The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
POEM OF THE WEEK
Michael Field were a poet. “Were” is not an error. A singular voice in late-Victorian poetry, Field was the creation of Katherine Bradley and her niece – and lover – Edith Cooper. “A warm aunt and niece rapport” gradually turned into something else, as Field’s biographer, the novelist Emma Donoghue, put it in a Radio 4 documentary (tinyurl.com/michaelfielddoc). “If it was a man and a woman, we would say this was clearly a creepy situation – uncle grooming his niece. But it was two women, and no one was remotely troubled by it.”
An intense love lyric addressed from a corpse to its own soul, this poem comes from a series of Egyptian sonnets in Wild Honey from Various Thyme (tinyurl.com/ wildhoneypdf ), published in 1908 – the year of Egyptologist Margaret Murray’s famous mummy-autopsy, the last public unwrapping of a mummy. Here, the mummy longs to be reunited with its spirit; failing that, it yearns to decompose. The soul draws tantalisingly close, then is gone, like a flighty bird. The sonnet’s volta, or turn, comes as the mummy accepts its lot; it can be content with “torpidity”, so long as it knows its soul is still out there somewhere, enjoying the world they once shared.
The poem’s dualism – one being of two halves, the quick and the dead – is a running theme for Field. Similarly, “The young phoenix”, born from its own ashes in Field’s 1895 poem “Renewal”, “lifts in its beak the creature it has been”. This poem’s speaking voice – “Down to me quickly, down!” – recalls the dramatic monologues of Field’s fan Robert Browning, who was to blame for outing “him” in the 1890s, after which Field’s reputation never recovered. Tristram Fane Saunders
the ‘Seven Works of Mercy’. Alongside burying the dead, sheltering the homeless and so on, visiting the imprisoned and feeding the hungry are symbolised by the scene of Cimon and Pero.
Not long after Caravaggio, Rubens produced five versions of ‘Roman Charity’ (the most famous, in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam – now thought to be largely the work of Rubens’s assistants – shows Pero turning away, but with her arm tenderly around her father as he sucks at her breast). Most aggressively public, as well as immovable, is the sculpture of the pair integrated into the façade of an 18th-century annexe to the medieval belfry in Ghent, above the doorway. The Mammelokker (‘Breast-sucker’), as the sculpture is popularly called, has given its name to this whole part of the building, which once formed the entrance to the city prison. What on earth the prisoners, their families or their guards made of this rather stern image of the daughter feeding her chained father is hard to know.
That raises the question of what the scene, and the underlying story, is all about. What is it saying about the ancient family, or the modern? One argument is that in the Roman world, as Valerius Maximus suggests, the story of Cimon and Pero (and the version with the anonymous mother) represented the highest form of family love and the greatest service a daughter could provide for her parents. That is the implication of the modern title, ‘Roman Charity’, too – charity or caritas, in the sense of selfless love.
But, even in the ancient stories and paintings, there are hints that it was more complicated. There is a shadow of incest here and of family relations gone wrong, and a sense that the images of Cimon and Pero could be unsettling to Roman viewers, as they are to us. Even Valerius Maximus points to the perhaps uncomfortable oddity of what is said to have happened. This is “strange”, he writes of the case of daughter and mother, “unheard of”. And referring explicitly to paintings of the scene, he recognises that people do admire the example of virtue when they look at the father and daughter, but that they are also “confounded” by them (the Latin word stupent has a range of meanings from “amazed” to “aghast”). Some of that ambivalence is vividly captured by a painting that still survives in Pompeii.
This is in the ‘House of Marcus
Lucretius Fronto’, a large property and particularly elegantly decorated. The painting of Pero nursing her father is a panel in the centre of one of the walls of a small room in the more public area of the house, just off the central hall or atrium. It is now badly damaged, but enough remains for us to be certain that the old man was shown sitting on the floor at his daughter’s feet, suckling from one breast while his hand touched the other through her clothing. Better preserved is the six-line Latin poem, painted in white letters in the upper left-hand corner, which offered a commentary on the scene (here calling the father ‘Micon’). The first four lines explain that “unfair Fortune” has turned food for infants into food for a father and they highlight his veins swelling as he draws on his daughter’s milk. But a careful reading of the final two lines gives a different view. For they point out that, with their faces brought together, she is “caressing” him. Or so some modern translations put it. In fact, that misses (or disguises) the sense of the word fricat, which means something much closer to “rub” – and which is also used in Latin with an explicitly sexual sense (“rub up”). In other words, it exposes the erotic side of the image, one that is confirmed by the last line of the poem: “there is sad shame [pudor] along with the filial devotion [pietas] here”. The poem is asking viewers to confront what kind of love between father and daughter we are witnessing. Can it ever be as innocent as is sometimes assumed? How shameful is it?
In many modern images of Cimon and Pero too, the apparent innocence of the title ‘Roman Charity’ is undermined by the details of the painting. The jailer usually appears, as in Van Baburen’s picture, as a leering face (or faces) through the bars of the tiny window. In part, this was guided by the logic of the story. The whole point is that the daughter’s devotion was discovered. But it adds an inescapable element of voyeurism to the scene, which has the effect of recasting it in erotic terms, while suggesting to the viewers of the painting that they see themselves as voyeurs too. And the figure of Pero straddles the line between devoted daughter, embarrassed participant and complicit partner. Van Baburen, as many artists do, makes her turn away. Again, there is a narrative logic here: she is startled as she realises that she has been spotted, but her pose also suggests that she cannot bear to look at what she is doing. In other paintings she looks directly at her father, tenderly embracing him (Rubens’s first version of ‘Roman Charity’ is one of those), or her pose displays her breasts fully frontal to the viewer. From the father’s side, the relief on his face, as he drinks his daughter’s milk, could to some eyes look as much like an orgasm as a welcome quenching of thirst and hunger (not unlike the “swelling veins” of the poem in Pompeii, perhaps). In one or two modern versions (for example, a 17th-century design for a cup by Thomas de Bry) the veil of propriety was literally removed, and the pair appeared entirely naked.
I admit that I find it quite hard to look at the images of ‘Roman Charity’. It feels far too much like a ringside seat at incest or even child-abuse. All the same, it is important to try to explain their huge (albeit now concealed) popularity. What was driving the repeated return to this image, in the modern or the ancient world? The bottom line is that the story of Cimon and Pero was one focus of a debate about the nature of the family, about how the erotic life within it could be (or should be) policed,