That single adjective, ‘astonished’, is sufficient to illuminate retrospectively this everyday story of marginal folk. We see that it is not a quaint tale of last-minute motherhood so much as an account of that reconciliation with old age and kinship which is, in itself, a reconciliation with time. Extracted from the text, the characters are patently emblematic: an old man, his daughter, a young man, a chorus of girls, a boy child. There is even an offstage cameo guest appearance by Alexandra’s ex-husband, the Communist Granofsky. (‘Probably boring the Cubans to death this very minute,’ opines her father.)
As in the News of the World, the whole of human life is here, and, indeed, many of Paley’s plots would not disgrace that journal. Other stories feature a man shot by a jealous cop, his neighbour’s husband; a White runaway raped, beaten, dead, in a Black neighbourhood – Paley extends tenderness and respect even to the rapists. There are shot-gun marriages and catatonic boys. But do not think that, Ophelia-like, Paley can turn hell itself to favour and to prettiness. In Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, two stories – ‘Gloomy Tune’ and ‘Samuel’ – are done as straight as case-histories. ‘Gloomy Tune’ is an analysis of social deprivation. The problem children ‘never stole. They had a teeny knife. They pushed people on slides and knocked them all over the playground. They wouldn’t murder anyone, I think’. They are doomed. ‘Samuel’ is probably one of the great works of fiction in our century, although it is but four pages long. He is a bold child killed at dangerous play on the subway. His mother is young and soon pregnant again. ‘Then for a few months she was hopeful. The child born to her was a boy. They brought him to be seen and nursed. She smiled. But immediately she saw that this baby wasn’t Samuel.’
I love to think how Joan Didion would hate Grace Paley. If a continent divides Paley’s seedy, violent multi-ethnic New York from Didion’s neurasthenic vision of LA as a city of the plain, their sensibilities are those of different planets. But, then, the poor always have an unfair moral edge on the rich, and most Paley characters are on Welfare.
Those who manage to keep their heads above water tend to come from good socialist stock. Even in retirement with the Children of Judea, one old man plots to organise the help. Ex-husbands constantly send committed postcards from developing countries. Ex-husbands are far more frequent on these pages than husbands, though, as in ‘The Used-Boy Raisers’ and ‘The Pale Pink Roast’, often turning up again like the refrain of an old song – mysterious, irrelevant, yet never quite consigned to oblivion.
Paley does not efface herself from the text. A homogeneous, immediately recognisable personality pervades everything she writes. Nevertheless, she is a ventriloquist par excellence, and speaks the American that has been moulded by Russian, Polish, and Yiddish as eloquently as she can personate the speech of Harlem. She can change sex, too: as a first person, she credibly becomes a man, young or old. Shape-shifting is no problem – thin, fat. ‘I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh.’ This is ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’, in The Little Disturbances of Man, the only one of all these stories that has a strong flavour of another writer. In this case, Isaac Bashevis Singer, with whom Paley shares a tradition and an idiom.
All the same, all the narrative roles Paley undertakes are those of the same kind of marginal people, with essentially the same exhausted, oblique tolerance as those child-besieged women, usually called Faith (she has a sister, Hope), who seem most directly to express the real personality of the writer. One of them describes her own marginality: ‘I was forced by inclement management into a yellow-dog contract with Bohemia, such as it survives.’ And perhaps the continuous creation of this fictive personality, whom we are always conscious of as the moving force behind the narratives, is the real achievement of these two marvellous collections. As if, somehow, this omnipresent meta-narrator is, finally, more important than the events described. I think this meta-personality is, in fact, something like conscience.
The charm turns out to be a stalking-horse, a method of persuasion, the self-conscious defensive/protective mechanism characteristic of all exploited groups, a composite of Jewish charm, Black charm, Irish charm, Hispanic charm, female charm. It is part of the apparatus of the tragic sense of life.
Technically, Grace Paley’s work makes the novel as a form seem virtually redundant. Each one of her stories has more abundant inner life than most other people’s novels; they are as overcrowded as the apartments they all live in, and an enormous amount can happen in five or six pages. Her prose presents a series of miracles of poetic compression. There are some analogies for her verbal method – e. e. cummings, perhaps, also a smiler with a knife, but she rarely plumbs his depths of cuteness. She has the laconic street eloquence of some of the Beats. This is not English English; scarcely a Wasp graces these pages. Yet the cumulative effect of these stories is that of the morality of the woman of flexible steel behind them; most of all, because of her essential gravity, she reminds me, strangely enough, of George Eliot. But, within its deliberately circumscribed compass, Grace Paley’s work echoes with the promise of that sense, not of optimism, but of inexhaustibility, which is the unique quality of the greatest American art.
(1980)
LA PETITE DIFFERENCE
Vive la petite différence!
Old French saying
• 30 •
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
In 1847, a young woman of genius, vexed at publishers’ rejections of The Professor, the first novel she had completed, on the grounds that it ‘lacked colour’ and was too short, sat down to give the reading public exactly what she had been told they wanted – something ‘wild, wonderful and thrilling’, in three volumes. Rarely, if ever, has such a strategy proved so successful. The young woman’s name was Charlotte Brontë and the novel she produced, Jane Eyre, is still, after a century and a half, ‘wild, wonderful and thrilling’. It remains the most durable of melodramas, angry, sexy, a little crazy, a perennial bestseller – one of the oddest novels ever written, a delirious romance replete with elements of pure fairytale, given its extraordinary edge by the emotional intelligence of the writer and the exceptional sophistication of her heart.
Charlotte Brontë lived during one of the greatest periods of social change in English history. In all her novels, she is attempting to describe a way of living that had never existed before and had come into being with the unprecedented social and economic upheavals of England in the early industrial revolution. Jane Eyre herself is the prototype Charlotte Brontë heroine – a woman on her own for whose behaviour there are no guidelines. This woman is not only capable of earning her own living but also must and needs to do so; for her, therefore, love is a means of existential definition, an exploration of the potentials of her self, rather than the means of induction into the contingent existence of the married woman, as it had been for the previous heroines of the bourgeois novel.
I don’t think for one moment that Charlotte Brontë knew she was doing this, precisely. When she wrote Jane Eyre, she thought she was writing a love story; but in order for Charlotte Brontë, with her precise configuration of class background and personal history, to write a love story, she had, first of all, to perform an analysis of the operation of erotic attraction upon a young woman who is not rich nor beautiful but, all the same, due to her background and education, free to choose what she does with her life.
The clarity and strength of Charlotte Brontë’s perception of her heroine’s struggle for love is extraordinary. Yet, of all the great novels in the world, Jane Eyre veers the closest towards trash. Elizabeth Rigby, writing in the Quarterly Review, 1848, makes the exact point that the novel combines ‘such genuine power with such horrid taste’. She went on, a touch petulantly: ‘the popularity of Jane Eyre is a proof how deeply the love of the illegitimate romance is implanted in our nature.’ In order to do something new, in order to describe a way of being that had no existing language to describe it, Charlotte B
rontë reverted, to a large extent, to pre-bourgeois forms. Jane Eyre is the classic formulation of the romance narrative, with its mysteries of parentage, lost relatives miraculously recovered, stolen letters, betrayal, deceit – and it fuses elements of two ancient fairytales, Bluebeard, specifically referred to in the text when Thornfield Hall is compared to Bluebeard’s castle, and Beauty and the Beast, plus a titillating hint of Cinderella. The archaic sub-literary forms of romance and fairytale are so close to dreaming they lend themselves readily to psychoanalytic interpretation. Episodes such as that in which Rochester’s mad wife rips apart the veil he has bought Jane to wear at his second, bigamous wedding have the delirium of dream language. As a result, Jane Eyre is a peculiarly unsettling blend of penetrating psychological realism, of violent and intuitive feminism, of a surprisingly firm sociological grasp, and of the utterly non-realistic apparatus of psycho-sexual fantasy – irresistible passion, madness, violent death, dream, telepathic communication.
The latter element is so pronounced that it gives the novel a good deal in common, not with Emma or Middlemarch, but with certain enormously influential, sub-literary texts in which nineteenth-century England discussed in images those aspects of unprecedented experience for which words could not, yet, be found: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. ‘There are times when reality becomes too complex for Oral Communication,’ says the computer in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 movie, Alphaville, ‘but Legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.’ Jane Eyre has this quality of legend and, like Frankenstein and Dracula, has proved infinitely translatable into other media: stage, screen, radio. As a child, I first encountered Jane Eyre in a comic-strip version. The text easily secretes other versions of itself. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, restores the first Mrs Rochester, Jane’s predecessor, to the centre of the narrative. One of the great bestsellers of the mid-twentieth century, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, shamelessly reduplicated the plot of Jane Eyre, and went on to have the same kind of vigorous trans-media after-life.
Nevertheless, if Jane Eyre arrives, like Bluebeard’s wife or Beauty, at an old, dark house, whose ugly/beautiful master nourishes a fatal secret, she arrives there not as a result of marriage or magic, but as the result of an advertisement she herself had placed in a newspaper. She has come to earn her own living and the fairytale heroine, as she travels to the abode of secrets and the place of initiation, is fully aware of her own social mobility, which is specifically the product of history. ‘Let the worst come to the worst,’ she ponders, ‘I can advertise again.’
Jane is only pretending to be a heroine of romance or fairytale. She may act out the Gothic role of ‘woman in peril’ for a while at Thornfield Hall, when she is menaced by her lover’s first wife, but, when things become intolerable, she leaves. She might be trapped by her desires, but she is never trapped by her circumstances. She is, in terms of social and literary history, not a romance figure at all but a precursor of the rootless urban intelligentsia who, seventy years later, will take the fictional form of the Brangwen sisters in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Like the Brangwen sisters, and like Lucy Snowe in Villette, Jane Eyre must earn her living by teaching. There is no other ‘respectable’ option, except writing fiction, and, since Jane is a character in a piece of fiction, she would give the game away if she resorted to that. When Jane sets out on her journey to her new place of employment, she says things that no woman in fiction has ever said before:
It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world; cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens the sensation, the glow of pride warms it: but then the throb of fear disturbs it.
Independence is not a piece of cake. But, for Jane, it is essential. It isn’t surprising to find her saying
Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people the earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.
The history of Charlotte Brontë and her family has itself been the subject of much fiction and speculation, as if it, too, were the stuff of legend. Certainly, the six Brontë children seem to have tried hard to be ordinary, but could not help making a hash of it. The Reverend Patrick Brontë, their father, may have passed his life as the ‘perpetual curate’ of Haworth Parsonage, near Keighley, in Yorkshire, but he early exhibited that discontent with the everyday that marked out the clan when he celebrated his arrival in England from his native Ireland by changing his spelling from Brunty. (The umlaut is a master stroke.) Of all of them, he repressed the discontent the best, which may be why he lived the longest, outliving his last surviving child, Charlotte, by six years, to die at the age of eighty-four in 1861; Charlotte died in 1855, at thirty-nine years old.
From childhood, the Brontë children knew there were no such things as happy endings. Cancer claimed Mrs Maria Brontë in 1821, when Charlotte was five. The two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died at the school Charlotte Brontë barely fictionalised in Jane Eyre as Lowood. (Charlotte claimed Maria as the prototype of Jane’s unnaturally self-abnegating friend, Helen Burns.)
Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, the only boy, and Anne lived to grow up. The family home at Haworth was close to both the majestic landscape of the Yorkshire moors but also to the newly built, sombre milltowns surrounding Leeds; their life was not as isolated as might be supposed. They read voraciously and extremely widely. Their father does not appear to have censored their reading at all.
From an early age, they amused themselves by writing stories and poems. After a failed attempt to set up a school following the period Charlotte and Emily spent in Brussels in 1842, studying French, Charlotte persuaded her sisters to publish an anthology of their poetry under the sexually indeterminate names, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Charlotte wrote that they ‘did not like to declare ourselves women because . . . we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice’. That’s an elegant piece of irony, especially since there have been persistent attempts to attribute not only Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s great novel, to the authorship of Branwell Brontë, but also virtually the entire oeuvre of all the other sisters too. Branwell, in fact, possessed little literary talent but, alone of them, exhibited signs of a genuine talent for physical excess that might have passed unnoticed at the time of Tom Jones but dissipated itself in drink and scandal at Haworth Parsonage.
Jane Eyre was published under the name of Currer Bell in 1847 and was an immediate and smashing success. It was followed, successfully, by Shirley in 1849 but Charlotte Brontë can have taken little pleasure in her growing fame; Branwell, Emily, and Anne all died of tuberculosis between September 1848 and May 1849. The unusually closely knit and self-sufficient family was gone. Charlotte and her father lived on together. In 1853, she published Villette, one of the most Balzakian of English novels, a neurotic romance that uses fantastic and grotesque effects sparingly to heighten an emotionally exacerbated realism in a most striking way. In 1854, Charlotte Brontë finally ceased to rebuff the advances of her father’s curates, who had been proposing to her in relays all her adult life, and married the most persistent, the Rev. Arthur Nicholls, in 1854. Less than a year later, she was dead, possibly from tuberculosis, possibly from complications of pregnancy.
Few lives have been more unrelievedly tragic. It is salutory to discover that her novels, for all their stormy emotionalism, their troubling atmosphere of psycho-drama, their sense of a life lived on the edge of the nerves, are also full of fun, and of a wonderfully sensuous response to landscape, music, painting, and to the small, domestic pleasures of a warm fire, hot tea, the smell of fresh-baked bread.
There is also a spirit of defiance always at large. It
is an oddly alarmed defiance; Charlotte Brontë’s frail yet indomitable heroines burn with injustice, then collapse with nervous exhaustion after they have passionately made their point. All the same, Matthew Arnold put his finger on it when he expostulated that her mind ‘contains nothing but hunger, and rebellion, and rage’. As orphaned children, as Englishwomen abroad, as wandering beggars, as governesses, as lovers, Charlotte Brontë’s heroines do not know their place. They suffer from a cosmic insecurity that starts in the nursery. Their childhoods are full of pain.
The first relation with the family, the elementary institution of authority, is often distorted or displaced. After the infant Jane suffers a kind of fit, or seizure, while being punished by her Aunt Reed, the local apothecary is sent for: ‘I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection and security, when I knew there was a stranger in the room.’
Aunt Reed’s husband, who might have protected her, is dead. Jane’s own father is long dead. When she is befriended by the Rivers family, they are freshly in mourning for their father. Jane Eyre is a novel full of dead fathers. As if to pre-empt the possibility of his own demise, Mr Rochester himself staunchly denies paternity – he refuses to accept little Adèle Varens, daughter of a former mistress, as his own child, causing Jane to cry out protectively: ‘Adèle is not answerable for either her mother’s faults or yours: I have a regard for her, and now that I know that she is, in a sense, parentless – forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir – I shall cling closer to her than before.’
The question of whether Rochester actually is Adèle’s father is left interestingly moot. But something curious happens at the end of the novel. After Rochester has been blinded and maimed, we are left with the image of himself and Jane, a grizzled, ageing, blind man, lead by the hand by a young girl (Jane is young enough to be his daughter). Suddenly, astonishingly, they look like Oedipus and Antigone, having ascended to the very highest level of mythic resonance. (Charlotte hastily restores the sight in one of his eyes before the first child of the union is born, and that is an interesting thing for her to do, too.) Jane has transformed Rochester into a father. Her mediation lets him live.
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