This Rare Spirit by Julia Copus

Author:Julia Copus [Julia Copus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571313556
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2021-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

May and Mrs Sappho had evidently been discussing Charlotte as if she were a star pupil whose rough edges it was their responsibility to knock off – and Charlotte was perhaps partly to blame in this, for putting it about that she was a poetic ingénue. But Mrs Sappho’s motivation for what she did next can only be guessed at: she wasted no time in showing May’s comments to Charlotte, who was unsurprisingly taken aback. Why had May written to Mrs Sappho to criticise the poem without expressing the same reservations to Charlotte? A fortnight later, to the day, May sent news from Yorkshire that Ezra Pound wanted to take ‘The Fête’ himself for the avant-garde magazine The Egoist.10 On the subject of her own opinion of the poem, she remained silent.

The letter Charlotte wrote to May has not survived, but judging from May’s reply, Charlotte must have decided to ask her outright about the comments she’d sent to Mrs Sappho. The response was embarrassingly contrite: May now bent over backwards to praise the poem. What she had thought was missing from it was never ‘vision, it was not passion, it wasn’t any of the great things that mark poetry – the poem is full of them – is alive with them’. Her previous conclusion that something about ‘the metric’ was missing had been arrived at ‘probably because I read it all wrong’; she now felt that it was ‘my own ear & my own senses that were in fault’, especially since ‘in all your other poems that I know, yr rhythm, yr metre, the structure of yr phrases and the pace & stress were always suited to the emotion or to the picture, so it will be here’.11

If Mrs Sappho’s motive in passing on May’s private comments to Charlotte had been to create a rift, then she was to be disappointed. Charlotte acknowledged that May had not been entirely candid but told Mrs Sappho she hoped she herself could see beyond people’s ‘weaknesses & poses’; after all, very few people were entirely without them. She threw in a quotation from G. K. Chesterton to illustrate her point: ‘“we are all stricken men” one way or another,’ she said; ‘the only thing I have no mercy for is hardness & deadness – & this lady has been kind to me’.12 Her balanced assessment of this incident brings to mind the moments in her writing when she steps back to present a situation from opposing sides. But while she did her best to remain level-headed, her last word on the subject betrays her irritation at Mrs Sappho’s behaviour: ‘I don’t think there’s anything quite so deadly’, she told her, ‘as “giving people away”.’13

*

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.