The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Everyone and no one, it seems. Meanwhile, we have a book worthy of its subject—graceful, astonishingly well researched, yet imbued with a sense of flow that is rarely achieved at this level of scholarship. Brimming with intelligence and excitement, it sets before us the idea of an electric mind, of indisputable greatness. Virginia Woolf thought the biographer had to go “ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions.” Here, then, is that miner’s canary—just listen.

  MOPING ON THE MOORS

  (THE BRONTË SISTERS)

  2004

  Has there ever been a background more marked by personal tragedy and literary ill omen than the one that produced the Brontë sisters? Charlotte, Emily, and Anne: there was less than four years between them (their brother, Branwell, who dissipated his talents in drink and drugs, came between Charlotte and Emily), and it is tempting to think of the three, radically different as their personalities were, as linked to one another like a chain of paper-doll cutouts. None of them lived to forty: Emily and Anne died of consumption within five months of each other, the one at thirty and the other at twenty-nine (Branwell died three months before Emily, at the age of thirty-one), and Charlotte, the only one of the sisters to marry, was in the early months of pregnancy at the time of her death just short of thirty-nine. Yet their legacy is incomparable in the history of writer-siblings both for the degree of individual talent and for the triumph of imaginative vision over inhospitable circumstance that they personify.

  The trio had much going against them: Branwell, the designated family genius, was educated in the classics by his father, and the money was found to send him to London to pursue his grand dreams of becoming an artist; his sisters, meanwhile, in keeping with their genteelly impoverished lot, were forced to find humble employment as governesses and teachers. All three were unconventional in both their ambition and their independence of mind, and although Emily and Anne were not without feminine allure, they were none of them real beauties. (Thackeray, who gave a dinner in Charlotte’s honor after she “came out” from behind the male pseudonym Currer Bell, believed that what troubled her more than anything else was that she was not pretty enough to win a man.) And yet, despite the corseting assumptions of their time and place—Victorian England at its most high-handedly patriarchal—these three slightly built (Charlotte was under five feet) and psychologically delicate young women contrived to produce a clutch of novels that to this day retain the daring originality and riveting characterization that scandalized their contemporaries. (Anne’s novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which are as bold as her reputation is mild, have been routinely slighted in favor of her sisters’, but when they came out, they were thought to be even more shocking.) Two of the sisters’ novels, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights, have entered the canon and can lay claim to equal status with the fiction of Dickens and George Eliot. (Although Jane Eyre was originally billed as “an autobiography,” it is Villette, Charlotte’s most accomplished novel, that is also her most painfully self-revealing one.)

  Lucasta Miller’s Brontë Myth is a wonderfully entertaining and often spellbinding account of the ways in which the Brontës’ “lonely moorland lives” lent themselves to the process of mythification even before the last sister had expired. It helped that misfortune lurked in every nook and cranny of the family history: Charlotte was five when their mother died, and within four years two elder sisters had died as well, at the ages of eleven and ten, as a result of the miserable conditions at a boarding school that would later be immortalized as the horrifying Lowood school in Jane Eyre. (Both Charlotte and Emily attended it briefly as well.)

  Patrick Brontë, the children’s father, was the curate of Haworth; the village parsonage fronted on a graveyard and looked out in back on the Yorkshire moors. Looked after by a spinster aunt and a housekeeper, Tabby, and cut off from the local goings-on by virtue of their not entirely secure social class (Patrick Brontë, who attended Cambridge on a scholarship, had risen from humble Irish stock, changing his name along the way from the plebeian Brunty to the more commanding Brontë, which is Greek for “thunder”), the four remaining siblings looked to one another for companionship. Patrick might not have been quite the deranged character he was made out to be until fairly recently, when his image was refurbished in Juliet Barker’s heroically—and sometimes myopically—researched 1997 biography, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, but he was undeniably on the peculiar side, preferring, among other habits, to take his meals alone.

  The children entertained themselves by creating, in minuscule script on tiny scraps of paper, elaborate and gory fantasy worlds, the most enduring of which were Angria and Gondal. The origins of the sisters’ literary gifts are clearly to be found in their juvenilia, but the remarkable fact is that they persevered in their scribblings despite so many obstacles. These included the sovereign fact that writing in the Brontë house was “very much a male domain”; their being saddled with managing their father’s household after the deaths of their aunt and their housekeeper; anxieties as to the worth of their writing (Charlotte was particularly afflicted with doubts, which makes her entrepreneurship on behalf of herself and her sisters all the more moving); and discouragement from outsiders.

  Miller is particularly good on this last point, although she is blessedly free of the sort of dogmatic gender-study approach that takes a perverse pride in counting off the indignities inflicted by an obtuse male establishment. Among those who either responded negatively to Charlotte’s work or advised her against pursuing it were Hartley Coleridge, son of the poet (who had earlier complimented Branwell on his poetry), and Robert Southey, the poet laureate, to whom she sent some of her poems while she was teaching at a boarding school. While conceding that she had “the faculty of Verse,” Southey solemnly admonished her: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be.” Resisting the impulse to wax irate on Charlotte’s behalf, Miller prefers to understate the case, wondering mildly whether Southey “might have considered a lust for fame more excusable in a young man than in a girl” and noting that Charlotte hastened to reassure the poet of the self-extinguishing program she had put into effect: “I carefully avoid any appearance of pre-occupation, and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits … I try to deny myself.”

  Although Miller’s style is vivid and graceful, a good deal of research and thinking has gone into this undertaking, which she accurately describes in her preface as “not so much a biography of the Brontës as a book about biography, a metabiography.” To this end she charts the emergence of a literary growth industry, one that is “littered with examples of apocryphal stories and fantastical claims” and was characterized by Henry James as a “beguiled infatuation” that “embodies, really, the most complete intellectual muddle, if the term be not extravagant, ever achieved, on a literary question, by our wonderful public.”

  The muddle began with Charlotte herself and the careful construction of her social persona as “the modest spinster daughter of a country parson,” which served, as Miller points out, as a kind of “protective ‘veil’ to distract attention from the unacceptable elements of her fiction and deflect attacks on her personal morality.” But the phenomenon that would eventually blossom into full-blown Brontëmania—with a cadre of relic-worshipping fans (including a former Hells Angel who interrupted a 1994 meeting of the Brontë Society to protest a newspaper article that described Charlotte as ugly) as well as the marketing of Emily Brontë soap (smelling of “the elusive fragrance of the wild moors”) and Brontë Natural Spring Water—was really set in motion with Elizabeth Gaskell’s landmark The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Published in 1857, two years after Charlotte’s death, and written in a colorful, you-are-there style that eschews literary analysis for poetic descriptions and psychological portraits, it is, Miller w
rites, “arguably the most famous English biography of the nineteenth century” and one that “set the agenda which would turn the Brontës into icons.” It became an immediate sensation, and although not quite an authorized version, the biographer’s hagiographic view of events was colored throughout by her subject’s participation and guidance; Gaskell was intent on playing up Charlotte’s “womanliness” and her noble penchant for “self-denial,” as opposed to the fiery romantic and intellectual passions that had ruled her life.

  The canonizing and sanitizing instincts that informed Gaskell’s rehabilitative project inaugurated the “purple heather school” of Brontë biography and would lead to a century and a half of imitations, rebuttals, correctives, and parodies, with the emphasis shifting in accordance with ideological fashions. There are now scads of biographies, critical studies, novels, plays, children’s books, films, and psychoanalytic inquiries (the last very much taken up with Charlotte’s Electra complex, lack of self-esteem, and overriding masochism, as well as with Emily’s anorexia). All of them attempt to trace the source of the sisters’ genius—in spite of the critic J. Hillis Miller’s wise observation about the most inscrutable of the Brontës’ novels, written by the most impenetrable of the sisters: “The secret truth about Wuthering Heights … is that there is no secret truth.” Some of these Brontë interpretations were done in a spirit of fun (a satirical two-woman theater piece called Withering Looks and a novel called The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s); others with a heavy touch (a book called Charlotte Brontë’s World of Death and a novel called Divide the Desolation) or a sensationalistic eye (The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë wildly claimed that Emily was murdered after she was impregnated by Arthur Nicholls, the assistant curate who finally got to marry Charlotte after loyally hanging around for years).

  Miller gives a hilarious account of the 1946 Warner Brothers movie Devotion, in which the reserved and very English Nicholls is played with “a disconcerting Austrian accent by Paul Henreid” and is given lines better suited to Rhett Butler, such as his declaration, after kissing Charlotte in the conservatory: “There are two ways of dealing with young women of your perverse temperament. It is fortunate for you that I am not a woman-beater.” But the funniest instances of the “lurid legend-mongering” that passed for scholarship have to do with inflamed guesswork about the romantic life of Emily, who has been called “the sphinx of English literature.” With great relish Miller hauls up a 1936 biography of Emily by Virginia Moore called The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë, which purported to be a rigorous examination in which “especial and respectful” attention had been paid to primary sources. In her zeal to bring new light to bear on the elusive Brontë’s lost lover, Moore misread the title of one of her manuscript poems as “Louis Parensell” instead of “Love’s Farewell.” Miller notes that the “mythic Louis went on to spend a colorful speculative existence on the letters page of the Poetry Review,” with one correspondent writing in with a suggestion as to where the two lovers might have met, based on a sleuth-like reading of a throwaway phrase in one of the diaries. Not content with her discovery, Moore excitedly went on to unearth another dark secret, proposing that Emily had been “a member of that beset band of women who can find their pleasure only in women.”

  There is little to find fault with in The Brontë Myth, except perhaps for its failure to bring the ghostly Anne out of the mists so as to give her the benefit of its respectful but vastly amused scrutiny. It suffers, too, from a somewhat tentative organizing principle, which slightly undercuts its ambitious agenda. But these are quibbles. The Brontës are an endlessly intriguing subject—as a 1931 novel about them put it, “What a family! Even if they’d never written a line, what a story!”—and Miller’s book is a superbly unmuddled contribution to the continuing literary conversation.

  THE LADY VANQUISHED

  (JEAN RHYS)

  2009

  Jean Rhys lived a hard-luck life and wrote, almost exclusively, about hard-luck women. Her pellucid prose, in which shards of pained observation cut a jagged edge in an otherwise fluid style, is so accessible that it is easy to overlook the art—the tight control—behind the seeming artlessness. Like those of Marguerite Duras and Katherine Mansfield, Rhys’s natural psychological habitat was despondency of a particularly female kind—what Mansfield in her notebooks describes as “an air of steady desperation,” hinging on desiring and desirability. With the exception of Rhys’s last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which reimagines Jane Eyre’s Mrs. Rochester, her characters are bewildered women of the demimonde who reside in what she describes as “lowdown” sorts of places: cheap hotels and seedy boardinghouses. Armed with kohl-blackened eyelids and feigned indifference, they dine out on erotic allure that loses its luster even as they banter with the men on whose good humor and money they depend, only to end up sooner or later drunk and alone. These cornered creatures are based on the author herself, and all suffer from the lassitude—the lack of élan vital—that plagued Rhys for most of her life, causing her to note in her unfinished, posthumously published autobiography, Smile Please (1979), “Oh, God, I’m only twenty and I’ll have to go on living and living and living.”

  Lilian Pizzichini’s Blue Hour is the second full-length biography of Rhys to appear since her death in 1979 at the age of eighty-eight; the first was Carole Angier’s excellent and tirelessly researched Jean Rhys: Life and Work of 1990. Pizzichini’s title is borrowed from the Guerlain perfume L’Heure Bleue, a scent that was meant to evoke dusk in Paris and happened to be Rhys’s favorite. As Pizzichini writes, “The blue hour was also the hour when the lap-dog she saw herself as being during the day turned into a wolf … Underneath our surface sophistication lurks a predator. Jean Rhys was always concerned with what lay beneath the top notes.”

  This sense of being at the mercy of latently hostile forces against which she had to arm herself informed the way Rhys approached the world from childhood on. She began life on August 24, 1890, the fourth of five children born to a family that belonged to the tiny patrician class of Dominica, a volcanic island in the West Indies—a class that enjoyed a simulated Victorian life among the natives. Rhys, née Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams (the novelist and critic Ford Madox Ford, who became her lover and literary champion in the 1920s, suggested the change to give her name a more modernist ring), lost her mother’s attention to a new sister when she was five and was thereafter looked after by a mercurial native named Meta, who, she would insist in Smile Please, “couldn’t bear the sight of me.” Meta was a believer in voodoo and obeah, the Caribbean form of black magic, and instilled fears in the vulnerable young girl of vampires, zombies, and werewolves: “Jean spent much of her childhood screaming, crying or collapsing with terror,” Pizzichini observes, “and taking weeks to recover in bed.” Until she left for an English boarding school at seventeen, Rhys spent an isolated youth reading and communing with nature; her increasingly removed mother, meanwhile, was mystified by her shy misfit of a daughter.

  Rhys arrived in a grimy, sunless, and crowded Edwardian city that didn’t live up to her fantasies: “London was disappointing. She could not see her future in its smog-smudged streets.” (One might argue that among Rhys’s problems was a failure to envision her future anywhere she was; she was doomed to be overwhelmed by first impressions.) Rhys attended Perse School in Cambridge, and although she did well in her studies and made some friends, she held on to her West Indian accent with its “lilting rhythms and French patois” and was mocked for talking “like a nigger.” Never one to feel easily at home—Pizzichini describes her as existing “in a permanent state of dissociation”—Rhys was at a loss when it came to basic skills, such as riding a bike, and got chilblains from the freezing dormitory. She stuck it out for three terms, winning the school’s Ancient History Prize, and then, with the support of her “indulgent” father, switched to the Academy of Dramatic Art. After two terms of classes in “fencing, ballet, elocution, and gesture del sarto,” her father refused to pay any further, havi
ng received a letter from the school that held out little hope for Rhys’s “success in Drama.”

  Defying expectations that she would return to Dominica, there to wait on a suitable marriage proposal, Rhys threw herself into the raffish life of a chorus girl. The next few years saw her gradual transformation into one of her own heroines, short on money and long on anguish. She entered into a two-year affair with an older, wealthy businessman she called Lancey; he set her up in spacious quarters, paid for her singing lessons, and listened to her tales of exotic Dominica. Despite Rhys’s dreams of being saved by her lover, Lancey abruptly ended the affair by letter, agreeing to pay her an allowance in return for being left alone. This turn of events led to Rhys’s emotional collapse, setting the pattern for relationships to come: “Lancey’s rejection … left her feeling nullified. As such she began her pursuit of disappointing adventures and loves that replicated this scenario of loss and mortification; or else retreated, disconsolate and speechless, alone with the chaos her feelings brought.”