Books: Faithful In His Fashion

ERNEST DOWSON— Mark Longaker—Universify of Pennsylvania Press ($4).

I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out out of mind . . . I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.

Long before the decade’s most famous book title was lifted from this lyric, the poems of Ernest Christopher Dowson were a part of the established pattern of English poetry—”not speech, but perfect song,” said Dowson’s late, great contemporary, William Butler Yeats. But about the poet himself the mists of time and faded memoirs had drawn close. Little but his friend Arthur Symons’ brief, exquisite biographical essay had preserved the memory of the Mauve Decade’s most desperately romantic life.

The Fog and the Pubs. Now, after almost five years of investigation in London and Paris, Dr. Mark Longaker, Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, has written the most complete study of the poet to date. It concerns his “life and personality rather than his works.”

Dowson was reared in the quaint, foggy, family home that stood on one of the wings of the family drydock in east London’s Limehouse. Tuberculous Father Alfred Dowson was far more interested in talking with his friends, Algernon Swinburne and Robert Louis Stevenson, than in keeping “Dowson’s” shipshape. Mother Annie Dowson, who was also tuberculous, nursed her lungs in retiring despondency. In winter the sickly parents took their sickly child to the Riviera. There he learned the classical Latin line that framed his work ever afterward, and discovered French literature and the way of life that became his obsession.

At Queen’s College, Oxford, he rejected religion, acquired a low opinion of women, and in a vituperative poem denounced Nature as an “abhorrent harpy.” Then he returned to “Dowson’s” and became the firm’s bookkeeper.

Every evening he pushed aside his ledgers and fled to the bars of west London—the Cock, the Crown, the Cheshire Cheese, the Café Royal—where he found his friends Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, Yeats, Symons and sometimes his French idol, Poet Paul Verlaine. At the first pub he would order absinthe, then quickly jot down the verses that had swum in his head during the day. That done, he would hurry on to a small, cheap Soho restaurant called the Poland, where he conducted one of the strangest, most fruitless courtships in literary history.

Blue-eyed, dark-haired Adelaide (“Missie”) Foltinowicz, the proprietor’s daughter, was twelve years old when Ernest Dowson fell in love with her. But those who were shocked by this strange infatuation (most of his women companions, whom he desired and despised, were streetwalkers and vaudeville girls) quickly realized that it was precisely “Missie’s” childishness and physical innocence that caused the poet to idolize her.

I would not alter thy cold eyes, With trouble of the human heart: Within their glance my spirit lies, A frozen thing, alone, apart; I would not alter thy cold eyes.

The Weeping and the Laughter. When Ernest was 27, Father Dowson put an end to his own misery with an overdose of chloral. A few months later his mother hanged herself. Soon afterward “Missie” married one of her father’s waiters. Dowson fled to France, declaring: “I have no lungs left to speak of, an apology for a liver, and a broken heart.”

He supported himself by translating French novels, co-authored two in English (A Comedy of Masks, Adrian Rome). He was perpetually quarrelsome, frequently took a dislike to people, strangers included. He continued, within his limits, to live “riotously, with the throng.” Once, when a friend tried in vain to dissuade him from living with a French prostitute, Dowson said gravely: “Our association is like that of Robert and Mrs. Browning.” In 1900, aged 33, he went home to London to die.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate.

In a London poorhouse in 1939 Biographer Longaker found the woman who witnessed his death. Destitute and half-mad, the old woman told the story of Ernest Dowson’s end:

“I have known great English poets: Ernest Dowson died in my arms. . . . I held the young man . . . and for a moment, he seemed to catch his breath. ‘You are like an angel from Heaven,’ he said . . . but I knew that it was the end. . . . We placed pennies on his eyes, and later they were replaced with silver coins by a friend of the young poet. . . . That I, or any woman who was in the house, took the coins and went off to get drunk at the nearest bar . . . I am sure is not the case.”