A House of Air. Hermione Lee

of all, he followed to Corfu. When he heard that another close friend, Chichester Fortescue, had been made Secretary for Ireland, he threw a fried whiting, in his joy, across the hotel dining room. There were tears, also, and ‘angries.’ Not a hint of homosexuality here, Levi insists, but this ignores the many lights and shades of that golden age of male friendship. Undoubtedly, however, the real married couple of the household were Lear and his grumbling old Suliot servant, Giorgis, an unsatisfactory cook (‘Fried oranges again!’) but faithful to the death. Giorgis did not think a poor man should want to live more than sixty years, and in fact died before Old Foss, Lear’s favourite cat, the other presiding genius of the villa at San Remo.

      Lear had escaped the fate of a mid-Victorian jester to the gentry, established his own life and planted his own garden. Now, accepting his stoutness, his beard, his strange nose, he mythologized himself, delightfully, though more wistfully, perhaps, than the circumstances warranted, as the desolate Yonghy Bonghy Bo and finally as Uncle Arly, who wandered the world in shoes too tight for him. There was a mythical version, too, of Old Foss.

      Levi wanders amiably and sometimes confusingly in and out of the diaries and letters, and up and down the years. But the book arose, he tells us, ‘from an attempt to put together a lecture on Lear as a poet,’ and it seems a pity that in the end he has left himself so little room for this. Lear was a skilled metrist, partial to dactyls (‘Calico,’ ‘Pelican,’ ‘runcible’), and a magic songwriter, with something like a reverence for the absurd. Levi says something about this, and, as a poet, he defends the limericks from anyone who may have found them disappointing because of the repeated last rhymes. But he goes over the edge, surely (as he does several times in this book), when he says that in the 1880s Lear was writing poetry which ‘no one but Tennyson (until Hardy) could rival for its lively and startling originality.’ What’s become of Browning?

      Times Literary Supplement, 1995

       The Sound of Tennyson

      I think of Tennyson as one of the greatest of the English-rectory-bred wild creatures. In matters of theology, love, doubt, grief, and loss he is usually felt to have said what most people wanted to hear, but when he was in the grip of his daemon, as he surely was in ‘Break, Break, Break,’ or ‘Tears, Idle Tears,’ with its strange series of comparisons, or ‘In the Valley of Cauterez,’ or the last five verses of ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava,’ he is not definable and not resistible. He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the English language. By this I don’t mean onomatopoeia (in any case many of his subjects for this—immemorial elms, church bells, steam trains—have unfortunately almost disappeared), but the sound of the language talking to itself. Take his round ‘o’s, which can be heard as he pronounced them himself in his recorded reading of ‘The Ballad of Oriana’: ‘When the long dun wolds are ribbed with snow…’ When my grandfather, as Bishop of Lincoln, preached the centenary sermon at Somersby, he quoted ‘Who loves not knowledge?’ and was told afterwards ‘You should have said know-ledge. Lord Tennyson always pronounced it so.’ Every round ‘o’ had its weight and its considered position. ‘Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!’—‘Naay, noä mander o’ use to be callin’ him Roä, Roä, Roä [Rover]/For the dog’s stoän deaf, and ’e’s blind, ’e can neither stan’ nor goä.’ That is the Spilsby variation, of course. At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does, in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sound s that he is inexplicably able, as a great professional, to produce.

      Times Literary Supplement, 1992

       The June-blue Heaven

      Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife, by Ann Thwaite

      In 1984, Ann Thwaite wrote, most successfully, the biography of Edmund Gosse, the Man of Letters. Now she has made a close study of another almost extinct profession, the Great Man’s Wife. It was a role that could end tragically, as it did for the second Mrs Watts, who had to live on in the painter’s house and studio for more than thirty years after his death, while his reputation faded to almost nothing. Emily Tennyson only survived her husband by four years, giving her time to work, with her son Hallam, on the two volumes of Memoirs.

      They first met each other as Lincolnshire children. She was the daughter of Henry Sellwood, a Horncastle solicitor; he came from the disastrous Rectory family at Somerton. She did not marry her Ally until she was thirty-six years old. By this time the worst of his financial troubles were over (although he had formed a chronic habit of grumbling about money), and a few months later he was appointed Poet Laureate. But for the past seven years the two of them had been eating their hearts out, while her well-meaning father forbade them to correspond. Sellwood was thinking of the drinking and smoking, the restlessness, the black moods and indeed the ‘black blood’ of the Tennyson family, the father an epileptic drunkard, one brother in an asylum, another one violent, a third addicted to opium from Lincolnshire’s homegrown poppies. Beyond this, Emily was a steadfast believer, while Tennyson was tormented and unresolved, particularly over God’s reason for creating sin and suffering. Another gulf to cross was the ‘deeper anguish’ of Arthur Hallam’s death, which had left Tennyson, as he said, ‘widowed,’ so that he ‘desired to die rather than to live’. But this, at least, was not a drawback to Emily. As a strengthening influence, she thought of herself as Hallam’s appointed successor. It seems a difficult concept, but it illustrates the depth, the purity, and the strange nature of Victorian emotional relationships.

      Even Ann Thwaite, the most thoroughgoing of researchers, can’t tell exactly how it was that the crisis was resolved. They were married on 13 June 1850, at Shiplake-on-Thames. Tennyson said, in apparent surprise, that it was the nicest wedding he had ever been at.

      Now Emily embarked on her profession, which was primarily a defensive campaign on many fronts. Tennyson had to be protected against distress of body and mind—against noise and disturbance, against the servant situation (which Georgie Burne-Jones, herself an expert campaigner, described as ‘a bloody feud or a hellish compact’), against visitors, sightseers, vexatious relatives, against a monstrous daily post (every amateur poet in the country sent their verses for his opinion), against contemptible hostile criticism and a writer’s own self-doubt and self-reproach. He seems to have managed up till then without her, largely by moving about. Indeed, even after his marriage, the Tennysons moved often, and for years Emily had two houses to run, Farringford at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight and Aldworth, near Haslemere, where they went in summer to avoid the holiday-makers. Ann Thwaite’s book is long, but her painstaking method is the only way to give an idea of Emily’s immensely troublesome, immensely rewarding daily life. Almost everything that could go wrong with the two houses did, including that traditional enemy, the drains. In 1856, for example, Emily was weeding potatoes, binding Alfred’s manuscripts, and planning a new dairy: she paid the bills and subscriptions, kept the accounts…found tenants…organized and supervised builders. She became deeply involved with the Farringford farm when they took it over in 1861. Emily would often consult Alfred—about the rent they should ask for the chalkpit, for instance—but he would say, ‘I must leave it in thy hands to manage.’

      In 1865, Queen Emma of the Sandwich Islands arrives with her Hawaiian entourage. The children’s rooms are needed for the royal party, and they are crammed into the lodge, while Emily’s cousin and aunt, who are staying ‘indefinitely,’ are stowed away elsewhere. Later, Dr James Acworth arrives; his wife is a spiritualist medium and ‘in A’s study,’ Emily’s diary records, ‘a table heaves like the sea.’ In 1871, there is a full house at Aldworth, but Mrs Gladstone is told to come and bring as many of the family as possible. ‘We have room, both in house and heart.’ Some guests have to be encouraged, some consoled. Tennyson, although a generous host, is unpredictable. In 1859, Edward Lear, a favourite guest, is so rudely treated that he goes upstairs to pack; Emily soothes him and buys one of his drawings. Meantime, her two sons, Hallam and Lionel, are brought up from golden-haired darlings, encouraged to walk on the dinner table, to become unrebellious, affectionate, quite dull young