And so she began. Like Henning, Strauss delved into the core of Christian belief, denying the divinity of Christ, saying that the supposed miracles of the Bible were merely tendentious fabrications by the early Christians, influenced by Jewish traditions, to show that Christ was the Messiah.
Snatching time from her household duties, she struggled over it. What was the proper translation of materiell? And formell? And the word Abendmahl? Was that simply “sacrament” or was it “the sacrament”? In addition to the German, Strauss quoted heavily in Latin and Greek. She had to try and teach herself Hebrew as well, to understand his arguments. But she took pride when she got it right, and the difficulty of it energized her. She realized she was good at translation. Perhaps she could somehow make a profession out of this, and it would be at the same time engaging and challenging.
Still, she found she could only translate about six pages a day, and the manuscript was 1,500 pages long.
At home, her father was aging and becoming more dependent on her. He’d never liked her going up to Rosehill, but it was part of their unspoken agreement that she could. Now he wanted her with him at all times. Dozing in his chair by the fire, his shawl wrapped around his shoulders, he’d wake up when she came into the room and realize that she hadn’t been there with him all along. “Where have you been?” he asked querulously. “What are you wasting your time on now?”
“I’m translating a book, Papa,” she said. “Remember, I told you? Don’t worry. I’m here now. I’m going to make your toddy and read to you.”
Every Sunday, she continued dutifully to take him to church, gripping the arm of the man who had once been strong as a tree and was now shrunken and bent.
But his need for her, his demands for her time, gave her intense happiness. He truly loved her. He made her read him his favorite passages of Walter Scott — the description of Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage and The Two Drovers — over and over again, just as she’d made him read The Linnet’s Life to her over and over again when she was a child.
As she continued on with the Strauss, her headaches grew more frequent. She became so immersed in it that she began to live within it. She no longer believed in Christ’s divinity. But he was still someone who had lived, a real figure to her, in his goodness and his sacrifice, and when she came to Strauss’s discussion of the Crucifixion and the soldiers piercing his flesh — “the habitual custom was to nail once only the feet as well as the hands” — she could feel the nails piercing her own flesh, and in her mind, she could hear his cry, “I thirst!,” as vividly as if he were there with her. As the sponge was raised to his poor, parched lips, she tasted the vinegar on her own tongue. And then, his final words, “It is finished!”
After months of this, she collapsed in tears in front of Cara and Charles. “I just cannot do this anymore. Why did I take it on?”
“Of course you can do it,” Cara said, putting her arms around her. Charles agreed. “You must finish it. We’ll get Mr. Bury, the surgeon, to come in and see you.” Mr. Bury examined her and said her “subconjunctivial vessels” were congested. He applied leeches to her temples. After he left, she fell asleep. For a while she was relieved of the headaches, but they always came back.
Sometimes, when she was completely “Strauss sick,” she helped Cara in the Infants’ School, happy to be distracted by the little children. Or she’d climb the road to Rosehill to see Nelly, just to see her laugh when she bounced her, and hold her little hands while she took her first steps. The child seemed to know her and always smiled in recognition when she saw her. Would she ever have a child of her own? She was twenty-five. There was still time. But first she must have a husband. And there was no one.
Exhausted by Strauss, she found herself one day sketching out the first few lines of a story. She saw pictures in her mind of Griff and being with her father in the gig and she was back again in that lost world. There was a village, she wrote, “sleeping on a hill, like a quiet old place as it was, in the late afternoon sunlight. Opposite it, below the hills, was the purplish blackness of woods, and the pale front of an Abbey, looking out from among the oaks. A road wound under the shelter of the woods, of upswelling hills.” As she wrote the words, she felt an intense joy in imagining the town — the word “upswelling,” so perfect, conveying the gentle-seeming softness of the hills, like a woman’s breast. And the woods, “purplish black.” They were that. Not many would use those blended colors to describe woods, the way the blackness was given warmth by the late afternoon sunlight, a special sweetness and mystery. She loved finding that color, imagining it, daring to describe it in not the usual language, but finding new words to make her impressions more real and live on the page.
How wonderful to be in the world of words, removed from Rosehill and all its complications, and most important, a world private to her alone, one that she owned and governed.
But the dream was interrupted. She rubbed her eyes and swung around in the chair to gaze out the window. Down below, on the lawn, she saw Charles and Cara sitting with a group of friends under the acacia. She was weary. And Strauss awaited her, pages and pages of it.
She bundled the pages of her “novel” together and put them aside.
At last the Strauss was finished, and in June it was published, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, by David Friedrich Strauss, Translated from the fourth German Edition, in three volumes by Mr. John Chapman of 121, Newgate Street, London. Marian’s name wasn’t on the title page, but that was the usual way. And she didn’t mind the anonymity in the least. The book had already caused an uproar in Germany for challenging prevailing Christian authority, and it would no doubt have the same effect in England. She was happy to be shielded from the criticism. And she got her twenty pounds for the work. It was the first real money she’d ever made. She was now an author — of sorts. It had given her a taste of what could be.
Still, when she looked around her, she saw no way to earn a sufficient living as a writer, no future project she could undertake that would pay her anything. For now, her job was to care for her father.
When the book was published, Charles took her up to London to visit her publisher, John Chapman. Chapman had recently moved his business to the Strand. Catching sight of him for the first time, she was overcome by his looks. He was in his twenties, a bit younger than she, very tall, with an erect carriage and dark, curly hair, a peaked brow, finely arched eyebrows, and a cleft chin. His eyes were dark and full, keen and inscrutable and closely set. He bent down to take her hand. “I’m very honored,” he said, “to meet the translator of Strauss, the person who’s done more than anyone to present his important ideas to the English-speaking world.” This was her publisher, the man who had brought her words to light, and bound them between the hard covers of a book. And he was so fine-looking, overwhelming in his height. She was so intimidated she could barely answer him.
Later, Charles took her to visit the studio of the phrenologist James Deville, who was also nearby on the Strand. “I promise you,” Charles said, “a cast can be made without shaving your head.”
Deville’s studio was filled with shelf after shelf of white plaster casts of people’s heads. They were eerily still, looking blindly out, and covered with lines and inscriptions. Charles watched enthusiastically while Deville made Marian recline on a special seat. He divided her head with strings and applied a light coating of almond oil to her eyebrows and hair. Then he brushed on the plaster, leaving holes at the nostrils so she could breathe. He inserted two quills into the nostrils, which made her sneeze at first. But the plaster soon dried and Deville removed it in pieces. It was unpleasant but bearable.
Charles undertook to analyze the results himself, and later he showed her what he had written. “In her brain development the Intellect greatly predominates,” he said. “She was of the most affectionate disposition, always requiring someone to lean upon … She is not fitted to stand alone.”
She had thought phrenology was silly, but oh, how true those words were. “Not
fitted to stand alone.”
Charles sent his report on to George Combe, who did his own analysis. Her head was so big, 22¼ inches around, that Combe wrote to Charles that at first he’d thought it was the head of a man. “She has a very large brain,” Combe wrote, “the anterior lobe is remarkable for length, breadth & height … Love of approb[ation] and concentrativeness are large … She is extremely feminine & gentle; & the great strength of her intellect combined with this quality renders her very interesting.”
“As I have always said,” Charles told her, when he read Combe’s notes to her.
Her father was wasting away, skeletally thin, coughing up phlegm, his legs swelling. His arms and legs ached so much that he couldn’t sleep. She tended to him fervently, and laid mustard plasters between his shoulders to try and draw out the illness and the phlegm.
Spring came, soft rain, new green on the garden’s gray soil, the branches of the trees swollen with buds. His heart beat so rapidly, he coughed so uncontrollably at times, that she was terrified he was having a stroke. He couldn’t climb the stairs to his bedroom anymore, so she made a bed for him in the dining room and slept by his side on the sofa. He became strangely peaceable, all his irascibility suddenly gone.
“Thank you, dear girl,” he said to her now, whenever she washed his poor withered body or gently shaved his grizzled face. “You are a dear girl,” he said. He smiled up at her feebly now, as if he were a child and she was his mother.
Finally, he lapsed into unconsciousness, his breath rattling in his chest. She held his hand and stroked his head as he died.
She wept in Cara’s and Charles’s comforting arms. “You have us,” Cara said. “You always have us.”
And then they swept her up and took her on a holiday to the Continent. Strange brother and sister, but always there for her.
Chapter 7
Alone now in her bed in the Hotel Europa, she said the word “Papa” softly aloud into the dark air. It was a name she could never call anyone again. But it was always there, the memory of saying it, even here in Venice, of being a little girl carried along in his strong arms, born aloft by him over all the harm and dangers of the world, in those moments when he wasn’t stern and rough, his secret favorite, his “clever gel.”
After he died and the Brays took her away, what a weight she must have been on them in her grief at her father’s death, spoiling their adventures.
They crossed the Alps on horseback, the women riding sidesaddle through the Simplon Pass, thousands of feet above sea level, amid the splendid, jagged peaks. As she looked down from her horse at the plunging ravines and the icy torrents roaring below, she became giddy and cried out hysterically, “My saddle’s slipping. Help!” The group came to a stop, the guide clipped a lead rope to her halter, and Charles led her behind him till they reached the safety and warmth of the hostel.
In Geneva, she announced she wasn’t going back to England. Geneva, the home of Calvin and Rousseau, was so clean after Coventry. Her father’s will hadn’t been probated yet — he’d left her a tiny inheritance, £100 in cash and £2,000 in trust, which would yield only about £90 a year, hardly enough to support her. But she could live here more cheaply. “I’d be pleased to advance you the money,” Charles said. He and Cara were anxious to get rid of her, she thought, because she was such a burden to them.
The Brays returned to England and she found rooms at a pension just outside the city, the Campagne Plongeon, a large, gleaming white house with a meadow sloping down to the blue Lake Geneva. The place was filled with people, refugees from all the revolutions sweeping through Europe, most of whom seemed to spend their days playing whist in the parlor.
She spent her days alone, sitting on the terrace of the pension, overlooking the vivid blue lake, watching the sailboats, and reading. She read more Rousseau, and Voltaire. She’d discovered the novels of George Sand and was transfixed by them. She knew of Sand’s scandalous reputation, leaving her husband, taking lovers, dressing like a man, smoking tobacco — her affairs with Chopin and Alfred de Musset. But that was no reason not to read her novels. She was compelled by their passion and tragic power, by Sand’s compassion for ordinary people, for the underdog — Consuelo, the Gypsy singer, a zingarella who rises from nothing to become a great diva. Sand refused to write simplistic moral maxims, but embedded them in the delineation of her complex characters.
Sometimes, to occupy her mind, she worked on mathematical theorems. One night, she attended a lecture on experimental physics at the Athenée by Professor de la Rive, who had been one of the inventors of the electromagnetic theory of batteries.
But the summer ended. The snows came, and the cold swept in off the lake, bitter and wet. It was daylight now for only a few short hours. She noticed clumps of hair in her brush — her hair was falling out. In November she passed her twenty-ninth birthday. It was obvious she’d be a spinster all her life. There was nothing here for her to do for her life’s work. What was her future to be?
She was homesick for Chrissey, and for Charles and Cara, for their comfort and the brightness they brought to her life. Inevitably, she’d have to return to England, to face the future, whatever it was.
In March she journeyed home. She felt obliged to visit Isaac and Sarah at Griff, but they were busy with two children now, and Isaac was relishing his role as manager of the estate, giving out orders, confident in his importance and authority. As she sat to the side while they went about their days, she felt like an outsider. She couldn’t stay in Meriden with Chrissey and Edward. They were mourning the loss of another child, Clara, seven years old, dead the past year from scarlet fever. And Chrissey had a brood of six other children to manage. Edward was still struggling to set up his practice. The Clarkes were near bankruptcy.
Marian was rootless; all she had was her portmanteau and her carpetbag. She was destined to be a stranger on the earth.
Again, Charles and Cara came to the rescue. They invited her to live at Rosehill, and refused to accept rent. It would do for the time, though there was no work for her in Coventry. The only skills she had came from her learning and her writing — and these weren’t just skills, she thought, but what she wanted to do. The only place to deploy those skills, to find some meager way in which she could use them, was London. But she hardly had the funds to live in London, and how would she go about finding work in that distant city?
In October, John Chapman, the publisher of her Strauss book, arrived at Rosehill to visit Charles and Cara. As before when she’d met him in London, she was awed by his presence, his vigor and good looks, his intensity.
They sat outside on the bear rug under the acacia. It was a lovely autumn day, the sun bright in the sky, the leaves falling in golden spirals to the ground, the air rich with the fragrance of moldering vegetation, ripe apples, and smoke from the fireplaces in the houses below in the valley. Chapman’s energy and curiosity made her forget her shyness. He drew her out. They had a lively discussion about French and German philosophy, subjects she knew well.
“This is marvelous!” Chapman said. “I do wish we could continue the discussion. I could use someone like you in London to help me with the firm and stop me from making mistakes.”
She was conscious as they reclined there of his dark curls, the cleft in his chin, his long thin legs.
He’d brought with him a copy of a new book he was publishing, The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews, by Robert William Mackay. Mackay was a philosopher and theologian and his book carried on the arguments of Hennell and Strauss. Mackay went further, arguing that as human beings developed, so too would their intellects and their ability to understand the basic moral laws embedded in religion.
“I’ve arranged to place an article about the book in the Westminster Review,” Chapman said. “Perhaps you’d agree to write it?”
“I’d very much like to do that,” she said diffidently. “I’d like to make something of a living writing revi
ews, and this would be a good start.”
She would have an essay in the Westminster Review! All the great thinkers had been published there, John Stuart Mill, who’d also been the editor, and Carlyle. She was so pleased at the thought that she dared say nothing more lest he realize how unworthy she was, and how inexperienced.
She remarked to Charles and Cara that Chapman reminded her a bit of Byron. “Oh, Byron!” mocked Charles.
But he did indeed look like Byron.
The review of Mackay took her over a month to write. She quarreled with some of Mackay’s analyses of the Greek myths, but his arguments, she wrote, were “admirable, both from their panoramic breadth and their richness in illustrative details.”
In November the review was ready and she wrote Chapman offering to bring it to London. She was thinking of taking lodgings in town, she said. She’d heard he was renting out rooms in his house at 142 Strand to visitors and inquired about his rates. A first-class room was £2.10s. per week. But a second-class room could be had for five shillings less. A fire cost an extra three shillings and sixpence. This she could just manage because meals were included. She could perhaps supplement her income by writing reviews.
“We’d be delighted to have someone of your brilliant character among us,” Chapman told her.
Number 142 Strand was in a tall building which had once housed a coffeehouse and tavern, next to Somerset House, on the bank of the Thames.
Chapman lived there with his wife, Susanna, who was fourteen years older than he, a plump, dour woman from a wealthy family of Nottingham lacemakers. She’d spent her own money to set Chapman up in his business.
The Chapmans lived with two children and their governess, Elisabeth Tilley, a pretty girl with a tiny waist, porcelain skin, and dark, wavy hair. The children, a boy and a girl, seemed a bit wild, racing through the hallways up and down the stairs, stopping only for a second when introduced to the new lodger.
The Honeymoon Page 10