Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  This was equivalent to a royal command, and Charlotte must have been anxious about her clothes. Her only piece of finery was a scarlet Chinese embroidered scarf and Anne’s pearl brooch, which she was always willing to lend. But Florence wrote to say that there would be no need for evening dress, as Hardy thought that changing for dinner in winter made him catch cold. The date of the visit was put off, first when Florence had neuritis, then when the cook at Max Gate was discovered to be a secret drinker. Finally the 4th of December 1918 was fixed upon.

  Max Gate has been described by Florence’s sympathetic biographers, Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, as ugly, damp, and comfortless, with a tiny spare room and no lighting but oil-lamps. The garden (according to another account) was darkly green and overshadowed, ‘with a distinct flavour of churchyard’. But it was no gloomier, with its crowded pictures and furniture, than 9 Gordon Street, and probably very much like it. The ‘dog to the household’, Wessex, was a menace to most visitors, but Charlotte emerged unbitten. The visit to her was what she whole-heartedly called it: ‘a great honour’.

  Florence, at first, seems to have been surprised and perhaps disappointed. Charlotte, who was ten years older than herself, struck her as a ‘pathetic little creature,’ plain and frail, who chattered throughout the whole two days. ‘We have never had anyone here who talked so much.’ Hardy had been kind, but ‘she was not his type of woman at all’ – although this may have been a relief to Florence, who had to bear patiently with the crazes, ‘the throbbings of noontide’, which sometimes overcame him even in the evening of life.

  If Charlotte talked too much, it was certainly from nervousness at meeting the man who for so many years had been her ‘King of Wessex’. There was, as it happened, a great deal in common between Hardy and her own father. Both had been country boys, trained as jobbing architects, coming up to London and marrying ‘above them’. But such things were not mentioned or discussed during the week-end at Max Gate. Charlotte and Thomas Hardy met as poet to poet. It was Hardy who persuaded her to stay for two nights. He read some of his own poems to her, and she read him something which pleased him very much, Saturday Market. It would be interesting to know, in this dialect poem, what he thought of her Island accent, as true to childhood as his own.

  Thomas and Florence Hardy in their garden at Max Gate.

  Florence soon changed her mind about Charlotte. Out of the little book of poems, it was romantic and dramatic Madeleine in Church which had appealed to her, and the thought of Madeleine’s ‘white geraniums in the dusk’ made her decide to plant some herself in the Max Gate greenhouse. These dreams and intimations (as Gittings has shown) were connected in Florence’s mind with her own earlier ambitions to be a writer, an independent ‘scribbling woman’. And Charlotte, after all, was a poet who had attracted notice, and lived in London, where the conscientious Florence every now and then allowed herself a day out. The usual invitation to tea in Anne’s studio seemed an exciting step into an almost Bohemian world, and it was a great disappointment to Florence when she was unable to come, because Hardy had required her to go and see a niece of his first wife’s who was in a lunatic asylum. Later, however, she managed it, although Charlotte warned her that the Hogarth Studios were by no means easy to find, and ‘people have been known to arrive in a state of suppressed or unsuppressed rage, having wandered round Bloomsbury, in their own words, “for hours’”. But this did not make it any less romantic. Florence brought with her a sister, who was a professional nurse, carefully explaining that ‘she is not in the least literary … and her life has been exceedingly narrow’. She herself, she implied, understood these things, and she was delighted to be among Anne’s canvases and half-finished work, while Charlotte herself was modelling some little plasticine figures. Florence knew that the Mews had an old invalid mother, and this aroused her ready sympathy, for she had one herself, but, apart from this anxiety, what an enviably free life the two sisters seemed to lead! She had almost given up her own dreams of being a writer, though she ventured to question one or two passages in Charlotte’s poems which she hadn’t quite understood. ‘But how all this must irritate you!’ she added.

  Hardy himself always sent Charlotte a message of ‘kindest regards’. He was firm in his opinion that she was ‘far and away the best living woman poet, who will be read when others are forgotten’.

  Sydney Cockerell was delighted with the success of his introduction. But surely there must be more poems for him to read, and to send to other people? He liked to keep things moving. Charlotte replied that poems couldn’t be turned out when wanted, like puddings. But Siegfried Sassoon, who happened to be in Cambridge, brought Cockerell the first number of Monro’s new shilling magazine, The Monthly Chapbook. On the last page was Charlotte’s Sea Love, certainly a new poem, which delighted both of them (and delighted Hardy too when it arrived at Max Gate). Sydney’s accumulative instincts, as usual, had been right. It was unkind of her, he told her, to keep her work under lock and key. This courtly tone (which made Charlotte write to him sometimes as ‘Dere Sydnie’) was, he had decided, the right one. By now he felt it was not enough for Charlotte to ‘sup’ with him before spending an evening at Alida’s flat. She ought to come to the theatre or the cinema. Charlotte replied that she could not. She was struggling with the three great miseries of daily life, the kitchen range (which kept going out), the boiler (which threatened to blow up), and ’flu. ’Flu had laid low both Anne and old Anna Maria. The basement of 9 Gordon Street must have been dismal indeed at the beginning of the 1920s, and it is difficult to imagine how Charlotte could have written Sea Love there. When her two invalids had recovered, she still refused Sydney’s invitation.

  Why so touchy? [he wrote to her (2 February 1920)]

  When I am merely seeking a means of providing you with

  three hours of exquisite artistic sensation and happiness.

  Why so diffuse? When ‘No, and be damned to you’

  would have said the same thing in six monosyllables.

  Why so proud? I stood for two hours this morning in

  a queue of people, who were buying tickets for themselves

  and for friends at a distance.

  Charlotte gave in. After all, it is something to be queued for, at the age of fifty, by the distinguished director of a museum, who, even if he is an over-zealous old fuss-pot, is a true admirer. She felt this, and felt the novelty of being escorted to Les Gobelins, Sydney’s favourite restaurant just off Regent Street (it had waitresses, and imitation tapestry on the walls), and of being asked whether she preferred this table or that, and what she would like to eat and drink. They were modest outings, of course. Charlotte only took an occasional glass of wine. In fact, she sent Sydney (still, and for the next two years, ‘Mr Cockerell’) a Breton poem which she had come across when she was ‘grubbing about’ in the North Room of the British Museum.

  Femme qui boit du vin

  Fille qui parle latin

  Soleil qui se lève trop matin

  Dieu sait quelle sera leur triste fin.

  To Sydney, who wrote, as his biographer puts it, ‘millions of words and never a coarse one’, this little verse would have seemed almost daring. And as a regular visitor to France who could never learn to speak the language, he liked to hear her talking and reading French. He and Charlotte agreed that they would both be French in their next reincarnation. She carefully saved up for him, too, the kind of story he liked her to tell, just on the edge of the macabre: for example, a hearse driver runs over a man in the street and kills him. A conductor from a passing bus sees the corpse and calls out: ‘Greedy!’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Shade-Catchers

  SYDNEY COCKERELL’S Charlotte, as one might expect, turned out to be a Miss Lotti, but with a sharp and witty edge – however, still recognizably Miss Lotti, grateful for a treat, deferential to his knowledge of the world. She didn’t at all mind being fitted in, as all his acquaintances had to be, between numerous important err
ands. Once up in London, he always had auctions and exhibitions to attend, or an Armenian manuscript to glance at, or an interview with someone who might be of use, or an official visit, or a valuation. On one occasion he appeared with a little bronze, worth £6000, in his black bag which ‘might be wanted for the museum’. Everything was written up in the diaries which, Charlotte and Anne decided, contained no secrets whatever. They called him ‘the blameless Pepys’. Cockerell, if he had known this, might have been a little dashed (though he recovered quickly). He saw himself more as a knight errant, coming to the rescue with unguessed-at treats. From time to time he was careful to include Anne, whom he found bright and charming, sometimes Florence Hardy and Dorothy Hawksley as well. He was happy surrounded by ladies, indeed his capacity for happiness was great, and was one of the most attractive things about him.

  Charlotte spent the Christmas of 1919 with Elsie O’Keefe, who had come back after four wartime years in Canada, where James had been acting as British financial adviser. They had settled into a house in Richmond, but their children were too old by now for the Christmas pantomime. Fortunately the Cockerells’ little daughter was almost of an age for Peter Pan, and it was arranged that, when the time came, no-one would be allowed to take her to it but Charlotte.

  ‘And what of Alida the charming?’ asked Sydney, who had been too busy of late to go to the poetry readings, but had heard rumours of ‘a Bookshop wedding’. In fact, Harold Monro’s divorce had been made absolute in 1916, and now in peacetime his friends (particularly, for some reason, those whose own domestic affairs had run into difficulties) were pressing him to marry Alida. ‘Dear Alida, with all my heart I wish you happiness, and if it [is] not fatally bad for you, your heart’s desire,’ wrote Charlotte in an affectionate, though ambiguous note (20 March 1920). The marriage took place at Clerkenwell Register Office, and immediately afterwards Monro disappeared. Alida had to go down alone to the cottage in Sussex which they were supposed to share (she had bought the crockery for it and the kitchen things). She told her friend, the poet and story-teller Pamela Travers, that when Harold eventually arrived and got into bed he said, ‘Come here, boy.’ But Alida added, what indeed everyone knew was true, that Harold and she were everything to each other. When they went together to a restaurant, she said, no-one could ever believe they were a married couple, because they had so much to say to each other.

  Cockerell knew nothing of all this, and Charlotte told him as little as she could, though she was not at all surprised when the following spring Alida went to the South of France by herself. Sydney, however, was amazed that a newly married woman should behave in this way. ‘He evidently sees you as much painted,’ Charlotte told her, ‘with a bright green parasol – flinging gold about in the casino.’

  It was in 1920 that Cockerell at last persuaded Charlotte to come down to Cambridge for a week-end visit – ‘packing a toothbrush’, he called it, to indicate (as Florence had) that no grand clothes would be needed. 3 Shaftesbury Road was a hospitable place where Sydney impressed his visitors, but innocently. His study, heavily curtained with Morris fabric, was the heart of the house. His books were massed there, and in the drawers there were smaller things, including a strand of Lizzie Rossetti’s hair in a locket, to be shown to the favoured. Always he produced examples of his wife Kate’s beautiful illumination, which her crippled hands could no longer manage. This process of showing, and then letting somebody touch and even hold, while watching their nervous pleasure and awe, was a satisfaction to Sydney. Ruskin, after all, had recommended that there should be open museums, where people could pick up the exhibits. And Cockerell, who in London could look something of an old woman as he fussed over his appointments, recovered all his dignity in Cambridge. There he was unmistakably what his biographer called him, ‘the friend of Ruskin and Morris’. His study fire was lit early in the morning, while the rest of the household shivered. (This was a Victorian custom which lingered well into the 1920s. ‘Women are doomed to cold and hunger for at least two hours every morning,’ Alida said, ‘until they can get some fires lighted and water boiled.’) Once, when Charlotte got up too late to say good-bye to Sydney before he caught his London train, she went into the study, and ‘my black heart’, she said, ‘was truly touched to find – fire burning – pen – ink-pot and slabs of paper laid out’. She sat down, she went on, to write a letter or so herself in the warmth, but if there was a shade of irony in this, perhaps on Kate’s account, she could be quite certain that Sydney would never notice it.

  On Sundays, whenever Charlotte came, he was surprised to see her ‘sally forth to Mass’. She certainly didn’t do this at Max Gate, where Florence would have been upset by anything that looked like Romanism. But although Sydney had no faith himself, and was bored by religious discussions, he had a kind of yearning interest, as towards something he had failed to get for his collection, in Catholic ritual and doctrine. His most prized correspondent was a scholarly Abbess, Dame Laurentia McLachlan of Stanbrook, and it was a puzzle to him that Charlotte, though respectful, seemed not quite willing to benefit from her counsel. When the question of Dame Laurentia came up, Charlotte used to insist that she was a ‘poor infidel’ and could only admire from a distance. Her mass-going was probably partly nostalgia for Brittany (after the war she could never afford to go to France again), and partly, perhaps, to flutter Sydney a little.

  If Charlotte was going to talk about her own conviction of sin, guilt, suffering and mercy, it was more likely to be with Kate. The friendship of Kate Cockerell was, to her, the most unexpected benefit of her visits to Shaftesbury Road. In the face of someone so transparently good, and so ill – the treatments were almost as bad as the pain, and quite ineffective – Charlotte dropped her defences. Kate could not express herself at all in written words. All she cared about was beauty in music and painting and the heart’s affections, and although she had been the only female student, in her day, in the Academy Schools, she now felt quite useless, with nothing at all to offer anyone. Like Anne, she never complained. She simply wished that she was not too shy and clumsy to give dinner parties. To her, Charlotte Mew ‘was one of the few people I have ever known with whom I could be quite intimate without the fear of being laughed at’. Shyness can only be cured by someone more shy. Charlotte was touched, but surprised, having always considered herself, as she said, not a tonic but an irritant. Other visitors to the house remember her as ‘pale and withdrawn’, or droll, witty, and profound, but with poor Kate Cockerell she did not need to be either.

  Charlotte, by now, had eleven new poems to make up the promised new edition of The Farmer’s Bride, which appeared in March 1921. The American edition came out as Saturday Market, which Macmillan selected as a better-selling title. It was a modest undertaking, Monro sending 250 copies in sheets for £14.11s.0d., the best he could do ‘in the present difficult conditions’. But it caught the attention of that good friend of English poetry, Louis Untermeyer, who had already been carried away by Madeleine when Siegfried Sassoon read it to him the year before. ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you et cetera,’ he wrote effusively from West 100th St, New York. The Farmer’s Bride itself attracted much more notice on its second time out. Edith Sitwell reviewed it favourably in the Daily Herald (4 April 1922). My own father, who had come back from three years in the trenches to his old job in the Punch office, was immediately told by his editor that he must do a series of parodies on well-known poets of the day, and that one of them must be Charlotte Mew. The Sphere wrote for a photograph, but ‘your poor Auntie’, she told Alida, ‘hasn’t one’. Poems For To-Day wanted biographical details, but Charlotte, it seemed, hadn’t any of those either. Virginia Woolf wrote to R. C. Trevelyan that she had got a copy of Charlotte Mew’s book and ‘I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else.’ Virginia Woolf would not, I think, have claimed to be a judge of poetry, but of originality she certainly was – also of that ‘plan of the soul’ which she was to put hesitantly forward in A Room of One’s Own.
‘Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine.’

  Besides Saturday Market and Sea Love there was in the new volume a small, unobtrusive poem, at the very opposite pole from the impersonations and dramatic monologues, as quiet as a passing remark on something just seen in the street.

  I think they were about as high

  As haycocks are. They went rushing by

  Catching bits of shade in the sunny street:

  ‘I’ve got one,’ cried sister to brother.

  ‘I’ve got two.’ ‘Now I’ve got another.’

  But scudding away on their little bare feet,

  They left the shade in the sunny street.

  The Shade-Catchers has seven four-stress lines, with a different rhythm for every line, but then, of course, something different happens in every line. It was probably one of the ‘little technical experiments’ which she mentions once or twice in her letters. It is not a Georgian poem, no Georgian poet would leave the reader undecided between the value of hayfields and streets (the children belong to both) or for that matter, between sun and shade (it is shadow that the children are collecting), or between the various meanings of the last line. And, although The Shade-Catchers records a passing moment, it is not an Imagist poem either, if Pound’s definition of ‘the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective’ is to be accepted. Charlotte Mew is a story-teller here as usual, and as usual ‘not like anyone else’.

  It was a favourite poem of Alida’s, a kind of password between herself and Charlotte, recalling the London summers of the 1920s – the last, too, of Charlotte’s poems about living children and their world of games which she observed with such respect. She had nearly entered that world in Dieppe when the fishermen’s children let her chalk the pavement for pelote. More often, she watched on the sidelines and marvelled. There had been a good wartime game, she told Alida, in the poor streets near Paddington Station. One little boy, selected as a German prisoner, was crammed into a sack and dragged and bumped over the uneven pavements by the rest of them. The boys were in competition. Every one of them desperately wanted to be the prisoner.