Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  The most striking thing about all this is, without a doubt, the era itself, for, having been born in 1862, Violet Hunt not only enjoyed to the full the brief Edwardian reign of great permissiveness (as long as any “irregularities” were not found out), she lived through much of the prim Victorian era too. This means, by the way, that Violet Hunt was forty-six when she began her affair with Ford Madox Ford, who was eleven years her junior. In those days it was a rare woman who could boast of having found the love of her life at such an age. One can only assume that Violet, though mature in years, was still rather ingenuous, since she fell into Ford’s trap in a somewhat theatrical manner: “by the will of Providence”, according to her (but it seems that it was more thanks to a timely nudge from him), her hand slipped into Ford’s jacket pocket and in it discovered a bottle, bearing the label on which was scrawled the word “POISON”. She snatched the bottle from him and asked if he had been intending to drink the stuff. He said that he had and she, judging that she had saved his life, felt duty bound to love him. Those who knew the real Mrs Ford said that, in the same situation, she would probably have encouraged her husband to drink it.

  In the midst of all this passion, Violet Hunt still found time for many other things, such as supporting the suffragist movement, avoiding being propositioned by well-known lesbians, attending a thousand and one parties, and writing articles and books, thirty-one of the latter, including novels, stories, poems, plays and translations. Those that have best survived are her neo-Gothic tales and her ghost stories, which are truly splendid, and which Henry James suggested should be entitled (although she, alas, refused) Ghost Stories by a Woman of the World, which, of course, she was, so much so that one has the feeling sometimes that her admiring colleagues loved her and kept up with her more for her inexhaustible abilities as a gossip and as an opener of social doors than for her literary gifts. She was always looking for patrons, but only managed to find rather half-hearted and reluctant ones in James and Conrad and Wells and Hudson. The first of these, much given to nicknames, used to refer to her either as “the Improper Person of Babylon” or “his Purple Patch”, because of the colour of the hat and coat she was wearing the first time he met her.

  She had no lovers after Ford and, at the end of her life, she went in for creating, without much success, scheming, treacherous male characters. Advancing syphilis affected her mind and caused her to make some irreparable faux-pas: she once said to the novelist Michael Arlen: “Michael Arlen’s really quite a nice young man—and extremely clever. I wonder why it is that his books are so awful.” It is no wonder that she became progressively lonelier and sadder until her death in 1942, at the age of seventy-nine. Her strong, contradictory personality survives in a few memorable characters created by those more important writers who were her friends or lovers: she inspired them, but they did not manage to make her very happy. Only a very naïve person could say that they, in exchange, immortalised her.

  Julie de Lespinasse, the Amorous Mistress

  THE LIFE OF Julie de Lespinasse was short, painful, and complicated, which only makes her extraordinary capacity for bringing people together and putting them at their ease all the more commendable. Those who attended the long daily gatherings in her salon in Rue de Bellechasse (among them D’Alembert the encyclopaedist, Diderot, Condorcet, Marmontel, prelates, noblemen, diplomats, and ladies of all kinds, even the wives of field marshals) bear witness to her remarkable ability to keep magisterial control over these meetings of privileged minds and demanding intellects, even though she herself barely contributed to the conversation. It is no wonder, then, that when her protectress Madame du Deffand threw her out of her house, accusing her of betraying her and of appropriating her friends, most of those now mutual friends, forced to choose between the two salons, opted to follow the less witty but more agreeable of the two ladies. Such was the feeling of harmony that she managed to create among her guests that, on the death of their hostess, one of them, Monsieur de Guibert, put it very succinctly: “We have been sundered.” Indeed, they saw no further reason to continue meeting, knowing that they would not be the same people without her presence.

  Julie de Lespinasse’s origins were murky and unpromising; she was the illegitimate daughter of the Comtesse d’Albon, and no one knows with absolute certainty who her father was, although it seems likely that it was the Comte de Vichy, Madame du Deffand’s elder brother. The Comtesse d’Albon had another legitimate daughter, who, in time (in 1739), married Vichy, who thus became the brother-in-law of his unacknowledged daughter, as well as the husband of his niece and ex-lover of his mother-in-law. None of this proved of much help to Julie de Lespinasse when that mother-in-law, her mother, died: she went to live with her double relatives, who treated her like a servant or worse, until Madame du Deffand (who was, I suppose, both aunt and sister-in-law) took pity on her and decided to sweep her off to Paris, with the aforementioned results. Julie herself, who was always discreet as to her origins, confessed, nevertheless, that nothing could surprise her in the convoluted novels of Richardson and Prévost, so full of consanguineous complications, and that may be why her favourite author was Sterne, whom she deciphered, imitated and possibly received as a guest on one of his Paris trips.

  Her life, however, was more like something out of Pamela or Manon Lescaut than Tristram Shandy, and if Julie de Lespinasse has passed into history it is, as with her protectress and rival, because of her letters. These two sets of correspondence could not be more different: if Madame du Deffand was noted for her pessimism, her caustic humour and her scepticism, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was all ardour and passion, at least in most of the letters that have survived, those addressed to Monsieur de Guibert, whom she loved regretfully and frenziedly and rather belatedly. Before that, she had loved, with fewer regrets but just as frenziedly, a brilliant Spaniard, the Marqués de Mora, of whom all his contemporaries said he was unworthy of Spain—as continues to be the case today, for any compatriot with the slightest degree of talent is invariably mistreated. Mora, who once wrote her twenty-two letters while he was away for ten days in Fontainebleau, had to leave Paris for health reasons; he returned, then had to leave again, but this time he did not return, for he died in Bordeaux in 1774. Even before his death, however, Julie de Lespinasse had already met Monsieur de Guibert, who was, at the time, a 29-year-old colonel, so charming that ladies even took the trouble to read his one book, a rather dry work entitled Essai de tactique, about which they would exclaim: “Oh, Monsieur de Guibert, que votre tictac est admirable!” Inevitably, Julie de Lespinasse, who was almost in her forties by then, was not the only woman in Guibert’s life; indeed, in the end, the colonel went so far as to marry another woman without this in any way diminishing the love and devotion of the fiery Mademoiselle Julie. Her letters to the flighty soldier are, without a doubt, among the great literary monuments that women of talent have, with relative frequency, erected to total good-for-nothings.

  And yet, perhaps the saddest character in this story is Monsieur d’Alembert, the great encyclopaedist. For many years, he lived with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, apparently on chaste terms that had not always (that is, before they lived together) been observed. Whatever the truth of the matter, he was convinced that he was the prime object of his great friend’s thoughts, as doubtless she was of his, encyclopaedia apart of course. On her death, he discovered that Julie had appointed him her executor and he, to his misfortune, had to go through her papers: not a single one of his letters had been preserved, whereas Mora’s many tons of correspondence were all there. Distraught, he went in search of Guibert (who received many letters, but probably did not reply)
and said: “We were all wrong! It was Mora she loved!” Needless to say, in those polite times, Guibert remained silent. D’Alembert survived her by seven years, during which time he accepted lodging in the Louvre, in his role as secretary of the Académie Française. He was inconsolable, and when his friend Marmontel reminded him of his late beloved’s behaviour, he replied: “Yes, she had changed, but I had not; she no longer lived for me, but I always lived for her; now that she is no longer here, I have no reason to live. What is left to me now? When I go home, instead of her, I find her shadow. These rooms in the Louvre are like a tomb; I never enter them without a shudder of horror.”

  Julie de Lespinasse had died on May 23, 1776, at the age of forty-three, surrounded by her closest friends. During her last three days, she was so weak that she could barely speak. The nurses revived her with cordials and made her sit up for a moment in bed. And her last words were of surprise. “Still alive?” she said.

  Emily Brontë, the Silent Major

  THE LIFE OF Emily Brontë was so short and silent and is now so remote that very little is known about her, not that this has stopped her biographer compatriots from retelling her life in fat and usually rather vacuous volumes. Although there are, as far as history is concerned, always three Brontë sisters, there were, in fact, five, to whom, as people all too frequently forget, one should also add their brother Branwell, who, however disastrous and alcoholic he may have been, was nonetheless important in the life of the most famous of the sisters. The two sisters no one ever mentions were called Maria and Elizabeth, and they died from tuberculosis, one after the other, when they were still children. In a rather Dickensian episode, they were harshly treated by their teachers shortly before they died, being punished and insulted and forced to get out of bed when they were already ill. Posterity has laid a strange reproach at Emily’s door: namely, that, despite being the school favourite, she failed to intercede for the victims, and remained silent before this rank injustice. The reproach is particularly unfair given that the author of Wuthering Heights was not yet six years old, five and four years younger, respectively, than her two ill-treated sisters. After them came Charlotte and then Branwell, and after Emily, Anne, the youngest, the three surviving sisters all becoming novelists, while Branwell became merely a frustrated poet. Their mother had died when Emily was three years old, and they were all brought up by their Irish-born father, who, as a writer of sermons, was not unconnected with literature himself. Other less pious members of the family initiated the sisters into the oral tradition, with the Irish story-tellers’ habitual preference for tales of ghosts and demons and goblins. This was doubtless Emily’s first contact with the supernatural, which hovers over her one novel from first page to last.

  Her silence apparently caused her more than one upset and gave her a reputation for arrogance: from adolescence on, Emily would often answer only in monosyllables or not at all, which caused some people to shun her and drew protests from her sisters. She was, however, her father’s favourite, as demonstrated by the fact that he taught her how to fire a pistol and often took her out target shooting (to which she became addicted). Mr Brontë—who exoticised his original name of Brunty when he was studying (where else?) at Oxford (perhaps because bronte means “thunder” in Greek)—was thought to be eccentric and austere and, although these extant reports come from rather unreliable sources (that is, sources with an axe to grind), it is said that, in his zeal, he refused to give his daughters meat to eat and condemned them to a diet of potatoes; they say that one rainy night, after he had discovered that the girls were wearing dainty boots given to them by a friend, he burned the boots because he deemed them too luxurious; he tore to shreds a silk dress that his wife kept in a trunk, more to look at than to wear; and, on one occasion, he sawed the backs off various chairs to make them into stools. If all this is true, then the Brontë sisters did very well in not turning to drink like their brother. And regardless of whether or not it is true, one thing is clear, Mr Brontë was also extremely affectionate towards them and, indeed, took the trouble to educate them: he would have them put on masks and would then interrogate them, believing that, with their faces covered, they would become used to responding freely and boldly. He once asked Emily what he should do with Branwell when he was at his most impossible: “Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him.” She was six years old at the time, and clearly had a proclivity for drastic measures. When she was older, she punched her dog Keeper in the face and eyes—they swelled right up—to stop the dog from going for her throat after she had reprimanded him. On another occasion, she separated the same dog and a stray, with whom it had become embroiled in a fight, by sprinkling pepper on their snouts, which indicates that, despite her silence, she was a very decisive woman. It was no coincidence that her sisters nicknamed her “The Major”. Nevertheless, and despite being the tallest in the family, she was sometimes described as rather a fragile creature with precarious health. After a stay of eight months with her sisters in Belgium, there were also some fears for her mental health, but that is a fairly commonplace accusation in family disputes. She loved Walter Scott and was a devotee of both Shelley and the night, which is why she slept very little, in order to enjoy it to the full.

  It was her sister Charlotte who, not without great difficulty, managed to persuade her to publish her poems. Later on, all three sisters, under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, sent their respective first novels to the publishers. The only one that was not, initially, accepted was Charlotte’s, but her second novel, Jane Eyre, was. The reviews of Wuthering Heights were very positive, but no one dared hail it as the masterpiece that time has shown it to be.

  In 1848, a year after its publication, Emily often had to go to the Black Bull Inn to fetch Branwell and help him back home. Her concern was merely routine, and neither she, through lack of foresight, nor Charlotte, out of a spirit of revenge, did anything serious about curing Branwell, who went to his grave not long afterwards, having spent periods racked by horrific coughing fits and terrible insomnia. Emily followed him only three months later, and although a housemaid declared that “Miss Emily died of a broken heart for love of her brother”, giving rise to speculations about incest, it is more likely that Emily Brontë knew nothing in life of the passions she so skilfully described in her semi-incestuous Wuthering Heights.

  During her illness, she refused to have any treatment or to be seen by a doctor and once again plunged into long silences, prepared to let nature take its course, although nature proved far from benign. On December 19, she insisted on leaving her bed and getting dressed, then she sat down by the fire in her room and started combing her long, abundant tresses. Her comb fell into the flames, and since she did not have the strength to pick it up, the bedroom was filled with the smell of burning bone. Afterwards, she went down to the living room and there, sitting on the sofa, she died at two o’clock in the afternoon, having refused to go back to bed. She was only thirty years old and she wrote nothing more.

  Perfect Artists

  NO ONE KNOWS what Cervantes looked like, and no one knows for certain what Shakespeare looked like either, and so Don Quixote and Macbeth are both texts unaccompanied by a personal expression, a definitive face or a gaze which, over time, the eyes of other men have been able to freeze and make their own. Or perhaps only those that posterity has felt the need to bestow on them, with a great deal of hesitation, bad conscience, and unease—an expression, gaze and face that were undoubtedly not those of Shakespeare or of Cervantes.

  It is as if the books we still read felt more alien and incomprehensible without some image of the heads that composed t
hem; it is as if our age, in which everything has its corresponding image, felt uncomfortable with something whose authorship cannot be attributed to a face; it is almost as if a writer’s features formed part of his or her work. Perhaps the authors of the last two centuries anticipated this and so left behind them numerous portraits, in paintings and in photographs, which may be why, over the years, I have got into the habit of collecting postcards of those portraits. This collection, entirely unmethodical and merely accumulative, now comprises about one hundred and fifty images. These are the ones I am accustomed to seeing, those with which I am familiar. It is these portraits, and no others (possibly better or more striking), with which I identify and always will identify Dickens, Faulkner or Rilke, because I have them to hand and occasionally look at them. It is significant that there is not a single Spaniard among them, but I have the impression that in Spain we are not interested in this kind of image, for there are no picture postcards of Spanish writers, or at least, I have never managed to find any. In England it is exactly the opposite, given that London has a museum—the National Portrait Gallery—devoted entirely to portraits, and from which, inevitably, many of these faces come. In this essay, I will limit myself to looking at them once again, briefly, not at all of them, just a few, but now with my pen in my hand. It would be naïve to try and extract from them lessons or laws, or even common characteristics. The only thing that leaps out at one is that all the subjects are writers and now, at last, when they are all dead, all of them are perfect artists.