Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ scholar Val Warner produced a complete edition of her poems and prose in 1981. Then, in 1984, Penelope Fitzgerald published Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, which drew attention all over again to this remarkable writer. This reissue of that fine biography will, I hope, introduce a new generation to the fascinating, strange, vivid world of Mew’s poetic imagination.

      Penelope Fitzgerald was writing fiction at the same time as working on her biography of Charlotte Mew, which allowed her to muse about how the two forms differed and overlapped. Her own biographer, Hermione Lee, quotes her joking: ‘On the whole I think biographers are madder than novelists.’ Fitzgerald also wrote: ‘I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.’ She considered that fiction’s advantage over biography was that it could contain dialogue, which of course the writer made up. As a biographer, she was diligent with her research, committed to facts and to truth. As a novelist writing biography, she occasionally allowed herself to speculate in a minor way. For example, speaking of the death in childhood of Charlotte’s younger brother, she says: ‘Charlotte, at seven years old, was certainly brought in, as elder sisters were in the 1870s, to see her little brother “in death”.’ She offers no direct evidence for this, simply invites us to imagine an experience.

      When you write fiction, you may try to create the subjective emotional truth of a character, the way she is for herself, thoughts and feelings constantly shifting and changing. You may try to imagine a character’s hidden, secret, inside world, composed of visual images, snatches of music, fragments of overheard talk, bits of memory, currents of physical feeling, all involved in a whirling dance. All this richness, linguistic and non-linguistic, has to be translated into connected words, put into sentences, arranged in narrative order, the timeless moment subdued to the constraints of time. Form and pattern emerge; the novel embodies the process of its making.

      As a biographer, you necessarily work more from and on the outside. Fitzgerald respects Mew’s private self, and seems to be protective of it, even as she shows that her subject’s sense of privacy was linked to her sense of what the wider society could and could not tolerate. Mew desired and fell in love with women, but could not discuss her feelings; not even with a close friend such as Alida Monro. Since she was not a feminist, not even a suffragist, she was cut off from the friendship of the lesbian women who found each other through those political movements. On her trips to Paris she had no access to the lesbian coteries and salons that flourished there. Sooner or later she had to return to a world of constraints; and to sexual loneliness.

      Some writers keep their patterns of disorder-into-order firmly inside themselves, firmly inside their rough drafts. Others need to live them out, to break away from limiting codes of conduct, take risks and make experiments. Outsiders, critics, looking at a writer’s apparently messy life and relationships, messy writing-room, may express uncomprehending disdain. But the writer, the poet, whether she prefers her mess to be metaphorical or literal, or a mixture of the two, needs to embrace her chaos. She needs to take inherited structures of grammar, inherited lexicons, break them up, see what she can make with them. She needs to play, both ferociously and tenderly; eagerly to destroy, patiently to rebuild. She may need to destroy, play with and reinvent inherited rules of relationship. On her own serious terms.

      At considerable cost to herself, Charlotte Mew triumphed. She achieved the writing of poetry of beauty, originality and intensity. In a culture that regarded poetry as a supremely male vocation (niches were granted to poetesses writing ladylike verses) she made her voice heard.

      How did she do it? Penelope Fitzgerald’s answer is that she divided herself in two. She maintained an outer, decorous, feminine persona, which Fitzgerald names Miss Lotti, the nice girl, passive and chaste, a disguise which hid the passionate, wilder persona, the artist, Charlotte, the ‘savage who threatened her from within’. As a survival technique, this proved exhausting: the divided self enacted a perpetual struggle, the ‘good’ self savagely fighting and punishing the ‘bad’ one. Perhaps this was an internalised version of battles begun in childhood. As a small girl, Charlotte Mew was taught gloomy Nonconformist piety by her nurse, for whom the human condition meant sin, judgement, rejection and guilt. Apparently she both loved and feared this nurse. How could she have escaped being damaged by her bleak, punitive, hell-threatening religion? Fitzgerald (herself a compassionate Anglican) does not explicitly suggest that Charlotte Mew’s inner struggle, one part of herself waging war on the other, may have acted out a version of the small girl’s drama with her nurse, but I let myself speculate that that is possible. In her later life Charlotte was described by one of her women friends and patrons as ‘a pervert’. What was perverse was the power relationship inflicted by the nurse.

      Nonetheless, despite these wounds, out of them, Charlotte made unforgettable poems. The same puzzled friend was able to recognise her as a genius.

      Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography is motivated not only by writerly admiration but also by sympathetic interest. Fitzgerald writes with just enough detachment: not too little and not too much.

      A biographer certainly needs to be scholarly and patient; intellectually capable and alert; knowledgeable and well-read. Also, given that modern biographies deal so much with their subjects’ personal and emotional lives as well as their worldly achievements, a biographer needs to cultivate empathy. Empathy means to feel with. To feel with your subject on her own terms as well as yours. A biographer who is shocked or upset by unconventional behaviour, passionate emotion, apparently ‘childish’ desires and needs, may fall back on expressions of moral superiority, or may start scolding. Women who break out of what’s expected of them, in order to live and write differently and originally, are not saints, and should not be idealised in hagiographies, but neither should they be mocked, labelled as neurotic. Penelope Fitzgerald employs a tone I think of as characteristic, which we note when we read her reviews: sharply intelligent, wry, often humorous, always trying to be fair and non-judgemental.

      The tone of this biography suggests an equal relationship between biographer and subject, one based neither on heroine-worship nor the need to dominate. It suggests the enactment of a relationship between friends, walking and talking, relishing together the comedy of the grubby London streets they both loved.

      At the same time it functions occasionally as a kind of dark mirror of its author. We know from Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald that the latter was ‘adept at evasions and self-editing’, faced many difficulties in her domestic life, and drummed up quietly heroic courage to deal with them. From time to time, as she writes about Charlotte Mew, we glimpse Penelope Fitzgerald’s admiration of stoicism and reticence, and her understanding of the need for masks and concealment. This biography is necessarily a chronological narrative but it dramatises an eternal moment: one unconventionally minded woman recognises another, salutes the other, across the gap of years, as both different and similar. At the same time both writers beckon the reader to follow them into their coincident worlds.

      Michèle Roberts

      2014

       CHAPTER ONE The Day of Eyes

      THE MEWS came from the Isle of Wight. It was a common name all over the island and still is, but by 1832 when Fred Mew, Charlotte’s father, was born, his own branch of the family had settled near Newport. Some of them were carpenters and labourers, some were known to have bettered themselves. This was certainly true of Fred’s grandfather, Benjamin Mew, the brewer – who was a member of the corporation and a prime mover of the Carisbrooke Water Company, which brought Newport its first public water supply in the 1820s. One of Benjamin’s sons, Richard, farmed at Newfairlee, a mile or so to the north-east of Newport, while another one, Henry, kept the Bugle Inn in the High Street. Henry imported wine and spirits, with premises in both Newport and Cowes; the farm at Newfairlee supplied milk and vegetables СКАЧАТЬ