There is an androgynous quality to Tonio Kröger, which is part of what makes him an artist and which links him, if I think about it, to other artist figures I’ve been drawn to. The highly androgynous David Copperfield, after all, becomes a writer, never losing his early “freshness” and “gentleness.” And I think, too, about fine-featured F. Scott Fitzgerald, who used to act the girl parts in the Triangle Club revues he wrote at Princeton. My mother in describing him always stressed his charm, his delicacy, his delight in talking to women. As I have touched on in the last chapter, men such as these have always seemed accessible to me in ways that more blatantly masculine men haven’t. When I was young, I allied myself with them in a stance of apartness and longing and then imagined the companionship they themselves might bring me.
Miss McKown, who introduced me to Mann’s story and through it to Mann as an author, was also a solitary figure, someone who stood apart from the vulgar throng, but in a different manner from Tonio Kröger. Perhaps she was shy, but she seemed aloof, and she had a cutting wit. If the modernist artist is the model for a stance of alienation, I would cast her as a caustic Stephen Daedelus rather than a soulful Tonio. Unlike Stephen, though, and his model Lucifer, she was willing to serve. She taught at Rosemary Hall for over forty years, moving with the school when in the 1970s it decamped from Greenwich to Wallingford, Connecticut, and merged with the boys school Choate. I wonder if her effect on coed classes was as strong as it had been on my class of all girls. When in the year 2000 I attended my fortieth Rosemary Hall reunion, Miss McKown had recently retired, but she came to a dinner—grey-haired, heavier, walking haltingly with a cane (she wasn’t well and would die a few years later) but still awesome in her benign remoteness. “I enjoyed reading one of your books,” she said to me in her measured way. I swelled with pride and at the same time felt embarrassed. The book she referred to, the memoir I’d written about my parents, was then my only published book. Surely Miss McKown, a prodigious reader, must have known that. She hadn’t finished her Yale PhD; she had never married; she had lived with her cat and read books. I appreciated her tact in giving me the benefit of the doubt, in suggesting the row of scholarly tomes that I, a nearly sixty-year-old college professor, must have produced.
When I won the English prize my senior year at Rosemary Hall, the prize was a copy, inscribed by Miss Mc-Kown, of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, a further exploration of the artist’s gift and linked curse of apartness. By then I had also read Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. I loved Mann’s characters for their loneliness and eloquence, their ruminations and their impotence. Somehow I had endless patience for their paragraphs and pages on end of talk. But since writing my paper on Mann at Bryn Mawr, I have not returned to any of his novels. I think of Susan Sontag reading The Magic Mountain at fourteen and loving it so much that when she came to the last page she immediately started over on page one. Perhaps Mann, for all his weightiness, is an author well-suited to young readers—or at least young would-be intellectuals. Occasionally I eye the group of books on my shelves. I think of rereading them—after all, they were books I once loved—but they seem too long, too ponderous.
To the Lighthouse is another story. It was the subject of my MA thesis and I have taught it often. My original hardback copy from freshman English is in tatters from overuse.
Curious about that old thesis, I recently dug it out, a rumpled carbon copy, from where it lay in my closet amid other school papers and old tax returns, and I read the first few lines:
The novels of Virginia Woolf reveal her preoccupation with a unity that transcends the egotistical self. Her characters must identify and merge with the life around them in order to fulfill the potential of their existence. Similarly, the novelist must escape from the narrow chambers of her own mind in order to create a fictional world that is “round, whole, and entire.”
The phrase that jumped out at me is the one about transcending “the egotistical self.” I knew I had focused on egotism as the theme of George Eliot but didn’t remember it in connection with Woolf. I have to question my persistent concern. Surely, the need to overcome a solipsistic inclination, the imperative to make common cause with others, was my own. I remember how arrogant I was at Rosemary Hall—believing myself the best student in the school, defiantly unpopular despite a small circle of friends. At that fortieth reunion, one of my classmates told me how proud of me the class had been. I felt deeply humbled by this revelation. It had never occurred to me that my achievement could connect me to the girls in my class rather than distance me from them. But it was only at the fiftieth reunion, which I also attended—still hoping for what: continuity with the past, shared marking of a milestone, renewed connections, I’m not quite sure—that I felt more poignantly how much I’d missed. I sat at breakfast talking to a classmate who’d been one of the “smokers,” the girls who laughed and gossiped on the steps outside the library while I, so dismissive of them, sat inside at a long wooden table and studied. She seemed very nice, this woman also in her late sixties, as we gave
