Soul at the White Heat Page 5

  It is perhaps unexpected that my story “Papa at Ketchum 1961” is not at all in the tradition of Hemingway’s minimalist stories, nor even in the tradition of his later, more expansive stories. It is rather more a meditative, introspective, postmodernist prose poem that builds through something like incremental repetition; the obsessions of the aging, ailing, near-paralyzed and deeply depressed “Nobel-prize winning author” constitute the plot, examining layers of motive and personality as Hemingway’s fiction rarely did. Such inwardness would have dismayed Hemingway for it would seem to signal the kind of unmanly, self-exhibitionistic weakness more appropriate to Scott Fitzgerald (particularly in the memoirist “The Crack-Up”) than to the hyper-manly Hemingway for whom the confession of weakness, any sort of intimate self-revelation or self-pity would be humiliating. The story moves back and forth in time as Hemingway’s fiction, with its focus upon the present tense, and the present setting, resolutely did not. For the aging, ailing, deeply depressed and suicidal author (already in his late fifties an elderly man) the only way out of his quagmire was through writing—but writing was what he could not do, because (this is my theory) he could not confront his true subject, the paralysis of the spirit, the wellsprings of his own depression, the enigma of his own divided personality in which any sort of sentiment was softness, “feminine.” That the portrait of Hemingway is clear-eyed does not mean that it is not wholly sympathetic: there is a sense in which, like James Joyce in a very different way, Hemingway is the essential writer’s writer, a hero of writing, perhaps a martyr.

  I take for granted the fact of Hemingway’s genius—indeed, this is true for all of the subjects of Wild Nights!

  Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was another of the great, influential novels of my adolescence, which I would subsequently teach as a university instructor so frequently, with such intensity, that decades later I’ve discovered, leafing through my old much-annotated copy the other day, that I had virtually memorized the novel; just to glance at a paragraph is to uncoil the familiar words, as a strain of music can precipitate an entire work of music once played on an instrument. Yet, the protagonist of the elegiac “Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906” is not portrayed in anything like Twain’s own prose. Here is a very different sensibility, not self-aggrandizing (in comic excess, in Twain’s usual masterly vein) but obsessed with the self’s guilt. (It is ironic that Twain would have considered such a story obscene and unfathomable. Though the writer was emotionally drawn to young, prepubescent girls he could not have confronted anything like the chastely modulated pedophilia depicted here, in himself; if he had, he could not have forgiven himself as we are moved to forgive Grandpa Clemens.)

  It was my intention in these stories to present classic American writers in their “secret” lives. Not as they are usually perceived, and might have wished themselves perceived, but as, essentially, they really were in the coils of their own deep fantasies, in the last weeks, days, hours and minutes of their lives. The exception is Emily Dickinson who appears transmogrified, physically truncated and “distilled” as a computer-operated manikin, EDickinsonRepliLuxe—no longer mortal but immortal (as long as her owner doesn’t destroy her in a fit of jealous rage); the author of the most exquisite verse, whose language is indeed iridescent—“Bright Knots of Apparitions/Salute us, with their wings—” that is maddening to those who don’t understand poetry (or, perhaps, women).

  “The Master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital” is my homage to Henry James. It is an elegy for James’s not often heralded courage, and for the vanished way of life of the Master; a depiction of a sudden flaring up of (sexual, spiritual) passion in an elderly gentleman-artist whose life has been almost totally repressed. This is the true subject of the story, that erupts in gothic excess in the Master’s fever-dream of the demonic adversarial female, Nurse Edwards, who peers into his most secret longings. In life, Henry James behaved with extraordinary courage and generosity in volunteering to work with wounded soldiers at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, as noted by his friend and benefactor Edith Wharton; it would be good to think that, at the age of seventy-three, James died with his romantic fantasies intact—a fate all writers might wish for themselves.

  THE WRITING ROOM

  “No ideas but in dreams”—or rather, day-dreams.

  A strange fact of my life is that I spend much of my time gazing out the window of any writing space I have inhabited. This is particularly true of my present study which overlooks, from the second floor of our house in a quasi-rural area four miles from Princeton, New Jersey, the rear of our property sloping down to a creek that flows into a nearby lake. (In Berkeley, where we sometimes live in the winter months in a house on Panoramic Hill, my writing table overlooks resplendent San Francisco Bay.)

  There is surely some subtle connection between the vistas we face, and the writing we accomplish, as a dream takes its mood and imagery from our waking life.

  Among my earliest memories are the fields, woods, and creeks of my childhood in western New York State where I grew up on a small farm on Transit Road in a rural community called Millersport, twenty miles north of Buffalo. We lived so close to the Tonawanda Creek that I could see it from the upstairs windows of our farmhouse.

  This writing room replicates, to a degree, the old, lost vistas of my childhood. What it contains is less significant to me than what it overlooks though obviously there are precious things here—photographs of my parents Carolina and Fred Oates, and my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern (who is the inspiration for my novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter). Photographs of my husband Raymond Smith, who died in February 2008, and of my second husband, Charlie Gross, who is a neuroscientist at Princeton University. Portraits of me by my artist-friend Gloria Vanderbilt, a collage by Gloria of photographs of my family and me, and a beautiful painting by Gloria—“Joyce and Ray in the Rain.” A beautiful photograph of peacocks taken by Charlie in China. Like all writers, I have made my writing room a sanctuary of the soul.

  Bookshelves contain copies of most of the books I have written from 1963 onward, along with selected paperback editions. How stunned I would have been to imagine, at the outset of my writing life, that, in time, I would write so many books!—when each day’s work, each hour’s work, feels so anxiously wrought and hard-won.

  My writing begins in “long-hand” sketches and notes. Ideally, I write in this way seated at my beautifully carved little “antique” table where I can gaze dreamily toward the creek/lake in the near distance and be distracted by the activities of myriad birds at the feeders below. (Red cardinals in the snow are the heart’s delight!) My larger and more utilitarian desk contains my laptop and it’s here that I type seriously, often for hours; invariably I am expanding upon ideas that I’ve written by hand, in what is called, quaintly, “cursive”—soon to be a lost or even secret skill, like Gaelic.

  I love my study and am unhappy to have to leave it for long.

  Yet I think I most envy writers who look upon the sea, or upon rivers—I would be absolutely enthralled facing such a view where time would pass virtually unnoticed, in anticipation of something wonderful.

  II

  CLASSICS

  MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH:

  REBECCA MEAD

  Rarely attempted, and still more rarely successful, is the bibliomemoir—a subspecies of literature combining literary criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.

  The most engaging bibliomemoirs establish the writer’s voice in counterpoint to the subject, with something more than adulation or explication at stake. Nicholson Baker’s quirkily inspired book-length essay U and I charts the young writer’s obsession with the sensuous, poised prose and public career of John Updike, a curious double portrait that manages to be both self-effacing and arrogant; Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence is a very funny if despairing account of the writer’s failure to write the “sober, academic study” of Lawrence’s work he has hoped to write,
before becoming overcome by distractions and inertia and creating a “wild book” in its place; Christopher Beha’s The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else is a warmly personal account of a young man’s intensive summer’s reading of the Harvard Classics Library (fifty-one volumes) amid a season of familial crisis and loss. Phyllis Rose’s ironically titled The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time subordinates the magisterial Remembrance of Things Past to the busy, often trivial minutiae of the memoirist’s daily life, while, as its ebullient title suggests, David Denby’s Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World is a zestful anecdotal account of an adult returning to the education he’d failed to appreciate as a Columbia undergraduate. And there is Rick Gekoski’s chatty Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir, which traces the influence of twenty-five books on the English bookseller-author’s life. Each represents a risky appropriation of an exalted subject, and each fearlessly casts the memoirist’s shadow over the text.

  By contrast, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch is a beguilingly straightforward, resolutely orthodox and unshowy account of the writer’s lifelong admiration for George Eliot and for Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1874) in particular—the Victorian novel famously described by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” There is no irony or Postmodernist posturing in Mead’s forthright, unequivocal and unwavering endorsement of George Eliot as both a great novelist and a role model for bright, ambitious, provincially born girls like herself, eager to escape their intellectually impoverished hometowns—“Oxford was my immediate goal, but anywhere would do.” At the age of seventeen, when she first reads Middlemarch, Mead’s identification with Eliot’s nineteen-year-old heroine Dorothea Brooke is immediate, unqualified, and will last for decades:

  [Eliot’s] theme—a young woman’s desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life—was certainly one with which Eliot had been long preoccupied. . . . And it’s a theme that has made many young women, myself included, feel that Middlemarch is speaking directly to us. How on earth might one contain one’s intolerable, overpowering, private yearnings? Where is a woman to put her energies? How is she to express her longings? What can she do to exercise her potential and affect the lives of others? What, in the end, is a young woman to do with herself?

  Today, such earnest questions are more likely to be found in young adult fiction for girls, but Victorian writers took seriously their duties to “instruct and enlighten”; Mead notes how Eliot’s “guiding principle” was that of creating work that would “gladden and chasten human hearts.” Nor are these questions likely to have been applicable to Victorian women of the working class: Dorothea Brooke is the daughter of a well-to-do family, and financial concern will not guide her life-choices. Instead, not unlike Henry James’s equally idealistic, naïve and well-to-do young heroine Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage guided by bourgeois Victorian marital expectations: “The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.” Contemporary readers are likely to see the impossibly pompous, pedantic, and self-deluded pseudo-scholar Reverend Edward Casaubon whom Dorothea marries as a caricature lacking even the subtlety of the elderly professor in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya—another failed pedant married to a young, beautiful and unhappy wife—but Dorothea is seduced by a kind of innocent self-aggrandizement in her decision to marry the scholar who hopes to solve “The Key to All Mythologies.” Poor Casaubon! Eliot is unsparing of his pretensions though the reverend’s quixotic project resembles at least superficially James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). And contemporary readers are likely to feel, as feminists like Kate Millett have observed, that Dorothea is a flawed heroine in that she chooses marriage—and then remarriage—in place of a courageously ambitious life of her own or one that approximates the life of her creator. It’s as if Eliot did not dare, for all Dorothea’s superiority, conclude Middlemarch in a region beyond the “marriage plot”—the formulaic conclusion to conventional romances for women which Eliot famously derided in her essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Mead notes the conjoining of “comedy” and “pathos” in Eliot’s compromised world in which the novelist “makes Middlemarchers of us all.”

  Distilled from numerous biographies of Eliot including Rosemary Ashton’s George Eliot: A Life and Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction, enhanced by firsthand reports of travels to places where Eliot lived and worked, and suffused throughout with enormous sympathy for her subject, Rebecca Mead’s’ My Life in Middlemarch is an exemplary introduction to the work of George Eliot and a helpful and informed companion guide to Middlemarch. Its origins in what is suggested as a personal crisis on the author’s part—“I wanted to recover the sense of intellectual and emotional immersion in books that I had had as a younger reader, before my attention was fractured by the exigencies of being a journalist”—connect with the perceived “natural history of yearning” which Mead sees in Eliot’s work, as Mead’s curiosity about the ill-fated friendship of Eliot and Herbert Spencer, the historical origins of the mismatched Dorothea and Edward Casaubon, and the relationship between Eliot and the infatuated Scots “fan” Alexander Main, who talked Eliot into allowing him to edit the cloyingly titled “Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Works of George Eliot” (1873) provide emotional ballast. (Of the gushingly enthusiastic Scotsman, Mead says reprovingly: “Such an appeal to fiction—where do I see myself in here?—is not how a scholar reads, and it can be limiting in its solipsism.”)

  Mead is so reverent about her magisterial subject, and Eliot so solemn about the duties of the novelist to “enlarge sympathy” in her readers, it’s a welcome surprise when the young Henry James arrives on the London scene to brashly proclaim: “(Eliot) is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth and a chin and jaw-bone qui n’en finissent pas”; yet this first, crude impression is soon amended by the young American:

  Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her. . . . You behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.

  That the twenty-six-year-old Henry James was capable of such rhapsodic praise comes as something of a surprise for many of us, more familiar with the older, rather more circumlocutious Master.

  The most evocative passages in My Life in Middlemarch are those in which the author hints at parallels with Eliot’s domestic life as a loving stepmother (to longtime companion the critic George Henry Lewes’s sons) in her own marriage to a man with children from a previous marriage: “From where I stand in the middle of my own home epic—my own mundane, grand, domestic drama, in which I attempt to live in sympathy with the family I have made—I now look upon the accomplishment of early-dawning, long-lasting love with something like awe.” Not youthful romance but mature, abiding love amid the life of the everyday is Eliot’s great subject: “Middlemarch gives my parents (who were married for sixty years) back to me.” My Life in Middlemarch is a poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction:

  I have grown up with George Eliot. I think that Middlemarch has disciplined my character. I know it has become part of my own experience and my own endurance. Middlemarch inspired me when I was young, and chafing to leave home, and now, in middle life, it suggests to me what home might mean, beyond a place to grow up and grow out of.

  Yet it will strike some readers as debatable that Eliot is, as Mead states, “the great artist of disappointment”—rather more, Eliot strikes us as the great artist of bourgeois accommodation and compromise.

  Admirable and endearing as My Life in Mid
dlemarch is, there are virtually no surprises here; as Eliot’s world view seems to confirm, for many, some approximation of their own, so too does My Life in Middlemarch confirm the general, uncontested view of this great Victorian novelist. There is something self-limiting if not solipsistic about focusing so narrowly upon a single novel through one’s life, as if there were not countless other, perhaps more unsettling, more original, more turbulent, more astonishing, more aesthetically exciting and more intellectually challenging novels than Middlemarch—James Joyce’s Ulysses, to name but one; Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, to name another. Does George Eliot, wonderful as she is, and certainly comforting in the unwavering sanity of her narrating voice, stir us to an awareness of the actual world with any of the authority of Franz Kafka? Isn’t there a radiantly gifted Charles Dickens who transcends any of his Victorian contemporaries, including Eliot? Are not the radically experimental novels of Virginia Woolf more exciting, simply as aesthetic experiences? Like her genteel predecessor Jane Austen, George Eliot gives the impression of being utterly oblivious to the physical, physiological, sexual lives of women; far more insightful in the relations of the sexes is Thomas Hardy, not to mention the sexual visionary D. H. Lawrence. Clinging to Middlemarch isn’t unlike clinging to an attractive but long-outdated map out of a stubborn predilection for the antique: an act of loyalty and fidelity, but perhaps disingenuous.