Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends - Penelope Fitzgerald

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be spared as much trouble as possible. Wek, her parrot, who had been with her since the days in Brunswick Square, was introduced, under protest, to his new home. Kendall’s picture of the Shining City was hung in the front drawing-room, next to the portrait of Anna Maria as a young girl. Fred’s office was on the ground floor. But Gordon Street was never either a happy or a lucky house. After the move, Fred pinned his hopes on Henry. The dashing, promising son must have been more than a help with the office routine, and a much-needed new life in the business. He was a refuge in a house full of women. But now, in his early twenties, Henry began to show unmistakable signs of mental breakdown. The illness was what was then known as dementia praecox, because it was thought to attack adolescents and young adults in particular. It would be called schizophrenia now. Fred was advised that there was no possibility of a cure, and for the rest of his life Henry was confined, with a private nurse, to Peckham Hospital.

      The history of mental weakness was not on the Mew side, but the Kendall. Never mentioned in public was the reason why Edward Herne Kendall, Anna Maria’s elder brother, had failed to join the partnership after his training, and why in fact he had no occupation of any kind. Edward was not a schizophrenic, simply a borderline case who might from time to time need looking after, and who could never be trusted with his own affairs. When he became completely irresponsible his money was saved up for him and invested until he ‘came back’. Mary Leonora, also, was not strong in the wits, or, at least, foolish, and it was the constant fear of her mother, Mrs Kendall, that she might be ‘got hold of’ in some way, and left penniless. In all probability, Henry Mew’s tragic illness had nothing to do with his Kendall uncle and aunt, and yet the suggestion remained that it had. Meanwhile the fact that there was no insanity to be traced in Fred’s family was likely to make him more, and not less, to blame.

      The family at 9 Gordon Street was reduced, after so many hopes, to three daughters. Elizabeth Goodman acted as the family’s consoler. ‘There was nothing conscious or masterful about this,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘it was simply the gentle, irresistible mastery of the strongest, clothed with an old-world deference.’ The son was as good as lost, but the youngest, Freda, was doted upon. Even her name had been a romantic flight, distinguishing her from all the rest. Fred and Anna Maria, whatever their discords, both combined to love and spoil this exceptional little girl, who grew into adolescence still beautiful and brilliant. This would be about the time when Henry Mew made his sad exit into separation and silence.

      Then, early in the 1890s, Freda followed him. She began to show recognizable symptoms of schizophrenia, then, like Henry, broke down beyond recall. Poor Fred asserted himself for almost the last time, and insisted that she must not be kept in London, but sent back to the Island, within reach of the Bugle Inn and the farm. Freda lived for another sixty-odd years as a paying patient at the Whitelands Hospital, Carisbrooke, without ever recovering her sanity.

       CHAPTER FOUR ‘These I Shall See’

      CHARLOTTE MEW’S two asylum poems are On the Asylum Road and Ken. These, like the others from which I have quoted, were written at a distance of time from the first experience. Like Hardy and Housman, she was a poet of delayed shock.

      Both Ken and On the Asylum Road are impersonations, written through, but not in, the first person. Mad people are described by a sane onlooker, but ‘this I is not I’. In both poems the speaker, or spoken-through, is painfully indirect and breaks down at one point or another into a kind of dislocation, as though the subject of insanity could only be approached in that way. The guilt is obvious, but there is no solution for it, except refuge in the community’s opinion.

      Ken is not about a case of dementia praecox, but an amiable harmless local idiot. He lives and always has lived at a place which sounds very like Carisbrooke – ‘the town is old, and very steep’, leading up to the mental hospital, the castle and the convent (which in Carisbrooke would be St Dominic’s). Ken means well, but is simply not like the rest of us, believing that all the children and all the deer in the park belong to him, and that a pile of broken feathers on the ground is really a living bird. He is hideous to look at, however,

       If in His image God made men

       Some other must have made poor Ken –

      In time he becomes too much, not of a danger, but of a nuisance. Sometimes he stays in church too long, or points to the crucified Christ and says ‘Take it away’; then everyone is embarrassed. The only thing to do is to pretend not to notice, ‘You did not look at him as he sat there’ and finally to lock him up – and the speaker doesn’t suggest that the authorities are wrong about this. What else could they have done? But the poem ends

       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 –

      Charlotte claimed that in this poem she had tried to ‘obscure the tragic side by tenderness of treatment’. Why she said this I cannot think. She must have known that she was emphasizing it.

      On the Asylum Road is not localized, and might be anywhere where mental patients, at the end of the nineteenth century, were institutionalized and taken out for regular exercise. The first verse opens:

       Theirs is the house whose windows – every pane –

       Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:

       Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,

       The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

      The horror of the darkly stained and clouded glass, the poem’s one insistent detail, works very strongly. Surgeries, Christian churches and mortuaries, as well as asylums, shut themselves off in this way, with glass which is a denial of what glass should be. Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing. ‘Theirs is the house’ – but we know it isn’t, only it will be more convenient for us to pretend that it is. And ‘you’ (or in the next three verses ‘we’) have agreed that the best thing to do is smile encouragingly at them,

       And think no shame to stop and crack a joke

       With the incarnate wages of man’s sin.

      The reader or listener is bound to ask what is happening here and why the inmates, the ‘brother shadows in the lane’, should (unless they are all syphilitics) be all classed together as ‘the incarnate wages of man’s sin’. This returns us to the wretched situation of 9 Gordon Street.

      As ill-fortune would have it, the breakdown first of Henry, then of Freda, coincided with the years when the science or apparent science of eugenics first took the field, and became a favourite subject of newspaper articles. Francis Galton’s Natural Inheritance was published in 1889, and in 1894 he set up his research laboratory in University College. The belief of so many centuries that, given God’s grace and human patience, there was a hope that mad wits could be restored, was superseded, for the time being, by what looked like conclusive scientific evidence. Eugenics dealt in statistics, family studies and the tabulation of ‘morbid inheritance’, setting out to show that transmission of this inheritance led to the gradual degeneration of a whole society. The improvement of society, then, depended on genetic politics. If any member of your family was ‘different’, no matter in what way, you were morally bound not to reproduce. If you did so, you contributed to the nation’s decline and must expect ‘the incarnate wages of man’s sin’. In fact, the first editor to see Ken rejected it on the grounds that the magazine ‘believed in the segregation of the feeble-minded’. Charlotte and Anne, living within the orbit of London University, both of them great readers of weeklies and attenders of lectures, came to the conclusion that they must never have children, and so had no right to marry. This decision was not the same thing for the two of them. For Charlotte, whether or not she ever came to terms with her

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