About twenty of us assembled at two o'clock on a warm August day outside the Ethnography Department of the British Museum in Burlington Gardens to wander around the London sites frequented by Ernest Dowson in the London period of his short and tragic life. There was no way of identifying the likely Dowson enthusiast (we ranged from those in their twenties to those in their sixties, and from those who had a lifetime of familiarity with the poet to those who had come to him fairly recently) but we were all happy to walk around his London, to hear the introductory comments and try to add our own, and to get a clearer idea of what London was like for him in the 1890s.

We began just along the road in Vigo Street, where a pleasant shopkeeper let us in to the shop which had been Lane's premises at the Bodley Head, and still had his monogrammed brass door handle plate. Then we strolled past Smithers' shop in Royal Arcade, glanced at the Arts and Letters Club in Albemarle Street, which Dowson joined but didn't seem to like, although he often wrote from there. Then, how short a walk it was to the sites associated with Adelaide, Dowson's "Missie" and his great love. We first saw what was in some ways the end of that episode (although it never ended for Dowson) the Bavarian Church where she was married, a little gem of a church, with the added curiosity that Sir Richard Burton was married there in 1861. Dowson's 'Against My Lady Burton', his savage attack on her prudish immolation of his manuscripts, is unlikely to have come from that association, and may not even have come from Leonard Smithers' association with the publication of Burton's erotica, but the connections make one think. Then we saw merely the site of 'Poland', the restaurant where he met Adelaide and where he tried to entice all his friends to come and dine. And so on past the Café Royal and many of the sites of the places where Dowson would hang out: the London Pavilion, the Criterion, Jimmy's (St. James's Restaurant) and the Egyptian Hall, the Empire, the Alhambra, the Cavour and the Cock. The names alone conjure up the flavour of the period, but to walk past what remains and to learn how they relate to each other gives a clear shape to one's idea of Dowson, coming in from his dock in Limehouse, playing billiards at the Cock, dining at 'Poland', going to the theatre, and then on to drinking, or discussion with some friend or dossing on a sofa or a floor at the flat of one of his acquaintances, or whatever else. We could not only see, but feel how it could be done. The end of Dowson's life was represented too, as Nick Granger-Taylor poured a libation of absinthe in Ernest's memory at the foot of what was once the Bodega, where Dowson had had his last drink in London before going off to die at Sherard's house in Catford. But it was a hot day and we were glad to repair to the Coal Hole for some refreshment ourselves before resuming the walk past Smithers's Arundel Street office and on to Fountain Court. The contrast with the hectic streets and the difficulty of penetrating to this spot, where Symons and Havelock Ellis and Yeats had lived, perhaps emphasised its quietness and its magical quality. Another libation into the fountain (the 'Do not feed the fish' sign could be ignored without guilt as there were no fish to feed) and we read a few of Dowson's poems in the quiet shade of the planes and the mulberry trees.

Some of us went for a drink then to the Cheshire Cheese, the old haunt of the Rhymers, and others made their way home. Speaking for myself, who began reading and writing about Dowson in 1960, the walk put together as never before the places and the life style of the period and a sense of Dowson's days and evenings there.

Thanks Nick, and to Roger Dobson too. Dowson often ended his letters by including a poem. 'To conclude let me inflict upon you the last vapourings of my Muse'. I inflicted it on the group in Fountain Court, so I shall shamelessly quote it again:

ERNEST DOWSON: A POEM

Of the ways of writing a poem, one way is

Where the sound's what you fashion the sense with; another

Where you try for a mood, not seeking out harmonies.

And they don't come together so often, these ways,

Except as how sometimes the sea's crash is music,

Or the motion expressed in some music's a mood.

 

That's where Dowson comes in. That's his mood;

And critics go carping along: 'No variety;

He only says one thing: he's in love and wants peace,

But she won't; so he yearns, grows sad, world weary.'

But they see the words circling and ignore their hearing.

Listen! Oh, but there's music in Dowson.

 

Say what you will, there's more than just Cynara

Stuck like a cherry on top of the nineties,

More than just dabbling in Verlaine and Pater,

And becoming a Catholic as most of the rest did.

It's more than being love-sick for juvenile virgins

And fashionably dying of tuberculosis.

 

'There are more than two ways,' did I hear? I expected

I'd get that. 'You might be engrossed in the meaning.'

That's just what you would say, too, looking in Dowson

For different themes, when his aim was the losing

Of sense in the calm variation of music.

He only knew one way. But one way sufficed him.

 

 

Kelsey Thornton