Good as her Word: Selected Journalism

Grave-side story

Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley JANE DUNN

JANE DUNN’S TITLE SETS out the glaring problem for Mary Shelley’s biographers: that she exists more as the child of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and as Shelley’s satellite, than as her own focus of interest. For much of her life she was, even to herself, a lesser light, so that although we know a lot about her, the information hasn’t ever quite added up.

Her other relationships, too, were oblique, filtered through Shelley: (Byron, Hogg, Claire Clairmont, Jane Williams); and after his death the pattern if anything intensified: with her fantasy-relation to Washington Irving and her indiscreet letters to the blackmailing Gatteschi look very like sad attempts to re-create scenes from the drama of her marriage. She was, as Jane Dunn says, intensely lonely for most of her 53 years, precisely because of her talent for intimacy.

She had of course, other talents: ‘my dreams,’ she wrote in her introduction to Frankenstein, ‘were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.’ For once (or almost twice, if you count The Last Man, the only other of her novels with something of this force) she contrived to build the contradictions of her experience – her agonies about parenthood as child and mother (or indeed, both simultaneously), the depressing human debris that surrounded her passionate marriage – into a fantasy that would dominate other people’s imaginations.

Frankenstein toiling away in his charnel-house laboratory (‘my workshop of filthy creation’) grew out of what was for her a natural association of creativity with destruction. There were the circumstances of her own birth, which killed her mother; then her father’s chilly and increasingly groundless and absurd performance of the role of ‘great man’ (‘You have it in your power,’ he wrote once to a prospective second wife, ‘to give me new life … to raise me from the grave in which my heart is buried. You are invited to form the sole happiness of one of the best-known men of the age’). Her first assignations with Shelley took place round her mother’s grave in St Pancras churchyard; and the way he seems to have talked of rejecting his first wife, Harriet – ‘I felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion’ – reveals a truly Frankensteinish capacity to switch from enthusiastic consciousness-raising to revulsion.

By the time Mary finished the first draft of the book, Harriet’s suicide had lent a more literal horror to Shelley’s cruel metaphor (‘Poor Harriet,’ she wrote years later in her journal, ‘to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows, as the atonement claimed by fate for her death’). Her half-sister Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstone-craft’s illegitimate daughter, put an apologetic end to her drab, unwanted existence with an overdose of laudanum, leaving nothing to identify her body but her mother’s initials on her stays. Further shades of the charnel-house were supplied by the death (the year before) of Mary’s first child: the way she talks about the book (‘my hideous progeny’ and so on) shows that she made that connection too.

Her own life, for the moment, was going well (was, in other words, only routinely precarious, dogged with money worries, begging letters from Godwin, and Shelley’s relation to Claire) and that seems to have enabled her to create the elaborate mythic mix of loneliness, guilt and innocent outrage that makes the novel such a splendid focus for everyone’s nightmares.

Usually, though, and almost always in the long years of her widowhood (she was 24 when Shelley died), her complex inner life was consigned to the amorphous, unhappy pages of her journal, where it came to nothing: ‘It has struck me what a very imperfect picture these querulous pages afford of me. This arises from their being a record of my feelings, and not of my imagination … my Kubla Khan, my pleasure grounds.’ She seems to have played her part courageously, but (as though the playing of it exhausted her, as well it might) she became more and more unable to imagine. Her losses and her memories isolated, as she said ‘islanded’, her, ‘sunk me in a state of loneliness no other human being ever before, I believe, endured except Robinson Crusoe.’

There were compensations – her surviving son Percy Florence (reassuringly ordinary), her socialising: she was abused by Shelley’s friends for her lack of radical fire, but she could reassure herself that while she couldn’t deal with abstractions (except in symbols), she practised liberation (‘I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed’).

A very clever, perceptive woman. And yet still in eclipse. Jane Dunn retells the story fairly straightforwardly, but that’s not enough to rescue Mary Shelley from unreality. It was a mistake, too, to underplay the fiction and the intellectual issues (references to ‘Shelley and his philosophising, and his ideas’ just won’t do) as if they weren’t part of the life. All too often Jane Dunn gets stuck on the conventional surface of her narrative (Byron was ‘worldly, red-blooded and extravagant’, Paolo ‘a hard-working but amoral Italian’) when what’s needed is precisely the boldness and inventiveness to delve underneath and challenge that ready-made perspective; and I suspect that her assumptions are too common-sensical and un-literary for such a venture.

Good as her word

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters J. A. V. CHAPPLE ASSISTED BY L. G. SHARPS

MRS GASKELL’S VICTORIAN REPUTATION for goodness has survived modern scholarship. Most of her writer-contemporaries have long been satisfactorily shown up as selfish, obsessive, perverse, quirky or inadequate: her all-round human decency seems simply confirmed by what we learn about her. She disapproved of introspection (it was ‘morbid’ and narcissistic, a form of hypochondria) but no commentator since has seriously claimed she had an ‘other’ secret self. She remains bewilderingly nice.

The result is that a book like Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters is bound to seem at first insipid. Her ‘Cranford’ (Knutsford) childhood may have had its sadnesses – she was after all motherless, and in effect fatherless, living with her aunt – but no letters survive to say so, and there is much fictional evidence to the contrary. Her marriage to Unitarian minister William Gaskell at 21 sounds happy enough, even if it didn’t sustain the first honeymoon rapture; she worked with him; she loved her four daughters dearly; and though the death of her baby son in 1846 was a dreadful sorrow, she turned from personal grief to chronicle the sufferings of the Manchester working classes in her first novel Mary Barton.

Her writing thus came to seem an extension of her indefatigable social and charitable work in her husband’s parish and beyond – exactly what, in contemporary terms, it should have been. And she has of course (true to her anti-self-consciousness line) little to say about the processes of imagination, or the art of writing: ‘a good writer of fiction,’ she says to an aspiring authoress, ‘must have lived an active and sympathetic life if she wishes her books to have strength and vitality in them. When you are forty.…’

The Portrait in Letters, in short, is hardly a self-portrait. But from another angle, this very omission is fascinating. What we get is a picture of a ‘self’ diffused, a ‘self’ distributed and absorbed in the family, and in society at large – an unperson surprisingly like Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or even Mrs Dalloway. Mrs Gaskell is sturdier and much more worthy, but there is something of a stream of consciousness in her letters, especially those to her eldest daughter. This one starts off on a charitable project:

We have got up to £2,236, and have more in hand. And I have had a letter from Mr Walpole (brother to the Home Secy) saying his brother will help on the Government pension, and the Hornbys (cousins of Lord Derby) are stirring him up; so we are in good hopes. I should think any air of Mendelssohn’s must be beautiful. Don’t call Shifts chemises. Take the pretty English word whenever you can … independently of the word we shall be most glad of the thing. Flossie is at her last shifts in two senses.…

‘Shifts’ indeed. She’s a brilliant lateral thinker, an almost infinitely divisible woman: ‘One of my me’s is, I do believe, a true Christian (only other people call her socialist and communist), another of my me’s is a wife and mother … that’s my “social” self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty …’ One is not, however, to imagine these selves squabbling or repressing one another (this is not introspection); they are all equally present, equally vocal.

Her reaction to literary fame was not to concentrate herself, but to spread her energies yet further. She travelled to Paris, to Italy, to Germany (as well as to the Lake District and Oxford), acquiring more and more connections, without shedding those in Manchester or London or Knutsford. Henry James, a friend of friends, recognised in her the social spirit that held fictions – and people – together: ‘Clear echoes of a “good time” (as we have lived on to call it) break out in her full, close page.…’ She saw what she was not – she admired George Eliot from a distance, and paid tribute in her Life of Charlotte Brontë to the woman writer who most questioned her values. She believed implicitly in the importance of the individual, though in certain senses she wasn’t one.

She was, perhaps, something more rare. Most good women turn out on closer inspection to be hypocritical, envious or dim (or of course bad), while she genuinely delights in living in and with others. Professor Chapple and Mr Sharps, in assembling the book (and doing an admirable job in making material from the 1966 Manchester University Press Collected Letters practically available) make no great claims. Professor Chapple ends indeed by quoting Charlotte Brontë on Mrs Gaskell: ‘Do you who have so many friends – so large a circle of acquaintance – find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman … ?’ The answer was no. You couldn’t and be good.

Flora by gaslight

The London Journal of Flora Tristan TRANSLATED, ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY JEAN HAWKES

FLORA TRISTAN’S INTEREST AS an investigator of nineteenth-century London starts with the fact that she is so un-English – so utterly immune, that is, to the atmosphere of decorum and common sense that covered the English public women of her time like a veil.

It’s not just that she is French, or at least it’s more complicated than that: her parents were a French émigrée and a Peruvian grandee; she was dubiously legitimate and certainly disinherited; her own marriage failed, and when, after a battle for the children, she won a court separation, her husband shot her in the back and got 20 years – all of which she rushed into print, along with an account of her voyage to Peru to claim kin. Unsuccessfully – hence her hand-to-mouth career as a wandering socialist prophet, and hence the London Journal, based on her visits in the 1820s and 1830s. She was also Gauguin’s grandmother, as the most recent biography (C. N. Gattey’s Gauguin’s Astonishing Grandmother) chauvinistically announces.

However, here she is in her own right, in a new translation by Jean Hawkes, who admits to removing some exclamation marks and dashes, but has otherwise splendidly preserved an original collage of romance, realism, high feeling and visionary prejudice.

We start from the Port of London, bamboozled by sheer size – the world’s biggest city – and mesmerized by the glamour of gaslight; but within a couple of pages we adjust to the English pace: it’s nearly impossible to get from A to B, which is why people are so churlish and weary, not to mention the climate, which is what drives them to drink … In short, Londoners are glum, snobbish, sycophantic, inhospitable, punctual (very sinister this, since journeys take hours) and appallingly conventional:

If a daguerreotype were made of the public in Regent Street or Hyde Park it would be remarkable for the same artificial expressions and submissive demeanour that characterise the crude figures in Chinese painting.

Flora, on the other hand, is a woman of spirit, labouring under the burden of reporting British Podsnappery for the sake of posterity (England is the shape of things to come, if we’re not careful). She is also very French, and blissfully unaware of it – ‘Thank God I long ago renounced any notion of nationality, a mean and narrow concept.’ She also doesn’t exactly believe in God (a mean and narrow concept).

‘Beer and gas are the two main products consumed in London.’ Can it have been true? Could it be still? The link between debauchery and drunkenness is obvious: ‘The sober Englishman is chaste to the point of prudery.’ But other equally incautious remarks give one pause – on the connection between Protestantism, free enterprise and insanity, for instance, or on religious education (‘in the Bible criminals can find good reason for persisting in their life of crime’). And if she’s altogether of her time when she visits prisons looking out for criminal physiognomy and ‘bumps,’ she soars into wilder regions when she confesses: ‘I see prostitution as either an appalling madness or an act so sublime that my mortal understanding cannot comprehend it.’ Her section on the need for infant schools from the age of two, on the other hand, is so prosaic, sane and obvious, it quite takes one’s breath away in our neo-Victorian age.

Volatile as she is, however (she is inconsistent on principle), it’s not hard to see how she reads England. Its commercial supremacy is founded on India (sharp of her in the 1830s?). It abolished the Slave Trade to prevent other countries founding colonies, and has proletarianised the West Indian Negroes, who are now almost as wretched as the English working class. London itself – the final exposure of British ‘humanitarianism’ – is a slave market, where young children (of both sexes, she observed coolly) are sold for prostitution. England is imperialist, materialist, masculine. Hope lies with the Chartists and the women, then, logically enough.

Her account of a Chartist meeting is in deliberate contrast with her visit to Parliament (squalid boredom, quite apart from the fact that she had to disguise herself as a Turk to get in). The Chartist delegates are alive, eager, visionary, and hopeful – ‘You can see that the poor boy believes in God, in Woman, in self-sacrifice’ – as are the women writers, though perhaps they write because their lives are so socially null:

In France, and any country which prides itself on being civilised, the most honoured of living creatures is woman. In England it is the horse …

Her profundities and inanities alike spring from the weird acuteness of the angle at which she approaches England. Who (except a Sterne) would have a chapter on pockets? Or report on a mud-splashing service for huntsmen too poor to hunt? Now there’s an idea for a small business. You never know, though, with this wild lady, when she’ll turn out to be timely. A final thought for the day:

Oh! The railways, the railways! In them I see the means whereby every base attempt to prevent the growth of union and brotherhood will be utterly confounded.

Life stories

A Need to Testify: Four Portraits IRIS ORIGO

THIS BOOK IS A SET of variations on the theme of biography: its dubious credentials, its delights and pieties, and – Iris Origo would argue, hence her title – its necessity. The four portraits here, all of people involved in resisting Italian fascism, make space for the quiddities and peculiarities of their subjects (whom she knew), but serve at the same time as statements of faith in ‘character’. Her people may be merely particular, but they are also stubborn and courageous; they are loners who none the less feel for and with one another, and many others.

The first of her subjects, Lauro de Bosis, is the hardest for her to make real, partly because he seems to have lived out his brief life as mythology. He was aristocratic, half-American, brought up on Shelley and Whitman, a bard and a chemist who advocated a conservative (King and Church) take-over from Mussolini. At 26 he wrote a verse drama about Icarus, and at 30, in 1931, he flew over Rome in a small plane, scattering anti-fascist leaflets, and vanished west to crash into the sea.

His style, in every sense, was excessive – though he did, in one letter, locate the twist in history that would lend him substance. ‘If the American Revolution had failed, Washington and Jefferson would be considered as seditious Bolsheviks,’ he reflected. When, 12 years later, Mussolini fell in (roughly) the way he had planned, de Bosis’s story returned to earth.

It was never, anyway, as Marchesa Origo points out, just his story: three years before his terminal gesture he had fallen in love with a celebrated American actress, Ruth Draper, whose long life comes next, linked with his. Here the biographer’s brief is different, for Ruth Draper not only came from a densely sociable background (‘old New York,’ very Edith Wharton), but had monologued her way through a multitude of characters, and round the world, before she met de Bosis, in middle age. She was all life-wish and, though savaged by his death, went on adding to her repertoire and her friends for a quarter of a century.

Her practical belief in his cause outlived him too: among other things, she endowed a chair in Italian history at Harvard, which was occupied by a man unlike de Bosis in every way but one, Gaetano Salvemini, socialist, republican, sceptic – and anti-fascist. Salvemini is the anchor man of the book, ‘the man who would not conform’ though events battered him grotesquely. In 1908 his wife and their five children died in the Messina earthquake; in the years that followed his whole generation, it almost seemed, was dispersed and destroyed – murdered on fascist orders, murdered in Spain, driven (like himself) into exile. In 1946, as the world repaired itself, the stepson of his second marriage was tried and executed as a collaborator in France. He comes through it all, in this portrait, suffering, resilient and mocking, with just a hint of secular sainthood.

Here Iris Origo’s conviction that ‘Every individual life is also the story of Everyman’ occupies the foreground. Her last subject, Ignazio Silone, is allowed to characterise himself, in passages from Fontamara, Bread and Wine and Emergency Exit, but at the same time the book’s structure quietly manoeuvres him into an exemplary role, as the priest of a non-existent church. Silone’s defection from the Communist Party, his long exile and his even longer wait for recognition in his own country, even the form of his final illness, in 1978, when agraphia scrambled words for him with a last irony – all of this piles up as evidence of ‘the need to testify’.