by Amanda Cross
The next section of the examination was on the medieval love lyric, and while Kate would assign a grade to this as to all other sections of the exam, she allowed her mind to wander. The fact was that if the candidate had made up out of whole cloth every one of the love lyrics he quoted, Kate would not have known the difference. Besides, George Eliot reminded her of the strangest bit of detective work she had ever been called upon to do. The case had only recently wound its way to its odd conclusion.
KATE HAD BEEN sitting in her office reading through applications to the graduate program when there came a knock on her door. She had called “Come in” before she remembered her determination to get through this pile of applications without interruptions. A young woman entered the office, her hand still resting diffidently on the door handle.
“May I talk to you for a moment?” she asked.
“If it really is only a moment,” Kate said. “I’ve got to finish up dealing with this.” She pointed to the bundles of purple folders on her desk.
“Well,” the girl said, as though honesty were the only possible answer in this and in all matters, “it is longer than a moment. But everyone I consulted said you would be the only person who might help. Not that I consulted many people,” she added. “Only three, to be exact, but they all mentioned you.”
“In what connection?” Kate could not resist asking.
“George Eliot,” the young woman said.
“Ah,” Kate answered. “What’s your name?”
“Luellen Sampson. I have a Ph.D. in English literature from another university, not here, and I’m an assistant professor of literature.” Which, Kate thought, explained nothing, except that the interruption would have better been directed to another professor, whose office was quite elsewhere.
“Could we make an appointment, Ms. Sampson?” Kate asked. “I really must get through this job.” Again she pointed to her desk.
“Of course. You couldn’t help me with only one meeting anyway. I don’t know if you can help me at all. You see”–and here Luellen Sampson paused; even her body seemed to come to attention as though she were about to attempt a difficult dive, which, Kate later acknowledged, was indeed the case–“you see, I’ve found an unpublished play by George Eliot and her companion George Henry Lewes, but mostly by George Eliot, apart from the main plot. Lewes probably outlined that.”
Kate put her pen, which she had been grasping with the air of one determined to return to her task despite all disruptions, down on the desk. She leaned back in her chair. “All right,” she said. “Tell me.”
“I’m afraid it’s a long story.”
“It can hardly help being a long story,” Kate agreed. “Why not start from the beginning, that is, with George Eliot. What year are we in?”
“1863. A man named Theodore Martin, who was an old friend of Lewes’s–they’d met before Lewes went to live with George Eliot as her husband, though not legally; of course her name was Marian Evans when she went to live with Lewes, she hadn’t begun writing novels yet.…” Luellen paused as though unable to disentangle herself from that sentence.
“I know about George Eliot’s life,” Kate said, not unkindly. “I’ve even heard of Theodore Martin. Wasn’t he married to a famous actress?”
“Oh, very good,” Luellen burst out, as though Kate were a student she was encouraging. “That’s the whole point, you see. He was married to an actress named Helen Faucit, whom Lewes thought the best tragic actress he’d ever seen, and since George Eliot was in one of her sad phases, he, Lewes, suggested that they write a play for Helen Faucit.” Luellen paused; her sentences, Kate noticed, tended to become unduly extended although the elements of proper syntax were never quite abandoned. “They decided to call the play Savello,” Luellen concluded with a sigh. “That’s the play I’ve found.”
Kate considered this statement in a deepening silence. The woman was probably demented, though not necessarily in a dangerous way. George Eliot materials had been searched out endlessly and thoroughly; the chance of anything else, certainly anything more than a letter, being found was unlikely to the point of impossibility. On the other hand, of course, a first novel of Louisa May Alcott’s had just been discovered in, of all obscure places, the Houghton Library at Harvard, where it had been misfiled. And then there were Boswell’s journals, which had surfaced more than seventy years ago, in a croquet box. All the same …
Luellen had risen to her feet. Kate rose also, to stretch her legs and to escort her visitor to the door. But Luellen was taking a large brown envelope from her backpack.
“Here,” she said. “I’ll leave you a copy. You can read it, and then we can talk about it. People said I could trust you, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone I can trust any better. Can we make an appointment to meet after you’ve read it? No hurry.”
Kate should have said that she hadn’t the time, that she didn’t want to be responsible for deciding what might become of a valuable, unknown manuscript, that this wasn’t the sort of problem she could help with, or any of a hundred other things. Instead, her hand, as though with a mind of its own, reached out and took the brown envelope.
“Come back on Monday, this time. Is that convenient? I’ll read this over the weekend and we can confer on Monday.”
“Fine,” Luellen said. “And thank you. I know you won’t show it to anyone or discuss it with anyone.” And she departed with more alacrity than Kate would have given her credit for.
To Kate, the “anyone” she was not supposed to discuss “it” with did not include Reed, and at dinner she told him about Luellen’s visit and about the play that the young woman intended to publish, making her reputation and–so Luellen clearly assumed–her academic fortune. Kate had read the play after her return home and before Reed, who had been kept late by a meeting, joined her for a drink and dinner.
“What’s the play about?” Reed asked, when he had heard an account of Kate’s afternoon meeting with Luellen Sampson. “I know that’s not the proper way to question a literary work. I guess I mean, what’s the plot?”
“That’s easier described than what the play’s about,” Kate said, laughing. “We have this Don Juan type, named Savello, who sees the beautiful Cassandra–and why they chose that name, only God and George Henry Lewes know, and they’ve both forgotten–anyway, he sees her in church, naturally, shades of Dante, and desires her, or lusts after her, whatever.”
“You usually describe literary works more elegantly, Kate.”
“This is scarcely a literary work. I’ll try to be quick about the hideous plot. You can probably guess it for yourself. Savello follows her home and covers her with words and kisses, all gentle enough not to upset her unduly. In fact, instead of defending her virtue, she paints for him a picture of the hideous life he will live if he continues on his feckless way. Deciding she has saved his soul, he sends her a note saying he must see her one more time, he tricks her husband–I think I forgot to say she was married–”
“You certainly did,” Reed interrupted.
“Yes, well, she is, but she tells her husband about Savello, and then tells Savello to come, which he does, and the husband kills him, or maybe Cassandra does–it’s not terribly clear–but she is sobbing over his body; she now understands that he has indeed been ennobled by her love, but she has killed him before he could live his noble life. Curtain.”
“Yikes!” Reed said.
“The perfect comment. But if George Eliot did write it, even with the help of Lewes, finding and publishing it is certainly worth a lot of academic credits.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite get it,” Reed said. “Why did she come to you, and what’s the problem you’re supposed to be coping with?”
“Good question,” Kate said. “Go to the head of the class.”
“What’s the good answer?”
“Only a guess. I think she needed someone from outside her circle to lend a name to the play, back it, push it, blurb it, endorse it, certify its authenticity. I�
��m something of an expert in the field of the novel, and something of a detective. If I say George Eliot wrote it, then a number of people will assume that she did. And those who think she didn’t will attack me as well as Luellen Sampson.”
“Are you going to endorse it?”
“Really, Reed, of course I’m not. George Eliot never wrote that thing, and while there is evidence that her ‘husband’ wrote the plot or at least the outline, I don’t think he had a hand in it either. It’s not so much the language and the syntax, although that’s not of the greatest. It’s other signs. Commas, for one thing. George Eliot, like Jane Austen, had a view of comma use wholly different from what today’s grammarians condone, and the commas in this play are, so to speak, modern.”
“What about the paper and the type?”
“They’ve gone to a lot of trouble about that. I’m no expert, but I’d be surprised if both aren’t exactly what John Blackwood, her publisher, would have used in 1863.”
“I see,” Reed said. “Well, supposing it is a fake, where did she, or whoever did it, get the idea for the play?”
“The same place where I learned about it, from Gordon Haight’s biography of George Eliot,* a really great biography, even if he was somewhat over convinced that ‘she was not fitted to stand alone.’ What I don’t know is what, if anything, I’m going to do about it. Of course I’m not going to endorse it, but …”
“But,” Reed finished the sentence for her, “you’re damn well going to find out whose plot this was and why they decided to involve you in it?”
“Exactly. Still, easier said than done. I’ll have to do a bit of digging.”
“Starting with Luellen Sampson, assistant professor of literature?”
“However did you guess?” Kate said, smiling at him. But her days were full for the rest of the week, and the weekend too had long since been promised to other activities. And so it was that Kate saw Luellen again before she could begin any of her investigations.
LUELLEN ARRIVED EXACTLY as she had before, knocking and then entering with an apologetic air, if one could be imagined, Kate thought, to offer apologies for what one was nonetheless determined upon. Invited to sit, Luellen did so.
“I’ve read the play,” Kate said. “If it wasn’t by George Eliot, I doubt anyone would find it of great interest. Do you agree?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Luellen said, startled by the question. “I mean, since it is by George Eliot, it’s very interesting indeed.”
“From a biographical point of view, I guess so,” Kate said. “I for one have never been able to get my pulses racing over Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy, and this is more or less in that mode, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes. It’s verse, and it’s got a very serious moral point to make. Still, one might not have guessed at what George Eliot’s views would be on a Don Giovanni type.”
This discussion, intriguing to anyone for whom literature was the stuff of life, had to be postponed.
“Tell me about yourself,” Kate said, “with an emphasis on your graduate school experience, unless something dramatic happened before then.”
“Yes,” Luellen said, “I thought you’d want to know about me. That’s only natural. There was nothing whatever dramatic in my life until I got to college. Then I met a man, really the first man who ever paid serious attention to me, the first one who ever listened to what I had to say, and I married him just to have someone to listen to me. Only, after we were married …”
“He stopped listening,” Kate provided, after a pause.
“Yes. He thought I was the docile type. Well, I was the docile type, I guess, and he thought I’d be the kind of wife he wanted. But I insisted on finishing college and even said I was going on to graduate school. I loved literature.” She said it the way, in a long ago and more distant time, men used to say “I loved my country.” Now what made me think of that? Kate wondered.
“And then,” Kate added, “he left, you left. What came next?” For Luellen certainly seemed to need encouragement to continue her story.
“It was funny. When we were in college, we seemed to be equals. Then, once we were married, he was reading the newspaper or watching a ball game in the living room and I was in the kitchen. If you know what I mean?”
Kate nodded to show she knew.
“That’s all. I guess you’d have to say I left. I had inherited some money from my grandfather, just like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe”–she waited while Kate smiled her recognition of the similarity–“not that someone was threatening to rape me. Anyway, I enrolled in graduate school and–”
“Let’s go a little more slowly now,” Kate said. “Did you get to know many students there? Were there any special professors you admired?”
“Benjamin Franklin was my mentor,” she said. “I know it’s an awfully funny name to have, but he signs himself B. Franklin, and everyone calls him Frank.”
“I know who he is,” Kate said. “That is, I’ve heard of him, naturally. He’s a well-known critic of nineteenth-century novelists. And he’s done some important work on George Eliot.”
“Yes. I guess that’s why I decided to write my dissertation on her. But I never thought I’d find this play and be able to edit it for publication. I hope it will get me tenure. It should, don’t you think?”
“How close was your relationship with B. Franklin? And if you think I’m suggesting something untoward, I may be.”
“You don’t believe in sex between people who love each other?”
“I don’t believe in sex between a professor and a student, or between a person in power and a person dependent on that power, no. Some lasting marriages have come out of such affairs, but not many, and not when the professor is married to someone else at the time. Was B. Franklin married?”
Luellen blushed. “Yes,” she said. “He was. I did feel guilty about that, but, well, I couldn’t really help myself.”
“And did he listen to you, at least at first?”
“Oh, no. I listened to him. But he did appreciate the fact that I could listen intelligently and ask meaningful questions. By this time, of course, he’d given up George Eliot and was writing on some less well-known male novelists. I loved discussing his work with him.”
“His wife wasn’t, on the other hand, able to ask such meaningful questions?”
“Oh, dear.” Luellen dropped her head at Kate’s tone, which, Kate knew, had been a bit harsh, and tried surreptitiously to wipe away a tear.
“What finally happened?” Kate asked. They had better stick to the relevant facts, or at least return to George Eliot.
“He found another student to ask meaningful questions, I guess,” Luellen said, sniffing ominously. “I’m sorry,” she added, accepting a Kleenex from a box Kate pulled from a desk drawer where she kept them for student use when required. “Does all this have anything to do with the play?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “It might. Tell me how you found the play. Did Frank help with that too?”
“Yes. Someone else had found it. It’s a long story. Descendants of Helen Faucit’s found it in an old box in the attic. Apparently George Eliot had given it to her when they decided not to publish it, and it just stayed there, in the same house.”
“Which has been in the family all these years?”
“Oh, yes. Faucit and Theodore Martin moved to the country, to Surrey, and a niece of hers inherited the house, and it’s stayed in the family, or branches of the family, ever since. They cleaned out the attic–well, it is like all those old stories about finding papers, but in this case it’s true.”
“And how did the play come into your hands?”
“I got a letter from the man who now owns the house, the one who had gone through the stuff in the attic when they decided to turn the attic into living quarters, and I went to England to look at what he’d found. He said he had been given my name by a friend who taught English in a school and was crazy about George Eliot. Th
e friend had read my dissertation; it was about George Eliot’s conviction of the necessity of work. I was surprised that he’d even heard of it, but life is like that sometimes.”
“So you flew to England.”
“I went right away. It was terribly exciting. The schoolteacher didn’t know what to make of it, but he agreed that it seemed likely to be a play by her; it had all her seriousness and rather shaky verse.”
“Great ideas, but better expressed in prose.”
“Exactly.” Luellen nodded her agreement.
“And you brought the play back and asked for Frank’s advice.” It wasn’t exactly a question. “Surely the authentication would have been easier if the play had been handwritten, either by Eliot or by Lewes; there are plenty of examples of their handwriting around for comparison. Didn’t you think it odd that it was set in type if it was never to be published?”
“It wasn’t so surprising. When Eliot was struggling with The Spanish Gypsy her publisher Blackwood offered to set it into type for her so that she could correct it more easily, and he did. He probably made the same offer in this case, but when she saw the play in type she abandoned it.”
“Wisely, don’t you think?” Kate asked.
“Probably, from her point of view. But from our point of view as students of her life and work, it’s of great interest. Surely you can see that?”
“I certainly read it with interest,” Kate admitted. “I might even say I was riveted by it. Surely the expectation of a beautiful woman’s reforming a rake had been seen to be highly unlikely even in Eliot’s time–once a rake, always a rake. In fact, Eliot was remarkably astute in recognizing the tendency of people to follow their dominant trait to the end, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Well, as I said in my dissertation, quoting Mr. Farebrother from Middlemarch, ‘if a man is denied love from one woman he can eventually obtain it from another, but not so with one’s work: there is a fit, a suitability, a properness which, once botched, can never be made good.’ I think maybe Eliot came to see that this isn’t true. After all, Lydgate in Middlemarch marries the wrong woman–which botches his work; Farebrother probably was consoling himself for losing Mary Garth.”