So on a clear June day in 1848 the poet and his new bride made their way along the shady river bank to the cavern which shelters the source of the Sorgue, a sight awesome and sublime enough to satisfy even the most romantic traveller and how much more impressive when conjoined with the memory of the great courtly lover Petrarch, living out there the days of his devotion and the horror of learning of his mistress’s death of the plague.
The baked river banks are slippery now with use, and the northern traveller must shuffle towards his goal amongst crowds of tourists, yapping French dogs, paddling children and candy floss sellers, solicited by hideous souvenirs and mass-produced “craft” articles. The river has been tamed by weirs and pipes, though the guide-book tells us it can rise and flood the whole cavern and surrounding countryside. The literary pilgrim should persist: he will be rewarded by a vision of green water and louring rocks which can in the nature of things have changed very little since our travellers came to see it.
The water rises very swiftly inside the cavern, fed by an underground river of some power, and by the confluence of the rainfall collected from the plateau of Vaucluse and the stony sides of the Mont Ventoux, Petrarch’s Windy Mount, as Randolph put it in a letter. He must have been put in mind, at the sight of this majestic stream, of Coleridge’s sacred river, and perhaps of the Fountain of the Muses, given the association with Petrarch, a poet to whom he was greatly attached and whose sonnets to Laura are thought to have influenced the poems to Embla. In front of the cavern, which is fringed with fig-trees and fantastic roots, several white rocks rise among the surface of the fast-flowing stream, which seeps away into a mat of flowing green weeds, which could have well been painted by Millais or Holman Hunt. Ellen remarked on the beauty of these “chiare, fresche e dolci acque.” Randolph, in a charming gesture, lifted his new wife and carried her across the water, to perch her, like a presiding mermaid, or water-goddess, on a throne-like white stone, dividing the stream. We may imagine her sitting there, smiling demurely under her bonnet, holding her skirts away from the wet, whilst Randolph contemplated his possession, so unlike Petrarch’s, of the lady he had worshipped from afar, through so many hindrances and difficulties, for almost as long as the earlier poet’s sixteen-year sojourn of hopeless devotion in this very spot.
Ash always maintained, unlike many of his contemporaries, notably Professor Gabriele Rossetti, father of the poet, that Petrarch’s Laura and Dante’s Beatrice, along with Fiametta, Selvaggia, and other objects of Platonic courtly affection, were real live women, chaste but loved in the flesh, before their deaths, and not allegories of the politics of Italy, or the government of the Church, or even of their creators’ souls. Petrarch saw Laure de Sade in Avignon in 1327 and fell immediately in love with her, and loved her steadily, despite her fidelity to Hugo de Sade. Ash wrote indignantly to Ruskin that it was a misunderstanding of the poetic imagination and of the nature of love to suppose that it could be so abstracted into allegory, could not in verity spring from “the human warmth of an individual embodied soul in all its purity and mortal vitality.” His own poetry, he added, began and ended with “such incarnate truths, such unrepeated unique lives.”
Given this sympathy with Petrarchan adoration, it is not surprising that he should have waited so devotedly on what may be called the Christian scruples or caprices of Ellen Best and her father. In the early days of their acquaintance Ellen was a high-minded devout young girl with a fragile and delicate beauty, if we are to believe her family and Ash himself. As I have shown, the Dean’s anxieties about Ash’s capacity to support a wife had some foundation, and were supported by Ellen’s own very real religious anxieties about the doubtful tendencies of Ragnarök. Such letters as have survived of their courtship—pitifully few, no doubt owing to the officious ministrations of Ellen’s sister, Patience, after her death—suggest that she was not flirting with him, and that her affections were not, nevertheless, deeply engaged. But she was, by the time she accepted Randolph’s hand, in the difficult position of seeing her younger sisters, Patience and Faith, making advantageous and happy marriages whilst she remained a spinster.
All this raises the question of the feelings of the ardent poet-lover, now aged thirty-four, for his innocent bride, now no young girl, but a mature thirty-six-year-old aunt, devoted to her nephews and nieces. Was his innocence as great as hers? How had he endured, the twentieth-century mind suspiciously asks, the privations of his long wait? It is well known that many eminent Victorians turned in their doubleness for relief to the garish creatures of the Victorian underworld, the joking, painted temptresses who created so much noise and nuisance at Piccadilly Circus, the lost seamstresses, flowersellers and Fallen Women who died under the arches, begged from Mayhew or were rescued, if they were lucky, by Angela Burdett-Coutts and Charles Dickens. Ash’s poetry, for Victorian poetry, is knowledgeable about sexual mores and indeed about sensuality. His Renaissance noblemen are convincingly fleshly, his Rubens a connoisseur of the solid human form, the speaker of the Embla poems a real as well as an ideal lover. Could such a man have remained happy with a purely Platonic desire? Did Ellen Best’s prim delicacy, a little past its flowering, hide an unexpected ardour of response? Perhaps it did. There is no record of any early peccadillo on Randolph’s part, let alone any later one—he was always, as far as we can tell, the preux chevalier. What did they see in each other, those two, alone and self-absorbed, as he put his hands round her comfortable waist and lifted her to her stony throne? Had they come from a night of bliss? Ellen wrote home that her husband was “exquisitely considerate in all things,” which we can read how we choose.
There is another explanation, to which I personally incline. It depends on two powerful and equally, nowadays, unfashionable forces, the idealisation of the Poets of Courtesy, on which we have touched, and the theory of sublimation elaborated by Sigmund Freud. Quite simply, Randolph Henry Ash wrote, during the courtship years:
28,369 lines of verse, including one twelve-book epic, 35 dramatic monologues covering History from its dimmest origins to modern theological and geological controversy, 125 lyrics and three verse dramas, Cromwell, St Bartholomew’s Eve and Cassandra, unsuccessfully performed at Drury Lane. He worked with dedication, far into the night. He was happy, for he saw his Ellen as a fount of purity, a vision of girlish grace, breathing an air infinitely more refined than the blood-soaked, plague-ridden scenes of his imagination, the tousled beds of the Borgias or “the sulphurous mud of the extinguished earth” in Ragnarök. No sense visited him that he was less a man for this chaste waiting, this active solitude. He would work, and would win her, and so it happened indeed. If later poems, such as “The Fountain Sealed” or “A Painted Lady,” with its image of beauty fixed forever on the canvas and fading in the face—if these later poems suggest that Randolph later came to count the cost of his long apprenticeship to love, this does not invalidate my case. Nor do these poems help us in our speculations about the feelings of the newly-wed couple on that sunny day outside the dark cave of the Fountain of Vaucluse.
Mortimer Cropper went up to his pleasant suite of rooms and re-read his photographed letters. He telephoned Beatrice Nest. Her voice had a thick woollen quality; she demurred, as she always did, putting up a flurry of slow half-objections, and then agreed, as she always did. He had learned that flattering Miss Nest produced no good results, but that making her feel guilty did.
“I have one or two very precise queries that only you can answer … I have saved this especially for you … any other time would be extremely inconvenient, though naturally I would change to oblige you … my dear Beatrice, if you cannot come, I must make other arrangements, I have no desire to inconvenience you in your busy life.…” It took a long time. Since the conclusion was foregone, it ought not to have done.
He opened his locked case, putting away Randolph Ash’s letters to his godchild, or anyway the stolen images, and drew out those other photographs of which he had a large and varied collection—as far as
it was possible to vary, in flesh or tone or angle or close detail, so essentially simple an activity, a preoccupation. He had his own ways of sublimation.
7
Men may be martyred
Any where
In desert, cathedral
Or Public Square.
In no Rush of Action
This is our doom
To Drag a Long Life out
In a Dark Room.
—CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE
If people thought of Beatrice Nest—and not many did, not very often—it was her external presence, not her inner life that engaged their imagination. She was indisputably solid, and nevertheless amorphous, a woman of wide and abundant flesh, sedentary swelling hips, a mass of bosom, above which spread a cheerful-shaped face, crowned by a kind of angora hat, or thick wool-skein of crimped white hair, woven and tucked into a roll from which lost strands trailed and wandered in all directions. If they thought of her harder, those few people who knew her—Cropper, Blackadder, Roland, Lord Ash—they might add a metaphoric identity. Cropper, it has been noted, thought of her in terms of Carroll’s obstructive white sheep. Blackadder, in bad moods, thought of her as one of those puffed white spiders, bleached by the dark, feeling along the threads of her trap from her central lair. The feminists who had from time to time sought access to the Journal saw her as some kind of guardian octopus, an ocean Fafnir, curled torpidly round her hoard, putting up opaque screens of ink or watery smoke to obscure her whereabouts. There had once been those who knew Beatrice—notably, possibly uniquely, Professor Bengt Bengtsson. She had been Professor Bengtsson’s student in London from 1938 to 1941, a troubled time, during which male undergraduates had become soldiers, bombs had fallen and food had been scarce. Some women during that time had experienced an unexpected frivolity and freedom. Beatrice had experienced Professor Bengtsson. He ruled the English Department of Prince Albert College. His main love was the Eddas and ancient Norse mythology. Beatrice studied these things. She studied philology, Anglo-Saxon, Runes, mediaeval Latin. She read Masefield and Christina Rossetti and de la Mare. Bengtsson said she should read Ragnarök—R. H. Ash was no mean scholar for his time, and was thought to be a precursor of modern poetry. Bengtsson was tall and gangling and bearded; he had fierce eyes and more animated energy than could be employed in instructing young ladies in the niceties of Nordic roots. He did not, however, direct that energy towards the souls, let alone the flesh, of the young ladies, but abused it daily in the bar of the Arundel Arms, in the company of his peers. In the mornings he was bone-pale and glittering under his blond thatch. In the afternoons he was ruddy and slurred and breathed beer in his stuffy office. Beatrice read Ragnarök and Ask to Embla. She took a First and fell in love with Randolph Henry Ash. Such loves were once not uncommon. “There are poets,” Beatrice wrote in her Finals paper, “whose love poems seem to be concerned neither with praise nor with blame of some distant lady, but with true conversation between men and women. Such is John Donne, though he may also revile the whole sex in certain moods. Such might have been Meredith if circumstances had been happier. A brief attempt to think of other ‘love’ poets who expect reciprocity of intelligence must persuade us of the pre-eminence of Randolph Henry Ash, whose ‘Ask and Embla’ poems present every phase of intimacy, opposition and failure of communication, but always convince the reader of the real thinking and feeling presence of her to whom they are addressed.”
Beatrice hated writing. The only word she was proud of in this correct and dull disquisition was “conversation,” which she had chosen in preference to the more obvious “dialogue.” For such conversation Beatrice would have given everything, in those days. Reading those poems, she obscurely knew, offered her a painful and as it seemed illicit glimpse of a combination of civilised talk and raw passion which everyone must surely want, and yet which no one—as she looked round her small world, her serious Methodist parents, Mrs Bengtsson running her University Women’s Tea Club, her fellow-students agonising over invitations to dance and whist—no one seemed to have.
We two remake our world by naming it
Together, knowing what words mean for us
And for the others for whom current coin
Is cold speech—but we say, the tree, the pool,
And see the fire in air, the sun, our sun,
Anybody’s sun, the world’s sun, but here, now
Particularly our sun.…
Ash told her and she heard him. She did not expect to hear such things from anybody else; nor did she. She told Professor Bengtsson that she wished to write her doctoral dissertation on Ask to Embla. He was very doubtful about this. It was uncertain ground, a kind of morass, like Shakespeare’s sonnets. What Contribution to Knowledge did she hope to make, could she be sure of making? The only safe PhD in Professor Bengtsson’s view was an Edition, and he really would not recommend R. H. Ash. He had a friend, however, who knew Lord Ash, who had deposited the Ash papers in the British Museum. It was known that Ellen Ash had kept a journal. Editing that might be a suitable undertaking—something certainly new, modestly useful, manageable and related to Ash. When she had completed that task, Miss Nest would be excellently situated to branch out.…
So it had been. Miss Nest had settled uneasily in front of the boxes of papers—letters, laundry lists, receipt-books, the volumes of the daily journal and other slimmer books of more private occasional writing. What had she hoped for? Some intimacy with the author of the poems, with that fine mind and passionate nature.
Tonight Randolph read aloud to me from Dante’s sonnets in his Vita Nuova. They are truly beautiful. Randolph pointed out the truly masculine energy and vigour of Dante’s Italian, and the spiritual power of his understanding of love. I do not think we will ever tire of these poems of genius.
Randolph read aloud to his wife daily, when they were in the same house. The young Beatrice Nest did try to imagine the dramatic effect of these readings, but was not helped by the vague adjectival enthusiasm of Ellen Ash. There was a sweetness, a blanket dutiful pleasure in her responses to things that Beatrice at first did not like, and later, immersed in her subject, came to take for granted. By then she had discovered other, less bland, tones of voice.
I can never say enough in praise of Randolph’s unvarying goodness and forbearance with my feebleness and inadequacies.
That, or something like that, recurred like the regular tolling of a bell throughout these pages. As is common with extended acquaintance with any task, topic or human being, Beatrice had an initial period of clear observation and detached personal judgment, during which she thought she saw that Ellen Ash was rambling and dull. And then she became implicated, began to share Ellen’s long days of prostration in darkened rooms, to worry about the effect of mildew on damask roses long withered, and the doubts of oppressed curates. This life became important to her; a kind of defensiveness rose up in her when Blackadder suggested that Ellen was not the most suitable partner for a man so intensely curious about all possible forms of life. She became aware of the mystery of privacy, which Ellen, for all her expansive ordinary eloquence, was protecting, it could be said.
There was no PhD in all this. One might have been discovered by the feminist movement, or by some linguistic researcher into euphemism and indirect statement. But Miss Nest had been brought up to look for Influences and Irony and there was little of either here.
Professor Bengtsson suggested she compare the wifely qualities of Ellen Ash with those of Jane Carlyle, Lady Tennyson and Mrs Humphry Ward. You must publish, Miss Nest, said Professor Bengtsson, glittering in matutinal icy determination. I cannot give you work, Miss Nest, without evidence of your suitability, said Professor Bengtsson, and Miss Nest wrote, in two years, a small book, Helpmeets, about the daily lives of wives of genius. Professor Bengtsson offered her an assistant lectureship. This was a great pleasure and terror to her—on the whole more pleasure than terror. She discussed with students, mostly female, swing-skirted and lip-sticked in the Fifties, mi
ni-skirted and trailing Indian cotton in the Sixties, black-lipped under Pre-Raphaelite hairbushes in the Seventies, smelling of baby lotion, of Blue Grass, of cannabis, of musk, of unadulterated feminist sweat, the shape of the sonnet through the ages, the nature of the lyric, the changing image of women. Those were the good days. Of the bad days, which were to come later, before she took early retirement, she did not care to think. She never crossed the threshold, now, of her old college. (Professor Bengtsson had retired in 1970 and died in 1978.)
She had a minimal private life. She lived, in 1986, and had lived for many years, in a tiny house in Mortlake. Here occasionally she had entertained groups of students, less and less frequently as she sensed her growing irrelevance to the deliberations of her department, as Bengtsson was succeeded by Blackadder. No one had come there since 1972. Before that there had been parties with coffee, cakes, a bottle of sweet white wine, and discussion. Those girls in the 1950s and 1960s had thought of her as motherly. Later generations had assumed she was lesbian, even, ideologically, that she was a repressed and unregenerate lesbian. In fact her thoughts about her own sexuality were dominated entirely by her sense of the massive, unacceptable bulk of her breasts. These, in her youth, she had flattened uncorseted under tunic dresses and liberty bodices, allowing them freely to develop their own muscles, as the best medical advice then suggested, stretching and sagging them, in the event, irremediably. Another woman might have flaunted them, might have carried them proudly before her, moulded grandly about a cleavage. Beatrice Nest bundled them into a drooping, grandmotherly bust-bodice and stretched over them hand-knitted jumpers decorated with lines of little tear-drop-shaped holes, which gaped a little, pouted a little, over her contours. In bed at night she felt them fall heavily sideways over the broad case of her ribs. In her cubbyhole with Ellen Ash she felt their living weight, in all its woolly warmth, brush against the rim of her table. She imagined herself grotesquely swollen, looked modestly down and met no one’s eye. It was to these heavy rounds that she owed her reputation for motherliness, a rapid stereotypic reading which also read her round face and pink cheeks as benign. When she was past a certain age, what had been read as benign was read, equally arbitrarily, as threatening and repressive. Beatrice was surprised by certain changes in her colleagues and students. And then, finally, accepting.