Growing up in Hollywood, I refused to be judged by its standards. The milieu, as my mother encouraged me to assess it, though she was part of it herself, was phony. My time would come, she told me, just as we know Jane Eyre’s time will come. I clung to that expectation. I clung to unadornment, to plainness if you will, as a synonym for self. I was a self, a not very popular self at school, an invisible self in Hollywood, but a self that I sensed would some day be acknowledged.
Yet isn’t this all rather tiresome? Virginia Woolf says it well in her essay on the Brontës in The Common Reader: “When Charlotte wrote, she said with eloquence and spendour and passion, ‘I love,’ ‘I hate,’ ‘I suffer.’” But Woolf’s implication is that Charlotte’s focus is narrow, that to be so consumed in intense first-person emotions is both limiting and exhausting. Suggesting broader ways to engage with the world, Woolf cites the perceptual and intellectual range of characters in Austen and Tolstoy. She does not speak of Thackeray. His characters, after all, are “puppets”; he never lets go their strings. Yet Thackeray, too, offers an alternative, perhaps more than one, to “I love, I hate, I suffer.”
The alternative, I’d hazard, of Vanity Fair’s intrusive narrator is: “We love, we hate, we suffer.” Vanitas vanitarum. And Becky Sharp’s alternative—she does hate Miss Pinkerton but soon learns to be more dispassionate—is: “You love, you hate, you suffer, not I—and I will take advantage of your folly.”
My mother as a Hollywood gossip columnist can be seen as a combination of Thackeray and Becky. She chronicled the vanities of a superficial world: the loves, feuds, and risings and fallings of the stars. The stars were in a sense her puppets. “My paragraphs,” she called them. They were fodder for her column; she didn’t take them too seriously because she knew all were playing a game. Like Becky, she saw through the world she was scrutinizing while at the same time aspiring to be part of it. And also like Becky, she was an interloper. To anyone who knows anything of the story of Sheilah Graham, the parallels between her life and Becky Sharp’s must be obvious. Before she came to America, my mother gained entry to the highest circles of British society. Like Becky she concealed her background, in her case early poverty and Jewishness. Her entry card, like Becky’s, was her mix of beauty and brains—and a certain unscrupulousness about the means of getting ahead. Neither my mother nor Becky can be imagined as ever stopping to worry about being true to oneself, the pursuit of sincerity that Lionel Trilling sees as an essential value of Western culture from the Renaissance onward. For both Becky and my mother such scruples would have seemed a luxury. Respectability has its importance but only as appearance, not as moral essence. I think of both of them as driven, not as Jane Eyre is by the outsider’s loneliness, but by the outsider’s pragmatism. The pinnacle of Becky’s achievement is attending Lord Steyne’s party at Gaunt House. The pinnacle of my mother’s “English society period” was being presented at the court of George V and Queen Mary. We have the pictures to prove it. When everything collapses for Becky, she removes herself to the continent. My mother also changed continents—running from entanglements of one sort or another, she came to America. People in America, she said, judge you by what you can do, not by who you are.
My mother acknowledges the parallel between herself and Thackeray’s character in her book College of One. Scott Fitzgerald chose Vanity Fair as the first novel my mother should read in the College of One curriculum (was he thinking she reminded him of Becky Sharp?), and my mother comments:
It seems incredible that before Scott’s College of One I had not read Vanity Fair, the first of the novels in the curriculum. It was easy to read in the good edition Scott bought me in three volumes with good paper and strong print. . . . I did not consider the “how” of Becky Sharp. I found her interesting and she was somewhat like me. I much preferred her to the meek Amelia, who was put upon repeatedly without protesting. Becky fought for what she wanted, as I did. Her ambitions had been somewhat different from mine; she had wanted money and position, I had wanted acceptance. Perhaps they are related.
Ironically, my mother achieved money and position—and acceptance in her chosen milieu, whereas Becky ultimately holds onto none of these. My mother set herself the goal of earning $5,000 a week, an income she achieved in 1954 when she had her daily television show, though, granted, the $5,000 was her gross budget for the show. Becky, as she drives away from Queen’s Crawley, the estate that got away from her, muses that she “could have been a good woman on 5,000 pounds a year.” We never get to know if this might have been true because Becky never reaches her level of imagined financial stability. Still, it’s not the ultimate success or failure, or even the particular details of the ascent or descent that seem to me the main point of the comparison.
What I responded to at age eleven in Becky Sharp and recognized in my own family experience—not knowing then that Sheilah Graham was really Lily Shiel who had spent six years in a Jewish orphanage, not knowing that the paired, framed pencil drawings of my mother as a small girl, daffodil in hand, in a sweet blue dress and her “dead brother David” in a sailor suit were fakes, reworked to create an impression of genteel ancestry from childhood photographs of herself and her first husband Johnny—were Becky’s qualities of wit and zest and resourcefulness and a bizarre underlying honesty. It is the honesty of the
