Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  ‘Mrs Gaskell went to Rome,’ I tell Max, as we wait to get to the front of the crowd. ‘She met an American there, a man called Charles Eliot Norton, and he changed her life. They understood each other. They had this incredible connection. I think she felt free, liberated, with him and all these artists: British and American painters, and sculptors, and writers. I think she finally felt that she was among her people. It was transformative for her, to meet Norton, to be in Rome, to be treated as an equal by other artists.’

  ‘And that interests you,’ says Max. ‘That moves you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So then write about it,’ he says. ‘Just write.’

  When we finally get close to the painting, I look up into the face of the Mona Lisa. She meets my gaze and smiles, as though she has known the answer to my Ph.D. woes all along, and has been waiting for me to get there by myself.

  Back in London after that second trip to Paris, I call Max on Skype. I am sitting on the floor of my room in Haggerston, computer on the bed. Max is at the table in Shu’s apartment, with laundry drying behind him: the sheets that I was sleeping on only a night ago.

  We are beginning to fall into a rhythm. There are the intense days when we are in the same city, when our bodies ache from too much sex and not enough sleep, and my mind fizzes over with things I want to say to him and things he has said to me. These are followed by the eerie quietness of separation: of being apart, sleeping alone, and nightly Skype calls. I am adjusting to this alternative, two-dimensional version of Max, his head contained neatly in a box on the screen, occasionally pixelated or out of sync with the sound.

  When we are tired, and it is late, we don’t speak, but type to each other instead. I don’t know why it is easier to type than to speak out loud, but it is, and I am bolder in writing than I am in speech. And so, after some back and forth about our days – my journey back to London, his work on a new story – I ask him something I haven’t dared mention before.

  Nell: I have another question for you.

  Max (expression momentarily concerned, and then adjusted back to a smile): OK.

  Nell: Do you remember that time in Boston, when I told you that I liked you? You said you weren’t looking for a relationship.

  Why?

  Max: I’m sorry I said that.

  Nell: But why did you?

  Max: Because … I was an idiot.

  Nell: No but why?

  [Pause. He begins to type – three rippling dots on the screen – then stops, then starts again.]

  Max: I had just left this life where I was always working, doing work I hated, and I was truly, seriously miserable. And I did this crazy thing of giving it up to become a writer, and moved back to Boston, and I went back to school … When I started at BU it seemed I had bought myself all this time – I felt as though I had ages to figure out what my next move was. But then all of a sudden it was summer and I had to confront the future all over again. People kept asking me: what next? And I didn’t know. I don’t know. I’m writing, but I can’t know what will come of it. It just didn’t seem like the time to commit to something – to someone. I knew I was coming to Paris, but this isn’t forever, and in a few months I’ll have to go back home and start earning some money, you know?

  Nell: OK.

  Max: OK?

  Nell: But then, what has changed now?

  Doesn’t all that still apply?

  Max: No. I realized it doesn’t matter. I want to be with you, and that’s more important than all those other things. [Pause] Is that OK? Are you OK?

  I don’t type back. I feel suddenly panic-stricken. Since Max first kissed me, I have been remarkably sanguine about our relationship, have come to accept it as a thing that is rightfully mine, and that cannot be taken away. I scan back over our conversation; it is littered with question marks, and they make me feel sick. I catch sight of my face in the little box on the top right of the screen: pale and frowning.

  ‘Hey,’ Max says, switching to speaking. ‘I bought you something today.’

  I type, ‘You did?’ and then feel stupid and repeat it out loud. ‘You did?’

  He leans out of shot for a moment, then returns, holding up a little red book. It is old, the fabric of the cover fraying in one corner, revealing the brown board beneath.

  ‘Hold it still,’ I say. ‘I can’t read the title.’

  When the gold lettering comes into focus, I read: ‘Anglistica & Americana. What is that?’

  He opens to the title page: Letters of Mrs Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton, 1855–1865.

  ‘I was just browsing in a market stall earlier, and there it was,’ he says, ‘just waiting for me to find it. Have you read them before, the letters?’

  ‘I’ve read some of hers to him,’ I say, ‘but not his to her.’

  Max puts the book down out of sight, and smiles. ‘You’ll like them. I read them this afternoon,’ he says, and then, still smiling, but more quietly, ‘I didn’t realize they would be love letters. You didn’t tell me they were in love.’

  2013

  Basic Accounting for Ph.D. Students

  How to explain desire? In particular, how to explain desire in Mrs Gaskell, a person I have always imagined, unquestioningly, as somehow asexual? She seems, in my vision of her, mumsy, reassuring. After discovering her in her letters, I returned to the novels with new devotion: I have spent rainy days in cafes reading Cranford, nights curled up at home with the BBC adaptation of North and South playing on my laptop. She is cosy and comforting. And yet, as I read her letters, it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that she did desire things, people. She desired Charles Eliot Norton.

  Mrs Gaskell. There is something determinedly unsexy about that ‘Mrs’: proper, old-fashioned. I have always hated it on principle. We don’t insist on Mr Dickens, Mr Thackeray, Mr Trollope. And yet I can’t help but use it, when I talk about her. When I consider her as an author, only, rather than a person, she is simply ‘Gaskell’; in my academic writing she sometimes becomes ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’, if I need to distinguish her from other Gaskells in the same paragraph: William, Meta, Marianne. And to those other Gaskells, I learn from reading more of her correspondence, she was not in fact ‘Elizabeth’, but ‘Lily’.Still, it is ‘Mrs Gaskell’ I come back to, in general usage; out of habit, I suppose, and fondness: a desire to keep her soothing presence close.

  It seems sacrilegious, at very least disrespectful, to imagine her as she must have been: a sexual being, desirous as we all are of other people, of other people’s bodies.

  The Rare Books and Music Reading Room at the British Library is an L-shaped space, with the exit at one end and the Issue and Returns desk around the corner. The floor is taken up with blocks of desks, each with its own lamp and place mat that details the rules: no food, no water, no pens, no coats, no Post-it notes. At the very top of the high ceiling there are windows that let in the slightest suggestion of natural light. It is a place of very few distractions; it would take severe effort just to tell if the weather outside had changed.

  I am sitting at the back, where I sit almost every day, holding a copy of a Mrs Gaskell book called A Dark Night’s Work. In it, a young woman, after becoming entangled in a somewhat melodramatic murder plot in England, goes on holiday to Rome. There, from a balcony overlooking the Corso during the carnival, she sees the young man who will go on to become her husband. The book is so old that the glue on its spine disintegrates into dust when I turn the pages. But I am not really turning the pages. In this hushed, well-lit space of contemplation, absent of external distractions, I find myself constantly distracted. For every ten minutes I spend reading and re-reading the balcony scene in A Dark Night’s Work, or researching the role of Rome as a triangulating point of encounter in transatlantic literary dialogues, I spend twenty thinking about Max. I am doing better with work after our conversation in the Louvre, but still, if I have a monomania, as Joyce described, it is clear that it is not about my research.

  The Max o
bsession is nothing new, of course, but its focus has changed. Whereas once my thoughts rotated around an axis of self-pity and wounded ego, they are now sexual, and, frustratingly, logistical. Even thinking about his name makes my stomach squirm and my mind turn at once to the apartment on the Rue d’Aboukir, to the low bed in the room that looks over the courtyard, to Max’s hands and mouth and body. Then I begin, frantically, to plan how to get back to Paris. And then I return, over and over, to the same theme: seeing Max costs money, and it costs time. The train is expensive. Term has not yet ended, and I should be glued to my seat in the reading room. Paris is supposed to be a luxury, a holiday, and whereas once a trip would be planned for months and anticipated and researched, now my instinct is to dash to St Pancras at a moment’s notice. It is only nine minutes’ walk from where I sit in Rare Books to the Eurostar ticket office – a fact I think about approximately three times an hour.

  Since my first visit, I have been back twice. Max has come to London, too, and met Holly and Izra and Louise, but the room I am renting in Haggerston is barely big enough to contain a full-size bed, let alone two adults and their belongings, and I’m aware that Max is older than me, and a little past the house-sharing, laundry-everywhere, washing-up-left-in-the-sink phase of life. My housemates are too present and too observant for it not to be embarrassing when Max and I emerge from my room in the middle of the afternoon, hair awry, faces red, both a little sweaty.

  And besides, Haggerston is fine, but it’s not Paris. It’s not the second arrondissement, where we drink espressos in the morning at a cafe called Père et Fils, and from where we walk to the Seine every night to watch the lights of the bridges drop into the water. London feels quotidian and dull. The drizzly, crowded, subdued texture of it, which I missed so much when I was living in Boston, is suddenly drab.

  I am reading about Rome – I dream I am in America, but it always looks like Rome – and in between fantasies of Max, and financial calculations, I am getting to know the members of the group of British and American artists who lived there in the middle of the nineteenth century, the ones Mrs Gaskell met and loved. They worked together, side by side: American sculptor Harriet Hosmer next door to British sculptor John Gibson; British poet Robert Browning learning to model clay in the studio of American William Wetmore Story; Emelyn Story at a dinner party telling ghost stories Mrs Gaskell had originally written to her, and which then found their way into Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels. Every Friday night, Story held an open house where the expatriate artists and writers gathered to talk and eat and collaborate. Their buzzing conversation, Henry James wrote, filled the rooms with a golden glow like electric light. They had ideas. They discussed them. They made art. They wrote. Harriet Hosmer once invited the Brownings to her studio to take a cast of their hands, clasped together, and it gives me a sense of panicked yearning to imagine it: how wonderful it must have been to be surrounded by like-minded friends, and somehow also to be so productive.

  After my meltdown about my Ph.D., Max and I instigated formal writing hours while we were together, during which we would work, he on his fiction and I my thesis, and we would not touch each other at all, not even a little bit. We spent a tense afternoon at the table in Shu’s apartment. I made half-hearted notes on an article about Mazzini and the unification of Italy while Max frowned at his laptop and occasionally tapped the keys. And then I crossed my legs, and as I did so my foot just happened to brush against his knee, and without looking up he sank a little lower in his chair so that my calf slid along his thigh, and then it was all over and we left the table, pulling clumsily at each other’s clothes and panting, as though we hadn’t been together in weeks.

  The next day we filled out applications to use the library at the Institut de France: fiercely formal, all dark wood and golden chandeliers. But there we were assigned desks next to each other and it took only an hour or so before our knees were touching as we wrote, and though I kept typing, I was so aroused and distracted by the closeness of Max, by the very idea of him, that the next time I opened my laptop I realized the page I’d been working on was a mess of half-thought-through observations on American interpretations of Risorgimento politics in art, and increasingly desperate notes to Max: Expatriate view of Italian politics … a polite distance and/or through an artistic lens … Shall we go soon? … the idea of Rome, both ancient and modern – a stimulus for questions re. collaboration/independence … autonomy? … Let’s go! I can’t concentrate! … nineteenth-century debate re. national identity in Italy and US relates to expatriate identity … the metaphor of the city state … I want you … Let’s just give up and go home … etc.

  Now, in my notebook, interspersed between notes on my reading, I am jotting down numbers, and lists of pros and cons: the amount I am paid, monthly, in a stipend from King’s versus the cost of train tickets to Paris; the value of staying in London and getting on with my research versus the hedonistic glee of seeing Max again. Sometimes the conclusion seems clear: I should travel less, spend less, see Max less, work more. But on other days I am awash with desire and then, somehow, nothing adds up after all.

  I attend a lecture on Victorian attitudes to marriage. It takes place in a cramped, book-lined room at Birkbeck College, where the audience is arranged in rows of folding chairs that creak at the slightest fidget, and the speaker is leaning on a lectern that tilts to the left. His papers keep sliding off and he catches them each time, then delivers the rest of the lecture with one hand firmly pinning them down.

  He covers religion, child-rearing, private and public spheres and the notion of the perfect wife. And then, in passing, he says, ‘The Victorians, generally speaking, had less sex than people in the eighteenth, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.’ I had been listening only partially until that moment – my mind drifting, persistently and repeatedly, to the Rue d’Aboukir where Max would be, at that moment, hard at work on his writing – but this suggestion cuts through my fantasies.

  I am intrigued and oddly upset by the idea, and when the time comes to ask questions, I raise my hand.

  ‘I’m interested in your assertion that the Victorians had less sex,’ I say, and there are a few uneasy titters from some undergraduates behind me. ‘How do you know that? How can we tell that?’

  The speaker is patient, and a little amused, and gives a long, unsatisfactory answer. I listen and nod and know it would be thoroughly awkward to press the point any further, but can’t help but feel … what? Unconvinced? Disappointed?

  Why do I care, I wonder, as I stomp the now-familiar path between Russell Square and the British Library. It’s a weird thing to care about. For all that the lecturer said about birth rates and prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases, it seems so much more likely, doesn’t it, that we simply struggle to imagine these people, whose novels tended to avoid discussing sex directly, and whose names we have known since we were children, getting naked together and doing we-all-know-what just as exuberantly and filthily and weirdly as every other generation?

  Here is how I am attempting to balance my life. I dissect Max’s body, and for its sake, I set myself tasks, as though it could be as simple, as neat, as a transaction. Perhaps I won’t feel so uneasy, so greedy and distracted, if I can use my desire to exercise some self-control in other areas of my life.

  For Max’s tousled black hair, I will write five hundred words on the costs of living for expatriate artists in Rome. For the crease in his upper lip, I’ll send an update on my progress to Joyce. For his shoulders, I’ll read an exceedingly dry article on subjectivity, biography and the portrayal of William Wetmore Story and his friends in Henry James’ William Wetmore Story and His Friends. For his back, I’ll walk home through driving rain, rather than replace the umbrella I left beside my table in the graduate student lounge, and which was gone by the time I went back for it.

  This is all well and romantic and good until the crushing boredom of reading yet another argument about the influence of Robert Browning’s dr
amatic monologues on William Wetmore Story’s statues makes me truly question the value of, say, Max’s chin, or his waist, or his knees.

  Because Mrs Gaskell never wrote about her desire directly, I have to search for it in places it might not be. I read between the lines, and when I see nothing there, I crowbar them further apart and look again.

  Take this, for example, which she wrote to Norton in 1861, four years after they both left Italy, four years before she died:

  Oh! Don’t you long to go back to Rome. Meta and I were so talking about you, and Rome and America yesterday, the Pamphile Doria gardens especially and about your face as we first saw it, – and this morning comes your letter.

  I can read these sentences and write, the swirling syntax here indicates a geography of memory that circles around Norton: contained in the intimacy of the initial ‘you’ is the global sweep of ‘Rome and America’, the relative specificity of the gardens, and in sharper focus still, the body of Norton – ‘your face as we first saw it’. Finally, the attention turns to the immediate physical object of the letter: a tangible connection between Norton’s body and Gaskell’s own, and which thus itself becomes a fetishized object of desire.

  I cannot say: [Mrs] [Elizabeth / Lily?] Gaskell’s reaction to Charles Eliot Norton’s physicality was likewise physical. She was attracted to him. His face ‘as she first saw it’ was an object of desire that made her cry out in the street, and the memory of which, years later, made her heart thud and her cheeks flush. She wanted to touch him. She ached for him, the way I ache for Max when I am away from him in London, when I am hurtling towards him on the expensive train, when I am sitting beside him, knee against his, in the library of the Institut de France.

  Other people’s desires, I suppose, are always hard to comprehend. I have watched friends in the past fall in love and lust with people who seemed formidably undesirable. Former passions of my own – for men and women who once struck me as sexually irresistible – seem overblown and embarrassing with hindsight. Desire is private and incomprehensible, confined to specific bodies in specific times. Across centuries and filtered through letters and novels, it is immaterial and ahistorical, suggested, only hinted at. And yet, as I read and re-read Mrs Gaskell’s writing to and about Norton, I can’t help thinking it is palpable for all that.