Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  GEORGE Eliot wanted to improve the society around her with an earnestness it’s easy to pigeonhole as Victorian—as if we had no earnestness ourselves. She had lost her faith in God at twenty-two, a crisis of belief that developed through her reading and her friendships. An attendant crisis ensued with her father when she refused to go to church with him. Ultimately she gave in, willing to accompany him on Sundays despite her freethinking, and in time she softened about religion to the extent that she came to see it as a force for moral and social good. In her mature years she loved to sit in churches because she felt they engendered “emotions of fellowship” as people came together to aspire to a higher plane. To promote such emotions was her aim as a writer. As she confessed to an admirer of her books at the time of the publication of Middlemarch:

  The inspiring principle which alone gives me courage to write, is that of so presenting our human life as to help my readers in getting a clearer conception and a more active admiration of those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence.

  George Eliot especially believed people could touch one another individually, as, for example, when Dorothea’s goodness moves egotistical Rosamond Vincy to one unselfish moment or when Daniel acts as a benevolent influence on Gwendolyn. The selfish or narcissistic characters are susceptible in these encounters to expanding their moral sympathies. They glimpse “those vital elements which bind men together” and take their first steps beyond private egotism and suffering. Eliot believed one can overcome the insistency of a desire by considering whether its fulfillment means a deprivation for another person, or grasp from others’ suffering that one’s own share of trouble is “not excessive.” Thus, to understand one’s links to others becomes a guide for proper conduct. “Community of interest is the root of justice; community of suffering, the root of pity; community of joy, the root of love,” she writes in “Leaves for a Notebook.”

  But the ideal of altruistic self-restrained participation in community is only half the vision. George Eliot’s intention to affirm the best influence of religion and society in elevating human nature persists throughout her fiction. But such idealism is increasingly in conflict with a more pessimistic view of her own day and age. Mid-Victorian society appalls George Eliot because of its essential immorality, and numerous of her letters from the 1860s and ’70s express her dismay. Instead of the old “plain living and high thinking,” there flourishes a prosperity that strikes her as vulgar, impersonal, and frantic. People lose proper values in “more and more eager scrambling after wealth and show.” England is a restless society “of ‘eels in a jar,’ where each is trying to get his head above the other.” The results of material progress strain her faith in moral progress. How can one believe in progress when the world is so clearly getting worse?

  Daniel Deronda represented the climax of my thesis, for I saw it as the novel in which George Eliot’s idealism and pessimism finally splinter. Middlemarch’s integration of her melancholy perception of a modern world with her hopes for human nature and a better future meant the severe constriction of idealism. Such muted optimism then worried her—again I quote from her letters—“lest the impression which [the novel] should make . . . for the good of those who read should turn to naught.” She was particularly disturbed when The Spectator labeled her a “melancholy” author. In Daniel Deronda, motivated in part by the intention to show human life as its most inspiring, George Eliot develops the idealized milieu of Judaism, in which man’s “higher plane of thought and feeling”—a phrase from the letters—flourishes unchecked by any realistic negative circumstances, with elements of myth, fantasy, and the occult, as critics have noted, coming in to further the hero’s quest. But at the same time that Deronda finds his providential identity, Gwendolyn, in her part of the story, is granted less relief from the oppressive conditions of environment (it’s interesting that Daniel Deronda is George Eliot’s only novel with a contemporary setting) than is any previous George Eliot heroine. I know the author wants Deronda’s departure to be a therapeutic scourging of Gwendolyn’s ego. But it does seem cruel that he gets to have a “social captaincy,”—such a cleverly equivocal phrase finessing the question of religious faith—while she is left with more conscience but little more direction or larger life than when he first met her. He gets to discover his proper community, and she . . . well, one wonders what will become of her. “Poor Gwendolyn,” as Eliot so often refers to her, humbled and stripped of her illusions, is still far from any meaningful self-realization. Yes, she has been saved from real evil, from hatred and self-delusion. Of course, that’s important. But what can she go on to do? Lead a less glittering life. Be kind to her mother and sisters? Engage in modest charitable activity? Try a second marriage, maybe to Rex? The options as I have played with them seem plausible but insufficient. Ultimately I do not know how Gwendolyn might become “the best of women, such as make others glad they were born”—or even if that is the destiny one should hope for her.

  iv

  THE JUDAISM, FROM WHICH Gwendolyn is excluded, might, strangely, have become part of my own self-realization. It turns out that it hasn’t, but I believe I understand its appeals as a subject and cause for George Eliot. First of all, it’s in keeping with her stress on “those vital elements which bind men together” to be eager to combat prevalent anti-Semitism. As G. H. Lewes writes to Blackwood, “Just as she had formerly contrived to make one love Methodists [see Adam Bede], there was no reason why she should not conquer the prejudice against Jews.” Then Eliot’s friendship with Emmanuel Deutsch in the 1870s familiarized her with the Zionist cause, and the Jewish longing for a homeland attracted her because it grounds our better impulses in a specific community. Eliot believed, as she explains in her tract on Judaism, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”—a title referring to the modern world’s aimless bustle, that “a common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man.” We have seen how Dorothea and the young Deronda flounder with only a sense of common humanity. They lack “that noble partiality which is man’s best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical.” The Jews, George Eliot feels, offer this. She marvels in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” that although they are “expatriated, denationalized, used for centuries to live among antipathetic populations,” yet somehow they cherish a sense of corporate existence “unique in its intensity,” “that sense of belonging which is the root of human virtue both public and private.” The fact that the Jews retain this sense even as a scattered people makes their existence relevant to the modern dilemma. Some may reject their heritage. We see Mirah’s father, Lapidoth, who has stuck to mocking Jewish custom and Daniel’s mother, the Princess, whose assimilation has led her only to lonely desperation. But if these parents have spurned the “kinship of Israel,” the children can reclaim it. Twenty years before Hertzl, George Eliot is in tune with the first stirrings of the Zionist movement, making her prophet Mordecai urge: “Revive the organic center: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth of its religion be an outward reality . . . Let the torch of visible community be lit.”

  Judaism also conforms to the novelist’s ideals in that she sees its sense of community, morality, and religion to be one. Speaking of Israel Mordecai asks: “Where else is there a nation of whom it may truly be said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made it one growth?” And the virtuous Jewish characters all evince such self-integration. Mirah’s religion is said to be “of one fibre with her affections and had never presented itself to her as a set of propositions.” Mordecai has “a mind consciously, energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies, but not the less full of conscience and tender heart for the footsteps that tread near.” And even the ordinary Ezra Cohen becomes extraordinary when, as he enters his home after a day of successful moneymaking, religious custom blends with family affection:

  The two children went up t
o him and clasped his knees: then he laid his hands on each in turn and uttered his Hebrew benediction; whereupon his wife who had lately taken baby from the cradle brought it up to her husband and held it under his outstretched hands to be blessed in its sleep. For the moment Daniel Deronda thought that this pawnbroker proud of his vocation was not utterly prosaic.

  When worship blends so thoroughly with domestic virtue, and faith with culture, religion need not be feared as mere theology or sect. George Eliot depicts Judaism as a complete and coherent way of life, a faith expressing itself in terms of custom and duty, the valuation of kinship and community, reverence for the past and future. And Daniel Deronda, in a unique resolution in Victorian fiction of the condition of being orphaned (one that also prefigures the artist figure’s later self-exile from mundane bourgeois society in the interests of a higher calling), is able to subscribe to it with his whole soul.

  But if I grasp how much Judaism comes to mean to George Eliot, I am also struck by how little it has ever come to mean to me. For, as I have said, I, too, like Daniel Deronda, discovered, after believing otherwise, that I was of Jewish origin.

  My mother resembled Daniel Deronda both in denying her Jewish heritage and in having ultimately to reveal it to her children. I learned of my mother’s early years in an orphanage as well as of her relationship with Scott Fitzgerald only when I was a teenager and she published the first of her books, Beloved Infidel (1957), the title that of a poem Fitzgerald had written for her. The movie version, starring Gregory Peck as Fitzgerald and Deborah Kerr as my mother, appeared two years later. Neither the book nor the movie made any mention of my mother’s five older siblings or of the fact of her family’s being Jewish. She had to tell Robert and me about these siblings and about the Jewishness on a 1959 trip to England because one of her brothers, upset at the family’s erasure from her history, revealed the “real Sheilah Graham story” to a London tabloid. I was just short of seventeen, about to begin my senior year at Rosemary Hall, where on a daily basis I chanted the responses in the Book of Common Prayer and sang the words of Episcopal belief of the anthems and the hymns. Despite my being an atheist, I was steeped in Christian liturgy, my experience at Rosemary building on Sunday school attendance at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. I had never set foot in a synagogue. In fact, back in Beverly Hills Hawthorne Elementary I had been one of the very few children left in school on Jewish holidays!

  When my mother explained about her family in our room at the Dorchester Hotel, I turned to face the mirror behind me and stared hard at my reflection for some sign of difference. As best I could tell, I looked the same as a moment before. “You should have told us,” I said. When I got back to school for my senior year, I went around letting people know that I was now “half-Jewish,” though some, like my friend Pam, disliked my news. My mother begged me to show discretion (they’re going to know this has nothing to do with Trevor Westbrook, she said), but I disregarded her plea. It seemed important to be truthful. I also found my new hybridity enhancing.

  My mother’s explanation for seeking to escape her Jewishness was similar to the explanation given by the Princess to Daniel. My mother said she had wanted to give us every access and advantage, and being Jewish wasn’t one of these. I think for her being Jewish meant, above all, the deprivations of her childhood in the East End of London. My mother’s father, Louis, an immigrant tailor to England from the Ukraine, had died on a trip to Berlin when she was an infant, leaving his family quite destitute. She had visited his grave in the 1930s and told us about the German children who came around throwing stones and shouting “Jüden, Jüden.” After the father’s death, my non-English speaking grandmother, Rebecca, who could get work only cleaning public lavatories, placed her youngest two children in the Jewish orphanage, where my mother’s golden hair was shaved to the scalp. We came to know the story. Six years in the orphanage, where Lily Shiel became head girl of “the school,” captained the cricket team, and won the Hebrew prize. Her first job as a skivvy in Brighton cleaning a five-story house. Home again to take care of her mother, dying of cancer. An older brother beating her. Escape to her own little flat in the West End. A Pygmalion early marriage. The creation of Sheilah Graham. “Passing,”—blond and blue-eyed (a Cossack twixt the sheets, she surmised)—in the worlds, successively, of the London theatre and English high society, New York journalism, and Hollywood movie making. “I don’t want to be in a ghetto,” she always said, adding, if challenged, that “all religions are hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo.” Why should she be bound by one?

  My mother told Scott Fitzgerald the truth about herself—not just about the poverty and the orphanage but also her Jewishness. But it’s as much a part of the story that Fitzgerald abused her trust as that he had won it. As she put it in her book College of One, during his great drinking binge of 1939, he screamed “all the secrets of my humble beginnings” to the nurse talking care of him. That same day, my mother and Fitzgerald grappled over his gun, and she made the pronouncement of which I think she was rather proud. “Take it and shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn’t pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.” What Fitzgerald had screamed to the nurse, my mother eventually told me, though she never brought herself to write it in any of her books, was that she was a Jew.

  I am pleased that increasingly over the years of her old age my mother seemed more at peace with her Jewish heritage. She reestablished contact with her two older sisters, both of whom lived in Brighton, and was close to them until they died. She was enormously enthusiastic about Israel, which she first visited in the 1970s. In London she took me to see where she had lived in the then still-Jewish neighborhood of Stepney Green, and together we peered into the windows of a dismal basement flat. Later in New York we went down to the Lower East Side one time to eat blintzes, for my mother truly loved Jewish food. In her eighties she was invited to a seder though I don’t think her hosts knew she was Jewish. I saw her when she returned from it and—for nothing to do with the food—she was indignant. “They got the prayers all wrong,” she said. Then with a swell of pride in her good memory, she proceeded to recite them correctly.

  But this is my mother’s Jewish heritage, not mine. She knew those Hebrew prayers; I knew the Nicene Creed. I have often thought that my mother succeeded in what she set out to do—in alienating my brother and me from our Jewish heritage. Not that I can put it all on her. I don’t know if my brother feels this, but I see myself as complicit in remaining an outsider to Judaism. A couple of times I wandered into temples and felt both uneasy with the strange liturgy and a little bored, as always, with religious ritual. I’m just too secular, I told myself, and continued my occasional attendance at Episcopal Christmas and Easter services.

  But isn’t it possible to imagine another path? I might, like Daniel, have studied Hebrew. I might have moved to Israel. (Wouldn’t that have been a fine form of daughterly rebellion?) Or, a less extreme option, I might simply have married a Jew. Living in New York in my twenties, I knew and dated many Jewish men. Donald Fairey, however, was lapsed Church of England. Emily, our daughter, sang in the children’s choir of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Our children’s own mates, with whom they have had their children, are non-Jews. The genes are thinning out.

  Nonetheless, when in 1989, precisely thirty years after learning that my mother was Jewish, I learned right after her death, that she had lied to me about the identity of my father and that my biological father was, in fact, the British philosopher A. J. Ayer, one of my very first thoughts, given that Ayer had a Jewish mother, was that I seemed to be becoming more Jewish. This pleased me, if only for the irony. I also remembered Freddie’s well-known atheism. Perhaps the psychological seeds of that intellectual position lay in his experience as a Jew at Eton, just as my own atheism emerged as a form of defiance at Rosemary Hall. Not having had him in my life as my father, I search for parallels in our experience.

  I know I have taken pleasure in evading w
hat George Eliot calls “partiality”—commitment to a specific culture and people. Much of my life has been lived in predominantly Jewish milieus, Hollywood and New York, yet I feel a cultural distance between myself and my Jewish friends. But if I’m not Jewish, I’m not non-Jewish either. Despite the Sunday school, I was never baptized nor confirmed, and I would never call myself Episcopalian, though I still enjoy the singing and chanting when I go to church. I still don’t pray, though increasingly my determination seems arrogant—a bit like the callow defiance of Stephan Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—a refusal to bend. I do believe, though, it’s important to continue affirming the secular, especially in this age of religious zealotry.

  George Eliot came to appreciate the social and moral functions of religion; she is hard on her characters when they turn from their roots. For the rejection of her Jewish heritage Daniel Deronda’s mother is emotionally blighted and called to a reckoning.