A Girl Walks Into a Book

by Miranda K. Pennington

  The answer is obvious, right? Unqualified surrender, silken snare all the way. A fool’s paradise is still paradise when you don’t know the difference. Freedom and honesty is all very well, but being loved wins in a landslide, every time. I was too thrilled to have Eric in my life, to have him squeeze my hand back when I squeezed his. I was too afraid. I couldn’t step back and protect either of us from the effects of surging ahead too quickly.

  Over the next six months we had the equivalent of three good ones together. Some weekends he would make the long train ride from Inwood to not-quite-Park-Slope and we’d go for long walks, sharing a sense of discovery and a love of Brooklyn architecture. We’d force each other to watch movies we knew the other would hate just to get distracted into fooling around halfway through. He got us tickets to Labapalooza, a series of experimental puppet vignettes at St. Ann’s Warehouse, and we lit up at the unexpected, the tiny and adorable, the strange.

  He took me to a screening of a Ben Katchor cartoon with live musical accompaniment, an ode to the New York Public Library. He convinced me to try sushi for the first time. Sushi is a lot like love, I thought, insufferably. You look for ingredients you recognize and try not to be scared by the ones you haven’t seen before. (And when in doubt, cover it in a slice of ginger?) I started eating sushi so often I actually worried about mercury poisoning.

  I wanted to tell Eric I loved him after about two weeks, but I managed to hold off for a whole month—and then I told him in every language I knew except English. When I finally told him in a language he understood, he smiled and whispered back that he loved me too. But a few hours later he sat up on my bed abruptly. “I feel like I’m cheating on both of you,” he said, and gathered his things to leave. There would be stretches where he’d be fighting with his ex, or caught up in his obligations to their demanding dog (who was diabetic as well as emotionally unstable), or just distracted, and I’d struggle to feel connected. It was like a switch went on and off—sometimes he was warm, and open, and generous. He got us theater tickets to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, for my birthday and didn’t blame me when it turned out to be terrible. We hid notes to each other in coat pockets, surprised one another with little gifts. Other times I had to pry any proof he cared out of the locked box of his closed hand; he met me with silence when I tried to talk about the future, whether it was “ours” or “two weeks from now.” I was still convinced that if we could just get through this part, what came next would be everything I’d ever wanted.

  Right after Christmas, which I spent in Arkansas with relatives and he spent in New Jersey with his older brother’s family, we broke up. I’d urged him to get some therapy, and the therapist had naturally pinpointed the turmoil he felt about our relationship. This prompted him to text me, “My therapist says it sounds like I need more time before jumping into a relationship—what do you think?”—essentially, trying to get me to do the work of breaking up with myself. Communicating over text message again while I was traveling had allowed him to finally voice his need for space, however obliquely. I was in shock. I had bent over backward to accommodate him and assured him I had no emotional needs whatsoever! How did that not work?! Seldom has a terrible decision backfired so predictably. When I got back to New York, he came over for the ritual torture of getting his things back. I gave him the little trinkets I’d picked up as Christmas presents. He brought nothing for me. We sat side by side on the same couch; he couldn’t even look at me. I curled into myself and didn’t get up when he left.

  After a month of misery, not eating, not sleeping, and not writing, I gave in to that selfish feeling Jane Eyre had so stalwartly resisted, and called him to suggest we get back together. Not because anything had actually improved, but because I was just determined to stick it out this time. That’s not what I told him, naturally—the story I fed him was that I was finally ready to let things be relaxed and casual, like he needed. So casual. My roommate and my coworkers all observed that it sounded like he wasn’t ready, my mother asked what I was thinking, and even my ordinarily supportive brother asked why on earth this was a good idea. But I knew how Jane Eyre ended already—with a sweet, happy reunion. Why spend a year banished to a metaphorical village school with only a frosty St. John Rivers to talk to if I didn’t have to? Eric and I went to dinner together at the Mermaid Inn on the Lower East Side. Things almost felt normal despite the lingering pit in my stomach and Eric’s noticeably monosyllabic conversation. After dinner, the little plastic fortune-telling fish they bring with the check curled right up in my hand (“Ready for love!”), but Eric’s just laid there in his palm, flat and dormant (“Cold fish!”). Nevertheless, as we walked uptown on Second Avenue, I cheerily put my arm through his.

  “I’m so glad we’re back—aren’t you glad we’re back?” I chirped. Eric looked down and away from me.

  “Well…” he trailed off.

  Despite that palpable flag on the play, I barreled ahead. Even though he still wouldn’t make plans more than a day or two in advance, I still wasn’t invited to his apartment, and he wasn’t comfortable staying over at mine. He showed no sign of letting me peek around the edges of his impressive emotional barriers. I knew what Jane Eyre would tell me to do (she would point out this guy bore no resemblance to her Rochester, first of all—and Edward Fairfax had real estate—and then she would talk about one’s moral fiber). I didn’t want to hear it, so in exasperation I picked up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Better the devil that nobody you know has ever read before than the one you have memorized.

  Is that not how that goes?

  Helen Graham and Branwell Brontë

  In taking leave of the work, we cannot but express our deep regret that a book in many respects eminently calculated to advance the cause most powerfully wrought out, should be rendered unfit for the perusal of the very class of persons to whom it would be most useful, (namely, imaginative girls likely to risk their happiness on the forlorn hope of marrying and reforming a captivating rake,) owing to the profane expressions, inconceivably coarse language, and revolving scenes and descriptions by which its pages are disfigured.

  —Unsigned review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Sharpe’s London Magazine, August 18481

  What the pearl-clutching society set felt about Wuthering Heights (alarm, discomfort, the general inadvisability of discussing it in public), Charlotte Brontë felt about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne’s second novel. When Smith, Elder & Co. offered to reprint her sisters’ novels in 1850, Charlotte gave Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey each a revised introduction and a diligent copyedit to excise the typos T. C. Newby had left behind. But she refused to produce a new edition of Tenant—that’s how uncomfortable it made her. Charlotte, writing to her publishers, said of Tenant and Anne,

  Nothing less congruous with the writer’s nature could be conceived.… She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations) as a warning to others. She hated her work, but would pursue it.… She must be honest; she must not varnish, soften, or conceal.2

  She insisted Anne should never even have attempted it in the first place. This could be attributed to her defensiveness against the charges of “coarseness” perennially leveled at the sisters, or to the fact that for all they were sisters, Charlotte just didn’t appreciate Anne’s earnest honesty. But I think the real reason was closer to home. So close to home it lived in the Parsonage and slept in Patrick’s bedroom. The reason was Branwell.

  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is essentially the story of fallout from one man’s brutal and abusive alcoholic existence. The short version: Robert Huntingdon, the villain of the piece, abuses and terrorizes his wife, Helen, until she runs away
to a remote village to take up residence in the aforementioned Wildfell Hall, and falls in love with a local farmer, Gilbert Markham. But before they can confess their feelings for one another, Helen receives word that Huntingdon is at death’s door, and she returns to his side to offer him the opportunity for redemption.

  At times it’s difficult to see the characters of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as individuals and not as allegories for Vice and Duty, but what it lacks in subtlety the novel makes up with candor. There are other contemporary novels about abusive marriages, drunken husbands, and suffering wives—Charles Dickens had been writing for twenty years already when Tenant was published—but for anyone accustomed to a certain literary propriety, the openness with which Anne Brontë writes of Huntingdon’s sins and Helen’s despair is searing. There’s a moral here, and it’s fully intentional and very brave.

  One of the Brontës’ worst-kept secrets was Branwell Brontë’s unmanageable opium addiction and alcoholism, fueled by his professional disappointments, his romantic rejection, and a lifetime of family indulgence. By 1839, he had already been an unsuccessful portrait painter, a mediocre poet, and a regular at the Black Bull pub, so when Patrick and Branwell spotted an advertisement in the Leeds Intelligencer seeking a tutor with the Postlethwaite family at Broughton-in-Furness, they hastily developed a curriculum and Branwell applied immediately. He secured the position but found himself abruptly dismissed after six months; for years the reason was a mystery—Had he devoted too much time to his own scribbling? Had he just been too hungover, too many times? In the most recent edition of her landmark Brontë biography, Juliet Barker dug until she brought the truth to light: Branwell was fired for fathering an illegitimate child with a local woman, most likely Agnes Riley, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a farmer in Sunny Bank. The child died before she turned two, however, and her mother later married and emigrated to Australia. After being fired from the Postlethwaites, Branwell wrote a poem, “Epistle from a Father on Earth to his Child in her Grave,” and threw himself into translations of Horace’s Odes.3

  In 1840, Branwell was able to secure a position as the assistant clerk-in-charge at a new railway station near Halifax, which kept him physically busy and offered him all the diversions and entertainment of a new railway hub town, such as lectures, concerts, and visitors. He eventually lost the job over some discrepancy in the bookkeeping, but by then Anne had become the governess to the Robinsons at Thorp Green, and in 1843 Branwell was hired on as tutor to the eldest son, Edmund. He was fired two years later. After that, his drinking progressed quickly and was accompanied by opium use. When Branwell returned home from the Robinsons in disgrace, Charlotte’s patience with him was worn out; by the time Tenant was published and he was in the final stages of his addiction, she was absolutely disgusted with him.

  Early biographers of the Brontës attempted to smooth over Branwell’s tarnished reputation in various implausible ways, but now it’s generally accepted, on the strength of letters he sent to friends and the behavior of Mrs. Robinson after her husband’s death, that Branwell’s illicit romance was real. I know I should be sympathetic to Branwell, but I find it very difficult. He’s pitiable, sure, but I struggle to get past my irritation that his wounded ego got in the way of his sisters’ creativity for even a minute.

  After the release of Poems in 1846, Mr. Robinson died; Branwell claimed in a letter to his friend J. B. Leyland that Robinson’s will stipulated his widow would lose her inheritance if she ever saw Branwell again. Though undoubtedly Branwell (and his sisters and everybody else in the village he complained to) believed this was the case, it’s more likely Mrs. Robinson knew that if she remarried, she’d lose executorship of her husband’s estate. She had no intention of taking on a second husband with negligible prospects and downgrading her standard of living, so she sent first her coachman and then her husband’s doctor to assure Branwell that while she, too, was prostrate with grief, they must be forever divided. In reality, Robinson’s will was revised shortly before his death to disinherit his eldest daughter, who had run off with an actor. There is no mention of Branwell or constraint on Mrs. Robinson. During the next two years, Mrs. Robinson sent Branwell various sums of money; whether you believe it was to sustain him or to silence him depends on the optimism of your worldview.

  As his physical condition worsened from alcoholism and opium addiction, Branwell was prone to fainting fits and destructive outbursts; Charlotte refused to invite visitors to the Parsonage when he was home, and toward the end of his life Branwell shared a room with his father to ensure he wouldn’t set the house on fire while everyone slept.

  In my eyes, Tenant is the work of a fearless heart. Yes, it’s moralizing, and yes, it’s unwieldy, but the woman who wrote it was not without power, fire, or originality, as Charlotte once described Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was indubitably Anne’s attempt to save other young people from the pitfalls that had destroyed her only brother. In a preface to the second edition, Anne wrote that the book’s rougher characters were taken from life, and “if I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps, or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain.”4

  And to Anne’s credit, it worked. Eventually, she got me to do what even Jane Eyre couldn’t, which was open my eyes to the reality I was actually living in, not the one in my imagination. Between researching Branwell’s life and death and churning through The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I was in for a dose of aversion therapy. There is no romance, capital-R or otherwise, in Tenant. Only emotional squalor, abuse, untrustworthy young men, and conniving village girls looking for husbands. The novel struck a sympathetic nerve with me for another important reason—the same reason I should really be more charitable toward Branwell. I’m an alcoholic too.

  I had my first beer at a college party in my freshman year. Alcoholism (and recovery) runs in my family so I’d always been wary of drinking, but I was determined not to spend the next four years being different and weird all over again. I joined the line for the keg and when my red plastic cup was filled, I gulped the tepid bitter contents. I immediately felt like a smaller version of me floating inside of myself. It was like sliding the driver’s seat back from the wheel of a car and finding an amazing amount of legroom. Somehow the party became more bearable. The noise was less overwhelming. I wasn’t afraid of the people around me. The lag time between thinking and speaking (to make sure I wouldn’t sound like an idiot) was cut short in favor of talking loudly and confidently, if incoherently. My friends were funnier—more importantly, they thought I was funnier—and they seemed much happier to have me around. I don’t think I ever turned down a drink after that, no matter how drunk I was already. The appeal of distancing myself from the anxieties and discomfort of my everyday brain was too enticing. I found I didn’t mind the atrocious hangovers I always got, because finally, I had something unmistakable in common with my peers and a shared vocabulary with which to discuss it.

  I even felt validated by the rich history of drunk writers in great literature, the ones who say things like “Write drunk, edit sober,” and die after demanding one more shot from the barkeep. Once I became a critic for the school paper, I would go to a movie or a play, take copious notes, get drunk when I got home, bang out a first draft, and edit through the foggy headache I had the next morning. Formerly compulsively early, I became chronically late for work, I blew off my friends, I missed deadlines. My semester in India? The flip side of rooftop bars and elegant gimlets at the discotheque was spending a month of independent study cooped up in my shared hotel room drinking Kingfisher and ordering pizza. Pizza. I could have gone anywhere, seen anything on that once-in-a-lifetime trip, but I stayed in and drank room temperature beer instead. I spent a lot of nights on the bathroom floor during that first summer in New York, too. This was not just drinking the way any college student might drink—I drank as though it were the only way to stay ahead of a massive boulder rol
ling after me. There was nothing wacky, or funny, or safe about it. I hope it is the only time of my life where I have more in common with Branwell than with Charlotte.

  Three years later, during my senior year, I was desperately trying to quit. I would swear off for a year, a month, a week at a time, but a binge and a blackout were never more than a drinking opportunity away. I scheduled all my classes and work shifts for afternoon and evening, to accommodate morning recuperation time. All my “friends” were drinking buddies, and very few of them cared to spend time with me if we weren’t getting drunk (which I found out after I got mono and actually couldn’t drink for a month, when everyone vanished). I was an anxious, fearful torpedo with no healthy mechanism to diffuse all that panic. I kept every hour of the day scheduled and accounted for, striving to maintain the semblance of control. In my lowest moments I even felt beyond the reach of the Brontës; aside from Tenant, the only alcohol abuse in their work is John Reed’s off-screen debauchery and suicide, Rochester’s much-repented youth, and Hindley and Heathcliff’s mutual self-destruction. I hid the extent of my guilt from family and friends as best I could. They found out anyway—as I neared my twenty-first birthday, my brother asked my dad, “Is Miranda going to start drinking now?” and Dad replied, “She’s been drinking. We just hope she’s not going to kill herself with it.”