by Jenny Uglow
What do you think as I have been & gone & I grow so tired of noisy lodgings, & yet am so more & more unable to think of ever wintering in England – & so unable to bear the expense of two houses & two journies annually, that I have bought a bit of ground at San Remo I am actually building a house there.
He drew a nonsense picture of his plans and joshed about living on figs in summer and worms in the winter, planting twenty-eight olive trees and an onion bed and having ‘a stone terrace with a gray Parrot & 2 hedgehogs to walk up & down on it by day & by night’.
*
The Corso degli Inglesi circles up the hill in San Remo and then loops along the ridges that point down to the sea like the bent fingers of a hand. Here rich English families built villas surrounded by gardens, with turrets and balconies gazing down at the bays: by the end of the century, the curving road would be a ribbon of art nouveau ‘Liberty’ architecture. A narrow lane, the Via Hope, winds steeply down from the Corso to the shore. This was where Lear built his house, the Villa Emily – named, Lear insisted unconvincingly, for his New Zealand great-niece, Sarah’s granddaughter, and not for Emily Tennyson. Below his garden lay a patch of land dotted with olives, and beyond it, across the road and the railway, the dazzle of the Mediterranean flared to the blue horizon. When Lear walked east, along the wide, new Corso Matteotti with its palazzi and smart shops, he reached the harbour and the fishing fleet. Behind, the old town, ‘La Pigna’, curled round the hill like its pinecone name, with narrow streets climbing like ladders to the church of the Madonna del Costa, a refuge from pirates and raiders. Could San Remo be the sanctuary he longed for?
In particular, the thought of the garden delighted him. The most notable things about the coast here, wrote the diplomat Ernest Satow, travelling on the Corniche train from Menton to San Remo, ‘are lemon-groves on the seashore which look as if they were ready to be washed away at every moment’. Above them on the heights, all along this coast, where the Alpes-Maritimes meet the sea, the panes of glass-houses and nurseries glittered on the hillsides, raising flowers for the markets of the north. Inland, growers harvested roses, jasmine, mimosa, lavender and myrtle for the perfumeries of Grasse, and plant collectors roamed the mountains, home to hundreds of rare species. The Riviera was a paradise for botanists, and wealthy English plant lovers created grand gardens here like the Quaker merchant Thomas Hanbury, who had made a fortune buying silk in the Far East (and gave Wisley to the Royal Horticultural Society). At La Mortola, just over the Italian border, Hanbury grew citrus, medicinal and exotic plants: agave, aloes and salvias; monkey-puzzles from Chile; palms from Africa and India; bamboos from China; eucalyptus and yucca from Australia.
Lear knew Hanbury, who owned the empty plot below his own planned villa, and he had painted La Mortola in 1865: it was hardly possible, he thought, to imagine ‘anything lovelier and more Italianly romantic’. All his botanical passions were revived. In the late spring of 1870 he was in Grasse collecting plants, and also inventing his own curious species. He sent drawings of his nonsense plants to his friend Mrs Ker, explaining that they only grew near Grasse, ‘& in the Humbly islands’ where he had seen them long ago and had met a professor who gave him ‘Generic & Specific names’. These plants would be his ‘Nonsense Botany’, an array of species like the Cockatooca Superba and the favourite, Manypeeplia Upsidownia, with its pendant persons, funny and fragile at once.
The Learical plants were comic but they also revealed Lear’s deep knowledge of a plant’s intricate organisation. In his drawings the stems branch in a host of ways, some with basal leaves, some with leaves sprouting from alternate sides, some with bracts climbing like the rising tiers of a cake. The flowers, too, flaunt different arrangements of petals and sepals: a single bell-shaped flower, like the Baccopipia Gracilis; tapering pyramids like the Piggiwiggia Pyramidalis or symmetrical five-petalled blooms like the clustering parrot-flowers of Pollybirdia Singularis. As in nature, each specimen is made up of multiple parts while remaining a clear example of a ‘type’, a distinctive, blooming individual, the union of the many and the one.
*
In the spring of 1870, impatient to have his own garden and waiting for the builders to start work, Lear rented rooms in San Remo for six months. To fill the time, he visited friends in Nice and Cannes and then headed to the hills to escape the steamy summer heat. One reason that he liked San Remo in comparison to the French towns, where villas mushroomed along the roads into the hills, was that the mountains behind rose like a wall and no roads led over them. As a carriage was out of the question, Lear and Giorgio set out to walk over the high ridges, with a mule called Roma to carry their packs, working their way across alpine meadows and through chestnut forests to the gorges of the river Roya, the border with France, and the town of Saorge. In the mountain inn Lear could not sleep for the song of nightingales outside his window, but this frontier town was a strange meeting place: at the table d’hôte, Lear found ‘Messres Muller, Murphy, Chambers &c. &c,’ and on his walk after supper he was pursued by the elderly Mrs Vigors, widow of Nicholas Vigors who had known him at the zoo when he was eighteen. ‘Strange, to come to this out of the way place & find all this pumped up out of the depths of memory 40 years ago!’ At last they looked up at the road winding up to the high Col du Tenda, ‘like a long riband unrolled’. This was almost too much: on the climb Giorgio hurt his foot and Lear suffered bad palpitations – a doctor told him later that he had a weak heart, like his father. ‘I have had advice about it,’ he told Fortescue, ‘& they say I may live any time if I don’t run suddenly or go quickly upstairs: but that if I do I am pretty sure to drop morto.’ He wrote a note for Giorgio ‘in case of my sudden death’.
Once over the pass, they travelled in more comfort, taking the omnibus on the Turin road to Cuneo, ‘a large & very interesting place. Arcades, shops – silkworm cocoons for sale’, and then winding south up a long valley to La Certosa di Pesio, an old Carthusian monastery that was now a smart ‘hydropathic’ hotel. It was a fashionable place, popular with writers (Stendhal had stayed there) and with minor royalty, American tourists and Piedmontese gentry, whom Lear found delightful, ‘really charming people, so simple & kindly. Only I wish they weren’t all counts. Who ever heard before of an omnibus stuffed quite full of counts – (8) & 2 Marquises?’ With its dull pink walls, squares of lawn and cloisters open to the woods and the mountain above, the Certosa stood at the valley’s head, where a brown stream rushed over the stones like a Cumbrian beck and insects hummed in the shade.
Later Lear came to love the whole area with its winding rivers and unexplored forests but to begin with he chafed against the narrow valley bounds. He found the place oppressive and climbed up to escape, drawing the Certosa’s square buildings against the widening view behind, scribbling, ‘oak, beech, all thick wood, chestnut, fern, moss’.
Within a week he adjusted to the regular, placid, pace of hotel life, creating his own routine in counterpoint. The new rhythm broke down when Lear decided that Giorgio, troubled by his injured foot and worried by news from home, should go back to Corfu to see his family. When he went to see him off in Turin on 17 July 1870, he learned that ‘The horrid news has come that WAR has been declared between F & P.’ Ahead lay Prussian victories, the siege of Metz and the defeat of the French at Sedan, then the long siege of Paris and the revolutionary months of the Commune: for the next year the horrors of war would thunder in the back of Lear’s mind.
Lear’s feet were still swollen after the walk: it was hard to get his shoes on, and he missed Giorgio badly. ‘For all I write cheerfully,’ he swore to Fortescue, ‘I am as savage & black as 90000 bears …’
I live the queerest solitary life here in the company of 70 people. They are – many of them – very nice – but their hours don’t suit me, & I HATE LIFE unless I WORK ALWAYS. I rise at 5. Coffee at 6. Write till 10. Bkft at Table d’hote. Walk till 11-30. Write till 6. Walk till 8. Dine alone. & bed at 10 or 9.30.
He had plenty of writing t
o do, including transcribing his Egyptian journals. He understood the quirky quality of his travel writing. A few years from now, writing to Amelia B. Edwards, who had illustrated her best-selling A Thousand Miles up the Nile with her own drawings and was a co-founder of the Egypt Exploration Fund, he tried to sound modest, but failed.
There is & must be a great drawback in my writing wh. your’s on a similar subject would not have; – & this is that whatever I write would be Edward Lear – egotistical & unmitigated – fanciful – individual – correct or what not – but nevertheless always Edward Lear; – whereas what you write might be written by Mrs Tomkins, or Queen Boadicea, or Lady Jane Grey, or Rizpah of Gibeah, Joan of Ark or anybody else – because A. B. Edwards never appears at all.
The Egyptian journal would never be published. Instead, up in the mountains Lear was also gathering material for his new book of songs and nonsense, a work that could never be written by Mrs Tomkins or Joan of Arc. Before he left, he had already made fair copies of ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo’, ‘Mr Daddy Long-legs and Mr Floppy Fly’, and ‘The Four Children Who Went Round the World’. At La Certosa he jotted in his diary: ‘completed the Jumblies’, ‘Finished the poem of “Spikky Sparrow”’. His aim, as he had told James Fields, was to make children laugh and there were plenty of children at La Certosa, ready to be amused. ‘Do the Carthusian friars look down on their old gardens & corridors?’ Lear asked, ‘& if so, seeing there are 43 ladies, 19 nursery maids and some 50 children in said gardens & galleries— How do they bear the sight?’
Among the new guests in August were the ‘English family’ (actually American) the Terrys, with their four children, Margaret (‘Daisy’) and Alfred Terry, and their older half-sister and brother Mary and Francis Crawford. Lear had known the painter Luther ‘Louis’ Terry in London and Rome and found him as kindly and gentlemanly as ever: in 1861 he had married Louisa, the wealthy widow of the sculptor Thomas Crawford, and their apartment in the Palazzo Odescalchi was a cosmopolitan salon, one of the few places where the Italian elite and politicians mingled with artists. With their arrival, Lear’s lonely summer became full: ‘drew for little Daisy Terry’, he wrote, ‘Walked & sate with the Terrys.’ In later life both Daisy and Mary recorded their impressions nostalgically. Daisy remembered how they were saved from the misery of sitting down with strangers at the table d’hôte by finding opposite them ‘a rosy, gray-bearded, bald-headed, gold-spectacled little gentleman … something seemed to bubble and sparkle in his talk and his eyes twinkled benignly behind the shining glasses.’ He helped Daisy with the rituals of hotel meals as she struggled with her large knife and fork, by slipping a drawing across the table. At seven, Daisy was ‘a turbulent little creature’, Mary wrote, ‘always getting into trouble of some kind, and from that first day she learned to take her troubles to “Uncle Lear”, who turned them into rhymes and pictures’, like a bump on the forehead that became the third horn of the ‘Uncareful Cow’, rubbed away with camphor two hundred times a day. Lear gave Daisy a copy of ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo’, sang ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and walked with her in the forest, kicking chestnut burrs, which they called the ‘yonghy bonghy bos’.
Every day Daisy and her small brother found a sketch and poem on their plates. These made up the alphabet of ‘The Absolutely Abstemious Ass’, drawn on scraps of paper and backs of letters, with afterthoughts like the crimson of the pensive owl’s carpet bag.
Mary was struck in particular by Lear’s musical voice, and remembered that the ‘strange meats and unmanageable cutlery of the table d’hôte inspired the marvellous botanical specimen “Manyforkia Spoonifolia” as well as most of the recipes for “Nonsense Cookery”’. (Gardening readers, like Maria Price La Touche, found the botany ‘delicious’, and called her zinc wheelbarrow ‘Lady Jingly’.) Lear invented a special Nonsense Gazette for the Terry children, and, thinking perhaps of experts like La Mortola’s Ludwig Winter, who was head gardener of the Botanical Garden at Poppelsdorf before moving to France, he attributed both plants and recipes to ‘Professor Bosh’. The professor found the plants, the Gazette stated with precision, ‘in the valley of Verrikwier, near the lake of Oddgrow, and on the summit of the hill Orfeltugg’, and had also collected the recipes for Amblongus Pie, Crumblobblious Cutlets and Gosky Patties. The recipes echoed perfectly the practical, patronising tone of Mrs Beeton and her peers. The cook must simmer a mess of Amblongusses until they become ‘a pale purple colour’:
Then, having prepared the paste, insert the whole carefully, adding at the same time a small pigeon, 2 slices of beef, 4 cauliflowers, and any number of oysters.
Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time.
Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as far as possible.
Food was always important to Lear, especially as he grew older: ‘It is funny to see what attention I always pay to “dinner” details’, he wrote at one point, ‘but I have a notion that food is a great factor in our fooly life.’ In his diary he noted meals at stately homes, at suppers with friends, in places on his travels. At one inn on the long walk to the Certosa, breakfast consisted of ‘wonderful trout & potatoes – beefsteak – & wine & raspberries’. At home his daily diary ended with brief notes: ‘dined on barley broth, & boiled mutton, cooked a la Giorgio Kokali – first rate’; ‘came back by 6. when Giorgio gave me a very grand dinner of p. soup & grilled fowl’.
Sometimes botany and recipes combined. One later set of ‘Flora Nonsensica’ was full of transformed objects: a clothes-brush tree; a fork tree; a tree of chignons. Each had a quasi-scientific description, like the Biscuit Tree, ‘never yet described or delineated’:
As it never grows near rivers, nor near the sea, nor near mountains or vallies, or houses, its native place is wholly uncertain. When the flowers fall off, and the tree breaks out in biscuits, the effect is by no means disagreeable, especially to the hungry. If the Biscuits grow in pairs, they do not grow single, and if they ever fall off, they cannot be said to remain on.
In the summer Lear sent all the drawings to be lithographed in England, where Robert Bush would be his publisher again. On 30 August, as his eight weeks at La Certosa came to a close, he copied out the alphabet he had made for the Terry children, ‘wrote out all the rest of the new Xmas book – & posted the whole to Bush’. This included all his new poems, the stories of ‘The Seven Families’ and ‘The Four Little Children’, the nonsense botany and cookery, and three alphabets. Sensibly, Bush persuaded him to leave the hundred new limericks for a separate book, More Nonsense, to be published the following autumn. Having sent all this off, Lear returned to the Corso degli Inglesi and waited anxiously for Giorgio: ‘No steamer – no George – no nothing’; ‘I wish George would come’; ‘Where can G be?’ Then Giorgio arrived, ‘& certainly, as one opens the window & looks out on the Lemon gardens to the city & mountain – S. Remo is a beautiful place’.
Putting the new book together was a simple matter compared to the agony of the Corsican journal, but in the storms of late autumn, Lear’s anxiety grew. Doubts returned, fears that he should have spent the money on travel instead of on the house, should have gone to America or somewhere else far away. ‘No sleep all night,’ he recorded on 21 November:
Counted every hour, & rose at 6 worried & miserable – I review my whole life in such hours & full of evil as it undoubtedly is, I am obliged to conclude as I always do, that the great physical misery & ‘particular skeleton’ of all these long years, was not of my making – commenced when I was 5 or 6 years old, – & has influenced all the course of my existence. Blame there has been on my part no doubt – but the foundation of wretchedness was too solidly there, ever to have allowed of a greatly different chain of events & condition of living than has been my lot to bear.
It had taken time to reach this point of self-forgiveness. The ‘particular skeleton’ was his epilepsy, but the foundation of wretchedness also lay in his mother’s rejection,
his bullying at school, the unspecified abuse. This month his epilepsy was bad. His days were black. He thought of his family, the living and the lost: ‘This was “Kate’s” birthday: she would have been 56 had she lived’; ‘This was poor Charles’s birthday – he would have been 63 today.’
The dark mood passed as the weather improved and the builders worked on. Soon he and Giorgio were unpacking cases and putting thousands of drawings into cabinets ‘just as if it were in Stratford Place’. James Field cheered him up by ordering five hundred copies of Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets and he was pleased when his own copies arrived on 8 December: ‘all my Autumn & Summer work at Certosa. – sent by Book Post from Bush. It is well got up & looks famous.’ He found, to his great relief, that it was universally liked. In his anonymous review in the Spectator Richard Ford found some lapses and disliked the recipes, but he greatly admired the ballads, stories and botany:
The nonsense botany is genuine nonsense – extravagant enough to make the most prosaic man laugh; but yet nonsensical precisely because it recognizes the laws of sense, and directly traverses them … in spite of little failures here and there, the ideal of nonsense is attained by Mr Lear, who, in this respect, may be said to stand at the very summit of the human race.
34: NONSENSE SONGS AND MORE NONSENSE
We don’t know whether Lear or Robert Bush chose the order for Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, but the first poem readers encountered was ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, in which love and voyaging joined. As the poems followed in sequence that happy combination seemed more elusive. The Duck and the Kangaroo are friends, not lovers, and although their escape is joyful, the book’s mood sobers with the ‘The Daddy Long-legs and the Fly’, playing forever on the shingly shore. But then the Jumblies sweeps melancholy away: they are so shouty and uncaring, so happy to launch their sieve full of holes, defying the storms and the warnings of ‘they’.