Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Divorce brings out the worst in human beings, and Road to Divorce is a serious book with a sombre subject. It is also, I’m afraid, magnificently entertaining. It will be supplemented by two further volumes of case histories, referred to in the text but not yet available, to be called Uncertain Unions and Broken Lives. Heartlessly, perhaps, I can hardly wait to read them.

  Independent on Sunday, 1992

  Unbeatable

  Mrs Gaskell: A Habit of Stories by Jennifer Uglow

  Which Victorian novelist constructed this story of secrecy, deception, financial risk and sudden death? A married woman has been away from home for six weeks, first abroad, then in southern England, leaving her husband to his work in Manchester. She has not told him where she is staying. She is preparing a surprise for him, and the surprise involves her in doing things of which he, as a Nonconformist minister, particularly disapproves. She has borrowed money to buy and furnish a country house in Hampshire, and concocted a plan that he should retire there in three years’ time, in defiance of his known deep attachment to Manchester.

  Her daughters are in the plot, and she is taking tea with them at the secret house when, in mid sentence, she gives a slight gasp and leans forward. Or rather, she seems to lean, and then she is obviously falling. As she sits on the newly bought sofa her heart has simply stopped beating, without a moment’s warning, and she is dead: in the bloom of life – she is only fifty-five – and in flagrante too. When the news is carried to her husband, he is grief-stricken; but he rejects the Hampshire house, and remains in Manchester until his own death, which comes some twenty years later, in 1884.

  The husband’s name is William Gaskell. His wife, the novelist, never wrote this story, of course, but lived and died it instead. How many wives, even today, you wonder, would hatch such a plot for (or against) their husbands?

  What we learn from the story is that Elizabeth Gaskell was a far stranger person than the usual picture of her allows. A strange, strong person – the superwoman of Victorian literature, perhaps? For she was lovely, charming, clever, expansive, brave, without vices or even neuroses; and formidable. With no more education than any other nice girl born in 1810; with marriage at twenty-one, and seven pregnancies thereafter; with all the domestic and social duties of the wife of a Unitarian minister, and the care and upbringing of her children; not to mention a taste for travel – prison visiting and humanitarian work among the poor – a social life as exuberant as that of Dickens and a circle of friends as large – with all this, still, at the age of thirty-six she became an enormously successful and respected writer in a hugely competitive and brilliant field.

  Compare her with other great women writers of her generation, all of whom felt absolutely obliged to protect themselves from the normal world in order to get any writing done. George Eliot (childless) refused even to keep a spare room for friends, knowing what it would do to her working schedule. Elizabeth Barrett (one late child) made herself into an invalid to get time and privacy in which to write. Christina Rossetti (childless) turned determinedly away from the pleasures of earthly life. The Brontë sisters (all childless, though Charlotte died pregnant) defended their isolation with ferocity, at the cost of any semblance of conventional womanly happiness.

  But Mrs Gaskell would dance half the night; she had a hearty appetite; she played cards, went to the theatre, cared about fashion and gossip, adored her children, enchanted almost everyone who met her and was forever entertaining and being entertained. Annie Thackeray described her conversational manner as ‘gay yet definite’, a description that suits many aspects of her behaviour perfectly. Even when her husband, with his degree from Glasgow and his classical scholarship, put her down for ‘slip-shod’ letter-writing, she remained a cheerful correspondent to his sister; and when she was quite tired out from all the demands made on her, the letter-writing pen only dashed the faster. Dickens, who admired her work, but did not expect women to fight him, was driven to exclaim, in the course of an editorial battle with her, ‘if I were Mr G. O Heaven how I would beat her’.

  Mrs G. was unbeatable. Her range and achievement as a writer of biography, novels and stories over the mere twenty years she had at her disposal are staggering. How was it done? She was certainly not the meek, dovelike creature some earlier biographers have drawn; equally, she was not the full-blown Marxist and feminist others have divined beneath the Cranford cap. Jenny Uglow lets us see how various she was, in this warm, rich and detailed biography, and shows that she knew herself to be diverse: ‘One of my mes is, I do believe, a true Christian (only people call her a socialist and communist), another of my mes is a wife and mother… then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty… How am I to reconcile all these warring members?’

  She did not waste energy, practical or emotional. For instance, she felt passionately about her books, and suffered in their composition; but she decided to scorn the reviews, and took to going off on holiday, preferably abroad, when they were due to appear. And these holidays abroad, which became the high points in her life, were almost all planned by herself and undertaken without her husband. Early in the marriage, she found that he was happy to go away without her when he spent ten weeks on the Continent with friends, leaving her behind with their first two children; and in this fashion he continued. Still the marriage prospered, and she neither complained – at least as far as we know, since no letters survive from her to him – nor repined. Instead, she set about making her own arrangements, practical and financial, to go where she wanted and see the friends she liked, whether in Paris, Rome or Heidelberg.

  Sons were expected to do while daughters had merely to be, she wrote, apropos the Brontë family. It was not a dictum she ever accepted for herself. As a daughter, her life was sad, her mother dying when she was just one year old; but she was taken in by a middle-aged aunt who lived, separated from an insane husband and with a crippled daughter, in the little Cheshire town of Knutsford. So her consciousness was formed among strong, odd women, and apart from her only brother. Knutsford was to become Cranford four decades later, its female society reconstituted in gently humorous prose. Jennifer Uglow suggests that the Cranford stories ‘make the dangerous safe, touching the tenderest spots of memory and bringing the single, the odd and the wanderer into the circle of family and community’, which is perceptive both about the book and about its origins in the life of an orphan.

  Growing up, Elizabeth was not unhappy; but she saw little of either brother or father and, when she did, found she had acquired an uncongenial stepmother. The sore and empty places left in the heart and the imagination by such experiences – lost parents and siblings, false geniality – must be thought of when you ask what makes someone become a writer. Add to them the disappearance of her brother at sea when she was eighteen, immediately followed by the death of their father; small wonder if the imagination had the edge on the real world. Yet she was cheerful, popular, serene, apparently pleased enough to keep moving from one set of friends and relations to another.

  Jenny Uglow is good on the various circles of cousins who helped to form Elizabeth: the Unitarians, who liked their women clever and well informed, the scientists and doctors, the businessmen; the card-playing ladies too, and the young people with picnics and dances and love affairs, in Newcastle, Edinburgh, Lancashire; and the holidays in wild, romantic Wales, which so stirred her imagination. Still better are the chapters devoted to the books, where a formidable knowledge of the period allows Uglow to say many new things. Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, for example, is well known as a great biography, and known to have caused scandal and threatened lawsuits because of its frankness about living people. Jenny Uglow also shows how it spoke not only of Charlotte Brontë but of the condition of all women writers: how it became the instrument through which Mrs Gaskell could say what she could not otherwise have said. She points out that a passage from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh is used as the book’s epigraph:

  Oh my God,
/>
  – Thou has knowledge, only Thou,

  How dreary ‘tis for women to sit still

  On winter nights by solitary fires

  And hear the nations praising them far off.

  And she gives the comment of another contemporary, Mrs Oliphant, who called the book a ‘revolution as well as revelation’ and said it ‘shattered… the “delicacy” which was supposed to be the most exquisite characteristic of womankind’.

  ‘Revolution as well as revelation’ characterized other Gaskell books, notably Mary Barton, with its sympathies for the oppressed workers of the industrial city, and its distaste for the masters; and Ruth, with its questioning of the comfortable appointment of blame entirely to the young women who became pregnant outside marriage. The courage of these two books, written in the 1840s by the wife of a Manchester minister whose congregation saw themselves held up to criticism, was immense, though Uglow is right in showing how Mrs Gaskell’s nerve failed at certain junctures. John Barton, the working man who goes too far in opposing the masters, has to die, and the ‘masters’ will mend their ways through pity rather than justice. Ruth is also killed off; so is the prostitute Esther, and the child of another prostitute, Lizzie Leigh: outside marriage, sexual activity in women, whether innocent or the result of economic desperation, has to be punished. But still these remain brave as well as good books.

  Mrs Gaskell wrote to a woman friend, during a blissful working period quite alone at home in 1854, ‘Nature intended me for a gypsy-bachelor.’ Curiously, she used the same phrase as Dickens, when he spoke of setting up his ‘gypsy encampment’, meaning his bachelor flat. But, unlike Dickens, she made her marriage work. To be fair to Mr Gaskell, it was he who encouraged her to start writing seriously, in the aftermath of the death of their small son. And although she did mention his inability to express affection, you can’t help wondering whether a certain emotional emptiness, first in childhood, then in marriage, may not have helped to form and keep her a writer. Too much intimacy, too much ‘happiness’, can be a problem, a distraction from the world of the imagination, a spoke in the mechanism that manufactures fiction. Had she lived, had she led Mr Gaskell triumphantly to the intimacy of the Hampshire dream house, would she have gone on writing so well? We can’t tell.

  Independent on Sunday, 1993

  The Trap: Sylvia Plath and Biography

  The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

  Something like twenty years ago, I was invited by Faber & Faber to consider writing a biography of Sylvia Plath. My response was cautious, but the idea interested me. I had published one biography of a great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose story mixed personal tragedy with high achievement; and Plath was another such, a true and extraordinary poet who had also gone to a terrible death.

  My very modest qualifications for taking on the task were that I was of exactly the same generation as Plath. She had been taught English literature by a remarkable teacher, Dorothea Krook, at Newnham College, Cambridge, just as I had been; although I took my degree the year before Plath arrived, and never met her, many of my friends had known her. My husband, Michael Frayn, remembers her from his undergraduate years in the mid fifties as a talkative and strikingly attractive American blonde who offered to introduce him and his friends to the editors of Mademoiselle so that they could earn their livings without having to take jobs. He first saw her when she turned up at a meeting of the staff of Varsity, a student paper, and then walked round the streets of Cambridge with him afterwards. She asked him to introduce her to another undergraduate she liked the look of, and they all three went punting on the river. Later he published two poems of hers in Granta, in those days an undergraduate magazine. He remembers Ted Hughes standing completely silently in her room when he called on her, ignoring their conversation and gazing out of the window. Karl Miller, who knew her only after her marriage, and published her reviews and poems, also greatly admired her work but did not like her personally; in his company it was she who was disconcertingly silent. She struck him as ‘self-centred and wrapped up in herself. Miller knew her through Hughes, and she was pregnant when he met her, so perhaps she had reason to be wrapped up in herself at that point. Or perhaps she had learnt the trick of social silence from her husband.

  Thinking back now to the circumstances of her life after Cambridge, it strikes me that certain notions about male-female bonding, loosely drawn from D. H. Lawrence via F. R. Leavis, coloured many young marriages of our generation. Lawrence certainly meant much to Plath and Hughes; they called their first child Frieda, after Mrs Lawrence, and his poetic influence is clear in such poems as Plath’s wonderful ‘Blackberrying’. The male-female notions were to do with sex within marriage being passionate, serious and sacramental. At Cambridge we had generally enjoyed our sexual freedom before marriage, girls as much as boys, but I think we saw sex as something entirely different from the bloodless, easygoing style of Bloomsbury, and imagined we had discovered its importance in a way unknown to our parents’ generation. Really we were innocents, of course, and in practice those Lawrentian marriages of total commitment worked out uncomfortably, at least during the early years.

  For one thing, unlike Lawrence and Frieda, or Constance Chatter-ley and Mellors, we produced children. Then, as young graduates, the husbands found jobs easily and continued to live much as they had before, but the wives had to struggle to fit what ‘work’ they could into any space left by childbearing and rearing and domestic duties. I don’t recall that many of our supposedly Lawrentian husbands took on the cooking or trimmed hats for us, as Lawrence did for Frieda. In fact one of my most vivid memories of the mid 1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes -there were no washing machines – while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier. I had wanted to do something with my life – I thought I had some capacities, and here they were going down the plughole with the soapsuds.

  When I recalled this to a friend, he asked whether I was suggesting that Sylvia Plath was merely a depressed graduate housewife. The answer is that I think she was that as well as a genius. The shock of adjustment from competitive and high-achieving girl to subjugated wife and mother hit the women of my generation hard. Sylvia Plath’s depression and suicide had many other sources, in her father’s death and her feelings of abandonment by him, in her double nature, now bubbling and outgoing, now inturned, watchful and silent, but I would guess that the breaking of the sacramental marriage bond between her and her husband just as she was so vulnerable with the two small children was crucial.

  Before I could begin to think of how to approach such a complex subject, Ted Hughes told Faber politely enough that while he had no particular objection to me, he did not want a biography done, and that was that. Friends have congratulated me on my lucky escape, and since I have read most of the books that have subsequently appeared, and followed the wretched disputes in the press, I suppose I should feel nothing but relief. It’s not quite what I do feel. I keep somewhere under my skin a sisterly sympathy for that young woman who was defeated by the misery of married life, alongside awe for the creature who rose out of her own death, triumphantly, as the poet of her generation.

  Now to Janet Malcolm, and her book The Silent Woman. I met her when she was planning this book; I already admired her writing, and thought she had found a good subject for her acute and witty pen in the barbed-wire tangle of recriminations surrounding Plath and Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn, to whom he entrusted the literary estate of his dead wife. (The fact that Olwyn and Sylvia disliked one another makes this a primary knot in the tangle.) The Silent Woman is, like everything Malcolm writes, intensely readable. It summarizes much of the material that has been published about Sylvia Plath’s life, and reminds us of a great deal of what has gone on, although not everything; she is oddly silent, for instance, about some of the more outrageo
us ‘feminist’ attacks on Hughes and on Plath’s grave. And sometimes it proffers journalistic brilliance where something gentler and kinder would have been more appropriate.

  After a few introductory pages, Malcolm introduces Anne Stevenson, the recent and troubled biographer of Plath – her book was called Bitter Fame – and proceeds to describe meetings and quote from correspondence with her. It is well known that Stevenson, a poet herself, was driven close to breakdown as she struggled with her task. The reason was the repeated interventions of Olwyn Hughes, who had made the contract for the book, and proceeded to take it over like some literary incubus. Perhaps Stevenson hoped for sympathy from Malcolm; but Malcolm was playing a very sophisticated game, and what Stevenson gets is something rather different. She is given the full interviewer’s treatment, her clothes, her cooking and her absent-mindedness laid before us, her history of marital problems and drinking dredged up for our inspection. Malcolm is apparently out to demonstrate just how brutal a trade biography is by adopting these methods on the people she interviewed. It is as though she has decided to model herself on Lynn Barber and has never heard of James Boswell.

  Later in this book, she interviews Jacqueline Rose, author of a fine academic and purely literary study of Plath, and again she sets to work à la Lynn Barber. She begins by telling us that Rose’s face, when she visited her, was framed by ‘a great deal of artfully unruly blonde hair’ – signifying, clearly, both personal vanity and inauthen-ticity – and adds that her whole person ‘was surrounded by a kind of nimbus of self-possession’. Just as well, under the circumstances, you feel. Because later Malcolm tells us she was not even attempting to be fair, on the grounds that she had already decided to take the side of the Hugheses in their quarrel with Rose, whose publication they had tried to block. Since, according to Malcolm, it is impossible to be fair-minded or detached in matters of biography, here is a demonstration of unfair and malicious reporting to back up her claim.