Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ Where had the money gone, from the long series of country mansions, Gothic parochial school and Domestic Elizabethan lunatic asylums? On 10 August 1878 Fred was obliged to apply, on the partners’ behalf, for ‘£100 on account’, suggesting that they were operating on a very small margin.

      By the end of the summer the main building was complete except for the boundary walls, and the Vestry, who had been ‘crouching’ in the half-finished rooms, emerged and passed a resolution that the money had been well spent. This, however, was in the face of public complaints about the delay, the small size of the hall, the bright red Bracknell brick which was ‘brought before the eye to a painful degree’ and which, without the stone dressings, would be ‘unbearable’ and make Hampstead’s residents dizzy. Most unfortunate of all was the fact that the builder had already had the date carved over the entrance, 1877, whereas the grand opening had to be delayed until November 1878. At the celebration dinner a number of healths were drunk ‘three times three’, but not Kendall and Mew’s.

      It seems clear that the Kendall women, who had always treated Fred as an uncouth interloper, blamed him for this and every other misfortune, and refused to admit his difficulties at the end of twenty loyal years of partnership. Although Fred was only an executor of H.E.K.’s will and not a beneficiary (unless he survived Anna Maria), there was a strong feeling that he was after the money. This appears from Maria Kendall’s will, made on 17 April 1883 to dispose of her legacy from her own family, the Cobhams. One-third was to go to Anna Maria ‘for her sole use and benefit separate and apart from and exclusive of her said husband Frederick Mew, and that she may hold and enjoy and dispose of such share in the same manner as if she were unmarried’. The legend that Fred was a monster of selfishness was now well established. Charlotte, sadly enough, the little girl for whom he had made the doll’s house with bow windows, grew up to believe the legend, and repeat it.

      In 1885 H.E.K. died, leaving a personal estate of £616 10s. His widow, with Mary Leonora, went to live permanently in Brighton, while Fred was confidently expected to keep the firm going, and maintain them all in comfort. Very likely the family did not know how things stood. Gissing’s Dr Madden in The Odd Women, who considers that ‘women, young and old, should never have to think about money’, and fails to take out any insurance, was a not unusual type of professional man. And probably Fred could not bring himself to tell them the truth, which was that for all his size and presence he was a follower, not a leader. After the death of his beloved old master, he lost direction. For years he had been doing virtually all the work, in the office and on the sites, but always as Kendall wanted it.

      During Kendall’s long illness Fred had designed or part-designed a few private houses, a bank at Aldershot (1882), and (his most important commission) the Capital and Counties Bank in Bristol (1885), ‘with details somewhat Greek in character’. In the same year the Hampstead Vestry, perhaps surprisingly, had asked the partners to undertake an extension to their Hall along the Belsize Park frontage. Fred in fact carried this out, but this is the last commission of his that I have been able to trace. The heart had gone out of him.

      He was, admittedly, cowardly in not telling his wife that the firm’s work had declined and that Elizabeth Goodman should be making do and patching even more, rather than less. After the commission for the Vestry Hall extension, he even agreed that the family should look for a larger house. Anna Maria no longer had Brunswick Square to fall back upon. She needed a ‘better address’. In 1888 the Mews moved to 9 Gordon Street, just where the street joins, or once joined, Gordon Square. It was a much taller house than Doughty Street, four storeys above the basement and its sunless area, and it had a piano nobile of spacious rooms, elegantly railed off with a wrought-iron balcony. The whole street had been built by Thomas Cubitt for the Bedford Estate before he moved on towards greater triumphs in London’s West End. This would have recommended the house to Anna Maria, since Mrs Lewis Cubitt was the most distinguished of her aunts. It kept up the connection, and this was precious to her. Fred bought the end of the lease, with another twenty-four years to run.

      Elizabeth Goodman settled them all in. The semi-invalid Anna Maria must of course be spared as much trouble as possible. Wek, her parrot, who had been with her since the days in Brunswick Square, was introduced, under protest, to his new home. Kendall’s picture of the Shining City was hung in the front drawing-room, next to the portrait of Anna Maria as a young girl. Fred’s office was on the ground floor. But Gordon Street was never either a happy or a lucky house. After the move, Fred pinned his hopes on Henry. The dashing, promising son must have been more than a help with the office routine, and a much-needed new life in the business. He was a refuge in a house full of women. But now, in his early twenties, Henry began to show unmistakable signs of mental breakdown. The illness was what was then known as dementia praecox, because it was thought to attack adolescents and young adults in particular. It would be called schizophrenia now. Fred was advised that there was no possibility of a cure, and for the rest of his life Henry was confined, with a private nurse, to Peckham Hospital.

      The history of mental weakness was not on the Mew side, but the Kendall. Never mentioned in public was the reason why Edward Herne Kendall, Anna Maria’s elder brother, had failed to join the partnership after his training, and why in fact he had no occupation of any kind. Edward was not a schizophrenic, simply a borderline case who might from time to time need looking after, and who could never be trusted with his own affairs. When he became completely irresponsible his money was saved up for him and invested until he ‘came back’. Mary Leonora, also, was not strong in the wits, or, at least, foolish, and it was the constant fear of her mother, Mrs Kendall, that she might be ‘got hold of’ in some way, and left penniless. In all probability, Henry Mew’s tragic illness had nothing to do with his Kendall uncle and aunt, and yet the suggestion remained that it had. Meanwhile the fact that there was no insanity to be traced in Fred’s family was likely to make him more, and not less, to blame.

      The family at 9 Gordon Street was reduced, after so many hopes, to three daughters. Elizabeth Goodman acted as the family’s consoler. ‘There was nothing conscious or masterful about this,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘it was simply the gentle, irresistible mastery of the strongest, clothed with an old-world deference.’ The son was as good as lost, but the youngest, Freda, was doted upon. Even her name had been a romantic flight, distinguishing her from all the rest. Fred and Anna Maria, whatever their discords, both combined to love and spoil this exceptional little girl, who grew into adolescence still beautiful and brilliant. This would be about the time when Henry Mew made his sad exit into separation and silence.

      Then, early in the 1890s, Freda followed him. She began to show recognizable symptoms of schizophrenia, then, like Henry, broke down beyond recall. Poor Fred asserted himself for almost the last time, and insisted that she must not be kept in London, but sent back to the Island, within reach of the Bugle Inn and the farm. Freda lived for another sixty-odd years as a paying patient at the Whitelands Hospital, Carisbrooke, without ever recovering her sanity.

       CHAPTER FOUR ‘These I Shall See’

      CHARLOTTE MEW’S two asylum poems are On the Asylum Road and Ken. These, like the others from which I have quoted, were written at a distance of time from the first experience. Like Hardy and Housman, she was a poet of delayed shock.

      Both Ken and On the Asylum Road are impersonations, written through, but not in, the first person. Mad people are described by a sane onlooker, but ‘this I is not I’. In both poems the speaker, or spoken-through, is painfully indirect and breaks down at one point or another into a kind of dislocation, as though the subject of insanity could only be approached in that way. The guilt is obvious, but there is no solution for it, except refuge in the community’s opinion.

      Ken СКАЧАТЬ