It is likely that the case of Charlotte Mew is unique in the history of English poetry. A certain ambition fought within her with a curious reluctance to be a poet at all. She probably could not resist bringing her poems into existence but she was often less than pleased to have them appreciated by others and sometimes became inwardly angry when she felt that such appreciation might threaten her independence.
Charlotte Mew’s family came from the Isle of Wight. Her father, Frederick Mew, became an architect in London who never fulfilled his potential. He subsequently married his senior partner’s daughter, Anna Maria Kendall. They had seven children, three of whom died in infancy. Charlotte, born in 1869, was third in line and the first daughter. There seems to have been a history of mental illness in the Kendall line; Henry, the first-born, and Freda, the youngest, both developed schizophrenia and lived most of their lives in care. This left Charlotte and her younger sister Anne to live with their parents; neither daughter ever married.
Charlotte became proficient in music and needlework and from an early age wrote verses for children. Anne Mew studied at art college and eventually became a painter, though without distinction. Charlotte, known to family and friends as Lotti, was apparently a somewhat wilful and troublesome child. She showed early on that she was willing to work hard and effectively only at subjects which interested her – mainly English literature, art and music. But there was something about her that caused her family and friends to feel that she was destined for notable things.
At the age of ten she entered Gower Street School for Girls, some twenty minutes walk from where she lived, where the headmistress, Lucy Harrison, strongly attracted and influenced her. Miss Harrison must have been a gifted teacher because apparently all the children loved and looked up to her. Charlotte’s time at the school no doubt contributed greatly to her lasting impression of having spent an idyllic childhood which she looked back on as a lost happiness.
Charlotte Mew began her literary career as a writer of prose. In April 1894 Henry Harland, the editor of The Yellow Book, accepted her short story, ‘Passed’, for publication, but asked for a few minor stylistic alterations. Despite Charlotte’s initial protestations, these were implemented (her family needed the money) and it was published three months later alongside work by Henry James, Ella D’Arcy and John Davidson. It was a good start. The Yellow Book turned down her next story, ‘The China Bowl’, but she eventually placed it with Temple Bar, a journal long past its best, which published it in two parts in September and October 1899. She contributed frequently to it after that and her poems duly appeared in it from 1901. It began to look as if, as a writer, she was on her way.
However, the demise of Temple Bar in 1906 closed that outlet for her work. Always diffident about promoting her verse, she managed to place her poem, ‘Requiescat’, in The Nation in 1909. Nothing else appeared until February 1912, however, when the same journal published ‘The Farmer’s Bride’. It was that poem which began to attract significant attention to her work.
It is clear that from early on Charlotte Mew’s verse did not lack supporters. In May 1912 she met Mrs Catharine Amy Dawson Scott, a would-be writer and literary hostess known, somewhat inappropriately, as ‘Sappho’ (she was the wife of a medical doctor). She was an ardent admirer of Charlotte’s poetry and, intent on establishing a literary salon at her home in Southall, invited her to read her work there. Sappho introduced her to the then eminent novelist May Sinclair who also became a supporter and approached editors on Charlotte’s behalf. 1913-14 proved to be a very successful year for Charlotte’s poetry, seeing the emergence of ‘The Quiet House’, ‘The Fête’, ‘Fame’, ‘The Forest Road’, ‘Ken’ and ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’. This burst of creativity may have had something to do with the fact that Charlotte had fallen in love with May Sinclair.
Charlotte Mew’s sexual orientation has some relevance to a consideration of her work. The number of unmarried women in late Victorian England was very nearly one in three and sexual relationships between women, though usually covert to respect the proprieties, were by no means unknown. By the time she was sixteen it had become obvious that Lotti was physically attracted to women and not to men, and this is reflected in her writing. She had fallen in love before, notably with Ella D’Arcy, who had been Henry Harland’s assistant at The Yellow Book. Neither woman reciprocated Charlotte’s feelings, which inevitably caused her great unhappiness. There were almost certainly others but always with the same negative outcome. In affairs of the heart she was, as we might say nowadays, a born loser. Her life experience taught that, for her, all passion was negatory and painful.
Despite fearing the insanity in her family history, Charlotte was never diagnosed as a schizophrenic. There were, however, two discernible and scarcely reconcilable sides to her personality. On the one hand there was the Lotti who expressed a free spirit, who deliberately shocked people, who swore in both English and French and rolled her own innumerable cigarettes, who scorned being chaperoned and who could let her hair down dancing and singing to entertain her companions. On the other hand there was the Miss Lotti who clung as determinedly as her mother and sister to social respectability, a lady to her fingertips keeping up appearances against the odds, who would never reveal poverty or admit to taking in lodgers to make ends meet; one who lived all these clichés to the full. One side of her felt profoundly unworthy while the other staunchly defended her privacy, dignity and rights. The two were mutually contradictory, each side afraid of, adamantly opposed to and sternly suppressing the other. This must have generated great tension throughout her life. It is likely that this tension acted, at least in part, as a catalyst for her poems.
Harold Munro, the Scottish publisher of Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry and founder of The Poetry Bookshop, had a young Anglo-Polish assistant, Alida Klementaski, who, in 1915, drew Monro’s attention to Charlotte’s poetry. They did not know Charlotte’s address, but obtained it from The Nation, and she was invited to submit a collection of her poems that would make a book and to hear her work read aloud by Alida at one of the regular readings at The Poetry Bookshop. In her reply Charlotte expressed the opinion that even if her poems were to be published no one would want to read them. One evening in November 1915 a diminutive figure entered the shop wearing a felt hat and a very small man’s overcoat. When asked ‘Are you Charlotte Mew?’ the figure responded: ‘I am sorry to say I am’. She adopted a defensive manner as if expecting hostility. She was then forty- six and beginning to look her age. Alida (later Mrs Monro) came to think of her as Auntie Mew.
At the time Charlotte could offer no more than seventeen poems which Monro reasonably concluded would be enough only for a chapbook. Charlotte characteristically bridled at this, insisting that they should be brought out as a proper book. May Sinclair advised her friend to accept Monro’s offer, which was a reasonable one under the circumstances, as chapbooks were generally selling well. Charlotte acted on May’s advice and Monro was able to send her the galley proofs in February 1916. After several other objections and quibbles from the author the book, in an edition of a thousand copies, finally came out as The Farmer’s Bride in May of that year. It was to prove the high point of her poetic achievement.
Three months later Harold Monro, worried about his imminent call-up for military service and pessimistic about the future of his press and bookshop, wrote to Charlotte that there had been very few reviews, only around a hundred and fifty copies sold and that the book was ‘going dead’. However, by 1918 sales of Charlotte’s collection had much improved. At one of the bookshop’s poetry readings Alida had met Sydney Cockerell, the influential Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, and she sent him a copy of The Farmer’s Bride. Cockerell became an immediate convert and began at once to post copies of the book to everyone he thought should have it. These included Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Siegfried Sassoon, A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf. All but Blunt and Housman praised the book.
Hardy was particularly impressed. His wife, Florence, wrote to Charlotte that her collection was on her husband’s study table and frequently read. He expressed the view that Charlotte Mew was ‘far and away the best living woman poet who will be read when others will be forgotten’. Charlotte greatly admired Hardy’s work and felt his interest to be ‘a great honour’. Overcoming her natural diffidence, she visited Hardy at Max Gate on 4 December 1918. Hardy persuaded her to stay for two nights. Florence and Charlotte became friends and correspondents and subsequently met several times in London.
Sydney Cockerell continued his support and Charlotte became a good friend of his invalid wife. In March 1921 a new edition of The Farmer’s Bride came out containing eleven new poems. This was followed by an American edition entitled Saturday Market, the different title being considered a better seller ‘over there’. It gained the support of the influential critic, Louis Untermeyer, who wrote about the book enthusiastically from New York.
Back in Britain The Farmer’s Bride did much better second time round. Edith Sitwell wrote a favourable review. Several publications requested biographical details and a photograph of the poet but Charlotte, characteristically, was too diffident to oblige. Anne wanted her to sit for a portrait by Henry Jarman RA but again Charlotte refused. Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else.’ With such a growing band of well-placed admirers it looked as if Charlotte Mew really was on her way to great things.
In February 1923 ‘Fin de Fête’ appeared in The Sphere. This was the last poem Charlotte ever sent for publication. Though the lovers in it are depicted as heterosexual there can be little doubt that the poem expresses the sad, thwarted lesbian love which Charlotte herself had known throughout her life. In May of that year her mother died. The loss devastated her; she could neither eat nor sleep as she felt the pincers of utter loneliness inexorably closing about her.
Sydney Cockerell had by no means exhausted his efforts to help Charlotte. He had access to people in power and took pride in his ability as a ‘fixer’. On 25 July 1923 he had an interview with the Prime Minister’s secretary regarding a Civil List pension for Charlotte. Though the interview went very well Cockerell knew that he would have to go further. He needed three notable sponsors from the literary world and managed to enlist Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare, the last having abandoned his original reservations about her work. Despite her and Anne’s great need of the money, Charlotte had doubts about accepting it out of a sense of unworthiness. Cockerell was able to reassure her, however, and in
December an annual pension of seventy-five pounds was awarded. This increased the sisters’ income by one third and would greatly help to keep their financial affairs in order.
Fortune continued to favour Charlotte during 1924 and 1925. The Farmer’s Bride was still doing fairly well; Joseph Conrad expressed admiration for her work; she met Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, and the redoubtable Lady Ottoline Morrell invited Charlotte into her literary coterie. Yet the reluctant poet refused adamantly to take part in any salon, would not be photographed and would not allow any of her poems to appear in Macmillan’s Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics. She did not, however, prevent Alida from broadcasting her poem, ‘Sea Love’, on the BBC; apparently she had some admiration for the Corporation. Charlotte even agreed to sit for the painter Dorothy Hawksley and the result now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. The contradictions in her nature were clearly still at work.
After a year of gradually declining health, early in 1927 Anne was diagnosed with liver cancer and given three months to live. She died on 18 June and, as Charlotte wrote to Sydney Cockerell, ‘… now she can never be old, or not properly taken care of, or alone’. It is as if, in writing of her dead sister, she was prefiguring what she most feared for herself – old age, neglect and loneliness. She began to show signs of the mental illness she dreaded – a compulsive fear of dirt and contamination and a growing sense of guilt and unworthiness. Her doctor sent her to a specialist to see if she could be certified but the answer was no. On 15 February 1928, under the diagnosis of neurasthenia, her doctor persuaded her to enter a nursing home. This establishment turned out inexplicably to be cheerless and drab and quite inappropriate for someone drifting towards despair. Sydney Cockerell called to see her nine days later and found her ‘in a state of great depression with nothing and nobody to live for’; yet he could not persuade her to let him take her out.
During early March her doctor believed that she was making progress. However, at just after midday on Saturday 24th of that month Charlotte told the Matron that she would pop out for a short while. She returned having bought a bottle of Lysol, a corrosive poison widely used as a disinfectant, poured half the contents into a glass and drank it. It was all carefully and deliberately carried out. She could take no more misery and, as a line from her poem ‘The Quiet House’ has it, When you are burned quite through you die. When her doctor arrived on his routine visit that afternoon she was found on her bed, foaming at the mouth and in great pain. Nothing could be done to save her and, as if to endorse this, her last words were ‘Don’t keep me; let me go’. She was buried in Fortune Green Cemetery in Hampstead in the same grave as her sister Anne, a Londoner to the last.
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Charlotte Mew had not been a prolific poet. There are only sixty poems in total from her two books plus seven published thereafter. Some critics have noted that although she crafted her poems with care, for her form was subservient to content; if what she wanted to express required it, the form would be made to adapt. In order faithfully to represent her experience in words she would not shrink from breaking the rules, including those of grammar and syntax. Her line lengths would vary accordingly, some being unusually long. This was an element of her undoubted originality and it was difficult for readers used to the smooth formality of most Georgian verse to accept it – and many did not.
The form of her poems was, nevertheless, of great importance because it was dictated by, and in the service of, what she wished to communicate. Indeed, some of her verse gives the impression of striving to express difficult and unusual experience of which she herself was only imperfectly aware. Yet one cannot fail to grasp her unremitting sense of reality. Not for her the unreal world of fantasy and daydream. She deliberately chose to confront experience as it really was rather than how she or her readers would have preferred it to be.
At its best her verse has an extraordinary power, seeming to burst out of the words that contain it. Take, for example, the following stanza from ‘The Quiet House’:
Red is the strangest pain to bear; In Spring the leaves on the budding trees; In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet:
A rose can stab you across the street Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere –
Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair
As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.
This stanza is quite unlike any other part of the poem in the force of its language. No one else, with the possible exception of Sylvia Plath, has ever written quite like this. It was written in 1913 but there is nothing Georgian about it. The irregular rhyme scheme binds the verse and its aggressive images together in a most unusual way. The imagery is arresting in its paradoxes: the normally pleasant seasons become hostile; red and pain become interchangeable and a rose becomes a lethal weapon. The colour crimson haunts the poet like a punishing nemesis and shafts of sunlight become reddened swords, threatening to spill her life. The pressure behind this choice and arrangement of words is human suffering, the verbal testimony of the embattled spirit, wanting but not being wanted. We can feel it unmistakeably; but exactly how it got there challenges the imagination. It is the poet’s experience represented in the only way available to her. It is effected by implication rather than statement; a prose paraphrase would not get near it. It probably defies adequate translation. It is true poetry at somewhere near its best.
One wonders what was likely to have been the true nature of the experience which generated such lines. Superficially, it reads as an estrangement from the normally benign seasons of spring and summer, together with hostility to the colour red and a fear of the rose. Yet this is most irrational and unlikely to be of service to the poem. It makes more sense to read it in relation to the permanent contradiction within her, between a masculine sensibility and a female body. It is rooted, albeit subliminally, in her resentment, perhaps even loathing, of that essence of female fertility – the menstrual cycle. How she must have hated that undeniable reminder of the femininity which her masculine attire and hairstyle strove to deny!
‘Fame’ was also written in 1913 but published in the New Weekly in May 1914. This is it in its entirety:
Sometimes in the overheated house, but not for long,
Smirking and speaking rather loud,
I see myself among the crowd,
Where no one fits the singer to his song,
Or sifts the painted from the unpainted faces
Of the people who are always on my stair;
They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places;
But could I spare
In the blind earth’s great silences and spaces,
The din, the scuffle, the long stare
If I went back and it was not there?
Back to the old known things that are the new,
The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet briar air,
To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do
And the divine, wise trees that do not care
Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!
God! If I might! And before I go hence
Take in her stead
To our tossed bed,
One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.
Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence –
A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,
A blot upon the night,
The moon’s dropped child!
The poem is intent on acquainting the reader with Charlotte Mew’s experience of the growing audience for her poetry and her ambivalent attitude towards it. It is concerned with her inner self’s trying to cope with intrusion from outsiders, fame being an example of that intrusion. One part of her divided self wanted to welcome the public attention her poetry was gaining; the other resented it as an invasion of her privacy.
In lines one to six the ‘overheated house’ is probably the Southall home of Mrs ‘Sappho’ Dawson Scott where Charlotte read some of her poems. The poet presents herself as deliberately adopting a public persona (‘smirking and speaking rather loud … among the crowd’). She sees her public as unenlightened because it does not significantly relate the creator to what is created (‘no one fits the singer to his song’), nor the natural to the unnatural self (‘Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces’). It is her public, led by her fame to intrude into her sensibility, ‘who are always on my stair;’, ‘stair’ being an image for her private self. The relevance of the masculine gender of the singer becomes clearer later in the poem.
In lines seven to eleven the poet observes that when life most favoured her (‘when I walked in heavenly places;’) the intruders were absent. But if she were to retreat to an unpopulated nature (‘the blind Earth’s great silences and spaces’), would she be able to do without the hubbub and intrusion (‘the din, the scuffle, the long stare’) which fame has brought into her life? This seems to be a tacit acknowledgement of the contradiction between her two attitudes to her literary success. In other words, if she reverted to a fameless existence, would she wish she still had it?
In lines twelve to sixteen the poet again acknowledges that fame has made a difference to her life. The ‘heavenly places’ are ‘old’ because they belong to the past before fame came. But, because she would be revisiting them after fame had changed everything, they would, in that sense, be ‘new’. The ‘old known things’ are objects in nature such as gorse, sweet briar, larks, who are thankfully unable to praise her poetry and thus cannot intrude, and trees because they are ‘divine’ and also outside the influence of fame. The emphasis here is on the bliss of being innocent of fame and thus not having to respond to it. The poet now sees ‘Fame’ as an attractive female with ‘such eyes and that bright hair!’ so that the reader may take the ‘I’ of the poem to be masculine – hence the male gender in line four. What, the poem asks, would be the consequence of her abandoning the so-attractive Fame?
Lines seventeen to twenty-four indicate that the notion of rejecting Fame (‘God! If I might!’) has the appeal of being a possible way out. In any case, because all her efforts to find a reciprocal mate in real life had failed, such a rejection would only be repeating the pattern. Instead of taking Fame, the female lover, to their ‘tossed bed’ – the image is blatantly sexual – the poet might alternatively take some symbol (‘One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.’) Such a symbol, to be appropriate, would have to be weak, abandoned, rejected, a failure – in a word, abortive, hence the poignancy of the dead, new-born lamb at the close of the poem.
The substitute for Fame, therefore, the ‘One little dream’, would be no more than an insignificant failure of nature. With one side of her being, this is very much as the poet saw herself – ‘The moon’s dropped child!’