by Jenny Uglow
Giorgio Kokali in 1881
Lear often felt he talked too much when he was out: he was drinking hard as well as working hard. Giorgio warned him about this, and investigated their regular supply of Marsala, which turned out to have been laced with spirits at the shop: put near the fire, it flamed up. Startled, Lear tried to cut down, guiltily buying the occasional bottle: ‘Tried Barbera wine but did not like it at all – wh. would have been perhaps a good thing only there was Barolo to fall back on. Certainly the question of drink is a painful one to me.’ The Barolo wine of Piedmont became his staple, supplemented with comforting bottles of Bass, and champagne, in quantities, if available.
If Lear was often tipsy – and his late night handwriting suggests that – he steered clear of becoming an alcoholic. Giorgio was the real victim of drink. Life in the Kokali family was turbulent and in 1879 Lambi was sent home for getting into debt, drinking and going to brothels. Now he and Nicola wanted to open a trattoria in Brindisi or Bari, the first stops for Corfiotes off the boat. Frustrated by their demands, Lear went south himself to see what the possibilities were. Despite his worries, he basked in his trip, staying with Arthur Glennie in Rome on the way; ‘Strange place Rome! It seems a kind of dream to have been here.’ In Brindisi the Corfu steamer lay below his hotel window, ‘as does the Sumatra from India – All the water is like a silver mirror, & I wish I was going too! – It is impossible to be thankful enough for the blessings of the day, & for the whole past week. I hope I may be able to do some good for those 2 unhappy sons of my good servant.’ He sketched a fishing boat sailing on the still harbour, found a place for the boys, and went home.
Money drained away. The Brindisi lease fell through and Lear learned from the British consul that trattorias opened and shut there in the wink of an eye. So the plan was dropped. Lambi came back to San Remo and went to work for the Watsons while Nicola, who was far from well, became a waiter at a nearby hotel. ‘What a queer lot of Suliot incidents in my silly life, since reading of Suli in Byron before I was 10 years old!’ Lear wrote in March 1882. Then Giorgio began drinking so heavily and behaving so wildly that Lear began to think he must dismiss him, even after their twenty-seven years together. In June, when the whole town closed in mourning for the death of Garibaldi, Giorgio was approaching collapse. He seemed a little ‘ugly’, thought Lear, and had ‘queer and violent fits’. Then he disappeared. Nothing was heard until a telegram arrived from Giorgio, sent from Toulon early one morning, demanding that Lear send money to him in Marseilles, so that he could go to England. Desperate, Lear contacted the Greek consul in Toulon and sent Nicola to bring his father back. When he found him, Giorgio was in rags, thin and ill and nearly unconscious: he had been wandering in the hills, without food, and had almost lost his memory.
Nicola took Giorgio up to Monte Generoso to recover, and Lear settled back to work. ‘I have still more to be thankful for,’ he told Fortescue brightly, ‘my health being MUCH better … I drink Barolo – fully as much “as is good for me” by way of precaution.’ When he went up to Monte Generoso himself he tried to believe that Giorgio’s alcoholic breakdowns were not serious, and set about enjoying himself: ‘This place just now is not unlike the last Day, or universal judgement, – such heaps of unexpected persons keep turning up.’ Fanny Kemble was there, and Mazzini’s widow, and John Cross, George Eliot’s widower … ‘I constantly expect to see the Sultan, Mrs Gladstone, Sir Joshua Reynolds and the twelve apostles walk into the hotel.’ He avoided the noisy mob of the table d’hôte by dining separately with friends and firmly turned the other guests, with their tentacular embraces and snapping conversation, into nonsense:
The Octopods and reptiles
They dine at six o’clock,
And having dined, rush wildly out
Like an electric shock.
Back in the Villa Tennyson, having smuggled precious alpine plants across the border in his pockets, Lear felt restored, writing casually, ‘Georgio is immensely better & cheery. Garden now in extreme beauty. Ipomeas especially.’ The Kokali quarrels continued but over the winter father and sons worked together. Foss, foolish and faithful, sat sedately under the canary’s cage hoping for biscuits to fall through. At Christmas, when Henry Strachey came to stay, Lear gave him the second part of ‘Mr and Mrs Discobbolos’ for his father, Sir Edward, then collected a sheaf of carefully cut-out backs of old envelopes from his bureau. On these, for Henry’s eight-year-old sister, he drew heraldic pictures of Foss: ‘After he had done seven he said it was a great shame to caricature Foss and laid aside the pen.’
In the new year of 1883 the Watsons sacked Lambi for stealing wine, pawning the cook’s watch and having a woman in Pisa: after much prevarication, he slunk resentfully back to Corfu. Again, Lear shrugged off the drama: ‘Watson may perhaps have been a little hasty, but Mrs Watson is beyond doubt very angelic & sensible.’ His friendship with the Watsons survived: he drew birds for their daughter Beatrice, and laughed at her playing at being a Harpy with a waste-paper basket over her head. Spring brought friends, good evenings, long talks, sunny days.
Adamson Parker had died, and in March Gussie came out to San Remo bringing two nieces with her. Gussie was used to caring for people – her mother, her father, her husband – and if Lear had proposed she would doubtless have accepted. Every day he felt more undecided, but ‘Alas! Alas! It cannot be,’ he wrote. ‘As a dream is a dream it is better to treat it as such.’ On the day she left, he made up nosegays and took them up to the hotel. That evening, he wrote,
so ends the very last possible chance of a change of life. Many causes occasion this – my age, the least among them: – the knowledge of all my misery, physical and psychical – now & of late quite clear to me & unescapable from, – among the greatest. It was a hard effort at the last, & I could only not burst into tears before I left. When I did.
If Parker had died ten years ago, he thought, ‘I might even then have hoped to have a good woman to nurse me at the last.’ But he would never have asked her. The tears were less for Gussie than for his own hesitation and loss.
People he loved turned up one by one. A few weeks later, Frank Lushington came out to stay, bringing Gertrude with him, still to Lear ‘an absolutely delightful girl; a perfect duck in all possible ways’. But during their visit Giorgio was far from well. After Frank left, Lear sat with him and coaxed him into the garden while the curtains were taken down and the carpets rolled up before the summer exodus. At the start of June Lear sent him to the mountains again with Nicola, and, glad of the calm, settled down to reading Crabb Robinson’s memoirs and Wilkie Collins’s stories with immense pleasure (he had cried copiously over Collins’s The Frozen Deep two years before). ‘It is impossible to be thankful enough for the quiet and comfort of these last few days,’ he wrote. Sitting on the terrace, he thought the garden ‘wonderfully lovely, & daily more so’.
It was a shock then, when he and Dmitri went to Mendrisio in July, to see Giorgio coughing and pale. He came down to sit beside Lear while he played the piano and struggled along to Bella Vista to see the view, but it was clear that he was fading. Lear tried hard not to believe this, insisting that when Giorgio was shivering he should just put on warmer clothes, but his actions betrayed his distress: one day he went up to the high slopes and threw away all the alphabets he had used to teach ‘poor Giorgio’s 3 sons’. At three in the morning on 8 August 1883, Giorgio died, asking for Lear and saying, ‘Nicola, Lambi, Dmitri.’ Lear and Giorgio’s sons closed his eyes and bound his hands. Astonished at how peaceful he looked, Lear went into the garden to write his diary in the dawn. ‘O dear Giorgio you are gone’, he wrote, ‘but be as good a guide and angel to me as for so many years.’
He did not want to go home. He thought longingly of faraway places – South America, Japan or Java – but all he could manage was a long walk through Umbria and Tuscany, sketching as he went, with Dmitri carrying his portfolio, as his father had done. Giorgio was buried in Mendrisio, but Lear also bought a plot
in the San Foce cemetery in San Remo, a few hundred yards from the Villa Emily, where he put up a large, pale, arched headstone in Giorgio’s memory, using the Italian form of his surname ‘Cocali’. The plot next to this, he bought for his own grave.
After Giorgio died, Lear went back to In Memoriam, quoting the opening stanza, as he had done many times before.
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
Could one rise, he wondered, not on the dead selves of the self, but on the good selves of others? Could he make Giorgio a stepping stone? He shook off all memories of rows, tantrums and drunkenness and recalled only Giorgio’s good side, writing emotionally to Emily Tennyson:
It is well for foolish people to say, – how can a mere servant be such a stepping stone? – but to one who for 30 years knew George’s constant fidelity, activity, humility, goodness of disposition, – endless cheerfulness – honesty – patience, & untold other virtues. It is plain since his death, that as a ‘stepping stone’ he is ever of more value to my life now than in all the 30 years of his unbroken kindness & service.
I wish I could think that I had merited such a friend, & that I had never been hasty or cross; but if anything is known to those separated from us, then all may be known, & more allowance be made for faults than self-accusing memory may imagine.
Lear clung to this idea. It was impossible, he felt, to accept that life was all ‘“a dream & a waste”: rather let me believe in the stepping-stone theory.’ He made lists of stepping-stone people, including his sister Ann and his gardener Giuseppe, and hung their photos in his bedroom.
The Kokali troubles were not over. During the next two years Nicola became increasingly ill and Dmitri, whom Lear had taught Italian and English – they read Robinson Crusoe together – and who had looked after Lear so lovingly, was found stealing and sent back to Corfu. (Eventually he settled as a schoolteacher in a village on Paxos.) At the start of 1885 Nicola was the only one left in the Villa Tennyson, devoted to Lear but sick with consumption. He began spitting blood and in his illness revealed to a shocked Lear another side of Giorgio: a father whose returns to Corfu they had dreaded, who kept another woman, abused his wife and bullied his children. It was as if, in thirty years, Lear had never known him at all. Nicola died in March 1885, aged only thirty-four, and was buried in the plot in San Foce cemetery, his name added to his father’s memorial.
*
Lear’s sister Ellen had died soon after Giorgio, aged eighty-six. Her wealth went to the Boswell family but she had bought a house in Texas for Frederick, and left Lear a handy £500. More money came from the house. The Villa Emily had been let to a string of tenants but in late February 1884 he finally found a buyer: ‘the old Villa Emily is no longer mine,’ he wrote, with heavy underlining. He had already reduced the price from £7000 to £3000, and in the end it went for 40,000 francs: £1,600. But still, it was a relief. At last, he thought, he could repay Northbrook’s loan (although he did not manage this for another two years). But his old house still seemed part of his life: while it lay empty that spring, John and Catherine Symonds rented it to find a calm place for their daughter Madge to recover from typhoid fever.
As if collapsing after the farewell to the Villa Emily, Lear fell ill with pleurisy. It took him a long time to recover but with Dmitri pulling and pushing him into railway carriages like ‘a sack of hay’, in late May he managed to get up to Recoara near Vicenza, where he fell in love with Palladian architecture. He was shocked, though, by the bigotry of ‘well-bred & educated’ American Southerners staying at his hotel. One family, he wrote, ‘electrified me by their opinion on “Slave Emancipation”’:
The Civil War, in their view, had nothing to do with a hatred of slavery, though hatred of slavery was used as a factor in the matter. It was wholly in substance a political move against the Southern States. Not one of us, nor of thousands in America, would sit at table with a black man or woman! ‘But’, said I to one of the sons, ‘you would sit in a room with your dog?’ ‘Dog? Yes, Sir! But you can’t compare an inferior creature such as a negro is with a dog.’
Dodging such encounters when he could, Lear worked on his Tennyson project. He had wept – not difficult for Lear – when Tennyson was made a peer the previous December. (Though he did wonder, as a matter of interest, whether royalty and peers cut their own toe-nails: ‘Thank the Lord that you are not a Centipede.’) He was cheered in his work by the affectionate encouragement of Emily and Hallam. Lear had written sweetly in November 1883, when Hallam became engaged to Audrey Boyle, urging them to marry ‘directly-suddenly’ and to come along the Corniche for their wedding trip and stay next door in the Hotel Royal. He gave them one of his paintings as a wedding present.
He was cheered too by the response to his watercolours and drawings in Wardour Street: his friend Alfred Seymour told him he had never done anything better, picking out ‘the poetical and mysterious’ Calabrian Pentedattilo, and the ‘lovely Corsican drawings’. But it was hard to concentrate. He mused on time passing: it seemed extraordinary to him that Frank Lushington and Chichester Fortescue were both now sixty-one. He brooded on faith, and a life hereafter. There had to be an afterlife, or at least the hope of one: ‘We know nothing, but is that a reason we should not cling to a hope of reunion after death?’ Playing his part among the British expats he went to church, stuck crossly between Fenton’s evangelical sermons and the High Church effusions of the Revd Verschoyle. Where, he wondered, were the moderate followers of F. D. Maurice and Jowett and his old friend Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, whose death he sorely lamented? ‘Is there no medium between damning Jews and Catholics to eternal burning and … walking among those dear candlestix?’
In 1884 he wrote a story-sequel to ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, and when he was ill the following year he drafted another in verse. They had different settings but in both versions the Pussy-cat, now definitely female, dies suddenly, leaving her brood – like the Congreves and Kokalis, and, in his mind, Lear himself – as motherless children. In the story the Owl is shipwrecked and the children survive alone, ‘though in a bereaved and bohemian condition’; in the poem, the widowed owl sings sadly to his old guitar:
But with the feathers of his tail he wiped his weeping eyes,
And in the hollow of a tree in Sila’s inmost maze
We made a happy home and here we pass our obvious days.
Lear too passed his days calmly. He had a new servant, Luigi Rusconi from Milan, who was quick and clever and played chess with him in the kitchen. He was busy with his work and his garden, played the piano and enjoyed his music: when the young lithographer Frank Underhill was coming out that autumn, Lear wrote, ‘if you only play JIGGS I won’t have you at all. Even Chopin worries & fidgets me – but Mozart, Handel, Mendelsohn, Hayden, Schubert & sichlike, I delight in.’ Above all his friends’ visits and letters kept him going. ‘He really lived upon the letters of his distant friends more than any man I have ever known,’ said Frank, ‘all the more since he became unable to carry out his wish to go on & on over the untravelled world.’
He thought nostalgically of those travels. In April 1885, Foord and Dickinson showed his watercolour drawings of Egypt, on sale at a miserable £5, and when Amelia Edwards reviewed them kindly in the Academy, Lear asked her advice about his own journals. ‘I don’t say – mind – that my “Nile Diaries of a Landscape Painter” would be worth the 99th part of a grasshopper’s eyelash,’ he wrote tentatively, but they might be worth something if considered as part of his art. She offered to introduce him to her own publishers, Harpers, but he put the scheme aside: he had enough on his hands with his Tennyson drawings. He had already mounted all the smaller drawings on card and written the lines from the poems beneath them: these little sketches were now his ‘Eggs’ as the early work had been; next the ‘Chrysalisses’ needed mounting too. When the great
heat came, he took these to the Villa Figini in Barzano, on the plains of Brianza between Milan and Como. He could see the Alps in the distance and in the pure, breezy air he felt he had never met ‘any summer place so everlastingly green & lovely’. Yet he still planned his book, and that autumn wrote a dedication to Emily.
In the Villa Tennyson he worked on, played the piano and read Trollope. Having started with Can You Forgive Her? he went back to the earlier novels and began the whole Barchester series, ‘wonderfully delightful books’, sending to London for five books at a time and buying still more in San Remo. Trollope, so blessedly prolific, would keep Lear happy to the end of his life, a strange, homesick return to the vicarages and country houses of England. In November 1885, that country-house world came back to him when Fortescue came to stay. He had been out of office since Gladstone resigned in June over the Irish Home Rule Bill, and now that the days of long meetings and dining with the queen at Balmoral were over he had time on his hands. Frank Underhill, who was helping Lear with the Tennyson lithographs, had the guest room, so Fortescue stayed down the road in the Hotel Royal. When he arrived, he was still grieving for Lady W.: ‘Slept badly last night, full of my love – I had her glove in my hand.’ He was glad to see Lear, and to walk round his garden, ‘a magical contrast to the bare bank covered in rubbish wh. I left in March 1880 – lovely convolvulus, daturas, begonias, scarlet passion flowers.’