Lily Briscoe. Mary Meigs
on either side. In one of the closets, my mother had lined the shelves with gold and embossed Japanese wallpaper and had arranged on the shelves a collection of treasures: little tortoise-shell fans and Chinese bottles, cats made of lead glass, ivory and wood carvings, ancient Greek toys and Egyptian scarabs and fragments of statuettes. There, hidden away in the dark behind the painted door, was the fantasy life of my mother, like buried treasure. It reminded me in its surprisingness of the churches of Ravenna, with their plain exteriors and the amazing glimmer of gold inside. Outside the closet, my mother chose and arranged with her unerring eye and light touch, and everything became increasingly formal as you went downstairs. Looking at the Empire of Beauty (a great polished highboy with bright brass drawer handles, with finials and ornamental carving like two breaking waves on the top, about which someone was said to have exclaimed, “It’s an empire of beauty!”), the Chippendale chairs and Queen Anne tables, the mahogany table with ten leaves in the dining room, the Ming vase on the mantelpiece and the 18th Century mirror with a carved gilt eagle at the top, you saw that “other” mother, composed of family pride, a less personal love for beautiful objects, for it might have been the living room, the dining room of any conservative American family with inherited wealth and a sense of its own importance. Isabel Archer would have felt immediately at home here.
“Your mother was clairvoyant,” said Miss Walker (a real clairvoyant) as she gazed at a portrait I had done of my mother at three ages: young, middle-aged and old. “You didn’t have to tell her when something was going to happen; she always knew.” Was this really so? I searched and searched my memory and could think of no examples of my mother’s clairvoyance. But I knew that Miss Walker could see things that are unknown to me; things that I can hunt for and never find: the magic being shut up in the conventional woman; the paradox of the bird in its cage that refuses to walk out the open door, who does not see that the door is open, and, caught forever in her cage-habits, does not care.
“I see a little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand,” my elder brother used to say, and we twins would laugh nervously, knowing that he spoke of a storm brewing in our mother, spawned we knew not how. She had what we called her “black look”; it came from something one of us had said or done, something which, in retrospect, often seems ludicrously innocent. I can remember the weight of her stern eyes on me, willing me to meet her gaze, at the dinner table, while I looked at my plate, and of slithering guiltily around the house while the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand grew into a towering thunderhead and finally broke when she caught me. “You do not say to a young man that you’ve seen your sister in her pyjamas!” She threw this at me like a lightning bolt when I was more than twenty years old. On this occasion, one of my sister’s suitors, who was a house guest, had descended for breakfast and had asked where my sister was. My mother had overheard the fatal words, “The last time I saw her, she was in her pyjamas.” This is unimaginable now, as it was even then, but it shows in what a senseless atmosphere of prohibition we grew up. When I went to boarding school, the rules seemed perfectly natural to me, even a welcome relief from home, since, ridiculous though they were, they were, so to speak, visible (don’t sit on your bed or don’t “communicate” in study hall). At home, there were rules that regulated not only our behaviour and our conversations, but also our thoughts. The mere use of the word, “pyjamas,” or worse still, “bed,” evidently suggested sex to my mother; or did she fear that these words would suggest sex to me? But she needn’t have been afraid; our training had been so thorough that nothing suggested sex to me. I would like to know the reason for her real terror of sex, a fear that went beyond convention.
In fiction, the character most like my mother and our governess is the governess in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. One of my recurrent arguments with Edmund Wilson was about his insistence (he had written an essay about it which was accepted as the final word on the subject) that James’ governess was a neurotic monster who visited her sexual frustration on the children, Miles and Flora, aged twelve and six, and literally frightened Miles to death. In Edmund’s view, the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel were creatures of the governess’ sex-starved imagination and the children were innocent. To me, this wholly negative view of the governess spoiled the whole story, for wouldn’t my mother and my own governess have behaved exactly the same way, more violently, but with less tenderness? I see the story thus: that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel made the children aware of sex by making it quite clear to them that they were lovers, by talking in front of them or by being overheard, and, in Miles’ case, perhaps by overt sexual exchanges between him and Peter Quint. That this is not just imagined by the governess is clear from the fact that Miles has been dismissed from school for reasons that no one can even talk about (“I said things,” he says to the governess when she asks. “To those I liked,” which makes the nature of his crime crystal clear) and that Flora, in a state of delirium, pours forth a stream of “appalling language” about the governess, in the hearing of Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper. It gives you some idea of the moral hysteria of those times that the governess’ response to the news of Flora’s “appalling language” should be to cry, “Oh, thank God!” and to explain to Mrs. Grose, “It so justifies me!” And the good, solid Mrs. Grose, instead of saying, “Aren’t you being rather egocentric?” says, “It does that, Miss!” Mrs. Grose lives in the same world of good and evil as the governess and she perfectly understands her need to be morally in the clear. And it was here that ego, so repressed in other ways (as it was in my mother and governess), worked in women of that time, in the sense of the Tightness of their judgements of others. “There had come to me out of my very pity,” says the governess, “the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I?” Edmund’s answer to this was that Miles was innocent and that the governess was a murderer. But to me, Miles’ death, like the young heroes’ deaths in two other stories by James, “Owen Wingate” and “The Pupil,” was death by terror and guilt. The hearts of the two young men and the boy are not strong enough to bear the image society has of their guilt. Each is suspected of being homosexual, and, in one way or another, James repeatedly killed the homosexual in himself. Note that it is Miles, presumably the stronger of the two children, who dies, for he has made gestures to those he liked, whereas Flora has merely repeated words that she has heard, and in an unconscious state. The thought of this worst of all possible crimes, this unthinkable crime between Miles and Peter Quint, or Miles and his school friends, has induced in the governess an exalted religious fervour, the mawkishness of which makes me feel slightly sick. With her, it took the form of passionate tenderness, a violence of tender willing that was just as hard to take as our mother’s blackness. It never occurred to our mother, as it did to the governess, to say to herself, “If he were innocent what then on earth was I?” Our parents and governess belonged to a moral school in which guilt was presumed, and it was useless to argue. The wonder of it was that we never “said things,” but were scrutinized in the event that we might. Thoughts might come into our heads. How else to explain my mother’s rush to silence the orchestra playing in our house for our first dance, when they started to play, “It’s Sleepy Time Down South”? One would think that this sleepy time would preclude thoughts about sex, but to my mother it suggested them and it would suggest them to us. Our parents’ ideas about the crime of sex made their children’s lives arid, guilt-ridden or punitive (in my brothers’ case) for a long time. Of my brothers’ lives, when they were growing up, I know little, but imagine much. During the war, when I was twenty-four years old and lived in the family house in Washington, I was embraced at intervals by a married cousin who spent the night now and then and professed to be “crazy about me.” Laughing, I recounted this to my brother, who turned white with rage. “I’m going to tell Mother,” he said. I imagined the sequence of events: my cousin disgraced and thrown out of the house; my mother, forever unforgiving. “No, no, no, I can handle it! I promise you I can! I will!. . .” That moral rage, so familiar to me, fashioned from something as insubstantial as smoke, an idea that hardens the heart and makes people willing to destroy each other in its name. One can almost make an equation: that moral outrage is multiplied by the craziness of the idea held and that the more the idea is untenable, the more drastic the punishment for the person breaking its law. Or is it the more something is tempting, the more it must be punished? Oddly enough, the people who have never been tempted are as ruthless as those who have resisted temptation—and