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by Wendy W. Fairey

  But George Eliot herself—in a good instance of what feminist critics see as her denying her female characters her own options—never wavered in her essential loss of religious belief. A pronouncement in one of her letters has always appealed to me. As she writes in 1860 to Barbara Bodichon:

  I have faith in the working out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other church has presented, and those who have strength to wait and endure, are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls—their intellect as well as their emotions—do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest “calling and election” is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious clear-eyed endurance.

  The last sentence in particular I find rousing. “The highest ‘calling and election’ is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious clear-eyed endurance.” I often quote this, both to students and to friends or simply intone it to myself. The directive seems both stoic and existential.

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  I COME BACK TO the important point of George Eliot’s being a moralist. As such she is enshrined in F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, the work I have alluded to several times that locates the strength of the English novel in its moral preoccupation—an urgent and serious interest in how we live. Leavis, as I’ve said, gives short shift to the Brontës, while Eliot is one of three central figures in his pantheon, the other two being Conrad and James. I don’t agree with Leavis about throwing out the whole Jewish half of Daniel Deronda. For me, that would leave a less interesting work. But when he assesses George Eliot as “a peculiarly fortifying . . . author, and a suggestive one” for our times, I am led to think of all the ways, both specific and diffuse, that this nineteenth-century novelist has helped to shape my twentieth- and twenty-first-century life.

  George Eliot’s novels, as I have tried to show, emphasize the importance of roots and of community. “Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth’s childhood, or endeared to her by family memories!” she begins Chapter 3 of Daniel Deronda. “A human life, I think, should be well-rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth. . . .” The passage is a long one, stressing the benefit to the soul of attachment even to one’s first dogs. I actually had beloved early dogs, I had a cherished home, my childhood home in Beverly Hills. And if my mother declared, following the example of Napoleon, “I am my own ancestor,” she was mine, and our home and family milieu provided my first community.

  In this home I learned many lessons—how to enter the world, how to be brave, how to make something of myself, how to be both irreverent and honorable, how to have fun, even how to be connected to other people. But spending four years working on the novels of George Eliot shifted my earlier ambitions, which like Gwendolyn’s were only in the vaguest kind of way to be “great” while worrying that I was really insufficient. George Eliot teaches the lesson of overcoming excessive ego, of putting community before the self, of making a contribution, of making others glad they were born, if that’s not carrying it too far. I’m not saying I consciously assented to this lesson—rather, I sought intellectually to deconstruct it. But I also see that it’s a powerful—and beneficial—lesson I am pleased to have at least in part absorbed.

  I feel fortunate that I have had the opportunity to be a teacher. The profession is one in which I’ve been able to develop an ideal of service—subsuming ego, harnessing my Gwendolyn Harleth-like delight in self display to serve literature and, I hope, most of all, to serve the students. It’s true that the years at the University of Hawaii were compartmentalized, as I sat on my lanai, only cursorily involved with Hawaiian culture, writing about George Eliot day after day. Yet it was also in Hawaii, now over forty years ago, that I became a full-fledged university teacher, first sharing with students my beloved nineteenth-century novels in the general education courses I was assigned to teach. Of course, the curriculum was Western—no one thought to question this, though students of Japanese, Chinese, Philippine, and Hawaiian origin filled the classroom. One day discussing the setting and metaphor of bad weather in Wuthering Heights, I did have a sudden awareness of my students’ attire—sleeveless cutoff shirts and shorts. How many of you have ever seen snow? I asked, and we had a good open discussion about cultural differences before returning more strictly to the syllabus.

  Teaching in a college setting can give a sense of belonging to what, as I have mentioned, Raymond Williams calls a “knowable community.” After my time in Hawaii, I have entered communities at Bowdoin College in Maine, Barnard College in New York, and Hollins College in Virginia. In each of these I participated, richly, but I also moved on, still restless, not quite rooted—still, if it’s not too fanciful a conceit, living through my years of wandering in the wilderness. It is at Brooklyn College, where I have now taught for twenty-nine years, that I have at last truly settled in a community and been, in turn, deeply sustained by it. Brooklyn College is an urban and public institution. Its students are the kind of students my mother might have been if she had had the chance to attend a college whose population was greater than “one.” I have loved teaching there, I feel connected to the students, and I take pride in the ways I have become a person who contributes to the well-being of others. My contribution is modest, but in my own way I have also been a leader, seeking to create, as the novelist would put it, a “wider life”—wider for others, wider for myself. I have even widened vistas by having students read Middlemarch and, on a couple of occasions, Daniel Deronda, works they find long but also can appreciate. It’s been especially interesting to introduce the large number of Orthodox Jewish students I teach to Eliot’s last novel. Their perspectives always enlighten and surprise me, as, for that matter, do those of all my students. In a sense I have my “social captaincy.” Yes, George Eliot. Women can be social captains, too!

  But there is another way, perhaps more indefinite, that George Eliot is bound up with my life’s progress. When Donald went off with that other woman in Hawaii, I suffered a terrible blow. I suspected the affair, then confirmed it by snooping—a love letter in his trousers’ pocket urged him to come away into a magic realm. When I confronted him, he said it was best for him to leave. I begged and pleaded with him not to go, but he left anyway. The next day I still had to get the children up and dress and feed them, deliver Emily to her preschool and Sean to his sitter, and go and teach my three courses. I did all this in those three hard months. I also kept writing my dissertation. I hadn’t thought I could cope through such a trial, but I did. You might say I learned “to do without opium and live through . . . pain with conscious clear- eyed endurance.” I suffered but I learned I could manage. I could carry on despite emotional distress.

  I should add that my mother, then almost seventy, near my age now, was a help to me in this time by coming to Hawaii and renting a house about a mile from mine. I would take the children over to her place in the afternoons, and we would sit with them by her pool and talk things over, even laugh. My mother proved quite selfless in a crisis. She came through for me remarkably. George Eliot would have understood this—how most of us can rise above ego when it really matters. My belief in this human capacity helps to make me an abiding optimist.

  Isabel Archer and Tess of the d’Urbervilles

  The first time I met my father, though I didn’t yet know his relation to me, he took me to a London bookstore and bought me Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I was eleven years old, on my first trip abroad. My mother had been invited by several Hollywood studios to visit their film locations in London, Paris, and Rome. She chose to have me go with her, while eight-year-old Robert remained at home in California with Bow Wow.

  Up to this point, the summer of 1954, I had ventured beyond Southern California’s span of ocean and desert, palm trees and eucalyptuses, only in the imagined landscapes of my reading. But as our TWA propeller plane descended over the patchwork fields of “little grey-green England”—Henry James’s epithet in The Portrai
t of a Lady—I felt myself, even without quite having words for the experience, on the brink of both an adventure and a homecoming. Little about England surprised me. I was startled that buildings were grimy (dirt seemed not to adhere to the gleaming stucco facades of Southern California) and that horse-drawn carts still delivered the milk. But I took in the sights before me, writing daily in the journal my mother had urged me to keep, a poignantly dutiful record, as I look back on it now, of my observations and activities. Within just a few weeks I also acquired an English accent. “Drop it,” advised my mother upon our return to the United States.

  In London, my mother’s former home, where we began and ended the trip, I saw people from her past, including her two ex-husbands. John Graham Gillam, the first of these—to me “Uncle Johnny”—now old and genteelly impoverished, was assigned to conduct me to Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. The second, Trevor Westbrook, a dour British engineer and the man I thought was my father, used the occasion of my visit to try to get to know me better. We were nearly strangers to one another, as he had always lived in England and had come to California only three or four brief times in my life’s eleven years. Now he took me into his homes—a flat in Eton Square and a pseudo-ancestral country house in West Sussex, an imposing brick edifice cobbled together from two laborer’s cottages, which he had dignified with the name of Little Brockhurst. I felt ill at ease in these settings, guilty, then and thereafter, at my discomfort in his uncommunicative presence and anxious, every time I was with him, to be back with my mother. Far more appealing than Johnny or Trevor was a trim, wavy-haired man in his early forties, introduced to me as my mother’s old friend Freddie Ayer. I knew he was a famous philosopher, though hardly understanding then what philosophy was supposed to be.

  That A. J., later Sir Alfred Ayer (who accepted a life peerage despite his ardent socialism), was my real father I would learn only thirty-five years later. My mother’s last great secret would emerge six weeks after her death when I was forty-six and Freddie, a few months short of his death, was seventy-eight. It was Freddie Ayer, this charming man with a ready smile, who suggested we go to the bookstore.

  My mother made the introduction. A standard black London cab deposited us at Freddie’s flat in Mayfair. Having since read his autobiography, I know now that the flat was a duplex at 2 Whitehorse Street. I remember a messy room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and papers strewn about. Freddie, who seemed very buoyant and animated, spoke to me in a direct and friendly manner. I didn’t mind when my mother left me with him and he and I then went out from the flat to catch a London double-decker bus—we sat on the top level—to get to the bookstore, which must have been Blackwell’s in the Strand. I embraced the adventure—so welcome an alternative to all that riding in limousines and taxis with my mother. Inside the store Freddie stood with me against a long shelf of books, jiggling the watch chain attached to the vest of his dark three-piece suit (I would come to know this as his habitual attire) and discussing our choices for the purchase in his fast-talking, somewhat staccato way. I can’t remember how he conducted the process of elimination—surely he must have asked questions about books I had read and liked. At that point I had no experience of Hardy. I left the store with a hard-backed copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

  The book had a royal blue binding, and I kept it long after it had somehow got waterlogged and warped, even though I had no idea Freddie was my father. I read it back in California, lying with it on my bed in the still, heavy air of late summer. My material inheritance from my father is so slight, and I have so few memories of him, even though we did spend time together, that it seems like the preserving of a precious relic to be able to evoke, over fifty years later, that book’s blue binding as well as the typeface of the letters and the map of Wessex, which I have since learned was Hardy’s own sketch, that served as frontispiece, showing all the towns and valleys and rivers of an apocryphal southwest English universe. On that map I could trace Tess’s sorrowful history in terms of its place markers: the Vale of Blackmore, where as a maiden of sixteen she misses dancing with passerby Angel Clare; Trantridge, where she goes to claim kin with her seeming d’Urbervilles relations and whistles to Mrs. d’Urberville’s parakeets; the Chase forest, where, sleeping, she is raped by the roué Alec d’Urberville; Talbothays Dairy in the Valley of the Froms, where she reencounters Angel and they fall in love in the dreamlike fertile landscape; the desolate Chawk Newton, where, abandoned by Angel, she works digging turnips; the fashionable seaside resort of Sandborne, where Alec, to whom she has again succumbed, though only in body, has taken her and where she murders him; and, finally, to primordial Stonehenge, where at the end of the few idyllic days with Angel—at least Tess and the reader are given these—she is apprehended.

  Meanwhile, Freddie Ayer wrote me letters in his minuscule script, and I took this as a matter of course. We were both intellectuals, he a famous philosopher and I an eleven-year-old straight-A student. Yet intellect now fails me, or at least fails to suffice, as I wonder about Freddie’s selection of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. What might my father have been thinking in handing a child of my age, who was, furthermore, his secret daughter, this story of seduction, betrayal, and illegitimate birth? A friend has suggested the motive of linking me more closely to England, since the novel is so deeply rooted in English soil. The theory seems plausible, yet I hesitate to embrace it. Freddie, for all his lucidity as a logician, remains opaque to me. I want his selection to have had meaning for him, but perhaps it didn’t.

  As for what Tess has meant to me, of all Hardy’s novels it’s the one I am today at once most moved by and find almost unbearable to reread. Tess is not an orphan, but in a sense she is orphaned by the universe. Any place or person to belong to, any happiness, and, ultimately, life are taken from her. She is doomed, moreover, from the moment we first see her at the country dance, the only girl with a pink, not a white ribbon in her hair, a sign of her lush, innocent sexuality, a portent of the red blood later to be spilled. Or perhaps she is doomed even before that, from the opening pages when feckless John Durbeyfield learns of his ancestry. His is a family in decline. Rural England is in decline. God is dead or doubtful, and nothing has yet replaced belief —it is in this novel, not Jude the Obscure, that Hardy coins the phrase the “ache of modernism,” using it to describe the unsettling effects of Tess’s standard sixth-form education. But beyond modernism—Hardy tends to have multiple causes of misery—the universe is inexorable. “We live on a blighted planet,” Tess tells her little brother Abraham. Tess will be hounded like the murdered pheasants she sleeps next to in the fields, on her way to join her friend Marian at Chalk Newton. Of course, the family horse dies and she has to claim kin with the false Stokes-d’Urbervilles. Of course, Alec traps her and rapes her while she’s sleeping. Inexorably, the note she writes for Angel gets hidden under the carpet, and then Angel lacks sufficient freedom from convention to pardon her “transgression.” And of course, the farmer she works for at Chalk Newton is the very man who has a grudge against her, whom Angel has fought with. And when she leaves her dirty boots by the roadside as she musters courage to present herself to Angel’s parents, she overhears his brothers mock the boots and this causes her to turn back. And then, retreating from her thwarted mission, she meets the insufficiently “converted” Alec, who relentlessly pursues her and beats her down, Alec, whom the reader dreads as much as Tess does, but who is not even a bad man really, just l’homme moyen sensuel.

  No interpretation, though, protects me from the anguish of Tess’s destiny. I suffer as I turn the pages, appalled yet mesmerized by Tess’s pure victimization. I jump ahead to the end to fortify myself with the few pages of respite—Tess’s time with Angel—between her killing Alec and her death.

  I don’t remember such feelings when I first read the novel. Despite the incursion of Bow Wow, I was hardly yet schooled in a tragic vision of experience. Death, disappointment, loss, waste, and even sexuality were largely abstractions in m
y sheltered and still innocent child’s existence. Sometime in the previous year, I had been told about sex, but its power and its consequences remained vague to me. My mother and I had lain next to one another on the floor in her bedroom—she used to stretch out like this to rest—and she had described the sexual act to me, stressing throughout how natural it was, even beautiful. I can see myself next to her, listening, aware of her speaking, pleased to be with her in this almost conspiratorial way. Afterward, back alone in my own room, I marveled at the fact that the man and the woman took off their clothes. That’s what I found incredible—that they actually took off their clothes. But as I tried to imagine a naked man and naked woman together in a bed, it certainly wasn’t my own self I slipped into this picture. I was ill at ease with my own burgeoning sexuality and, I think, with sex in general, hoping to keep it at bay. In my Beverly Hills public school, the boys in the previous sixth-grade year had started roughhousing with the girls, and I had attended one party where in a game of Spin the Bottle I had to walk across the circle we sat in and bend down to kiss a boy. This moment bewildered and frightened me. But Tess’s highly sexualized body, her vulnerability, her impassioned cry to her mother, “Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in menfolk?” the terrible price she pays for her initial misstep—I should say mishap—were just parts of a sad and mesmerizing story—the way a child can blithely recount terrible things without express sense of their horror. “And then he ravished her. And then she had a baby and it died. And then she murdered him.” That’s the story.

  In truth, I don’t remember much of the experience of reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles late that summer when I was back from Europe and waiting to begin seventh grade. I do recollect, far more vividly, rereading Little Women in the Illustrated Classics edition, a text I knew almost by heart, and suddenly feeling I wanted to switch from public to private school. I closed the book’s pages and went downstairs to try to convince my mother to make this change for me. She proved immediately receptive, and, ever a woman of action, got me admitted to a small private school in Bel Air, where we wore blue and white checked cotton jumper uniforms designed by Lanz. My aspiration was to more refined culture and gentility. It had been stirred in me by the trip to Europe, my disgust with the roughhousing on the playground, and the inspirational story of the March girls, whose fictional lives, except perhaps for that of Beth, who dies, seemed so enviable. Even Beth in a way was enviable—she plays the piano and dies sweetly. Tess, on the other hand, doesn’t play the piano, or speak Italian, or paint or write. She is beautiful and truthful, and she suffers. Hardy calls her a “pure woman,” defying the social conventions that would brand her otherwise. I hardly knew at eleven what being a pure woman might mean since I didn’t understand what it meant to be impure.