He done her wrong
Asked last year to nominate its favourite modern poem, as a follow-up to the triumph of Kipling's 'If' as top choice among the classics, the nation selected some lines by the poet Jenny Joseph entitled 'Warning', on the subject of growing old disgracefully. Miss Joseph is accomplished and serious, what those in the poetry business like to call 'an original voice', with several fine collections to her credit, so she was understandably a trifled miffed to find that this whimsy little number, not at all representative of its author, was the only piece of hers to have seized popular awareness by the button- hole. Through this choice, le peuple, it seemed, had assigned to her that least enviable of literary roles, that of the One- Poem Wonder.
Such was the destiny of Frances Corn- ford, for example, part of that intellectual aristocracy of Hodgkins, Darwins and Wedgwoods which turned Edwardian Cambridge into the nearest thing to Periclean Athens this country had ever possessed. Nowadays, if she is read or remembered at all, it is for the poem on the lady seen from a train, with its lines: 0 fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?
And did that ghastly young puppy Julian Grenfell, darling Ettie Desborough's boy, who chased one of the Sassoons round Eton with a horsewhip for being Jewish and took his cricket bat to the Western Front thinking it would all be over before September 1914, write anything else as sinisterly good as 'Into Battle'? And what about W. J. Turner, the New Statesman music critic, who produced those weird little verses about Chimborazo, Cotopaxi and Popocatapetl?
It could all have been much worse for them, as indeed for Jenny Joseph. Each hangs onto the precipice-edge of literary oblivion by at least a hand and nobody seems inclined to stamp caddishly on their fingers. Each might derive some sort of lesson from the fate of a much earlier poet, famous in her time but nowadays counting herself lucky to figure in a learned footnote or a scholar's throwaway allusion. Only five of her poems survive, yet taken together they make us long to be the happy discoverers of a hundred more. Presumably she was baptised, though nobody is certain of her Christian name or the exact years of her birth and death. Known to us as La Comtesse de Die, she lived and wrote at some time during the 12th century in a Languedoc mercifully unknown to Peter Mayle, where for every troubadour turning elegant verses to some hard-hearted beauty, there was his female counterpart, la trobairitza, witty, knowing and passion- ate.
The Countess, in her day, was the most admired among the trobairitzas, which makes it all the more irritating that the only surviving biography of her occupies precisely two and a half lines. It tells us, in Provençal, that she was `bella domna e bona', that she married Guillaume of Poitou but fell in love with Raimbaut, Count of Orange, and made many fine verses about him. The rest is up to us. We can go to Die, which is on the river Drome in the mountains south of Grenoble, and which, according to Larousse's arid little summary, produces furniture, tonneterie', cattle food and a white wine of the type known as 'clairette'. Or we can fossick about in the life and works of Raimbaut d'Orange, who — naturally — said not a word about the Countess in his 40 existing poems, though the same mediaeval biogra- pher who was so stingy with her details tells us that he 'delighted much in noble ladies' and even names a few of them.
`He's become quite the little hellraiser.' Not, of course, the poor Comtesse de Die. Her pathetic handful of verses can be read as one of the earliest outlines of that well-loved feminine genre, the he-done- me-wrong story. To begin with, she is posi- tively jaunty, boasting that 'I feed off joy and youth, and the more my friend loves me, the prettier I become.' Tongues start to wag however, her husband becomes jeal- ous, and the smile on her face grows a shade more strained. Raimbaut, in any case, has turned out to be what people call `a bit of a one'. The Countess can't stop thinking about him, 'en leig e quand sut vestida,' 'when I'm in bed or up and dressed: I want him naked in my arms for just one night', yet something tells us he won't oblige.
Sardonically she imagines a little dialogue between them, with this vain, preening lover (as we know him to have been from his poetry) swearing eternal fidelity for the pleasure of being able to break his oath. 'Lady, may the hawk never rise from my fist, nor the falcon stoop to its prey if, once you give yourself to me entire- ly, I ever leave you for another.' All ended miserably, as she must have guessed it would. The saddest and most beautiful of the Comtesse de Die's five poems is an agonised outpouring of passion for the man who has spurned and betrayed her: I was never inconstant to you; remember how our love began and the promises we exchanged. My beauty, my high birth and my faithful heart may yet do me service when I send this song to you as my messenger. Tell me, my handsome lover, why you need to be so cruel. And let me tell you that pride like yours always comes before a fall.
And that apparently was that. Raimbaut went to Spain, where, as was the way with troubadours, he wrote poems to a lady he never saw, and La Comtesse de Die disappeared until German scholars at the end of the 19th century rediscovered what was left of her, a tiny, heart-wrenching fragment of one woman's amorous autobiography. Jenny Joseph, with printed editions, poems on the Internet and American libraries presumably falling over themselves to get hold of her manuscripts, will never suffer such a fate. As we say dahn Sarf London, count yer blessin's, darlin'.
Jonathan Keates
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