Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ idiot. He lives and always has lived at a place which sounds very like Carisbrooke – ‘the town is old, and very steep’, leading up to the mental hospital, the castle and the convent (which in Carisbrooke would be St Dominic’s). Ken means well, but is simply not like the rest of us, believing that all the children and all the deer in the park belong to him, and that a pile of broken feathers on the ground is really a living bird. He is hideous to look at, however,

       If in His image God made men

       Some other must have made poor Ken –

      In time he becomes too much, not of a danger, but of a nuisance. Sometimes he stays in church too long, or points to the crucified Christ and says ‘Take it away’; then everyone is embarrassed. The only thing to do is to pretend not to notice, ‘You did not look at him as he sat there’ and finally to lock him up – and the speaker doesn’t suggest that the authorities are wrong about this. What else could they have done? But the poem ends

       So, when they took

       Ken to that place, I did not look

       After he called and turned on me

       His eyes. These I shall see –

      Charlotte claimed that in this poem she had tried to ‘obscure the tragic side by tenderness of treatment’. Why she said this I cannot think. She must have known that she was emphasizing it.

      On the Asylum Road is not localized, and might be anywhere where mental patients, at the end of the nineteenth century, were institutionalized and taken out for regular exercise. The first verse opens:

       Theirs is the house whose windows – every pane –

       Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:

       Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,

       The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

      The horror of the darkly stained and clouded glass, the poem’s one insistent detail, works very strongly. Surgeries, Christian churches and mortuaries, as well as asylums, shut themselves off in this way, with glass which is a denial of what glass should be. Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing. ‘Theirs is the house’ – but we know it isn’t, only it will be more convenient for us to pretend that it is. And ‘you’ (or in the next three verses ‘we’) have agreed that the best thing to do is smile encouragingly at them,

       And think no shame to stop and crack a joke

       With the incarnate wages of man’s sin.

      The reader or listener is bound to ask what is happening here and why the inmates, the ‘brother shadows in the lane’, should (unless they are all syphilitics) be all classed together as ‘the incarnate wages of man’s sin’. This returns us to the wretched situation of 9 Gordon Street.

      As ill-fortune would have it, the breakdown first of Henry, then of Freda, coincided with the years when the science or apparent science of eugenics first took the field, and became a favourite subject of newspaper articles. Francis Galton’s Natural Inheritance was published in 1889, and in 1894 he set up his research laboratory in University College. The belief of so many centuries that, given God’s grace and human patience, there was a hope that mad wits could be restored, was superseded, for the time being, by what looked like conclusive scientific evidence. Eugenics dealt in statistics, family studies and the tabulation of ‘morbid inheritance’, setting out to show that transmission of this inheritance led to the gradual degeneration of a whole society. The improvement of society, then, depended on genetic politics. If any member of your family was ‘different’, no matter in what way, you were morally bound not to reproduce. If you did so, you contributed to the nation’s decline and must expect ‘the incarnate wages of man’s sin’. In fact, the first editor to see Ken rejected it on the grounds that the magazine ‘believed in the segregation of the feeble-minded’. Charlotte and Anne, living within the orbit of London University, both of them great readers of weeklies and attenders of lectures, came to the conclusion that they must never have children, and so had no right to marry. This decision was not the same thing for the two of them. For Charlotte, whether or not she ever came to terms with her own sexuality, all passion was destructive. She had learned that already, and never had reason to change her mind. Anne, on the other hand, three years younger, was the most normal or even ‘the most human’ of the family. There was some self-imposed guilt in regard to the persuadable Anne, although they must have made the decision together.

      But both the Mew girls loved children, Charlotte in particular. Their great capacity for happiness and disappointment appealed to her, so did their detachment from adult affairs and their concentration on the far greater reality of a game. She was delighted when she saw a small girl and boy wait unconcernedly for a coffin to be carried down the stairs and out of the door, and then turn back at once to playing shops. Of walking on stilts she wrote: ‘If you could go on doing it for ever, you need envy no-one, neither the angels nor the millionaires’, and of playing with water, ‘The horse-trough is always there to sail your hat in and trail your arms in, until your elder sister sneaks up from behind, and cops you out of it by the neck’. She suffered, only half-unwillingly, from empty arms. If she did not want to bear children, she would have liked to want to. ‘If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came.’ Absorbed as she always was, from her Gower Street days, with the Brontës, she was haunted by the story of Charlotte Brontë’s dream as Mrs Gaskell tells it in her Life, a dream of holding a crying child, and knowing that nothing can save it.

      There were the two daughters, then, in 9 Gordon Street, vowed to sterility, which would also mean devotion to each other. Three years’ difference in age steadily came to be less and less important. Charlotte and Anne saw that they had been born to make head against their difficulties together, with this difference, that there were some things Charlotte would never tell, or feel it right to tell, the docile Anne. Their mother’s role was established: she was a chronic invalid with no definable illness, a precious responsibility because so much had to be done for her. As to Fred, there is nothing to show what he felt about the fates of his youngest and oldest child, except his loss of interest in life. He ceased to do very much at all. There are no more records of him at the R.I.B.A., and his subscription to the newer Architectural Association lapsed altogether. In 1895 he wrote a dignified but pathetic letter to The Builder, pointing out that even the design for his Capital and Counties Bank at Bristol was now being attributed to another architect.

      How did the Mews manage? In 1892 Anna Maria inherited a third of the estate from her grandfather, Thomas Cobham; this came to £2266 12s. 3d. Her mother died in this same year, again leaving her the correct third share, £1717. 2s. 10d., and an annuity of £50. Anna Maria had also come into two legacies, a little earlier, from an uncle and aunt. All these sums of money were administered for her by Walter Barnes Mew, the son of Fred’s sister Fanny, who was a solicitor with an office at 4 Harcourt Buildings, in the Temple. Fred evidently relied a good deal on Walter, and, writing to him as ‘your affectionate uncle’, was glad to leave matters in his capable hands. ‘Anything that appears foggy to me will doubtless be clear enough to your legal eye,’ he added, sounding a good deal older than his sixty years. Walter, with the approval of the trustees, invested the total sum in an annuity for Anna Maria, which would bring her in £300. It was a reasonable sum at a time when you could cling to respectability, even gentility, on £80 a year. The annuity, of course, would СКАЧАТЬ