Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  “The negroes will be given a vote,” confidently.

  “I don’t see what real use to dem dat is yet,” gravely. “It’s edication my people needs, and ways for work. It’s de fever time wid ’em now in de Souf; dey’s made for de chance to learn. Ole men an’ young stretch out dere hands for de books. It won’t last if dey’re balked now. . . .”

  *Margaret says to a house slave who asks her what freedom does for blacks up North:

  “It does nothing for them” carelessly, remembering to whom she was speaking. . . . “They are like Mose. He does light work here; he shaves beards, or whitewashes walls, or steals; he does the same in Philadelphia. He is thick-lipped and thriftless and affectionate, go where he will; only in the South they hunt him with dogs, and in the North they calculate how many years of competition with the white race it will need to sweep him and his like off of the face of the earth.”

  *This remains true to this date. In Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War, American Writers and the Civil War (1973), considered to be the authoritative volume on the subject (it was commissioned by the Civil War Bicentennial Commission), his major thesis is that the war remained largely unwritten. With a few notable exceptions, writers, “the antennae of the race,” “had revealed little of the meaning or causes of the War; nor discerned its moral and historical implications, nor written the complexities, the seamy and unheroic side.” Rebecca Harding Davis is not included among his few notable exceptions—nor does her fiction figure anywhere.

  Aaron mentions “the sterility of the American literary imagination” as a possible explanation for writers avoiding the war as subject, does not examine the idea, but instead ascribes the phenomenon to “emotional resistance [because race cannot be dealt with] blurring literary insight” and to “spiritual censorship,” primarily “the fastidiousness of lady readers. . . . The ‘real war’ [was] too indelicate for female ears.”

  As Rebecca Harding Davis (“a lady writer” furthermore), almost alone, and singularly in her time wrote directly of meaning, causes, moral and historical implications, the seamy and unheroic, the complex question of race (“disturbing truths and portents . . . understandings far ahead of her time”) it seems the gravest of omissions to have ignored discussion of her work as Aaron does. One paragraph of her Bits of Gossip account of Emerson, Alcott, and Hawthorne is included.

  *Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to her later: “The Nation has no sympathy with any deep & high moral movement—no pity for human infirmity. It is a sneering respectable middle-aged sceptic who says I take my two glasses & my cigar daily . . . dont mind them & dont hope for a sympathetic word from them ever.”

  *1976: There is now some question as to whether she was its author.

  **Yes, Rebecca, who did not do much resting in her husband’s house, said “rest.” In “The Wife’s Story,” she also uses the word “rest”—in a differing meaning: “To nestle down into this man’s heart and life! To make his last years that warm Indian summer day! I could do it! I! What utter rest there were in that.”

  †Prevalent—and oft expressed—medical opinion of the period.

  *Though Richard Harding Davis’s multitude of books do not have the intrinsic merit and interest of his mother’s, he was one of the celebrated writers of his time, a man of action and letters whose example supposedly influenced Hemingway and John Reed.

  His was the most famous face of his generation. Booth Tarkington wrote of him: “To the college boy of the 90’s, he was the beau ideal. His stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as were those of our own football captain; we knew his face as we knew the face of the President of the United States, but we infinitely preferred Davis’.”

  Davis was the model for Charles Dana Gibson’s man-about-town, appearing over and over in the famous Gibson Girl drawings. Later, during his roving correspondent days, he was often seen in press photographs with presidents, warring generals, revolutionary leaders, explorers.

  He wrote Rebecca almost every day of her life, and took care of her the last few years.

  *All the stories previously quoted from, including Life in the Iron Mills, remain uncollected.

  *The newsstory-obituary erred as to when Life in the Iron Mills was written, saying that Rebecca “was then less than 20 years old.” The lead paragraph and the account as a whole gave as much space to her family as to her: “Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, 79 years old, widow of the late L. Clarke Davis, at one time editor of The Philadelphia Public Ledger, mother of Richard Harding Davis, the novelist and dramatist, and herself a novelist and editorial writer of power, died here to-night of heart disease.”

  **Since 1971 when this was written and published with Life in the Iron Mills in the Feminist Press reprint series, there has been a revival of interest in her work. Life in the Iron Mills is increasingly taught in literature courses, American Studies and Women’s Studies classes. I first taught it, in Xerox copies made from the 1861 Atlantic, at Amherst College in 1969.

  *From Walt Whitman’s “Yonnondio.”

  **C. E. Norton was Charles Eliot Norton, editor, man of literature, Harvard professor. He left his library to that university.

  *Only Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps, herself largely forgotten, acknowledged the debt, the influence, paying tribute to Rebecca as “writing with an ardor that was human, and a passion that was art.” In her reminiscences, Chapters in a Life, she writes of Life in the Iron Mills as: “a distinct crisis for one young writer at the point where intellect and moral nature meet. . . . One could never again say that one did not understand. The claims of toil and suffering upon ease had assumed a new form. For me they acquired a force which has never let me go.” Phelps’s “The Twelfth of January” (Atlantic Monthly, November 1868), in which 112 mill girls are burned to death in a textile mill fire (an actual incident), and her Silent Partner (1871) were directly inspired by Rebecca’s work. So, less directly, were the Story of Avis and Dr. Zay.

  PART TWO

  Acerbs, Asides, Amulets, Exhumations, Sources,

  Deepenings, Roundings, Expansions

  Much of this aftersection is the words of others—some of them unknown or little known, others of them great and famous. Each quotation, as each reference to lives, is selectively chosen for maximum significance; to become—or to become again—current; to occur and recur; to aim.

  The organization follows the order of thought in the original essays, page by page, and is so keyed.

  ESSAY PAGE NUMBER TO WHICH EACH REFERS.

  The silences I speak of here are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being . . . when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.

  SILENCES IN LITERATURE–II

  SILENCES OF THE GREAT IN ACHIEVEMENT:

  (Primarily in Their Own Words)

  Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

  “Less and less shrink the visions then vast in me,” writes Thomas Hardy in his thirty-year ceasing from novels after the Victorian vileness to his Jude the Obscure (“so ended his prose contributions to literature, his experiences. . . having killed all his interest in this form.”)

  It was a twenty-eight year killing. Every aim and aspiration of Hardy’s in the writing of fiction (except for the getting of his living by it) was thwarted. He had sought to write “the substance of life only”—(of working people, of women; illuminating their constricted circumstances; according them and their lives full dimension and tragedy)—and to create fiction “near to poetry.” Tenaciously though he fought, always he ended up not being able to attain—or having to damage—“his artistic whole.”

  In the earlier writing years, he had had neither the confidence (by reason of origin) nor the means, to write what or how he wished. Later, even with Tess, even with Jude, the great mature novels written when he was financially less at the mercy of publishers, there yet remained the massive class and sexual (i.e., sexist) censorship of his time
; the rigidly circumscribed form of the novel as then practiced, to continue to defeat him. He was fifty-eight when he was “grated to pieces by the constant attrition,” gave up imaginative prose, thirty years of writing vitality still in him.

  The record is in his own statements, understatements rather—for he was the most reticent of writers. Whether in first or third person, these are all Hardy’s own words:*

  1873

  He perceived that he was . . . committed by circumstances to novel-writing as a regular trade; and that hence he would, he deemed, have to look for material in manners—in ordinary social and fashionable life, as other novelists did. Yet he took no interest in manners, but in the substance of life only. So far, what he had written had not been novels at all as usually understood.

  1884

  Hardy fancied he had damaged [his Mayor of Casterbridge] more recklessly as an artistic whole in the interest of the newspaper in which it appeared serially, than perhaps any of his other novels; his aiming to get an incident into almost every week’s part, causing him . . . to add events to the narrative somewhat too freely.

  1887

  The ending of [The Woodlanders] hinted rather than stated . . . that the heroine is doomed to an unhappy life with an inconstant husband. I could not accentuate this strongly in the book, by reason of the conventions of the libraries, etc. Since it was written, however, truth to character is not considered quite such a crime in literature as it was formerly.

  1889–1890

  In October [1889], as much of Tess of the d’Urbervilles as was written was offered . . . to Murray’s Magazine. It was declined and returned . . . virtually on the score of its improper explicitness. . . . The editor of Macmillan’s Magazine . . . declined [it] for practically the same reason.

  Hardy would now have much preferred to finish the story and bring it out in volume form only, but there were reasons why he could not afford to do this. . . . Some chapters or parts of chapters [were] cut out . . . till they could be put back in their places at the printing of the whole in volume form. In addition several passages were modified. . . . But the work was sheer drudgery.

  1890

  If the true artist ever weeps, it is at the fearful price he has to pay for the privilege of writing in the language, no less a price than the complete extinction of sympathetic belief in his personages in the mind of every mature and penetrating reader.*

  1891

  . . . During the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a serial in The Graphic . . . the editor objected to the description of Angel Clare carrying in his arms, across a flooded lane, Tess and her three dairymaid companions. He suggested that it would be more decorous and suitable for the pages of a periodical intended for family reading if the damsels were wheeled across the land in a wheelbarrow. This was accordingly done.

  The Graphic [also] refused to print the chapter describing the christening of Tess’s illegitimate infant. This . . . was afterwards restored to the novel, where it was considered one of the finest passages.

  1892

  . . . The tediousness of the alterations and restorations had made him weary of [Tess].

  1893–1895, during the writing of Jude the Obscure (“the tragedy of unfulfilled aims”), eight years in the gestation and closest of all his novels to his heart, Hardy again had to continuously alter, invent substitute scenes and prose suitable for magazine serial publication.

  1894

  . . . Restoring the Ms. of Jude the Obscure to its original state.

  . . . On account of the labour of altering [it] to suit the magazine, and then having to alter it back, I have lost energy for revising and improving the original as I meant to do.

  1895

  You have hardly an idea how poor and feeble the book seems to me, as executed, beside the idea of it that I had formed in prospect.

  1896, in the midst of his private despair over his failure to make Jude the book he had wished, and of the public revilement of it, he wrote in his notebooks:

  Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse, ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion—hard as a rock—which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting. . . . If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.

  1897

  . . . So ended his prose contributions to literature . . . his experiences of the few preceding years having killed all his interest in this form of imaginative work (which had ever been secondary to his interest in verse).

  1897–1898

  . . . [All] wellnigh compelled him, in his own judgment at any rate, if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect, to abandon at once [this] form of literary art. . . .

  . . . The change, after all, was not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper, and as more specifically understood, that is, stories of modern artificial life and manners showing a certain smartness of treatment. He had mostly aimed at keeping his narratives as close to natural life and as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow, and had regretted that those conditions would not let him keep them nearer still.

  How deeply he lived his books in their creating—the younger writer so possessed that in

  . . . writing Far From the Madding Crowd—sometimes indoors, sometimes out—when he would occasionally find himself without a scrap of paper at the very moment that he felt volumes . . . he would use large dead leaves, white chips left by woodcutters, or pieces of stone or slate that came to hand.

  How ineradicably his creations lived on in him; notebook entries of incidents, or people seen, reminding him of them; other instances of recalling. And the old, old Hardy, close to eighty-six, at a special performance in his home of Tess of the D’Ubervilles, sitting there with tears in his eyes, his lips mutely repeating by heart the words he had written thirty-seven years before; after the performance, “insisting on talking to us until the last minute. He talked of Tess as if she was someone real.” He spoke of her so to Virginia Woolf, too, when she visited him: “I used to see women now and then with the look of her.”

  But the great poetry he wrote to the end of his life was not sufficient to hold, to develop, the vast visions which for twenty-eight years had had expression in novel after novel. People, situations, interrelationships, landscape—they cry for larger life in poem after poem.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

  It was not visions shrinking with Hopkins, but a different torment. For seven years he kept his religious vow to refrain from writing poetry, but the poet’s eye he could not shut, nor win “elected silence to beat upon [his] whorled ear.” “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a poem which now I realised on paper,” he writes of the first poem permitted to end the seven years’ silence. But poetry (“to hoard unheard; be heard, unheeded”) could be only the least and last of his heavy priestly responsibilities. Nineteen poems were all he could produce in his last nine years—fullness to us, but torment pitched past grief to him, who felt himself become “time’s eunuch, never to beget.”

  In briefest summary, the making of that torment:

  —Years in which poetry begged to be written, had to be denied.

  —Scarcely ever the slightest circumstances for writing—a life of sheer, hard, tasking work.

  —When he did write, the sense of it as sin—betrayal of his highest convictions and responsibilities as a Jesuit priest.

  —The crushing burden of the terrible circumstances for “common humanity” felt during his work in Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin.

  —The sense of exile: “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life Among strangers.”

  —Lonely knowledge of his great and original achievement—unvalidated outside himself. To hoard unheard.

  —Aborted hopes for publication in his lifetime; ineradicable hunger for esteem, recognition of his achievement, if only in the form of comprehending appreciation of his work by a selected few poets of standing
. To be heard, unheeded.

  Each selection that follows could be multiplied many times over. All are from letters to those selected few poets of standing.

  In each case, Hopkins initiated, and maintained, the correspondence.*

  1876, when he began to write poetry again, to 1879 were years of favorable circumstances for Hopkins. He was stationed in Wales, which he loved and where he created almost with his early fluency—twenty-five poems in three years. It was in this time that he began to send work to the poet Robert Bridges; having to explain and defend it, he began writing to Richard Watson Dixon as well.

  1877, to Bridges

  There is no conceivable license I shd. not be able to justify. . . . With all my licences, or rather laws, I am stricter than you and I might say than anybody I know. With the exception of the Bremen stanza, which was, I think, the first written after 10 years’ interval of silence, and before I had fixed my principles, my rhymes are rigidly good to the ear. . . .

  1878, the year Hopkins was ordained, to Dixon

  . . . if I had written and published works the extreme beauty of which the author himself the most keenly feels and they had fallen out of sight at once and been . . . almost wholly unknown; then, I say, I should feel a certain comfort to be told they had been deeply appreciated by some one person, a stranger at all events, and had not been published quite in vain. Many beautiful works have been almost unknown and then have gained fame at last. . . but many more must have been lost sight of altogether. . . .

  1878, also to Dixon

  When I spoke of fame I was not thinking of the harm it does to men as artists: it may do them harm, as you say, but so, I think, may the want of it, if “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise To shun delights and live laborious days”—a spur very hard to find a substitute for or to do without. . . .

  What I do regret is the loss of recognition belonging to the work itself. . . .