A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Monro’s first move, as soon as he felt his friends around him, was to recommend himself to what might be called the establishment, the august Poetry Society. They agreed to lend their support to a new journal, the Poetry Review, and to enclose in it their dismal list of fixtures, the Poetical Gazette. Although Monro was to do the work and meet some of the expenses, his attraction for the Society was probably partly his appearance. His moustache and upright bearing made him look like a Guards Officer (‘a dejected Guards officer,’ said John Drinkwater) and ‘safer’ than most young poets. Late in 1912, however, he parted company with the Review and started up his own quarterly, Poetry and Drama, on the principle, said del Re, ‘that poetry was to be judged as poetry and not according to standards that, more often than not, have nothing whatsoever to do with poetry.’ Meanwhile, in September 1912, he was approached by Eddie Marsh, who asked him to publish an anthology of the new Georgian poets.

  Marsh was Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary, a patron of the arts and, in a guileless and generous way, of artistic young men. It was Rupert Brooke who had suggested the anthology (and, indeed, had offered to write the whole thing himself) and Marsh, though his taste was conservative, was taken by the idea of new young voices, rejecting the Victorian past, outshining The Golden Treasury. The selections, of course, he wanted to make personally, but it says a good deal for Monro, who had no experience of publishing beyond the Samurai Press, that Marsh should have chosen him to bring the look out, even though once again he took some of the financial risk. Georgian Poetry 1911—1912 sold more than fifteen thousand copies, and it was ready on the centre table for the customers who came to the opening of Monro’s new venture, the Poetry Bookshop. Thirty-five Devonshire Street was to become a shop that would stock every book published in English by a living poet. The offices were moved up to the first floor, and downstairs, as the sculptor Gaudier-Bržeska put it, they would ‘sell poetry by the pound.’

  Shopkeeping was new to Monro, and he never quite took to it. ‘Conscientious but incompetent’ was his own description, although the shop in itself realized his dearest ambitions. Coming down from his office with stiff bows and hesitant smiles he would give heartfelt advice to the customers, often advising them to choose something more worthwhile but less expensive. The office boy was ‘slow and dreamy’ and del Re, who never managed to master the Bar-Lock typewriter, drifted away, becoming a protégé of Logan Pearsall Smith. But Monro had the luck which courage deserves when he met a beautiful young woman, Alida Klementaski, who asked for nothing except the chance to serve humanity. She came from a Polish refugee family, and was ‘free,’ living largely on tea and cigarettes in a single room. A few days later she wrote to him: ‘The only way to make life worth living is to try and make other people love beauty as much as we do, isn’t it? That is what I try to do.’ Teaching herself everything that was necessary as she went along—stock keeping, accounting, copyediting, hand printing, hand lettering—she became his shop assistant at twenty-five shillings a week.

  She had thrown in her lot with him and was eager to live with him and to bear his child, ‘a record of our love.’ Monro, after all, had a son by his first marriage, who sometimes came to see him—so too did his first wife, who was living cheerfully in London with her lover, and sending her friends gifts of port wine. ‘She is just a woman I married,’ he explained. He loved Alida. To him she was ‘Dearest Child,’ his safe refuge. ‘We are most nearly born of one same kind’—but they were not, and he could never find the right words to tell her that he had been homosexual ever since his school-days. Possibly he thought that since Alida had joined ‘the ranks of the emancipated’ she would understand him without difficulty, but she could not and did not, either then or ever.

  Monro dreamed, night after night, that he was being buried alive. Both Romney Green and Frank Flint believed that Alida was a cool and balanced young woman who converted Monro from a romantic to a cynic. But in fact her temperament was one of heights and depths, and her love (though she had a generous heart) had its reverse side in wild jealousy, even of the visiting poets. Monro never lived with her, and was frequently away. Having become something like the official spokesman for English poetry, he worked devotedly at one of the most tiring of all occupations—travelling and giving talks. One of his lists reads ‘Workers’ Educational College, National Home Reading Union, Village Clubs Association, Carnegie Trusts, Shakespearean Reading Circle.’ Sometimes the wheels of the train, as they rattled along, seemed to him to he repeating ‘Windy bore, windy bore.’ He could rely on Alida to send him every detail of the shop’s fortunes. While the tragicomedy between them played itself out, she never failed the confidence he had put in her.

  During its first years the Poetry Bookshop was crowded, and known as a welcoming place, warmed in winter by a coal fire with Monro’s cat Pinknose and Alida’s dogs stretched out in front of it, and with seats where you could sit and read without being asked to buy. The seats, and indeed all the furniture, had been made by Romney Green out of massive oak. What became of these pieces in the end is a mystery, but it is hard to believe that they could ever have been destroyed. The shop was also a meeting place, and poets arriving in London, or even in England, made their way there as though by instinct. It was assumed that they would be needy, and the small rooms at the top of the house were available for them at the low rent of 3s 6d a week. The D. H. Lawrences, the Epsteins, the Frosts, all lodged there, and Wilfred Owen, who came there to get good advice, found that the place was full and had to take refuge in the local coffeehouse. Flint, however, noticed that none of them stayed there long. Devonshire Street was too much for them, he thought.

  Monro, of course, was also still a publisher, on the lookout for good poetry. He never arrived at a definition of it, although he believed it had something to do with rhythm and sense becoming identical. He might have added, however, after a few years’ experience, that poetry was what demanded, at all costs, to be published. In Poetry and Drama for June 1914 he had rashly said that he would ‘be glad at all times to receive letters from authors who consider themselves unfairly treated.’ In the Chapbook No. 23, May 1921, he specifies that manuscripts brought to the shop by hand will not be received, and even when sent by post ‘they cannot be examined within any specified period,’ but before that he had become used to abuse and reproaches of all kinds. Rejected authors called him ‘Your Lordship’ and complained that he was reducing them to starvation, and even those who were accepted often protested bitterly.

  You bloody Deaconess in rhyme

  You told me not to waste your time—

  And that from you to me!

  Now let Eternity be told

  Your slut has left my books unsold—

  And you have filched my fee.

  This was from that ‘magnificent gypsy of a woman,’ as Louis Untermeyer called her, ‘gnarled in her own nervous protests,’ Anna Wickham. No greater contrast with Anna could be imagined than the pale, withdrawn, enigmatic Charlotte Mew, Alida’s ‘Auntie Mew,’ who also wrote sharply to Monro about his arrangements for her first book, The Farmer’s Bride. To both these poets, and to all the others, he sent out careful and regular accounts.

  In 1913 the Bookshop’s work was extended in two directions. It began to publish and sell its own illustrated rhyme sheets as cheaply as possible (they started off at a penny plain, twopence coloured) and it announced twice-weekly poetry readings. These in themselves were nothing new—Monro had met Alida at a Poet’s Club evening at the Café Monico, where she had read and he had been the guest of honour. But at the Bookshop’s Tuesday and Thursday evenings, where comfort was not thought of, there was a spirit of quiet intensity. The room was up a flight of ladderlike stairs. The desk was candle-lit, later lamp-lit, with a shade of dusky green. Audiences, except for Yeats, were not large, and the takings (out of which the reader was paid) were small. Alida often read herself, or, if not, ‘managed’ the highly-strung poets, although W. H. Davies—for example—whine
d from nerves like a baby. Monro had always thought of a poem as a printed score, brought to life by the human voice. His own (although he was a good amateur singer) he thought was too gloomy, and if any of his work was to be read, he left it to Alida. After the reading came ‘selling time,’ which often turned out to be talking time, late into the night. Yet these sparse occasions turned into immortal hours, and their reputation mysteriously spread. When Richard Aldington joined up in 1916, he (one might think rashly) told the Quartermaster Sergeant that he was a poet. ‘Oh, are you? Have you ever heard of the Poetry Bookshop?’

  The war meant that Monro, like other publishers, lost his cashier and his traveller, ran out of paper, and found it difficult to sell any poetry except ‘trench verse.’ London, and particularly Bloomsbury with its wide squares, became like an armed camp. In August 1916, Monro got his own calling-up papers, and was sent first to an anti-aircraft battery, where he felt wretchedly out of place, and then to the War Office. ‘Dear child, what shall I do?’ Alida, distracted with worry for him, had no doubt about what she ought to do. The shop had to be kept open, even though she had to do the packing herself and made deliveries with a handbarrow. In the evenings, if there were no Zeppelin raids, she coloured the first series of rhyme sheets and some of the chapbook covers in watercolour, sometimes with the help of Charlotte Mew. Sidgwick & Jackson offered to travel the books for her, but they asked for 10 percent commission and that would have left her with less than nothing.

  In the early Twenties, when, in Rose Macaulay’s words, ‘there was a kind of poetry-intoxication going about’ and John Masefield sold eighty thousand copies of his Collected Poems, the shop, to all appearances, should have done well. But though Monro had been untiring in his efforts to sell both his authors and the rhyme sheets in America, he had no capital to expand. Worse still, the shop’s early success had given rise to competition. Arundel del Re himself opened a Chelsea Bookshop in 1919, and began to issue the Chelsea Broadsides. But he also sold modern pictures, while other establishments offered smocks and pottery and even tea and scones alongside the books of verse. This was quite foreign to Monro’s original conception. But his account books told him one thing, his ideals another.

  In 1920, apparently at the insistence of McKnight Kauffer, he married Alida at Clerkenwell Register Office. Up to the last moment he had tried to explain his difficulties without success, and she had been left ‘terror-stricken’ by hints that she did not understand. Her heart, she said, was raw. As soon as the ceremony was over he disappeared, leaving her to go down to the country alone. Yet they still made their appearance in the shop together, although the customers talked and read rather than bought, and in 1923 bankruptcy seemed to threaten. ‘Will they sell my dogs?’ Alida asked.

  Drink, in one of Monro’s earlier poems, he had called his ‘strange companion,’ not pretending that he could ever do without it.

  We never smiled with each other.

  We were like brother and brother,

  Dimly accustomed.

  Out of a residual sense of duty and his love for Alida he undertook during the 1920s a series of cures in France and Germany—‘not the best places,’ she thought, ‘to fight such a battle,’ as wine was so cheap there. Meanwhile, the Devonshire Street lease would be up in 1926, and they arranged to rent new premises in 38 Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum. With not much hope, surely, of success, Monro put out a proposal for the conversion of the Bookshop into a limited liability company. In this scheme the stock is valued at £3,500 and Romney Green’s oak furniture at £500; the approximate turnover is given, but there is no mention of current profits. A few friends put themselves down for shares, but the idea came to nothing.

  The second Bookshop, however, opened gallantly, with McKnight Kauffer’s new sign and an interior decorated in orange, pink, and purple, the colours of the all-conquering Ballets Russes. But this room had to be partitioned and shared with the publishers Kegan Paul, and the readings were moved to a nearby hall, which meant that there was no ‘selling time’ at all. Worn out with the move, Alida arranged things as best she could. The big book table and the wide seat still stood in the light from the windows, but there was no fire, only a gas stove, and she felt the old magic was lost. The rhyme sheets were still pinned up and could be read by passersby, but Monro had been obliged, in spite of everything, to stock general books on literature and art. It was no longer in the truest sense a poetry bookshop.

  Monro by now had not much hope of recovery. In Great Russell Street he had taken to drinking at the local public house, the Plough, with the rough trade. ‘Red Mudie,’ ‘Albert’ and ‘Italian Lou’ figure in his scattered diary. Once the police had to be called in, and Alida’s letters to him are in the truest sense pathetic. It is only the Strange Companion, she tells him, who stands between ‘the two helpless creatures that we are.’ And yet something in Monro, something that lay deep at the bottom of his mind, seemed to tell him that he was close at last to what he had always wanted to write about. He made a note to himself: ‘Can’t I eat up some of these pornographic experiences and digest them hot and spit them out again as beauty?’

  Monro died on 16 March 1932. In his will he had asked for his ashes to be scattered at the root of a young oak tree, though only if the idea proved practicable. The Poetry Bookshop was to be wound up. Alida did not take the decision to do this until June 1935, trying to persuade herself, she wrote to her friends, ‘that the moment had not come.’ But she told them that she would continue to live upstairs at 38 Great Russell Street and would be delighted to see any of them, ‘as if the Bookshop were still in existence.’

  Georgian Poetry 1911—1912, the Bookshop’s first publication, was also its greatest success. The sales of the series dropped with the fifth volume, although Georgian Poetry 1920—1922 still sold eight thousand copies. Finally Eddie Marsh was left looking back on his past success as an editor ‘very much as I should towards having been Captain of Cricket at Westminster.’ This remark in itself shows why Monro was anxious not to identify himself with the Georgians as a group, and why he appeared sourly gratified by their decline in reputation. Meanwhile in 1914 he brought out Ezra Pound’s Des imagistes, and in 1915 Richard Aldington’s Images (1910—1915) and Flint’s imagist Cadences. With Futurism he would probably have gone much farther than he did if Alida had not expressed an absolute horror of Marinetti. All this was in line with the original idea of the shop as a ‘depot’ where poets of different views could meet and talk far into the night, while their volumes confronted each other from the shelves. Through war, through money troubles, through alcoholism he continued doggedly to look for new poetry. His only competitor in the field was Grant Richards, who wrote to him in December 1920 that ‘we might between us clear up the poets of the country.’ Monro remains as the publisher of Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham, and Frances Cornford, and of Robert Graves’s first book.

  The Bookshop’s list falls short of what it might have been. When the Big War (as he preferred to call it) became inevitable, Monro forcibly refused to print ‘patriotic rubbish,’ but from the young serving officers he managed to get only Robert Graves’s early Over the Brazier and Magpies in Picardy1 by his young friend T. P. Cameron Wilson, who was killed in 1918. Apart from this, Monro was reproached, and reproached himself, for his rejection of T. S. Eliot and Edward Thomas. Thomas had been an early friend both of Poetry and Drama and of the shop, and it seems inexcusable that the ‘Edward Eastaway’ poems, which he sent round in May 1915 in a sad brown-paper parcel, should be returned to him. But Alida decisively objected to Thomas, probably as a friend of the dreaded Robert Frost. She also complained (March 1917) that Ezra Pound had been in ‘hawking’ T. S. Eliot’s poems. ‘We don’t want them but he wouldn’t take “No” and said he’d send them to be seen.’ In both cases Monro came to recognize his mistake and did what he could to atone for it. After Thomas’s death in action, he wrote to his widow, Helen, offering to publish, and must have felt that he deserved
the reproachful snub he got in reply. Eliot’s early poetry he frankly found hard to understand (so, too, did Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who took it for the Hogarth Press). But by 1915 he was able to ‘hear’ Prufrock—‘I consider that Harold is dawning,’ Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe—and in 1921 the Bookshop distributed the remaining copies of Ara Vos Prec. Monro wrote well, though cautiously, about The Waste Land (Chapbook No. 34, February 1923), and Eliot, who remained a loyal friend, wrote the Critical Note for Monro’s Co llected Poems (Cobden-Sanderson, 1933). Monro, he said, was not a technical innovator, but a poet needs a new technique ‘only as far as it is dictated, not by the idea—for there is no idea—but by the nature of the dark embryo within him which gradually takes on the form and speech of a poem.’

  As an editor Monro was at his happiest, or, to be more accurate, at his least unhappy. His gloomy enthusiasm was persuasive. Although Poetry and Drama was kept going by the royalties from Georgian Poetry 1911—1912, he was unable to pay his contributors, and yet the hard-up Edward Thomas and the penniless Flint worked their best for him. Aiming high, he tackled Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, and Henry Newbolt, both of whom responded. These were names from the past, but his drama critic, Gilbert Cannan, boldly supported Gordon Craig and the experimental theatre. Flint’s ‘French Chronicle’ in particular is written with information and feeling. The September 1914 number leaves him watching the North Sea roll in on a flat English beach, having heard that Charles Péguy is dead, wondering whether Guillaume Apollinaire will survive. But the war put an end to Poetry and Drama, and Monro showed good sense in not trying to revive it. Its place was to be taken by The London Mercury (1919), edited by John Squire, and Eliot’s Criterion (1922), although The Criterion’s circulation was never more than nine hundred. ‘There are too many periodicals,’ Monro noted in his diary, ‘yet who is going to stop? There is not enough stuff to go round.’ Meanwhile he had devised the monthly Chapbook, a delightful miscellany, sometimes unexpectedly lighthearted. For this he spirited up his old illustrators and some new ones to decorate the front covers and often—although it would have paid better to use the space for advertising—the back ones. Anyone who is lucky enough to possess a run must be glad to have No. 29, designed by Terence Prentis, the last of Monro’s admiring disciples, or Ethelbert White’s covers in plum red, white, and yellow for No. 33, or Paul Nash’s No. 35. The paper, of course, did not pay, al though Monro tried a number of editor’s devices, including the unusual one of lowering the price (Nos. 25 to 38). It was erratic during 1921, the year after their marriage—Harold and Alida went abroad independently of each other and publication lapsed for six months—but this was part of the Chapbook’s ragged, Petrouchka-like charm. With almost every issue the subscribers could expect something different. Nos. 6 and 18 offered songs with music, No. 20 a crazy but deeply interesting piece by Gordon Craig on the political aspect of puppet shows, No. 29 a roaring satire by Osbert Sitwell on the Georgians under the guidance of their goddess Mediocrity, No. 32 Harold Monro’s ‘morality,’ One Day Awake, where the wretched protagonist, threatened by the voices of Business, Food, and Furniture, pours himself out a glass of wine as the scene closes. These were in addition to the issues on contemporary American, French, and English poetry.