by Jenny Uglow
VI. CALLING
31: SAIL AWAY: CANNES 1868–1869
When Lear left Gussie in Somerset in November 1867, she waved goodbye at the door, ‘and so’, he wrote, ‘I went away – with a mind drearily tangled & numbed … What is left now but to go abroad as soon as possible – yet where to go?’ He decided on Cannes and was there by the end of the month. It was freezing – ‘O! O! O! how cold it is’. The only good thing was that he had found someone to grumble with; on 1 December, looking for good rooms, he wrote, ‘Lo! All of a sudden I remember that the Simmonds are here!’ This was the young John Addington Symonds and his wife Catherine, the daughter of Lear’s Hastings friend Frederick North, whom he had known as a girl. He had noted her marriage, four years ago, and they had met on the boat at Nice and now they were here with their three-year-old daughter, Janet, and baby Charlotte, ‘Lotta’.
Next day he called at the Pension Joseph, ‘where the most amiable good Symonds & Catherine S. was at home. I fancy they liked my visit, tho’ I was rather noisy methinx. Came home unwell & coughing much, so cayennepeppery is this air; yet better than ffogg.’ Every day Lear saw the Symonds and walked and talked, sharing views on poetry and art and Italy, and swapping moans. Within a week of knowing them, Lear took a break after settling down to write up his Cretan journal, and composed an Eclogue, ‘funny enough – & wrote it out’. It was a a catalogue of woes:
Edwardus. – What makes you look so black, so glum, so cross?
Is it neuralgia, headache, or remorse?
Johannes. – What makes you look as cross, or even more so?
Less like a man than is a broken Torso?
The mock eclogue appeals to Catherine as a judge of their ‘foolish growlings’ as the two men compete in damning the cold, the lodgings, the cooking, the piano-playing neighbours and German bands, the flies, the swells in their carriages who had not bought Lear’s pictures. When Catherine forces a close, Johannes, she decides, has more excuse: her sentence is only that he nurse ‘The baby for seven hours, and nothing worse’. Edwardus, however, told that his ‘griefs are fudge, yourself a bore’, is condemned
To make large drawings nobody will buy –
To paint oil pictures which will never dry –
To write new books which nobody will read –
To drink weak tea, on tough old pigs to feed –
Till spring-time brings the birds and leaves and flowers,
And time restores a world of happier hours.
The Symonds ‘laughed hugely at the Ekklogg – & say they’ll print it. Afterwards we talked of Ruskin, Byron, Shelley &c, &c.’ Lear warmed to Johnny Symonds’s learning and lack of vanity. But why, he wondered, did Catherine have ‘a wildness in the eye – painful’, and why was ‘remorse’ in her husband’s list of ailments?
The truth was that their marriage was both solid and a sham. Symonds was twenty-seven, thirty years younger than Lear. His mother had died when he was four, the same age that Lear was when his mother rejected him. He too had been a sickly boy in a house full of aunts, governesses and sisters, but unlike Lear, he was more influenced by his father, an eminent physician and Greek scholar with a love of all things Italian. He was disturbed by the rough homosexuality he encountered at Harrow (where the headmaster had an affair with one of his friends), but at eighteen he fell in love with a Bristol chorister: ‘For the first time in my life’, he wrote in his memoir, ‘I knew that I must take possession of the dream, and clasp it.’ His father put an end to the infatuation, but at Oxford, where he won a prize for his essay on the Renaissance, gained a First and became a Fellow of Magdalen, he was caught up in yet another scandal. He left, and when he collapsed from stress the eminent doctor Sir Spencer Wells advised a cure through ‘cohabitation with a hired mistress, or what was better, matrimony’. Symonds took this advice. He had already met and liked Catherine in Switzerland, and they were married in November 1864. He was nervous: his graphic, self-obsessed diary vividly conveys the pressure facing men of his day to control and smother their feelings, something Lear could understand. For a long time before his marriage, he wrote, ‘I had treated the purely sexual appetite (that which drew me fatally to the male) as a beast to be suppressed and curbed, and latterly to be down trampled by the help of surgeons and their cautery of sexual organs,’ and now, although he genuinely loved Catherine, he missed ‘the coarse and hard vibrations of sex, those exquisite agonies of contact’ he found with men.
Understandably, Catherine soon began to feel depressed and they left London for the Riviera, where Symonds’s sister, Lady Strachey, had a house at Menton, and Catherine’s half-sister, Lady Janet Kay-Shuttleworth, a villa in San Remo. But the sunshine did not help. In Cannes, where Symonds was diagnosed with consumption, he worked on his Problem of Greek Ethics, showing that ‘what the Greeks called paiderastia or boy-love, was a phenomenon of one of the most brilliant periods of human culture’. And that winter he decided that although he wanted to be a husband and father he must follow his true self or go mad. The tension rubbed off on their daughter Janet: ‘The little girl is unwell – and all is sad,’ wrote Lear. Unlike most children, Janet shrieked and fled when she met Lear, and although she relaxed and grew fond of him he found her ‘a queer, difficult child’.
For this troubled little girl Lear wrote his purest, most famous poem, with its lovely, halting, lilting lines. There was no fanfare, no rapturous reception, no sense that this would be known the world over. It was just a tale of an odd couple who found happiness on the shore, hand in hand, under the moon. On 18 December 1867, he wrote, ‘At 3.40 – walked to the Symonds with a picture poem for little Janet.’
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’
Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
‘Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Slivers of darkness float within the nonsense and the pictures. In ‘real’ life, cats and birds are enemies and in the poem a tingle of threat remains. Their gender is indecipherable, yet the owl, the bird of wisdom, is the one who sings, while the pussy-cat, who sounds so feminine, steers the boat and proposes. When they reach the pig the cat seems to have grown, to be proud and predatory at once. Is this marriage actually a trap? No. Beneath the turkey’s outspread wings the cat bows down. And then they are joined in the dance.
The Owl and the Pussy-cat take their year-long honeymoon before their wedding. Their poem has been read to children and sung at weddings ever since. But although we know it in the form above, that was not quite the poem given to Janet Symonds and the other children to whom Lear sent early drafts. All those copies had slight variations, i
n stanza form and wording: the runcible spoon was plain silver, the Bong Tree was a palm tree, the Turkey was absent (the Pig did the honours at the wedding), and the lovely, sighing repetition of ‘the moon/ The moon/ The moon’ was missing altogether. But the Turkey soon made an entrance in the drafts. On one copy Lear showed the foursome – owl, cat, pig and turkey – all dancing together, but he took out this picture when the poem was published. Without it the Owl and the Pussy-cat could dance on alone.
*
Lear’s great poems and songs are not ‘about’ his life – they float free. But their gaiety and sadness feel even keener when set against the tensions he saw, and suffered.
That year, leaving the Owl and the Pussy-cat to sail away, he concentrated on his work. Cannes was full of Dukes and Lords and Ladies and Honorables and Bishops, but although they came to see his drawings, it was a while before he made any sales:
I suppose some will be sold eventually – nevertheless, considering the constant outgoing expense, this suspense is not pleasant … The fuss the swells made today about asking me the prices of drawings! Poor old Lady Grey’s regal ways – tho’ she don’t mean them ill. – But oh!! how sick I am of the upper 10,000! – I mean as acquaintances, for friends I have in their station, as in others.
Gradually he found purchasers, both here and in Britain, where to his joy in 1867 Lady Ashburton finally bought Cedars for two hundred guineas – less than a third of the price he had originally asked. Lady Lyttleton bought Masada, and Edgar Drummond, after some unsubtle bullying by Lear (‘you may have it … & pay for it AT ANY TIME THAT BEST SUITS YOU’), bought his painting of Beirut.
Soon he had dinners to go to and people to walk with through the olives and vines. In spare moments he read the women’s novels he loved, old favourites like Fanny Burney’s Evelina, ‘always a pleasure’, and new works like Romola, George Eliot’s drama of Savonarola’s Florence, ‘a powerful but painful book’. But he also read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855: William Michael Rossetti was currently editing Whitman’s poems, and Symonds would try for years to get Whitman to declare his homosexuality openly. On Christmas morning Lear noted that it was a cold, miserable day, ‘but got some good out of queer Walt Whitman’.
At the end of the year, Symonds sprained his ankle on a walk with Lear, telling his sister Charlotte: ‘Mr Lear, who is a whimsical Punster, had only just before invented this sorry riddle: “Why is this hillside like an old-fashioned waistcoat? Because it’s a little jerkin”. I had no notion I was to afford so painful an illustration of the conundrum’s force.’ The bad ankle was enough to send Johnny back to bed again, and back to his agony about how to live. His friend Henry Sidgwick told Lear that the problem was ‘an affection of the brain … but this I have known before. Poor Catherine (North) is sadly harassed I fear – Poor thing.’ Probably everyone in their circle knew of Symonds’s ‘affection of the brain’, but this was an age where nothing was said in public. Lear may well have discussed his dilemma: he often sat with Johnny, who could not sleep and harped on dying or going mad. Symonds’s last night in Cannes, he wrote, ‘was the worst of my whole life. I lay awake motionless, my soul stagnant, feeling what is meant by spiritual blackness and darkness … Catherine, who kept hold of me, seemed far away. I was alone, so utterly desolate that I drank the very cup of terror of the grave.’ Once he decided that he could be a lover of men, the relief was huge, but in his poetry, coded as love of women, he mused ‘on these last miseries of mankind’:
On souls that, fainting, feed a nameless thirst;
On hearts that long, with self-loathed longing cursed;
On loves that know themselves shameful and blind,
Fierce cruel loves that crucify the mind.
Symonds would win fame as a vivid, popular poet and writer, author of the seven-volume The Renaissance in Italy (1875–86), friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse and Leslie Stephen, and always a fervent advocate of ‘Greek love’. Catherine accepted the situation and all her life, according to their third daughter Madge, Virginia Woolf’s childhood friend, showed ‘singular Sybilline fortitude’.
Lear knew that ferocious hiding of the self, and that desolate loneliness, but at this point his life was unusually tranquil. It had been a good year, he thought, pushing away the humiliation with Gussie. On New Year’s Eve he summed it up: he had seen the second cataract of the Nile, wandered through Italy, sold several pictures and moved out of the ‘gallery’ of Stratford Place, letting McLean’s show his pictures when he was away. This was ‘certainly a goodly amount of items in one year – tho’ how valuable each – who may say? Progress – or the contrary. Not, I think, the latter, but yet I doubt much of the former. Let me hope some: – and let me hope, leading to more, that some.’
He drew pictures for Janet and baby Lotta, and took a trip to Corsica, the basis for a book that would take up much time over the next two years. In the hot summer of 1868, he was working feverishly, ‘So that rest there is none,’ he sighed to Fortescue. ‘When shall we fold our wings, and list to what the inner spirit says – there is no joy but calm? Never in this world I fear.’ Perhaps, he joked, in the next existence they and Lady W. might sit placidly under a lotus tree eating ice creams and pelican pie, with their feet in a stream ‘and with the birds and beasts of Paradise a sporting around us’. Yet it was hard to keep this dream alive. In one small poem, written that summer, even the birds and beasts – the fish from the syllabub sea, the little mice, the grasshoppers, butterfly, beetle and bee – seemed to flee him. The birds fly in a stream – where from, where to? – alighting for a moment and soaring away:
Calico Pie
The little birds fly
Down to the calico tree,
Their wings were blue,
And they sang ‘Tilly-loo!’
Till away they flew, –
And they never came back to me!
They never came back!
They never came back!
They never came back to me!
All his life Lear had hidden essential aspects of his own nature: his epilepsy, of which he was ashamed; his troubled sexuality; his feeling of being an outsider. He had turned these anxieties outwards on to his perception of his body, convinced of his ugliness, exaggerating his bulk and spindly legs, bushy beard and bulbous nose. Like his limericks, the songs he now wrote were full of odd, self-conscious misfits. Even the tools on the brass stand at every Victorian fireside were mournfully body-conscious:
‘Alas! Mrs Broom!’ sighed the Tongs in his song,
‘O is it because I’m so thin,
And my legs are so long – Ding a dong! Ding a dong!
That you don’t care about me a pin?’
In ‘The Broom, the Shovel, the Poker and the Tongs’, the anxious coachman who drives the tools sees their pain and takes them home, where ‘They put on the kettle, and little by little,/ They all became happy again.’ It seemed to Lear, though, that domestic life rarely ended in tea and happiness: marriage was an off-rhyme, like kettle and little. He watched the Symonds suffer in Cannes, and he worried, too, about Frank and Kate Lushington in England. Over the years, without quite overcoming his longings, Lear had gradually established a calm, close friendship with Frank, and this grew steadily after Frank’s marriage, when the possibility of ever living together finally receded. They corresponded often while Lear was abroad, and he had dinner with Frank and Kate in July 1868 before they set off for their Suffolk holiday. Their son Harry had died three years before (‘a kind of awful doom seems to hang over that family,’ wrote Emily Tennyson: ‘A sort of martyr fate’). Their two girls, Gertrude and Millicent, were nice, Lear thought, ‘& F. & Kate seem happy – but their everlasting silence is horrible, & makes me foam and burst. They go on Friday morning & coolly say “we shan’t see you again” – wh. I endorse coldly also.’ He was horrified when their baby, Edmund Henry, died in mid-August, before his first birthday. ‘Certainly, as far as I can see, poss
ession of children is more of a sorrow in the long run, than the not having any.’
The following summer he stayed with the Lushingtons for a fortnight at Southwold on the Suffolk coast. Kate was pregnant again, and Frank was ill and tetchy; his sister Ellen was there too, ‘little changed but broken in spirit’, spreading ‘dead mournful speechlessness’. Lear was supposed to stay nearby with Frank’s brother Edmund and his wife Cecilia and daughter Zilly, but dreading the Park House gloom, he hastily booked a comfortable hotel. Every day he braced himself. There were diversions, including scandalised discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s article revealing Lady Byron’s suspicions of incest between Byron and his half-sister Augusta, and walks across the cliffs and the commons, including a dramatic flight from a bull. Lear was drawn to the old town, the beach with its long pale shadows and creamy waves, the sea full of boats, and the marshes ‘so remote & quaint & East Anglian that one feels as it were in the time of Edward the Confessor’. He tried to enjoy it, waking to see the dawn, ‘beautiful semi-oriental colour on the broad sea & horizon at sunrise’, but then the sea fog swept in and Lear went to bathe, ‘or rather had a dip: but the shore is sharp & stony & very uncomfortable, & the act of dipping undesireable … Shall I live through 10 more days here? 13 left …’
It was worse on Sundays. Sadness rolled in like the sea mist, carrying ghosts of the Lushingtons gone: Louisa, Harry, Tom, little Eddy, Frank and Kate’s children. ‘It can’t be good for the living to live with the dead,’ Lear wrote. He warmed to Kate, who talked sensibly and openly, he thought, about the weight of the family melancholy, and told him one day, after Frank left the room, about his grief for the lost, ‘how wonderfully they worry & torment him, as of old in Corfu. They are the scourge of the living, those dead people of P. House.’ He was cheered only by the strange beauty of the coast and the joyful effect of his nonsense, hearing six-year-old Gertrude recite ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and ‘Calico Pie’, which she knew by heart. Next day: ‘Rose 5.30 – gray: did little till 8 but a child’s song.’