I look back on this period, our two years in the Brooklyn Heights brownstone, with a great swell of nostalgia for a happy time. Two decades later I heard the critic John Bayley discuss a passage in Anna Karenina in which Vronsky sees a street sign and knows he will go home and describe it to Anna. “And that,” said Bayley, “is ordinary happiness.” Yes, I thought. I recognized what he was talking about. We had had it in Brooklyn—ordinary happiness—something I think I valued all the more because I hadn’t really known it growing up in Hollywood. Donald and I shopped together for groceries and cooked meals out of Craig Claiborne and Julia Child. Having a baby enriched our life together, and living in the building provided community. I remember everyone, especially the Suzmans and us, as always laughing. I liked going to work, and I liked coming home.
Yet a more soberly nuanced narrative also asserts itself, one less tinged by nostalgia or that gathers pace and clarity as nostalgia subsides. I need only imagine how George Eliot would have probed and even pitied us as characters in her fiction. Poor Wendy, poor Donald, she would have begun her paragraph of sympathetic but relentless analysis, piercing into the shadows and the secrets of our idyll. I say that I was happy to be married, but it’s also true that I married impulsively, not sure what I was fleeing or seeking, though eager for some ill-defined transfiguration. A brief romantic entanglement with a woman classmate in Alice Fredman’s seminar, sexual though not quite consummated, had frightened me. Donald was one of several men I was going out with at the time of this involvement. He was amiable, kind, and emotionally undemanding. I appreciated that he didn’t pressure me, for similar to Gwendolyn, I recoiled from “being made love to” and was often on the run from male ardor and insistence. Donald fell in gracefully with my friends, my mother liked him though he wasn’t rich or on much of a career path in his job as assistant foreign student advisor at Columbia, and I sort of slipped into loving him. At Bryn Mawr, we had quoted our founder, M. Carey Thomas, “Only our failures marry.” What she really had said, I learned only years later, was that “our failures only marry.” This may seem a consequential corrective, but in a practical sense it hardly mattered. Whatever her words, most of my classmates got married—the pull of conventional aspirations trumping a spinster’s aphorism. Soon Donald and I were engaged—I think that was my idea (so much for my vaunted immunity to the charms of the marriage-plot in fiction). Then it all seemed to work out well—a nice wedding, the brownstone, the baby, the circles of colleagues and friends. In many ways we suited one another, though sometimes, especially if Donald were late coming home, I’d have a flash of fear that I hardly knew him.
What followed was harder. In February 1971, almost as a joke to imagine escaping winter, I signed up for an interview with a recruiter from the University of Hawaii’s main Manoa, Oahu campus. The University of Hawaii was seeking ABD—all but dissertation—instructors to teach for a three-year stint. To my surprise I was offered a position, and without much worry or even much thought, we opted for adventure. Donald quit his job; we sold our furniture, most of which came from my mother, shipped our books and wedding china with the dubiously reputable Seven Santini Brothers, and flew off with one-year-old Emily to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I remember looking down from the plane at a small island, my new home, dwarfed in the vast expanse of glittering blue water, and wondering if I hadn’t made a terrible mistake.
In the three ensuing years in Hawaii, I gave birth to our son, Sean; my husband left me for another woman four months after the baby was born and three months later came back; my mother visited at least twice a year, expressing her wonderment each time she stepped off the plane that anyone could work in such a tropical paradise. And no matter what else was happening, I taught my three courses a term, listened a lot to Toscanini’s recordings of Brahms symphonies, and, sitting at a table on the screened porch, or lanai, of my rented suburban house and looking out onto a garden of plumeria blossoms and banana trees, I wrote my dissertation on George Eliot. It was one of the hardest times of my life but also, oddly, one of the most productive.
The thesis I developed, which today would probably fall under the rubric of cultural studies, was to trace a recurrent plot in Eliot’s fiction in the context of the author’s outlook and values. Always attuned to narrative patterns and structure, I saw the novels repeatedly telling the story of a woman caught in personal distress and isolated from the community around her. Her success or failure to find release from her crisis in a reunification with the surrounding world seemed to me to form the central dramatic action in books ranging from George Eliot’s first published work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, to her last, Daniel Deronda. When the heroine succeeds, it is with the help of a sympathetic man, often a religious leader, to whom she confesses her distress and who in turn has connections with the community. In the later novels the notion of community becomes more problematic; still, the plot is never resolved as a personal love story. The relationship of heroine and confessor may be erotically charged, but it does not lead to marriage. Usually the heroine is unhappily married already. Though George Eliot obligingly kills off a
