NOVEMBER 25TH 1889
I write this sitting at His desk at two in the morning. I cannot sleep and he sleeps his last sleep in the coffin, quite still, and his soul gone away. I sit among his possessions—now mine or no one’s—and think that his life, his presence, departs more slowly from these inanimate than from him, who was once animate and is now, I cannot write it, I should not have started writing. My dear, I sit here and write, to whom but thee? I feel better here amongst thy things—the pen is reluctant to form “thee,” “thy,” there is no one there, and yet here is still a presence.
Here is an unfinished letter. There are the microscope, the slides, a book with a marker, and—oh, my dear—uncut leaves. I fear sleep, I fear what dreams may come, Randolph, and so I sit here and write.
When he was lying there he said, “Burn what they should not see,” and I said, “Yes,” I promised. At such times, it seems, a kind of dreadful energy comes, to do things quickly, before action becomes impossible. He hated the new vulgarity of contemporary biography, the ransacking of Dickens’s desk for his most trivial memoranda, Forster’s unspeakable intrusions into the private pains and concealments of the Carlyles. He said often to me, burn what is alive for us with the life of our memory, and let no one else make idle curios or lies of it. I remember being much struck with Harriet Martineau, in her autobiography, saying that to print private letters was a form of treachery—as though one should tell the intimate talk of two friends with their feet on the fender, on winter nights. I have made a fire here, and burned some things. I shall burn more. He shall not be picked by vultures.
There are things I cannot burn. Nor ever I think look at again. There are things here that are not mine, that I could not be a party to burning. And there are our dear letters, from all those foolish years of separation. What can I do? I cannot leave them to be buried with me. Trust may be betrayed. I shall lay these things to rest with him now, to await my coming. Let the earth take them.
Mortimer Cropper: The Great Ventriloquist 1964, Chapter 26, “After Life’s fitful fever,” pp. 449 et seq.
A committee was hastily constituted to see whether it might not be possible to inter the great man in Westminster Abbey. Lord Leighton went to see the Dean, who was understood to have some doubts about Randolph Ash’s religious beliefs. The poet’s widow, who had watched devoted and sleepless by his bedside during his last illness, wrote to both Lord Leighton and the Dean to say that it was her wish, as she was sure that it had been her husband’s, that he should lie in the quiet country churchyard of St Thomas’s Church at Hodershall on the edge of the North Downs, where her sister Faith’s husband was Vicar, and where she hoped to lie herself. Accordingly a great number of fashionable and literary personages made their way through the leafy lanes of Downland, on a dripping English November day, when yellow leaves were pashed into mud by the hooves of the horses and the sun was red and low in the sky.22 The pall-bearers were Leighton, Hallam Tennyson, Sir Rowland Michaels and the painter Robert Brunant.23 When the coffin had been lowered into the clay, covered with huge white wreaths, Ellen laid upon it a box, containing “our letters and other mementoes” which were “too dear to burn, too precious ever to expose to the public view.”24 Then the grave was filled up with flowers and the mourners turned away, leaving the last sad acts to the spades of the sextons, who engulfed both the ebony casket and the fragile flowers with the local mixture of chalk, flint and clay.25 The young Edmund Meredith, Ellen’s nephew, carried away from the grave’s edge a cluster of violets which he carefully pressed and kept among the leaves of his Shakespeare.26
In later months, Ellen Ash caused a simple black headstone to be set up, with a carving of an ash tree, showing the spread of both the crown and the roots, such as he would occasionally playfully draw beside his signature in some of his letters.27 Beneath it was carved Ash’s own translation of Cardinal Bembo’s epitaph for Raphael, which is carved around Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon, and appeared in Ash’s poem about the painting of the Stanze in the Vatican, The Sacred and the Profane.
Here lies that Man, who, whilst he was in Breath
Made our great Mother tremble that her skill
Was overmastered, who now, by his Death,
Fears her own Powers may grow forever still.28
Beneath this is written
This stone is dedicated to Randolph Henry Ash, a great poet and a true and kind husband, by his sorrowing widow and wife of more than 40 years, Ellen Christiana Ash, in the hope that “one short sleep past, we wake eternally”29 where there is no more parting.
Later critics have expressed amusement or scorn at the “bathos”30 of comparing this prolific Victorian poet to the great Raphael, though both, in the early part of this century, were out of favour. It is perhaps more surprising that there is no contemporary record either of disapproval that the Stone should have no mention of the Christian faith, or possibly, conversely, admiration for the tact with which Ellen had avoided this. What her choice of citation does is to link her husband, through his own poem and Raphael and Bembo, to the whole ambiguous Renaissance tradition, exemplified in the circular Pantheon, a Christian church which was originally in the form of a classical temple. It is not to be supposed that these thoughts were necessarily in her mind, although they may have discussed these matters together.
We cannot avoid speculating about what was contained in the box which was buried with Randolph Ash, and was observed to be still intact when his widow’s casket was lowered beside him four years later.31 Ellen Ash shared her generation’s prudery and squeamishness about the publication of private papers. The claim is frequently made—not least by Ellen herself32—that Randolph participated in these scruples. Fortunately for us he left no testamentary indications to this effect, and even more fortunately for us, his widow’s carrying out of his supposed injunctions was patchy and haphazard. We do not know what invaluable evidence is lost to us, but we have seen, in these pages, the ample richness of what remains. Nevertheless we cannot help wishing that those who disturbed his rest in 1896 had seen fit at least to open the hidden box, survey it and record for posterity what it contained. Such decisions to destroy, to hide, the records of an exemplary life are made in the heat of life, or more often in the grip of immediate post-mortem despair, and have little to do with the measured judgment, and desire for full and calm knowledge, which succeed these perturbations. Even Rossetti thought better of burying his poems with his tragic wife and had to demean himself and her in disinterring them. I think often of what Freud said about the relations of our primitive forebears to the dead, who could be seen ambivalently as demons and ghosts, or as revered ancestors:
“The fact that demons are always regarded as the spirits of those who have died recently shows better than anything the influence of mourning on the origin of belief in demons. Mourning has a quite specific psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivors’ memories and hopes from the dead. When this has been achieved, the pain grows less and with it the remorse and self-reproaches and consequently the fear of the demon as well. And the same spirits who to begin with were feared as demons may now expect to meet with friendlier treatment; they are revered as ancestors and appeals are made to them for help.”33
Might we not argue, in extenuation of our desire to behold what is hidden, that those whose disapproval made demons of them to their nearest and dearest, are now our beloved ancestors, whose relics we would cherish in the light of day?
NOVEMBER 27TH 1889
The old woman trod softly along the dark corridors, and climbed the stairs, standing in uncertainty on various landings. From the back—we are going to see her clearly now—from the back and in the shadow, she might still have been any age. She wore a velvet dressing-gown, and soft embroidered slippers. She carried herself upright and without creaking, though her body was comfortably fleshed out. Her hair hung in a long pale plait between her shoulders; in the light of her candle, it could have been palest gold, though it was creamy white, a
soft brown turned.
She listened to the house. Her sister Patience was sleeping in the best spare room, and somewhere on the second floor her nephew George, now an aspiring young barrister, slept too.
In his own bedroom, his hands crossed, his eyes closed, Randolph Henry Ash lay still, his soft white hair framed by quilted satin, his head pillowed on embroidered silk.
When she found she could not sleep, she had gone to him, opened his door quietly, quietly, and stood, looking down, taking in the change. Immediately after death, he had looked like himself, gentled and calmed after the struggle, resting. Now he was gone away, there was no one there, only an increasingly carved and bony simulacrum, the yellowing skin stretched taut over peaks of bone, the eyes sunk, the jaw sharp.
She looked at these changes, murmured a prayer into the blanket of silence, and said to the thing on the bed, “Where are you?”
The whole house smelled, as it did every night, of extinguished coal fires, cold grates, old smoke.
She went into her own little writing-room, where her escritoire was covered with letters of condolence, to be answered, and the list of those invited to tomorrow’s funeral, checked. She took her journal out of her drawer, and one or two other papers, looked irresolutely at the heap, and slipped out again, listening to sleep and death.
She went up another flight, towards the top of the house, where Randolph’s workroom was, from which it had been the business of her life to exclude everyone, anyone, even herself. His curtains were open. Light from a gas-lamp came in, and light from a full moon too, swimming silvery. There was the ghost of the smell of his tobacco. Heaps of books on his desk, from before that last illness. The feeling of him working was still in that room. She sat down at his writing-table, putting the candle in front of her, and felt, not better, that was the wrong thought, but less desolate, as though whatever was still present here was less gaunt and terrible than what slept, or lay as still as stone, down there.
She had his watch in her dressing-gown pocket, with the few papers she had brought up. She took it out and looked at it. Three. Three in the last morning he would be in the house.
She looked around at the glass-fronted bookcases, vaguely reflecting multiplied flames back at her. She opened a drawer or two, in the desk, and found sheafs of paper, in his hand, in others’; how was she to judge and decide the fate of all this?
Along one wall was his botanical and zoological collection. Microscopes in their wooden cases, hinged and latched. Slides, drawings, specimens. The Wardian cases containing sealed worlds of plant life, misted with their own breath, the elegantly panelled marine aquarium, with its weeds, its Actinia and starfish, against which M. Manet had painted the poet amongst his ferns, suggesting a world perhaps of primaeval vegetable swamp or foreshore. All this must go. She would consult his friends at the Science Museum as to a suitable home for it. Maybe it should be donated to an appropriate educational institution—a Working Men’s club, a school of some kind. There had been, she remembered, his special airtight specimen box, glass-lined and sealed. She found it where it was kept; he was orderly in his habits. It would be ideal for her purpose.
There was a decision to be made and tomorrow would be too late.
He was a man who had never really had a serious illness, until this last one. And that was long-drawn-out; he had been confined to his bed for the last three months, with both of them knowing what was coming, though not when, nor how fast. They had both, during those months, lived in that one room, his bedroom. She had been close to him at all times, adjusting his air or his pillow, towards the end helping him to feed, reading to him when even the lightest book became too heavy. She thought she could feel his needs and discomforts, without words. The pain too, there was a sense in which she had shared the pain. She had sat quietly beside him, holding the papery white hand, and felt his life ebb, day by day. Not his intelligence. At the beginning there had been a feverish piece of time in which, for some reason, he had become obsessed by the poems of John Donne, had recited them to the ceiling, in a voice both resonant and beautiful, puffing away the fronds of beard from his mouth. When he couldn’t find a line he called, “Ellen, Ellen, quickly, I am lost,” and she had had to riffle and seek.
“What would I do without you, my dear? Here we are at the end, close together. You are a great comfort. We have been happy.”
“We have been happy,” she would say, and it was so. They were happy even then, in the way they had always been happy, sitting close, saying little, looking at the same things, together.
She would come into the room and hear the voice:
“Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.”
He carried out his dying in style. She watched him working it out, fighting the pain, the nausea, the fear, in order to have something to say to her that she would remember later, with warmth, with honour. Some of the things he said were said as endings. “I see why Swammerdam longed for the quiet dark.” Or, “I tried to write justly, to see what I could from where I was.” Or, for her, “Forty-one years with no anger. I do not think that many husbands and wives can say as much.”
She wrote these things down, not for what they were, though they were good things to say, but because they reminded her of his face turned towards hers, the intelligent eyes under the damp creased brow, the frail grip of the once-strong fingers. “Do you remember—dear—when you sat—like a water-nixie on that stone—on that stone in the weeds at the—the name’s gone—don’t tell me—the poet’s fountain—the fountain—the Fontaine de Vaucluse. You sat in the sun.”
“I was afraid. It was all rushing.”
“You did not look—afraid.”
Most of what they shared, after all, after all was done, was silence.
“It was all a question of silence,” she said aloud to him, in his workroom, where she could no longer expect any answer, neither anger nor understanding.
She laid out the objects involved in her decision. A packet of letters, tied with faded violet ribbons. A bracelet of hair she had worked, from his hair and her own, over those last months, which now she meant to bury with him. His watch. An unfinished letter, undated, in his own hand, which she had earlier found in his desk. A letter to herself, in a spidery hand.
A sealed envelope.
Trembling slightly, she took up the letter to herself, which had come a month ago.
Dear Mrs Ash,
I believe my name will not be strange to you—that you know something of me—I cannot imagine you cannot—though if by chance my letter is an absolute surprise I ask your pardon. I ask your pardon, however things may be, for intruding on you at this time.
I am told Mr Ash is ill. Indeed the papers report so, and make no concealment of the gravity of his state. I am reliably told that he may not live long, though of course I ask your pardon again if I am in error, as I may be, as I must hope to be.
I have writ down some things I find I wish, after all, that he should know. I am in a state of considerable doubt as to the wisdom of putting myself forward at this time—do I write for my own absolution or for him—I cannot know. I am in your hands, in this matter. I must trust to your judgment, your generosity, your goodwill.
We are two old women now, and my fires at least are out and have long been out.
I know nothing of you, for the best of reasons, that nothing has been said to me, at any time.
I have writ down, for his eyes only, some things—I find I cannot say, what things—and have sealed the letter. If you wish to read it, it is in your hands, though I must hope, if it can be, that he will read the letter, and decide.
And if he cannot or will not read it … oh, Mrs Ash, I am in your hands again, do with my hostage as you see fit, and have the right.
I have done great harm though I meant none to you, as God is my witness, and I hope I have done none—to you that is
, or nothing irretrievable.
I find I shall be grateful for a Line from you—of forgiveness—of pity—of anger, if you must—will you—go so far?
I live in a Turret like an old Witch, and make verses nobody wants.
If in the goodness of your heart, you would tell me what becomes of him—I shall praise God for you.
I am in your hands.
Yours
Christabel LaMotte
So for the last month of his life she had carried these two letters, hers and that sealed one, in her pocket, like a knife. In and out of his room, in and out of their time together.
She brought him posies she had arranged. Winter jasmine, Christmas roses, hothouse violets.
“Helleborus niger. Why are green petals so mysterious—Ellen? Do you remember—when we read Goethe—metamorphoses of plants—all is one—leaves—petals—”
“That was the year you wrote about Lazarus.”
“Ah, Lazarus. Etiam si mortuus fuerit … Do you think—in your heart of hearts—we continue—after?”
She bowed her head and looked for the truth.
“We are promised—men are so wonderful, so singular—we cannot be lost—for nothing. I don’t know, Randolph, I don’t know.”
“If there is nothing—I shall not—feel the cold. But put me in the open air, my dear—I don’t want—to be shut in the Abbey. Out in the earth, in the air. Yes?
“Don’t cry, Ellen. It cannot be helped. I am not sorry. I have not—done nothing, you know. I have lived—”
Outside his bedroom, she wrote letters in her head:
“I cannot give him your letter, he is calm and almost happy, how can I disturb his peace of mind at this time?”
“You must understand that I have always known of your— How to find a word? Relationship, liaison, love?”
“You must understand that my husband told me, long ago, freely and truthfully, of his feeling for you, and that the matter, having been understood between us, was set aside as something past and understood.”