Lily Briscoe. Mary Meigs
says the amazing Jane. But Charlotte, knowing this, chose submission. She married Arthur because she pitied him, emaciated and pale for love of her, and one feels that Arthur, after their marriage, putting on weight, becoming pink-cheeked and healthy, is feeding on the body and blood and will of Charlotte.
But to get back to Isabel, whose crime was to marry for her own sake—she who loved the company of beautiful forms, was had by appearances and by the art of the con man. If I feel less close to her than to Lily Briscoe, the painter in To the Lighthouse, one of the reasons is that her resignation at the end of The Portrait of a Lady is too much for me to stomach. “She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.” Too straight! Back to Florence; in other words, back to hell. It is useless to hope that she will divorce Osmond; useless for Caspar to wait for her. She, the perfect lady, is going to stew in her own feelings of guilt. Oh Isabel, you had less courage than Ibsen’s Nora, who, at the end, is where you began! I feel the twinge of disappointment I’ve felt so often in my life at the spectacle of this resignation, planted, it seems, deep in every woman’s heart.
The wife of a great man. Finally, she is less in his light than in his shadow. Great men—with nothing to prevent them from soaring as high as they can, all those qualities of greatness (the selfishness, the iron will, the discipline that sets hours and refuses to be disturbed) coddled and encouraged and excused by the women around them, for every great man needs his slaves, even if one of them, his wife, is a great woman. She, with the same qualities perhaps, running into the stone wall of Him. Or perhaps, she is an almost artist, like Caitlin Thomas, who, eclipsed, went half-crazy in the effort to salvage her soul. Edmund, who gave me John Stuart Mill to read, put me down in my enthusiasm (his put-downs were part of his male arsenal) for, whatever his respect for individual women, he knew from experience that women can’t be liberated. “They are the way they are, born that way, or they want to be that way,” he would say impatiently. I had to agree that many women are, one might say, typically feminine, and proud of it, that they are superficial, irrational, catty, that they are all the things they are accused of being. But that they are born that way? Rather, don’t they realize, very quickly, perhaps at birth, where their power lies, the perverted power that is allowed them? Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point, which Edmund was incapable of getting, because no one had ever effectively challenged his power, was his right to command, to shout orders to his wife, his children, like a master sergeant in the Marines. (At an early age, I challenged this right in my older brother. “Why?” I asked him, when he told me to do something. “Because I say so,” he said, slapping me hard on the behind.) Where did this power come from, except from his own male assumption of it? Why was it that when he telephoned and said peremptorily, “Come over here around five, will you?” we trotted over like obedient dogs? To be sure, we grumbled; maybe we’d been in the middle of something, or ventured to give him some excuse for not coming. “Well, come if you can,” he would say angrily and he would hang up. We went, torn between our doggy devotion to Edmund and our ferocious sense of ourselves as beings who couldn’t, shouldn’t, be ordered around. And, as usual, we fell under the spell of Edmund, triumphant, doing his card tricks, playing Authors, anagrams, Chinese checkers, bouts rimés. We would tiptoe into the bright house and shout above the deafening music that poured from the depths of his study and he would appear, his face pink and freshly-shaved, to greet us.
Thinking about Edmund’s presence in my life, I make a distinction between the innocent prodigality of daytime and the nighttime Edmund who woke my anxieties. I described the daytime Edmund and his ancestral landscape in a letter to Anne Poor after our visit to him in July, 1964. “Upstate New York is . . . quite surprisingly like central Maine, with great elms, pastures, rolling hills and infinite green stretches under skies that generate thunderheads from nowhere, so there’s a marvellous play of light à la Greco’s ‘Toledo.’ One has more of a sense than in Maine of being on a frontier, even of something melancholy and sinister, but it’s probably because so many houses are actually falling down, and if they aren’t, they tend to be covered with hideous asbestos shingles or they consist of trailers that have been immobilized on cement blocks. There are very few really old houses and the towns are awful beyond words. Edmund’s house is BEAUTIFUL, very sparsely and simply furnished and freezing cold. I shivered so hard that he finally lit a fire in the dining room fireplace and we sat as close to it as we could. It was obvious that it was the first fire of the season, and that E. isn’t bothered by the cold. We spent almost all of the six days sightseeing—seeing natural wonders, ancestral mansions, Lake Ontario, Utica, Cooperstown. When there were a few minutes to spare, Bobbie [Barbara] and I would rush off to the underground river and the wonderful quarry, like Angkor Wat, but more ruined, or to some pasture where there were lovely cows (always Holsteins) and we’d run around to get warm . . . Then we’d sightsee and Edmund would talk more or less continuously about the past, and, in the evenings, he would play records or read to us or even sing songs of the twenties. In six days, we met only one set of neighbours, so you can imagine that our powers of attention were stretched to the breaking point and we’re still feeling rather limp.”
The daytime Edmund was a marvellous companion, with his enthusiasm for everything under the sun, and my only fear was that the awful words he sometimes applied to others—“He or she is a bore”—might be applied to me if my responses were stupid or ignorant. But as I look over the letters, postcards and valentines from him that accumulated during my years in Wellfleet, I realize better now than when I first read them, that I needn’t have worried, and I am moved by the courtly sweetness that permeates them, as if he needed the protective medium of the written word to express his most delicate feelings. He had a habit of sending small coloured engravings of fish with messages on them. I look at one of a pale blue fish resting dejectedly on an exotic shore. “I have missed you since you left—feel more and more like the picture on the other side,” says Edmund. And a little poem accompanies the Dolphin of the Ancients:
The Dolphin is extremely wise,
Turns rainbow colors when he dies;
But when the Dolphin thinks of you,
He turns a special lovely hue.
We shared a love for natural history and one of his presents to me was an Audubon engraving of an ocelot from the big folio edition. The munificence of this gift, and another of star-nosed moles, worried me, and I have a soothing letter from him, in which he says, “I didn’t want to keep the ocelot. I was pleased to be able to give you something you liked. I think you need it to counterbalance the mole. I am sure you have an ocelot in your nature, too.” Another of his psychological tests? For I had chosen, unconsciously, the opposites I harbour in me, timid and ferocious. Edmund’s character, too, contained its opposites: on the one hand, the Minotaur; on the other hand, an animal as graceful, shy and tender as the Unicorn, who rests one hoof in the lap of the Lady, in the Cluny tapestry. His intuitions never failed to surprise me, for his spoken judgements were monolithic and unchangeable, and, in a sense, we only really communicated in letters, which gave him time, instead of immediately overpowering me, of listening to what I had to say. In my meetings with him, I was constantly frustrated by my inability to express myself, yet I come upon forgotten letters which show that, after all, he took me seriously. “I was very much interested in your ideas about Edwin Drood,” he wrote in 1962. I cannot now remember what my ideas about Edwin Drood were, only that Edmund’s enthusiasm for the book had kindled one in me and that I had read it with a sleuth’s intensity, determined to solve its riddles. In the space of this one letter, which gives an idea of how he attempted to form my mind, he suggests that I read: “a long paper written on the probability that Dutchery is Bazzard,” that, if I want to go seriously into Edwin Drood, I will “have to get Robertson NicolPs book,” and that I should “probably read Love’s Cross Currents” by Swinburne, about whom he was writing then. He sometimes accused me of not reading anything he suggested, but I read as much as I could, and my anxiety to please him made me read with particular attention. Perhaps only in the forgotten matter of Edwin Drood was I able to persuade him that I was right about anything. I wanted to convert him to my view of The Turn of the Screw (of which more later) and to bring up the as yet unaired subject of Henry James’ homosexuality. He asserted