The Puttermesser Papers

by Cynthia Ozick

  Rupert was reading this from the Letters. Puttermesser slammed down her eyelids. She had those pitiful phrases by heart. The abjectness, the yearning. Dry Herbert Spencer, a man shut off; no feeling could invade him. But one day he brought George Lewes with him to the Westminster Review, where George Eliot—she was still plain Miss Evans—was working as an editor. Lewes was playful, impudent, jokey; his face was pitted, he had a little neat nose with big nostrils. He was an apt mimic and told clever stories without a speck of meanness. George Eliot at first thought him ugly; she was ugly enough herself. People said he resembled a monkey; they said she resembled a horse. He had free tickets to the theater and invited her along. He reviewed plays, books, art, music. His mind was all worldly versatility. He wrote on French and German literature, he wrote plays, he made a study of insanity, he wrote on history and science and philosophy, on anemones and Comte and Charlotte Brontë. She translated Strauss, Feuerbach, Spinoza; she wrote on Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, Thoreau, Ruskin. She read Homer, Plato, Aristophanes, Theocritus; she read Drayton and a history of Sanskrit.

  “What a pair, what a pair,” Puttermesser said.

  She had discovered something disconcerting: Rupert had confessed that until now George Eliot had been no more than a rumor for him. In high school in the town near Atlanta they had read Silas Marner in sophomore year. That was all of George Eliot he was acquainted with. The rest was new. He had never before looked into a biography of George Eliot. He had never heard of George Lewes or Johnny Cross or all those others.

  “Why didn’t you say so when we began? When we started reading?”

  “I thought you could tell.” He put his hand on her hand. How dependable he was; how eager to satisfy. “Anyhow I’m catching up. In fact I’m caught up. What do you know that I don’t?”

  She could not contradict him. It was as if he had swum into her brain and swallowed up its spiny fish, great and small, as they flickered by. Puttermesser was ravished: it was true, there was no difference between them. Under the sea-green lamp he was caught, he knew what she knew.

  It was Lewes she wanted him to know.

  They read until they were dried up. They read until their eyes skittered and swelled. The strangeness in it did not elude them: where George Eliot and George Lewes in their nighttime coziness had taken up Scott, Trollope, Balzac, Turgenev, Daudet, Sainte-Beuve, Madame d’Agoult (Lewes recorded all this in his diary), she and Rupert read only the two Georges. Puttermesser discussed what this might mean. It wasn’t for “inspiration,” she pointed out—she certainly wasn’t mixing herself up with a famous dead Victorian. She was conscious of her Lilliputian measure: a worn-out city lawyer, stunted as to real experience, a woman lately secluded, eaten up with loneliness, melancholia ground into the striations of her face. The object was not inspiration but something sterner. The object was just what it had been for the two Georges—study. What Puttermesser and Rupert were studying was a pair of heroic boon companions. Boon companions! It was fellowship they were studying; it was nearness.

  “George and George,” Rupert said. “Practically a couple of twins.”

  “They were lovers,” Puttermesser corrected.

  In the mornings he snatched up his satchel and dolly and the clatter of his easel and headed for the Frick. Puttermesser marveled at the soaked threads of the canvas, glistening with bright heavy oil. In the evenings, after supper, they pushed on with the two Georges. A history of money and family. The money went to Agnes, Lewes’s easy-going adulterous wife, and her brood of children by another man. Agnes in old age, very fat, with small fat fingers twiddling in her lap, supported until her death by George Eliot’s earnings: they mooned over her photo in one of those bricklike volumes that littered the kitchen chairs. But to Lewes’s sons George Eliot was “Mutter.” One died young—she nursed and mourned him as if he were her own. Another was attached to her all her life. Lewes, meanwhile, was coaxing her to try her hand at writing stories, though privately he doubted whether she could master drama. Overnight she bloomed into greatness. And was a pariah all the same. Her brother Isaac, still in the Midlands of their childhood, would have nothing to do with her. She wrote him and he refused to answer. His sister was living with a man who had a wife. His sister could not be received in respectable drawing rooms. In the end the world came to her. Queen Victoria contrived to be presented to George Eliot.

  Rupert read: “‘Our unspeakable joy in each other has no other alloy than the sense that it must one day end in parting.’” For twenty-five years George Eliot and George Lewes had their unspeakable joy—each other, and fame, and homage, and Europe, and a carriage of their own, and comforts, and the admiration of the best minds, and the hoverings and adorations of the young, among them Johnny Cross. Johnny Cross helped Lewes find a house in the country—he was good at all sorts of practical things. George Eliot called him nephew. “My dear Nephew,” her letters to him began; and ended, “Your affectionate Aunt.” He was a tall comely young man of twenty-nine, introduced to her by his mother on a holiday in Rome. After Rugby he went to New York to work in a branch of the family bank, and returned to London to do the same. George Eliot met Nephew Johnny Cross on George Lewes’s fifty-second birthday.

  IV. THE AWFUL DISCREPANCY

  THE DEATH SCENES AND their aftermath fell to Puttermesser. They were familiar to her, and unimportant. It was the living Lewes she cared for, the salvational Lewes, the merry Lewes of transformation. George Lewes died at sixty-one, at the last of a dank November. He had always been sickly. During his final hours the doctors bustled in and out. In front of the Priory their coachmen cracked noisy jokes. George Eliot did not go to the funeral. Day after day she shut herself up in her bedroom with Lewes’s books and microscope; she howled and howled. Only the servants heard.

  Here Puttermesser stopped. It was over.

  Rupert said, “We ought to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Get married.”

  “They didn’t marry,” Puttermesser said, and closed the book.

  “Hey, don’t quit—there’s more.”

  “No more Lewes.”

  “There’s all the rest.”

  “You don’t like her on her own. You called her a prig.”

  “That was before I knew her. Do the rest,” he persisted.

  So she went on with it. Two months after Lewes’s death, George Eliot wrote to Johnny Cross, “Dearest Nephew, I do need your affection. Every sign of care for me from the beings I respect and love is a help to me. . . . In a week or two I think I shall want to see you. Sometimes even now I have a longing. . . . Your affectionate Aunt.” And on a brilliant May day, at St. George’s Church on Hanover Square, sixteen months after she had howled over the parting from Lewes, George Eliot married Johnny Cross. The new wife was sixty. Johnny’s mother had died within days of Lewes. He was an orphan of forty.

  Rupert danced around Puttermesser’s tiny bedroom, where they had set up the sea-green lamp on Puttermesser’s teak desk. “Look at that, look at that!”

  “She needed someone to lean on,” Puttermesser said. “It was her temperament.”

  “The body was hardly cold!”

  “You can’t lean on a dead man.”

  “Aha!” Now he took her by the wrists. “Didn’t I tell you that from the start? That first day in the Met? I told you—I’m the one who’s alive!”

  Puttermesser wondered at this. “Well, there’s the honeymoon.”

  “I’ll do the honeymoon!” Rupert said.

  She watched him reconstruct Johnny Cross. Johnny Cross was anyhow a puzzlement. No one knew him really. He was expected to be “deep” and he wasn’t. He was handsome and genial and athletic and rich. He was no intellectual, though he worked at it gamely, the same plucky way he chopped down a clump of trees or devotedly smacked at a tennis ball. He was a tremendous swimmer. He wasn’t even remotely a writer, but he did turn out one astonishing book—astonishing chiefly because Johnny Cross had written it: George Eliot’
s Life. The title was as obvious and direct as he was. He plugged away at it after she died: it was a genuflection.

  Rupert saw quickly that the heap of biographies they had been reciting from—including Johnny Cross’s—were useless. Johnny Cross appeared in all of them, to be sure—which didn’t signify he was there. You might find him but you couldn’t get hold of him. Rupert did what he could to conjure up the true Johnny. In a way he remade him—Puttermesser thought it was a kind of plunder. Rupert was being preposterous and unfair, but she had to acknowledge he was ingenious. He went after unheard-of combinations and juxtapositions: a letter, then a paragraph from one of the biographies, then again a letter. He threaded in and out of whatever was at hand. And what emerged from all that prestidigitation was Johnny Cross in love—but not with George Eliot.

  “Good God,” Puttermesser said. “The one thing everybody knows for sure about Johnny Cross is that he loved George Eliot. He adored her! There never was anybody else for him. When she died he never married again. You can’t just contradict what everybody absolutely knows.”

  But Rupert pressed on with his evidence. It was, he said, right there in Johnny’s unnatural behavior in the first weeks after Lewes’s funeral. George Eliot had pleaded with him to come and help her with the business matters George Lewes had always taken care of; Johnny was good at money. He arrived carrying Dante’s Inferno. George Eliot was in her sitting room rereading the Iliad—in Greek, of course—to take her mind off her sorrow. Johnny said he was hoping to get started on Dante to take his mind off his sorrow; he was mourning his mother. The trouble was he had to read Dante in Carlyle’s translation. The Italian he had picked up in Rome, with his mother, wasn’t up to snuff. “Oh,” George Eliot cried out to Nephew Johnny, “I must read that with you!”—she liked Dante better than accounting. They went at it word by word. She was massively patient. He was painfully attentive—this was his design.

  Rupert held up George Eliot’s Life under the sea-green lamp and chanted: “‘The divine poet took us into a new world. It was a renovation of life.’ There, that’s Johnny confessing.”

  “Right! You see?” Puttermesser said. “A renovation of life! He’s telling us how he adored her—”

  “You’re not getting it,” Rupert said. “The fellow was infatuated. With Lewes.”

  “Rupert, that’s ridiculous.”

  “I don’t mean what you think. I mean incarnation. He was trying to jump right into Lewes’s shoes—whatever Lewes was good at, Johnny was going to do. He was out for that. He was going to be Lewes for her. A reasonable facsimile. The idea was to impress on her that Lewes was still around. Accessible, in a manner of speaking. In another packet of flesh. The face was the face of Johnny, but the soul was the soul of Lewes. That’s the point.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Puttermesser said, weakening. It was ridiculous and it was not.

  “And the night readings. He kept a record just like Lewes. First Dante. Then she took him through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth. The basics. He had to sweat it. All of it right there in her sitting room in the Priory, right smack under a big blown-up photo of Lewes. For all I know he had his bottom in the same chair Lewes used to put his bottom in. And doesn’t he ask her to play the piano for him? The same music she played for Lewes? Then she turns sixty and Johnny kisses her hand.”

  “And then he marries her. George Lewes never did that! You keep ignoring that,” Puttermesser said. “Marrying her isn’t jumping into George Lewes’s shoes!”

  “You think she wouldn’t have had a big church wedding with Lewes if she’d had a chance to? If the law had allowed it? Look, the minute such a thing gets to be possible—Johnny’s definitely single—what does she do? She runs out to buy a trousseau.”

  Rupert fished up a book from the stack on Puttermesser’s teak desk and wet his thumb. “They’re sending letters right and left behind her back. Churning up the gossip. ‘George Eliot had been seen at all the fashionable milliners and dressmakers in London. . . . Whatever money and taste could do to make her look not too unsuitable for a man of forty had been done.’ And after a quarter of a century of snubbing her for living with Lewes, brother Isaac writes to congratulate her on her marriage to Johnny! And she’s grateful. These are conventional folks, Ruthie, believe me. It’s Johnny you’ve got to keep your eye on.”

  Puttermesser stared. “Why?”

  “I’m telling you why. Watch him make himself into a second Lewes.”

  “You’re doing that. You’re making him into Johnny Cross, Reënactments.” Puttermesser drew back. Her lungs felt fat from too much air. “You’re making him into a copyist!”

  Rupert gave a paradisal smile. “Isn’t that what he had in mind?”

  “He was in love! And she was lonely, she was missing connubial love. She’d been happy with Lewes, she wanted to be happy again—”

  Puttermesser seized the Letters and shook out the pages with a ferocity. “Damn it, Rupert, listen!”

  A great momentous change is taking place in my life—a sort of miracle in which I could never have believed, and under which I still sit amazed. If it alters your conception of me so thoroughly that you must henceforth regard me as a new person, a stranger to you, I shall not take it hardly, for I myself a little while ago should have said this thing could not be.

  I am going to be married to Mr. Cross. . . . He has been a devoted friend for years, much loved and trusted by Mr. Lewes, and now that I am alone, he sees his only longed for happiness in dedicating his life to me. . . . Explanations of these crises, which seem sudden though they are slowly dimly prepared, are impossible. . . . We are going away tomorrow and shall be abroad two or three months.

  “And then they went off together. That’s how it is,” Puttermesser finished. “A pair of married lovers. You can’t just go and twist it into something else. You want to hear how she’d been feeling? Here’s how she’d been feeling!” She was as pitiless as a conqueror. It was Rupert she wanted to conquer—Rupert’s plan for Johnny Cross. She thumped a fist on the Letters and read out furiously, “‘Blessed are the dead who rest from their labors, and have not to dread a barren, useless survival.’ That’s why she married Johnny Cross!”

  Rupert looked meditative; he looked serious. Puttermesser took him in all over again—he was narrow, and blond, and burnished, and small. He was brushed and orderly. The clear blank circles of his eyes needled out their steady black pupils. The pupils made deep fierce periods. They punctuated; they punctured.

  “ We ought to do that,” Rupert said. “Not the going away part. The great momentous change—that part.”

  He was serious. It wasn’t a snicker, it wasn’t a crack tossed off. Puttermesser hated banter and flippancy; she had fled Harvey Morgenbluth’s party because of banter and flippancy. Rupert was a Southerner—he wasn’t infected by the New York patter. “Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems—a man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy.” That was how George Eliot had once described George Lewes—though not right away. Her first impression was of a miniature fop, gyrating his arms, too talkative, shallow. But Rupert was serious through and through.

  “O.K.,” Puttermesser said. “Let’s do it.”

  She wasn’t sure whether she had at just that moment agreed to marry Rupert Rabeeno.

  “Let’s not forget the honeymoon,” he said.

  “O.K.,” she said. “The honeymoon. You do it.”

  She watched him do the honeymoon. He did it fastidiously, with a sort of military instinct for the organization of it—slips of paper to mark the pages, volumes set in consecutive order ready to hand, quotations culled on cards. It was curious how well he had prepared himself. Out of the jumble they drew from every night—maps, letters, journals, biographies, memoirs, pamphlets, books and more books!—he was fashioning something clever, something out of the ordinary. A destiny. Rupert went about doing the honeymoon with the same heat of immanence he had blown into “The Death of Socrates.
” He read, yelled, sang, beamed. It was all for Johnny Cross, and Johnny Cross was only footnote and anticlimax. He wouldn’t let her ride over his theory; she hadn’t been able to deflect him. Puttermesser was jealous. Rupert had lavished nothing like this on George Lewes. Yet it really was happening again, a second round. Puttermesser was obliged to admit to herself the possibility that Rubert might be on the right track. The honeymoon of Johnny Cross and George Eliot was turning out to be purest mimicry of the honeymoon of George Lewes and George Eliot—the honeymoon that couldn’t be called a honeymoon because there had never been a wedding.

  Rupert did the wedding first. It was plausible to begin there, at the church at half-past ten in the morning. Lewes’s son, two years younger than Johnny, gave George Eliot away. All of Johnny’s relatives came—his sisters and their husbands and his cousins and his cousins’ children. After the ceremony the bride and groom went back to the Priory with a pair of solicitors to sign their wills. Then they set out for Dover, to catch the next day’s Channel steamer for Calais. In Dover they spend the night at the same hotel George Eliot and George Lewes had stayed at on their journey twenty-five years before. (“When Johnny was still a schoolboy!” Rupert crowed. “The same hotel!”) When they reached Calais Johnny noticed how much younger and healthier George Eliot was looking—it was as if she were being renewed by every familiar mile along the old route. (“It was the old route,” Rupert pointed out.) They were heading for Venice. Johnny took them down to Milan through Grenoble and Mount Cenis, exactly the itinerary Lewes had designed for what George Eliot had called their “deep wedded happiness.” A week in Milan, as before, and then Venice.