The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  “Because it may have had a lasting influence on the view of life communicated by the novels. That’s why.”

  “The novels would have been different if she had lived?” Jane asked. “Well, that may be true, Jay, after all.”

  “Works of art are not usually created by perfectly serene, untroubled minds,” Austin said, gathering steam. “What made Trueblood produce as much as he did? Through what disasters and anguish did he go to become the legendary affable old man we see in the paintings? He went to Europe, you remember, he fled Cambridge.”

  “There you are,” Jane pounced. “Now you are reading his travels in your own way, and that is what is dangerous.”

  “Every cultivated New Englander made the grand tour, Austin,” Jay added.

  “Of course. But Trueblood made it rather differently, as a form of therapy, perhaps.”

  “That may be your view.…”

  “And I am writing the biography, Miss Reid. Surely a biographer has a right to a point of view?”

  “Yes, of course,” Jane said, but she felt uncomfortable just the same and at a loss to say exactly why. “Let me be frank with you. Biographers today seem often to be more interested in the warts on a face than on the face itself. Trueblood has been neglected for years. Do you want to ‘bring him to life,’ as you put it, only to diminish his greatness? To create pity and perhaps even contempt rather than admiration?”

  “That is our fear,” Jay put in for himself. “Don’t you see that we, the family, have a certain responsibility?”

  “Oh indeed, I do see that. You might decide to close the intimate papers to any examination by any scholar. I can’t but feel that would be to serve your grandfather ill. Besides, sooner or later they will become available unless you choose to destroy them. So why not let me be the one to have first look in depth? What is wrong with me?”

  “Because we aren’t sure what your motives are,” Jane said. She felt they were going round and round the bush and things must be clarified once and for all.

  “My motives?” Austin seemed genuinely at a loss.

  “Are you out for blood because that would make your name, because scandal pays off, to put it crudely,” Jay said quite impatiently.

  “Crudely is exact.” It was Austin’s turn to flush. “I hope I am a scholar and a gentleman. I’m not out for blood, I’m out for understanding. I’ll admit that when I first thought of this biography I had no idea what a great influence Trueblood was, what cross-fertilization he represented between European and American literature, nor was I aware of his generosity, of how hard he worked at translating from the French and Italian. Far from denigrating your grandfather my intention is to give him his full due. He was an astounding man, and an immensely influential one.”

  “But was he, do you believe, a great writer as well?” Jay asked.

  “In some ways yes. There are books that have had and still do have great influence without being great works of art—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example.”

  “But Benjamin Trueblood had no axe to grind, did he?” Jane was pondering this. “He was simply, I suppose, the most loved author of his generation.”

  “Widely read then, a household word, then … but not now,” Austin said gently. “A teller of tales.”

  “And what is wrong with that?” Jay asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. But I would like to show that he was something more interesting than merely successful … and one of the things that interests me is what great fame did for him, in what ways he was changed or not changed by it, and what a tremendously happy marriage and large family did to heal the wound but perhaps slacken a little the tension in the bow, if I may use Philoctetes as an image.”

  Jane, who could not remember what the myth of Philoctetes was all about, glanced over at Jay. “‘The Wound and the Bow.’ Edmund Wilson has made a whole theory of literature on that, in a famous essay,” Jay explained.

  “Oh,” said Jane.

  Austin, perhaps feeling that he was on safer ground at last, dared to ask, “Are you feeling a little better about the biography? Have I persuaded you that I am not out for blood after all? And may I see the letters and journals that concern Jennifer?”

  Jane and Jay exchanged a look and Jane nodded.

  “There’s nothing for it but to let you go ahead,” Jay said then. “Just don’t let Freud and your own imagination go wild.”

  At this Austin laughed for the first time. “I’ll keep them both on a tight leash,” he promised.

  And so they parted. And Jane and Jay went back upstairs, having agreed to give Austin a look at the papers the following week.

  “Oh dear,” Jane said with a sigh, “it’s awfully painful, making these decisions, Jay. Are we doing the right thing?”

  “I think we are, Jane, I think we are. But heaven knows no biography ever tells the whole truth. It is truth filtered through someone’s mind … someone of another generation, often, as in this case—the whole ethos has changed. So it is going to be Trueblood seen through twentieth-century glasses, and we can’t do anything about that.”

  “How glad I am that no one will ever write my biography!” Jane laughed.

  “Or mine,” Jay assented, with a quiver at the very idea.

  “Of course Grandfather was used to being in the public eye.” She was smiling now with the relief of something settled. “It’s only that Austin seems so young and so sure of himself. I don’t really like him, do you?”

  “One doesn’t see the wound in him, only the bow.” Jay grew thoughtful. “But he seems to be learning something from Trueblood himself. He has changed his view. Do you remember how detached and smug he seemed the first time we met?”

  “Yes, I do. And you and I have changed, too, since then, haven’t we?”

  “In what way, Jane?” Jay looked surprised.

  “We know a lot more about Grandfather than we did. We, too, have come closer to the truth. It is exhilarating. When people are alive how little we ever know about them, the complexity … and after they die very rarely are we given a chance to know what we know about Benjamin Trueblood.”

  Then they set to work, but after an hour and some conferring about the date on one folder that Jay was setting into order, Jane, who had been thinking, said, “In spite of what I said just now, I am troubled, I must confess. Is one of the responsibilities, no, that is not the word—obligations—to society of the very famous that everything in the life be open to public scrutiny? I mean, is that right? What would Grandfather himself say?”

  “None of their damn business is what he would say … that is my guess.”

  “Maybe.…” She lifted her head to look out of the window at the tulip tree outside, just coming into leaf. “But the older I get the less sure I seem to be about what is right and wrong. If the anguished Jennifer played such an important part in Trueblood’s eventual great work, shouldn’t that be known … for her sake as well as his? You know Mamma never spoke of her … never that I can remember. I suppose that is why it has been rather a shock to know what we now know, Jay.”

  “There is that letter to Lowell where Trueblood speaks of going to Mount Auburn to take flowers to her grave, as apparently he did every year on the anniversary of her suicide. He speaks of the lilacs being in bloom … is nothing sacred then? Is everything to be exposed?” Jay had tears in his eyes.

  “Austin says yes, everything.”

  “And we have agreed, you and I, to the rifling of a tomb.”

  “Have we?” Jane said with a twinkle in her eye. “Strong words, Jay.”

  “I never realized till now what a prickly subject biography is.”

  “I come back to the difficult problem that if you are a writer and make your work public, and as a result become in a way the possession of the public—at least they may think so—maybe the doors into the intimate life are going to be forced open, sooner or later.”

  “It’s a high price to pay for fame.”

  “Think of poor Keats!” Jane
said.

  Jay smiled, “And think of lucky Shakespeare, about whom little or nothing is known … although that has not prevented scholars from digging around and making guesses.”

  “At least whatever Austin finds will be authentic. The man himself speaking to his friends.”

  “But not, curiously enough, to himself … he never mentions Jennifer in the journals, does he?”

  “Only several times in the year after, a note: ‘A lonely day,’ or ‘Very depressed.’”

  “We have to remember that he could have destroyed her journals and letters, but instead they were carefully preserved, tied with a lavender ribbon in an inlaid box.”

  “Oh, I am glad you remembered that … after all, what is not destroyed is perhaps deliberately left to be discovered in time.”

  “We must hope so.”

  This insight took some of the burden of responsibility off their shoulders, Jane felt. At any rate they had promised Austin and it was useless to go on worrying about it. There was work to be done.

  She looked forward now to working with Jay. He was, once he got down to it, far quicker than she would ever be. Only it took him a few hours to achieve momentum, so he often worked late into the night, long after she had driven back to Sudbury with aching eyes.

  A lot of things besides the Trueblood papers were on Jane’s mind. And one of them was the Cambridge Community Center for the black community just east of Harvard Square. Her considerable gifts to the Center over the years made it natural for her to be asked to become a member of the board, but Jane was not one to attend quarterly meetings and then go her way. She spent hours at the Center, doing odd jobs, helping in any way she could, from taking curtains out to be cleaned to going out to get a sandwich for Ellen Ford, the head.

  Ellen and she had hit it off from the start, and Jane treasured this friendship with the first black person she had ever known as an equal. Ellen, thirty years old when she came to the Center and educated at New York University, had great charm … for one thing, she was apt to burst into laughter when someone else might have shown anger. They had to improvise all the time, as there was never enough money, and the problem was always that new furniture or anything brought in was apt to be rather quickly broken down or destroyed. This year she and Jane were determined to get an annex built that would provide a gym that could be used also as an entertainment center for dances, plays, and meetings of all kinds.

  “Even if we never manage to get it funded, the project has served to bring the community together,” Ellen said one day. “It’s not a cohesive group, as you know as well as I do.”

  Over and over again, in the two years Ellen Ford had been there, opportunities had been offered. For instance, a Harvard boy had tried to do a production of Obey’s Noah, but half the time the actors failed to show up for rehearsals.

  “Why don’t they come to rehearsals?” Jane had asked.

  “They just don’t see it as their thing, I guess,” Ellen answered gently. “We’re up against years and years of indifference, you know, indifference and resentment. After all, Harvard’s just next door … all those rich boys in their sports cars! Do they even know we exist … right down the street? So when one isolated young man shows interest he pays for all the others who couldn’t care less.”

  The community house was indeed three blocks from the college, but it might as well have been on the moon. When Jane mustered the courage to try to raise the large sums necessary for the new building, and went to family friends on the Hill in Boston or even friends living within a mile of the black pocket, they often seemed astonished that it existed.

  “Why, I had no idea there was a sizable black community in Cambridge,” a professor’s wife had said. The Episcopal church had black members, but they were not the poor, and they did not live in the slum where many of the services were curtailed, garbage collection for one. There were no black police to be seen on the streets. The Irish still dominated the police and judiciary, and this was long before the civil rights activists, before “Black is beautiful” became a slogan.

  Very occasionally there was a fracas and then public reaction was strong. Jane was amazed to see at once the fear it aroused, as though the blacks were an enemy army about to pillage and rape and destroy.

  “The thing is, you see, that we have such high visibility. When I walk down the street in the Square I know that the first thing that is noticed about me is my color. Even for a liberal white person that is true.”

  It had never occurred to Jane that this was so. But she saw it at once. When they lunched together in the Square, her own visibility was heightened because she was with Ellen. People stared. How really awful it was! What would ever change it?

  During the time that she was immersed in the Trueblood papers, it was nourishing to go down to the Center and feel that she was part of a going concern, and even, in a small way (for she had no illusions), helping to make things happen in the present.

  After one especially frustrating meeting, she and Ellen decided to walk to the Square and have lunch.

  “And cool off,” Ellen said. “I was pretty mad inside, I can tell you.”

  “A boiling kettle with the lid on?” Jane laughed, and Ellen smiled her discreet smile.

  “Exactly.”

  At lunch Ellen’s bitterness came out and Jane listened, and devoured her mushroom omelette and roll. Meetings always made her ravenous, for some reason.

  “You’re the only one who ever comes and finds out what we are doing, the only one who has any idea what I’m up against day by day.”

  “I’m the only one without a full-time job, you know.”

  “They could take an hour a month, Jane. Florida, for instance, is in Cambridge quite often.”

  “I get the feeling that she doesn’t really care very much … and she’s awfully busy, as she made clear.”

  “Why accept the job then?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t look at it as a job.…”

  “Prestige? Something she can say she’s doing.… I’m sick and tired of blacks who think only of themselves.”

  “It’s hardly racial,” Jane said gently. “I can’t say that many of my acquaintance move out beyond the Warren School … granted that the school asks a lot of parents and teachers, and granted that the school is concerned and imaginative on the racial question. But still …”

  “Oh well,” Ellen sighed. Then she looked up and gave Jane a warm smile. “If only there were more people like you. You really are amazing … do you know that?”

  “Am I?” Jane was genuinely surprised. “But you see I have no children, no husband, to look after. I think it’s natural that I have time and energy to get involved.”

  “You know what’s amazing about you … among other things?”

  “What?”

  “You never use money as power. I’ll tell you something, Jane. When we first met I thought you were just another Lady Bountiful, a do-gooder.”

  At this Jane laughed. “And maybe that’s just what I am!”

  “No, you’re not. And the reason is that you give yourself. You spend yourself in a wildly extravagant way.”

  “My grandfather would turn in his grave, if he heard that. He was against extravagance … but to go back to what you said, I don’t think of money as power.”

  “But it is, Jane.”

  “I think of it as responsibility, as a requirement to serve life.”

  “Well, you are unique!” It was Ellen’s turn to laugh.

  “The problem is that one has to make choices … there are so many people and organizations I want to help. That’s the rub, as far as I am concerned. I get overwhelmed sometimes by all that I would like to do, so I sometimes feel awfully frustrated.” Even as she admitted this to Ellen, Jane realized that this was one of the very few people with whom she ever discussed such things. Almost never with anyone in the family. Jane surmised that they might feel she was going a bit far. Better in their view to give a million to Radcliffe, as her aunt h
ad done, a solid contribution that was memorialized in the Trueblood building on the campus, than to give continually to civil rights organizations and refugee organizations, where whatever she gave was swallowed up, drained off, with little to show for it.

  “Yes,” Ellen assented, “choices.…” She thought about it for a moment and then said with her characteristic practical sense of things, “You know, people do what they want to do. That is what I see every day. I see it at the Center, where one person is simply no good at working with a group but then turns out to be an excellent accountant. I came to Cambridge because I wanted to … but my friends in New York thought I was crazy to do it. I had been offered a much more important job, but it would have meant a lot of administrative work and less contact with people.”

  “I wish I could find a job where I was doing more, not just giving money,” Jane said and Ellen caught the look of uncertainty, of being at a loss, in the tone. “That’s what I want to do. I’m too old to be of use to you really.”

  “On the board you are very useful, you know,” Ellen said quietly.

  “Maybe, but I’m an outsider there and always will be. You know that as well as I do. And besides,” Jane added quickly, “I want to be able to work, not just help make decisions.”

  “You’ll find a way,” Ellen said, smiling her warm smile. “I know you will.”

  But after they had parted, Jane wandered around for a while in the Square unable to shake off the feeling she had that she was not living her real life and had not been since she had resigned from the school. She was surely busy enough, off at the end of the week to New York for a meeting of the Refugee Association and then to Philadelphia to take Russell out for lunch somewhere and see how he was getting on at the new school. She would have a chance at least to catch up on everything with Lucy and maybe shake off this feeling of uncertainty, of being adrift.

  Jane pushed the dark thoughts away as she boarded the train for New York three days later. There was something about a journey that lifted the spirits and the Merchants Limited to New York, a fast, comfortable train, took just five hours. Jane, who considered lunch in the diner an extravagance, carried a sandwich and a thermos of milk in her bulging briefcase and settled in to read first a lot of papers from the Refugee Association that she had laid aside for weeks, then The Atlantic Monthly and a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner.