Ernest Dowson and "Missie"
A study of the "strange and sordid" romance between Ernest Dowson and Adelaide Foltinowicz
Ernest Dowson was born in 1867 into a family of some distinction. His father Alfred Dowson associated with literary figures such as George Meredith (1828-1909) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) (Flower and Maas 5-8), but the family dockyard in Limehouse on the Thames had fallen into decline. Ernest left Oxford University in March 1888 to pursue a literary career as a poet and novelist, with initial success but increasingly overshadowed by poverty, unrequited love for his young adolescent muse Adelaide Foltinowicz, and declining health. He died of consumption on 23 February 1900 aged thirty-two. On 12 February 1900, the critic and poet Arthur Symons (1865-1945) summarised Dowson’s tragic life in a letter to his future wife Rhoda Bowser.
Dowson has had a miserable life every way: hereditary craving for drink, an insane mother who committed suicide, debauchery of the vulgarest kind, united with an almost crazily ideal affection for a very young girl, the daughter of a Polish inn-keeper in Soho – his whole story is as strange and sordid a romance as I know. (Symons, Letters no. 67)
On 9 November 1889, Dowson wrote to Arthur Moore, his friend from Oxford University and co-author of the novels Adrian Rome (1889) and A Comedy of Masks (1893),[1] that he had discovered a Polish restaurant at number 19 Sherwood Street, he would subsequently refer to simply as Poland. “I am dining tonight with Samuel [Smith] at a Polish Pot au Feu in Sherwood St., Glasshouse St. Soho. I discovered it. It is cheap; the cuisine is fair; I am the whole clientele, and there is a little Polish demoiselle therein (Minnie at 5st 7 –no not quite that – whom it is a pleasure to sit & look at” (Dowson, Letters no. 73). In A Comedy of Masks, originally titled in draft form Masquerade, Dowson adopted Poland as the basis for a bohemian restaurant called Brodonowski’s, located in a fictional Turk Street, Soho, frequented by three of the novel’s central characters, Philip Rainham, Dick Lightmark and Oswyn. Philip Rainham, suffering from consumption, runs an unsuccessful dockyard in the East End and is reclusive but held in esteem by Lady Garnett, a leading socialite, and her niece Mary Masters. Dick Lightmark, an up-and-coming society painter, marries Eve Sylvester, for whom Rainham harbours repressed romantic feelings from when he knew her as a child. Oswyn, a talented but dissolute painter, befriends Rainham but falls out with Lightmark over his plagiarism of a painting by Oswyn. The plot revolves around the revelation of an affair Lightmark had with a young model, Kitty Crichton, and his subsequent abandonment of her and their child. When Kitty reveals the affair to Eve, Rainham steps in to protect Eve by asserting he is the father. After Rainham’s death, Oswyn takes steps to clear his friend’s reputation, thereby exposing Lightmark’s conduct.
Dowson supplied the plot, the principal characters and locations and, given that he had written a fair amount of prose on his own, it is perhaps surprising that he wanted to share it with Moore at all. However, Dowson had the self-knowledge to appreciate that he could realize a great project only if he had the support, encouragement and constant pressure of a collaborator. (Adams 42)
On 9 November 1889 Dowson met the eleven-year-old daughter of the proprietors of Poland, Adelaide Foltinowicz, or ‘Missie’, whose family lived above the restaurant and with whom he became infatuated. He courted her until her marriage in September 1897 to a tailor, previously a waiter at Poland, put an end to his illusions. In letters to Moore from 1890 to 1891, Dowson provides several descriptions of “la petite demoiselle” who had so infatuated the young poet.
My little Frauleinchen was quite too adorable in her pinkest pinafore, & a complexion of milk & roses. (25 June 1890, no. 105); I have just returned from actual Poland where I spent most of the evening. Missy came back all right looking rosy & prettier than ever & bringing a good scent of hops & roses with her. The effect of her entry was transfusing – we all with one accord became joyous (I have quite become one of the family you know now) and I observed a stolid German cousin who has been staying there for the last month, knitting in a perfectly stolid condition, smile for the first time. Die Kleine more entirely resembles a sunbeam than anything which I have ever come across. I am still mellow from the interlude. I could rhapsodize for many sheets but I will spare you. (27 Aug. 1890, no. 113) We celebrated the Natalia of “Missy”, last week; the thirteenth, I did not greatly care for the butterfly brooches; so found a cadeau, less ornamental. She has a charming, new toilette; dull slate blue with silver buttons: you must see it. (22 Apr. 1891, no. 143) If I find the Poste Restante full of letters, it may save me: or perhaps the tonic spray of Biscay: but I am full of shudders & the solemnity of my adieux in Poland almost reduced Adelaide to tears. She told me she saw you; but to-night she had a new toilette & a new coiffure, & looked precisely like a little child Marquise who had stepped out of a canvas of Watteau. (25 June 1891, no. 154)
Events would cast a darker light for Dowson on his relationship with Adelaide. In August 1891, the newspapers reported on the savage abduction of a sixteen-year-old girl. In a letter to Moore of 3 September 1891, Dowson expressed how he felt the story might cast a sinister light on his relationship with Missie.
I have had a moral shock since yesterday, which has racked me ever since with an infinite horror that I may be misunderstood in the only thing that I really care about, by the only people to whom it matters. As ill luck would have it I came across the Star yesterday and read a most disgusting story of a disgusting person, which I suppose is a notorious scandal that one has escaped by being in Brittany. The worst of it was, that it read like a foul and abominable travesty of – pah, what is the good of hunting for phrases. You must know what I mean, and how I am a writhing. I imagine all the comments & analogies which one’s kind friends will draw, and unfortunately I can’t help feeling that even her people – and mine, as far as that goes, might take alarm and suspect my motives. And yet I swear there was never a man more fanatically opposed to the corruption of innocence – even where women are concerned – than I am. Unfortunately the excellence of my conscience doesn’t make any difference. This beastly thing has left a slimy trail over my holy places. (Dowson, Letters no. 162)
In his Preface, written from Pont-Aven in Finistère, Dowson dedicated Verses (1896) to Adelaide, “For I need not write your name for you at least to know that this and all my work is made for you in the first place” (Dowson Poems and Prose 19).
MY LADY APRIL
Dew on her robe and on her tangled hair;
Twin dewdrops for her eyes; behold her pass,
With dainty step brushing the young, green grass,
The while she trills some high, fantastic air,
Full of all feathered sweetness: she is fair,
And all her flower-like beauty, as a glass,
Mirrors out hope and love: and still, alas!
Traces of tears her languid lashes wear.
Say, doth she weep for very wantonness?
Or is it that she dimly doth foresee
Across her youth the joys grow less and less.
The burden of the days that are to be:
Autumn and withered leaves and vanity,
And winter bringing end in barrenness. (Dowson, Poems and Prose 27)
Ezra Pound, who was influenced by Dowson’s verse, portrays a less idealised but, to judge from Dowson’s correspondence, more realistic view of Dowson’s sexual attitudes in his poem “Siena Mi Fe, Disfecemi Maremma”, in Part I of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued
With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.
So spoke the author of “The Dorian Mood”. (Pound 15)
In letters to Moore, Dowson reveals his less than romantic attitude to girls around the time he first met Missie.
There is no doubt in my mind that given the desirability of an amourette, this is the right type of girl. A girl in society is too much fettered & cramped – another sort of girl is always bringing you down to the most material base standpoint – but here you have the refinement of the mondaine with the independence of the cocotte - & conjoined the special, enchanting quality of the grisette. It is quite new too, to meet with a girl who takes one’s love-making shyly –with whom it’s not merely an exchange of persiflage. For in spite of her audacity in public, when one has her to oneself, Mademoiselle Lena is really shy - blushful – full of charming reticences. She must be extremely young & presumably innocent. (Dowson, Letters no. 24; 24 March 1889). The tart is aged 153/4 & belongeth to a tobacconist of Piccadilly who apparently views his paternal responsibilities lightly. The circumstances attending the origin of our acquaintance I will tell you some other time. She hath the torso of seventeen, at least, and wonderfully fine eyes- she has vouchsafed me a rendezvous for Sunday, when I tea with her at the Abode of Prophecy (No. 4 M M) and for Satdy when I take her to a theatre. I have also made lavish vows of correspondence & am now contemplating effusion, - a task of some difficulty. I confess I have not quite grasped the situation. How does it strike you? The name, I may mention is Bertha Van Raalte!!!!!. (Dowson, Letters no. 74; 11 November 1889)
In April 1897, Dowson, on his return from a year spent in France, briefly lived in a room above Poland, a foolish decision as he acknowledged in a letter that month to Samuel Smith, a friend from Oxford.
I know that you must think me a fool, but I am suffering the torture of the damned. I ought to have drowned myself at Pont Aven, or having come back to London I ought to have had the strength of mind to have kept away. Now, if I change my rooms or go to the Arctic Pole it is only an increased intolerable Hell, and except yourself, and slightly, Moore, there is not a person I come across who realizes that I am being scorched daily, or does not put down my behaviour to sheer ill humour. (Dowson, Letters no. 351)
Arthur Symons in his review of Verses, identified Dowson’s relationship with Adelaide as the source of his creativity.
I only saw twice, and for a few moments only, the young girl to whom most of his verses were to be written, and whose presence in his life may be held to account for much of that astonishing contrast between the broad outlines of his life and work. The situation seemed to me to be of the most exquisite and appropriate impossibility. She had the gift of evoking, and, in its way, of retaining, all that was most delicate, sensitive, shy, typically poetic, in a nature which I can only compare to a weedy garden, its grass trodden down by many feet, but with one small, carefully-tended flower-bed, luminous with lilies. I used to think, sometimes, of Verlaine and his "girl-wife," the one really profound passion, certainly, of that passionate career; the charming, child-like creature, to whom he looked back, at the end of his life, with an unchanged tenderness and disappointment: "Vous n'avez rien compris à ma simplicité," as he lamented. In the case of my friend, however, there was a sort of virginal devotion, as to a Madonna; and I think, had things gone happily, to a conventionally happy ending, he would have felt (dare I say?) that his ideal had been spoilt. (Symons, “A Literary Causerie” 92-93)
On one level Dowson’s relationship with Adelaide was unexceptional. Not tainted by any sense of sexual impropriety, it appears from Dowson’s correspondence that he behaved in the role of a benevolent relative escorting Adelaide on outings to the circus (Hengler’s Grand Cirque (183)), and Niagara (a London attraction of Niagara Falls (174)). Dowson’s reaction to the story in the newspapers about an older man taking advantage of a young woman demonstrates his dismay at being associated with any improper conduct. It still remains a mystery, as Symons perceptively remarked, why Dowson should persist in romanticising a relationship which was in every sense impossible – on grounds of age, social class, education – and seen as such to the bemusement and exasperation of his friends. One clue may lie in a letter to Arthur Moore of 22 August 1990, where Dowson is expressing dissatisfaction with their portrayal of the character of Eve Sylvester in The Comedy of Masks: “Our ingenués are certainly our weakest creations. Or are all ingenués so very much alike? You know them better than I do. And you have been at least “interested” in them from time to time -―n’est ce pas?―whereas I have been interested in “young persons”―etc but never in ingenués” (161). In another letter to Victor Plarr of 5 March 1891, Dowson’s ambivalence to his besotted behaviour towards Adelaide is reflected:
Die Kleine instead of changing, altering, repelling, as I hoped/feared might happen, in the nature of things, seems to grow in grace & favour daily. What a terrible, lamentable thing growth is! It “makes me mad” to think that in a year or two at most the most exquisite relation I have ever succeed in making must naturally end. Yes, it makes me mad! One ought to be able to cease caring for anyone exactly when one wished; its too difficult; or one ought to be able to live entirely in the present.
Dowson’s failure, or perhaps inability, to forge a relationship with a woman of his age and social class meant that his infatuation with Adelaide continued for eight years to its inevitable end when she married. Symons’ hypothesis that the relationship was the well from which Dowson drew his creativity and its end signalled his decline, is dubious. It was more Dowson’s ill-health, dissolute lifestyle and financial impecuniosity that terminated his career and not the end of a relationship that he himself recognised was doomed to failure. Dowson’s talent in prose, theatre and poetry was considerable and far from exhausted at the time of his untimely death. As Oscar Wilde wrote to the publisher Leonard Smithers on learning of Dowson’s death: “Poor wounded, wonderful fellow that he was; a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol or a scene. I hope bay leaves will be laid on his tomb, and rue, and myrtle too, for he knew what love is” (cited in Ellmann 553).
Works Cited
Adams, Jad. Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent. J. B. Tauris, 2000.
Dowson, Ernest. The Letters of Ernest Dowson. Edited by Desmond Flowers and Henry Maas, Cassell, 1967.
---. The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson, Boni and Liveright, 1919, pp. 187-209. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.49015001264549&view=1up&seq=9
Dowson, Ernest and Arthur Moore. A Comedy of Masks. William Heinemann, 1893. 3 vols. Archive.org.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Hamish Hamilton, 1987.
Flower, Desmond and Henry Maas, editors. “Introduction.” The Letters of Ernest Dowson. Edited by Desmond Flowers and Henry Maas, Cassell, 1967, pp. 3-8.
Pound, Ezra. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. The Ovid Press, 1920. Archive. org.
Symons, Arthur. Arthur Symons. Selected Letters, 1880-1935. Edited by Karl Beckson and John M. Munro, U. of Iowa Press, 1989.
---. The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art in the 1890s. Edited by Karl Beckson, Pennsylvania State Press, 1977, pp. 157-69.
---. “A Literary Causerie: On a Book of Verses.” The Savoy, edited by Arthur Symons, no. 4, Aug. 1896, pp. 91-93. Archive.org, archive.org/details/savoy_1896_04/.
[1] Arthur Symons in his essay Ernest Dowson, described the two novels as “both done under the influence of Mr. Henry James, both interesting because they were personal studies, and studies of known surroundings, rather than for their actual value as novels” (The Memoirs of Arthur Symons 89).