The mystery associated with Wrenne Jarman's grave was alluded to in our tribute to Father Brocard Sewell in the Lost Club Journal No. 2. The journalist and poet Wrenne Madeleine Jarman was a friend of Montague Summers in his last years, spent at Richmond-on-Thames in Surrey, and a magnetic personality in her own right. No one will ever write a biography of Wrenne since there is presumably insufficient information available regarding her life, so she seems an eminently suitable candidate for assessment by the Lost Club. Father Brocard provided a portrait of Wrenne in Tell Me Strange Things, the tribute to Montague Summers (The Aylesford Press, 1991). Wrenne came from a comfortably off Richmond family -- her father Job Jarman was a builder -- and worked as a journalist on the Richmond and Twickenham Times. Father Brocard suggests that she met Summers through a series of articles she wrote on local notables. (We believe we may have identified Wrenne's profile: an article on Summers appeared in the Richmond Times in winter 1945. Although there is no byline, Wrenne may have been responsible for the piece, for one sentence, referring to Oxford, suggests that the reporter was female. Our investigations are continuing.) Her verses appeared in the Poetry Review, Poetry Quarterly, Punch and other periodicals of the day. Her first book, The Breathless Kingdom, appeared in 1948, from the Fortune Press (oh, for a time machine to travel back to the London of the Forties to see how Wrenne got on -- or not -- with Reginald Caton, the eccentric owner of the Press! See Timothy d'Arch Smith's The Books of the Beast [1987] for a candid chapter on the incorrigible old rogue1).
After Wrenne's death a second collection, Nymph, in thy Orisons (1961), edited by her brother Archie Jarman, a poet and painter, was published by Father Brocard at the Saint Albert's Press in a limited edition of 250 copies. Walter de la Mare, Edmund Blunden and Clifford Bax among others expressed admiration for Wrenne's poetry. Her friend Mrs Eileen Garrett, president of the Parapsychology Foundation of New York, described her as 'a brown-eyed, gazelle-like creature'. Indeed, the studio photograph of Wrenne reproduced in Nymph, in thy Orisons shows her to have been breathtakingly lovely; more movie star than poet, and an easy face to fall in love with, if only posthumously. To his shame, the present writer took no interest in Wrenne when he encountered her name in Joseph Jerome's Montague Summers: A Memoir (1965): clearly a spinster poet who was of little account. Then, sometime later, he saw the photograph in Nymph, in thy Orisons, and all was changed. No wonder Wrenne attracted the attention of Aleister Crowley. Although a devout Catholic -- many of her poems concern religious themes -- Wrenne became friendly with Crowley, who lived in Petersham Road and in a Queen Anne house on Richmond Green (has it ever been identified, one wonders) in the 1940s.
Joseph Jerome, in the Summers biography, says that Wrenne met Montie through the poet and editor Charles Cammell and his wife Iona (perhaps they introduced her so that Wrenne could write her newspaper profile): 'Summers came to have a high regard for Miss Jarman, who was extremely gifted and able intellectually to meet Summers on his own level . . . her courage and sense in ignoring gossip about Summers and taking him as she found him were admirable.' Mr Jerome (or should that be Fr Jerome?) quotes a kindly letter from Summers to Wrenne, written in 1946: she was ill and was about to enter a nursing home (at Amblecote): 'Eat well, drink well, sleep well, rest well -- and be well. And may our Lady of Lourdes look after you as She will of course do.'
The poet and author Derek Stanford met Wrenne when he was working at Eric Barton's Baldur Bookshop on Hill Rise, Richmond, in the 1940s. In his essay 'Boutique Fantasque' in the London Magazine (August/September 1988), Mr Stanford has left a poignant sketch of Wrenne:
One of those literary hostesses -- Betty Shaw-Lawrence on The Green was another -- who collected lions and lovers, Wrenne had been, still was, a very beautiful woman. She had independent means, a charming old house, and enough talent and sex appeal to set her up successfully as a lyric poet in the minor mode of the pre-Sparkian Poetry Society.
She invited me to supper shortly after I had met her in the bookshop and asked me if I liked beautiful women. I replied that I did -- especially when they were amusing as well -- and this appeared safely to circumvent a possibly romantic moment à deux. She was full of those confidences which the garrulity of self-preoccupation seems to sponsor.
It was not only the evident -- I might almost say protuberant -- attractions of her person which justified her in regarding herself as a femme fatale. Her current lover, a young middle-aged, good-looking but balding, sexological man-of-letters, had just passed away; and this sort of thing appeared to be the norm.
'All the men I love, and who love me, die, Derek. Is it something about me, do you think?'
I rather supposed it might be a question of emotional over-work, Wrenne was, after all, very intense.
Indeed, there did seem to be certain traits of fatality attached to her. Sometime during the war years, Aleister Crowley had lived at Richmond; and it was inconceivable that such a womanizer should not have come up against Wrenne. What their relationship was I do not know -- Don Juan versus La Belle Dame sans Merci? -- but she protested sadly that it was he who had 'wished' his asthma on her, which she had suffered from ever since.
Her own delightful dwelling in The Hermitage (at the end of The Vineyard) [now called Hermitage House] was at one time haunted, by a previous resident or a servant, until Wrenne, a member of the Old Faith, had asked a priest in to exorcize the troubled chamber. Apparently, the sprinkling had proved efficacious; but Wrenne's own spirits had remained disturbed. I always remember seeing her, one morning before nine-thirty when the shop opened, come shuffling, carpet-slipper-shod, into The Kardomah, in the High Street, where I was drinking a preparatory pre-work cup of coffee. Obviously, for her, this was a 'morning after'. I thought it might well have been a bad night -- nuit blanche -- rather than one over-dedicated to Venus or Bacchus. Somehow, her appearance, her desperate forlornless, prompted in me such images as that of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in late autumnal decay or of the Tower of Pisa the moment before its fall.
Somewhile later, when I had ceased my connection with the bookshop and was making a chance visit to Richmond, I met her behind the bus station. It was a sunny, early summer afternoon, blue, and with the canary-coloured acacia in blossom. But Wrenne was dolorous.
'Do you know, Derek, I can't pray any more.'
Well, she was an actress; but this time I believed her. Not long afterwards I heard she was dead.
Learning of Mr Stanford's interest in the spectral, Wrenne managed to fix a lunch date for him with Montague Summers. Mr Stanford went along to the house at 4 Dynevor Road one steamy and thundery autumn morning to meet the 'historiographer of warlocks and witches'. Naturally Mr Stanford was fascinated to see Summers' formidable library, but it was to be their one and only meeting: Summers died shortly afterwards2. Mr Stanford relates an amusing tale of Wrenne's relations with Dylan Thomas in Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs 1937-1957 (1977). On one occasion Wrenne arranged for Thomas to read his verse to some local poetry lovers at her home in Richmond. Dylan arrived an hour late:
. . . apologizing, smiling, and woefully drunk. By a superhuman effort, he controlled himself, and read to the scandalized audience one of his best and newly written poems. Annoyance and boredom were conjured away by the spell of his magnificent voice. Royally, the poem drew to a close; and as the listeners broke into applause, Dylan turned his back on them and proceeded to retch and vomit in the hearth.
Wrenne took rather a dim view of Dylan. She narrated his behaviour at a Poets' Club dinner, at which, drunk as usual, he had smoked throughout. 'Don't you think the writing of poetry ought to be limited to gentlemen, Derek?' I agreed that would be an ideal condition, but doubted whether her proviso would produce the best verse.
Wrenne died of cancer in Westminster Hospital, aged 42, on 8 March 1953. Canon R. P. Phillips, of St Elizabeth's Church in The Vineyard near Wrenne's home -- he had officiated at Summers's funeral in 1948 -- gave her the last sacraments and said of her: 'She was a great soul, and bore her atrocious sufferings with the greatest patience and resignation.'
The Jarman family grave at Richmond Cemetery has long been the centre of a romantic enigma. Letters and flowers from an admirer have been left on the memorial for years. Derek Stanford has written an effective ghost story, 'The Other Stairway', inspired by the mystery. Gardenia Holeshaw, a love-lorn poet modelled on Wrenne, lives in a haunted house in The Hermitage, and after her death messages are left on her grave. Eric Barton appears in the story as bookseller Miles Moncton, Montague Summers crops up (under a nom de guerre), and he and the protagonist, Paul Digby, based on Mr Stanford, lunch together. In the winter of 2000, one of the Lost Club editors wrote a piece for the Richmond and Twickenham Times enquiring whether anyone living in the town had any memories of Wrenne. It was not our intention to pry into the identity of her admirer, though the slant put on the story (which was rewritten, rather carelessly it must be said, by a reporter or sub-editor) gave that impression. Shortly after the story appeared in December, Mr Lionel Kenneth Watson, who lives at Isleworth, wrote to us identifying himself as the mystery admirer. He had been looking after the grave since the early 1980s, and over the years had left letters, flowers and trinkets there in memory of Wrenne. He explained:
Last summer some restoration work having been done, I got the impression that an unknown-to-me relative had taken an interest; my bits and pieces were all removed, and not wishing to upset anyone I haven't touched it since, though I still keep a daily eye on the area re. weeding if necessary . . .
I never knew Wrene personally, but as a young man (I'm now seventy) I came across her name at the London Poetry Society, a few months after her death. The unusual Christian name stuck in my mind; by and by, I came across both books of her poems, some of which I liked very much indeed, and eventually I came across her grave too not very far from here.
I was lonely at that time; after her brother's death in 1982, it was obvious that no one else would, so I 'adopted' the grave . . . 1983 approx. to this year, and as I say, I still keep an eye on it.
But readers of Tell Me Strange Things will know that Father Brocard, referring to the mystery in his tribute to Wrenne, said that on examining an envelope left on the grave in 1988, after the headstone for Montague Summers was unveiled, it appeared to bear the message 'From Arthur'. Mr Watson says:
A possible solution is my handwriting: mostly printing . . . but occasionally in 'real writing' . . . 'Lionel' could be misread as 'Arthur' . . . Especially if one's eyesight was a little faded. Did Father Sewell have poor eyesight I wonder. For he mentions that the inscription under Job Jarman's name was 'completely illegible' which it never has been. Faded out, so far as paintwork was concerned, yes, but at all times readable, being incised as he says in Latin . . .
I wrote quite long letters for ten years or so ¾ say 1985-1995 . . . Earlyish in this period, letters disappeared or were opened and disarranged a bit, fairly often, but later, hardly at all. I always thought it was council workmen, learning from experience that this nut's letters weren't bothering with.
Mr Watson has also been looking after Montague Summers' headstone in another section of the cemetery. Unfortunately in recent years the Welsh slate stone has fallen over. (Lost Club members were alarmed to hear, in July 2001, that the memorial stone had gone missing.) As officials at the cemetery office didn't seem to know what had happened to the stone, we feared occultists might have been responsible, purloining the Welsh slate slab for their own dark, nefarious purposes, and so were about to prepare a story for the press. Then, fortunately, a few days later, the stone was back in its rightful place, repaired and upright once again.)
Speaking to workmen preparing the Jarman gravestone for restoration in summer 2000, Mr Watson was told a relation -- possibly a doctor -- arranged for the work to be done. Mr Watson pointed out to us that near the grave is another Jarman monument -- to a Gretel Joan Jarman, who died in May 1938, placed there by her husband, 'Francis Jarman of this parish'. Mr Watson told us of a third book by Wrenne, The Inward Greatness. The eight-page booklet, published by The Fountains Press of Richmond (Wrenne herself?), consists of a poem dedicated to Winston Churchill. During the war Wrenne worked at the Hawker Siddeley aircraft factory; she also appeared at least once on the BBC, perhaps reading her poetry. In Mr Watson's copy of The Breathless Kingdom there is a letter from Wrenne, to a Fred Daniels, presumably a photographer, of 17 Coventry Street, London W1. The typed letter is dated 31 January 1948, from The Hermitage, Church Terrace, Richmond, Surrey, and runs:
Dear Fred Daniels,
The photographs are right out of this world! Thank you, thank you.
And my Brother finds the photograph of the painting very interesing.
I enclose my small tribute to Mrs Daniels. (I told you you would go
down on this.)
With all the best to you both,
Yours very sincerely,
'Renjie' Jarman [signed]
One wonders if one of the photographs referred to was the striking picture published in Nymph, in thy Orisons. And do any other photographs of Wrenne exist? It's interesting to discover that Wrenne was known to her friends as 'Renjie'.
The Jarman grave is located not far from the cemetery lodge at the Grove Road entrance. Take the path to the right and it is a few hundred yards away, A distinctive stone screen, with a tall brick surround, makes the grave easily identifiable. Nearby is the grave of the editor of the Bookman, Arthur St John Adcock (1864-1930), the author of Gods of Modern Grub Street (1923) and The Glory that was Grub Street (1928), and a fit subject for Lost Club investigation. According to Who Was Who, he lived at 55 Queens Road, Richmond.
In the Lost Club Journal No. 4 we will consider Montague Summers' relationship with Dennis Wheatley. Montie and the 'Prince of Thriller Writers' got on very well -- at first: in the 1930s Summers helped Wheatley with his research into occult lore. Some years after Summers' death Wheatley used his character and appearance as the basis for his satanic villain, Canon Copely-Syle, in To the Devil -- a Daughter (1953). And we have identified a possible Machen reference in The Devil Rides Out (1935). More next time . . .
NOTES
1. Caton crops up as 'L. S. Caton' in five of Kingsley Amis's novels, and as a seedy literary agent in The Terrible Door (1964) by George Sims (both were Fortune Press authors). He is shot to pieces in Amis's The Anti-Death League (1966). Mr d'Arch Smith states that when Caton died, in 1971, he owned ninety-one houses in Brighton, with 'not a bathroom among them'; but he had published more than six hundred books.
2. Mr Stanford's impressions of Montague Summers from his London Magazine article are worth reproducing:
The top of his head, in his baldness, suggested a tonsure; but his white hair hung elegantly combed upon his shoulders. He wore a clerical collar and waistcoat, and what I can best describe as ecclesiastical knickerbockers. I am not sure that his shoes were not adorned with buckles.
I found him to be a very hierarchical character -- at which, I, in no way took umbrage, having lately emerged from my ten-year-old cocoon of Anarchism in order to become a sceptical chain-mail Tory who would have welcomed Disraeli but regarded Margaret Thatcher with horror.
What I registered of Summers were visual rather than intellectual traits. Dressed in black, he made a sombre impact; and his combination of formal courtesy and hauteur did not make for a plenitude of communication. The look of the man was emphatic, however. His head was large, his countenance white. There was almost a bloodlessness about it; and he told us his health required that he took no vegetables with his meat. To see this pale-skinned necromancer wearily forking up slices of cold white chicken was a strange experience: sensual, carnal and yet curiously ectoplasmic. The fowl seemed to be the substance -- the element -- of some esoteric Communion: some white, or not so white, Mass.