Unsure of my status, ill at ease, I returned to England a month after Freddie’s death, to attend a large public memorial for him at University College London. He had been teaching there when I first met him, before his later appointment at New College, Oxford. It was on the second day of my visit that Freddie’s widow—an American-born journalist named Dee Wells, now Lady Ayer, who had become Freddie’s second wife in 1960, divorced him in 1982, and remarried him just months before his death—broached how Freddie had said to her, “I must do something for Wendy.” I held my breath waiting to know what that something could be. When friends in America had asked me whether Freddie had left me any money, I had consistently treated the inquiry as rather crass. “Oh no, I don’t think so,” I had said. “I didn’t expect him to.”
“And sooo,”—Dee drew out the word—“he has left you the choice of twelve books of English literature from his library.”
The library occupied a floor in the house that Freddie had inherited from his third wife, Vanessa, who had died of cancer. It occurred to me that this was the third London address at which I had known Freddie. I had met him in his flat on Whitehorse Street, frequented the house he had with Dee on Regent’s Park Terrace, and then come to “claim kin,” as it were, in this house on York Street, once again in Mayfair. Now he was dead, and his library remained—testament in its thousands of tomes of philosophy and history and biography and the literature of different countries, to his breath of knowledge and enthusiasms. Choosing the books of my legacy meant combing through all that to pick out my precisely defined dozen, and it was a hard, even bitter task. A six-volume set of Jane Austen took care of half my bequest and seemed apt. When I had arrived at the York Street house on my earlier visit after Freddie had written me that he was my father, I had found him in the library with his secretary and been subjected to a quiz.
“What is Mr. Darcy’s first name?” he had asked, looking up from his work.
“Fitzwilliam,” I had said, relieved to know the answer.
“And where in the novel does it occur?” he had pressed.
I hadn’t known, and Freddie, delighted to get the better of a PhD in English literature, had informed me it is when Darcy writes to Elizabeth in the wake of her rejection of his first proposal. I tried to laugh off my discomfiture, but the exercise seemed too much at my expense.
Back in that library and forcing myself on in the selection of the books, I chose Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, which included his essay on “The Decay of Lying,” a leather-bound edition of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a 1865 leather-bound edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a Hogarth Press first edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Moment and Other Essays, and an e.e. cummings 95 poems, in which the author had scribbled a few words to his friend Freddie.
And there I stopped with eleven books chosen. I looked over others but couldn’t decide on a final volume. I kept worrying how much the books would weigh in my suitcase, and though I tried to tell myself this was a silly concern, the books, in truth, felt to me like lead, each chosen one another loadstone to sink my spirits further. I couldn’t pick a twelfth and left it at that. Perhaps with a book still to go, any of the multitudinous books of English literature in the library seemed still potentially mine. Or perhaps I simply couldn’t bear the dispossessed way choosing these books made me feel. Later Dee wrote to ask me to give back the cummings, saying the whole collection of cummings had been left to her and Freddie’s son, Nick, and offering me another choice. I returned the cummings but did not replace it. Twenty-six years after Freddie’s death, I have never opened any of the books of my bequest, which sit grouped together on a shelf in my living room bookcase.
When I think of Freddie and English literature, I think of his love of Dickens and I think of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Freddie was Angel Clare for me, a man of quick-paced intellect and bodily lightness of being, a spirit of air like his name, not a creature of gross flesh like the detested Bow Wow. He was a free-thinker, a renowned atheist. But he was also Alec d’Urberville, a roué, a compulsive seducer of women, a sensualist. “What was my mother like?” I had asked him on my daughterly visit. He had smiled and thought for a moment. “I remember her as being rather plump,” he said. I expected something else, something more, but that’s what he chose to remember.
Both Alec and Angel fail Tess. I could say that Freddie failed me. But that pronouncement seems too blunt—it belies the intricacies of my story. I think I need a different author than Hardy to help me convey its nuances and its treacheries, perhaps someone less fixed on “the President of the Immortals,” existent or not, and more on the willful duplicity of human beings. Hardy’s characters are too subject to fate and ultimately too fragile for my purposes. I need an author whose personages do more to “choose” the tangles of their lives and then have the stamina to live with what they’ve chosen.
One of the most cherished books in my library is a tattered Riverside edition of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the first work we read in a year-long freshman English course at Bryn Mawr College. Studying The Portrait of a Lady, writing papers about its narrative techniques and its use of imagery (I remember tracing window and bird imagery) taught me techniques for approaching modern literature. I learned
