Margery Clute: Literary Phenomenon Or Provincial Nobody?

Charlotte and Emily Brontë's writing table in the Haworth Parsonage Museum.

Following a recent visit to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, I was reminded again of that little-known Yorkshire poet Margery Clute (1824-76), who, I'm reliably informed, entered into and vanished from the lives of the Brontës like a wraith on the Pennine moors. When you've had a surfeit of Emily Brontë's poetry, and you're wondering where to turn next, it's well worth perusing Clute's (admittedly meagre) output for a bit of light relief.

It's on record that Clute became increasingly jealous of and vindictive towards the Brontë sisters, particularly Charlotte and Emily, as it became more and more evident that her own work would never achieve the starry heights so obviously destined for these superior writers. What's not always realised is the extent to which Clute tried to sabotage the work and reputation of her talented contemporaries. For example, she was in the habit of accompanying minor portrait painter Branwell Brontë on some of his habitual pub crawls around Haworth — not for reasons of social intercourse or beer-soaked bonhomie (indeed, Clute was strictly teetotal), but in order to clinically observe Branwell's progressive inebriation and document each sordid detail in her notebook in a neat and precise hand. (This cold and calculating attitude, it may be argued, is a necessary stimulus to creativity. Did not Graham Greene talk of the writer's 'splinter of ice in the heart'?) Although she never actually used any of this 'evidence', as far as I can gather, it was always there in case she needed it in her secret campaign to sully the Brontë image.

Another story, so incredible it must be true, goes as follows. Clute kept a pet magpie which she'd found injured in Haworth churchyard. She nursed the bird until it was completely recovered, training it easily, as one can an intelligent corvid. Then, one warm summer's day, when Tabitha Aykroyd, the Brontës' housekeeper, had opened the rectory windows to let in some fresh air, Clute introduced the magpie through the window of the downstairs room where Charlotte and Emily were in the habit of working at a large mahogany writing desk. It promptly flew across to a sheaf of papers on the table, picked them up in its beak and carried them off into the treetops. Neither bird nor booty were ever seen again. The papers comprised the half-finished manuscript of Emily Brontë's second novel, provisionally entitled Blethering Depths. Emily never restarted the work.

One final apocryphal narrative suggests that Margery Clute is in fact a pseudonym for the obscure Bradford poet William Eckerslyke, though why he should adopt a female name is a mystery, as it would be an invitation to even less attention and fewer book sales (after all, the Brontë sisters adopted the masculine first names of Currer, Acton and Ellis in order to evade the pervasive nineteenth-century prejudice against female writers, and, of course, Mary Ann Evans published under the name George Eliot). 

I've been able to trace very few of Clute's poems myself. Despite rumours of a second slim volume of verse, possibly called Moorland Ditties, her only verifiable published work is Fallen Leaves, which is extremely rare, and I believe only a handful of copies exist in this country (there are tattered copies in New York and Tokyo, I'm told, which are being repaired and restored as we speak). The bulk of the short, privately-printed run may have disappeared in the Great Fire of Ramsbottom (1888). However, I do know that one or two of my blog friends and followers have more than a passing interest in Clute's oeuvre, and may be able to supply me with one or two of her poetic gems. If anyone can contribute, please do so in the comments section. With grateful thanks.

Could one of these indecipherable tombstones in Haworth churchyard mark the grave of Margery Clute?

The Strange Case Of Telfour Tremble

Paris: home of the unfortunate Telfour Tremble.

If any of you followed the extraordinary story of Dominic Rivron unearthing the neglected work of little-known English poet Margery Clute, you may also be intrigued by my own similar tale of literary detection.  

I was rummaging through some dimly-lit poetry shelves in the basement of a local second-hand bookshop the other day when, as chance or perhaps destiny would have it, I came upon a slender, leather-clad volume of verse bearing the gold-blocked inscription: Signes et Symboles: Poèmes Melancholiques. A closer inspection revealed the name of the author printed below the title in much smaller Gothic letters — a certain M. Telfour Tremble, Poète. Immediately a sharp frisson of excitement ran from my coccyx up my spine then into my neck. Just to be doubly sure, I took this rather tattered-looking book from the shelf and turned over a few mildewed pages. A short foreword written by none other than Paul Verlaine confirmed my original suspicion that this was an incredibly rare copy of the only published work of obscure French Symbolist poet Telfour Tremble, contemporary of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and close friend of Jean Moréas, author of the Symbolist Manifesto of 1886.

I knew from my specialised knowledge of the period that Tremble had lit up the Parisian literary salons like a shooting star when this, his first and only collection of poems, was published; but the initial excitement seemed to quickly wear off and, after a particularly malicious review of the book had appeared in the literary journal, the Mercure de France, sales of the small print run plummeted, and Tremble vanished without trace. It was generally assumed that he joined the ragged ranks of the army of down-and-out poets who thronged the whorehouses and drinking dens of Paris at the time, and that he died in squalor — a poverty-stricken, absinthe-addicted dipsomaniac. All we know for sure, however, is that he expired, coincidentally, on his thirty-first birthday, 1st April 1900, and was buried in an unmarked grave in a remote suburban graveyard — not, as you might think befitted the status of a gifted Symbolist poet, in the cemeteries of either Père Lachaise or Montparnasse.

I bought the volume at a ridiculously cheap price from the unsuspecting bookseller and returned home gleefully with my prize. The collection contained forty-six poems in all, and I began at once the pleasurable task of translating them. Indeed, I have high hopes that eventually these English translations of mine may eventually be published in their own right — perhaps in a bilingual edition. At any rate, come what may, I'm delighted to present in this blog a sample of the work of the late M. Tremble, thereby rescuing him from obscurity at last.           

Idyll In A Sylvan Hut

How can I leave it all behind?

This slice of moon —
This wedge of Camembert —
This hot and clamorous night

With its chorus of frogs
And symphony of mosquitos
And angelic choir of nightingales?

This sturdy cabin at the woodland edge,
Its windows open
To the still air, heavy with thunder?

This humble, splintered table,
This slick knife
Which hacks at a stale baguette,

Then scores an orange skin
Quarter-wise — peasant thumbs
Peeling it like unfolding petals?

This bitter wine,
Cinnamon-spiced, with a hint of gall,
And thick and red as oxblood?

This sultry woman by my side,
Her skin gleaming with sweat,
Sticky as the summer night itself?

Her body, slight as a young boy’s,
With buttocks scarcely rounded
And breasts like tangerines?

Her animal eyes
Darting from moon to table
Then back to moon again?

This moonlit path
Winding through forests
On and on and on

And even further —
From this cabin’s portal
To the mighty Pyrenees?

How can I leave it all behind?
Yet leave it I will
For when the morning sun

Bathes the east in a diaphanous pink glow,
I’ll lift the latch and set off in the dawn
Whistling a melancholy tune.

Telfour Tremble (1869-1900)

Translated from the French by The Solitary Walker