Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Correspondence
Volumes III-V, “The Chelsea Years, 1863-1872”
Edited by William E. Fredeman
608pp. D. S. Brewer. £125.
0 85991 794 0

Three new volumes of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by the late William E. Fredeman, cover the period 1863–72, the Chelsea years, when Rossetti was living and working at 16 Cheyne Walk. These were the years immediately following the death of his wife, Lizzie Siddal, in 1862. Fredeman’s magnificently edited, annotated, appendixed and indexed edition, which is also beautifully produced, is testimony to an immensely impressive editorial labour of love. It is all the more a labour of love because the letters themselves are, in literary terms, peculiarly ungrateful.

Rossetti is a perfunctory, if prolific, letter-writer. The form, for him, is rarely an occasion for fine writing, for artistic disclosures, trials of thought, or even ordinary gossip. He writes with routine, almost anonymous purposefulness. Letters to patrons, dinner guests, friends and family use the same brisk, unadorned style, which seems worlds away from the lush canvases, the rococo poetry, and, as we know, the morbidly susceptible imagination of the man. Readers who need to find out how much was paid for a painting, which lines of poems were altered and on whose advice, who dined where and with whom, will find what they want. Those looking for a clue to the events of Rossetti’s life, accounts of his feelings, creeds or doubts, will be largely disappointed.

The overall effect is of a wall of words, with few chinks. Even those letters which suggest a special warmth and confidence – those to his mother, for instance, beginning “My Dearest Mother”, “Dear Old Thing”, “Dear Old Darling”, “Good Antique”, “Dear Teak” – are mostly full of regular accounts of his work, queries about the family’s health, and apologies for invitations missed or postponed. To Christina there is, alas, very little, as if these siblings who shared many of the same obsessions, phobias and guilts found few reasons for epistolary exchange. To his closest literary confidants, his older brother William Michael and Swinburne, for instance, he occasionally indulges a risqué expletive, emulating the latter’s “delightful farrago of blasphemy and indecency”, but mostly he gets down to business: the nitty-gritty of poetic alterations, some general but not painstaking assessments of others’ work, and invitations to dinner. There is a sense that life as well as art is happening elsewhere, and that, in addition to the censorship later exercised by his brother, Rossetti himself is both too cautious and too secretive to let his readerly posterity know much about either.

Mostly, then, we must make do with glimpses, supplemented by Fredeman’s rich and full appendices. For instance, the weird menagerie of beasts at Cheyne Walk, with its small, ongoing tragedies of accident and neglect, is given only a passing mention. Just how this rum collection, which included a zebu (a small domestic ox), a parrot, a peacock, a dormouse, a wombat, a fawn, a woodchuck and a laughing jackass, somehow all mucked in (and presumably mucked the house), remains largely invisible. The beloved, much-sketched wombat survived only two months, the dormouse was found caught in a trap, “almost dead . . . but still gnawing at the wires”, the fawn pulled out all the peacock’s tail-feathers, and the jackass “drowned himself in a tub of water”. “My poor beasts have been dying fast”, Rossetti writes in 1871, and hurries on to other matters.

Meanwhile, paintings are finished, models come and go, friends wine and dine, and Jane Morris looms in the background, an important if discreet presence, whose actual relationship with Dante Gabriel is largelyc disguised by cheerful-sounding, merely friendly missives. Very occasionally another tone intervenes: “Now everything will be dark for me till I can see you again”, he writes in 1870, lamenting that “places that are empty of you are empty of all life”. On the whole, little is to be learned about the ménage of Dante Gabriel, William Morris and Janey Morris – one of those complex nineteenth-century threesomes which, one suspects, had as much to do with artistic love and rivalry between the men as desire for the woman. William took himself off to Iceland when Dante Gabriel needed to work at Kelmscott, Janey kept her head, and Fredeman offers what cautious editorial explanations he can.

Through the tantalizingly blank curtain of Rossetti’s prose, two events poke unnervingly. In March 1869, he sent some sonnets to his mother with an unusually exuberant explanation: these “bogies . . . may join with the skeletons of Christina’s various closets, & entertain you by a ballet”, he suggests, adding, irresistibly: “As their own vacated graves serve them to dance on, there is no danger of their disturbing the lodgers beneath”. In this rare piece of verbal flamboyance he touches not only on an aspect of his own writing, its florid dance of words over an underlying hollow, but also on an event he was keen to conceal at this time: the projected exhumation of the manuscript of his poems from the grave of Lizzie Siddal. Something in the show of the writing signals the very thing he would hide: a “vacated” or unvacated grave, and its variously disturbed lodgers. It is as if his prose cannot, for once, resist a rhetorical danse macabre around the hidden facts. Who or what might be disturbed by this projected dance of poetry on (or from) the grave is one of the unsolved fascinations of Rossetti’s life.

The emotional cost of that event can be gleaned only from the odd word here and there. Certainly, between 1865 and 1870 Lizzie was not entirely undisturbed. As a friend put it, she was “constantly appearing (that is, rapping out things) at the séances at Cheyne Walk – !”. On this topic Rosetti’s letters are silent. Whatever news he sought from the other world is kept to himself. The episode of the chaffinch, which has been taken as the turning point in his decision to recover the poems, is reported indirectly by a friend. On picking up the bird, Rossetti apparently cried out: “It is my wife, the spirit of my wife, the soul of her has taken this shape”. Lizzie, who is rarely mentioned in these letters, is evidently a restless lodger in his imagination. The actual exhumation of the grave, in October 1869, only gave that restlessness a wider and more complicated circulation. Rossetti did not attend the event, but followed its progress closely. The recovery of his poems, poems which are “as I may say, dead stock”, set loose a mix of morbid fear and guilt which would run for years. A briefly mooted, then suppressed, suggestion that he might dedicate the volume to Janey Morris reinforces the undercurrent of plunder and betrayal. These grave-goods, Rossetti knew at some level, were a way of stealing from one woman to give to another.

Little of this inner turmoil, however, is verbally apparent. Even during the event, the letters appear all sense and practicalities. The “rough grey calf” cover of the manuscript – not, Rossetti explained, to be confused with the copy of the Bible also in the grave – had to be recovered, disinfected and then carefully transcribed, in spite of, as he puts it, “a great worm-hole right through every page” of “Jenny”. He sends a vivid drawing of that hole to William Michael, showing the precise proportions. “It has a dreadful smell”, he warns him of the whole. The few friends in the know were sworn to secrecy, although, Dante Gabriel guessed, in a word which touches a bit too closely on the physics of the event, “the truth must ooze out in time”. It is as if the self-protective cloak of his matter-of-fact style is punctured, here and there, by words which mean more than they should. One of these becomes prominent through sheer repetition. Four days after the exhumation, he writes, with relieved satisfaction: “It, and all with it, was found quite perfect”. This is a curious construction, as if he feared to look something in the eye, while insisting on “its” perfection. In fact, this proved not quite true, but the word persists like unfinished business: “All in the coffin was found quite perfect, but the book”, he admits. Even so, he adds, some of the poems were “quite perfect”. The word “perfect” wavers between body and book, one “it” and another, in a confusion loaded with oblique fears and self-justifications. “Had not I received medical assurance that all in the coffin would probably be perfect (as it proved to be) I should not have had the courage to make the attempt”, he explains. Not being able to name the object suggests how much he was haunted by it. Whatever the nature of the perfection, Poems (1870), which was astonishingly successful and went into five editions in its first year, would always be tied, in Rossetti’s mind, to the disturbed ground of its provenance. That ground remained an object of horror and dread to the end. “Let me not on any account be buried at Highgate”, he begs his brother, years later.
The other event which, even more invisibly, prods at the dull efficiency of these letters is Rossetti’s breakdown and suicide attempt in 1872. The problem became obvious on June 2, 1872, which William Michael described as “one of the most miserable days of my life”. Whether because of the personal attack on Poems in Robert Buchanan’s “Fleshly School” pamphlet in May of that year, which accused Rossetti of “wheeling his nuptial couch out into the public streets”, or because of the strain of his secret relationship with Jane (“Janey at his own house for the night!”, William Bell Scott reported), his failing eyesight and poor health, or his continuing addiction to chloral, Rossetti collapsed. On that day, William Michael feared that his brother might be “partially insane”, though he later revised his opinion and reckoned he was suffering from chloral poisoning. A week later, Rossetti attempted suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum.

Interestingly, however, on June 4 and 5, he wrote two perfectly lucid and businesslike letters, one to a patron, thanking him for praise and the loan of a lamp, and the other to Robert Browning, thanking him for a copy of Fifine at the Fair. “Thanks once more for a new book bearing your name loved from of old”, he writes to Browning. Like all his letters, these seem the work of a man who keeps his affairs in order, whose public face expresses sense and sanity, but whose imagination is elsewhere. After this, there is a silence of two weeks, for which anyone trying to follow the chronology of the life must turn to Fredeman’s editorial appendices. The next two missives, written from Scotland where he was recuperating, are to his mother, thanking her for her solicitude and describing the weather and the house, and to William Michael, suggesting some complicated financial transactions in relation to Fanny Cornforth’s house and furniture. The man-of-the-world front continues. Letters, for Rossetti, are a formality of life, a practical façade behind which the artist stays hidden.

 The story of his paranoia, his belief that “the walls [were] mined and perforated by spies”, or that Browning was part of the Buchanan attack, his continuing guilt at the exhumation, is rehearsed, from the outside, by slightly less discreet friends and contemporaries.
Fredeman has reproduced, sourced and annotated every known letter by Rossetti, and provided appendices in which one seems to be reading the story of a whole generation. His additions include some derived from the recently amalgamated Angeli and Penkill Papers at the University of British Columbia, which contain fascinating circumstantial detail about the more mysterious episodes in Rossetti’s life. Fredeman also gives an invaluable bibliographical summary of the proof stages of Poems, as well as various other chronologies, calendars and bibliographies. This is a magnificent work of scholarship, long overdue and to be warmly welcomed. In it, the story of these turbulent years in Rossetti’s life is told again, not by a biographer recharging a well-known legend, but by an editor scrupulously sifting and reassessing small pieces of evidence. Ultimately, however, these letters will not answer questions raised by the life. There are few insights into the man’s tormented being, and no new interpretation emerges of his emotional affairs. They do, however, point to something which seems intrinsic to his personality: the resourceful distances between public and private personae. In the end, they are a stark, sometimes frustrating reminder that it is in the grey regions, between practical control and sheer insanity, that the artist works. Rossetti, in his letters, keeps the door to that region largely barred. In his poetry, however, the wayward, fantastical traffic of the imagination is more obviously apparent.

At its worst, that poetry’s Italianate obsessions, its medieval lore, full of personified Loves and Ladies, and its sometimes affected, archaic vocabulary seem off-puttingly eccentric. Some of the sonnets, and in particular the translations, can appear mere courtly exercises in imitation. At its best, however, it is stunningly bold, modern and strange. It is Rossetti, after all, who writes one of the great post-coital poems in the language. “Nuptial Sleep”, which provoked Buchanan’s outburst about dragging the marriage couch into the public streets, enacts, with breathtaking indulgence, the long-drawn-out afterpangs of orgasm: “yet still their mouths, burnt red, / Fawned on each other where they lay apart”. Having tried out “chirped”, “kissed” and “moaned to each other”, he hit on “fawned” and instantly caught the animal sensuousness of the piece. Ironically, and as if confirming the tormented sources of his inspiration, the poem, far from being a marriage hymn for Lizzie, was probably about Janey Morris. Even in this transparently personal poem, art comes refracted through layers of evasion, disguise and self-deception. Whose “nuptial”, one might ask, is being celebrated here? Rossetti’s breakdown after the Buchanan attack may have had more to do with this guilty emotional overlay than with any hurt poetic sensibility.

Other poems are haunted by Lizzie, especially by the memory of that golden-red hair which, in the poet’s memory at least, keeps catching on things. In particular, it catches on books. The fateful act, in 1862, of placing his poetic manuscript among those dead tresses, was already loaded with pre-rehearsals. The association of hair and books runs through “Jenny”, where the prostitute’s “wealth of loosened hair” is likened to “a book”, and she herself to “a volume seldom read”. So, the poet imagines, “might the pages of her brain / Be parted at such words, and thence / Close back upon the dusty sense”. This anatomical simile, with its unnerving hint of death, foreshadows the final lines, where the speaker leaves his gold coin in the sleeping woman’s reciprocally golden tresses. Lizzie’s hair gets everywhere. A line from a later sonnet, “all that golden hair undimmed in death”, plunges back into that vision which had to be “perfect” in order not to wreck the survivor completely. If, on the one hand, this seems the stuff of madness, it is also the stuff from which poems emerge. For Rossetti, the a-chronological twine of art and life cannot easily be straightened into a logical narrative.

In addition to their complex interactions with life, these poems also open up oblique conversations with the works of others. “Jenny”, for instance, asks to be read alongside Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Not only do they share a drama of good and bad sisters, coins and hair, but one of Dante Gabriel’s most haunting lines, on the moral confusion of the sexual market, draws on Christina’s ambiguous shape-changers: “It makes a goblin of the sun”. Similarly, the four “Willowwood” sonnets converse eerily with Lizzie Siddal’s work. “Better all life forget her than this thing, / That Willowwood should hold her wandering!”, the figure of Love warns. To rhyme “thing” with “wandering” is to release, somewhere beyond grammar, the idea of an unexorcized ghost. Indeed, the lover has no wish to stop that “wandering”, either of sense or of the dead lover. Drinking from “a woodside well”, he finds her lips “Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth”. This seems to draw on an event also recorded by Lizzie. In two of her small sketches, she and Dante Gabriel stand side by side, gazing sadly into a fountain and a pool. In both, he is struggling to hold back her heavy hair. In Siddal’s own poem, “A Silent Wood”, she recalls just such a place of love and foreboding: “Can God bring back the day when we two stood / Beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood”. Rossetti’s wood, in “The Portrait”, seems to point to a similarly specific place: “A deep dim wood; and there she stands / As in that wood that day”. It may be that Dante Alighieri’s “dark wood” houses the imaginations of both Siddal and Rossetti, giving to the latter a lifelong figure for some desperate, posthumous meeting, near a pool, a stream or a well. “That Willowwood should hold her wandering!” is a wish and fear that he never finally allays.

Another perspective is added to this ramifying unease by Christina’s poem “An Echo from Willow-Wood”, where she repeats the water imagery of meeting and parting: “Lilies upon the surface, deep below / Two wistful faces craving each for each”. Willow-land is a place full of echoes in the Rossetti family, as if it drew on some shared mythology even beyond the facts of life. In some sense, its “wandering” thing is the ghost-presence of Lizzie Siddal – a presence that Christina imaginatively “inhabits” in her numerous poems about dead women; but in another sense it is the “wandering” drift of poetry, that thing which refuses to be tied down, is no respecter of facts, feelings, dates and deaths, but somehow circulates freely among them, with maddening illogic. “Better all life forget her than this thing . . . .”

It may be, then, that an understanding of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art is to be found, not in the letters at all, but in the writings of the poet who, even more than he, understood the morbid, freakish ways of the imagination: his sister Christina. It was she who, as early as 1850, wrote a short story in which she rattled her own oddly premonitory skeleton in the closet. In “Maude”, she describes how, on the death of the girl poet of the title, a manuscript of her verse is buried with her in the coffin. As a figure for where poetry comes from – a figure ransacked, in different ways, by both brother and sister – this one is perhaps as good and secret as any.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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