Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ learned from Miss Harrison’s English lessons. Charlotte always had trouble with grammar and punctuation, but, apart from that, the presentation of the story is laborious in the extreme, opening with

      It was an after-dinner patter; someone had been generalizing on the elevating influence of sports, of angling in particular: ‘And thereby,’ interposed my friend, John Hilton, ‘hangs a tale; it was when we lived near Maida Vale of Melancholy Memory: I was walking home one horribly damp afternoon by way of the canal’ …

      and so on. This very short story hardly needs the ‘after-dinner patter’ or John Hilton either: he is simply a device, or rather a gallant attempt to adapt to the fiction market. And he was not of much use to Charlotte, who was unable to place The Minnow Fishers, although she put it by and sent it later to The Outlook. She would have to try a different tack.

      The epigraph to The Minnow Fishers is from Richard Jefferies, ‘to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of nature’. Charlotte, from her school days, kept lists of quotations from favourite authors, copying out sentences that seemed to her helpful and true. In 1889 she had been reading Jefferies’ Field and Hedgerow, his last essays, a book published after his death. ‘It set my own heart beating,’ she wrote, ‘for I felt I discovered in it an undreamed-of universe.’ Jefferies’ large claims to have learned ‘the spirit of earth and sea and the soul of the sun’ answered to her own intimations, feelings beyond words that had come to her as a child on the Island.

      They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,

      Over the fields. They come in spring.

      Field and Hedgerow, like her own vision of nature’s peace, was a relief from what she called ‘pavement dreams – those thoughts that come sometimes in cities, of the weary length or terrible brevity of life’. The trouble was, and she knew this very well herself, that she was an incurable Londoner. The intimations would not hold. She wanted company, even when she was declaring she didn’t, she loved hurrying from one appointment to another, and feeling all round her the pressure of a million unknown lives. Jefferies himself, in Amaryllis at the Fair, has a sudden glimpse of the ‘terrible, beautiful thickness of people’ in the London streets, ‘so many, like the opulence of Nature itself’. How well she understood this Charlotte showed in one of her last poems, The Shade-Catchers.

      At about this time Anne brought a new friend home to Gordon Street, a student from the Female School of Art, Elsie Millard. Elsie’s father was elocution master at the City of London School; her elder sister, Evelyn, was on the stage. Evelyn had been rigorously trained in her father’s personal system, based on a selection of speeches from Shakespeare arranged alphabetically to illustrate the whole range of emotions from Ambition and Anger to Unimpassioned speech, Violence, Wistfulness and Zeal. In 1891 she was appearing at the Grand Theatre, Islington, in Joseph’s Sweetheart, but her speciality was in ‘perfect lady’ parts and her great successes were to be in Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray and as Princess Flavia in The Prisoner of Zenda. Elsie, who preferred landscape painting, occasionally made sketching trips to the West of Ireland. The Millards were eminently respectable – they lived in Kensington, and were strict Catholics – but they did bring Charlotte, for the first time, into the fringe of the theatrical and studio world.

      A break with the past came in 1893, with the death of Elizabeth Goodman. At the age of sixty-nine she contracted blood poisoning, as the result of running a needle into her hand. She had always wanted to die in harness, and she did. But after it was all over a strange group of Goodman relatives and in-laws, whom no-one had ever heard of before, turned up to take away her few belongings in a cab. They insisted on arranging the funeral, ‘not without some bitterness’. Charlotte felt they made the house smell. ‘Their moral and physical odour seemed to cling about it long after they had left it.’ An interesting point is her attitude to Elizabeth Goodman’s ‘plausible greasy sister-in-law, who was alleged to be an artist’s model and when not sitting to someone or other was said to be nursing an invalid gentleman at Boulogne or Worthing or Ostend.’ In short, she was a kept woman, ‘always taking expensive medicines and borrowing railway fares’, and this is what Charlotte felt about such women when she actually met them. In contrast, she went on romanticizing the Magdalens and pale harlots of the pavements and street lights, creatures of the abyss, seen only in passing. In this matter Charlotte Mew was truly a child of the 1890s.

      Nothing of Elizabeth Goodman’s was left at 9 Gordon Street – not even her workbox, or her Queen Victoria Jubilee tea-pot. How deeply and how confusedly Charlotte felt the loss can be seen from a curious fantasy which she wrote, A Wedding Day. The bride, in the excitement of her marriage, forgets the old woman who has looked after her since she was a child. The old woman, tired out by a lifetime’s work, sits in her spotless cap and apron, with her Bible and workbox on her knee, waiting in vain for the expected visit. During the bridal night itself, when for the lovers ‘the present is eternity’, the old woman dies. As a corpse she is still sitting stiffly the next morning in her chair, ‘alone and smiling’. She has remained on duty.

      Charlotte was twenty-five. The Minnow Fishers had not been accepted so far, nor had A Wedding Day. In 1894, in common with most of London’s hopeful writers, she saw the preliminary announcement of yet another magazine, this time a new quarterly. ‘In many ways its contributors will employ a freer hand than the limitations of the old-fashioned periodical can permit. It will publish no serials; but its complete stories will sometimes run to a considerable length in themselves.’ The notice was printed on bright yellow paper, with a bizarre illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. ‘And while The Yellow Book will seek always to preserve a delicate, decorous and reticent mien and conduct, it will at the same time have the courage of its modernness, and not tremble at the frown of Mrs Grundy.’ Although John Lane, the publisher, was every bit as commercially-minded as Newnes, the élitist tone of all this contrasted boldly with The Strand, which had been ‘respectfully placed’ in the hands of the public. The Yellow Book also promised to be important, charming, daring and distinguished, and the editor was prepared to consider contributions.

       CHAPTER FIVE A Yellow Book Woman

      JOHN LANE, who launched The Yellow Book with his partner, Elkin Mathews, was (in Arthur Waugh’s phrase) ‘a sly new-comer’, or, to put it another way, a publisher with a fine instinct for the right moment. In 1893–4 he sensed that the Aesthetes had still a little distance to go, and could contribute to the beautiful book-making which he loved. On the other hand, he could cautiously scent the new movements, women’s independence in particular. He was projecting his Eve’s Library (the title itself is a Lane-like compromise) which was to include a translation of Hansson’s Das Buch der Frauen and studies called The Ascent of Woman and Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction. Meanwhile, when Aubrey Beardsley and Henry Harland came to him with their idea for the new quarterly, distinguished in contents and make-up, but bound in lemon-yellow, the colour of dubious French paperbacks, Lane realized that there was something in it for him. With the attention-catching Yellow Book he could trap new authors on to his list and publicize those he had already. ‘Modernness’, yes – no stirring yarns, no serials, no rescue from the railway-line – but Lane wanted Harland, while looking around for new talent and creating an agreeable stir, to keep his head. The down-and-out element on Lane’s list, unfortunates like Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, СКАЧАТЬ