Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  and indeed, though I am not in the strongest sense of the word Bohemian, I have just so much of that nature in me as it is perhaps impossible the artistic and poetic beast can be born without. Always accustomed as a boy to go my own ways uncontrolled, I cannot help fearing that I should run rusty and sulky by reason of retinues and routines.

  Sometimes he thought he might just go with Giorgio, and ask Northbrook to fund him by commissioning drawings. At other times he thought he would not go at all: he had a new house, and to take flight so soon ‘seems a kind of giddiness’.

  In the end he decided to go and hurried back to London in the summer to collect orders for drawings. The trip also let him see his friends. The Lushingtons now had another daughter, Clare, another Lear godchild. Frank was tender towards his children, telling Emily Tennyson this autumn, ‘Dear little Clare goes on pulling her way through the difficulties of teeth with a good deal of vigour … she is sharp enough for anything – she took to Lear as her godfather very kindly.’ When he wrote this in November, their new son had been born on the first of the month: they thought of calling him ‘Allsaints Lushington’, Frank joked. In the end he was a solemn George Henry Fitzjames – soon known to all as a second Harry.

  Lear left the Lushingtons and England tired but pleased. His many visits had paid off, winning £1000 of commissions. Despite a fall that left him feeling giddy and badly affected his right eye, making him worried about the pressures of the journey to India, in October he closed the house and sailed off, picking up Giorgio in Corfu. The sea was stormy, the ship was packed, the deck swam with vomit and Lear’s temper was vile. In Egypt, whose scenery and people had always delighted him, he fell into uncharacteristic, racist rants against ‘brutal Arabs’, ‘the devil nonsense of the loathsome aborigines’ and ‘Egyptian pests’. At Suez he drank in tales of the country’s viciousness, lapping up the Prussian ambassador’s story that the most popular entertainment at the opening of the canal had been ‘a giant negro buggering seven boys in a row for two hours’. Such outbursts were very startling after so much self-concealment and reticence: Lear was heading for disaster. The boats at Suez were full and when a French boat for India arrived a week later and he booked a cabin, there was a muddle over Customs. A Customs officer demanded that his baggage be transferred from one barge to another to be checked; anxious about time, Lear began to argue; the officer then refused to look at his bags altogether and rode away. ‘Nearly mad with worry, noise, delay & uncertainty’, Lear impetuously ordered his luggage to be taken off the barge and sent to the station. By evening he and a shocked, vexed Giorgio were on the Alexandria train. Lear scrawled in large letters, ‘The Indian bubble is burst.’

  Next day despair overwhelmed him. The breakdown of the trip was a calamity, he wrote, ‘as at Jerusalem in 1867, & Larissa in 1849 – the abrupt change is afflicting, as savouring of insanity’. Was he going mad? And what was he to do about the £1000 commissions? He must plan the journey all over again.

  *

  In San Remo Lady Kay-Shuttleworth had died, and although Walter Congreve was still a good neighbour, Lear found him disconcertingly worldly. Scandal had surrounded him for the past two years. In the winter of 1871 Lear had heard rumours that Walter’s servant Ellen, now in Nice, was pregnant and that he planned to marry her. He rushed to find details from the Congreves’ visitor, Revd John Richard Green, author of A Short History of the English People, who implied that Ellen – ‘a lascivious bitch’ – would sleep with anyone, and was strongly against the marriage. (The following winter Walter told him that she had been fighting off brutal advances from the respectable Revd Green himself.) But it was clear that their relationship was serious, and Lear was concerned for the boys.

  Fussing over the Congreves, dipping in and out of local gossip, in early 1873 Lear painted a set of Tyrants, read Horace Walpole’s letters and Tom Moore’s diaries, planned his garden and worked on his Tennyson paintings. He was bored: in April he was ill in bed, in May he had a swollen face. He felt crippled, emasculated, and the India plan seemed ridiculous and impossible. But in the heat of July he wrote wryly to Lady W. that he thought the sedentary life would kill him, after a lifetime of travel. He must pick himself up and go.

  In these low days Lear turned to nonsense, writing two versions of ‘The Pobble who has no Toes’, and no nose either, judging from his bandaged face. Perhaps spurred by a news item reporting that the son of the Akhoond of Swat, near to the Hindu Kush, had quarrelled with his father, he also wrote an exuberant, foot-stamping, many-versed, poem, ‘The Akond of Swat’:

  Who or why, or which, or what, is the Akond of SWAT? …

  Do his people like him extremely well?

  Or do they, whenever they can, rebel or PLOT

  At the Akond of Swat?

  If he catches them then, either old or young,

  Does he have them chopped in pieces or hung or SHOT,

  The Akond of Swat?

  India was on his mind. He began to get ready to go and spent the high summer sorting through three chests full of letters. He reckoned that he had over four hundred correspondents: it felt as if everyone since the invention of letters must have written to him, ‘with a few exceptions perhaps, such as the prophet Ezekiel, Mary Queen of Scots & the Venerable Bede’. He was moved. ‘It is quite impossible to record in detail what wonderful evidences of kindness to myself these multitudinous letters are!’ he said. ‘I destroy a great part, – but a great number remain – what I cannot bring myself to extinguish.’

  Letters, however, could also bring pain. In September he learned that Gussie had finally married. Her husband, Adamson Parker, was old and an invalid – someone to take care of. Hit again by the vision of a lonely life, he wrote, ‘I must leave this place.’ Fancifully he told Fortescue that he had still always planned to propose to Gussie and his decision to go to India would have depended on her answer. ‘So altogether I considered that to go to India for 18 months would really be my best course – as a change of scene may do me good, & besides, – living as I do from hand to mouth by my art, I dare not throw away the many commissions for paintings & drawings I already have for Indian subjects.’

  Soon after he read Gussie’s letter, Lear left for Genoa, full of nerves. In his diary, he wrote:

  I have thought some time today that I would walk once more to San Remo from Genoa, & see Foss the forsaken, & Walter Congreve & Hubert & Arny once more, but I’m sure that would not be wise. // N.B. it would have been better not to have drunk those 2 bottles, but having drank them, let us forget that fact, & act sotto-sopra accordingly.

  He spent the next three weeks in a hotel, and finally, on 24 October, he boarded the steamer India. There were last-minute anxieties about a day’s delay in sailing, when he had all his luggage taken off the boat and nearly turned home. Next day, finally, he was off, meeting Giorgio in Naples, then sitting on deck in his warm cloak with ‘good old George’, heading across the great green sea to Bombay.

  36: INDIA

  When Lear reached Mumbai on 22 November 1873, he was excited to the point of shock: ‘Extreme beauty of Bombay harbour! … Much surprised by the beauty of Bombay! … Violent and amazing delight at the varieties of life and dress here.’ The short journey to the Esplanade Hotel, he said, drove him nearly mad from sheer wonder at the foliage, palms, flowers, beasts, colours and costumes and ‘myriadism of impossible picturesqueness’. Even the woman who emptied the slops in the hotel was a wonder, her arms covered in bangles.

  He would explore this new world for the next year and a half, criss-crossing the subcontinent by every kind of transport. He rode in trains and bullock carts, horse-drawn gharries, ehkkas – small pony-carts – and dhoolies, covered litters, and even a jampan, a sedan chair less bumpy than a dhooly, ‘only when the men change the pole from one shoulder to t’other, it seems as if they were about to pitch you over into space’. He went from west to east, north to south, from the Himalayas to Sri Lanka, his long-dreamed-of Ceylon. He moved from tor
rid heat and monsoon rain to mountain ice and balmy shore. The travelling often tired him: he was cross and crusty, troubled by his bad eye, plagued by thoughts of going home. Equally often he was moved, amazed, astonished to be there, thrilled by passing scenes from a railway carriage which he noted hour by hour. ‘What groves of Bananas! What groups of figures – (Crows on all cows bax) … Lovely river views! Every minute makes life more wonderful. Astounding effects of beauty on each side Railway, neck-twisting & eye-cracking.’

  Using the old Anglicised names that Lear knew, the first great loop took him north-east up to Cawnpore and Lucknow, where he met Northbrook and Evelyn Baring, who had come out as Northbrook’s secretary and who managed all Lear’s arrangements. Giorgio had always wanted to see an elephant, and here, looking down from a hill at Lucknow, Lear drew a herd bathing in the river.

  Lucknow, 1 p.m., 8 December 1873

  Next he travelled down the Ganges to Benares and Calcutta. In the New Year of 1874 he went up to Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas, then turned back south to Agra and Delhi, which he thought dirty and ruined by British barracks, but he still made ‘Delhineations of the Dehlicate architecture as is all impressed on my mind as inDhelibly as the Dehliterious quality of the water of that city’. From here Lear trekked north again to Simla, the British summer capital in the hills, and then further north still, to Narkunda on the border with Tibet, an interminable four-day train journey that produced a string of limericks with dreadful rhymes:

  There lived a small puppy at Nārkunda,

  Who sought for the best tree to bārk under,

  Which he found, and said ‘Now, I can call out Bow Wow

  Underneath the best Cedar in Nārkunda.’

  In late April he worked his way nine hundred miles south again to Poona where the monsoons trapped him for two months. At last, when the rains stopped, he and Giorgio journeyed south, to Hyderabad and Madras, then across to the west, to Calicut in Kerala. The final stop, in late 1874, would be Ceylon.

  Northbrook and Evelyn Baring could not have been kinder, but they were furiously busy. Northbrook was a liberal viceroy, determined to reduce tension by abolishing the new income tax and moderating the land tax on peasants, and working desperately to stave off famine in Bengal. And Lear had been right to think viceregal retinues were not for him. In the great camp at Lucknow he watched a parade in the ruined Residency, which had been destroyed in the Mutiny of 1857: ‘Vast numbers of people. Immensely fine spectacle. Astonishing elephants.’ But his luggage had vanished, causing ‘a miserable hullabaloo’, and he had to borrow clothes for the smart dinners. At Calcutta he found the strict protocol and packed social calendar of the governor’s house hard to bear: ‘No rest in Hustlefussabad.’ At Hyderabad, although after a ball ‘the 20 men who took up the carpets, & the 20 more who cleared the room were a sight to see’, it was not for him. ‘Boo! Bah! Ye Indian houses & humbugs!’ Yet he fitted in well with the British society in Simla, where he spent nearly a month, in the Bombay hills and in Ootacamund, ‘Ooty’, the southern mountain retreat from Madras. The communities of the hill stations, with their villas, churches, croquet lawns and tea parties, reminded him of English spas, bizarrely set in Indian life: ‘What strange scenes of ladies in Jampans! And liveried Coolies! What groups of beautiful little English children, with Ayahs and Behrers!!!!! What women with nose-buttons, and rings, and spoons, and sky-blue breeches! Verily Simla is a queer place.’

  Meeting the British residents, Lear came haloed in Northbrook’s patronage and they found him a (mostly) cheery addition to their lives, singing his Tennyson songs, drawing alphabets and funny pictures for the children: he was delighted to find that ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ was known in all the English schools in India. The hill stations were breathing spaces, in all senses. But on their travels Lear tried to avoid staying in private houses where he had to fit in and be polite to his hosts, or in hotels, which were generally squalid. He preferred the Dak houses, government-run bungalows on the main roads. When they arrived their luggage was simply put in any empty room: ‘old George in 10 minutes used to get both of ours in neat order’ and within half an hour the khamsamah, the cook, brought dinner and beer, or claret and sherry – Lear drank a lot on this trip.

  In the bungalows he could get up as early as he liked and leave when he chose. As a British traveller he was in a bubble, floating above the people of the country, whom he never really came to know. Northbrook himself had identified this distance as a problem as soon as he arrived, noting how little his high-up civil servants knew the people, and advising one new residency governor to get the views of district officers and those of Indians ‘wherever we can get them to speak freely’. Lear went further than most, exploring the bazaars and temples of Poona and the villages around, drawing street scenes in Hyderabad, sketching men and women on mountain roads and beneath coastal palms and banyan trees. But he never really crossed the ‘Borderline’, as the young Kipling would put it ten years from now, ‘away from Levees and Government House Lists past Trades Balls – far beyond everything and everybody you ever knew in your respectable life’.

  This separation was intensified by his insistence on travelling with Giorgio rather than taking Indian servants: soon after he arrived he had been warned this was contrary to custom, and indeed, for the first time, there were mutterings about their relationship. But Giorgio knew him, understood his sudden fits and his need to sleep, could find his spectacles or false teeth, carry his sketches, hold down his sketch pad in a howling wind. They were an odd pair, this large, shambling, short-sighted, heavy-bearded man in his early sixties, and the craggy Suliot, now fifty-five and still proudly handsome, looking more like a couple than master and servant, quarrelling and making up, struggling on together, through varying landscapes, changing peoples, different languages. Lear found to his surprise that many people spoke English, the official language for the last forty years, with a ‘curious fluent exactness’. This was useful, but he was sometimes disconcerted by the imposition of British education, so remote from their daily lives and own rich history. Towards the end of his stay he visited a school in Malabar: ‘Heard upper class read Henry V, and they were examined in Ivanhoe. Is there, or is there not time thrown away in this sort of learning?’ He tried to learn some Hindi, and some Tamil in the south – really just to ask the way – scattering his journals and letters with Indian terms and rolling the words and names round in his mind.

  Nonsense was a refuge from boredom. After almost a fortnight of Poona downpours, he noted, ‘Pouring rain – buckets – all day. Penned out all day … Wrote out the Cummerbund and sent it to the Bombay Times. The Monsoon has come upon us quoth the Lady of Shalott.’

  She sate upon her Dobie,

  To watch the Evening Star,

  And all the punkahs as they passed,

  Cried, ‘My how fair you are!’

  Around her bower, with quivering leaves,

  The tall Kamsamahs grew,

  And Kitmutgars in wild festoons

  Hung down from Tchokis blue.

  His lady swallowed by the angry Cummerbund has something of Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ of two years before, but Lear’s ballad took its energy from the joyful translocation of words, giving them vibrant, sinister life. The Dobie, a washerman, becomes a seat, the punkah fans a chorus; the cook is a tree, the kitmutgars who wait at table are winding creepers, festooning the Tchoki chairs. The feast of words went on, with golden-finned Chuprassies (smarter servants), green Ayahs perching like parrots, a moaning Mussak (a water-bag), silvery Goreewallahs (grooms) and the angry Jampan howling, deep in his hateful lair. Lear was delighted when the Bombay Times printed it in their ‘Whims of the Week’. Copying it out later he added a nonsense glossary, attributing the poem to a lady long resident in India, famed for her knowledge of its customs:

  Cummerbund, a sort of Tiger or Leopard of immense size & ferocious nature

  Dobie – a silk cushion

  Punkah – a wandering
minstrel

  Khamsameh, a tree of the poplar kind

  Kitmutgar – a sort of convolvulus.

  Nonsense passed the time, but Lear was travelling as an artist, and everywhere he went, he carried his small sketch pad, making fast drawings, ‘scraps’ as he called them, and penning them out or leaving them until he came home to develop into larger watercolours. Giorgio kept the sketches in portfolios and boxes, until the rainy days in Poona, where they had tin cases made to preserve them better. As he travelled, Lear thought of earlier British artists in India, like Thomas Daniell and his nephew William, who had spent ten years here at the start of the century, publishing coloured aquatints in their six-part Oriental Scenery. For Lear, they had failed to capture India’s brilliance. He remembered Daniell’s view of the ghats in Benares, the steps where pilgrims gathered to bathe in the holy Ganges, as pallid, gray, sad, solemn. Yet when he saw them, he was dazzled by the rainbow colours of the crowds and found the river ‘one of the most abundantly bruyant, and startlingly radiant places of infinite bustle and movement!!’ Out in a boat, he put his pencil aside and took out his brush, making clear, pink-tinged, atmospheric sketches, outlining the buildings and the crowds later in sepia ink.

  Benares, 2.30 p.m., 14 December 1873. Notes: ‘A. Bathing rafts B. boats. C hazy blue. D sand. | E. Women above. F. Sheds on broken steps. G. green. H. cindery … light off sky. I. millions of pigeons J. gray L. gold. R. red’

  India was almost beyond his grasp. He reached constantly for comparisons with places he had known: Cairo and Naples, Italian villas, Cumbrian mountains, Sussex parks, Nile cataracts, landscapes of Greece and Crete. All were inadequate for somewhere so magically, infuriatingly different. The watery area of Tollygunge in Calcutta, with boats moored along the banks, seen at dawn, was more like an English view, he thought, than a Nile scene, though his description gives the lie to this idea: