When I won the English prize my senior year at Rosemary Hall, the prize was a copy, inscribed by Miss Mc-Kown, of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, a further exploration of the artist’s gift and linked curse of apartness. By then I had also read Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. I loved Mann’s characters for their loneliness and eloquence, their ruminations and their impotence. Somehow I had endless patience for their paragraphs and pages on end of talk. But since writing my paper on Mann at Bryn Mawr, I have not returned to any of his novels. I think of Susan Sontag reading The Magic Mountain at fourteen and loving it so much that when she came to the last page she immediately started over on page one. Perhaps Mann, for all his weightiness, is an author well-suited to young readers—or at least young would-be intellectuals. Occasionally I eye the group of books on my shelves. I think of rereading them—after all, they were books I once loved—but they seem too long, too ponderous.
To the Lighthouse is another story. It was the subject of my MA thesis and I have taught it often. My original hardback copy from freshman English is in tatters from overuse.
Curious about that old thesis, I recently dug it out, a rumpled carbon copy, from where it lay in my closet amid other school papers and old tax returns, and I read the first few lines:
The novels of Virginia Woolf reveal her preoccupation with a unity that transcends the egotistical self. Her characters must identify and merge with the life around them in order to fulfill the potential of their existence. Similarly, the novelist must escape from the narrow chambers of her own mind in order to create a fictional world that is “round, whole, and entire.”
The phrase that jumped out at me is the one about transcending “the egotistical self.” I knew I had focused on egotism as the theme of George Eliot but didn’t remember it in connection with Woolf. I have to question my persistent concern. Surely, the need to overcome a solipsistic inclination, the imperative to make common cause with others, was my own. I remember how arrogant I was at Rosemary Hall—believing myself the best student in the school, defiantly unpopular despite a small circle of friends. At that fortieth reunion, one of my classmates told me how proud of me the class had been. I felt deeply humbled by this revelation. It had never occurred to me that my achievement could connect me to the girls in my class rather than distance me from them. But it was only at the fiftieth reunion, which I also attended—still hoping for what: continuity with the past, shared marking of a milestone, renewed connections, I’m not quite sure—that I felt more poignantly how much I’d missed. I sat at breakfast talking to a classmate who’d been one of the “smokers,” the girls who laughed and gossiped on the steps outside the library while I, so dismissive of them, sat inside at a long wooden table and studied. She seemed very nice, this woman also in her late sixties, as we gave the outline of our lives. Soon, others joined in. The conversation turned to reminiscing about old high jinks in the dorm, and I could remember nothing. I could name so many of the books assigned but had taken in so little else. The books had been wonderful, to be sure, but I’d chosen them over living people.
College was better. Others seemed more like me: bright and awkward, a collection, perhaps, of Tonio Krögers and Stephen Daedaluses—or the American female version of these. Many were indeed artists: dancers, poets, painters. But we saw ourselves reflected in one another and yielded to a spirit of community. Twenty years after graduation from Bryn Mawr, as a candidate to be its dean, I was asked to say what made Bryn Mawr different from other colleges. Someone asked this—I think it was a trustee—as I sat in a roomful of faculty, trustees, and students being put through my interview paces. As if confronted with a Delphic riddle, I felt myself tunneling into depths of buried knowledge for the answer. It couldn’t be that Bryn Mawr was unrivaled in being an elite women’s college. After all, it was one of seven sisters. Nor, I thought, was it unique in being small or Quaker-affiliated, or highly intellectual. I kept excavating and at last felt my response taking shape. “The girls who choose Bryn Mawr,” I said, “have often been outcasts and misfits. When they come to Bryn Mawr, they’re transformed.” And I set forth my theory of our empowerment in our collective oddity. The answer the person was looking for was that Bryn Mawr enrolled more international students than other colleges did. What I had said still seems to me a deeper truth. But I wasn’t offered the deanship.
After college, I spent a year away from school. My summer job, arranged for me by my mother, was in Rome, writing movie publicity for the American producer Joseph E. Levine—his company was making a film starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. A couple of times I went out to Cinecittà and once glimpsed the director Vittorio DiSica talking to his stars on the far side from me of the set, but mostly I was clocking time in a little office off the Via Venito, pounding out copy on my typewriter in which I took little pride of authorship. Then I was back in New York in the textbook department at Harper & Row. For the first time since I’d started kindergarten, I felt free in these jobs of all the pressures of academic achievement. I did what I was asked to but didn’t need to try to be the best, didn’t have to hole up in a library or worry about tests and term papers and grades. That year I made it my goal to be easier and more gregarious, someone who had fun and lots of friends, a person with and within a social circle, the express opposite of a Stephen Daedalus choosing “exile, silence, and cunning,” and even of a Tonio Kröger with his apartness and his longing for Hans and Ingeborg. You might say I wanted to be Hans or Ingeborg, not long for them.
At New Year my mother urged my friend Helen and me to give a party as a way to improve our social lives. “Girls, give a party,” she pronounced, as if that would set all good things in motion, and offered her apartment on East 65th Street as the venue. Helen’s mother sent a Virginia ham up from Middleburg, Virginia, where she lived, and we made up our guest list. Donald Fairey, my future husband, came to that party, the date of a Bryn Mawr classmate. I remember thinking he was handsome and can still see him silhouetted against the living room window, looking down and cupping his hands to light a cigarette. Donald had no memory of the party when I met him again three years later.
The success of the party pleased me—I hadn’t thought I was someone who could bring people together like that. Virginia Woolf’s catalytic hostesses Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay weren’t particularly in my thoughts then, but I had a sense of our party as endowed with the kind of glow Woolf might have accorded it in one of her novels. The guests, the food, and the setting were the party’s components, but then something spontaneous seemed to happen—something that emanated from Helen and me, or rather from us in conjunction with everything and everyone else, to create a sense of wholeness. When the next year I was back at school, my master’s thesis topic became “The Quest for Unity in To the Lighthouse,” a study of the overcoming of the feeling of apartness as Woolf’s thematic and formal concern.
My own sense of apartness had also dissolved in a love affair that began my summer in Rome and continued, on and off, over the next few years. I met Ezio Tarantelli in the Villa Borghese, when, sitting on an adjoining bench, he plucked a laurel leaf from a tree, crumpled it and asked me to smell its fragrance. I was twenty-one and Ezio twenty-two. He was a student in economics at the University of Rome—the best student in the university, he boasted, and that impressed me. In the summers he supported himself by working as a tour guide since he spoke English, French, and some Spanish as well as his native Italian, and soon I was riding along in the buses as Ezio conducted tours of Roma di notte.
At first I had resisted him in my usual skittish way, and then I didn’t. The relationship was sexually exciting, in fact my first fulfilling sexual experience, and it was playful in a way that minimized the differences between us. We were playmates, comrades, co-conspirators in exuberance, he a male Italian economist and I a female American student of literature, but we seemed the same—each drawn from a separate and potentially lonely gender into some miraculous commonality. I think of Virginia Woolf’s
man and woman getting into a taxi in A Room of One’s Own and from the sight of these converging figures, her building a notion of the androgynous mind that is “naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.” Ezio and I together seemed “creative, incandescent and undivided.” He would pick me up in his little Fiat at midday from my office, and we would make our way to the public swimming pool or to one of the barges on the Tiber, where the whores, off-duty, sunned themselves. Together we swam and ate a simple lunch of bread and fruit. On weekends we drove out to the nearby beaches, usually Ostia, talking and often singing. Ezio taught me the words to “Bella Ciao,” which I now understand to be a very commonplace song, but it didn’t seem so then. “Una mattina mi son svegliato. O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao . . .” Then he took me to meet his mother, maiden aunt and younger sister, the three women he lived with in a small apartment in a modest residential neighborhood. I remember the address—Via Tripolitania 115—from all the letters we wrote after that summer. His father, decades older than his mother, had run off for ten years to America but then had come back, an old man needing to be taken care of. The father had been an opera singer but now also was a tour guide. Ezio revered his mother for keeping the family together, and the women of his family, in turn, worshipped him and expected the world of him.
At the end of our summer, Ezio did not ask me to stay in Rome, and I didn’t volunteer to. Vague though it loomed, some undefined destiny seemed to await me in New York, and I was eager to encounter it even though this meant leaving him. On the day I left, we kept taking pictures of each other with my camera, then asked a taxi driver at the airport to take more of us together. Back in New York, I would lie on my bed and stare at these as if trying to reanimate that day. I looked back at myself, dark-haired and tanned in my yellow sleeveless linen dress, exuding happiness though about to leave for New York, and at Ezio, a blond Italian with his domed forehead and lovely smile, dressed in the rumpled blue summer jacket he wore to do the tours for Roma di notte, both of us young and joyful and about to part. In one of the photos Ezio is hugging a palm tree; in another we have our arms draped on each other’s shoulders, for he was only a little bit taller than I am. I sent him a set of the pictures, and we wrote back and forth about them. They were precious, these pictures, capturing something both tangible and ineffable. Yet I had left him to board my plane, and he had driven home in his Fiat to his mother, maiden aunt, and younger sister and his elderly prodigal father. And surely a day came—who knows how soon thereafter—when he sat again in the Villa Borghese and plucked a laurel leaf for some other girl.
Given all odds, the relationship should have ended as a summer romance. Apart, we kept writing letters—weekly at first and then less frequently. After a while I started dating other men in New York, gave my party with Helen, and ultimately started an affair with a man who visited occasionally from Boston, while Ezio, in Rome, fell into a number of casual involvements. When I went back to Europe the next summer, I based myself in Paris and went to Rome only briefly. Seeing Ezio wasn’t the same, and I returned home with no expectation of a shared future. But then—I can’t quite say why, perhaps just because nothing else was happening and I found it hard to form another meaningful relationship with a man—I invited him to New York for Christmas, and we started up again. By that point I had begun graduate school at Columbia, and he was headed to England to spend the spring semester at Cambridge. In May, when I was done with my classes and needed only to prepare for the MA exams I would take in August, I joined him abroad. We lived in an old house outside of Cambridge, where you had to put shillings in the meter to keep the heat going and we were always running out of change in the chilliest hours. Then going back with him to Rome, I rented an apartment with spare furniture and marble floors, and he drove his little car back and forth between his family and me. We weren’t thinking of marriage yet were trying to be together as much as our respective commitments allowed. In Rome, as in Cambridge, I found libraries with all the books of English literature I needed.
Our last stretch together was a semester that ensuing fall of 1967 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ezio by then was working for the Bank of Italy, which sent him to study with a prominent M.I.T. economist. I rented an apartment for us in Cambridge, a few blocks from the Harvard campus, and then commuted each week by bus to New York to attend my classes, crowded into two days, at Columbia. Neither of us felt we were where we belonged. Ezio would meet my bus when I returned from New York, and I remember taking the Boston subway in the cold fall evenings back to our apartment on Trowbridge Street, where Ezio in my absence had never washed a single dish. For Christmas my mother wanted me to come to California, but she wasn’t prepared to pay his ticket as well. “If you go, don’t come back,” he said to me. I was standing and he was sitting on a sofa as he said this. Shades of Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle. I went to California to spend that Christmas with my mother. The pull of her orbit was simply too strong. Two and a half years later, after a few short involvements with other men and my first tentative sexual encounter with a woman, I married Donald Fairey. I didn’t see Ezio Tarantelli again for seventeen years.
I had got the idea for my master’s thesis on To the Lighthouse almost a year before the end of my relationship with Ezio, when he and I had just got back together. Seeing him off after his holiday visit to New York, the thesis sprung, fully shaped in my mind, on the bus back from the airport to the city. I would have a Part I focused on Mrs. Ramsay and her two experiences of merging: her contemplation of the lighthouse in her moment of solitude and then her blending with the assembled family and guests at dinner; Part II would look at the experience of the artist Lily Briscoe and the impulses that allow her to complete her painting; and, finally, a Part III would focus on Woolf’s aesthetic as a novelist and the attempted wholeness of To the Lighthouse. I wrote of my academic epiphany in a letter to Ezio, and he was pleased to have his visit to me end so productively. You could say that I, too, had my vision and that somehow it linked with loving another person. Beyond this, though, a tie between Ezio Tarantelli and Virginia Woolf seems tenuous. While someone like him might make an appearance in a novel by E. M. Forster—Forster would extol his physical grace and, notwithstanding his ambition and discipline, his freedom from Protestant shame, Virginia Woolf doesn’t seem especially interested in her fiction in foreigners. There’s the Swiss maid in To the Lighthouse, lying in bed at night and homesick for her father and beautiful mountains, and Lucrezia, the Italian wife of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, who, back home, sewed hats with her sisters. But these characters fail to introduce any ethos into the novels that competes with Englishness. Woolf doesn’t look outside English society or landscape for any of her values.
In the end I couldn’t as well. I didn’t want to leave my language and my culture for more than an extended excursion. When I married, it was to an Englishman who had emigrated to the United States in adolescence and resided as long as I had in New York. Ezio Tarantelli, in an ironic twist, married an American with a PhD from Tufts in English literature and a BA from Wellesley, who did indeed go to live with him in Italy. She and I would have been classmates if I’d chosen Wellesley, which I also applied to, and not Bryn Mawr. Ezio met her the winter he stayed on in Boston, something I learned only seventeen years later when I saw him again in Rome.
In the summer of 1984, during the period I lived in Virginia, the Barnard philosopher I was still involved with rented a villa close to Florence, and I was able to join her there for a few weeks. Immersed in early Renaissance art—churches, frescos, sculpture, and painting, Donatello, Massacio, Fra Angelico—she and I and a couple more visiting friends took side trips to Siena, Pisa, and other towns, and a plan formed for a short excursion to Rome. Whom do I know in Rome? I wondered in momentary amnesia. Remembering, I dialed Rome phone information and got numbers for three Ezio Tarantellis. The first I tried was the right one. “Ti ricordi Wendy?” I asked. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he answered in En
glish.
I arranged to meet him for lunch, and he picked me up at my hotel in a much nicer car than his old Fiat. We were now in our forties. I had worried I might find him bald or fat or dull, but he wasn’t any of these things. He looked and seemed the same, and without effort or strain we fell into our old familiarity. Though I didn’t divulge my affair with a woman, I spoke of my marriage being in trouble, and he urged me to try to work it out. At the same time, however much he valued family stability, he confessed to being habitually unfaithful to his wife. He had tried to change for her, he said, but just couldn’t do it, and I was grateful not to be in her position. I’m sure if we’d had a bit more time, he would have proposed driving out to Ostia for a tryst, and I might very well have gone and then regretted it. Instead, we talked on about our children—he had one son, my son’s age—each other’s friends and family, and our careers. He had realized most all of the ambitions he’d harbored when I knew him and was proud now to be the youngest full professor at the University of Rome as well as an economics advisor to a major trade union. He’d done well, he said, since I’d abandoned him in the cold Boston winter. “Poor boy,” he said, miming grief. The pain was remembered playfully. “You’ll always have a friend in Rome,” he assured me, as we walked to his car with our arms around each other’s shoulders.
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