Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ Beardsley himself, could all be got rid of if necessary, and so indeed, before long, they were. Lane was the coming publisher, poised between the old century and the new, and making a profit from both.

      Henry Harland, his editor, was a very different kind of literary man, a garrulous flamboyant New Yorker, unpredictable except in his kindness. Although he wrote a great deal himself, favouring at this particular time a style half way between Maupassant and George du Maurier, his real talent lay in encouraging others. He was a champion of the short story, even a martyr to it, since underneath his party-giving geniality he was already mortally sick with tuberculosis.

      Harland loved his contributors, whenever that was possible, and was loved. He was ‘the Chief’, with a rare editorial temperament, putting all his knowledge of the business at their disposal, and working passionately over their copy. Yet he allowed himself to be laughed at. He could in fact be quite childish, buttoning up his waistcoat over two cushions to appear unnaturally stout, or telling his guests – though always with great charm – that there was nothing to eat in the place and he could only conclude that he must have been drunk when he invited them. But the next step would be to some little French restaurant, where everyone could talk till the stars grew pale. When Aline, his wife, arrived from America, there might be arguments on a heroic scale, and a crockery-throwing element was added to the Harlands’ true commitment to music and literature. The editorial desk was disorderly, and the Chief relied on his assistant, Ella D’Arcy (not really anything as grand as an assistant, she said, all she did was to tidy up the drawers and put the typescripts at the bottom to the top), to meet the printer’s deadline. Before Ella volunteered for the job, however, and while there was still clear space on the desk, Harland and Beardsley brought out the first number of The Yellow Book.

      All who paid their five shillings expected something extraordinary; most were outraged by Arthur Symons’s Stella Maris, written a long way after Rossetti’s Jenny, and glorifying the ‘delicious shame’ of some long past night with a prostitute, or, as he calls her, a ‘Juliet of the Streets’. Symons’s piece yearns back to the faint end-time of the last Romantics, and Beardsley’s Night Piece, which does duty as an illustration, is precisely of the nineties. Ella D’Arcy’s short story Irremediable, however, looks forward to the coming psychological novel. Understated, economical and subtle, the story is one of what she called her ‘monochromes’. The husband no longer loves his intensely irritating wife who can’t even shut the door properly, or ‘do one mortal thing efficiently or well’. But in the end he accepts that she will always be the centre of his life, because hate is stronger than love.

      Charlotte Mew seems not to have written her next story, Passed, until she had read The Yellow Book’s opening number. By this I don’t mean that she was waiting to see what sort of thing would suit, rather that reading it set her imagination free. Passed bears every sign of being written at top speed, projected with not much conscious control from the level which her life as Miss Lotti suppressed. The narrator, who appears to be a well-off young woman, given, however, to ranging the London streets at the mercy of her own ‘warring nature’, suddenly rushes out of her comfortable home on a cold December evening. She enters a Roman Catholic church (which seems to be St James’s, Spanish Place), and in the lamp-lit darkness sees a girl kneeling in ‘unquestionable despair’, a ‘wildly tossed spirit’ who appeals silently for help. ‘Did she reach me, or was our advance mutual? It cannot be told. I suppose we neither know. [sic]’ They hurry together through mean crowded streets to a wretched tenement, where the girl’s sister lies dying; their last possessions, a chair and an inlaid workbox, have been put on the fire. We are to understand that they have come down in the world and the sister has been seduced by a lord, or at least by a clubman, as fragments of a letter on crested paper are lying on the quilt. The fragrance of a bunch of ‘dearly-bought’ violets, in a tea-cup at the bedside, strays through the room.

      Indisputably, I determined, something must be done for the half-frantic wanderer who was pressing a tiring weight against me. And there should be some kind hand to cover the cold limbs and close the wide eyes of the sleeper.… The dark eyes unwillingly open reached mine in an insistent stare. One hand lying out upon the coverlid, I could never again mistake for that of temporarily suspended life. My watch ticked loudly, but I dare not examine it, nor could I wrench my sight from the figure on the bed.…

      My gaze was chained: it could not get free. As the shapes of monsters of every varying and increasing dreadfulness flit through one’s dreams, the images of those I loved crept round me, with stark yet well-known features, their limbs borrowing death’s rigid outline, as they mocked my recognition with soundless semblances of mirth.… The horribly familiar company began to dance at intervals in and out of a ring of white gigantic bedsteads, set on end like tombstones, each of which framed a huge and fearful travesty of the sad set face that was all the while seeking vainly a pitiless stranger’s care.

      In spite of this Poe-like vision, the narrator harshly refuses to stay. Suppressing her own conscience, she escapes (a cab happens to be passing) to her own home and family. Her brother’s friends have arrived, there are lights and dancing, and she waltzes all night. The next day, feeling uneasy, she goes back to the church, where she is vexed by a ‘mumbling priest’ and empty ritual. Then two children come in hand in hand, one of them an idiot. ‘Her shifting eyes and ceaseless imbecile grimace chilled my blood. The other, who stood praying, turned suddenly and kissed the dreadful creature by her side … I shuddered, and yet her face wore no look of loathing nor of pity. The expression was a divine one of habitual love.’

      Snow is falling as the narrator (who is never given a name) leaves the church, conscience-stricken. Her only chance of peace is to find the girl she rejected so cruelly the night before and make amends. But no one knows anything, no one can direct her, the search is useless. ‘Some months afterwards,’ in a large glittering shopping street, the girl walks past her, clinging to the arm of a man. Obviously she is now a prostitute, or, as Charlotte puts it, one of ‘the dazzling wares of the human mart’. And the man – the same man, of course, who seduced the sister – is wearing a buttonhole of scented violets. The story ends with ‘a laugh mounting to a cry.… Did it proceed from some defeated angel? Or the woman’s mouth? Or mine? God knows.’

      Passed seems almost as over-written as a story can be, hurrying along in distraught paragraphs, only just hanging on, for decency’s sake, to its rags of English grammar. Odd though it is, the elements are familiar. The overwrought narrator has something about her of Lucy Snow in Villette, and there are echoes of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘flash-eliciting, truth-extorting’ style. The pathos of the bunch of violets suggests a number of popular novels, in particular Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well. The whole business of hurrying in desperation through a maze of mean streets is one of romance’s standbys. Dickens, if he didn’t invent it, used it to great effect for poor Florence Dombey and Little Dorrit. As to the blank encounter and the cry of despair at the end of Passed, not to mention the mumbling priest and the cynical seducer, they are part of the mythology of the nineteenth century’s unreal city.

      All the same, Passed makes its impact. Charlotte originally gave it the title Violets, but Passed gives a better sense of missed opportunity. Her story is impossible, but it is true. The real subject is guilt – the guilt of the provided-for towards the poor, the sane towards the mad, and the living towards the dead. The motive force is everything she had once half-understood about Miss Bolt and the disgraceful Fanny, all her feelings for her mad brother and sister, for her dead little brother and the dead Elizabeth Goodman, even for Anne. These had to be expressed in images, or they would have broken her.

      Harland loved Passed. True, he favoured hurrying-through-the-mean-streets stories, and was to accept some particularly absurd examples. But Passed seemed to him not only a remarkable literary achievement, but original, and therefore bound to be violently abused, which was just what The Yellow СКАЧАТЬ