Mr Lear
Page 25
Many Corfu friends bought his pictures of Italy and Greece, Athos and Egypt, but some families also had more informal offerings, his alphabets. He had drawn these little gifts for several years, a habit of friendship. In 1846, the year of the first Book of Nonsense, he sent one to a friend, Sam Sandbach: ‘My dear Sam,’ he wrote, ‘I send this alphabetic nonsense for the future amusement of your little boy,’ telling him that the loose pages should last a long time, if pasted on linen. He made others for the de Tabley children – the house where ten years earlier he had quieted the baby by playing his accordion – for the children at Tatton Hall and for the Tennyson boys, three-year-old Hallam and the baby, Lionel. At Christmas 1855, Tennyson tried sticking the pages onto linen himself: ‘The pasting and the ironing have been by no means so successful as they ought to have been,’ confessed Emily, ‘but then I hope you will consider the remarkable fact of the Poet Laureate being seen ironing by nearly the whole household as something of a consolation.’
In his letters from Corfu he made these sound a chore: ‘Now I finish 3 Alphabets for children – and so get pretty wearied by the end of the week.’ But his invention and his pleasure were plain to see. The possibilities were endless: ‘B’ could be bee, bird, bat, butterfly, broom, book; S could be snail, spider, shoe, swallow, sugar-tongs, slipper, spoon, soup, screw; ‘U’ could be ukase, uppercoat, urn. Only one letter was constant – X was always for Xerxes, Lear’s favourite villain. As in his limericks, the last line often circled back to its subject, now given an imaginative identity. The pages were packed with miniature stories of insects, fans and hats, ice creams and puddings, full of wonder at nature, bafflement at fashions and delight in bad rhymes, like the U for urn, ‘with hot water in it/ To bubble and burn/ And make tea in a minute’, or the W for whale, who ‘rushed all so frantic/ Across the Atlantic’.
Some later alphabets were more fantastical, with illogical, logicalsounding juxtapositions, and gleeful alliterative word-making: ‘The Dolomphious’ Duck’, the frisky, finny ‘Fizzgiggious Fish’ and ‘The Enthusiastic Elephant’,
Who ferried himself across the water with the
Kitchen Poker and a New pair of Ear-rings.
Another alphabet, for a father and his children, became a set of very simple stories of Papa, a touching way for children to laugh at and share the oddities of parental life: his starched cravat, his bottle of beer, his hat and walking stick and watch:
H was Papa’s new Hat,
He wore it on his head;
Outside it was completely black,
But inside it was red.
The alphabets were perfect to read aloud. By attaching the letter to an animal, or a cake, a doll, or a kite, Lear could tumble out rhymes for small children to join in.
The rhymes, ‘Hairy! Beary! Taky Cary!’ or ‘mousey, bousey, sousey’, were the kind of nonsense words that parents speak to babies, often the first words they hear, and all the more alluring – and important – for that reason.
But adults could play with alphabets too. In one letter, asking a friend to see his drawings of Corsica, Lear ebulliently proclaimed their delights by running down the alphabet, sloping across the page, sometimes using the sound, sometimes the letter’s name, from ‘A – mazing’ and ‘B – wildering’ to ‘Y – ld, & savage’ and ‘Z – edekiah perplexing’.
Quick and funny, the alphabets let us hear how Lear spoke. They show, too, how clever he was at introducing the building blocks of writing, hinting at how the names of consonants differ from their sound, or how vowels can be flat or round, short or long – as in his Ass, who eats grass, or hay. He enjoyed the way that splitting words made easy riddles and puns. Inviting a friend round, he wrote, ‘Are you a tome or R U knot? – come & have dinner.’ And he particularly liked question riddles:
What would Neptune say if they deprived him of the sea?
‘I haven’t a n/otion!’
What letter confounds Comets and Cookery?
G – for it turns Astronomy into Gastronomy.
Letters have a life of their own, they can jump and change the sense, or speak in different tones. In Lear’s poem ‘Mr and Mrs Discobbolos’, he could make the final letters of the alphabet into a fluttery sigh, a gasp of amazement, or a muttered curse:
Mr and Mrs Discobbolos
Lived on the top of the wall,
For twenty years, a month and a day,
Till their hair had grown all pearly gray,
And their teeth began to fall.
They never were ill, or at all dejected, –
By all admired, and by some respected,
Till Mrs Discobbolos said,
‘Oh! W! X! Y! Z!
It has just come into my head,
We have no more room at all –
Darling Mr Discobbolos.
Lear also liked to play with the function of letters in building words, and with the rules of grammar in making ‘sense’. Even as a boy he grasped that if the common rules of word-making are followed – like adding ‘ly’ for an adverb – then a word will be accepted even if it’s nonsense, as in his packing ‘furibondiously’. Similarly, if a sentence sticks to accepted syntax, it will ‘sound’ like sense, whatever words are used, as in: ‘It’s as bright and cold & icicular as possible, and elicits the ordibble murmurs of the cantankerous Corcyreans.’
He could break the rules successfully because he knew them so well. His language is alive, protean, ever evolving. Words mutate and evolve, finding new endings and appendages, like new limbs. He delighted in children’s mishearings and battles with speech and spelling, so similar to his own nonsense slippages. ‘I went up a mounting & made a sketch.’ His coinages work not only because he used conventional word formation but also because his phonetic spelling and forms, which looked so odd, genuinely evoked the sound, as in ‘ordibble’ for audible, ‘Orgst’ for ‘August’, or ‘So I came moam & rote this’.
Nonsense forms could embody situations in sound. They became a kind of Joycean, or Gerard Manley Hopkins-esque, shorthand in Lear’s letters and diary: ‘a horridodious earthquake’, ‘dimmy-scirocco early’, ‘the wind shaken shutters bebother’, ‘the soft hushy ripple’. He found he could use this style in many ways to give a feeling of texture and atmosphere: struggling round Lago di Paola in the Pontine marshes near Rome, he described it as surrounded by ‘immense lots of tangle jungle bungle greedy reedy grogorious stuff … very wild and uncomfortably tangly’. In 1861, when he was writing to Emily Tennyson, suddenly ‘horrible borrible squashfibulus migoposhquilous sounds were heard’, he wrote, ‘ever increasing, like 5000 whales in hysterics’: ‘The – huming screams & shouts. – Then stamping: – roaring: – rushing: – bouncing: – Booming: by-go-bustling: – O – the great cistern, along of the sudden thaw – had bust all the pipes – which spouted forth, arm-broad torrents of water like fire from cannons.’ The labials and sibilants were themselves an aural waterfall. And nonsense forms could evoke the visual as well as the aural, as in his disarmingly vivid description of the view from Fortescue’s house at Ardee where he watched ‘the perspective struggling milkly enthusiastic calves afar off’.
The playful mix of images and sounds that make Lear’s alphabets so alive leaps to an extravagant length in one joyfully hectic picture-poem, ‘Ribands and pigs’, in which unrelated words and pictures bang against each other, setting the unnamed hero spinning like a top.
Ribands & pigs,
Helmets & Figs
Set him a jigging & see how he jigs.
The combinations seem random – ‘Trumpets & Guns, beetles & buns’ – but the clashing nouns create a chain, like free association: ‘knives’ rhymes with ‘hives’, ‘hives’ lead to bees, to ‘set him a stinging and see how he stings’, and so on. As the paired nouns are matched by paired verbs, stinging moves to weeping, weeping to staring, hopping to sailing, screaming to howling:
Lobsters & owls,
Scissors & fowls,
Set him a howling & hark how he howls!
–
The whole performance is driven by the energy and motive power of simple nouns: puddings, beams, cobwebs, creams; pancakes, fins, roses, pins; bonnets, legs, steamboats, eggs. And the drawings have their own oddity: all the creatures and objects appear in pairs as in a dance. The effect is dizzying, as if the world is in perpetual motion. The poem rolls on like the ball on this slope, beautifully balanced above the thistles and moles, crumpets and soles (or Souls?) below:
Thistles & Moles
Crumpets & Soles –
Set it a rolling & see how it rolls!
The drawings of the thistles and moles seem to have escaped from an alphabet to claim a life of their own. Such drawings could indeed make an alphabet: ant, bear, cat, dog. Small children could ‘read’ them, just as they could read Lear’s drawings for nursery rhymes – ‘Humpty Dumpty’, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ – so that once they knew the songs they could follow the sequence. Drawings could act as words: in Albania, when Lear drew, the dervish had cried out, ‘Scroo! Scroo!’: you are writing us down.
On the simplest level, pictograms could be a parlour game. Late in life, Lear wrote a pictogram letter to Hallam and Lionel Tennyson, drawing his address in Duchess Street, Portland Place with a fat duchess and a bottle of port, and using a lion’s curling tail for ‘dear Lionel’. Lear’s own signature was also a picture of a sort, in the monogram that he began using in the late 1850s. ‘That’s my new assygram,’ he wrote as he signed a letter to Chichester Fortescue. Joining initials in a pattern, the monogram was an ancient device, used on Greek and Roman coins, royal seals, by artists like Dürer and Rembrandt, and now, in Victoria’s age of affluence, on the silver plate of the rich as well as in the cryptic initials of the PRB, the looped Hs of Holman Hunt, the crown-like M of Millais. In Lear’s monogram he caught the E in a curving L, like an open bubble blown into the air, as if ‘Edward’ was almost swallowed by ‘Lear’.
A letter could be a person. Tennyson became a tall A with a hat; Fortescue a curl of Ps and Fs. When he drew the seating plans at dinner-tables, he did not put ‘me’, but his balloon-like EL. At huge parties at Strawberry Hill, his monogram looked like a snail sheltering in a shell; at cheery meals with Millais and Thackeray it expanded a bit; with friends like Emily and Lionel Tennyson, or Frank, it opened happily, like a boat on the sea, and occasionally, if he dined alone, he seemed to carry the whole table on his head. As in his alphabets, his initials usher in a trail of rhymes – an eerie, queery, sometimes weary, sometimes cheery Edward Lear.
Single letters could speak. Lear’s alphabets, which he wrote to entertain, were also serious – letters were tools to open a door for children into the land of language, rhyme, story and feeling; the world of imagination.
23: HOME AGAIN, ROME AGAIN
There was an Old Man with a nose,
Who said, ‘If you choose to suppose
That my nose is too long, you are certainly wrong!’
That remarkable Man with a nose.
At the end of the 1850s Lear was circling between Britain and the Continent, pushed around by European politics and swept by his own restless need. Returning to London in August 1858 he leapt like a diver into his British social life. On his first day he dashed to leave cards, rushed to Camden Town in search of Holman Hunt, jumped on an omnibus to see the Tennysons at the Great Northern Hotel, got money from his banker, marched to the framers, Foord and Dickinson off Wardour Street, who had taken over from McLean as his picture dealers, and bought brushes and colours from Winsor & Newton. On the same breathless day, he saw Fanny Coombe and his old Rome friend John Proby, now sick and skeletal. (When Proby died on 19 November, one of his sisters blamed their Sicilian trip for ruining his health, but another, Isabella, sent details of John’s death, ‘because I know you loved him’. And it was true, Lear wrote, ‘I did love him very much.’)
Wherever he went, the welcome was warm: at Wansfell, at Knowsley, in Liverpool and Manchester and Sussex. Everywhere he found music, good talk, ‘much fun and laughter’. Yet for some reason he felt weary – it must be the climate, he thought. In truth, a depression was building. At Portman Square in September he hired a piano and settled down to his commissions, including the paintings of Jerusalem and Masada for ‘good, kind, wonderful’ Lady Waldegrave. He showed his work in his studio and was often asked to bring his box of drawings on visits and to dinner parties, a tiresome business but he was pleased that his Palestine pictures were admired. ‘They are the most beautiful things he has ever done,’ Thomas Woolner told Emily Tennyson; ‘if you have not seen them I hope you will, for they would give much delight and interest you extremely, not only for the mystery and history attached to the places themselves but also for the excessive fineness, tenderness and beauty of the art displayed in them.’
He had requests for many watercolours and was now painting large Palestine oils, asking advice from Holman Hunt, his admiration undiminished: ‘He is the painter these days.’ He left his large canvases in Hunt’s studio at Tor Villa in Kensington and worked on them there almost every day, while other artists swept in and out: Ford Madox Brown, William Rossetti, Woolner, Egg and Martineau. When he stayed with Hunt he was, he said, ‘happier than in most places’, yet he knew Hunt would prove impossible to live with. Hunt’s obsessive side came out in long talks late into the night about his woes over Annie Miller. He had found Annie, with her heavy-lidded eyes and tumbling hair, when she was a barmaid in Chelsea in 1850, making her his model for The Awakening Conscience and the Moxon Lady of Shalott. He firmly believed that he was ‘rescuing her’ by arranging her education and paying her bills and had expected her to stay faithful when he went to the Middle East; instead she whirled around with the painter George Boyce and with both Rossetti brothers – she was Dante Gabriel’s model for several pictures including Helen of Troy – and she was also involved with Lord Ranelagh. On Hunt’s return there were storms. In 1859 he would break off the relationship and, some years later, when he fell in love with Fanny Waugh, he scraped Annie’s face off The Awakening Conscience and replaced it with Fanny’s.
‘Much conversation with H.H. on certain subjects – greatly disturbing to myself – thereof I say little to him,’ Lear scribbled in his diary. Hunt’s attitude to Annie bothered him, as well as his views on religion. Lear was half-heartedly still thinking of Helena Cortazzi, but really he was trying hard to put his own obsession behind him – nearly ten years of brooding about Frank Lushington. They did not see each other often, but wrote constantly. One letter forwarded from Beirut showed that Frank had tried to tell Lear all his reasons for leaving Corfu, with ‘many true & kind words. Poor dear F.: I wish his life were brighter: yet it is good: – & what more should we desire?’ That year the Lushingtons suffered yet another blow: Tom died of fever on his way back to India and was buried in Ceylon. In June Frank hurried anxiously to meet his widow and five children off the boat.
To Lear’s dismay Frank moved into chambers in the Temple with Henry’s friend George Stovin Venables, who had always resented Lear’s closeness to the family. Lear slept badly and had horrible epileptic nights. He began to hate his appearance: worried that his hair was thinning, he kept his moustaches and grew a bushy beard; he put on weight and became ever more conscious of his owl-like glasses and his large nose. By early October he was feeling very odd: ‘unhinged – unhooked, unhappy – un-everything’. He thought he looked hideous and no one could love him. At a dinner with Fortescue, although the evening was easy and enjoyable, inside he felt ‘more and more isolated’. A few days later he opened his eyes on a bright, fine day:
Wake, to impatience blindness & misery. Incapable of deciding whether life can be cured or cursed – I totter giddily, refusing to take any road, yet agonized by staying irresolute. To go to Brighton? To see H.C. – To take a place at the I. of Wight – & dismiss Giorgio? – To start at once for Rome with unfinished work? – To go to Madeira? – To try to complete the 5 paintings here? To be involved in ne
w debt? To attempt the Palestine small drawings? — I cannot fix any point – but meanwhile groan.
At the end of November finally he fixed on Rome.
There were bright spots in this gloom. Lear had been fascinated by the Irish-English speech he heard when staying with Fortescue at Ardee, and amused too, by his friend being the Member of Parliament for Louth. When he was wheezing in a London winter, about to set off for Italy and hoping they might meet before he left, he pulled the Irish echoes and his own idiosyncratic language together in a ballad (or a pastiche of Isaac Watts) with clarity and smoothness.
O! Mimber for the County Louth
Residing at Ardee!
Whom I before I wander South,
Partik’lar wish to see; –
I send you this – that you may know
I’ve left the Sussex shore,
And coming here two days ago
Do cough for evermore.
Or gasping hard for breath do sit
Upon a brutal chair,
For to lie down in Asthma fit
Is what I cannot bear.
Or sometimes sneeze: and always blow
My well-developed nose,
And altogether never know
No comfort nor repose …
But if you are not coming now
Just write a line to say so –
And I shall still consider how