But there is another way, perhaps more indefinite, that George Eliot is bound up with my life’s progress. When Donald went off with that other woman in Hawaii, I suffered a terrible blow. I suspected the affair, then confirmed it by snooping—a love letter in his trousers’ pocket urged him to come away into a magic realm. When I confronted him, he said it was best for him to leave. I begged and pleaded with him not to go, but he left anyway. The next day I still had to get the children up and dress and feed them, deliver Emily to her preschool and Sean to his sitter, and go and teach my three courses. I did all this in those three hard months. I also kept writing my dissertation. I hadn’t thought I could cope through such a trial, but I did. You might say I learned “to do without opium and live through . . . pain with conscious clear- eyed endurance.” I suffered but I learned I could manage. I could carry on despite emotional distress.
I should add that my mother, then almost seventy, near my age now, was a help to me in this time by coming to Hawaii and renting a house about a mile from mine. I would take the children over to her place in the afternoons, and we would sit with them by her pool and talk things over, even laugh. My mother proved quite selfless in a crisis. She came through for me remarkably. George Eliot would have understood this—how most of us can rise above ego when it really matters. My belief in this human capacity helps to make me an abiding optimist.
Isabel Archer and Tess of the d’Urbervilles
The first time I met my father, though I didn’t yet know his relation to me, he took me to a London bookstore and bought me Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I was eleven years old, on my first trip abroad. My mother had been invited by several Hollywood studios to visit their film locations in London, Paris, and Rome. She chose to have me go with her, while eight-year-old Robert remained at home in California with Bow Wow.
Up to this point, the summer of 1954, I had ventured beyond Southern California’s span of ocean and desert, palm trees and eucalyptuses, only in the imagined landscapes of my reading. But as our TWA propeller plane descended over the patchwork fields of “little grey-green England”—Henry James’s epithet in The Portrait of a Lady—I felt myself, even without quite having words for the experience, on the brink of both an adventure and a homecoming. Little about England surprised me. I was startled that buildings were grimy (dirt seemed not to adhere to the gleaming stucco facades of Southern California) and that horse-drawn carts still delivered the milk. But I took in the sights before me, writing daily in the journal my mother had urged me to keep, a poignantly dutiful record, as I look back on it now, of my observations and activities. Within just a few weeks I also acquired an English accent. “Drop it,” advised my mother upon our return to the United States.
In London, my mother’s former home, where we began and ended the trip, I saw people from her past, including her two ex-husbands. John Graham Gillam, the first of these—to me “Uncle Johnny”—now old and genteelly impoverished, was assigned to conduct me to Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. The second, Trevor Westbrook, a dour British engineer and the man I thought was my father, used the occasion of my visit to try to get to know me better. We were nearly strangers to one another, as he had always lived in England and had come to California only three or four brief times in my life’s eleven years. Now he took me into his homes—a flat in Eton Square and a pseudo-ancestral country house in West Sussex, an imposing brick edifice cobbled together from two laborer’s cottages, which he had dignified with the name of Little Brockhurst. I felt ill at ease in these settings, guilty, then and thereafter, at my discomfort in his uncommunicative presence and anxious, every time I was with him, to be back with my mother. Far more appealing than Johnny or Trevor was a trim, wavy-haired man in his early forties, introduced to me as my mother’s old friend Freddie Ayer. I knew he was a famous philosopher, though hardly understanding then what philosophy was supposed to be.
That A. J., later Sir Alfred Ayer (who accepted a life peerage despite his ardent socialism), was my real father I would learn only thirty-five years later. My mother’s
