The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

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The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit Page 23

by Eleanor Fitzsimons


  She detailed the “vivid contrasts” that characterized Edith’s extraordinary personality:

  She was wise—and frivolous; she was kind . . . and so intolerant. She didn’t dissect her aversions, but when she said of someone: “Dear I don’t like them!” it was finis. She was a brave Socialist of pioneer views—and how artfully she included propaganda in her children’s stories. But I have heard her complain that some illustration made her characters look “as if they weren’t children of gentle folk”!17

  Another friend of Iris’s attended the Académie that spring. Arthur Watts was a handsome young man from Kent who turned twenty-one while they were there. Edith nicknamed him “Oswald in Paris” after Oswald Barron. She dedicated The New Treasure Seekers:

  TO

  ARTHUR WATTS

  (OSWALD IN PARIS)

  FROM

  E. NESBIT

  Montparnasse, 1904

  Watts, who was a talented artist and would win acclaim for his work with satirical magazine Punch, took to sending her illustrated letters signed “Oswald.” He illustrated several of her stories, among them “The Power of Darkness” and “The Third Drug” for The Strand Magazine.*

  At some point Hubert joined them. Novelist Arnold Bennett, who lived in the city, noted in his diary that he bumped into him with “his Liberty-clad daughter Rosamund” at the studio of Miss Thomasson, an American painter friend of his. Although H. G. Wells had offered her an introduction to Bennett, Edith was absent that day and they did not meet during that trip. Noel and Nina Griffith joined them in April, and they went to the Trocadero Museum to watch free-spirited American dancer Isadora Duncan perform to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in front of an immense and wildly enthusiastic crowd.

  While she was sitting in the public room of a Paris hotel, Edith heard someone strumming on a mandolin. Curious to find out who this was, she sent Rosamund to borrow matches from him and report back. It was Herman Webster, an artist who was studying at the Académie Julian. They christened him “Monsieur Trente-Sept” after the number of his room. Webster took Rosamund to a concert and introduced her to American novelist and playwright Justus Miles Forman, aged twenty-nine, who was also studying in Paris.† Berta Ruck remembered him as “a young man of parts, good looks and charm” who was “writing a novel about a haunted man.”18

  While her daughters and niece returned to England in May, Edith left Paris for Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, accompanied by Herman Webster, Justus Miles Forman, Berta Ruck, and Arthur Watts. They took rooms at an old farmhouse in the village and Edith covered Watts’s expenses since he had no money. He had traveled there by motorcycle, and he would rattle up and down the dusty white roads around Grez with one or other of them in his sidecar. Their days were spent messing about on boats and barges, riding in a donkey cart and eating outdoors. Each evening they would talk, or play music and games, on a terrace overlooking the river. Berta left a lovely account:

  In the evenings we supped out of doors with a lamp on the table, round which the moths fluttered and blundered. I see us now—the Duchess, with her inevitable cigarette in its long holder, her elbow on the table, the Inn cat lying asleep on the trail of her sweeping, peacock-blue robe. Mr Webster strumming his mandoline. Mr Forman fastidiously, Arthur scare-crowishly, turned-out, and myself dressed by the Duchess in a bright green silken tea-gown of her own—“Here’s a picturesque rag, Berta,” she said. “You have it. I hate blouses and skirts, especially in a place like this. And wear a red rose in your black plaits and look as much like a [the artist Alphonse] Mucha . . . as you can.”19

  Three of Webster’s first etchings, small pastoral studies made in and around Grez and in the Forest of Fontainebleau, were accepted by the Salon de La Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and he was recognized as an emerging talent. Edith had an unpleasant encounter with an alcoholic English musician who claimed he had set one of her poems to music and Forman included a similar scene in his novel Tommy Carteret (1905), which he dedicated “To Rosamund Bland.” In it, a young woman “was singing a song by E. Nesbit, called ‘The Past.’”20

  While she was there Edith worked on The Incomplete Amorist, which is set largely in Paris and which she discussed at length with Forman. As Berta Ruck recalled:

  He and the Duchess would go out and talk shop together by the hour in a crazy row-boat they had moored under the willows of the little forget-me-not bordered stream.21

  One dashing, green-eyed character in The Incomplete Amorist is named Eustace Vernon. In a studio in Paris, her protagonist, a young Englishwoman named Betty Desmond, is confronted with:

  The strange faces, the girls in many-hued painting pinafores, the little forest of easels, and on the square wooden platform the model—smooth, brown, with limbs set, moveless as a figure of wax.

  One exchange goes: “‘Go to Grez’ said the other, not without second thoughts. ‘It’s a lovely place—close to Fontainebleau.’” She included images of the river in The Incomplete Amorist too: “A turn of the river brought to sight a wide reach dotted with green islands, each a tiny forest of willow saplings and young alders.” Betty spots a boat moored under an aspen and decides to row to the islands. “As she stepped into the boat, she noticed the long river reeds straining down stream like the green hair of hidden water-nixies.”22

  During this time Edith developed a very close relationship with Berta, who took to calling her “mother.” Her character Bobbie in The Railway Children is Roberta, which was Berta’s full name. Just as Berta was the oldest child in her family, Edith explained in The Railway Children: “Roberta was the eldest. Of course, Mothers never have favourites, but if their Mother had had a favourite, it might have been Roberta.” Chapter seven opens:

  I hope you don’t mind my telling you a good deal about Roberta. The fact is I am growing very fond of her. The more I observe her the more I love her. And I notice all sorts of things about her that I like.23

  She also has Bobbie recite a poem that is almost identical to “Birthday Talk for a Child (Iris),” a poem she included in The Rainbow and the Rose (1905). The original goes as follows:

  DADDY dear, I’m only four

  And I’d rather not be more:

  Four’s the nicest age to be—

  Two and two, or one and three.

  All I love is two and two,

  Mother, Fabian, Paul and you;

  All you love is one and three,

  Mother, Fabian, Paul and me.

  Give your little girl a kiss

  Because she learned and told you this.

  Edith dedicated The Rainbow and the Rose to Eleanor Ruck, Berta’s mother, in commemoration of a delightful week she spent with the family in Caernarfon in Wales:

  To Eleanor Ruck

  Seven roses for seven days!

  Now they’re over, I go my ways;

  With me the thought of the good week goes—

  Every day was a rainbow rose.

  The white rose blows in your own dear heart,

  And the black in mine, now we have to part.

  E. Nesbit

  Bryn Teg October 31–November 6

  She told Berta she “put some of Caernarfon in The Incredible Honeymoon.”24 One character, Colonel Bertram, was modeled on Berta’s father, Colonel Arthur Ashley Ruck, who was chief constable of Caernarvonshire. While she was staying with them, he arranged for Edith to tour a Welsh prison. This experience appears to have affected her greatly. As she left, she turned to one convict and declared “I wish you well.” In “Cheaper in the End,” the remarkably progressive essay she wrote for Cecil Chesterton’s magazine, the New Witness, in 1913, she declared “we want more money spent on schools and less on jails and reformatories.” She believed education was the key to avoiding incarceration, and she explained her reasoning:

  It cannot be put too plainly that the nation which will not pay for her schools must pay for her prisons and asylums. People don’t seem to mind so much paying for prisons and workhouses. What they rea
lly hate seems to be paying for schools. And yet how well, in the end, such spending would pay us! “There is no darkness but ignorance”—and we have such a chance as has never been the lot of men since time began, a chance to light enough lamps to dispel all darkness. If only we would take that chance! Even from the meanest point of view we ought to take it. It would be cheaper in the end. Schools are cheaper than prisons.25

  The first installment of The Railway Children appeared in the London Magazine in January 1905. When the book version was published the following year, Edith dedicated it:

  To my dear son Paul Bland,

  behind whose knowledge of railways

  my ignorance confidently shelters

  Paul, who was in his mid-twenties by then, had inspired ten-year-old Peter. He says to his mother:

  Wouldn’t it be jolly if we were all in a book and you were writing it? Then you could make all sorts of jolly things happen . . . and make Daddy come home soon.

  She responds:

  Don’t you think it’s rather nice to think that we’re in a book that God’s writing? If I were writing a book, I might make mistakes. But God knows how to make the story end just right—in the way that’s best for us.

  This, her most popular book, marked a shift in tone from the magical to the natural. Three “ordinary suburban children” move with their mother from London to Yorkshire after their father has been imprisoned on a false charge of selling secrets to the Russians. A review in Kindergarten magazine declared:

  The background of the father’s imprisonment seems rather tragic for a child’s book, but it is not made prominent and would, perhaps, be scarcely felt by the younger readers who will enjoy the healthy experiences of the children.26

  The reviewer discerned that the book unfolded “as though it might have been suggested by the Dreyfus tragedy.”27 That political scandal was playing out in the British press as Edith was writing The Railway Children; Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who had been convicted of treason for passing French military secrets to the German embassy in Paris in 1895, was officially exonerated in 1906. Edith knew several Russian dissidents who lived in London. Among them was Ukrainian socialist revolutionary Sergei Stepniak, who had founded the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in April 1890 but was killed by an oncoming train on December 23, 1895. She was also acquainted with Russian aristocrat turned anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, who founded the Freedom Press with Charlotte Wilson. He appears in The Prophet’s Mantle.

  In The Railway Children, Edith expressed sympathy with Russian dissidents by including a member of the movement who arrives from Siberia, where he had been imprisoned for writing “a beautiful book about poor people and how to help them.” Mother tells her children:

  But you know in Russia you mustn’t say anything about the rich people doing wrong, or about the things that ought to be done to make poor people better and happier. If you do, they send you to prison.

  Edith put a Russian émigré into Daphne in Fitzroy Street too, a Mr. Vorontzoff who is “very unkempt and very shabby” and had been imprisoned and tortured in Russia. He had come to London to campaign for the oppressed, but he finds the city “so rich—so rotten.” Realizing that the wealthy care little for the plight of the poor, he decides to mount “an exhibition of paintings in which I will show, to the eyes of the half-blind, the slime of misery on which they build their palaces.”28 Daphne realizes that her compatriots are immune to terrible headlines from Russia:

  The things that we read of every week in our daily papers, the things that do not take away our breakfast appetites. But “Further Outrages in South Russia,” “Massacre of Jews at Odessa,” “Three Hundred Peasants Shot down by Cossacks,” “Children Tortured by Russian Officials”—these in cold black and white are powerless to stir jaded nerves.29

  In 1906, Edith signed her name to “The British Memorial to the Russian Duma,” a statement of support for the Russian legislative chamber. In June 1907, she wrote a letter to the Manchester Courier that was published as “Great Britain and Russia”:

  The persistent rumours of a proposed alliance with the Russian Government are causing alarm and uneasiness in decent men of every shade of political opinion. An alliance with the Russian Government means, in plain words, an alliance with men in power who have not scrupled to use that power to crush with every circumstance of abominable cruelty the people of their country.

  She urged readers to write to the newspapers and to their Member of Parliament in order to “compel our Minister to pause, to reconsider, to retreat from a position that threatens so unbearably the honour of England.”30

  When The Railway Children was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, in 1914, Edith was paid an exceptionally high fee. Her old friend Justus Miles Forman, who had returned to his native country by then, wrote to congratulate her. She had a talent for negotiating excellent terms, and she could be uncompromising when her work was used without permission. In 1904, when a young journalist named Alphonse Courlander published a story that included a song she had written about a bluebird, she wrote to him and asked for his publisher’s address so she could send them an invoice. She convinced them to pay her twenty pounds and invited Courlander to tea to thank him for his cooperation. Afterward she took an interest in his career and befriended his wife, Elsa.

  This was not the first time she had asserted her rights. In a letter published in the St James’s Gazette on Saturday April 24, 1897, she complained about a poem of hers that had appeared in the Weekly Sun. “No acknowledgement of its source was appended and the name affixed was E. Nesbitt (the name I believe of another writer),” she explained. When the editor had refused to pay her, she threatened him with her solicitor and received payment by return post.31 In February 1907 the Yorkshire Post reprinted, without permission or payment, a poem she had translated for the Daily Chronicle. She instructed her agent, James Brand Pinker, to write to the editor:

  Mrs Nesbit [sic] will be glad to know what fee you propose to pay for the use of the poem, and she thinks it should not in any case have been published in an incomplete form, without the fact being explained.

  Pinker received an unsatisfactory response and published the exchange in The Author, the journal of The Society of Authors, explaining that he did so:

  To draw attention to the extraordinary attitude towards authors who make the very reasonable request that they should be remunerated for the use of their property, and that such property should not be annexed without acknowledgement of the source from which it is taken.32

  Edith’s steely determination spilled over into other aspects of her life. When some troublesome tenants refused to leave one of the cottages at Well Hall, she let the adjoining cottage to Sergeant William Birbeck and his wife, Marjorie, and, fearful of attracting the attention of their policeman neighbor, the unwanted tenant left shortly afterward. In The Red House, when Len and Chloe want to get rid of Prosser, a bricklayer’s laborer, and his wife, a “slatternly drab of a dusty-haired woman,” they let the neighboring cottage to a policeman. The newly vacated fictional cottage is let to “a journalist, or an author, or something.” In real life, Edith let her cottage to Sidney Lamert, who was managing editor of a London broadsheet, The Sun. Like his fictional alter ego, he left his home each day “to fight with beasts in the newspaper offices of Fleet Street.” Both men were war correspondents; Lamert covered the Boer War for the London Daily Express.* It was he who recommended that Fabian be sent to Loretto School.

  Edith often included real people in her novels and stories. Laurence Housman believed either he or Lamert had inspired Father in The Phoenix and the Carpet. She included two real magicians in The Railway Children, and hinted at an exciting new project:

  I don’t suppose they had ever thought about railways except as means of getting to Maskelyne and Cooke’s, the Pantomime, Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud’s.

  John Nevil Maskelyne and George Alfred Cooke were hugely popular stage magicians. They of
ten worked with a third magician, David Devant. Toward the end of 1906 Edith was supervising rehearsals for a Christmas performance of The Magician’s Heart, a play in three scenes, in St. Georges Hall, Langham Place. A version of “The Magician’s Heart” is included in The Magic World (1912). According to the Pall Mall Gazette, this play “tells of the adventures of a wicked magician who casts a spell over a beautiful princess and made her ugly.” Readers were informed that “Messrs Maskelyne and Devant have produced new tricks, illusions and magical effects to accompany it.”33 Devant played Professor Taykin in the play, and Edith made his most famous trick, “The Mascot Moth,” the centerpiece. A review in The Globe declared:

  Mr Devant brings before us all the wonders of E. Nesbit’s fairy story: it is like reading about the “Phoenix and the Fairy casket” or “The Amulet” with the authoress’s imaginings rendered in living pictures.34

  She put Devant into The Story of the Amulet too:

  Though the eyes of the audience were fixed on Mr David Devant, Mr David Devant’s eyes were fixed on the audience. And it happened that his eyes were more particularly fixed on that empty chair. So that he saw quite plainly the sudden appearance from nowhere of the Egyptian priest.

  He also appears in The Enchanted Castle with his partner Maskelyne:

  They were alone in the room. The jewels had vanished and so had the Princess. “She’s gone out by the door, of course,” said Jimmy, but the door was locked. “That is magic,” said Kathleen breathlessly. “Maskelyne and Devant can do that trick,” said Jimmy.

  Many of Edith’s young friends had married by the end of the first decade of the new century. So too had her daughters Iris and Rosamund, although neither relationship would be successful. While Iris chose poorly, Rosamund was pushed into marriage to avoid a disastrous affair with a family friend. Edith’s intense relationship with Richard Reynolds had lasted ten years and appeared to have a sexual dimension. When he decided to marry her niece Dorothea, friends and family believed she did all she could to prevent this. She did not succeed. Dorothea was thirty-four when they married on December 21, 1910, at Saint Mary’s Church in Finchley. Her new husband was a decade older. Dorothea suffered from poor health, and in 1922 Reynolds left his job at King Edward’s School in Edgbaston to move with her and their three daughters, Diana, and Hermione, and Pamela, to Anacapri on the island of Capri, where Dorothea died two years later.* Edith, who was ill herself by then, wrote:

 

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