Book Review : Charlotte Mew: A Puckish Poet’s Pain

Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, with a selection of her poems, by Penelope Fitzgerald (Addison-Wesley: $17.95; 275 pages)

Thomas Hardy called Charlotte Mew “far and away the best living woman poet, who will be read when others are forgotten.” Virginia Woolf called her the “greatest living poetess.” Sic transit blurb, the reader reflects.

He or she will only do so for a page or two into this lovely and continually surprising book. Penelope Fitzgerald has accomplished a rare and high form of biography. It is a conversation with the life, the times and the work of Mew, who wrote painfully and sparingly in the first quarter of the century, and died in 1928 after drinking Lysol.

But Mew can’t be dead. We hear Fitzgerald talking to her in the next room; and what talk! It is hard to tell where biographer begins and subject ends, and it doesn’t seem to matter. By the end, we have been introduced to a life and a selection of poems in a way that makes the notion of “major” or “minor” quite irrelevant. Both the life and the poetry have become irreplaceable.

A Surge and a Barrier

Mew’s poems, quoted throughout and printed in a tight and well-chosen selection at the end are a surge and a barrier all at once.

They are personal and emotional, sometimes in her own voice, sometimes in that of an alter ego with a rural accent reminiscent of Hardy’s. They speak very directly of love, loss and death. They flood toward sentimentality; and the flood is held back by a laconic stoicism.

This makes an extraordinary tension; and it spills over into Mew’s wandering measures, with as many as 14 stresses to a line, and as few as one. It is not capricious but necessary, as if each line consisted of as many handholds as it took to climb a wall to safety. Here is a sample of her heart and diction:

Seventeen years ago you said

Something that sounded like Good-bye;

And everybody thinks that you are dead

But I.

So I as I grow stiff and cold

To this and that say Good-bye too;

And everybody sees that I am old

But you.

And here is another in a dialect tone suggesting her native Isle of Wight:

Tide be runnin’ the great world over:

‘Twas only last June month I mind that we

Was thinkin’ the toss and the call in the breast of the lover

So everlastin’ as the sea.

Here’s the same little fishes that splutter and swim,

Wi’ the moon’s old glim on the gray, wet sand;

An’ him no more to me nor me to him

Than the wind goin’ over my hand.

The loves that fail and die are not men. Mew’s heartfelt and lifelong companion was her younger sister, Anne; and it was shortly after Anne’s death that Charlotte broke down and killed herself. She fell violently in love twice, both times with women writers--Ella d’Arcy and May Sinclair--and was rebuffed both times, not without some kindness but with infinite humiliation.

There was an element of farce in Sinclair’s account. “My good woman, you are wasting your perfectly good passion,” she claims to have told the lovesick Charlotte. She also claims to have had to leap over her bed five times to get away from her.

To which Fitzgerald adds that Sinclair’s biographer, Theophilus Boll, calculated that this was unlikely since it would have left Sinclair pinned up against the wall.

A Sense of Farce

“A most painstaking scholar,” Fitzgerald calls the professor. She too has a sense of farce, not to mention irony. It enlivens the book no end. But it is only a first stage. For Fitzgerald, incongruity is the way in to perceiving an eccentric of the dimensions of Charlotte Mew. You need to perceive in order to understand; to understand in order to love. And to love in order, not to pity, but to respect.

Fitzgerald, a novelist, may be the best English writer who is at present at the prime of her power. (Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark are powerful but not in their prime.) She is kind. Her excitement lies in using kindness with the sort of cutting edge that others use for tragedy or alienation.

It makes a continuous backlighting for the oddities of Charlotte’s painful life. It draws us into them as something other than gawkers.

She was tiny, odd-looking, with a bristly manner that could give way to clowning--she danced the cancan in her underwear aboard a ferry crossing to France--or to an inefficiently guarded yearning. She would retreat, wren-like, into the shabby rooms where she lived with Anne, but when she did come out, she exerted “an immediate appeal wherever she went to the toy-loving human race.”

A Cocky Toss of Her Head

Her expression was deadpan but with raised eyebrows, “as though she had just heard a joke, or perhaps thought that if life is a joke it is not a very good one.” She read her poems in a powerful hoarse voice that transformed her, and she would end with a cocky toss of her head.

When she allowed it, she was surrounded with kindness. Henry Harland, editor of the Yellow Book, published an early melodramatic story, and took her into the warm circle of writers, many of them women, who would meet at his house for evenings of French and Italian songs. Henry James was there, walking “up and down the room, searching for a word to finish his sentence.”

Harold Monro, who founded the Poetry Bookshop, published her first verse collection. Alida, who married him although he was homosexual--”Come here boy,” he commanded her on their wedding night--remained her close friend and supporter. Sydney Cockerell, the influential director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, became her champion.

It was his persistent campaigns that gained her the attention and admiration of Hardy, Woolf and others; and that obtained for her a small royal pension.

Support and Affection

“Charlotte Mew and her Friends,” beautifully edited and produced, carries a perceptive prologue by the poet and critic Brad Leithauser, who assisted the editor, Christopher Carduff, in selecting poems for the American edition.