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Chapter One

Does every life deserve an autobiography? Does mine? I belong to an endangered species which in the eyes of many deserves to be extinct: the gently born, the monied, the sheltered, many of us squeamish about the things that make up the substance of life, its dark truth composed of everything we deny or refuse to think about. If we are lucky, as I have been, we have made friends of the witnesses of life, and have been humbled by them. I, who have never suffered from want, have known only the exigence of my own character, which has demanded that I rebel against my respectable and conservative family genes, though one scarcely knows for what reasons one branches off from the path that seems ordained by one’s inheritance. I carried the baggage of that inheritance for a long time, though I gradually made decisions that made it imperative to get rid of it—decisions not to marry, to be an artist, to listen to my own voices. It was easy for me not to marry, for I was never seriously tempted; to be an artist was harder, for how could I know how much painful ground there was to cover between the wish and the becoming? I remember after World War II, when I had decided once and for all to become a painter, a friend of mine looked at some of my paintings and said, “Don’t you want to marry and have babies?” I said that my paintings were my babies, a reply which made him look extremely dubious. “Babies are more important than pictures,” he said. But, protected as I was by a beginner’s blindness, a beginner’s ignorance, I stubbornly continued to think that paintings were more important. What had taken place in me was a coalescing of this stubbornness and a kind of pride like vanity, but stronger than humiliation, united with the conviction that there was something there in my depths. (I thought I had depths.) The fact that this something was invisible to others was a goad which, again and again, produced the defiant thought, “I’ll show you!” It required years of false starts, of failures, of periods of doubt and despair, for me to show anyone anything, or even to understand that one is not necessarily an artist by wanting to be one. In the course of those years, it was my good fortune, gradually, to acquire friends whose lives were wholly dedicated to their work as painters or writers or poets. They were, or are, the “witnesses of life,” in a sense that I had never been. I had to learn, even if it was chiefly through these friends, that an artist must above all see, not a sterilized fragment of life, but its ugly paradoxes and “terrible beauty.” I had to learn to get over some of my squeamishness about sex, for part of my inheritance was a belief in the life of the mind and the Christian soul at the expense of the life of the body. In my family, the body was unmentionable and sex was a secret subject, taboo, along with its vocabulary, including innocent words that might suggest it. Much great art has come from the sublimation of sex; I think not only of women writers like the Brontës or Emily Dickinson, whose passion was distilled in their art, but also of men such as Hopkins or George Herbert. Two of my friends, Hortense Flexner and Marianne Moore, were poets who belonged to this race. In my case, my upbringing prevented me from accepting my sexual nature by making me ashamed of it, doubly ashamed, because I belong to a despised sexual minority. The two chief tasks of my life have been to become an artist and to overcome my shame, and, at the age of sixty-one, I am only just beginning to feel that I have accomplished them.

We are formed, I suppose, by everybody we meet, out of resistance or emulation, but our choice of friends often seems to come from the pressure of whatever in us wants to grow, or refuses to grow. My meetings with Barbara Deming and Marie-Claire Blais came about because I recognized in their work a beauty which I wished for in my own work, but felt I hadn’t attained, because they were beings somewhat like myself, but further advanced on their paths as artists. I was introduced to Marie-Claire by Edmund Wilson, but my meeting with him was pure chance (though I believe that chance is destined), which grew from a parent chance—that I had bought a house in Wellfleet and lived there with Barbara. Edmund’s first paralyzing question to me had been, “Are you related to the Meigs of the Hill School?” a question I was unable to answer, except to mumble that all Meigses are, willy-nilly, related, there being so few of us. Later, he had become our friend and reigned over our winter life in Wellfleet, in which good friends were scarce and life so austere that many Wellfleetians took to drink or escaped in other ways. I have found a birthday sonnet (imitation Wordsworth) that I wrote from Pamet Point Road (where Barbara and I lived) on May 8, 1966, which gives an idea of our humourous and humble relation to Edmund:

EDMUND! Thank heaven thou livest at this hour!

Pamet hath need of thee; she is a fen

Of turbid waters: paintbrush, pencil, fren-

Etically struggle to preserve our dower

Of peace of mind and hope beyond our ken.

Oh! Cheer us up and read Verlaine again

To us, who tremble in our ivory tower.

Your soul is like the Sun and dwells on high,

You have a voice whose sound is like the ocean.

When in a happy mood, you set in motion

Our satellite thoughts that orbit all you say.

O indefatigable planet, I

Bring myriad wishes on your natal day.

My friendship with Edmund created in me a mixture of fear, shyness, humility, anger, uneasy love, pride, and a terrible anxiety that, through my unworthiness, I would lose his friendship. Our friendship was complicated (for me, at least) by the fact that, for several years, he believed himself to be in love with me. I was, in fact, one of a good many women he loved during this time, but I was close at hand, whereas they (except for Elena, his wife) were far away. I did not want Edmund to be in love with me; I could not believe he really was, yet I was afraid he would cease to be, knowing the indifference that follows on the heels of love. “We belong to the same generation,” he used to say, though he was old enough to be my father. He meant that we both belonged to the time of “ladies” and “gentlemen”; that we both had authentic good manners and impressive pedigrees. He had all the courtliness and gallantry of an old-fashioned gentleman, but at the same time, he belonged to the world of brutal maleness, of the Minotaur, that still frightens me; the world that accepts sex and its violence as a matter of course. How could he know not only that I was profoundly ignorant of this world, but also that I had yet to come to terms with myself, that the question, which seemed inexcusable to me when he asked it, was probably for him quite ordinary? “You’re really a sort of Lesbian, aren’t you?” He said this to me one evening when we were alone and I was in the state of slight apprehension I always felt with him. It was the first time in my life that anyone had associated the word “Lesbian” with me in my presence and the question made me feel faint and sick with terror. It was there, faceless, like the “Thing” that swelled and hummed in the dark when I was a child in bed at night, a black something, an extension of me that got bigger and bigger until it filled the whole room. I heard my stifled voice say, “I wouldn’t say that,” felt myself leave the house to go home where I spent a tormented and sleepless night. The next morning, Edmund called to apologize for having upset me, for mixed in with his blindness was a surprising delicacy, which made him, when I least expected it, protective of my feelings.

A “sort of.” Perhaps all women artists are “sort of’s”? The mitigating “sort of,” lightly touching, without accusation, with an indulgent smile, all those women who wore pants before the time of pants, who inspired passions in other women, who, very often (fortunately for their biographers), had male lovers and husbands. They were bisexual, a respectable thing to be these days. Käthe Kollwitz, for instance, say her biographers, Mina and Arthur Klein, “though for her attraction for the masculine sex dominated . . . had found an inclination toward her own sex which she grew to understand only in her maturity. She came then to believe that such bisexuality is essential for the highest attainments in art. The masculine element within her, she felt, strengthened her own creative work.” Facts like these about women artists, long hidden or glossed over, are now acceptable elements of their biographies, though in the eyes of the world, it is permissible for a woman to have “an inclination toward her own sex,” only if she has married and produced at least one child. The marriage, the child, are the payment she must make to convention in order to have the freedom to love women. Kathe Kollwitz had the good fortune to be able to love her husband and children, to be an admirable mother and a toweringly great artist, and to love women without the pain and dislocation of her life that other androgynous women have suffered.

When Edmund asked if I wasn’t really a “sort of Lesbian,” I still lived in the shadowy world of denial and pretense, even though I was then living with another woman. How would I have felt if he had said, “You’re really androgynous, aren’t you?” Would I have been as terrified? Even then, the word “androgynous” did not carry a weight of opprobrium like the word “Lesbian”; on the other hand, “androgynous” which, unlike “hermaphrodite,” seems to imply a spiritual and mental, rather than physical blending of the sexes, had not yet acquired its current dignity. “Androgyny,” as the word is now used, has nothing to do with sex; it implies, rather, a new being, free of sexual stereotypes, a person who may be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. But a “sort of Lesbian,” the “sort of” added for the sake of politeness, was something else again. No one had ever dared say to me what I was and I had not dared say it to myself with the proper conviction. Under pressure from a heterosexual friend, I had (before I knew Edmund) a week-long affair with a man in Italy, pleasant enough, but ending in recrimination on both sides. From the time I was very young, I fell in love with men, women, heads, eyes and voices. I even fell in love, as I still do, with objects. I remember at six, being so enamoured of a jack-in-the-box for sale in a booth in the Tuileries that I howled all day long when my mother refused to buy it for me, and I believe the passion for things to be one of the many forms that sexual repression can take.

At the age of eleven, I had never heard of sex, did not know that people made love, and had never wondered where babies came from. On a voyage to Europe at this time, I wrote a poem about the sea beating against “Miss Porthole,” which I found thirty years later and showed Edmund, who kept it for himself. “A sexual image,” I could almost hear him thinking as he laughed delightedly over it, but couldn’t Miss Porthole really have been a porthole, and the sea, the sea? For anyone who has read Freud, everything in nature contains a sexual overtone, and a little girl who has never seen a vagina, who does not know the meaning of the word “virgin,” somehow achieves a prophetic use of sexual imagery. The fact was that for a long time my loves were purely visual and belonged to a realm where sex is non-existent. Perhaps they caused my childish heart to beat, but the physical reality, the coming close of any body with its everyday details, was invariably a shock to me. Objects and animals remained the same or were even more seductive if you looked closely at them, but men turned into the sum of their details: their huge feet, the hair that often covered their arms, legs, chests, or even sprouted from their ears, emphasizing their close cousinship with the apes, their mouths, their chins, like rough sandpaper, the friction of which, in those days of dancing cheek to cheek, left one’s face sore for days. My fallings in love were a succession of failures, much more pronounced with men, but bedeviling even my relationships with women, as if a disgust of bodies had been planted in me like a curse. My interest in male bodies was purely plastic: I liked to look at men or boys who were clad in their skins like beautiful animals, with a rippling of hidden muscles when they moved, or when they posed negligently, with one hip bone thrown a little outward, with their hands on their hips, thumbs turned backwards, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped like 6th Century Greek Kouroi, or like the walking Egyptian figures I have seen in the Louvre. Women, too, appear in those distant times to have had broad shoulders and narrow hips, or so one would infer from a 7th Century B.C. stone statue of an Egyptian woman in the Louvre, or from Hera of Samos (6th Century B.C.), herself the shape of a Kouros in her exquisite fine-fluted robe. These androgynous women seemed much more beautiful to me than the curvaceous and overly-modest Venus de Milo or the women with massive thighs and buttocks beloved by Rubens and Courbet. If I have never succeeded in liking Rubens, it is because of the sheer weight of all that well-fed female flesh—pink with what must have been the excellent circulation of the time. As for Courbet, whom I revere, the pallid and bloated bodies of his women suggest, not robust health, but the imminence of death—or perhaps a very cold studio.

My father and brothers did not take the unselfconscious poses of Greek statues, but had, nevertheless, much of their fineness of bone: beautiful wrists, ankles, feet and hands. Each was unhappy in his body, like an awkward adolescent, and hid it under clothes or droopy bathing suits (men had not yet begun to bare their torsos when I was little). The three men in our house had none of the redolence of men, the heaviness, the suggestion of sensuality. They had all been indoctrinated, like the female inhabitants of the house, with the idea that the body should, as far as possible, cease to exist. We were still encumbered by our bodies, which were like forbidden subjects, literally hidden by clothes and denied their physicality.

Later, I was both unconscious of my body and self-conscious, and my self-consciousness prevented me from putting the pagan energy into love-making that most people take for granted. My brief experience with a man gave me pleasure because I was scarcely aware of our bodies in the dark, just of a cool harmony with its terminal delight. Perhaps the reader will find it hard to believe that it is possible for a woman to make love with a man without ever setting eyes on his body, but such was my case. I remember how one afternoon Patricio and I walked to a lonely field on the heights of Anticoli (the little Italian village where we spent the summer) and how he sank down on me in the warm, dry grass with all the discretion of the swan over Leda. I must have kept my eyes closed, for only the agreeable sensation of his love-making remains in my memory. There was no single visual detail.

The time of my growing-up was long before the sexual revolution and it was not as peculiar as it would be now to maintain a Victorian distance between oneself and a man. For reasons which still puzzle me, there was an endless succession of men when I was in my twenties, who fell in love with me and who proposed marriage, which I invariably refused. Perhaps it was simply a response to my overwhelming properness, but none of these suitors ever proposed any living arrangement except marriage. A convenient psychological mechanism made every proposal a signal to fall out of love (for sometimes I believed that I was in love) or not to fall in love, a mechanism which still operated when I was in my forties and Edmund told me from time to time that he was in love with me. My reaction was my usual one of withdrawal and wariness, coupled with the certainty that it couldn’t possibly be true, or, if it were true today, it wouldn’t be tomorrow. And when Edmund said to me, “I don’t know why I’m in love with you,” I said, or rather shouted, since he was getting deaf, “I can’t imagine!” It was just as I’d thought: there was no reason; it had nothing to do with me. I longed to think, but did not say so, that I was like those other women he had loved, remarkable in one way or another, but he never gave me the comfort of comparing me with them. Some of them were “sort of’s,” too, it was said. Did he love me not for myself, but because I didn’t seem to care whether he loved me or not? How had the others been with him, not his wives, but the others he’d loved? Did they seem to care? Did he kiss them, striking his solid pose like a knotty-muscled acrobat about to swing someone up on his head? Did he make love to them? Did he appreciate my balancing act, walking the precarious wire between resistance and receptivity? Part of my “sort of” ethic was to conceal my fear—of bodies, of kisses, of passion—to protect our egos (his, the male’s; and mine, the sort of’s), to try, simultaneously, not to be prudish and not to be encouraging. His definition of me had stiffened my pride. But he, with his strange intuition, seemed to know exactly how far he could go without my fleeing. He would kiss me (I see him now, bearing down, striking the pose) without undue insistence, stand there heavily, or help me on with my coat. Even in his ancestral house, with my friend Barbara in the next room, after drunkenly prowling the corridor, he tottered into my room in his dressing gown and seated himself on my bed—even there, something gentlemanly in him (or was it the thin walls?) yielded to my refusal, stated calmly, loudly, to make him hear, though I was quaking inside. Instead, we went downstairs and talked about marriage. “What would you be like to be married to?” he asked, and I said, “I’d make a terrible wife.” How could I explain that I couldn’t be a wife to anyone, that I had never been tempted to sacrifice myself to anyone—to a man or a woman either. “I’m like Isabel Archer before she married Osmond,” I said. “What? Oh, Isabel Archer. You’re not like Isabel Archer,” he said grumpily. Wanting to shout, “Can’t you see that I have a sense of my own survival, that I don’t want to be a slave?” I said, “It’s because I’m too selfish,” for in every man’s mind is the conviction that nothing could possibly be more important to a woman than he is, than his love is. An odd kind of etiquette prevented me from reminding him of Elena, his wife, who had given herself to serving him in a graceful and beautiful way, who believed this to be the duty of a wife; it would have been to acknowledge that she was threatened by something real, when in fact, the “why” of his being in love with me and my absence of response, prevented it from being real. But perhaps he was playing with me, seeing how far a “sort of” would go, testing the depth of my vanity—or my gratitude? Edmund liked to set traps and play psychological games, but perhaps he was too genuinely humble to play this one. It seemed to me that he didn’t even notice the effect he had on people—the tremors of excitement, the paralyzed timidity, the coquettishness, the discreet competition for his favour. Seismic waves ran round the living room when he said to the “Chosen One,” “Come into my study, I want to talk to you.” Hypnotized, she (it was almost always a woman) would rise from her chair and follow him, striking a little silence among the rest of us. She would emerge from his study twenty minutes later, flushed and proud. “What did he say?” I would ask it it was Barbara who was thus honoured. “Oh, we just talked about the non-payment of taxes,” she would say. More wonderful than being called into his study was to be with him alone in a restaurant or at the theatre, to be part of the obeisance done to him, to shine like a full moon in the sun’s light! It was then that I understood why women choose to be satellites, to reflect light rather than risk generating their own, in short, to be wives. How warm and comfortable I felt with Edmund; how nice everybody was to me! And how chilly it was to go back to my unprotected life as a non-wife, a “sort of,” perpetually on the defensive.

“She is someone in her own right,” I’ve heard it said admiringly of a wife who is more than just a satellite, as if a husband can legitimately ask his wife to be someone in his right. Isabel Archer. I loved her because she was born, evidently, with a sense of her own right (so were Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Shirley, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett and Emma, and Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe). Henry James treated with perfect rectitude Isabel’s determination to be herself, and allowed her to recognize all the marriage-traps: the suffocating prison of life with an English lord; the trap of Caspar Goodwood’s passion—until the last, for poor Isabel, with her premonition of what women’s liberation is all about, was punished by the man with whom she felt most free. James’ genius lies in not seeming to have intervened. Still, he lets us know where he stands. Other women who go too far in the direction of liberation are mocked at, like old Miss Birdseye, a genuine feminist, or, like Olive Chancellor, pinned on a board, a perfect specimen of a repressed Lesbian. In real life, Henry James was shocked by Virginia Woolf (he would have been more shocked had he read Quentin Bell’s biography) and all her untidy friends, a lot of them “buggers”, as Bell puts it. Was James a snob? A persnickety old maid? Outwardly perhaps, but with an inward sensibility that was refined and refined, tortured by little dissonances, by noise, messiness, engaged with enormous cunning in the task of trying to hide the disorder in his inner self, lucky to die before the hounds ran his secret to earth. And Isabel? Does any man like Isabel? While I was thinking about Isabel, I got a letter from an old friend, the painter, Leonid, who had been reading The Portrait of a Lady. He was furious with Isabel for the same reasons that all men are furious with her. “De repousser un lord authentique, humain, anglais, pour s’amouracher de ce fake italien,” and so on, to “sa vie aboutit à un mess.” Leonid, who was no more like Lord Warburton than, say, Pissarro was, identified himself with Warburton and felt refused by Isabel, just as Edmund (I could swear) identified himself with Caspar, of the famous kiss like white lightning, who was also refused by Isabel, somewhat more ambiguously. And another painter friend (homosexual) ranted against Isabel, accused her of being a selfish monster, and turned all the virtues that I saw in her into vices. Some women are even angry with Isabel for refusing Lord Warsburton (for some reason, no one remembers or cares about her refusal of her cousin Ralph, the only one with whom she might have been happy, but James has arranged for Ralph to have a fatal sickness), or with any heroine who refuses the hero—and not many do. I myself was vaguely irritated by Lily in Trollope’s The Small House at Allingham, who adamantly turns down the likable Johnny, for even those of us who are happily unmarried have been conditioned to think of marriage as the only happy ending to a novel. But Isabel Archer is a real threat to the male ego, and for a woman to defend her, stirs up the little flame of jealousy at the bottom of every man’s heart. Strange, because she is punished terribly, and what she sought was not real freedom, but a relative freedom within marriage. She would settle for this illusory freedom, just as they all did, the fighting women, the real ones and their fictional alter egos, except for Jane Austen. One would like to know, did any man ever propose marriage to her, and if he did, why did she refuse him? As for Charlotte Brontë, the fieriest of them all, finally she was submissive to her Arthur. She loved him, she said, but didn’t she give up writing for his sake; couldn’t she be said to have died for his sake? My heart bleeds for Charlotte, who, in Jane Eyre, had so perfectly described the ideal relationship with a man. One thinks of Jane and St. John, how she was dominated by him, petrified by his certainties, and how, after seeing him as he really was, after refusing to live his life, she suddenly discovered her own. “I was with an equal,” she says, “one with whom I might argue—one whom . . . I might resist.” And of her life with Rochester, she says, “In his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine.” One wants to take these phrases from Jane Eyre and broadcast them all over the world. “I know no medium between absolute submission and determined revolt,” says the amazing Jane. But Charlotte, knowing this, chose submission. She married Arthur because she pitied him, emaciated and pale for love of her, and one feels that Arthur, after their marriage, putting on weight, becoming pink-cheeked and healthy, is feeding on the body and blood and will of Charlotte.

But to get back to Isabel, whose crime was to marry for her own sake—she who loved the company of beautiful forms, was had by appearances and by the art of the con man. If I feel less close to her than to Lily Briscoe, the painter in To the Lighthouse, one of the reasons is that her resignation at the end of The Portrait of a Lady is too much for me to stomach. “She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.” Too straight! Back to Florence; in other words, back to hell. It is useless to hope that she will divorce Osmond; useless for Caspar to wait for her. She, the perfect lady, is going to stew in her own feelings of guilt. Oh Isabel, you had less courage than Ibsen’s Nora, who, at the end, is where you began! I feel the twinge of disappointment I’ve felt so often in my life at the spectacle of this resignation, planted, it seems, deep in every woman’s heart.

The wife of a great man. Finally, she is less in his light than in his shadow. Great men—with nothing to prevent them from soaring as high as they can, all those qualities of greatness (the selfishness, the iron will, the discipline that sets hours and refuses to be disturbed) coddled and encouraged and excused by the women around them, for every great man needs his slaves, even if one of them, his wife, is a great woman. She, with the same qualities perhaps, running into the stone wall of Him. Or perhaps, she is an almost artist, like Caitlin Thomas, who, eclipsed, went half-crazy in the effort to salvage her soul. Edmund, who gave me John Stuart Mill to read, put me down in my enthusiasm (his put-downs were part of his male arsenal) for, whatever his respect for individual women, he knew from experience that women can’t be liberated. “They are the way they are, born that way, or they want to be that way,” he would say impatiently. I had to agree that many women are, one might say, typically feminine, and proud of it, that they are superficial, irrational, catty, that they are all the things they are accused of being. But that they are born that way? Rather, don’t they realize, very quickly, perhaps at birth, where their power lies, the perverted power that is allowed them? Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point, which Edmund was incapable of getting, because no one had ever effectively challenged his power, was his right to command, to shout orders to his wife, his children, like a master sergeant in the Marines. (At an early age, I challenged this right in my older brother. “Why?” I asked him, when he told me to do something. “Because I say so,” he said, slapping me hard on the behind.) Where did this power come from, except from his own male assumption of it? Why was it that when he telephoned and said peremptorily, “Come over here around five, will you?” we trotted over like obedient dogs? To be sure, we grumbled; maybe we’d been in the middle of something, or ventured to give him some excuse for not coming. “Well, come if you can,” he would say angrily and he would hang up. We went, torn between our doggy devotion to Edmund and our ferocious sense of ourselves as beings who couldn’t, shouldn’t, be ordered around. And, as usual, we fell under the spell of Edmund, triumphant, doing his card tricks, playing Authors, anagrams, Chinese checkers, bouts rimés. We would tiptoe into the bright house and shout above the deafening music that poured from the depths of his study and he would appear, his face pink and freshly-shaved, to greet us.

Thinking about Edmund’s presence in my life, I make a distinction between the innocent prodigality of daytime and the nighttime Edmund who woke my anxieties. I described the daytime Edmund and his ancestral landscape in a letter to Anne Poor after our visit to him in July, 1964. “Upstate New York is . . . quite surprisingly like central Maine, with great elms, pastures, rolling hills and infinite green stretches under skies that generate thunderheads from nowhere, so there’s a marvellous play of light à la Greco’s ‘Toledo.’ One has more of a sense than in Maine of being on a frontier, even of something melancholy and sinister, but it’s probably because so many houses are actually falling down, and if they aren’t, they tend to be covered with hideous asbestos shingles or they consist of trailers that have been immobilized on cement blocks. There are very few really old houses and the towns are awful beyond words. Edmund’s house is BEAUTIFUL, very sparsely and simply furnished and freezing cold. I shivered so hard that he finally lit a fire in the dining room fireplace and we sat as close to it as we could. It was obvious that it was the first fire of the season, and that E. isn’t bothered by the cold. We spent almost all of the six days sightseeing—seeing natural wonders, ancestral mansions, Lake Ontario, Utica, Cooperstown. When there were a few minutes to spare, Bobbie [Barbara] and I would rush off to the underground river and the wonderful quarry, like Angkor Wat, but more ruined, or to some pasture where there were lovely cows (always Holsteins) and we’d run around to get warm . . . Then we’d sightsee and Edmund would talk more or less continuously about the past, and, in the evenings, he would play records or read to us or even sing songs of the twenties. In six days, we met only one set of neighbours, so you can imagine that our powers of attention were stretched to the breaking point and we’re still feeling rather limp.”

The daytime Edmund was a marvellous companion, with his enthusiasm for everything under the sun, and my only fear was that the awful words he sometimes applied to others—“He or she is a bore”—might be applied to me if my responses were stupid or ignorant. But as I look over the letters, postcards and valentines from him that accumulated during my years in Wellfleet, I realize better now than when I first read them, that I needn’t have worried, and I am moved by the courtly sweetness that permeates them, as if he needed the protective medium of the written word to express his most delicate feelings. He had a habit of sending small coloured engravings of fish with messages on them. I look at one of a pale blue fish resting dejectedly on an exotic shore. “I have missed you since you left—feel more and more like the picture on the other side,” says Edmund. And a little poem accompanies the Dolphin of the Ancients:

The Dolphin is extremely wise,

Turns rainbow colors when he dies;

But when the Dolphin thinks of you,

He turns a special lovely hue.

We shared a love for natural history and one of his presents to me was an Audubon engraving of an ocelot from the big folio edition. The munificence of this gift, and another of star-nosed moles, worried me, and I have a soothing letter from him, in which he says, “I didn’t want to keep the ocelot. I was pleased to be able to give you something you liked. I think you need it to counterbalance the mole. I am sure you have an ocelot in your nature, too.” Another of his psychological tests? For I had chosen, unconsciously, the opposites I harbour in me, timid and ferocious. Edmund’s character, too, contained its opposites: on the one hand, the Minotaur; on the other hand, an animal as graceful, shy and tender as the Unicorn, who rests one hoof in the lap of the Lady, in the Cluny tapestry. His intuitions never failed to surprise me, for his spoken judgements were monolithic and unchangeable, and, in a sense, we only really communicated in letters, which gave him time, instead of immediately overpowering me, of listening to what I had to say. In my meetings with him, I was constantly frustrated by my inability to express myself, yet I come upon forgotten letters which show that, after all, he took me seriously. “I was very much interested in your ideas about Edwin Drood,” he wrote in 1962. I cannot now remember what my ideas about Edwin Drood were, only that Edmund’s enthusiasm for the book had kindled one in me and that I had read it with a sleuth’s intensity, determined to solve its riddles. In the space of this one letter, which gives an idea of how he attempted to form my mind, he suggests that I read: “a long paper written on the probability that Dutchery is Bazzard,” that, if I want to go seriously into Edwin Drood, I will “have to get Robertson NicolPs book,” and that I should “probably read Love’s Cross Currents” by Swinburne, about whom he was writing then. He sometimes accused me of not reading anything he suggested, but I read as much as I could, and my anxiety to please him made me read with particular attention. Perhaps only in the forgotten matter of Edwin Drood was I able to persuade him that I was right about anything. I wanted to convert him to my view of The Turn of the Screw (of which more later) and to bring up the as yet unaired subject of Henry James’ homosexuality. He asserted on several occasions that Proust was not homosexual (“Proust wasn’t anything,” he said) and my heart would begin to beat with fear at the thought of discussing with him my theory about James.

I blurted out my theory after Edmund had written me one of his fish cards, in which he said, “I saw Leon Edel in New York and he has worked out the rest of Henry James’ life in a way which I don’t doubt is correct, but he has pledged me not to talk about it.” It seemed to me that this could only refer to what I have already called James’ secret (i.e., his homosexual leanings), but in the fourth volume of his biography of James, Leon Edel produces both a young man to whom James wrote passionate letters and a woman friend who troubled him greatly by committing suicide. “I know what Leon Edel is going to say about Henry James,” I said. “That he was homosexual.” I was driving Edmund back to his house after he had had dinner with Barbara and me and there was such a long silence after the word “homosexual” that I thought he had not heard me. Then he said that James had suffered some kind of injury that prevented him from having a sexual life.

As long as it is thought disgraceful for a great man or woman to have been or to be homosexual, heterosexuals will use every means possible to deny it. Families destroy or conceal evidence or lock it away so that it is inaccessible; genders are changed in poems that have been written to someone of the same sex; biographers search for evidence that the great man loved a woman, or that the great woman loved a man. They consider it improper and shameless, an invasion of privacy, for homosexuals to keep insisting that so-and-so is one of their own, though it is not at all improper, for instance, to make public that Emily Dickinson sat on the lap of an eminent judge. Indeed, this piece of news is received with sentimental joy by all who care about Dickinson’s reputation and are worried about her “excessive” feelings for certain women. When I knew Edmund, I hadn’t thought much about this species of adamant denial which makes discussion impossible and conjecture indecent. But what if the intent of the biographer is an attempt to conceal something crucial to the understanding of a great man or woman, what if the view of him or her, as was the case of Walt Whitman, has been totally false? Is Virginia Woolf any less great a writer because it is now known that she fell in love with women?

Edmund was one of a host of people who accept homosexuals as friends, but for whom homosexuality is in contravention of some immutable law, people who, for the most part, have had a Christian upbringing. He loved Barbara and Marie-Claire and me, but he shared the community view that Lesbians are faintly ridiculous, that pairs of us are, in Gertrude Stein’s words, “like two left-handed gloves.” Because of our fear of men, we have settled, they think, for a half-life with its imperfect satisfactions. This view, which we cannot help but feel as a burden, made me uneasy in Wellfleet; it was always there—the unspoken mockery that attached itself to conventional problems, such as how to seat us at a dinner table or whether or not to invite us with heterosexual couples.

I will speak later of the period when Marie-Claire joined my life and my relation with Edmund became much more complicated and uneasy. Nevertheless, at the end of his life, he was still wistfully writing, “I miss you.” I did not dare, during all those years, to accept his friendship with the joy it should have given me, but clung to it with secret pride and suffered torments when he was cold, angry or seemingly indifferent. When he died, I was living in France, but I felt his absence with a sense of desolation. He had enlarged my life with his myriad enthusiasms, with his programs for the improvement of my mind, with his brutal truths; it was enlarged even by my resistance to him and by the anxiety I felt.

This is a Valentine note for Mary,

Of whom I am fond, and even very.

I sometimes dream we are sitting astride

A bicycle, taking a bicycle ride.

Edmund sent me this in 1960, one of a series of valentines we all exchanged to lighten the winter cafard in Wellfleet. He and I dreamt about each other now and then (I dreamt after his death that he was seated at a round table wearing the mask of Queen Victoria), and sometimes, we even dreamt the same dream. It was about going into a house full of old things, going from room to room, seeing depressing changes. And then, the house was threatened—by a super-highway or by sinister people surrounding it, or by crumbling walls. It was our past, that house, what we cherished of the past—stolen, mutilated or decaying.

We belonged to the same generation, he had said. We shared the ability to be moved to tears or to feel a rush of joyful emotion in the presence of something beautiful. Edmund read Yeats to us (when he had begun to walk slowly, groaning, up the hill to our house), his voice becoming unsteady at, “Till the wreck of the body,” and breaking at, “A bird’s sleepy cry,” unable to finish. Edmund was moved to tears by Yeats, who, bare as bleached bone at the end of his life, still used nature for his grandest image. “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.” These flies walk on water as blithely as Jesus, or a mind moving on insubstantial silence, where many minds drown; Edmund’s mind must have moved easily upon silence.