by Adam Gopnik
Olivia is watching The Lion King in the bedroom. She turns to Martha and asks, out of the blue, “Will you and Daddy ever get divorced?”
“No. We love each other.”
“Will you ever leave me? Even when you die?”
Martha doesn't know what to say.
“When you die, you'll go to heaven,” Olivia answers before Martha can say anything. “And then when I die, I'll go to heaven, too, and we 'll be a family again.” She smiles and returns to The Lion King. She is the only believer in the house.
At six, she still belongs to Narnia, not middle Earth. She believes not in the unending contest, but in the undiscovered country, the World Around the Corner, where small girls are queens and animals talk. I wrote a “comprehensive” take on Lewis's penchant for the fatuous allegory and then took the kids to see the Narnia movie. Luke liked it well enough but Olivia loved it: The cobbler's children have no shoes, and the critic's children have no crabby opinions, or at least not the crabby opinions of the critic. A six-year-old girl who discovers another world! Whom everyone condescends to as if she were a baby, but who then is proven absolutely right! And becomes a queen. Good stories are simple stories, and speak to our condition. We went to see it again, and she glided away from me.
“You don't know anything, Dad,” she says suddenly. I am hurt, offended, and I say, “Olivia, how can you say that?”
She catches herself. “I mean, you don't know anything, Dad. You're always just guessing.”
I am, too. Trust me though she does, she sees the limits of my knowledge.
* * *
Verticality, possibility, plurality. The towers over there and the small apartment over here, the Blue Room and the Big Store, just as it was when we were young and had just arrived. The dialogue between the dense and the isolated, the lady down the hall who lives alone and plays Christmas carols on Christmas Eve after we started to play them, too. Hyper-intimacy and absolute isolation, less dancing partners than planets in uncomfortable relation, pulled toward each other as their orbits change, threatening to collide and then spinning off again. The downstairs neighbors waiting to be infuriated, listening for a sound, and the upstairs neighbors making their sounds while we listen. There is a whole world, a dense network of connections in a city that can't be reproduced on the Web and can't be mirrored by a nation in cars, a constant daily dialogue between big and small, vast and tiny, the individual experience and common fate. In a big town, you can't avoid the dialogue completely. So why not stay here, in the biggest?
I'll believe this forever, even after Martha bundles me at last off to Connecticut and I'm having people who drive over for six o'clock cocktails after riding the happy mower on the happy lawn, happily.
Out of the blue, a letter arrives from the granddaughter of Molly Hughes: I've been asked to write a new preface to A London Child of the 1870's. I'm stunned. It has been years since I thought of Molly. When Martha and I first came to New York, we lived for three distant, disquieting, and now very long-ago-seeming years in that tiny basement room, nine feet by eleven feet, whose only conventional attraction was that its high-up window looked past a playground onto the back of the stained-glass windows of the Church of the Holy Trinity on Eighty-eighth Street. In that room, only blocks away from this room where I write now, Molly Hughes's book had become our favorite, our only, reading. It tells the story of an ordinary family in London from the 1870s to World War I, as related by the one daughter—Molly—in the 1930s. I read it out loud to Martha every night in those first couple of New York years.
It's David Copperfield from the point of view of the Micawber children. “We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistinguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people,” Molly says at the beginning. She writes simply and vivaciously of the life she shared with her four brothers, Barnholt, Vivian, Tom, and Charles; of going to the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, and supper at the grill in the theater afterward; of walking a mazelike route of side streets from Canonbury to St. Paul's on Christmas Day; of going on excursions up the Thames to Kew—a whole world of small comforts now lost but still living.
It's a beautiful book, but A London Child ends tragically. Molly's father is run over and killed in a railway accident. “During the years that followed my mother used to sit in the dusk, in a chair facing the gate…. I think she almost hoped that the past was only a nightmare, and that she would surely see my father coming up the garden path with his springy step, and would hear his familiar knock,” Molly wrote.
Afterward, Molly was courted by a very good, very poor young lawyer—a clerk, really—named Arthur Hughes. After an agonizingly long engagement, they married and had an incandescent little girl named Bronwen. But Bronwen dies, too, suddenly and cruelly, just after her first birthday. Finally, in an unspeakable irony, Arthur is killed in the same kind of accident that claimed Molly's father.
Yet Molly resolutely shook off despair. She wrote two more books after A London Child—A London Girl and A London Home. As Martha and I neared the end of the trilogy, we realized that Molly had written all three books as an old lady, living alone in the 1930s in a cottage in the country, though she had kept to the end all the clarity and mischief of a happy child. I suppose there is something sentimental in Molly's writing, but sentimentality in such circumstances seems a way of organizing harsh and perplexing experience, as worthy and admirable as classical stoicism or medieval chivalry or modern irony.
In our first New York years, Molly's world seemed to us less an imaginative alternative to our world than an extension and equivalent of it. Molly's experience of London was utterly true to our own experience of New York. We began to feel that there was some real connection between our world and Molly's, as though, beneath Second Avenue, we had stumbled on a great abandoned tunnel (coffer-roofed, gas-lit, something from a Doré engraving) that had long ago connected Canonbury Road and East Eighty-seventh Street.
This turned out to be true, in a small and serendipitous way: The stained-glass windows that faced us on Eighty-seventh Street were designed by Henry Holiday, the illustrator of “The Hunting of the Snark,” Molly's favorite poem; and the path we used to take home from Parsons, across Astor Place and up lower Broadway, when I would collect Martha, who in those days was studying fashion design, was exactly the view Molly had sketched from her hotel window on her single visit to New York as a traveling teacher in the 1890s. I made our love for her book, and our discovery of those serendipitous and occult overlays of experience between two utterly unlike times and lives, into the subject of my first long story published in The New Yorker.“The Blue Room,” it was called, and its publication was the event of my writing life, the proof that our basement years in New York had not been wasted. I walk with the children past the window now and then, on our way to and from Alex's MVP, the memorabilia shop. They listen to the stories of our first New York years with exactly the same polite inattention that I gave my grandfather's endlessly repeated stories of his life in the old country (Cossacks, cellars) before he arrived at Ellis Island.
With the letter in front of me and the commission in mind, I sat down to read the book again. I was much changed by the quarter century, and so my reading of Molly Hughes had changed, too. I think as well of her memoirs as I ever did, better, if anything. Yet I realize now how much she had to make up and cover up in order to write a life at all. I have come to suspect her more as a witness, admire her more as a writer.
Much of what she wrote in those lovely, high-spirited, beguiling pages, I learned from the letter, covers up pain and grief deeper than she could admit. Her beloved father, whose death in the book forces the family's expulsion from the perfect nursery-garden of Canonbury Road, actually took his own life in 1878, apparently in despair at having been caught in the kind of financial scandal we know so well from Trollope and Thackeray. This archetypically Victorian disaster casts an almost unbearably poignant light on her father's remark to her mother, which superintends t
his book as a motto of married love: “Oh, well, nothing matters, because you and I are in the same boat.” The “nothing” that mattered was more than we knew.
There were, I learned from the letter, still darker truths: Molly's father may have carried on an affair with one of his son's women friends. Yet that Molly would remake her father's death in the pattern of her husband's (which she reports truthfully) seemed, after my twenty-five years of adult life, less cover-up than constellation searching, the consequence of a diligent will to meaning and pattern, the kind we all force retrospectively onto life. The cradle rocks above an abyss, Nabokov tells us, and the middle-class nursery is perched above a chasm of debt and dread. There could not have been, I know now, a single easy moment in all this history for Molly, or for her parents, or for her husband, Arthur. Her mother's courage in the face of her father's suicide and the shame that must have attached to it are staggering. People who call Molly's work narrowly nostalgic or who imagine that she provides a somehow “comfortable” view miss the desperation of her subjects and their real grace in the face of it. There is much that is comforting in Molly Hughes's writing, but nothing that is comfortable.
Having realized this, I now recognize, too, as I could not when I first read Molly Hughes, the true subject of the urban middle-class existence of family homes and haunts, the kind she describes so beautifully and so fully. What runs beneath the surface of her books is money. The need for it, the lack of it—that is the hidden ostinato of these charming memoirs. A family life like the Thomases’—entirely respectable and fixed, resting on a foundation completely precarious and unsure—is familiar to that same class today.
The problem, then and now, lies in the difficulty of what we long for. For Molly's middle-class, literary-minded, high-Victorian London family lived, as we still do, according to a pattern of pleasures established by older, richer, more leisured classes. Theaters and novels, Shakespeare and classical music, the theater and the ball: These are inherited, the pastimes of Jane Austen's young ladies and gentlemen pursued by Dickens's characters. (I see now that Dickens understood this himself. It is what gives his precarious people their poignancy and their dignity.) Molly's people must fight for each pleasure, each matinee or amateur theatrical, in adverse circumstances that they gallantly refuse to see. They have all the bourgeois pleasures and ailments save boredom.
No society has set itself so much to pursuing pleasure as the commercial urban society whose first high period of joy Molly celebrates, and to which we still belong—and no society has been so essentially a magnificent swindle. The Thomas family love of shops and cities, stage doors and Saturday matinees, is not reciprocated by its objects, which look as warm as gaslight but feel as cold as ice. The joys that fill this book nearly all rise from what the Marxists call commodity fetishism, and they exist to make money for the people who propose them. It is a web of social relation from which the Thomases and everybody else is sure to be shut out cold the moment they stop making enough. Even the organ-grinder and his monkey in Canonbury Park are not there to be picturesque; they are there to raise a profit, and all their charm lies in the plaintive improbability of their doing it well, or at all.
So my youthful surprise at the similarity of Molly's Victorian city and our own Reagan-era town now seems to me, well, jejune. Our cities felt alike because they were alike, because the urban commercial world of cities and shops is still governed by the iron logic of the menu and the bill, the music hall and the countinghouse. Molly's recital of pleasures and affinities, of altruisms and worthy educational institutions, takes place before a backdrop of calculation and graspingness and want, as much as any medieval memoir takes place against a background of cruelty and hunger.
And yet, as Molly grasped and illuminated, these small shared pleasures were, and remain, not less moving or beautiful or real for being so precarious. They remind us of the precariousness of all things that exist in time. A life whose meaning is found not in a faith in the past, or in the afterlife, but in family, in children, is fragile as no other can be.
Molly died, I was startled to discover from her granddaughter's letter, in the year that I was born; and though I make exactly as little of this as it deserves, still and all, it suggests something for me that I cannot avoid mentioning. Not a fact of metempsychosis, certainly, but the dawning of a duty, a burden passed on. At least my own ambitions, since those early years, have narrowed enough to make me, in an irony I could not have imagined during those world-devouring days, hope to be a faithful chronicler of another middle-class world and family life in another great and precarious city, where the threat of disaster looms every day, and the reality of daily happiness is all that there is to make it ache a little less. I read Molly now not merely as a metaphysical occult “Other,” but as an end to be achieved, a writer to be imitated, a pattern to apply, the obvious example at hand. To press a few pleasures within the book of time, as country people press their flowers, seems to me nearly all that city writers can do—not because there is no higher subject than family pleasure, but because every family pleasure carries within it the knowledge of the larger fact, of family heartbreak and family pain. We see light only because the shadows set it off.
Liberal civilization creates the conditions in which Molly can live an enviable life, but it could not create the conditions in which such a life would seem, as it should, noble, even heroic. It is, I suppose, possible to see something unreal in Molly's avoidance of all and every truth. But no realism can encompass all that is real. Death and loss are enough pain to season any sunny memoir. If there is something evasive about her celebration, there is also, in its minute detailing of a life gone already by the time she wrote it, something beautiful and permanent—happiness not merely recorded but actually wrought, from a time and circumstances more iron and resistant than she is prepared to allow. Realism, like Parnassus, has many mansions, and a mantelpiece is as real as a marriage bed. The heroism of children, seeking happiness in the midst of their parents’ anxieties—this is a kind of heroism, too. Molly's book seems to me more painful now than it did when I first read it, but even finer as writing. The pain I didn't understand is part of the fineness that was, in those days, beyond my grasp.
After I reread Molly Hughes, I went for the first time since we came home, though it lies mere blocks away, to look closely, not just in passing, at our old apartment and the church windows it looked toward.
The apartment was still there, its basement window grilled as before. But the church windows were gone, or invisible. The asphalt playground that lay open before them and let us look at the church had been sold, and the lot's new owners had built a “splinter” tower, a high, thin building crowded jeeringly with apartments, each with its tiny terrace, completely eradicating the view. Like almost everything else that had been part of our first New York—twenty-five years ago, it's true, but still, only twenty-five years, a blink in Paris or London time—the view was gone, just as the German restaurants were gone, and the deli on the corner and even our Gristede's. (It had become another Duane Reed drugstore.) Now you had to walk all the way around to Eighty-eighth Street to get into the church, and you could see the windows only from inside, from their front-facing side. I went in and looked at the windows and, getting no sense of a usable past, went home. I did say a prayer, though.
I am not connected to Molly by the strange serendipity of things. I am not connected to her because our lives are alike. I am connected to her because there are no ordinary lives.
Last night we took the children to see The Nutcracker, as we do every year, and I enjoyed it greatly, as I always do. But I was struck uneasily, as I have been for the last few years at the performance, by how much tragic foreboding there is implicit in it. The two civilizations that came together to produce it, after all—the German Romantic civilization that E. T. A. Hoffmann came from, and the Russian one that Tchaikovsky celebrated—would both in the next century know catastrophes that would be unique in human history, if the other
one wasn't arguably worse.
And one sees, in the first act of The Nutcracker, offered as play, the original source of the disasters: the small boys in a late-nineteenth-century Russian house all march as make-believe soldiers in mock drill, and everyone is delighted to watch them. It puts one inescapably in mind of John Keegan's point that it was the mass militarization of civilian culture in the late nineteenth century—the cultural change that had monarchs out of their court robes and into military uniforms, complete with medals—that was the entirely new thing of the time, leading directly to the catastrophe of World War I. The boys in the Nutcracker house are in training for a war whose extent and destructive force they don't yet conceive. Watching the children play at war beneath the Christmas tree, I can't help but recall how easily liberal civilizations have been driven to suicide in the recent past by an infatuation with war and a fear of national humiliation. What awaits our own Nutcracker house is unknown, but the suicidal impulses are there every morning on the front page.
No matter how well I know the children, no matter how many books I read to them, and no matter how many meals I cook for them, I will never know them as well as their mother does, because she knows them better than they know themselves. She was away on a rare trip to see her mother, and we lost the remote control for the television. We three searched the bedroom, high and low, and couldn't find it, and were reduced to changing the channels manually, as though it were 1964. Since Luke's sports are around Channel 9 and Olivia's shows on the Disney Channel, up around 56, it was wearing on the dad's fingers. I sighed and explained it to Martha when she called.