Mr Lear Read online

  MR LEAR

  A LIFE OF ART AND NONSENSE

  JENNY UGLOW

  For Steve

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Scroobious Pip

  Prologue

  I. FLEDGING

  1 One Foot off the Ground

  2 With the Girls

  3 ‘O Sussex!’

  II. PERCHING

  4 To the Zoo

  5 Knowsley

  6 Tribes and Species

  7 Make ’Em Laugh

  8 Mountains

  III. FLYING

  9 ‘Rome Is Rome’

  10 Happy as a Hedgehog

  11 Third Person

  12 Excursions

  13 Derry down Derry: Nonsense, 1846

  14 ‘Something Is About to Happen’

  15 ‘Calmly, into the Dice-box’

  16 ‘All that Amber’

  IV. TUMBLING

  17 The Brotherhood

  18 Meeting the Poet

  19 An Owl in the Desert

  20 Half a Life: Corfu and Athos

  21 Bible Lands

  22 A Was an Ass

  23 Home Again, Rome Again

  24 No More

  V. CIRCLING

  25 ‘Overconstrained to Folly’: Nonsense, 1861

  26 Mr Lear the Artist

  27 ‘From Island unto Island’

  28 ‘What a Charming Life an Artist’s Is!’

  29 ‘The “Marriage” Phantasy’

  30 ‘Gradually Extinguified’

  VI. CALLING

  31 Sail Away: Cannes 1868–1869

  32 ‘Three Groans for Corsica!’

  33 Degli Inglesi

  34 Nonsense Songs, and More Nonsense

  35 Restless in San Remo

  36 India

  37 Families

  38 Laughable Lyrics

  VII. SWOOPING

  39 Shocks

  40 The Villa Tennyson

  41 ‘As Great a Fool as Ever I Was’

  42 Pax Vobiscum

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Abbreviations

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  The Scroobious Pip from the top of a tree

  Saw the distant Jellybol, –

  And all the birds in the world came there,

  Flying in crowds all through the air.

  The Vulture and Eagle – the Cock and the Hen,

  The Ostrich, the Turkey, the Snipe and the Wren,

  The Parrot chattered, the Blackbird sung,

  And the Owl looked wise but held his tongue,

  And when the Peacock began to scream,

  The hullabaloo was quite extreme.

  And every bird he fluttered the tip

  Of his wing as he stared at the Scroobious Pip.

  At last they said to the Owl, – ‘By far

  You’re wisest Bird – you know you are!

  Fly close to the Scroobious Pip and say,

  “Explain all about yourself we pray! –

  For as yet we have neither seen nor heard

  If you’re Fish or Insect, Beast or Bird!”’

  The Scroobious Pip looked gaily round

  And sang these words with a chirpy sound –

  ‘Flippetty chip – Chippetty flip –

  My only name is the Scroobious Pip.’

  EDWARD LEAR

  PROLOGUE: ‘IT’S ABSURD …’

  There was an Old Man of Spithead,

  Who opened the window, and said, –

  ‘Fil-jomble, fil-jumble, fil-rumble-come-tumble!’

  That doubtful Old Man of Spithead.

  Every time I look at Edward Lear’s nonsenses, as he called his limericks and songs, I am amazed afresh. They make me laugh with surprise. They are full of joys, shocks, rule-breaking freedoms and assaults. They open a window onto another world. Lear’s poems exist both within and outside the rules. They follow the logic of syntax, the linking of rhyme and off-rhyme, the strict dance of rhythm, but are peopled by oddities whose actions are bizarre, upsetting their neighbours. Where do they come from, the stubborn eccentrics, the animal- and bird-like humans? Later, Lear’s creatures took on another life in his beautiful and melancholy songs – the Dong with the Luminous Nose searching by lake and shore, the Owl and the Pussy-cat under the stars, the sweet, long lines lapping like waves on their pea-green boat. His people exist nowhere else in literature. Some are gentle, some are violent, some are musical, some are wild. They slide between sky, earth and sea. Even when they are peaceful, like the fishing daughters of Marseilles, they are exceedingly strange.

  There was an Old Man of Marseilles,

  Whose daughters wore bottle-green veils;

  They caught several fish, which they put in a dish,

  And sent to their Pa’ at Marseilles.

  Lear wrote nonsense alphabets, botany and cookery, and marvel-filled travel journals. He was a great letter writer, sprinkling the pages with sketches or fat self-portraits of the bespectacled artist followed by Foss, his cat with the cut-off tail. A letter could itself be a drawing. Lear could fly, as he does, rotundly, in a note to his friend, the ‘beneficial & brick-like Baring’, or his letter could crawl – snail-mail.

  Lear’s youthful drawings of animals and birds are almost hyper-real, as if he wanted to free the creatures from the page. Chronically short-sighted, in the landscapes that he painted he looked always into the distance, to towering mountains or far horizons. He was roused to rage by religious intolerance yet yearned for an afterlife: one thing he always believed in was forgiveness. All his life he depended on patrons and moved in establishment circles yet never truly belonged among them. He loved men yet dreamed of marriage, and remained, it seems, wrapped in himself, alone yet surrounded by friends.

  There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,

  Who danced a quadrille with a raven;

  But they said – ‘It’s absurd, to encourage this bird!’

  So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

  That last line has a real thump of surprise, of violence delivered with gusto. Such a satisfying verb, ‘smashed’, a word for six-year-olds to shout as they bash the hedges with a stick. But why Whitehaven? Perhaps the bird came first – few places rhyme with raven. When Lear sketched in the Lake District as a young man, Whitehaven lay on the coast in the corner of his map, yet his rhyme gives the stress to White-haven, a safe harbour – one that proves not so safe after all. Lear knew his birds, and as he walked the fells he watched ravens soaring above the crags in aerial acrobatics, rising, falling, swooping, turning, tumbling. He could hear their hoarse ‘caw caw’. In this nonsense dance – a couple in a quadrille designed for four – he shows the raven’s excited cawing, the man with coat-tails like wings and nose in line with the bird’s open beak. The raven takes off, and the man, too, is almost – almost – in the air. Below them comes the rhyme. Eyes and mind jump between image and word, challenging each other: the delight of the image, the shock of the verse.

  When Lear was nearly fifty he added this rhyme to his Book of Nonsense. It is one of many unlikely pairings: man and bird, owl and cat, daddy long-legs and fly, duck and kangaroo. And it is one of many appearances of the disapproving ‘they’, who turn up again and again in his nonsense. ‘They’ don’t, we notice, damn the dancing itself but say ‘It’s absurd to encourage this bird’, to make it at odds with its place in nature. Yet absurdity is the essence. Many writers quote this particular limerick (a later term, first recorded in 1898, but one we can use) to illustrate Lear’s attack on the invisible, pettifogging crowd, ‘The legions of cruel inquisitive They’, as W
. H. Auden called them, or in George Orwell’s words, ‘the realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing’. But are we too part of the common-sensible ‘they’, who so often turn against the odd and the outsider? And sometimes, when the limericks confront Lear’s own fears – loud noises, scary dogs, fierce women – are ‘they’ the author himself?

  In this case ‘they’ miss the point, as they often do. The wonder is not that a raven should dance but that a man can join it: a Lear-like longing. As a child I was fascinated by Lear’s limericks and songs, and sometimes scared. I loved the unexpected rhymes, the exotic and ordinary places and the strange words: intrinsic, scroobious, dyspeptic, abruptious. They meant nothing to me but were fat and full and good on the tongue. In the late songs, I heard Lear’s music, the jerky sharpness of Mr and Mrs Discobbolos, the yearning of the Dong with the Luminous Nose. I pored over the pictures while my grandmother read and I still wonder if sometimes the image came first, a doodle in a margin, a crafty portrait, a feature or expression, then a rhyme to go with it.

  Lear’s scratchy figures play a harp with the chin, nurse fishes in the sea, wear a wreath ‘Of lobsters and spice, pickled onions and mice’. Even an aunt can reach excess.

  There was a Young Girl of Majorca

  Whose aunt was a very fast walker;

  She walked seventy miles, and leaped fifteen stiles,

  Which astonished that Girl of Majorca.

  Astonished I was. But children, used to fairy tales and nursery rhymes, rarely question stories. The impossible becomes possible, as it was for the Jumblies: ‘They sailed away in a sieve, they did, they sailed away in a sieve’. They did. Every time one returns to the limericks one can find something new: the gap between the characters, never quite touching, the action suspended in time; the darkness and anger. A whole world is here: nonsense beings come from Hull and Harrow, Parma and Paris, Cairo and Crete, while the late songs inhabit a geography of their own, the land where the Bong Tree grows, the hills of the Chankly Bore and the great Gromboolian plain.

  There are other Lears. One is the young painter of birds and beasts: toucans with huge beaks, like his own big nose, flaming red parrots, the horned owl with ruffs round his eyes, the wildcat with its soft fur. Another is the landscape artist, painting ruins in Rome, rivers in Albania, boats like moths on the Nile. Lear saw himself as a Romantic wanderer and wrote dramatic, self-mocking, quirkily evocative travel journals, letting us feel rain and heat, and evoking the structure and life of a land. Beyond these, his passion for Tennyson’s poetry prompted him to explore the kinship of the arts, and in illustrating lines from Tennyson he created a unique visual autobiography. How do these worlds fit together?

  Because memories were important to Lear, I want to follow his life straightforwardly, to see how the layers are laid down, how they overlap and twist like strata. He was always involved with the lives of his friends and also always slightly apart. One of his fantasies was of living on top of a tree, like a bird in a nest, looking down at the ground, but he enjoyed small, daily things: food and drink, sunshine, odd comic happenings, curious words, turning them over like stones. He is like the sandpiper on the edge of the sea in the poem by Elizabeth Bishop, one of Lear’s great admirers:

  On his left, a sheet

  of interrupting water comes and goes

  and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.

  He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

  Lear ran. Back and forth over the silent-roaring ocean. He travelled to Italy, Greece and Albania, to the Levant and Egypt and India. For most of his life, he was a self-appointed exile, spending the winters abroad and returning like a reluctant swallow in the summers. But what was he flying to? Or what was he fleeing from? If we follow him across land and sea, to the borderlands of self, can we see where the art and nonsense are born? This is what, in my sieve of words, I am setting sail to find out.

  I. FLEDGING

  1: ONE FOOT OFF THE GROUND

  O Brother Chicken! Sister Chick!

  O gracious me! O my!

  This broken Eggshell was my home!

  I see it with my eye!

  However did I get inside? Or how did I get out?

  And must my life be evermore, an atmosphere of doubt?

  Lear was intrigued by beginnings: the growth and structure of plants, the inherited make-up and habits of birds, animals and humans, the child’s acquisition of language. He was moved by the way civilisations rose and faded, and by the progress of life itself, evolving from primitive forms, crawling from the sea. He wrote his lighthearted verse of the chicken and the egg in his late sixties. Accepting mystery, fluidity, doubt, he came to the conclusion ‘that we are not wholly responsible for our lives i.e., – our acts, in so far as congenital circumstances, physical or psychical over which we have no absolute control, prevent our being so.’ We have partial control, but it is too hard, too late, as adults, ‘to change the lines we have early begun to trace and follow’. He was formed, he felt, by a mix of nature and nurture, setting him always at variance with ‘they’.

  The first ‘they’ were his family. He was small and they were many, talking, bossing, teasing, ignoring. He was a part, yet set apart. His mother Ann had been pregnant almost constantly after she married his father Jeremiah in 1788. The babies came year after year, and names were used and reused until one survived, a litany of hope. Thus: Ann, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, Mary, Henry, Henry, Eleanor, Jane, Harriett, Cordelia, Frederick, Florence, Charles, Catherine, Edward, Catherine. Different lists are confused as to whether there were seventeen, nineteen or twenty-one babies (as Lear often claimed). The first Catherine, born about 1811, must have died just before or while Ann was pregnant with Edward: death and birth, burial and cradles, so close together, a conjunction that perhaps spurred rejection.

  The Lear family were nonconformists (Lear often jumped angrily to defend dissenters against complacent Anglicans, ‘bigots and fools’), and most of the children were baptised by Joseph Brooksbank, the pastor of the Independent church that met in Haberdasher’s Hall in Staining Lane, off Wood Street in Cheapside. In this respect they were city babies, christened in the street where Wordsworth’s ‘Poor Susan’ heard the song of the thrush and thought of her mountain home. Edward, the thirteenth baby to live past infancy, was born late at night on 12 May 1812 – four months after Dickens, a few days after Browning. Until his middle age, he kept his birthday on the 13th, but then started to celebrate it on the 12th. Was he ducking an unlucky day? He was born, he told a friend, at half past eleven at night, so late that it seemed to the busy household like the next day. He looked up through a ladder of brothers and sisters, the nearest to him being Charles, aged three when Lear was born, Florence, six and Fred, who was seven. Within months his mother was pregnant again – her last child, a second Catherine, arrived the following November.

  *

  In late middle age Lear began to look back on his life, he said, as ‘a series of pictures seen through “Memory’s Arch”’. Often, when his mind went back to these days, he was feeling sad, or ill, and muddled the dates. And he made things up for fun, like the family descent from a Dane called Lr, who had allegedly changed his name, in graphic Lear style, by removing a horizontal line and sliding Lr to Lear. ‘As for memory,’ Lear quipped when he was seventy, ‘I remember lots of things before I was born, & quite distinctly remember being born at Highgate 12 May 1812.’ Nonsense, of course, but what he did remember were the stories told by his eldest sister, Ann, who grew up in his father’s golden days.

  Jeremiah Lear’s great-grandfather was a Dorset butcher’s son who came to London in the late seventeenth century and set up first, the story goes, as a gingerbread baker in Soho. To succeed in this mercantile city it was useful to belong to a livery company, and in the 1720s the baker’s son, George, joined the Fruiterers’ Company, one of the oldest guilds, becoming a Freeman and eventually Master. From this
point on, making a lucrative move into sugar refining, the family ran a firm on the London wharfs, importing raw sugar from Jamaica and re-exporting to Hamburg. Strict dissenters, they built links with the Hamburg Lutheran Church in Trinity Lane – something that Lear, who had a rooted, if mysterious, dislike of Germans, chose to blot out, as he did any mention of money based on slavery. George’s grandson, Jeremiah, joined the family sugar-boiling business run by his widowed mother in Thames Street. At thirty-one, he married the nineteen-year-old Ann Clark Skerrett from Whitechapel, but Ann felt herself above the London trades, mourning a lost inheritance from forebears on her mother’s side, the Brignalls of Sunniside, south-west of Gateshead in the Durham coalfields.

  The couple were always said to have eloped, and the truth, if less dramatic, still suggested parental disapproval: a quiet wedding in Wanstead, away from their home parish, with only the clerk and a passer-by for witness. Jeremiah brought his bride sugar, if not honey, and plenty of money. In 1799, when his oldest daughter Ann was eight, and Sarah and Mary were four and three, he became a Freeman of the City and Master of the Fruiterers. For the girls there were glimpses of City pomp, of their father setting off in his livery with the Master’s badge, an oval of Adam and Eve with the apple. Every November the Fruiterers marched to present the Lord Mayor with twelve bushels of apples, packed into white baskets from Faringdon market, and then to a banquet in the columned Egyptian Hall of the Mansion House, with servants scurrying beneath the swinging chandeliers.

  Although Jeremiah went on attending at the Fruiterers’, he left sugar refining to become a broker in the City: the family home was in Pentonville, on the northern outskirts, while the business address was now ‘Pinner’s Court, Broad Street and Stock Exchange’. In the long years of the French wars, from 1793 to 1815, the City grew in strength, with issues of bonds and raising of loans, but business was risky. Men could make a fortune but they could easily go bankrupt, as Jeremiah’s young nephew Henry Chesmer did after speculating in Spanish wool, becoming embroiled in a court case that would go on for years. Jeremiah was lucky, at least to begin with. He took a share when the stock exchange became a formal subscription body in 1801, to raise money to build a new Exchange in Capel Court, and in 1806 he moved his family west to Bowman’s Lodge, a villa in Holloway. On today’s map it would be at the Nag’s Head crossroads, where the Seven Sisters Road joins the Holloway Road. But then the Seven Sisters Road did not exist: beyond the side garden there was only a narrow alley, cutting through to the old Heames Lane. It felt like the country.