It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas (1878—1917) and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built and then refused to live in it, he tormented his wife and children with his restlessness—he calculated that he was never happy for more than a quarter of an hour in the day. Two women, his wife Helen and the good-hearted but overwhelming Eleanor Farjeon, spoiled him as much as they dared. He couldn’t get on with his son and was sometimes ruthless with his friends—‘people soon bore him,’ said Walter de la Mare sadly—although most of them were called on to help him in his struggle with depression. But Edward Thomas was, and is, greatly loved. His scholarly biographer, George Thomas, irritated as he is by what he calls the ‘dithering’ of Edward Thomas’s early life, treats him not only with respect but with love.
Thomas saw himself with bitter clarity. ‘I suppose one does get help to some extent by being helpless, but when one doesn’t—it’s as if one had no pride at all.’ In October 1907 he wrote: ‘I went out and thought what effects my suicide would have. I don’t think I mind them…W. H. Davies would suffer a little, Helen and the children less in reality than they do now, from my accursed temper and moodiness.’ Even so, it might be true of him, as Ian Hamilton once wrote of Robert Frost, that ‘he knew his own failings, knew what the world would think of him if it found out, and yet believed the world was wrong.’
In this short selection of Edward Thomas’s letters, George Thomas has aimed, he says, at reflecting the entire writing life while using, as much as possible, unpublished material. To do this he has examined, or re-examined, nearly three thousand autograph letters—including the new acquisitions of the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth—of which 126 are included in this collection. The book is meant, I think, not so much to illustrate his 1985 biography but rather as a possible first introduction to Edward Thomas. For this reason George Thomas includes a note (although a late one) written to Dad Uzzell, the Wiltshire gamekeeper, poacher, and Salvation Army convert who taught the very young Edward Thomas about ‘twig, leaf, flint, thorn, straw, feather,’ how to read the weather, skin moles, and so forth. After this he has to show, and does show, the teenager eagerly approaching a distinguished man of letters, James Ashcroft Noble (‘my note-book would show you that I am not wasting my time out doors the least’); his dissipations at Oxford; the complexity, beauty, and bloody-mindedness of his love for Helen Noble; the disheartening untidiness of life in a cottage with three children; the wearisome search for work and commissions for ‘open-air’ books, for which his enthusiasms often faded some way before the last chapter. This was an excellent time for open-air and open-road literature of all kinds: in the summer of 1907 Elizabeth von Arnim took a large party, including E. M. Forster, through Sussex by caravan, while the Neo-Pagans were camping out in the New Forest. Even so, with the rent of his cottage ‘a quarterly worry,’ Edward Thomas had to make ends meet with the reviewing he hated. It became an effort for him, by 1911, not to look on a new book as an enemy.
Sympathetic understanding kept him in more or less perilous balance, and nearly three-quarters of the letters here are to friends. George Thomas says that ‘each was chosen for particular needs.’ Harry Hooton, who was something in the City and married to an old school friend of Helen’s, was consulted about the difficulties of the marriage. Walter de la Mare, Edward Garnett and the dramatist Gordon Bottomley were ready to give literary advice and criticism and to send ‘suggestions, warnings etc as they came to mind.’ ‘Perhaps I am not quite just to myself,’ Thomas wrote to Bottomley in December of 1909, ‘in finding myself very much on an ordinary everyday level except when in a mood of exaltation usually connected with nature and solitude. By comparison with others that I know—like de la Mare—I seem essentially like other men in the train and I should like not to be.’
No way seemed open, however, and Thomas was on the verge of having to write a tourist’s guidebook to Hampshire and Wiltshire. Meanwhile he gave generously, as well as took. It’s a pity it wasn’t possible to include any letters to W. H. Davies; there is nothing, therefore, to show his generosity in encouraging Davies to write and in getting him a grant for a decent wooden leg. Thomas believed, and told Helen more than once, that his own nature was incompatible with love, and that he was never quite at ease in the company of two or more people. But his salvation, he said as early as 1906, would depend on the one right person.
In 1913 Robert Frost arrived with his family from New Hampshire, unsuccessful as a farmer and not well known as a poet. George Thomas includes some of the first notes between them (‘My dear Frost—I wish you were nearer so that we could see one another easily with our children’), and after that, Frost said, ‘1914 was our year. I never had, I never shall have, such a year of friendship.’ Thomas took his family to stay near Ledington, on the Gloucester-Herefordshire border, two fields away from the Frosts. The meadows were full of windfalls from the old cider-apple trees, and at every gate and stile they paused and talked ‘of flowers, childhood, Shakespeare, women, England, the war, or looked at a far horizon, which some gap or dip occasionally disclosed.’ Possibly they also talked about alienation, loneliness, self-disgust, and self-forgiveness, since both of them were something other, or more, than the bird-and-weather writers their readers knew. In May 1914 Thomas tells Frost that he ought to get started on a book about speech and literature, ‘or you will find me mistaking your ideas for mine and doing it myself.’ He has been reading Frost’s North of Boston, abstemiously, only one poem an evening, and now, halfway through the letter, he asks: ‘I wonder whether you can imagine me taking to verse. If you can I might get over the feeling that it is impossible—which at once obliges your good nature to say “I can.”’
He began to write poetry in December 1914, and all his poems were written by December 1916. Credit for this is usually given to Frost, certainly by Thomas himself, although Frost declared that ‘all he ever got was an admiration for the poet in him before he had written a line.’ Certainly they were agreed at once on the relationship between traditional metre and the tones and half tones of the spoken voice, a kind of counterpoint. But Frost’s practical advice to his friend in 1914 was to look at certain passages in his latest book, The Pursuit of Spring, and to write them again in verse form, but with exactly the same cadence. It seems unusual advice, not quite using words ‘as poets do,’ and Thomas sometimes tried it the other way round, turning poems back into prose, though he did describe this as ‘unprofitable.’ The mystery of his transformation remains, although George Thomas himself doesn’t hold with the idea of a significant division in Edward Thomas’s inner life. Despite his ‘immense prose output and the later flowering of his verse,’ he says, ‘the name and nature of poetry was his dominant lifelong concern.’
His poetry is a question of fine apprehensions, ‘intuition on the edge of consciousness,’ Leavis wrote, ‘which would disappear if looked at directly.’ He is listening, ‘lying in wait for what I should, yet never can, remember’; he cannot bite the day to the core. Now that the war has begun ‘to turn young men to dung,’ he sees himself as a ‘half-ruined house’:
I am something like that,
Not one pane to reflect the sun,
For the schoolboys to throw at—
They have broken every one.
In 1915 he had been considering whether he should follow the Frosts to America. He was thirty-seven. In July he resolved his own perplexities and enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles (later he transferred to the Artillery because they allowed a better pension to widows). He expected his friends to forget him, knowing that his appearance was completely changed by his first army ‘shortcut,’ when he lost his longish hair, described as dull gold. ‘Nobody recognises me now,’ he wrote to Frost in May 1916, ‘Sturge Moore, B. Marsh and R. C. Trevelyan stood a yard off and I didn’t trouble to awake them to stupid recognition.’ But Helen divined that what she called (in her memoir As It Was) ‘his old periods of dark agony’ had gone forever. Among the memoirs included at the end of this book is one written by an old friend, R. A. Scott-James, who was at training camp with Thomas and found him ‘scarcely recognisable for the same man.’ As a sergeant instructor, it turned out that he was not only a good soldier but a good teacher of soldiers, and surely no siege battery can ever have had an observation officer better suited to his job. Thomas himself put this another way, writing to his parents: ‘I have done all the things so far asked of me, without making any mess.’
His last letters are to Helen. ‘Still not a thrush—but many blackbirds,’ he wrote to her, a few days before the battle of Arras.
My dear, you must not ask me to say much more. I know that you must say much more because you feel much. But I, you see, must not feel anything. I am just as it were tunnelling underground and something in my subconsciousness directs me not to think of the sun. At the end of the tunnel there is the sun.
The first publisher of Edward Thomas’s poetry was James Guthrie of the Pear Tree Press, who in 1916 published six poems under Thomas’s pen name, Edward Eastaway. Otherwise Thomas was not fortunate. An introduction to Edward Marsh was a failure, and Marsh did not include him in any of the five volumes of Georgian Poetry. Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, a friend, also rejected Edward Eastaway. ‘Many thanks for saying it,’ Thomas wrote to him. ‘I am sorry because I feel utterly sure they are me. I expect obstacles and I get them.’ Professor Thomas might perhaps have explained that the enemy was not Monro himself so much as his highly-strung partner, Alida Klementaski. She associated Thomas with Frost, whom she detested. ‘I could have pulled that Frost man down the stairs by his coat when he said he was going up to see you,’ she told Monro. In this way Monro, a deeply harassed man who missed many opportunities, missed one of the greatest of all.
London Review of Books, 1996
The Poetry Bookshop, both as a shop and as a publishing venture, existed from December 1912 to 1935—I should like to say ‘flourished,’ but it hardly did that. It was never quite out of financial difficulties, and more than once close to bankruptcy. Yet it was considered a success by everyone who knew it, and remembered with affection. It had one object and one only, to bring readers and poetry together. It has to be judged, therefore, I suppose, by how close they seem together now.
The Bookshop was the idea of one man, Harold Monro, who was born in 1879. His family were Scottish in origin, and before his father there were three generations of doctors. The Monros owned a private lunatic asylum, and there would have been money enough for Harold to live his life in modest comfort without making much effort. He had begun, in fact, as a drifter, expelled from school, tormented by his ambitions as a poet, and, after seven miserable years of marriage, separated from his wife. ‘She for whom I had built such cloud-capped summits of ideals,’ he noted, ‘cares for nothing better than to play tennis and reads novels the whole week.’ Here was the source of anguish, for Monro was deeply affected—though his wife evidently was not—by the mind-climate of the new century with its expectation of joy and freedom, expressed through Fabianism and Utopianism, through Tolstoyan settlements, garden cities and vegetarianism tea-rooms, through Shelley’s Spirit of Delight and the Spirit of Ecstasy and the new Rolls-Royce. In 1908 he had tried to fit himself to join the Samurai, a movement that aimed, through clean living and spiritual training, to evolve a higher human type. There is a feeling here of sincerity pushing itself too hard, and at an early stage Monro began to drink, to struggle against drink, and to be haunted by his dreams. These were often nightmares of locked doors, or of grotesque chases and falls, or, once, of Christ begging him not to drink, but ‘because Christ meekly implored, I drank it down.’ But Monro had good friends, and it was his English friends in Florence, where he often stayed, who told him he ought to go back to London and concentrate his scattered efforts on ‘doing something about poetry.’
Why should this be necessary? Certainly, at the beginning of the twentieth century, English people still read poetry. They read Kipling, Masefield and Yeats, they took anthologies on walking tours through Scotland and Switzerland, and in particular they read The Golden Treasury. My own aunt and uncle, when they were engaged to be married in 1911, corresponded by postcard, giving a reference to The Golden Treasury. But rebellious elements were at work—the Imagists, the Vorticists, the Futurists, the new Georgians. Ezra Pound had arrived in London to call everyone to order. Edward Thomas believed that the trouble was too much poetry. Anyone with £5 to spare, he said, could get a book of verse printed, and ‘reviewers and booksellers have not been able to keep their heads above the stream.’ To Monro, poetry was a constant and necessary element in the life of man, particularly industrial man. It had to be restored to its right place.
Monro came back to London in the autumn of 1911. His happiest relationship was always teacher to pupil, and he brought with him a young man, half Italian, half English, Arundel del Re. ‘His weakness and paleness did not impress us,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of him in 1919, ‘but then, perhaps weakness and paleness are the necessary qualities.’ Del Re, on this first visit, was ‘thrilled by everything,’ even ‘the long terraces of tall, grimy-looking, flat-faced houses peering down on the street.’ In one of these flat-faced houses, 35 Devonshire Street, Monro established his office.
Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) was in Bloomsbury, ‘which at that time,’ del Re remembered, ‘had not yet become the favourite haunt of the younger highbrows.’ It was an unsavoury place, full of cats and dustbins, and the ground-floor workshops made it noisy. At No. 35 there was only one cold-water tap for the whole building. But it was near the British Museum and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and it was cheap. Monro had the habit, as he noted himself, of taking on responsibility for other young lives, and if you do that you must be careful with your money.
Needing advice, although he did not always take it, Monro turned to his friends, and in particular to two of them, Arthur Romney Green and Frank Flint. Romney Green has been described as a ‘craftsman, woodworker, boat builder, sailor, mathematician, social reformer, friend and lover,’ but referred to himself as a small workingmaster. Carpenters and poets, in his opinion, faced the same problems, and he held that any man left with a chisel and a straight piece of wood will want to round it off—what was more, when he ran workshops, during bad times, for the unemployed, he proved that he was right. Extravagant and cranky though he was, Monro knew him for his good angel. Frank Flint was Monro’s invaluable expert on French literature. His childhood was spent in London’s old East End, one of a family that flitted from one home to another when the rent was due, and even before he left school at the age of thirteen he was working as a soap-boy in a barber’s shop. In 1909, having made his landlady’s daughter pregnant, Flint married her, but he managed, during intervals of his work as a clerk in the Civil Service, to learn nine—some say ten—languages. After bringing out his three small volumes of poetry—two of them published by Monro—he became cautious of expressing his emotions. But he was one of the few who attended Monro’s funeral, and with the coffin, he said, disappeared ‘the largest and best part of my life.’
Monro’s first move, as soon as he felt his friends around him, was to recommend himself to what might be called the establishment, the august Poetry Society. They agreed to lend their support to a new journal, the Poetry Review, and to enclose in it their dismal list of fixtures, the Poetical Gazette. Although Monro was to do the work and meet some of the expenses, his attraction for the Society was probably partly his appearance. His moustache and upright bearing made him look like a Guards Officer (‘a dejected Guards officer,’ said John Drinkwater) and ‘safer’ than most young poets. Late in 1912, however, he parted company with the Review and started up his own quarterly, Poetry and Drama, on the principle, said del Re, ‘that poetry was to be judged as poetry and not according to standards that, more often than not, have nothing whatsoever to do with poetry.’ Meanwhile, in September 1912, he was approached by Eddie Marsh, who asked him to publish an anthology of the new Georgian poets.
Marsh was Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary, a patron of the arts and, in a guileless and generous way, of artistic young men. It was Rupert Brooke who had suggested the anthology (and, indeed, had offered to write the whole thing himself) and Marsh, though his taste was conservative, was taken by the idea of new young voices, rejecting the Victorian past, outshining The Golden Treasury. The selections, of course, he wanted to make personally, but it says a good deal for Monro, who had no experience of publishing beyond the Samurai Press, that Marsh should have chosen him to bring the look out, even though once again he took some of the financial risk. Georgian Poetry 1911—1912 sold more than fifteen thousand copies, and it was ready on the centre table for the customers who came to the opening of Monro’s new venture, the Poetry Bookshop. Thirty-five Devonshire Street was to become a shop that would stock every book published in English by a living poet. The offices were moved up to the first floor, and downstairs, as the sculptor Gaudier-Bržeska put it, they would ‘sell poetry by the pound.’
Shopkeeping was new to Monro, and he never quite took to it. ‘Conscientious but incompetent’ was his own description, although the shop in itself realized his dearest ambitions. Coming down from his office with stiff bows and hesitant smiles he would give heartfelt advice to the customers, often advising them to choose something more worthwhile but less expensive. The office boy was ‘slow and dreamy’ and del Re, who never managed to master the Bar-Lock typewriter, drifted away, becoming a protégé of Logan Pearsall Smith. But Monro had the luck which courage deserves when he met a beautiful young woman, Alida Klementaski, who asked for nothing except the chance to serve humanity. She came from a Polish refugee family, and was ‘free,’ living largely on tea and cigarettes in a single room. A few days later she wrote to him: ‘The only way to make life worth living is to try and make other people love beauty as much as we do, isn’t it? That is what I try to do.’ Teaching herself everything that was necessary as she went along—stock keeping, accounting, copyediting, hand printing, hand lettering—she became his shop assistant at twenty-five shillings a week.
She had thrown in her lot with him and was eager to live with him and to bear his child, ‘a record of our love.’ Monro, after all, had a son by his first marriage, who sometimes came to see him—so too did his first wife, who was living cheerfully in London with her lover, and sending her friends gifts of port wine. ‘She is just a woman I married,’ he explained. He loved Alida. To him she was ‘Dearest Child,’ his safe refuge. ‘We are most nearly born of one same kind’—but they were not, and he could never find the right words to tell her that he had been homosexual ever since his school-days. Possibly he thought that since Alida had joined ‘the ranks of the emancipated’ she would understand him without difficulty, but she could not and did not, either then or ever.
Monro dreamed, night after night, that he was being buried alive. Both Romney Green and Frank Flint believed that Alida was a cool and balanced young woman who converted Monro from a romantic to a cynic. But in fact her temperament was one of heights and depths, and her love (though she had a generous heart) had its reverse side in wild jealousy, even of the visiting poets. Monro never lived with her, and was frequently away. Having become something like the official spokesman for English poetry, he worked devotedly at one of the most tiring of all occupations—travelling and giving talks. One of his lists reads ‘Workers’ Educational College, National Home Reading Union, Village Clubs Association, Carnegie Trusts, Shakespearean Reading Circle.’ Sometimes the wheels of the train, as they rattled along, seemed to him to he repeating ‘Windy bore, windy bore.’ He could rely on Alida to send him every detail of the shop’s fortunes. While the tragicomedy between them played itself out, she never failed the confidence he had put in her.
During its first years the Poetry Bookshop was crowded, and known as a welcoming place, warmed in winter by a coal fire with Monro’s cat Pinknose and Alida’s dogs stretched out in front of it, and with seats where you could sit and read without being asked to buy. The seats, and indeed all the furniture, had been made by Romney Green out of massive oak. What became of these pieces in the end is a mystery, but it is hard to believe that they could ever have been destroyed. The shop was also a meeting place, and poets arriving in London, or even in England, made their way there as though by instinct. It was assumed that they would be needy, and the small rooms at the top of the house were available for them at the low rent of 3s 6d a week. The D. H. Lawrences, the Epsteins, the Frosts, all lodged there, and Wilfred Owen, who came there to get good advice, found that the place was full and had to take refuge in the local coffeehouse. Flint, however, noticed that none of them stayed there long. Devonshire Street was too much for them, he thought.
Monro, of course, was also still a publisher, on the lookout for good poetry. He never arrived at a definition of it, although he believed it had something to do with rhythm and sense becoming identical. He might have added, however, after a few years’ experience, that poetry was what demanded, at all costs, to be published. In Poetry and Drama for June 1914 he had rashly said that he would ‘be glad at all times to receive letters from authors who consider themselves unfairly treated.’ In the Chapbook No. 23, May 1921, he specifies that manuscripts brought to the shop by hand will not be received, and even when sent by post ‘they cannot be examined within any specified period,’ but before that he had become used to abuse and reproaches of all kinds. Rejected authors called him ‘Your Lordship’ and complained that he was reducing them to starvation, and even those who were accepted often protested bitterly.
You bloody Deaconess in rhyme
You told me not to waste your time—
And that from you to me!
Now let Eternity be told
Your slut has left my books unsold—
And you have filched my fee.
This was from that ‘magnificent gypsy of a woman,’ as Louis Untermeyer called her, ‘gnarled in her own nervous protests,’ Anna Wickham. No greater contrast with Anna could be imagined than the pale, withdrawn, enigmatic Charlotte Mew, Alida’s ‘Auntie Mew,’ who also wrote sharply to Monro about his arrangements for her first book, The Farmer’s Bride. To both these poets, and to all the others, he sent out careful and regular accounts.
In 1913 the Bookshop’s work was extended in two directions. It began to publish and sell its own illustrated rhyme sheets as cheaply as possible (they started off at a penny plain, twopence coloured) and it announced twice-weekly poetry readings. These in themselves were nothing new—Monro had met Alida at a Poet’s Club evening at the Café Monico, where she had read and he had been the guest of honour. But at the Bookshop’s Tuesday and Thursday evenings, where comfort was not thought of, there was a spirit of quiet intensity. The room was up a flight of ladderlike stairs. The desk was candle-lit, later lamp-lit, with a shade of dusky green. Audiences, except for Yeats, were not large, and the takings (out of which the reader was paid) were small. Alida often read herself, or, if not, ‘managed’ the highly-strung poets, although W. H. Davies—for example—whined from nerves like a baby. Monro had always thought of a poem as a printed score, brought to life by the human voice. His own (although he was a good amateur singer) he thought was too gloomy, and if any of his work was to be read, he left it to Alida. After the reading came ‘selling time,’ which often turned out to be talking time, late into the night. Yet these sparse occasions turned into immortal hours, and their reputation mysteriously spread. When Richard Aldington joined up in 1916, he (one might think rashly) told the Quartermaster Sergeant that he was a poet. ‘Oh, are you? Have you ever heard of the Poetry Bookshop?’
The war meant that Monro, like other publishers, lost his cashier and his traveller, ran out of paper, and found it difficult to sell any poetry except ‘trench verse.’ London, and particularly Bloomsbury with its wide squares, became like an armed camp. In August 1916, Monro got his own calling-up papers, and was sent first to an anti-aircraft battery, where he felt wretchedly out of place, and then to the War Office. ‘Dear child, what shall I do?’ Alida, distracted with worry for him, had no doubt about what she ought to do. The shop had to be kept open, even though she had to do the packing herself and made deliveries with a handbarrow. In the evenings, if there were no Zeppelin raids, she coloured the first series of rhyme sheets and some of the chapbook covers in watercolour, sometimes with the help of Charlotte Mew. Sidgwick & Jackson offered to travel the books for her, but they asked for 10 percent commission and that would have left her with less than nothing.
In the early Twenties, when, in Rose Macaulay’s words, ‘there was a kind of poetry-intoxication going about’ and John Masefield sold eighty thousand copies of his Collected Poems, the shop, to all appearances, should have done well. But though Monro had been untiring in his efforts to sell both his authors and the rhyme sheets in America, he had no capital to expand. Worse still, the shop’s early success had given rise to competition. Arundel del Re himself opened a Chelsea Bookshop in 1919, and began to issue the Chelsea Broadsides. But he also sold modern pictures, while other establishments offered smocks and pottery and even tea and scones alongside the books of verse. This was quite foreign to Monro’s original conception. But his account books told him one thing, his ideals another.
In 1920, apparently at the insistence of McKnight Kauffer, he married Alida at Clerkenwell Register Office. Up to the last moment he had tried to explain his difficulties without success, and she had been left ‘terror-stricken’ by hints that she did not understand. Her heart, she said, was raw. As soon as the ceremony was over he disappeared, leaving her to go down to the country alone. Yet they still made their appearance in the shop together, although the customers talked and read rather than bought, and in 1923 bankruptcy seemed to threaten. ‘Will they sell my dogs?’ Alida asked.
Drink, in one of Monro’s earlier poems, he had called his ‘strange companion,’ not pretending that he could ever do without it.
We never smiled with each other.
We were like brother and brother,
Dimly accustomed.
Out of a residual sense of duty and his love for Alida he undertook during the 1920s a series of cures in France and Germany—‘not the best places,’ she thought, ‘to fight such a battle,’ as wine was so cheap there. Meanwhile, the Devonshire Street lease would be up in 1926, and they arranged to rent new premises in 38 Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum. With not much hope, surely, of success, Monro put out a proposal for the conversion of the Bookshop into a limited liability company. In this scheme the stock is valued at £3,500 and Romney Green’s oak furniture at £500; the approximate turnover is given, but there is no mention of current profits. A few friends put themselves down for shares, but the idea came to nothing.
The second Bookshop, however, opened gallantly, with McKnight Kauffer’s new sign and an interior decorated in orange, pink, and purple, the colours of the all-conquering Ballets Russes. But this room had to be partitioned and shared with the publishers Kegan Paul, and the readings were moved to a nearby hall, which meant that there was no ‘selling time’ at all. Worn out with the move, Alida arranged things as best she could. The big book table and the wide seat still stood in the light from the windows, but there was no fire, only a gas stove, and she felt the old magic was lost. The rhyme sheets were still pinned up and could be read by passersby, but Monro had been obliged, in spite of everything, to stock general books on literature and art. It was no longer in the truest sense a poetry bookshop.
Monro by now had not much hope of recovery. In Great Russell Street he had taken to drinking at the local public house, the Plough, with the rough trade. ‘Red Mudie,’ ‘Albert’ and ‘Italian Lou’ figure in his scattered diary. Once the police had to be called in, and Alida’s letters to him are in the truest sense pathetic. It is only the Strange Companion, she tells him, who stands between ‘the two helpless creatures that we are.’ And yet something in Monro, something that lay deep at the bottom of his mind, seemed to tell him that he was close at last to what he had always wanted to write about. He made a note to himself: ‘Can’t I eat up some of these pornographic experiences and digest them hot and spit them out again as beauty?’
Monro died on 16 March 1932. In his will he had asked for his ashes to be scattered at the root of a young oak tree, though only if the idea proved practicable. The Poetry Bookshop was to be wound up. Alida did not take the decision to do this until June 1935, trying to persuade herself, she wrote to her friends, ‘that the moment had not come.’ But she told them that she would continue to live upstairs at 38 Great Russell Street and would be delighted to see any of them, ‘as if the Bookshop were still in existence.’
Georgian Poetry 1911—1912, the Bookshop’s first publication, was also its greatest success. The sales of the series dropped with the fifth volume, although Georgian Poetry 1920—1922 still sold eight thousand copies. Finally Eddie Marsh was left looking back on his past success as an editor ‘very much as I should towards having been Captain of Cricket at Westminster.’ This remark in itself shows why Monro was anxious not to identify himself with the Georgians as a group, and why he appeared sourly gratified by their decline in reputation. Meanwhile in 1914 he brought out Ezra Pound’s Des imagistes, and in 1915 Richard Aldington’s Images (1910—1915) and Flint’s imagist Cadences. With Futurism he would probably have gone much farther than he did if Alida had not expressed an absolute horror of Marinetti. All this was in line with the original idea of the shop as a ‘depot’ where poets of different views could meet and talk far into the night, while their volumes confronted each other from the shelves. Through war, through money troubles, through alcoholism he continued doggedly to look for new poetry. His only competitor in the field was Grant Richards, who wrote to him in December 1920 that ‘we might between us clear up the poets of the country.’ Monro remains as the publisher of Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham, and Frances Cornford, and of Robert Graves’s first book.
The Bookshop’s list falls short of what it might have been. When the Big War (as he preferred to call it) became inevitable, Monro forcibly refused to print ‘patriotic rubbish,’ but from the young serving officers he managed to get only Robert Graves’s early Over the Brazier and Magpies in Picardy1 by his young friend T. P. Cameron Wilson, who was killed in 1918. Apart from this, Monro was reproached, and reproached himself, for his rejection of T. S. Eliot and Edward Thomas. Thomas had been an early friend both of Poetry and Drama and of the shop, and it seems inexcusable that the ‘Edward Eastaway’ poems, which he sent round in May 1915 in a sad brown-paper parcel, should be returned to him. But Alida decisively objected to Thomas, probably as a friend of the dreaded Robert Frost. She also complained (March 1917) that Ezra Pound had been in ‘hawking’ T. S. Eliot’s poems. ‘We don’t want them but he wouldn’t take “No” and said he’d send them to be seen.’ In both cases Monro came to recognize his mistake and did what he could to atone for it. After Thomas’s death in action, he wrote to his widow, Helen, offering to publish, and must have felt that he deserved the reproachful snub he got in reply. Eliot’s early poetry he frankly found hard to understand (so, too, did Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who took it for the Hogarth Press). But by 1915 he was able to ‘hear’ Prufrock—‘I consider that Harold is dawning,’ Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe—and in 1921 the Bookshop distributed the remaining copies of Ara Vos Prec. Monro wrote well, though cautiously, about The Waste Land (Chapbook No. 34, February 1923), and Eliot, who remained a loyal friend, wrote the Critical Note for Monro’s Co llected Poems (Cobden-Sanderson, 1933). Monro, he said, was not a technical innovator, but a poet needs a new technique ‘only as far as it is dictated, not by the idea—for there is no idea—but by the nature of the dark embryo within him which gradually takes on the form and speech of a poem.’
As an editor Monro was at his happiest, or, to be more accurate, at his least unhappy. His gloomy enthusiasm was persuasive. Although Poetry and Drama was kept going by the royalties from Georgian Poetry 1911—1912, he was unable to pay his contributors, and yet the hard-up Edward Thomas and the penniless Flint worked their best for him. Aiming high, he tackled Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, and Henry Newbolt, both of whom responded. These were names from the past, but his drama critic, Gilbert Cannan, boldly supported Gordon Craig and the experimental theatre. Flint’s ‘French Chronicle’ in particular is written with information and feeling. The September 1914 number leaves him watching the North Sea roll in on a flat English beach, having heard that Charles Péguy is dead, wondering whether Guillaume Apollinaire will survive. But the war put an end to Poetry and Drama, and Monro showed good sense in not trying to revive it. Its place was to be taken by The London Mercury (1919), edited by John Squire, and Eliot’s Criterion (1922), although The Criterion’s circulation was never more than nine hundred. ‘There are too many periodicals,’ Monro noted in his diary, ‘yet who is going to stop? There is not enough stuff to go round.’ Meanwhile he had devised the monthly Chapbook, a delightful miscellany, sometimes unexpectedly lighthearted. For this he spirited up his old illustrators and some new ones to decorate the front covers and often—although it would have paid better to use the space for advertising—the back ones. Anyone who is lucky enough to possess a run must be glad to have No. 29, designed by Terence Prentis, the last of Monro’s admiring disciples, or Ethelbert White’s covers in plum red, white, and yellow for No. 33, or Paul Nash’s No. 35. The paper, of course, did not pay, al though Monro tried a number of editor’s devices, including the unusual one of lowering the price (Nos. 25 to 38). It was erratic during 1921, the year after their marriage—Harold and Alida went abroad independently of each other and publication lapsed for six months—but this was part of the Chapbook’s ragged, Petrouchka-like charm. With almost every issue the subscribers could expect something different. Nos. 6 and 18 offered songs with music, No. 20 a crazy but deeply interesting piece by Gordon Craig on the political aspect of puppet shows, No. 29 a roaring satire by Osbert Sitwell on the Georgians under the guidance of their goddess Mediocrity, No. 32 Harold Monro’s ‘morality,’ One Day Awake, where the wretched protagonist, threatened by the voices of Business, Food, and Furniture, pours himself out a glass of wine as the scene closes. These were in addition to the issues on contemporary American, French, and English poetry.
The idea of the rhyme sheets may have come to Monro from the Dun Emer Press broadsides and the Flying Fame rhyme sheets, which the Bookshop took over in 1914, but they became distinctively his own. In the Chapbook No. 35, March 1923, he wrote that ‘certain distinctive qualities are essential to a successful Broadside, and it will be found, if these are studied, that only a few poems possess them.’ What are they? He never made this quite clear, perhaps, even to himself, but an important point was their impact. The poems vary a good deal in length, but they are usually short, sometimes cut down, even when (as with Blake’s ‘Schoolboy,’ The New Broadside No. 6) this means changing the meaning entirely. In commissioning his illustrators Monro showed none of his hesitation with authors. They were the best he could get—Lovat Fraser, Charles Winzer (who designed two signboards for Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co.; both were stolen), John and Paul Nash, Albert Rutherston, later David Jones, McKnight Kauffer, Edy Legrand, Edward Bawden. The illustrations, particularly Lovat Fraser’s, were often decorations, almost independent of the text. But Monro, in the spirit of William Blake, wanted the verse and the picture to make their impression together. The sheets were meant to be pinned up and replaced at will, but the memory would retain the song and the last word would belong, not to time, but to joy, a memory which would last when the sheets were thrown away with the rubbish or blown with the wind. Robert Frost, waiting for a train on Beaconsfield station during his first visit to England, had seen a bit of paper blowing about at his feet, and picking it up he had read for the first time Ralph Hodgson’s ‘Eve,’ printed as a ‘filler.’ This kind of chance, this kind of contact, was what Monro hoped for with the rhyme sheets. As to poetry, he once said, ‘the less of it printed the better; and the more of it carried in the memory and conveyed by the voice, much, much, the better.’ This, surely, is one of the strangest remarks ever made by a hard-working publisher. But the rhyme sheets’ verses were carried in the memory. The writer William Plomer, looking back through thirty years, remembered how as a boy at Rugby he had hung the rhyme sheets on the walls of his room, ‘best of all, de la Mare’s “Arabia,” with gaudy decorations by (I expect) Lovat Fraser.’ Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in August 1952 to Leonard Bacon, ‘Your mention of Ralph Hodgson and his broadsides swept me back to the public at fisticuffs. Broadsides were what one bought at Munro’s (sic) Poetry Bookshop, only I think we called them rhyme-sheets. Like a galley proof, as you say, with rough coloured woodcuts heading and tailing them, often drawn by Lovat Fraser. And we tacked them on our walls, above our beds and our baths. I remember one I was particularly attached to, that began
Oh, what shall the man full of sin do,
Whose heart is as cold as a stone,
When the black owl looks in through the window,
And he on his deathbed alone?’
(This particular poem was the first to be issued, and surely only the conscience-ridden Monro would have chosen it.) Sylvia Townsend Warner couldn’t remember the author, and Plomer couldn’t remember the artist (in fact Charles Winzer), which is not surprising, since these names were usually printed as small as possible. In a sense, they didn’t matter; this was poetry, as Monro described it to Amy Lowell, to be ‘sold anywhere and everywhere, carried in the pocket, read in the train.’ This makes it hard work, of course, for today’s collector and bibliographer.
Finally, in both the first and the second Bookshops, children were not forgotten. Although Harold and Alida were, in their different ways, rather intimidating for a young child, and cats, kittens and dogs were needed as intermediaries, everything they published for children was successful. There were special rhyme sheets for them in both the two series and in the New Broadsides, which opened with de la Mare’s ‘The Huntsmen.’ (It was disappointing, perhaps, that Ethelbert White had drawn the horsemen riding up the stairs to bed at the top, but not, in the tailpiece, going downstairs again.) Eleanor Farjeon gave readings of her verses from the Nursery Sheets, while Lovat Fraser’s ‘Rhymes for Children’ in the November 1919 Chapbook was so popular that they were reprinted on their own. Other poems, not in the first place intended for children, were dearly loved—Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Changeling’ (from The Farmer’s Bride), Frances Cornford’s ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train’ (from Spring Morning), and Harold Monro’s ‘Overheard on a Saltmarsh’ (from Children of Love, and reprinted as a rhyme sheet), which has been called ‘as complete and inexplicable as a thing seen suddenly and clearly between sleeping and waking’ and was inspired by the green glass beads of an actress, Vera Tschaikovska. Osbert Sitwell declared that the children of a racecourse tough who lived next door to the Bookshop were offered some of the rhyme sheets but tore them up and stamped on them. This Monro would have to mark as another defeat. But it is fair to say that the Poetry Bookshop made a lasting impression on two generations.
Introduction to The Poetry Bookshop: A Bibliography by
Howard J. Woolmer, 1988
During her lifetime Charlotte Mew was either greatly liked or greatly disliked, and now, more than fifty years after her death, those who are interested in her are very much interested. There are at least two collections of her papers which nobody is given permission to see—not quite with the feeling that she ought to be left to rest in peace, but, rather, that she shouldn’t be shared indiscriminately with outsiders. She was a writer who was completely successful perhaps only two or three times (though that is enough for a lyric poet) and whose sad life, in spite of many explanations, refuses quite to be explained.
Val Warner, who has worked for so long and against so many difficulties to produce this edition, is to be congratulated. The prose pieces and seven of the poems have been collected for the first time, there are five new poems, and the fifty-four lines which were cut from ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’ in Duckworth’s collected edition of 1953 have been put back. There is a level-headed introduction and a bibliographical note (to which Sir Sydney Cockerell’s diaries should be added). Val Warner, herself a poet, is not primarily interested in biography. I am therefore hoping to expand and correct one or two points.
Charlotte Mew, who lived from 1869 to 1928, changed very little for about thirty years of her life. She was tiny, trim, curly-haired, and pale, wearing size-two boots—doll’s boots. Her eyebrows were fixed in a half-moon of surprise, apparently at a joke. What joke? Possibly one that she liked to tell: a hearse-driver runs over a man and kills him, and a passer-by shouts: ‘Greedy!’ She was the sort of person whose luggage is carried by helpful young men, and yet she regarded the world with defiance, answering inquiries with a toss of the head, and carrying her umbrella like a weapon. This umbrella, with which she repelled tiresome children on the beach, was part of her Victorian character as ‘Miss Mew’ or ‘Miss Lotti.’ Among what she called ‘good five o’clock people,’ she guarded this personality carefully. Only when she felt sure of her company would she sometimes let herself go, and like most melancholics, prove wildly entertaining. But at the same time Charlotte Mew was writing, and indeed living, à rebours, under the threat of insanity and in the dark thrill of self-inflicted frustration. The split could not be concealed indefinitely, and by the 1920s her appearance had altered, and shocked. ‘Her wind-blown grey hair, her startled grey eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another world, frightened at what she had undergone in this one.’ The biographer has not so much to reconstruct her life as to account for what life did to her.
Charlotte Mew was the third child (out of eight) of Fred Mew, a farmer’s son from the Isle of Wight, who had come to London to be trained as an architect by H. E. Kendall. In 1863 he married Kendall’s daughter, a tiny, silly woman who was ‘above’ him, and always made him feel so: he was made to describe his own father, on the marriage certificate, as ‘Esquire.’ Charlotte remembered her childhood as happy. Looking back, she was quite sure, as English poets are, that there had been a happier time. That had been in the two top rooms of 10 Doughty Street, with the round table and the rocking horse, and a doll’s house designed by Fred. Here Lotti, radiant, passionate, and excitable, ruled the nursery, hopped up beside the driver whenever a cab was called, and was half-mad with excitement at Christmas. She told Florence Hardy that she ‘never outgrew the snowflakes.’ And yet when she was only seven, two of her brothers died—one a baby, one, her great playmate, a six-year-old. Lotti, as was then considered right, was taken in to see him in his coffin. The steadying influence was their Yorkshire nurse, Elizabeth Goodman, tenderly described in Charlotte’s article ‘An Old Servant’: ‘as fixed a part of the Universe as the bath (cruelly cold in winter) into which she plunged us every morning, and the stars to which she pointed through the high window, naming some of them, in the evening sky.’ But it was also this faithful servant who imprinted on Lotti’s mind the Evangelical sense of guilt and retribution. Every sin—and every happiness—has been calculated in advance, though not by us, and must be paid for.
Sweetheart, for such a day
One mustn’t count the score;
Here, then, it’s all to pay,
It’s good-night at the door.
This was the poem, ‘Fin de Fête,’ that in 1916 attracted the attention of Thomas Hardy and convinced him of Charlotte Mew’s talent. Hardy, of course, didn’t need to be persuaded that the Spirit of the Universe was exacting, and Charlotte had the kind of temperament that accepted this without question, even in the nursery.
In 1882 Charlotte was sent to the Gower Street School, which had connections with Bedford College. Here, at the age of fourteen, she fell violently in love with her headmistress, Lucy Harrison. Miss Harrison was one of the great educationalists of the turn of the century. ‘There was something royal in her nature,’ Octavia Hill wrote. There was also a strongly masculine element. She was one of the conspicuous successes of the liberal and unsectarian Bedford College: a brilliant scholar (as well as an expert carpenter) and a supporter of liberal movements—she kept as a souvenir a cigar given her by Mazzini. Her aim was to open windows for her pupils, both for the body and the mind. During this first important post the strain on her temperament proved too great, and in 1883 she was forced by what was called ‘a breakdown in health’ to resign. One of the old Gower Street pupils, Mrs Alice Lee, said that when the news was given out Charlotte, who had been playing the piano, ‘jumped up and in a wild state of grief started to bang her head against the wall.’ Alice, who was younger, wondered if she ought to bang her head too. Miss Harrison retired for the time being to Hampstead, where she continued to coach her favourite girls. Lotti was one of them: Fred Mew innocently believed that it would ‘stabilize’ her to keep in sight of the beloved teacher. Her friends remembered that at this time she was in such high spirits, and so amusing, that the walk from Bloomsbury to Haverstock Hill seemed short. After two years, however, Lucy Harrison fell deeply and permanently in love with Amy Greener, who had taken over the Gower Street School. ‘Dearest, I do not feel at home anywhere without you now,’ she wrote. ‘With the person you love comes a halo and a glow over everything, however miserable and poor, and without that presence the light seems to leave the sun itself. This is a trite remark, I am afraid.’ Miss Greener later wrote on this delicate subject delicately, saying that she had often been asked whether her friend’s life had ‘lacked the perfect rounding love can bring.’ She assured her readers that it had not, and the two of them lived for many years of unclouded happiness together in Yorkshire.
Besides this first experience of desertion, Lucy Harrison left with Charlotte her ideals of restraint and self-discipline, even in small things (‘if a pudding is begun with a fork, the help of a spoon must not be called in half-way through’), and a passion for English literature. The books she read with the inner group allowed for a certain release of emotion—in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office.’ When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With them there was less need for concealment, because they had grown up with Charlotte and knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse, in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte described, twenty years later, in ‘Ken’:
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—
Ken, however, is represented as an amiable idiot, whereas both Henry and Freda were victims of what was then called dementia praecox—that is, schizophrenia. ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’ sets out to represent the process of the split mind—‘a sudden lapse from sanity and control,’ as she explained it—by the dreadful heap of earth and flowers in the graveyard. Meanwhile the guilty identification with the two unfortunates, and the heavy expense of having them looked after, darkened the Mews’ respectable daily life. Charlotte wrote of 9 Gordon Street as ‘The Quiet House.’ She had a wretched fantasy that one evening when the front-door bell rang, she would answer it and face herself, waiting outside in the street.
In September 1898 Fred Mew died of cancer. During his long illness Charlotte had made her first appearance in print with a short story, ‘Passed,’ which was published in the Yellow Book for July 1894. I think she probably began to write in order to make some money. Mrs Mew was left, or made out that she was left, badly off, and lamented that she would have to let off half of the house. Anne had trained at the Queen’s Square Female School of Art as a screen and furniture painter. Charlotte had been trained for nothing, so she wrote. She wrote slowly, and, like the heroine of New Grub Street, did her time in the British Museum Reading Room, grinding articles (‘The Governess in Fiction,’ ‘Mary Stuart in Fiction’) out of other people’s books. Original to the point of wilfulness when the impulse to poetry came, she seems, with these prose contributions, to have studied the market. In ‘In the Curé’s Garden’ she is imitating Villette, in ‘Mark Stafford’s Wife’ she is imitating Henry James, in ‘The Wheat’ she is imitating May Sinclair, and in ‘The Fatal Fidelity’ she seems to be having a shot at W.W. Jacobs.
Her first story, ‘Passed,’ is the most impulsive and interesting of the lot. The subject is guilt. A respectable young woman hardens her heart when a prostitute appeals to her for help. Later she wanders into a Catholic church as the candles are lit for Benediction, and sees a girl patiently helping her imbecile sister. She knows then how far she has failed in human love. ‘Passed’ is appealing because the painful emotion is felt as true, but it is a period piece: apart from the scene at the altar and the prostitute, we get the prostitute’s dying sister, the cynical clubman who seduces them both, and the haunting scent of violets in a cheap china cup. No wonder it was accepted immediately by Henry Harland, the Yellow Book’s editor. To her old friends—rather left behind at this point—Lotti seemed one of the New Women. She went about London unescorted, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, her hair cut short as Miss Harrison’s had been, and wearing a smaller version of Miss Harrison’s black velvet jacket, collar, and tie. She was now in the orbit of Harland’s contributors and John Lane’s Keynotes—‘George Etherton,’ Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett, and the languid but sharp-witted Ella D’Arcy. These young women were not Bohemians: they were dandies. They objected when Frederick Rolfe left lice on the furniture; Beardsley was ‘a dear boy’ to them. At the Victorian Club for Professional Women, or in the new flats and studios, they talked with passion and spirit. As Evelyn Sharp puts it in her reminiscences, ‘We were on the crest of the wave, and felt that everything must go.’ Meanwhile they lived on very small incomes. It was a gallant fellowship, but precarious. When her brother died in 1901, Charlotte made a run to Paris and the companionship of Ella D’Arcy. When she describes how she walked through the rai n and the dazzling lights to help Ella arrange her bed-sitting room in the Rue Chat we get a last glimpse of the decade that had suited her best.
She was soon recalled to London. Mrs Mew rarely let her daughters stay away for long. But the tyrannous old mother was, it turned out, indispensable. In the end, Charlotte’s attachment to her home and family was stronger than her desire to be free: they promised normality, which implies peace. During these apparently quiet years, when, as ‘Miss Lotti,’ she was ordering the dinner or doing social work in the Girls’ Clubs, she became a poet. Hers is a poetry of tensions, which Val Warner defines as ‘passion unfulfilled by the loss of youth, by death, by the working of a malign fate, by the dictates of conventional morality, by renunciation and even by the glorification of renunciation of all love into itself a kind of passion,’ to which I would add the overwhelming conviction of guilt. This is only too clear in ‘Fame,’ where Charlotte Mew sees herself with disgust ‘smirking and speaking rather loud’ at London parties, ‘where no one fits the singer to his song,’ or ‘On the Asylum Road,’ where she is one of the crowd passing the darkened windows which cut off the inmates, or ‘Saturday Market,’ where a wretched woman tries to hide her disgrace under her shawl and sets the market ‘grinning from end to end.’ The images leave the writer, as she put it, ‘burned and stabbed half through.’ They are not experimental, but they are not quite under control either. In the main, the shorter her lyrics are the better, partly because her ear for metre was uncertain over a long stretch (she calculated by syllable, not by stress), and partly because they are cris de coeur. Explaining this in a letter, she gives examples of genuine cris de coeur. Margaret Gautier’s ‘je veux vivre’ and Mrs Gamp’s ‘Drink fair, Betsy, wotever you do.’ Cries have to be extorted: that is their test of tr uth. The quality of emotion is the first requirement of poetry, she said. Given that, she liked to speak in different voices, and for both sexes. She is a ‘cheap, stale chap’ in ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’ and an adolescent French schoolboy, set on edge with frustration, in ‘Fête.’ In ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ the young wife has ‘turned afraid’ and sleeps alone, while the farmer sweats it out only a flight of stairs away.
‘Oh, my God! the down, The soft young down of her, the brown The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!’
‘Sexual sincerity is the essential of good emotional work,’ complained Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who, predictably, didn’t like the personae and was ‘often left in a puzzle by the situations.’ But the uncertainty, of course, was in itself sincere, and made a strong, half-uncomfortable appeal to readers as different as Hardy and Virginia Woolf.
One of these early admirers was the novelist May Sinclair. Charlotte had written to her in 1913 congratulating her on The Combined Maze, a novel in which the image for the human condition is a men and women’s evening gym class at the Polytechnic. The outcome for the hero is sacrifice and repression of ‘the murmur of life in the blood,’ a theme well understood by Charlotte. May replied, ready to embark on another of her many literary friendships, but within a few months Charlotte had begun to fret. May Sinclair was a small, pretty, cat-loving woman and an entirely professional writer. She had many interests, including philosophy and what was then called medico-psychology, and kept an escape route for suffragettes across her back garden. She could deal competently with most situations, and her letters show that when the friendship grew warmer and Charlotte became importunate, she knew how to put her quietly in her place. ‘When I say, “I want to walk with you to Baker Street Station,” I mean I want to walk, and want to walk with you, and I want to walk to Baker Street Station…Better to take things simply and never go back on them, or analyse them, is not it?’ At the same time May was generous in her appreciation of the poems, which Charlotte read aloud to her in her hoarse little male impersonator’s voice. She recommended them to Ezra Pound (who printed ‘Fête’ in The Egoist) and, indeed, to every critic she could think of. She perhaps encouraged Charlotte unduly when she wrote to her: ‘I know one poet whose breast beats like a dynamo under an iron-grey tailor-made suit (I think one of her suits is iron-grey) and when she publishes her poems she will give me something to say that I cannot and do not say of my Imagists.’ It was surely a loss on both sides when the friendship abruptly ended, in 1916—17. After the brea ch, there was not much poetry left in Charlotte Mew. In 1969 an American scholar, Theophilus Boll, who was most painstakingly writing the Life of May Sinclair, began to turn this episode over in his mind. ‘If I should find something awful enough,’ he frankly admitted, ‘I might produce a best-seller, instead of an academic “doubtsell.”’ In this he was disappointed, but Dame Rebecca West allowed him to see a letter from G. B. Stern, recalling how May Sinclair had told them, in her ‘neat precise little voice,’ that Charlotte Mew had chased her upstairs into her bedroom, ‘and I assure you, Peter, and I assure you, Rebecca, I had to leap the bed five times.’ Dr Boll says he pondered this, working out with true academic caution how far May Sinclair, who was then over fifty, would really have been able to leap.
It is not surprising, then, that when she first called at the Poetry Bookshop and was asked, ‘Are you Charlotte Mew?’ her reply was: ‘I am sorry to say I am.’ The Bookshop, during those years the natural meeting-place of poets, was a small room off Theobald’s Road in what was then a slum area of Bloomsbury, and it was largely run and managed by an intense, energetic Hampstead-Polish girl, Alida Klementaski. Alida had read ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ in The Nation, and was ‘electrified.’ ‘This poem I immediately committed to memory, and a year or two later repeated it to Harold Monro, who had recently opened the Poetry Bookshop with the avowed intention of publishing the work of young poets and presenting them to a large audience.’ Charlotte was no longer young, but in 1916 the Bookshop brought out ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ and sixteen other poems in an edition of five hundred copies, with a cover design by Lovat Fraser. After Charlotte’s death Alida, with a good deal of difficulty, composed a memoir that, up to now, has been the standard source of information. There are some unforgettable passages—the chloroforming, for example, of the Mews’ savage old parrot (a job which Alida reluctantly undertook), and the tragic account of the sisters’ last days. But Alida, though a staunch friend, was not qualified to understand the nature of Charlotte’s emotional life. Homosexuality dismayed her. In 1916 she wrote in distress to Harold Monro that she had missed the last 19 bus and been stranded in the rooms of a fellow suffragette: during the night she had been terrified and ‘nearly went off my head when the young woman came into my room—I said “go and get a dressing-gown”…but she said in a curious voice, “No, it’s too much fag.”’ In consideration for this new friend, Charlotte produced an edited version of her lifestory. She did not tell Alida the truth about May Sinclair, and she accounted for her distrust of men (except for the old and tamed) by saying that a lawyer had once cheated her out of a sum of money. So Alida, the first and closest biographer, was also the first to be mystified.
To her, the fiftyish Charlotte was ‘Auntie Mew,’ and as an eccentric auntie Charlotte became a habituée of the Bookshop. Now that she was modestly well known she was more farouche than ever and more suspicious of patronage, refusing to visit the Sitwells, dodging Lady Ottoline Morrell, intimidating Virginia Woolf, but in the fire-lit bookshop, with Alida’s dogs and Harold Monro’s cat, there was no need for defensiveness. During the Twenties she acquired, also, an elderly beau. Sydney Cockerell, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, had been struck by ‘The Farmer’s Bride,’ though he was timid at first about ‘the brown of her’: ‘I suppose her sunburnt arms and neck?’ he suggested. In time, Charlotte became one of the middle-aged artistic ladies with whom he conducted decorous flirtations. She was, he noted in his diary, ‘both witty and profound.’ He invited her to Cambridge to see the Fitzwilliam’s Brontë manuscripts, and ‘after tea we sat on the grass, looking at the waterlilies.’ In London they had little suppers in restaurants and saw Charlie Chaplin in Shoulder Arms and Noël Coward in Hay Fever. To Cockerell it seemed that she was subsisting on tea and cigarettes, since Charlotte, like most women living on a fixed income, had the illusion of being much poorer than she really was. In 1924 he arranged a Civil List pension for her of £75 a year, calling on the ‘Big Three’ (Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, and Walter de la Mare) to give their recommendations. It didn’t matter, he explained when she objected that she was writing nothing—the pension wasn’t dependent on that. For all this kindness she was thankful, but when she needed, as she put it, to listen to her own heart she turned to his wife, Kate, or to Thomas Hardy’s second wife, Florence.
In 1922 the Mews moved to 86 Delancey Street. It was a smaller house, but they could look down and see the children and the Punch and Judy in the street below. This had always been a resource to Charlotte. ‘The Shade Catchers,’ which Alida thought the best of her poems, simply describes two barefoot children shadow-hopping down a sunny London pavement. The move upset Mrs Mew. She fell, contracted pneumonia, and in May she died. Four years earlier Edith Sitwell had described Charlotte as a grey and tragic woman ‘sucked dry of blood (though not of spirit) by an arachnoid mother,’ but the death did not come as a release. On the contrary, Charlotte felt adrift, ‘like a weed rooted up and thrown over the wall.’ ‘Was not able to be of any use,’ Cockerell noted in his diary. The two sisters retreated to Anne’s studio off the Tottenham Court Road. It was the bachelor establishment that, in the Nineties, they had never had, but without the spirit of those lost days. They looked on it, indeed, as a comedown, and all Charlotte’s warring emotions were concentrated on the protection of her sister. Anne, who had not been able to work for some time, was ill. The illness was cancer of the liver, and Anne began gradually to die in public, for callers were still received. ‘They ought to be allowed to put her to sleep,’ wrote Alida. ‘As I talked to her and she shut her eyes I felt they were sealed on her face and would never open, but they did. Auntie Mew says the Dr says any moment she may go down to earthy mould. Poor little Mew it is more tragic than I can tell you—Her rough little harsh voice and wilful ways hiding enormous depths of feeling—now she will be entirely alone and her relation with Anne has been one of complete love, and I imagine the love of sisters (or brothers) more marvellous than any other as there can be no fleshly implications or sex ual complexities.’
When Anne died in June 1927, Charlotte felt a survivor’s guilt. It was not the search for recognition, or even the search for love, that was to extinguish her, but the determination to be punished. She convinced herself first that Anne might, as the result of her negligence, have been buried alive, and next that she herself was contaminated and that the black specks in the studio were the germs of cancer. A doctor examined the specks: they were soot. Charlotte was persuaded to go into a private nursing home where the matron was not the kind of woman to understand her, and the view from the window was blocked by a stone wall. After living there alone for about a month, Charlotte Mew went out, bought a bottle of Lysol, and drank half of it. A doctor was called, but she only came round sufficiently to say: ‘Don’t keep me, let me go.’
‘24 February 1928,’ Cockerell wrote in his diary. ‘A tragic ending to the tragic life of a very rare being. After dinner wrote a little memoir of her for the Times.’ In the following year the Bookshop brought out ‘The Rambling Sailor,’ with thirty-two more poems—all that could be found by Charlotte’s executors. By the 1930s the grave where Charlotte and Anne lay buried together was neglected, but collectors had begun to buy Charlotte’s letters. In 1940 the research staff of the American publishers H. W. Wilson & Company were at work on their Twentieth-Century Authors, and evidently quite at a loss over her entry. They settled for: ‘She was educated privately, she lived for some time in Paris, she loved someone deeply and hopelessly, she endured poverty and illness and despair.’ She was given a pension, they added, ‘so that she should not starve.’ So the half-myth perpetuated itself. None of this would matter if it did not concern a poet ‘who will be read,’ as Hardy insisted, ‘when others are forgotten.’
London Review of Books, 1982
Walter de la Mare believed that children—if they could be got to listen at all—were the best listeners. I remember as a small girl hearing him at afternoon readings upstairs at the Monros’ Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street. I did not consider that he read satisfactorily, though he was better when he took turn and turn about, as he often did, with the valiant Eleanor Farjeon. And he did not look like a poet. I knew how poets ought to look, because at that time they walked about the streets of Hampstead. De la Mare was at the same time too stout and too trim for someone who had met at eve the Prince of Sleep, as I did not doubt that he had. But he was the man who had written Peacock Pie. That was enough.
But poetry, he said, ‘depends for its life on being remembered,’ and no one knew better than de la Mare that iron rusts, Time returns mocking answers, and poets become what publishers call ‘due for reappraisal.’ Waterstone’s catalogue lists him as ‘not always fashionable, but always popular.’ Even this seems uncertain. Theresa Whistler, in a strong-minded and sympathetic prologue to Imagination of the Heart, tells us that she was determined not to write ‘yet another comprehensive biography of someone formerly esteemed, now neglected, who knew everybody worth knowing.’ Rather than that, she has based her book on a conversation she had with de la Mare at the end of his life, in 1950, at South End House in Twickenham. He suggested then that imagination took distinct forms, and she could tell from his voice that the one he valued most was ‘the imagination of the heart.’ On this element she decided to concentrate, tracing it like a river whose outfall turned out to be very close to its source.
Theresa Whistler’s qualifications to write this book couldn’t be bettered. She is the granddaughter of Sir Henry Newbolt, de la Mare’s great benefactor, she knew de la Mare himself very well, she has made her way through countless drawersful of papers (he kept everything) and spent several years in research. All the same, I found it difficult to accept the pattern of the heart’s imagination. For half a century, while his mind took journeys into space and eternity, he presented the outside world as it had first come to his notice in the 1870s. Tailors sit cross-legged, children sent to bed blow out their candles, crickets sing behind the wainscot, sweeps and bakers push their carts through the morning streets. The atmosphere, however, is hostile. The fish in the frying pan says ‘Alas!’ but no help comes, and children are drowned with their silver penny or shut up in a bag and stolen. Everywhere there are the cold and solitary, watching from behind closed windows. And why do the rats run over John Mouldy in his cellar, and what does Miss Emily want with that long, shallow box? Sometimes a bargain can be made with the mysterious persecutors by settling—like the poor old Widow in her Weeds—for very little, or simply by running away, as in the stupendous ‘Tom’s Angel.’ Every now and then, there is an epiphany of a moment’s total happiness or innocence—in ‘Chicken,’ in ‘Full Moon’ (‘One night when Dick lay fast asleep’), and in the miraculous three verses of ‘The Funeral.’ But James Reeves, in his Penguin anthology Georgian Poetry (1962), includes ‘Drugged,’ ‘Dry August Burned,’ ‘The Feckless Dinner Party’ (they are trapped in the cellars), ‘The Marionettes’ (‘Let the foul scene proceed’), ‘Echo’ (which repeats ‘Who cares? ’), ‘The Dove’ (its voice ‘dark with disquietude’), ‘Treachery,’ and ‘Tit for Tat,’ where the trapper Tom Noddy ends up hanging still from a hook ‘on a stone-cold pantry shelf.’ In some of these poems there is regret and dismay, but the imagination they show is not of the heart but of second sight, or rather second senses, icily alert. ‘Their atmosphere is like that of overpowering memory,’ Edward Thomas thought. ‘Never was child so tyrannous a father to the man.’
Her account of de la Mare’s early life turned out, Whistler explains, ‘rather like a row of late-nineteenth-century engravings.’ It begins in a small, overcrowded house in Charlton, now part of Woolwich, where Walter (always called Jack) was born in 1873, the sixth of seven children. When his father died, the family moved to Forest Hill. His biographer thinks that these outer suburbs, on the shadowy borderline of London and country, were an image to him of persistent straying between dreaming and waking. In any case, he seems never to have lost the child’s special faculties—daydreaming, make-believe, questioning. In middle age, he would still deliberately ask himself: what is it like to be a river? a house? a blind man? To him, as to Blake, the child was an exile who must make the best of his way home.
De la Mare was educated at St Paul’s Choir School, where, although not an angel chorister, he did well enough. ‘Music,’ he thought, ‘even if not closely attended to, is on this earth what the soul can unwittingly breathe, to its infinite benefit.’ At the age of sixteen, he started as a copy clerk with the Anglo-American Oil Company. In the evenings he sat down to study grammar and poetry. ‘When he opened his books his real day’s work began.’ Although the office was not congenial, the Nineties were, and it seems that he was drawn to stories of the exquisite and the violent, and grew his hair to an aesthetic length. It was at this point that he changed the spelling of his name from Delamare, to emphasize his Huguenot ancestry. But his nights of self-education began with words. ‘Sound and meaning are inseparable,’ he wrote in ‘How I Became an Author,’ ‘and the words themselves become the means of make-believe—one of the richest of human consolations.’ He was turning himself into a wordmaster—a craftsman in sound ‘beyond Music’s faintest Hark!’ Meanwhile, he had a growing collection of editors’ rejection slips.
De la Mare met his wife, Elfrida Ingpen, at an amateur dramatic society. She was more than ten years older than him, and they did not marry until 1899, by which time Elfie, perhaps in desperation, had become pregnant. (Whistler believes that de la Mare was passionately interested in birth and death, but not in sex.) He did, in any case, the decent thing, struggling to support four children on £3 a week. ‘Worry about money, he said, ‘thrust its foul nose into [my] thoughts,’ although Elfie was an excellent manager, ‘working tirelessly to preserve whatever small graces of living she could, since they meant so much to Jack.’
De la Mare was less cautious than Eliot in escaping from his city desk. The order of release came through Henry Newbolt, then literary editor of the Monthly Review, who began to accept de la Mare’s verses and stories. In 1908, Newbolt (a great fixer) succeeded in getting him a grant of £200 from the Civil List. On the strength of that, he gave in his notice to the Oil and scarcely thought of it again. By now he was in the generous care of the Settee, which consisted of Newbolt, living in mysterious harmony with his wife, Margaret, nicknamed ‘Lad,’ and his mistress, Ella Coltman, Margaret’s cousin. The writer Mary Coleridge made up a gracious fourth. De la Mare, who had been used since he was a little boy to a protective female household, responded and expanded, while Elfie, usually not invited by the Settee, aged rapidly in the cramped house in SE20.
He still worked very hard, reviewing, reading for Heinemann—both tasks that ground away the soul—and writing, at the rate of about fifteen hundred words a day, novels which were ventures into ‘the other real.’ The novels made their way slowly. When, however, The Listeners and Other Poems and Peacock Pie both came out in 1911, de la Mare became one of the best-loved poets in England. The following Christmas, when Eddie Marsh collected his first volume of Georgian Poetry, he included five poems from The Listeners, and for de la Mare ‘invitations multiplied—to join the English Association and the Omar Khayyam Club, to improve André Gide’s conversational English, to lunch with Asquith at 10 Downing Street…De la Mare accepted and accepted.’
The years of success are a biographer’s nightmare. Friends and patrons begin to crowd the page, but all are firmly dealt with by Whistler, who concentrates on those who ‘seemed to give fresh bearings on my theme.’ This means that some loyal supporters (Percy Withers, for example, and Sydney Cockerell) hardly get a mention, but there is a close and sympathetic account of the dearest friend of all, Edward Thomas, who actually got de la Mare to take a five-mile walk. The two of them loved England’s earth and sky perhaps about equally, although de la Mare valued the past not for its weight of history but simply for its pastness. This partly accounts for his disconcerting goblin diction, ‘the dusk of words’—pelf, hark, nay, shoon, e’en, saith, and so on. Thomas couldn’t be doing with this, and said so, but their friendship held.
Equally careful is the chapter on the handsome journalist Naomi Royde Smith. Said by Storm Jameson to be like the younger Queen Victoria, she might be considered a tiresome woman, but Mrs Whistler makes us see how de la Mare came to love her for nearly five years. She herself was certain that it was good for her to be with him—it was not good, of course, for Elfie—and he waited until 1930 to describe what he had felt in Memoirs of a Midget. ‘The core of the book is the Midget’s passion for the full-sized Fanny, beautiful and false,’ Whistler says. ‘The condition itself is unmistakeably what he had known for Naomi.’
Imagination of the Heart shows de la Mare, by and large, as he describes himself in A Portrait—a child gone grey, ‘haunted by questions never answered yet’—and his day-to-day life is given in absorbing detail. The one thing missing is the different climate of artistic and intellectual correctness that was developing around him almost without his noticing it. In 1912, for instance, the Post-Impressionist Exhibition had been open a year, the Ballets Russes had made their first visit, and Conrad Aiken had arrived in London with Prufrock for sale, while Yeats had given warning that in future his poetry would be walking naked. Meanwhile, Barrie was causing the Peter Pan statue to ‘appear’ in Kensington Gardens, and Constable was bringing out Peacock Pie. Walter de la Mare’s strangeness and greatness might have detached themselves more clearly against a middle distance.
In ‘The Old Men,’ written when he was about fifty, he had thought of the old as caged and riddle-rid, lost to Earth’s ‘Listen!’ and ‘See!’, but nothing of the kind happened to him, and Theresa Whistler has a long, tranquil, attentive old age to record. It wasn’t that he had nothing to suffer. Elfie declined slowly and painfully, and his younger daughter, Jinnie, became an alcoholic. But Florence, his eldest, was at hand, as his sister Flo had been, and a private nurse, Nathalie Saxton (to whom the book is dedicated), devoted herself to him entirely. In fact, Walter de la Mare was spoiled for eighty-three years, as poets probably should be. He knew this and was grateful for it, as he would be grateful for this fine biography.
Times Literary Supplement, 1993
‘I can no more define poetry,’ A. E. Housman wrote in 1928, ‘than a terrier can define a rat when he comes across one; and I recognise poetry by definite physical sensations, either down the spine, or at the back of the throat, or in the pit of the stomach’—a warning, surely, that poetry can’t be usefully argued about. Housman also said that he didn’t begin to write it until the ‘really emotional part of my life [that is, his unreturned love for Moses Jackson] was over.’ I accept what Housman says—no biographer has made it much clearer, nor does Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love.
Last Poems came out in 1922, when I was nearly six years old, and in fact my copy is a first edition, published by Grant Richards, with discreet ‘printer’s flowers’ at the end of each poem. Most of them had been written much earlier and recall A Shropshire Lad’s themes of guilt, longing, distance, absence, the dead friend, and the soldier who trades in his life for thirteen pence a day (‘everything comes un-stuck,’ as George Orwell complained, while admitting grudgingly that Housman was likely to be immortal). But in Last Poems there is more relaxation of Housman’s glacial severity:
In a world I never made.
He has been born, however, as we all are, within the confine of the laws of God and the laws of man. The daily effort has to be made. ‘Oh often have I washed and dressed,’ Housman says:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.
England, meanwhile, is beautiful (and was much more so in 1922), and at the end of Last Poems is the unforgettable ‘Tell me not here,’ a description of his own border country, so quiet that a single pine cone falling to the ground and the cuckoo that ‘shouts all day at nothing’ are the loudest sounds in it. But he reminds us that although we may be beguiled, as he was, for a lifetime, it will be at our own risk. ‘Heartless, witless nature’ makes no response to us whatsoever.
These are the verses of a reserved, unbending man who was first a clerk at the Patent Office, then a meticulous Professor of Latin. I cannot explain why I find them such a great consolation.
‘Book of the Century’: Last Poems by
A. E. Housman, Daily Telegraph, 1998
1Monro could not resist ‘improving’ the title poem by leaving out the last two verses. But Field Marshall Lord Wavell, when he included ‘Magpies in Picardy’ in his anthology Other Men’s Flowers (Cape, 1944), was able to remember the verses from the Westminster Gazette, where they had first been printed.