The secrets in these novels emerge, but they are so potent as to be almost unprintable. Hardy omits Tess’s confession to Angel from his text, while managing to convey its intensity through bodily gesture and the image of the diamond necklace Angel has fastened around her neck.
She bent forward, at which each diamond gave a sinister wink like a toad’s; and pressing her forehead against his temple, she entered on her story of her acquaintance with Alec d’Urberville and its results, murmuring the words without flinching and with her eyelids drooping down.
We cut to a new chapter, which begins: “Her narrative ended; even its reassertions and secondary explanations were done . . .” Tess has told her story, but we haven’t heard it. I have read feminist critics who reproach Hardy for denying Tess her own voice in this scene. Yet that’s not what I’m thinking as I take in the toad simile (another reptile) or the tenderness of Tess’s and Angel’s foreheads pressed together. Throughout the novel Hardy is so bold and brilliant in the settings and gestures he finds for his characters—the sleepwalking scene, Tess and Angel among the cows, Tess on the threshing machine at Flint-Ashcomb, Tess sleeping at Stonehenge. These images remain with me far more than what the characters say. Speech in a Hardy universe seems paltry. There are greater seismic forces at play.
In The Portrait of a Lady, on the other hand, whatever the brilliance of James’s settings and all his metaphors of houses and windows and birds and gardens, speech matters. Sometimes utterances are passionately direct; often they are enigmatic or elliptical, puzzles that compel our attention. Thus, silences matter, too, the things that aren’t said or are hinted at obliquely. In Hardy we see the author creating the ellipses; in James the characters themselves seem to take on this function. I am especially attentive to the words—and words unspoken—that in a series of cautious encounters convey the secret of Pansy’s birth. The first is Isabel’s wordless shock at the sight of her husband seated and Madame Merle standing, a lingering image she doesn’t yet understand; the last is the scene between Isabel and Madame Merle at Pansy’s convent in which “Madame Merle had guessed in a second that everything was at an end between them, and in the space of another instant, she had guessed the reason why.”
The power of the unearthed secret is then acknowledged in a pointed yet still elliptical exchange:
“I think I should never like to see you again,” says Isabel.
And James gives the defeated Madame Merle the last word. “‘I shall go to America,’ she quietly remarked . . .”
What would have been the conversation, what would have been the “scene” if I had learned my mother’s secret before she died? Since these possibilities would have been part of the real world and not literature, I doubt if we would have spoken with Jamesian restraint. In a way I’m glad the scene didn’t happen. It may be my abiding reluctance to look into unlighted corners, but I can’t help feeling the damage might have been great. As it is, I have been able to confront my mother only in dreams, in which I control both sides of the dialogue. I ask in my dreams, “Why didn’t you tell me?” But the dream always ends before she replies.
I hardly ever dream about Freddie. His imprint on my psyche seems faint or is so deeply buried as to be inaccessible to consciousness. Knowing he was my father has changed some fundamental sense I have of myself, but it hasn’t done much to change how I live my life or to shift my attachments. Tess learns she is a d’Urberville, and tragic consequences ensue from that discovery. I learned I was the daughter of a philosopher, and the discovery gave me a story. Casting myself as a writer, not a victim, I set to work on a family memoir. Writing the book engaged my best energy and spirits, and its publication, as I’ve said, helped me gain promotion to the rank of Full Professor. Perhaps I should think of this as Freddie Ayer’s fitting last gift to me: the twelfth book of his bequest.
The Odd Women and Howards End
In the fall of 1985, I wasn’t thinking about fathers. Trevor Westbrook had died seven years earlier, leaving me with a dreary but soon muted sense of the failure of our connection. The adventure of Freddie lay three years in the future, and I had, in fact, lost touch with this old “family friend” after he and Dee separated and then divorced. I heard he had married someone new, but I never met her. Freddie and I hadn’t seen each other since my stay in England a decade earlier nor been in any form of contact.
The only parent in range was my mother, aging and arthritic, who still swayed the lives of those around her as if we were saplings bowing to her strong gusts. “Why don’t you just bring in the coffin with the cake and be done with it?” she had grumbled at my plans for an eightieth birthday party. No one except Bow Wow had ever given her a party. She caviled and complained, suspicious of my motives. Then from the first guest’s arrival, she was fine. “Thank you for going to so much trouble,” she said to me afterwards. “I didn’t think I would like a party, but I did.” I was very pleased to hear that. As her daughter I seemed always to be ricocheting between despair and elation.
For a long time I had been embarrassed to be a person whose mother figured so powerfully in her life and emotions. I remember a friend’s husband, a psychiatrist, saying about me when I was in my twenties and dating one of his friends, “The
