Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  You braced yourself. ‘What business?’ you asked.

  Mr Gaskell began to take off his boots. ‘There are over a hundred letters waiting for you downstairs,’ was all he said.

  The newspapers were full of it. They were jubilant with viciousness. They laid it out over and over again: the allegations made by Mrs Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë regarding the irreputable behaviour of one Lady Scott with one Branwell Brontë, late brother of the late Charlotte Brontë. Articles lingered over the fury of Lady Scott upon reading the biography, reported that she had written to the solicitors of Mrs Gaskell and of her publisher, threatening legal action, and that she had insisted on the recall of all unsold copies of the book. This, you read, had taken place, and at the end of May, only two days ago, a letter from your solicitor had appeared in The Times and been reproduced in all the evening papers:

  As solicitor for and on behalf of the Rev. W. Gaskell, and of Mrs. Gaskell his wife, the latter of whom is authoress of the Life of Charlotte Brontë, I am instructed to retract every statement contained in that work which imputes to a widowed lady, referred to, but not named therein, any breach of her conjugal, of her maternal, or of her social duties, and more especially of the statements contained in chapter 13 of the first volume, and chapter 2 of the second, which impute to the lady in question a guilty intercourse with the late Branwell Brontë. All those statements were made upon information believed to be well founded, but which, upon investigation, with the additional evidence furnished to me by you, I have ascertained not to be trustworthy. I am therefore authorized not only to retract the statements in question, but to express the deep regret of Mrs. Gaskell that she should have been led to make them.

  The Athenaeum, to add insult to injury, had gone so far as to publish their own rebuke:

  We are sorry to be called upon to return to Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, but we must do so, since the book has gone forth with our recommendation. Praise, it is needless to point out, implied trust in the biographer as an accurate collector of facts. This, we regret to state, Mrs. Gaskell proves not to have been. It is in the interest of Letters that biographers should be deterred from rushing into print with mere impressions in place of proofs, however eager and sincere those impressions may be. They may be slanders, and as such they may sting cruelly. Meanwhile the Life of Charlotte Brontë must undergo modification ere it can be further circulated.

  You were pale with rage. You stared at the headlines in the papers, at your name printed over and over, at the words that were put in your mouth by the lawyer, on the instruction of Mr Gaskell, and the way they had been thrown back at you. ‘The deep regret of Mrs Gaskell’! You clutched the page so tightly it began to tear, and you had to force yourself to let it go, to return it to your desk. ‘… trust in the biographer as an accurate collector of facts. This, Mrs Gaskell proves not to have been.’

  You stared at the window, and at the rain slamming against the glass. On the street, people were passing in carriages, the horses bending their heads into the wind. Your hands moved towards your correspondence paper and pen, and you didn’t know, at first, who you were writing to, until the address somehow peeled itself from your pen onto the page: Mr C. E. Norton, Piazza di Spagna, Rome.

  ‘Dear Mr Norton,’ you wrote. ‘I am back in the hornets’ nest with a vengeance.’

  2015

  Loon Mountain

  Max’s face in the small box on the screen, eyebrows pinched together. Behind him is Boston. It is snowing. It has been snowing all winter, and now it is February, and it is still snowing. This has become a thing we talk about.

  ‘How’s the snow?’ I ask.

  ‘Still going,’ he says. ‘They say there’s more on the way. They’re calling it a “snow emergency”. There’s a parking ban on the street. My brother lost his car in a drift.’

  It snows every winter in Boston, of course, and at first I thought Max was making an uncharacteristic fuss about it, until I realized that it really is worse than usual, this year. There are segments on the British news showing Bostonians skiing down huge white piles that have been ploughed off the streets. The mayor has issued a warning against people jumping into drifts from second-floor windows: I’m asking people to stop this nonsense now. This isn’t Loon Mountain, this is the city of Boston, where we’re trying to remove snow off of the street and it becomes very dangerous.

  ‘What did you do today?’ I say, every day, and every day Max says, ‘I shovelled.’

  He shovels his own driveway, and his parents’ driveway, and the driveways of the houses being renovated by the developer for whom he does odd jobs. It snows, even as he shovels, and so when he has reached the end of a driveway, he says, he might as well just go back to the beginning and start again.

  We are irritable with each other. Once we have exhausted the topic of the weather, he asks me about my day, and I say, ‘I went to the library, and then I went to the gym, and then I came home.’ I glare at him. It is his fault, I can’t help feeling, that my life is so boring and repetitive and mundane. It is his fault that my days never vary. It is his fault, because he is not here with me.

  If he asks what I did at the library, I tell him that I have discovered nothing new about Mrs Gaskell, but that I am in the running to win a pair of limited edition trainers. Often he does not ask.

  Sometime after he left Paris for Boston, Max began emailing me poems. The idea was that it would be a casual, simple record of the things he had read, and which he thought I might like: he sends the poems each night before he goes to sleep; I wake up to them. They are as regular and predictable a part of my day as the morning news on the radio, as the announcement at the library every evening at 7.45: The building is about to close. Would you please return all borrowed items to the issue desk. The building is about to close.

  Max’s ‘Poem of the Day’ messages are numbered, and soon they become, without him really meaning them to, a counter tallying up the length of our separation. He stops sending them when we are together, and then picks up where he left off when we are apart. Poem of the Day, 105; Poem of the Day, 200.

  Most days, I send him something in return. He gives me ‘Poet’s Work’ by Lorine Niedecker – Grandfather / advised me: Learn a trade / I learned to sit at desk and condense – and I respond with ‘Michaelangelo: To Giovanni Da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel’ by Gail Mazur: I am not in the right place – I am not a painter. He sends Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. I reply with ‘The Nineteenth Century and After’, by Yeats: Though the great song return no more There’s keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.

  These are indirect, abstract conversations. These are the things we do not say on Skype, or have our own words for. We wrestle and argue and flirt and compliment and get tangled up in quotations. We are ventriloquists’ dummies, yapping at one another in other people’s voices. On my twenty-ninth birthday, he sends me ‘Something Amazing Just Happened’ by Ted Berrigan, which is an account of a dream in which the poet wins a Guggenheim Foundation Grant for the purpose of giving his friend Jim ‘the best possible birthday present’.

  We have arranged for you and Jim to spend a year

  in London, in a

  flat off of King’s Row.

  During the year,

  At your leisure, you might send us from time to

  time copies of your

  London works.

  It is a clear and aching fantasy; it hurts to read; it makes me cry. It is a dream, recounted in a poem, discovered in a book and sent, via email, to me. It is not our life.

  On Max’s birthday, I send him Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’.

  Lately, ‘Poem of the Day’ has become ‘Poems of t
he Day’. It seems that the briefer and harder and more strained our nightly conversation has been, the more poems I will wake up to in my inbox. There are now routinely so many that I stop reading them all. On the bus, on my way to the library, I glance at the titles, and read the first two or three, and then give up. I feel swamped and annoyed. Just say what you mean, I think, as I skim through them. Stop making me decipher these things. Stop making me read between the many hundreds of lines you have scooped up on your side of the Atlantic and hurled over here while I was sleeping.

  ‘Time Long Past’, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. ‘Lyric VII, from In Memoriam A.H.H.’, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. ‘How Soon Hath Time’, by John Milton.

  ‘It just keeps piling up,’ Max says.

  ‘What does?’ I ask. ‘The snow?’

  And he does mean the snow, but he means, too, the other things.

  ‘I need to figure out my life,’ he says, when I needle him. ‘I’m nearly forty and doing odd jobs. I need to figure it out.’

  ‘Come to London,’ I say. I say this, if not daily, then at least every other day. ‘Come to London, live rent-free with me. You can write here. We’ll find a way to make my Ph.D. stipend stretch. I have extra money from teaching now. You wouldn’t have to work.’

  He just shakes his head and says, ‘I need to figure this out for myself. I don’t want to scrounge off you.’

  It makes me want to scream at him. ‘You’d do the same for me,’ I say, ‘if it were the other way around. If you were the one stuck in situ doing the Ph.D. and I was the one doing the odd jobs. You’d let me live with you and you’d help me out with money and you’d be so furious with me if you knew I was miserable but refusing your help.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know.’

  ‘Just get on a plane,’ I say. ‘Just come. We’ll figure it out.’

  And then, nine times out of ten, he reverts to talking about the snow.

  This isn’t Loon Mountain. This is the City of Boston.

  ‘Just come,’ I say. ‘Come to London. Then we can talk. Really talk.’

  ‘I will,’ he says.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Nuit Blanche’, by Amy Lowell. ‘A Mind of Winter’, by Martha Kapos. ‘Snow’, by Vidyan Ravinthiran: What I’m saying is, this isn’t the right kind of snow.

  And then, at last, he books a flight, and I realize that in some part of myself I have been holding my breath, for weeks, months even, and that now, finally, I can exhale.

  He is coming. He will be here soon.

  2015

  Upgrade Examination

  As a research student at King’s you are registered as an M.Phil. student initially. To receive a Ph.D. you must transfer to Ph.D. status by undergoing a formal review. We call this process the Upgrade Examination. The key principle for upgrading is that you are well on course to produce research of the required standard within the permitted timescale. The Upgrade Examination must take place between 9 and 18 months after you begin your course of study.

  ‘It’s time,’ says Joyce. ‘It’s time to upgrade.’

  I groan. Joyce shrugs in a manner that reminds me of my mother, the way she used to look at me when I was a teenager: I would complain about some inevitability of my existence that seemed, then, intolerable – getting out of bed, going to school, being polite to distant uncles who hadn’t seen me since I was yay high – and she would give me a look that was part pity, part amusement, part murderous frustration. It would propel me, somehow, through whatever it was that I did not want to do.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Joyce says, ‘but you have to upgrade if you want to stay enrolled on the programme.’

  By now, Joyce and I have reached a sort of truce: I won’t openly complain about the things she asks me to do, and she will not push me to do anything more than is absolutely necessary. The other members of my cohort, the ones who want to be real academics one day, seem to exist in a constant rotation of seminars and conferences and writing papers for journals. This, though, is not my life. I go to the library, and then I go to the gym, and then I come home. Joyce has come to, if not accept, then at least tolerate, the fact that I am not like those other, earnest, industrious, ambitious Ph.D. students. She knows that I am a writer, but not, by nature, an academic writer, and that the only academic events or gatherings that interest me are American ones that take me closer to Max.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘I’ll get the work together.’

  You should expect to submit a substantial body of work of 15–20,000 words, ideally including two or more substantive draft chapters, and a methodological or research framework. You will then have a thirty-to-sixty-minute interview with your Ph.D. committee, on the basis of the materials submitted. The committee’s comments at a relatively early stage of the dissertation writing reduce the chance of major problems arising in the student’s work later on.

  I sift through the various pieces of writing I have put together in a word document called, optimistically, ‘thesis.docx’.

  Recently I have been working on a chapter about Spiritualism. One of the things the nineteenth-century artists and writers did when they were together in Rome was hold séances. They would sit down in darkened rooms, in the presence of self-proclaimed ‘mediums’, and try to contact the dead. William Wetmore Story thought he might himself have the power to channel spirits through his pen in a practice he called ‘spirit writing’. Elizabeth Barrett Browning attested to seeing apparitions – disembodied hands, a wreath of flowers that floated through the air and landed on her head – in séances. Harriet Hosmer encountered ghosts in Rome: she wrote to friends about having a conversation with her maid one morning, and learning later that the servant had died in the night; she described a little sprite who ran laughing through her bedroom and out into the sunlight. John Ruskin attended séances in which he demanded to speak to the spirits of dead painters: ‘I want to speak to the spirit of Veronese!’ he instructed his medium. ‘Won’t I cross-examine him!’ I found all of this quite moving in the source material – the efforts they made to reach the unreachable, their yearning to be friends with long-gone predecessors – but by the time I have passed it through the filter of my own academic prose it seems devoid of interest. Still, I include it, together with some introductory paragraphs about Rome and the conditions it provided the expatriate artists who lived there, in my Upgrade submission.

  The exam takes place in Joyce’s office, the little boxy, white-walled room in which I have learned the art of the awkward silence over the past year-and-a-bit. Now, though, it is not Joyce sitting across the table from me, but two other nineteenth-century specialists from the department. One is the man who led the doctoral seminar, who first pointed out to me that Gaskell had written ‘Rome’ and not ‘home’. The other is a more junior member of the faculty, who seems perpetually nervous, her hands always searching for something to smooth out: her hair, her clothes, the air in front of her.

  The upgrade doesn’t really matter, I know. I’ve heard plenty of stories of students who didn’t pass on their first attempt. When I ask Joyce about this, she says, ‘Sometimes failing a student on their upgrade is a good way to give them a gentle kick up the backside.’ I think about my peers at the conferences and seminars and networking events, and then of my own half-hearted days spent procrastinating in the library. It is all right if I don’t pass, I tell myself. I don’t really deserve to pass. I probably do need a kick up the backside, gentle or otherwise.

  Now, in the exam, Joyce is sitting silently in the corner, taking notes. She is allowed to be present, but not to intervene. She fiddles with her pen and glances out of the window, waiting for the examiners’ questioning to start.

  There will be three possible outcomes to an Upgrade Examination:

  1. Unconditional Pass: you will be transferred to Ph.D. with immediate effect.

  2. Refer for Further Review: this could be either minor amendments over a defined period of time, or a full repeat
of the online upgrade procedure.

  3. Failure to Upgrade: the upgrade panel will review your registration status on the programme. The review determines whether you should remain at M.Phil., or whether you should withdraw from the programme.

  The male academic is very quiet. He lets the younger woman do all the talking. She has blustered through a series of objections to the formatting of my footnotes and bibliography, and I am leaning, once again, on the formulaic response I developed for the doctoral seminar: ‘That’s interesting. Yes. I’ll take a look at that. Thank you.’ I am keen to draw out the formatting discussion for as long as possible: the more time we spend on the footnotes, the less we have for them to tear apart the content of my chapter. But the woman’s attention is turning. She is leafing back through her printout of my submission.

  ‘I’ve read all your work,’ she says, ‘and I have to say, I’m still not entirely sure I understand what your point is.’

  ‘My point?’

  ‘Your argument. What is it, exactly, that you are trying to say?’

  ‘I want to say … I’m trying to say … I’m writing about ways of being close to people,’ I say. ‘I’m writing about the places where artists come together, and the ways they obtain closeness.’

  ‘And they “obtain closeness” in Rome?’

  ‘Yes. Artists and writers travelled to Rome to be close to each other, and then, when they were there, they used Spiritualism to try to reach even more of them. Even the ones who had died.’

  ‘In Rome, specifically?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why Rome? What was special about Rome?’

  I look at the male academic. He is gazing sleepily at his notes. This is my chance, I think, to wake him up, to bring him back into the room. If he is not interested in my work, then he should at least be interested in his own impact on it. Rome is the connecting thread that runs between us, the reason I abandoned my ‘unreachable Americas’ project in my first year; it was all on his suggestion.