Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  In my parents’ house in Texas, in my old bedroom, there is still a box of legal pads that my father brought home for me to write on, and which are covered in poems and stories. Also, drafts of plays, few of them completed; ideas for poems and stories, and sometimes several versions of the same thing, written out fair or messy depending on the draft. Not a box exactly, but a seaman’s chest, ribbed with wood and covered in pressed tin, which my father himself bought for me at an antique market and spent a month on, taking a piece of steel wool to the rust. My bedroom window overlooks the courtyard and sometimes I would sit on my bed and write while he was outside, not ten feet away, rubbing his hands raw against the rust. He had in mind already that I would keep my manuscripts in it, which I found flattering, as an indication of how seriously he took my schoolboy scribblings. It also suggested to me the idea that these are things to be preciously stored because no one will read them. The memory of that summer was very strong in me as I glanced through Peter’s notebooks, and I felt again as I had not in years the atmospheric pressure of a writer’s ambitions, ‘like ten feet of cold water’ on top of your head. Such pent-up, concentrated loneliness.

  There was another date at the end of another book (‘his arm stretched forth, his gesture expanding into an embrace.’), under which he had written the word FINIS and December 29, 1985 – a week into his Christmas holidays, and a year and a half after he first put pen to page.

  After an hour or so I shifted my attention to the second box. There were five or six folders of loose-leaf paper – not just paper, but receipts with something scrawled on them, paper napkins, train tickets, torn-out pages of books. Several containing nothing more than a single phrase or observation. For example: Greater and greater happiness, which like a small tea stain in wash after wash becomes more general. Or, Softly as spiders, descends. The folders were labeled by content (ADMIN, MISCELLANEOUS WRITING, NOTES, LETTERS, etc.) and had on them the branch and leaf insignia of Harvard College Library; they belonged clearly to Gerschon’s efforts at ‘rearrangement.’ I found a few stories and a few poems, as Paul had said, but I wanted to look at the letters, and this is the first one I came to:

  Peter Sullivan

  Beaumont Hill School

  23rd of March, 1986

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  I am an upper-school English master at the Beaumont Hill School, a preparatory academy located in one of the wealthier suburbs of Boston. You may have heard of it. Several of our students have gone on to make names for themselves in various fields, and we boast also our share of famous parents. The school is very well-respected, both within the teaching community, and outside it; it is the kind of institution on which others model themselves.

  For almost twenty years I have taught at this school and struggled against the declining interest my students show, not only in literature generally, but especially in the fields of poetry, and in whatever else strikes them as old-fashioned or out of date – a category that includes, of course, most of what we would call the classics of Western civilization. It occurred to me some time ago that what I needed, to bring these classics to life, is a story that would allow my students to treat the authors of these works as characters in their own right, and to appreciate the act of composition itself as a dramatic act.

  If you want something done, there’s nothing like doing it yourself. I have now written such a story, which touches on the life, not only of one of the most famous poets of his age, Lord Byron, but on scenes of composition which have themselves become a part of literary history. I am referring to the famous summer in which Frankenstein was written, by a nineteen-year-old girl intoxicated by the company of two great poets. This book, or novel, which I have called Imposture, would serve as a very useful commentary to any class on Romantic poetry, whether it was taught at the high-school or collegiate level.

  I confess to knowing nothing about the business of publishing, but one thing I do know something about is the business of teaching. If a school like Beaumont Hill can be persuaded to adopt such a novel as one of its set texts, others would follow suit; and the sales possibilities among high schools alone would more than justify the expense of publication. I do not know if it is customary or not to send publishers unsolicited manuscripts in their entirety, but this is what I have done. My novel is enclosed, and I look forward to hearing your response to it.

  Yours sincerely,

  Peter Sullivan

  I leafed through the rest of the folder. There wasn’t a single private letter in it; all of them seemed to begin Dear Sir or Madam. I had the impression of one of those after-school tasks assigned for the punishment of misbehaving kids. Copy down a hundred times the following words. Sometimes he mentioned recently published novels that had made the best-seller lists and seemed to him to bear some resemblance to his own. Mostly potboilers, from what I could tell, with titles like Mistral’s Daughter or The Sands of Time. Sometimes he mentioned the name of a parent or colleague who had recommended him to a particular editor or house, because he or it ‘would make a good fit for the kind of work I am doing, and I’m told it’s important, right from the start of a career, to establish a relationship with a publisher sympathetic to your literary ambitions.’ And so on.

  There was another folder of materials, which Gerschon hadn’t labeled yet, but just at that moment he knocked at the door and I didn’t get a chance to look at them till after Christmas. I asked him if there was a Xerox nearby, and he let me photocopy a few pages, including the letter I have just quoted in full. ‘Against the grain of my conscience,’ he said. By rights they all belonged to Mrs Sullivan.

  ‘Why Byron?’ I asked him, on the way to lunch. ‘And only Byron – he didn’t write about anything else. You’re probably the wrong person to talk to about this, but three novels looks a little like a fixation.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe for someone like Peter, who lived the way Peter lived, there was something about Byron, and the way be lived, that he couldn’t get out of his head.’

  ‘Did Peter ever talk to you about his writing?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Did he ever show you anything he had written?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he ever show anybody anything he had written? I mean, someone he knew, who knew him, who wasn’t a dear Sir or Madam.’

  ‘They hardly look like the pleadings of a great writer, do they,’ Peter said. ‘Though maybe great men plead no better than anybody else.’ Later, when the food arrived, he came back to this question. ‘Maybe Lee Feldman, is what I wondered. Maybe he showed something to Lee Feldman. All of that business took place a couple of years after he finished Imposture. But nobody that I know of at the Byron Society, which would have been a natural starting point for friendly reactions, ever heard about his writing till you published it.’

  ‘Why didn’t he talk about it with you?’

  ‘Let me ask you the same question,’ he said. Then: ‘I don’t know. You look at these letters, and maybe you get a feeling for why. The same feeling you get reading them: embarrassment. I suppose writers have to sell themselves like anyone else; but not like that. As if he didn’t trust anyone, or thought they were all idiots. But he only comes across as desperate himself, or completely out of touch, which amounts to the same thing. What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Just that I used to write such letters myself.’

  *

  For fifteen months I lived in the basement of that Hampstead house and went quietly crazy. The only room with any natural light was the bedroom, so I put a desk in there, which meant that my commute to work in the morning was all of four and a half feet. I used to take a walk first thing just to get myself out of the house. On one of these walks, on a turning off the High Street, I discovered a charity second-hand shop with a steady supply of suits and dress shirts for six-foot-six men. Over time I acquired a closet full of these suits. (Not that they fit me – the guy shedding them was six inches bigger in the chest.) I bought ties, too, an
d spent a few minutes each morning picking out combinations of jacket, shirt and tie before sitting down to write.

  It wasn’t only in the mornings that I looked out for Caroline, hurrying to catch her bus. My desk was pushed under the window that gave onto the front stairwell. In the mornings, she never saw me, but coming home she faced the other way and sometimes glanced down ‘just to see if I was really working,’ as she said to me once, in her kitchen, while I was picking laundry off the radiators. Around six o’clock each day I became conscious of the fact that she might come home any minute and looked up occasionally into the last of the daylight to check. I wanted her to see me writing; the thought of her kept me going longer than I otherwise might have. Sometimes she waved, and once, after forgetting her key, she came down to use the back stairway, which gave me the chance of inviting her in to tea. I didn’t mind being seen in jacket and tie at my desk, but sitting across from her at the kitchen table turned out to be different – a fact that struck me when I brought in the tea. I looked ridiculous; worse, I looked unhappy. ‘Very smart’ was all that Caroline said.

  From time to time, in the throes of some urgent feeling that might have been optimism or desperation, I took an afternoon off from my other ‘work’ to write letters – to agents and publishers and magazine editors. I had one of those books that list them. A soft-bound volume, thick as the yellow pages, with bright red lettering on the front and on the back stories of advances paid. After only three months, etc. So I wrote letters. Dear Sir or Madam, the whole business. I am a young American writer living in London. My first novel is about. I am writing to you because. In your last issue, I noticed a story, which I liked very much. It suggested to me that you might be the right … A few years ago you published a book. My own first novel. I have written a short story. Whether I could interest you in a poem or not. I don’t know if you accept unsolicited submissions. A good friend of mine suggested I get in touch. Recommended you to me. Me to you. I am just at the stage where I am beginning to consider.

  Every line of these letters was equally unnatural and dishonest, and I disliked myself for writing them and resented the need to. Though I never wrote anything as bad as Peter Sullivan. And there was no need to, because nothing ever came of them. Except rejections, which I kept in a shoebox under my bed, since even this contact with the literary world seemed better than nothing.

  Maybe I would have given up if I hadn’t come home one day from one of my walks and seen Caroline through the bedroom window, reading, licking her thumb and turning over the pages at my desk. I sat on the stairwell for two or three minutes watching her and then climbed up the stairs again to continue my walk. When I came back again, she was gone, and two weeks passed before she brought up the subject of my writing. I remember that for most of that time it struck me as some kind of dirty secret, which Caroline had stumbled upon but was too embarrassed to mention. It was a real relief to me when she did, and relief led to other things, but if Peter ever had any personal response to what seems to me the clearest and best expression of his character, I don’t know.

  A few days after my lunch with Gerschon, Caroline and I returned to her parents’ house in London, which is the house she grew up in and where we had also fallen in love; and I didn’t get back to Cambridge or Peter until the new year.

  Behold Him Freshman!

  I heard of her marriage from my mother, who seemed to take in the news that particular form of delight which is sometimes called sympathy. We were having tea at the Pigots. Since Kitty was occupied, in conversation with Mrs Pigot, I had retired to my chair by the window to read. Elizabeth and John were on the floor in front of the empty fireplace, tempting the dog with bones. But I was listening to my mother. I heard her say, ‘That puts me in mind of something, I must tell Byron.’

  Then she called over to me, ‘Byron, I have some news for you.’

  I said, ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘Take out your handkerchief first, for you will want it.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Pigot, ‘he isn’t a boy.’

  ‘You will see.’ Then, more loudly: ‘Mary Chaworth is married.’

  ‘Is that all?’ I said.

  ‘To Mr Musters. I received a letter this morning from her aunt, Mrs Norris. What are you reading? I thought you would be more affected.’

  In fact, it surprised me to suffer so little at the news – Miss Chaworth married. But I was then busy with preparations for entering upon college life. Our sentiments are not exhaustless, and divided amongst so many objects, they appear weak and colourless, and we begin to suspect ourselves of indifference. At least, this is what my mother accused me of, as I gave her my arm and we walked the short distance home.

  She said, ‘I preferred your childishness. These modest, patient airs become you very ill.’

  All this to provoke me. She dreaded my going as much as I longed for it, and by a dozen little stratagems each day attempted to incite in me a violence of reaction to equal her own.

  ‘I like what you call airs,’ I said. ‘You mean, I suppose, that you cannot reduce me to tears, as you used to.’

  ‘You take everything coolly. For my part, I have ceased to take offence at it, but I thought Miss Chaworth would bring the blood to your cheeks.’

  The next day, Elizabeth had engaged me to tea, and as the weather was fine we sat in their garden afterwards with books on our laps and read or pretended to read. The clouds in the sky were broken up into little pieces of clouds – it had been dry all week, and the earth had a contracted late summery look, so that even the lawn had need of a feather-duster.

  After a silence of no great duration, Elizabeth said, ‘I feel I must require you to write to me, and you must protest, in great earnestness, the impossibility of your neglecting me.’

  ‘You think I will not.’

  ‘I think you will find a great deal to amuse and distract you.’

  At the bottom of the garden was a low stone wall, and on the other side of it, a field with sheep grazing. Beyond the sheep, a farmhouse made up of the same dry grey stone as the wall, and beyond the farmhouse the hills rose mildly to the heavens, and towards Annesley.

  ‘I will not pretend any reluctance to leave Southwell, but I have no great desire to go to Cambridge.’

  ‘This is because you may do as you please. So nothing pleases you.’

  We continued to read, and the shade of the cherry tree, leaning across the bench, moved slowly across our faces. ‘Now, this will please you,’ she said after a minute and holding her book at arm’s length, out of the glare of the sun. ‘This more or less fits the case:

  Scenes of woe and scenes of pleasure

  Scenes that former thoughts renew,

  Scenes of woe and scenes of pleasure

  Now a sad and last adieu!’

  She is a handsome girl, with a pleasant voice, but when she recites there is something that enters her face and gives her a very unnatural and insistent air. But I replied, ‘No, do not say last. You do not mean to raise my hopes in this fashion.’

  ‘I believe your mother is right. You have become very unfeeling. I thought you more soft-hearted, but you are spoiled by London women. They have taught you to be tender and cold.’

  I took the book from her and opened it to the frontispiece: Robert Burns. Then, as I had a pencil in hand, I wrote something beneath his name and returned the volume to Elizabeth, saying, ‘Perhaps that will satisfy you of my feelings,’ and she looked at it closely and held it away again, and read back to me in the same loud voice:

  Now no more, the hours beguiling,

  Former favourite haunts I see,

  Now no more my Mary smiling,

  Makes ye seem a heaven to me.

  ‘A very pretty sentiment,’ she said, after a suitable pause, ‘though I must confess, I did not believe till this moment you could feel so little for Miss Mary Chaworth as you have pretended to feel. But I believe you now.’

  We parted soon afterwards, amicably enough; and a few da
ys later, I sat on the London coach and looked out the window as it drove along King Street, having taken leave of my mother half an hour before – sitting on the steps, with her face in her hands. Consequently, I was much surprised to see her again through an opened door at Mrs Crawley’s, the pastry-cook. She was waiting her turn and spoke to no one and I felt almost sorry for her.

  ***

  After a month in London at Mrs Massingberd’s, I went up to Cambridge. There was at first a slight difficulty about the rooms. The porter, having mistaken me for a commoner named Brown, sent me to the wrong stairwell, and I went up and down it a good quarter-hour, on a foot already sore from confinement, without finding my name above any of the doors. It was by this point nearly four o’clock in the afternoon – the sun rapidly descending over the college roof – damp rising between cold stones. For a minute I thought of going to an inn, but I found the porter again and was gratified by my display of temper, and he directed me at last to a very pleasant room off a stairwell wide enough for a coach and six. His name, the porter’s I mean, is Cummings, and I think he shall remember me hereafter.

  The next morning at chapel I met this Brown. He is short and freckled, with a reddish, chafed complexion. He had heard of Cummings’ error and was rather pleased by it. He said to me, ‘It is odd that our acquaintance should be launched in this fashion.’ But I don’t mean to confine my acquaintance to the sons of lawyers from Chorley. No one of any distinction, in name or appearance, rose early enough for chapel. I said to myself, this is the Southwell spirit; you must cure yourself of it.

  My first task is to fit up my rooms, which are large and bright but unfortunately situated. On one side there is my tutor, and on the other an old Fellow of the college; he came out to see me directing the joiner, who was building a cabinet and two seats against the angle of the bay. The cabinet is for books. He said to me, ‘You are tall enough, come here,’ and led me into his room, where there was a small fire and a small rug in front of it. Then he invited me to a glass of ‘right sherries’, which stood warming on the hearth-stone. ‘Do you know Henry Mortlock?’ he asked. ‘Do you know Frederick Toms? Do you know Richard Willoughby?’ He had been at Harrow thirty years before, but I told him all the old masters have gone.