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Chapter Two

Edmund and I belonged to the same generation in the sense that I was brought up as a child of his generation and not of my own. My parents, in turn, belonged to a generation before their own, though my mother was born the same year as Virginia Woolf and my father the same year as her sister, Vanessa. If I place a photograph of my father at twenty next to the photographs of Vanessa and Thoby Stephen in Quentin Bell’s biography, I see an extraordinary resemblance. My father might have been another Stephen brother, with his fine brow and clear blue eyes under curving, heavy eyelids, gazing at the camera with the guileless look people had at the turn of the century, like angels come down from heaven, the men dressed in high, stiff collars; the women, in angelic white, their dresses frilly at the neck. Not a single person in my family has inherited my father’s eyes—of a blue so blue that one was struck dumb with amazement; eyes that could blaze or sparkle blueness, or emit the tranquil blue of a high summer day. Some of us have my father’s eyebrows, or eyes, deep-set and heavy-lidded, but his bright blue eyes have been bleached or mixed with grey or green, have been reduced in me, at least (who am said to look like him), to several sizes smaller and to a less clear blue. Resemblances—the little things that emerge in children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews: an oblique look, the shadowy hollow between eyebrows, the flat cheekbones of the father wedded to the Roman nose of the mother, the elements of parents jumbled like anagrams to form the “word” of each of us. Hester, my twin sister was given the beautiful upper half of my father’s head and the mouth of my mother’s family; I was given a head like a cobblestone, his reduced eyes, set between a high forehead, and a wide square jaw like his, but out of all proportion to the top. One of the sorrows of my childhood was that I had not inherited my father’s eyes, and I used to concentrate my whole being on willing my little eyes to be like his, hoping that someone would notice the resemblance. “She looks like her father.” Once, in a sailboat, a grown-up said this to another grown-up at precisely the moment when I’d been gazing at the water, willing my eyes a dazzling blue. I was in love with my father’s eyes. I see them now, a few weeks before he died of tuberculosis, at the moment of one of my great failures—my refusal to love enough. We were in the library of our big old house and my father was wearing rumpled pyjamas under a cream-coloured Chinese silk dressing gown. Stooped, emaciated, but with his eternally young face, high-coloured cheekbones and enormous eyes, an unbelievable blue, sparkling with happiness because, at last, we had been able to talk to each other—about Emerson, one of his gods. I had given my students The American Scholar to read and had written an ironic poem about the laws of compensation:

Wisdom goes in humble guise;

He is ugly who is wise.

Some are wise, the rest are dumb—

Beautiful residuum!

My father liked my poem and we laughed together. For the first time, we both felt that we were comrades, that this conversation was unlike those innumerable others we had had in which he had tried to instruct me, or I had tried to irritate him, or he had felt that I didn’t understand him—and I hadn’t tried to understand him. For most of my childhood, I had been in that hateful state of being where one does not get out of oneself enough to feel the presence and reality of another person. When I was leaving the library, he held out his arms to me, and instead of embracing him, I blew him a kiss. That was the last time I saw him alive, except in dreams. I still dream about him and see his eyes; sometimes he is younger, not sick; sometimes he takes the form of a blue-eyed child, tiny and wise. I gaze at this child in silent admiration. He is myself perhaps, as I wanted to be—a small replica of my father.

Later, having learned nothing, it seemed, from this failure with my father, I was irritated by the question, “Do you love me?” “Love me!” “Help me!” To me, it was the same idea in different words: the sudden weight of the other on oneself, a trap (the obligation to love) and the wary reaction; something grim inside that says, “Did you love me? Did you help me when I needed it?” A different “you” who, long ago, had withheld love. “I give when I feel like giving,” says a stingy little voice inside me. It is fatal when a giver in his own time is wedded to a person who needs, who insists on love; the needer makes the needed even stingier.

“Yes, yes, it’s a matter of temperament, from the day of one’s birth, one has chosen to refuse or accept.” My parents were like the couple in lonesco’s Jeux de Massacre: the wife has chosen acceptance and love; the husband, refusal and anguish. But is it a choice? Rather, is it not something in each person that succumbs or not under the weight of evidence? It is as if each one of us were a jury member for a huge trial with the evidence spread out: one chooses to believe that the good outweighs the bad, that the human race is worthy of survival, or vice versa. My parents, except for their Puritan heritage, began quite gaily. They adored each other, and in photographs taken of them after their marriage, they looked wonderfully joyful. Yet I remember my mother telling me that she cried from homesickness all through their honeymoon. How did it happen, the slow sinking of my father into depression (“a nervous breakdown,” they said), his yielding to it, dying of it (which came first, the depression or the tuberculosis?) while he was still quite young? “It was his mother’s fault,” said my mother. His father, a doctor, had died young, too, of a ruptured appendix; and his mother, a tiny person with a high-bridged nose and my father’s eyes, several shades paler and frostier, ruled her three sons, each twice as tall as she was. She would write my father at medical school: “Be sure to leave cards at the Eliots’. Be sure to call on your Aunt Emma.” She was still interfering, fussing, bossing him around when she was eighty and my father was fifty. “Your grandmother is a remarkable woman,” everybody said. Could it have been this little woman, so dogmatic and sure of herself, who ruined my father’s life? She kept lists of “Things to Do.” She travelled with at least fifteen watches and clocks, wore her yellow-white hair piled high, a velvet ribbon round her neck, and her skirt down to the ground. She reigned over her house in the country; over her Irish cook and maids, her Scottish chauffeur, her Italian gardener and her butler, Percy; over her garden full of peonies, roses, giant oriental poppies, larkspur, box hedges; the vegetable garden beyond; the cows with wildflowers’ names (Buttercup, Primrose, Four O’Clock), the geese, ducks, sheep, donkeys; and her little dog, Balfour. And she reigned over my uncle, her irascible unmarried son, an architect, who, after her death, tore down the Poicile, the imitation Greek temple in the garden (but left the Sunset Tower and the Burning Pit), and turned the Garden Room into a pool room; de-Victorianized the entire house with silvery carpets and a suppression of all but the most elegant furniture.

My grandmother was snobbish, arrogant and prejudiced, but packed in with these qualities, there was something whimsical and artistic. She painted exact watercolours of rocks and flowers. And the house she lived in was an extension of her best self. My sister and I felt happy there the moment we began the walk upstairs on the red-flowered carpets with polished brass rods to our room on the third floor which had straw matting on the floor, brass beds, and a window on a level with the tops of the tulip poplars outside, where the robins sang in a great chorus every morning at dawn, and from which you could look down into the open poplar flowers and see raindrops shining. And I felt happy with the ceremony of meals there: the smell of the little gas flame under the egg-boiler; the pepper enclosed in a silver pug dog; and Percy, the butler, with his white face, lank black hair and sardonic mouth, who stood close to my grandmother’s chair. We had hominy for breakfast. There was laughter because I thought Harmony, an erstwhile dog of my grandmother’s, whom I’d seen in a photograph, was named Hominy. Laughter, because I thought the multiplication tables were real tables. My uncle, ever-superior, mystified the four children with: “Irks care the cropfull bird? / Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?” No amount of explanation could ever make this clear to me.

I remember the joy of that house, yet there was something missing at its heart. My grandmother and my uncle were two identical contentious souls who never really tried to understand another soul, who imposed themselves on other people and then judged the person that resulted. “Why don’t you talk?” my grandmother would ask my sister and me, striking terror and silence into us, making it impossible to talk, and then she would tease us for our shyness. We were called “The White Rabbits.” My grandmother even bullied my mother, just after her marriage, made her feel, because she was born in a little town where her father ran the iron works, that she belonged to a lower social order, made her cry—and cry by herself. (I have inherited the bully in her, the nagger, but at least I hear myself doing it.) My mother was always amazed by the high-pitched arguments between Mater, as she called my grandmother, and Mater’s sons, which became louder and louder at the dinner table. After Mater died, the arguments continued, between my father and my uncle, violent argument being as necessary to certain members of the family, it seems, as food and drink.

Pater, who had been dead for a long time, looked down on us from the wall of the dining room. A “distinguished physician” in a long, unbroken line of them, says the Dictionary of American Biography, as Edmund pointed out to me. Pater looked kind and intelligent. Mater told a joke about him: that he had been introduced to her as a person who was timid and silent. It turned out that he wasn’t at all timid and talked all the time. Mater telling this story, which for some reason always made everybody laugh, seemed not to realize that she herself was as loquacious as a guinea hen. Talking, in fact, is something that has always run in every branch of my family. “We’re not fighting, we’re discussing,” my uncle used to say, but I see now that in these so-called discussions every member of the family thought he was right, except for my mother, who was preternaturally humble and only thought herself right about questions of morality. About these, she was as inflexible as the Rock of Gibraltar. Sometimes they were all “right” about the same things (they agreed); sometimes the sense of Tightness lay like a huge weight in a scale and dragged the scale down, while the little weight of the counter-argument flew upwards.

The case for the family was composed of pride, self-importance, duties, responsibilities—an inflated sense of what we were as a family, for we selected our most distinguished ancestors to be descended from: the one who had signed the Constitution, for instance; and felt less enthusiastic about the ancestor who made hats in Guilford, Connecticut. The family case was argued by Mater and my uncle against my father, a renegade, who had left the ancestral city of Philadelphia to work for the government in Washington, for something in him obviously had longed to be free of the crushing burden of family. “He was losing his roots,” my uncle said, and his children would be rootless. In every discussion of “roots,” I took the position that I preferred to be rootless, which made my uncle furious. But lurking in me was a silly little pride; I suffered when my mother said that someone was “not quite” or when my aunt said that Grace Kelly came “from the other side of the tracks” (the royal ascent of Grace Kelly had not the slightest effect on this judgement), but refused, for the most hypocritical reasons, to invite my college roommate to our “coming out” party. “She wouldn’t like it,” I told my mother. My roommate was different from me in unimportant ways, in the kind of shoes she wore and in her ankle socks. I judged people by these little differences and preened myself on the niceness of my taste. I was snobbish in a worse way than my mother, who had an intuitive sense of the real worth of someone and was more offended by vulgarity than by superficial details.

Looking at this notion of family, I try to decide what there was in it of positive good. My father’s side was prosperous and tidy, with Roman virtues: scrupulously honest, disciplined, rational, law-abiding; my mother’s side was full of people who embarrassed me by their eccentricities. (I was embarrassed then by anything unconventional.) They were prosperous too, but messy, with a little Irish and Welsh fantasy thrown in, much less rational, but just as rigorously Puritan. On both sides of the immediate family, not a single person was divorced, not one husband was unfaithful to his wife, or vice versa. There were no homosexuals, though my mother once murmured something about “your Uncle Len,” something I interpreted much later as “that.” Unlike his brothers, Uncle Len had not been in the Union Army in the Civil War. Could “that” really have been the reason? On my father’s side, in the coal-mining part of the family, people drank, caroused and were divorced. My parents did not drink and were probably among the few people in the United States during Prohibition who refused to have even a bottle of homemade wine in their house.

These “virtues” have been transmitted to us, the four children: we only tell white lies in the name of politeness; we scarcely drink and do not smoke; three of us are faithful spouses who had no premarital sex and frown on divorce. In short, we are real “ladies” and “gentlemen.” The reader will say that there are things about my siblings that I don’t know (little infidelities, etc.), just as there are things about me that they don’t know. We never discuss our lives with each other; in this sense, we are total strangers. Once, driving somewhere with me, my older brother looked at my bare knees while I drove. “Couldn’t you pull your skirt down a little?” he said. “Isn’t it a little immodest?” I answered by fiercely pulling the offending skirt higher and decided that no secret of mine would be safe in his keeping. Of the four children, my older brother was certainly the most tormented by sex, and perhaps he had almost yielded to its temptations. But if he had yielded, would he have been so disturbed by the sight of my sunburned knees? We were all haunted by the Puritan ideal of chastity, that living skeleton tapping on our shoulders or actually gnawing at our flesh, like Death with the Maiden. Sometimes I wonder if some of my hormones, so resolutely channelled in non-sexual directions, weren’t actually destroyed when I was a child, atrophied so that only a small percentage remained? After all, if a person has no experience of sex until she is twenty-five years old; if even, at that age, she has to be shown the “seat of pleasure,” as they say, and patiently taught that it is pleasurable; if, throughout her life, sex continues to have relatively little importance, something must have been killed. A sexual lobotomy, you might say. A psychoanalyst might be interested to know that it can be done without too much damage to the psyche, though it is much more likely to produce an obsessive counter-reaction.

If our family curse is Puritanism, the family virtue is “niceness.” We are all nice, even unto the nieces, nephews and grandchildren; whatever violence is in us is masked by good manners, a guileless good will and willingness to help our fellow man. We are gullible, easily taken in by people who pretend to be honest, endlessly taken in by promises; we cannot believe that some people lie as easily as they breathe. We (the generations of my siblings, parents and grandparents) denied and denied (who among us didn’t have a sneaking sympathy for St. Peter and the rich young man who cannot give up his whole fortune to follow Jesus?), but never lied; withheld, but never stole. We committed the sin of stinginess of spirit. Was it my grandparents’ and parents’ fault if the prevailing Puritanism made their fists clench, their eyebrows knit and their faces darken with disapproval, made the words shoot out of their mouths like serpents’ tongues? Was it their fault if their inherited prejudices against Jews, Roman Catholics and black people made them commit crimes against their own niceness? My brothers are free from racial and religious prejudice, but are saddened, let us say, by divorce, homosexuality, promiscuity, atheism, etc. Perhaps some of my nieces and nephews are prejudice-free, if such a thing is possible. It is obvious that prejudice diminishes as freedom expands, and that beliefs in general are like vaccines that either take or do not. Religion, which is the source of some of my brothers’ prejudices, took for them, but not for me. I become irritated and aggressive when the subject is raised. As for my twin sister, she has overcome our parents’ most blatant prejudices, but still believes, like my brothers, in fidelity, family and duty to the community, in all the articles of faith injected into our veins by our parents with excellent results, except in my case.

And yet, I have articles of faith—or non-faith. If I didn’t, why would I hear myself arguing in a high-pitched voice (just like other arguers in my family) about everything under the sun? Why, if a calm discussion of religion gets under way, does the adrenalin begin seeping into my veins until I actually begin to twitch and sputter? Why this rage? Am I that angry with my parents? Is it sexual frustration? I’ve noticed, though, that inexplicable rage lurks in many, perhaps in all human beings, ready to burst out at the most surprising times; in people who are not in the least sexually frustrated or angry with their parents. It is the infant in each of us, pure ego that cannot endure opposition of any kind. How do you explain otherwise the looks of black hate, the shakings of fists, even by strangers, drivers of automobiles who have been kept waiting for a few seconds, or the murderous fury of friends defending anything one has happened to attack? I still remember with astonishment an acquaintance turning on me when I made a slighting remark about Hemingway, the idea being that an insignificant piece of shit like me didn’t have the right to talk thus about a great writer. And I am the same, ferocious as a wolf when a friend speaks of Rodin’s “rubbery surfaces” and “big feet.” “I couldn’t see anything except those big feet,” a good sculptor friend of mine said. “I’m up to here in waterlilies,” he said about Monet. Why did I feel sick with despair? Do I feel that I’m wrong to love Monet if a good sculptor is “up to here in waterlilies?” It must be that. And just as we feel guilty about loving, so we feel guilty about not loving, or about the not-loving of others. “I’d give all of Matisse for one Clyfford Still,” said another friend about fifteen years ago, a double blow, pro and con, since I hadn’t learned to like Clyfford Still and worshipped Matisse.

Thinking of these threats to the ego, I recall a conversation in the early 1950’s with Mark Rothko about Rembrandt, another of my gods. Rothko, who once loved Rembrandt’s portraits, now preferred those of Tintoretto. Rembrandt, he said, imposed on his sitters something that did not necessarily belong to them, a deepness, as though he were saying, “Look how profound I am.” Tintoretto told the truth about human beings without trespassing on their integrity, and this was the duty of a great portrait painter. This conversation made me unhappy for days. I tried to free myself from it by resisting Rothko’s greatness as a painter, as I resisted the greatness of everything I could not understand. I underestimated his painting, seeing it as merely “serene.” “I want it to be like the minuet in Don Giovanni,” Rothko said, pointing out that the serenity I saw was the calm before the storm. Now I understand what he meant—that, in his work, the radiance of the minuet and the tragedy about to break are held in trembling suspension, one over the other or within the other. And his feeling about Rembrandt? Having just seen a big Rothko retrospective, I feel that, particularly in his late work, he is permeated by the spirit of Rembrandt, and that the great formal squares, as dark as death, are, in a sense, self-portraits, abstractions of Rothko’s inner torment. The catalogue speaks of “the Rembrandtesque obscurity of the upper portion” of the brown and grey paintings; and of Rothko’s reverence for Rembrandt. Was he, as so many men do with women, disagreeing with me for the sake of disagreement? Or did he really believe that Rembrandt was too present in his portraits? Wasn’t his own work a long struggle to withdraw himself, his personality and feelings, to reduce his statement to form and colour; wouldn’t he have been angry if I had said to him that the late paintings were self-portraits? For I think that the most resolute minimalist is there in his work, that Barnett Newman, for instance, or Ad Reinhardt, who went beyond Rothko in removing sensibility as an element of painting, are as present as Rothko; that even if one reproduces photographs of soup cans, those cans of soup proclaim not Campbell, but Warhol. The painter or sculptor enters into fluorescent lights, chunks of wood, electrical gadgets, steel girders, by the fact of his having given them new instructions and a new order.

Rothko was one of many good painters I have known, who, without intending to, had the power to summon up the vulnerable infant in me by reminding me of my nonentity as an artist. Even his kindness made me miserable. He liked a little still life I had done of green pears on a red chair, the paint laid on with a certain freedom which must have appealed to his merciful eye. But the fact that he liked them, instead of pleasing me, revealed their weaknesses, and I wanted to plunge a knife into them and punish their insignificance. In those days, when I was struggling with insufficient means, with no theory or sense of direction to be a painter, I was destroyed by the simple contact with “real” painters: Rothko, Milton Avery, Wallace Putnam, Karl Knaths—all those who were already masters. In me there was a poisonous brew of humility and resentment; and the total inability, because they were so far beyond me, to learn from them—the inability to see what they saw, how they saw, to take even a first step; the infantile frustration spent on rage at the hapless pears on a chair, which seemed like a crystallization of my impotent self.

Sometimes we can come to terms with the infant in ourselves, but we cannot kill it. Aroused, this infant behaves in fascinating ways, awful and uncontrollable. He or she shouts, weeps and raves like a lunatic. There is a lunatic in every one of us, ready to be triggered off by “something,” the threat of threats. Lovers breaking up are in a state of derangement, on the edge of madness. I have been that way, possessed by unreason. We are threatened by superior beings, threatened by the fear of being abandoned. The latter can drive human beings and animals mad. Communism. Homosexuality. I know a remarkable woman, accomplished and intelligent, who writes reports, heads commissions, practices psychotherapy, and her madness resides in that part of her that is homosexual, that unadmitted part. To admit it would send her over the edge. Contemptuously, she speaks of women as lesbians and men as faggots; unmarried, she talks of the joys of married life and of heterosexual love. And coward that I am, I never allude to the incident in her life when she was in love with another woman, for this is the trigger and I am afraid to pull it. I begin to tremble at the very thought, just as I tremble at the thought of discussing myself with anybody, afraid to kill or be killed. Isn’t the threat, finally, death to an essential image of ourselves, to the way we hold our egos together?

I have always had difficulty holding my ego together, for it was battered both by my infinitely slow progress as a painter and by society’s generalized threat to homosexuals, which could turn me to craven jelly even while I remained in hiding. Homosexuals live more than others in the shadow of threat. We have committed a crime that has been condemned for thousands of years. Our answer has been to deny it. We lead double lives; we are hated (if recognized) and then judged for hating ourselves. We are judged for reacting bitterly to the unbearable weight of guilt that has been put on us. The most beautiful and loving experiences of our lives have to be kept secret; and the lies we live make us wary and cold. “Cold heart, what do you know about love?” my mother once said to me. At the time she spoke, I was twenty-five and having my first sexual experience with a woman. But it was not my first love.

Three years before, I was in love with a woman and it made me quake with fear and happiness, such flooding happiness that that time of first being in love with a woman still seems like the happiest time of my life. I was twenty-two years old and knew only enough about homosexuality to be afraid of the subject. Long before that, at a debutante party (for we dutifully went through the conventional paces), a young man questioned me, “Have you ever been in love? Do you want to get married?” I said that I hadn’t thought about it, but no, I didn’t particularly want to get married. He kissed me suddenly. I saw his lips coming closer and pulled away. “Don’t you feel anything?” he asked. I said I didn’t, not wanting to say that I hated the feeling of this strange mouth pressed against my own. He looked curiously at me and said, “Maybe you’re . . .” and stopped. “Maybe I’m what?” “Nothing,” he said. I remember this exchange about thirty years later when what he meant came to me with a blinding flash. A “sort of” or a real Lesbian? Had I deliberately hidden myself from myself? How did it happen that I remained so long in a state of total innocence about sex, that I didn’t try any of the experiments with my body that other children try? My sister and I were caught one day by our governess lying on the bed with our feet in the air, trying to study ourselves. After her scolding, I never looked at myself again and never wanted to. How well it worked, repression by shame and disgust! The exchange of sexual information that normally goes on between brothers and sisters in a family was taboo in ours and harmless experiments became crimes. With the following exception, our brothers and we never saw each other nude. It was summer; my sister and I were eleven and our brother was sixteen. Our rooms adjoined one another and one night he stole into our room to give us a lesson in comparative anatomy. This ended disastrously, for in the purity of our mean little hearts, we informed. “Why couldn’t you have told me that you minded?” said our brother, who had been annihilated by our mother’s wrath. Now, almost fifty years later, I know that this brother has been devoured by guilt ever since, martyred like Prometheus, though he did nothing shameful, and that my sister and I are partly responsible. As for me and the fact that I “minded” so much—did it mean that the “sort of” was already latent in me? Or was it our upbringing that made me continue to be squeamish about men’s bodies to this very day, to skirt gracefully around the word “penis,” and yet to harbour in me a certain interest in this unruly organ that all men carry about with them?

When my short-term Argentine lover, in the stormy days of our breaking-up, accused me of suffering from “penis envy,” I flew into a rage, longing to think of an equivalent accusation for him. “You have penis envy yourself,” I said, wishing to attack his manhood, for he was sensitive in a general way on this point (he did not know how to drive and it humiliated him to be so capably driven by me). But he smiled sardonically. For Freud, penis envy was inherent in every woman, like original sin; for most people now, it is a useful term to throw at women who aspire to self-determination. Or perhaps it is because they are Lesbians? For, if your attitude toward the penis is at all irreverent, if you refuse to think of it as the rising sun, the risen Lord, the creation, or whatever, you are immediately suspect. Hasn’t Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover a sixth sense for spotting the “Lesbian woman” (i.e., one who pits her sexual will against his)? “When I get with a Lesbian woman, whether she knows she’s one or not I see red,” he says to Connie. Well, Mellors has suffered from women’s wills and refusals and frigidity, which (in Lawrence’s eyes) adds up to Lesbianism, and since I have a sneaking affection for Mellors, I forgive him. But I don’t forgive Lawrence, who might have made an effort to understand Lesbians as profoundly as he understood everybody else. But being an almost “sort of” himself, he was uptight about threats to his manhood. So was my Argentine friend. I understand now why he said during a furious argument we had about Lawrence, in which each tried to claim him as a friend, “Lawrence would have hated you.” Yes, I think now, having just read Lady Chatterley’s Lover after all these years, Lawrence would have perceived the Lesbian in me, the resistance to his maleness—and would have “seen red.” At the time of our argument, the sentence, “Lawrence would have hated you,” seemed to be groundless, calculated to arouse my fury. Now I think—would he have? Couldn’t we perhaps have been friends if there had been no question of our being lovers?

But to return to my sexless childhood, to my grown-up relations, and to the two houses where we spent our vacations. I see now that my choice of Mater’s house, The Peak, rather than of Belfield, my maternal grandmother’s house, was less an early exercise of taste than an instinct for what made me happy. Belfield had thick stone walls, narrow, almost perpendicular staircases, small rooms full of beautiful old furniture, a basement that smelled of mould, turned butter and souring cream. Everything about Belfield should have made us happy, yet we were less happy than at The Peak. The garden at Belfield was fragrant with lilac and peonies, and you could descend stone steps past a rock garden and take a path that led to the spring, a pool covered with a lacy green plant which heaved and trembled with the perpetual bubbling below. It terrified me to think that if you fell into the spring you could never get out. There were other things to fear at Belfield: a bad tempered cow that chased us and giant Muscovy ducks with their faces entirely covered by red wattles, standing in the mud of the chicken yard, their eyes like brass buttons. But worse than that, there was something almost abstract there, a sense of menace: the huge grey building, a Catholic seminary, that was built on the land beyond the back gate.

My mother’s prejudice against Roman Catholics was shared by her sister, Sarah, who fought tooth and nail to keep the land from being acquired and the seminary from being built. Aunt Sarah was acknowledged by everybody to be a great woman. By sheer force of character and intelligence, she became president of a medical school for women, though she had had no medical training, and was given several honourary degrees. She was a feminist at a time when it was hard work to be one. When we were young, she wished even to liberate my sister and me from our subject state. “Do you remember when Aunt Sarah said to mother, ‘Suppress, suppress,’ meaning that mother suppressed us?” my sister asked me not long ago. Aunt Sarah was celebrated for her wit and told long comical stories in which, I began to notice at an early age, she was always the heroine. One was about George Bernard Shaw, who, on a Far Eastern cruise ship, had spotted Aunt Sarah as an interesting woman and had let word drop that he wanted to meet her. Aunt Sarah sent the message that her knees turned to wood if a gentleman wouldn’t make the effort to come to see her. And so, in the story, Shaw came to see her. But what I wanted to know was, what did they talk about? Did they match wits? Did they become friends? The point of the anecdote was Aunt Sarah’s triumph over male chauvinism, but this seemed to me much less important than her actual meeting with Shaw and I was almost ashamed of her for having put principle before the privilege of meeting a great writer.

But all the happy times were at The Peak, where the sun seemed to shine almost all the time. On rainy days, we would play in a back sitting-room with a fire burning and Balfour (a coincidence that this pugnacious little dog had the same name as our governess) for company; and Percy would bring milk toast for supper on a tray. We were glad to be segregated from the grown-ups, except for the ever-vigilant Miss Balfour, their precept in this case being that children should be neither seen nor heard. In the morning, we had delightful little tasks, for Grandmother employed us to pick rosebugs off the bushes at the walled end of the garden. I can still feel their dry claws on my hand as they clambered out of the can of kerosene and over the edge; I feel the squashiness of their beige-grey backs between my fingers when I pried them loose and forced them back into the can. And I smell the mingled smells of the rosebugs, the kerosene and the roses warmed by the sun with their hundreds of fragrant petals lying on the hot dry earth. Each of us had a little manila envelope tied with a different coloured ribbon, and into this envelope our wages were put, one penny for each five rosebugs. I remember sometimes earning as much as thirty-five cents, paid very solemnly by Grandmother in her morning-room, which was bright with polished silver and blue and white chintz.

There is something of The Peak in every house I have ever chosen for myself, even though there have been no servants, no elaborately served meals, even though the furniture is relatively shabby and the gardens like poor relations. Perhaps it is the perfume of box, lilac, roses and peonies that gets into the pores of every house and is exhaled, or the surrounding peace that I choose by imperious necessity. Now and then, the dreams I have about houses translate my love for The Peak into the image of a kind of terrestrial heaven. I remember one dream in which I found myself in a house, Georgian perhaps, with big square rooms, painted white, and flooded with sunlight that came through French windows. Outside, there was an orchard and the apple trees in it were covered with fruit, like big glowing rubies. My happy dreams have always been visions of sunlit rooms, radiant landscapes and birds.

I wonder now why I felt so depressed always in Mater’s city house in Philadelphia, wonder to what extent it formed my tastes and anti-tastes, wonder why some children in the same family absorb and copy the lives of their parents and grandparents and others reject them and determine to do the opposite. Mater’s city house was a splendid example of high Victorian rococo, with oriental rugs laid over flowered carpets and every flat surface covered with objects: gilt French clocks, cloisonné vases, Dresden figurines, ornate brass candelabra. On a small round table in the downstairs library, covered with a pale satin embroidered Chinese tablecloth (I have photographs and a magnifying glass), there are seven highly polished silver objects and a tall bronze and marble lamp, a wingèd maiden standing on a pedestal and holding a polished marble sphere, half hidden by an embroidered linen shade. Among the silver objects, I recognize with a little rush of joy my plump bird with moveable wings and a head that turns, this bird which I take out of his soft brown bag on great occasions and, with a feeling of ostentation, place on the dinner table. Here and elsewhere, there are objects that found their way by inheritance into our house in Washington: a bronze Buddha on a high bookcase, and next to him, incongruously, a terra cotta mastiff with his nose almost touching the box turtle at his feet. His sharply arched back is turned to the Buddha and behind them is an engraving of one of Raphael’s lunettes at the Vatican. On the small wall area between one bookcase and the next, there are ten engravings, miniatures, watercolours and a mirror. The etching of a cathedral interior, the Holbein reproduction, the watercolour of a bluejay, the bronze on the bookcase of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus (her dangling breasts fascinated me when I was little)—all these moved to my family’s house after Mater’s death.

One might think that, gazing at the concentration of things (one can’t call it a clutter because it has its own highly ordered and intricate and unchangeable composition), I would feel a sense of acute indigestion. On the contrary, having inherited a measure of my grandmother’s acquisitiveness, I rove around this elegant antique shop and dwell with real sorrow on the objects I would like to have, that I never noticed until I saw them under the magnifying glass, objects dispersed, sold, gone forever: a bronze bird, its head turned sideways and up; a white china cat with bright brooding eyes; four musical cherubs perched above the open doorway of the solarium; pillows, huge ones, covered with velvet and satin and needlepoint. This leaves the ninety-eight percent that I do not want, the things that were lovingly bought for a lot of money by Mater, clustered together, polished and dusted with a feather duster by generations of Irish maids. And forgotten? Did she look at them? In the hodgepodge of pictures covering the walls were there some that she studied and loved? Did she ever think, where am I going to put these three Majolica cherubs holding bowls aloft? But there was always a place for everything, and in this case, she put them on top of a high cabinet in the dining room, itself filled with crystal beakers and bowls and compote dishes, all sparkling like diamonds. She was like me, I suppose, but her capacity for acquiring things was infinitely multiplied, untinged by the smallest feeling of guilt and shaped by the ideal image of an elegant house. Was my grandmother competing with other rich Philadelphia families? I study the photographs and look for my grandmother’s soul, for her real loves and attentions, but I see her soul fragmented; see it most concentrated in the plants that crowd the sunny west window of the dining room. I remember the smell of the sweet olive, a smell that mitigated my city depression; I remember that my grandmother’s bathroom was full of plants, and that, at eighty-four, she was found dead there in the bathtub, having fallen peacefully asleep.

The plants spoke of love, whereas the thousands of objects in the house spoke in a loud stage whisper of money. It was not a really welcoming house. There were sofas and chairs covered with velvet on which one decidedly did not fling oneself, but sat precisely. (“Twins, stop fidgeting,” Mater often said to my sister and me, but it was not our fault; the chairs were fidget-provoking.) At Christmas, there was only one room in which the joys of subdued romping were allowed, supervised, of course, by Miss Balfour. This was a back study hung with family portraits and miniatures, plus a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Corot landscape, a Rowlandson coach and four in a storm, and a farm scene, highly idealized, in which a donkey gazes at a large pot of milk, a youth stands embracing the head of a cow, and the children and mother are in an unlikely state of cleanliness. Here, we were given a box of toys and allowed to spread them out on the floor and play with them. Carefully, without making too much noise.

One more detail that will perhaps throw light on my grandparents’ character. In the dining room, there was a fireplace that was never used for fires, with a carved oak mantle above, the oak inlaid with marble. Particularly striking about this fireplace were the words carved in Gothic letters just under the mantlepiece: “Foster the Guest that comes,” it is written, “Further him that maun gang.” Between each word is a little rosette; the “gang” turns the corner and is at a right angle to the “maun.” This sentence was incomprehensible to me and had to be explained, for a “maun gang” was mixed up in my head with a chain gang. I was prone to confuse words with two meanings, as I had confused the multiplication tables, or to take metaphors literally, as when our governess told me I was “skating on thin ice.” Knowing now what the words mean, I try to apply them to my grandmother and her sense of hospitality. She certainly “furthered (perhaps as a family we still do) him that maun gang”; in those days, people were less likely to overstay their welcome, constrained by a sense of fitness and the suggestive silences that hastened their departure. “Foster the guest that comes.” Were we fostered? I remember that Grandmother spent a lot of time trying to draw us out and failed; we were miserably shy and she made shyer. Why? What did she do wrong? What did so many of my relations, including both my parents, do wrong? In this house, there were rules of properness: proper conversation, proper behaviour. Children must be silent when grown-ups talked, mustn’t fidget, must cover their mouths when they yawn, must sit up straight at the table with their hands out of sight, mustn’t giggle (this was our one safety valve, but was frowned upon). Later, it occurred to me that I was skating on thin ice when I got too near the frontier of properness. I had been “fresh,” which meant to want in respect for all things sacred, to answer back. Levity had to be of the right kind. What did Grandmother want to draw out of us? Our opinions? If I had any, they vanished in the drawing-out process. I was backward in many ways, but sensitive to houses that did or didn’t “foster” me. Our grandmother fostered my older brother and planted in him family pride and love for his inherited family treasures. His house looks like a simplified version of Grandmother’s, with silver displayed on his sideboard and a formal drawing-room that inspires proper thoughts. When I was twenty, I turned against everything Victorian, despised all our family furniture and fell in love with colour, throwing it around in a tasteless and unsubtle way, wearing a green coat, a plaid skirt, a brown hat, a navy-blue sweater. The sensuous use of colour was absent in the houses of my relations, for colour meant a letting-go. My father was angry when I tried to tell him what I saw in Van Gogh. I can almost remember when I began to see colours, having, like my whole family, been blind to them till then. Is it credible that I did not notice the colours of the buildings in Rome? Yet, at seventeen, I hadn’t noticed them; indeed, it seems to me that there was almost nothing I did notice. I try to make the connection between “fostering” and a sense of colour, but can think of too many drab but welcoming houses. In Grandmother’s house, there was above all an absence of carelessness and spontaneity, of sofas sat in and books open, waiting to be read. To my friend, Marie-Claire Blais, all that counts in a person is coeur; intelligence, culture, etc. are nothing if you lack coeur. My little grandmother, packed with energies and enthusiasm, with her knowledge of English and Italian gardens, with the knowledge that selected each object in her house, did she have coeur, the kind that “fosters him that comes,” really fosters? I would like to think she did, and yet, in my arrogant way, I feel I would have responded, that she would have wakened my sleeping coeur (on which, even wakened, I can’t always rely). But it was other much humbler people I loved, in the tentative way I loved then, and I remember having the power to distinguish between a real love for children and the humbug kind, which I detested without knowing why. My grandmother imagined that to will affection was enough, though I doubt if she spent much time analyzing her attitudes; much more, perhaps, in analyzing our non-responsiveness.

I was mortally afraid of grown-ups, feeling obscurely that they abused their power, but I remember a cousin, one of the eccentrics in my mother’s family, who was like a grown-up child, a stout little woman with an oversized head like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. Her name was Cousin Elsie Keith. Once, when chickenpox prevented me from going to North Carolina for our Easter vacation, and I lay in bed in a state of profound self-pity, Cousin Elsie appeared and gave me a necklace, which I have still, composed of red beads, each of which has a smiling face on either side. Somehow Cousin Elsie had known that I would like this grown-up present better than anything else she could give me; the grotesque little smiling faces made me absurdly happy and I remember a glad feeling of love rushing into my heart when Cousin Elsie put the necklace round my neck.

Cousin Elsie came to see me in our house in Washington, which our parents had bought when we (the twins) were nine years old. It was a five-storey, semi-detached, red brick house, facing a little park, and beyond, the facade of the Roman Catholic cathedral. The house had been quite splendid in its heyday, hallowed by the legend that Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the former owner and the last living daughter of T.R., had stood on her head at the foot of the stairs, in the stairwell where our Christmas trees were to stand so tall that you had to fix the electric star on the summit by leaning over the second storey bannister. Mrs. Longworth was never invited to the house for the simple reason that she was a Republican and my parents were Democrats. The social life of Washingtonians was determined by the party in power; until Franklin Roosevelt was elected, my mother dwelt in the shadows, but from that moment, until a few years before her death, she was free to pursue her social ambitions with an energy that amazed me. There was much leaving of cards at the houses of senators and justices of the Supreme Court, and at the White House; there were special days appointed for this, and days when my mother, too, was “at home.” She believed in all these rites and they paid off in the form of invitations which, in turn, generated grand dinner parties given by my mother when the silver service plates would emerge from their red flannel jackets and my mother would get out her Crown Derby dinner plates and Waterford wine glasses and embroidered linen table cloths, and the mahogany table, immensely long with its full complement of inserted leaves, would be decked with all this splendour. Yes, it really happened! My mother lived this way. And during the war, I would go to these dinner parties in my WAVE uniform and engage in sparkling conversation (I thought) with the Attorney General, who, by accident or design, had touched his knee against mine under the heavy tablecloth. It would be dishonest of me to pretend that I never enjoyed myself in these exalted circles or that I wasn’t pleased when we (the four children) went to a dance at the White House, and later, to receptions with our parents where we shook hands with President and Mrs. Roosevelt and with General Eisenhower. Who could resist the heady air of great houses and great people? But I didn’t fit; I didn’t look the part; I was too shy to make conversation with our supposed peers; and above all, I didn’t really care. None of us, including my father, cared as our mother did. She cared, but failed to make lasting friends among the elegant ladies at whose houses she left cards, and whom she never called by their Christian names.

But I must speak of the metamorphoses of the house, changes not so much physical as spiritual. On the back side of the house was a walled yard with two maple trees, an ailanthus growing close to the house that shot up to the third storey, and another strange tree with leaves as big as dinner plates, a garage and a little house my brothers had built and named the Brass Tack Club. Innumerable alleycats prowled along the wall and wailed; bats hung upside down in the wisteria vine that climbed up the back wall of the house, and, on hot summer nights, they sometimes flew into our open windows and brushed our heads with their leathery wings. The earth was hard-trodden, baked by the summer sun, and the grass refused to grow except in the corners. During the war, I tried to dig up worms in the intractable soil of the backyard for the baby robin I’d found in the street and I could only find one worm. A few days later, I had a hard time digging the robin’s grave. Nobody loved that backyard; the Brass Tack Club was abandoned and the cats rounded up. It never changed its status and became a garden, despite our periodic efforts to plant flowers, and my mother’s surveillance over a somewhat spindly crepe myrtle bush. The growing things that flourished had to seek protection against the house, like the wisteria vine which spread with such prehensile energy that it tore apart the bricks of the house and had to be cut down, almost to the ground.

As for the house—its ghost is full of memories, pleasant and uncomfortable, for it was a witness to all the pains of our growing up—its basement was peopled with the dark shades of our black servants: Sarah, the cook; Amelia, the laundress; Kathleen, Archie, Randolph, Christine—their names changing with the years—except for Sarah, Amelia, and Kathleen, who outlived our mother. Symbolically, rivers of black coal were fed from the street into the bins next to the furnace room, and a horrendous retching was audible even on the third floor, when the furnace was stoked. Every day my mother would descend the steep stairs to the basement and confer with Sarah, the cook, and the others, and it shows something of her true character that they loved her steadfastly and stayed on. As for my sister and me, we scarcely gave them a thought. Sometimes we chatted with Alvernia, the black seamstress, who pedalled away at the old Singer sewing machine in a little room next to our “nursery” on the third floor and who claimed to be able to speak every language, including Egyptian. We stayed upstairs with Miss Balfour and learned nothing from the servants in the basement, when we might have learned much. Most shocking of all, we did not learn what it was, then, to be black. Black people had scarcely begun to rebel; Kathleen, for instance, was unhappy when my older brother asked her to call him by his first name. We were Miss Mary, Miss Hester. My mother held to the belief that you did not entertain black people in your drawing-room or consider them as possible friends. It makes me sick now to think of all this—of the passive state that permitted me to receive ideas and prejudices without questioning them. It surprises me that our black servants, knowing what they knew about us, having endured our sense of superiority, didn’t end by hating us. My older brother, so like my mother in many ways, was to become their true friend, to help them in need, to visit them when they were sick and to go to their funerals when they died; I look on his tender propitiation of our sins with awe.

It should have been obvious to me from our lifestyle that we had the means to enjoy it, and yet it never occurred to me that we were “rich.” My mother’s prejudices embraced not only all those who were “not quite” or “common,” but also the “nouveaux riches,” who had begun life, she presumed, either as one or the other. To have inherited your money and your possessions was not to be rich, but to inhabit the special and discreet world in which good Philadelphia families lived. Your house could be furnished with Chippendale chairs, Queen Anne tables and oriental rugs, you could be waited on by four or five servants, but it was as though all these visible signs of richness were the legitimate garments of one’s class, which, one was given to think, was the only class that had the approval of heaven. To talk about money was vulgar, though you could complain about how much things cost, and “rich” was a dirty word; better to think of one’s family as “comfortably off,” with a sense of Christian responsibility. My parents were so harried by their consciences, so determined to be good and do good, that they were ashamed of “enjoying” their money. My father had an almost monkish simplicity of soul and the things he loved were reduced to his gold repeating watch (he used to let us listen to its fairy chiming when we were little), a gold pocketknife and a little carnelian owl that sat on an ebony stand. It was our mother, like me, who craved things and who enticed Father on excursions to buy a Ming vase or a Chinese screen; it was she who had a real passion for shopping, but also it was she who drew those nice lines between Tightness and luxury, who knew exactly at what point you overstepped the boundary and passed into ostentation. As for us children, I believe we still deceive ourselves with the thought that our attitude toward money and a Puritan rigour of mind prevent us from being “rich” as others are.

I should add that we were so thoroughly insulated from life that we hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was like to be poor. We did not have any poor friends or even any whose parents had been poor. Without having our parents’ precise notions of the social hierarchy, I had the complacent idea that our status was normal, instead of seeing, as I now do, that we belonged to a very small and snobbish minority. In my present circle of friends, I am the only one with an inherited income, and I listen humbly to the tales they tell of their growing-up in families who fought hard battles with poverty. My childhood, my school and college years were passed among the “privileged,” who not only had money, but also were “respectable” in the same sense that we were. It was not until the war threw me with different kinds of people that I discovered that friends sometimes have drunken mothers or ne’er-do-well fathers, that the children of poor parents are often more remarkable than the children of rich parents, that people one knew had abortions and illegitimate children, were divorced, alcoholic, etc., that the professions of law, medicine, the ministry and teaching were not the only honourable ones. My family’s sense of hierarchy extended even to shibboleths like the proper pronunciation of “tomato.” If you said, “tomato,” you revealed that you were “not quite,” even if you qualified for “quiteness” in every other way. My mother belonged to a charitable organization which probably still exists called The Girls’ Friendly Society, the purpose of which was to go among the needy and minister to them, much as the good ladies in Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë did. When we were sixteen, my sister and I conducted a class for poor children, the idea being to teach them to sew and to play games such as Going to Jerusalem and Musical Chairs. I remember only my distaste for these strange clamouring little girls whose clothes smelled of stale cooking oil, who could not learn to sew and who hated our games. It was a long time before I learned that we were as handicapped by our wealth as they were by their poverty. They, at least, had an accurate idea of what life was like; ours was restricted by the blinders we wore.

In my mind, I recreate the vanished house and my parents who now inhabit the shadows of death, their complicated lives reduced to my memories of them, faulty and biased, and with so little evidence of their real selves, for I have only a few of their letters, and they did not keep journals. Even in letters, they hid from us and from themselves, and in this, I am utterly unlike them, for in letters I spill out all my joys and sorrows without reticence or remorse. Sometimes, my parents appear to me in dreams, miraculously cured, my father of his tuberculosis; my mother of her stroke, and I recognize them joyfully. Or they are sick, as in a dream about my mother, paralyzed, lying in a bed surrounded by people. She speaks, but no one can understand her; then, I hear words, “Don’t worry about light. You’ll always have enough to see your way.” I took these words spoken in a dream six years after she died as having come directly from her. Now and then during her lifetime she had made me happy by saying something of the same sort, out of a clear sky. “There is something light about you—like the touch of a butterfly wing,” she once said to me, who felt, on the contrary, that I must weigh heavily on her. Perhaps it was the memory of this other kind of light that had provoked the dream. It was uncharacteristic of my mother to analyze character or, in fact, to think rationally about anything; she had a “feminine” way of conducting a discussion as something to escape from, instead of as a way of getting at the truth. One could write at length about the tricks that people invent in order to avoid talking about what they don’t want to talk about, elaborate and beautiful tricks of evasion, but maddening to a rational adversary. The course of her flight was studded with burrows in the form of entrenched prejudices and refusals. There were things that were too terrible to be talked about at all, such as divorce (my mother did not speak to divorced people if she could help it) or illegitimacy. These prohibitions were expected to apply to everybody in the family; once I was severely scolded when I remarked that a baby which had been adopted by the mother of an unmarried friend looked exactly like the friend. My mother would not even permit the subject to be discussed. At the time, I thought this ridiculous, but I now see how much it reveals of her fierce discretion; she would fly in the face of reason to protect a friend. It is possible that she made herself believe that the baby had really been adopted, knowing as she did that no “nice” young woman would have an illegitimate child. If a person’s misbehaviour was outside her circle of friends, my mother was unforgiving, and her not-forgiving was of as pure an ore as her rectitude. By keeping these two qualities shackled together, generations of “good” people were bred and lived to make life miserable for others. Just as Chinese mothers had consented to foot-binding, my mother’s mother, and her mother before her, had bound and shrunk their daughters’ minds and their will to question the accepted order of things. My parents went to China for their honeymoon, and I remember my mother telling us that she had seen a woman with bound feet, as though it were not a scandal, but a fact of great interest. She had even bought a pair of tiny shoes which I looked at without horror, and it was not until a few years ago, when I saw a bound foot pickled in ajar of formaldehyde at the Musee de PHomme in Paris, that the crime of foot-binding struck me with its full force.

I ponder now on our mind-habits that enable us to suppress or to torture other human beings or to fill them with guilt; and on my mother, whose habits were set when she was very young. She was not a naturally rigid person (is anyone?), but full of delicacy and gaiety. She was “light.” I know this not only from memories, but also from studying photographs of her as a young woman, in which her face was often transformed by the most delightful smile. I think of her in our house in Washington and of my parents’ room with twin beds made of mahogany, with flowered pink and white wallpaper, with blue chintz slipcovers on the furniture, and a dressing table covered with little china and silver boxes, much like Mater’s. In the drawers of the 18th Century highboy, there was a sweet disorder of handkerchiefs and stockings and underthings scented with lavender and rose sachets, for even the messiness of my mother was charming, and on the closet floor, many pairs of long, narrow shoes in a row. I remember the sadness of seeing these elegant shoes and the hats on a top shelf, decorated with fruit and feathers, after my mother’s death, testifying to her long sickness when she could no longer wear them. The eloquence of a pair of shoes! Just as my mother refused to wear glasses until she could no longer read the telephone book, even at arm’s length, she refused to buy bigger shoes when her ankles were swollen from high blood pressure. She was proud of her hands and feet, proud perhaps of those parts of her which my father had admired; she pretended not to know how to wind a watch because it pleased my father to think that she was helpless about mechanical things. What a strange mixture she was of pride and humility, of grace and rigidity! There was a little corridor between her bedroom and my brother’s, with a closet on either side. In one of the closets, my mother had lined the shelves with gold and embossed Japanese wallpaper and had arranged on the shelves a collection of treasures: little tortoise-shell fans and Chinese bottles, cats made of lead glass, ivory and wood carvings, ancient Greek toys and Egyptian scarabs and fragments of statuettes. There, hidden away in the dark behind the painted door, was the fantasy life of my mother, like buried treasure. It reminded me in its surprisingness of the churches of Ravenna, with their plain exteriors and the amazing glimmer of gold inside. Outside the closet, my mother chose and arranged with her unerring eye and light touch, and everything became increasingly formal as you went downstairs. Looking at the Empire of Beauty (a great polished highboy with bright brass drawer handles, with finials and ornamental carving like two breaking waves on the top, about which someone was said to have exclaimed, “It’s an empire of beauty!”), the Chippendale chairs and Queen Anne tables, the mahogany table with ten leaves in the dining room, the Ming vase on the mantelpiece and the 18th Century mirror with a carved gilt eagle at the top, you saw that “other” mother, composed of family pride, a less personal love for beautiful objects, for it might have been the living room, the dining room of any conservative American family with inherited wealth and a sense of its own importance. Isabel Archer would have felt immediately at home here.

“Your mother was clairvoyant,” said Miss Walker (a real clairvoyant) as she gazed at a portrait I had done of my mother at three ages: young, middle-aged and old. “You didn’t have to tell her when something was going to happen; she always knew.” Was this really so? I searched and searched my memory and could think of no examples of my mother’s clairvoyance. But I knew that Miss Walker could see things that are unknown to me; things that I can hunt for and never find: the magic being shut up in the conventional woman; the paradox of the bird in its cage that refuses to walk out the open door, who does not see that the door is open, and, caught forever in her cage-habits, does not care.

“I see a little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand,” my elder brother used to say, and we twins would laugh nervously, knowing that he spoke of a storm brewing in our mother, spawned we knew not how. She had what we called her “black look”; it came from something one of us had said or done, something which, in retrospect, often seems ludicrously innocent. I can remember the weight of her stern eyes on me, willing me to meet her gaze, at the dinner table, while I looked at my plate, and of slithering guiltily around the house while the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand grew into a towering thunderhead and finally broke when she caught me. “You do not say to a young man that you’ve seen your sister in her pyjamas!” She threw this at me like a lightning bolt when I was more than twenty years old. On this occasion, one of my sister’s suitors, who was a house guest, had descended for breakfast and had asked where my sister was. My mother had overheard the fatal words, “The last time I saw her, she was in her pyjamas.” This is unimaginable now, as it was even then, but it shows in what a senseless atmosphere of prohibition we grew up. When I went to boarding school, the rules seemed perfectly natural to me, even a welcome relief from home, since, ridiculous though they were, they were, so to speak, visible (don’t sit on your bed or don’t “communicate” in study hall). At home, there were rules that regulated not only our behaviour and our conversations, but also our thoughts. The mere use of the word, “pyjamas,” or worse still, “bed,” evidently suggested sex to my mother; or did she fear that these words would suggest sex to me? But she needn’t have been afraid; our training had been so thorough that nothing suggested sex to me. I would like to know the reason for her real terror of sex, a fear that went beyond convention.

In fiction, the character most like my mother and our governess is the governess in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. One of my recurrent arguments with Edmund Wilson was about his insistence (he had written an essay about it which was accepted as the final word on the subject) that James’ governess was a neurotic monster who visited her sexual frustration on the children, Miles and Flora, aged twelve and six, and literally frightened Miles to death. In Edmund’s view, the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel were creatures of the governess’ sex-starved imagination and the children were innocent. To me, this wholly negative view of the governess spoiled the whole story, for wouldn’t my mother and my own governess have behaved exactly the same way, more violently, but with less tenderness? I see the story thus: that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel made the children aware of sex by making it quite clear to them that they were lovers, by talking in front of them or by being overheard, and, in Miles’ case, perhaps by overt sexual exchanges between him and Peter Quint. That this is not just imagined by the governess is clear from the fact that Miles has been dismissed from school for reasons that no one can even talk about (“I said things,” he says to the governess when she asks. “To those I liked,” which makes the nature of his crime crystal clear) and that Flora, in a state of delirium, pours forth a stream of “appalling language” about the governess, in the hearing of Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper. It gives you some idea of the moral hysteria of those times that the governess’ response to the news of Flora’s “appalling language” should be to cry, “Oh, thank God!” and to explain to Mrs. Grose, “It so justifies me!” And the good, solid Mrs. Grose, instead of saying, “Aren’t you being rather egocentric?” says, “It does that, Miss!” Mrs. Grose lives in the same world of good and evil as the governess and she perfectly understands her need to be morally in the clear. And it was here that ego, so repressed in other ways (as it was in my mother and governess), worked in women of that time, in the sense of the Tightness of their judgements of others. “There had come to me out of my very pity,” says the governess, “the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I?” Edmund’s answer to this was that Miles was innocent and that the governess was a murderer. But to me, Miles’ death, like the young heroes’ deaths in two other stories by James, “Owen Wingate” and “The Pupil,” was death by terror and guilt. The hearts of the two young men and the boy are not strong enough to bear the image society has of their guilt. Each is suspected of being homosexual, and, in one way or another, James repeatedly killed the homosexual in himself. Note that it is Miles, presumably the stronger of the two children, who dies, for he has made gestures to those he liked, whereas Flora has merely repeated words that she has heard, and in an unconscious state. The thought of this worst of all possible crimes, this unthinkable crime between Miles and Peter Quint, or Miles and his school friends, has induced in the governess an exalted religious fervour, the mawkishness of which makes me feel slightly sick. With her, it took the form of passionate tenderness, a violence of tender willing that was just as hard to take as our mother’s blackness. It never occurred to our mother, as it did to the governess, to say to herself, “If he were innocent what then on earth was I?” Our parents and governess belonged to a moral school in which guilt was presumed, and it was useless to argue. The wonder of it was that we never “said things,” but were scrutinized in the event that we might. Thoughts might come into our heads. How else to explain my mother’s rush to silence the orchestra playing in our house for our first dance, when they started to play, “It’s Sleepy Time Down South”? One would think that this sleepy time would preclude thoughts about sex, but to my mother it suggested them and it would suggest them to us. Our parents’ ideas about the crime of sex made their children’s lives arid, guilt-ridden or punitive (in my brothers’ case) for a long time. Of my brothers’ lives, when they were growing up, I know little, but imagine much. During the war, when I was twenty-four years old and lived in the family house in Washington, I was embraced at intervals by a married cousin who spent the night now and then and professed to be “crazy about me.” Laughing, I recounted this to my brother, who turned white with rage. “I’m going to tell Mother,” he said. I imagined the sequence of events: my cousin disgraced and thrown out of the house; my mother, forever unforgiving. “No, no, no, I can handle it! I promise you I can! I will!. . .” That moral rage, so familiar to me, fashioned from something as insubstantial as smoke, an idea that hardens the heart and makes people willing to destroy each other in its name. One can almost make an equation: that moral outrage is multiplied by the craziness of the idea held and that the more the idea is untenable, the more drastic the punishment for the person breaking its law. Or is it the more something is tempting, the more it must be punished? Oddly enough, the people who have never been tempted are as ruthless as those who have resisted temptation—and I came to be convinced that my parents belonged to the former class.

But all this moral intransigence and sternness wasn’t our real mother, who was an innocent schoolgirl, on whom the doors of life had closed like the doors of the Iron Maiden. She was the brilliant, laughing girl who had won all the prizes for excellence and had been given a carved wooden spoon as the most popular girl in her class. I am convinced that she knew nothing about life except as a schoolgirl might when she married my father, as beautiful as an archangel; he, too, the first in his class. Didn’t she say once to my sister, “I cried the whole time of my honeymoon”? So here was a clue, that my father, who was as chaste as my mother when they married, had perhaps frightened her during their first night together, and that this created the horror of sex that she visited on her children. There is a sexual element in all physical tenderness and it was this that was so resolutely suppressed in our family relationships, the absence of which made us so cool and awkward with each other. When we hugged each other, it was without the lovely yielding of real tenderness, and if the latter existed between our parents, they were always careful to hide it from us. My mother created fatal barriers between herself and her children in the name of what was “done,” by turning us over to nurses and governesses, by giving us away, in fact, to Miss Balfour, who came when we were six years old and did not leave until we were sixteen. Miss Balfour’s moral stuff was sterner than our mother’s, and one of our worst crimes was to try to appeal to our mother over Miss Balfour’s head. She liked little boys better than little girls. “Little girls are deceitful,” she said. Her presence in our family created a lethal triangle, and I see now that this is what poisoned that period of my mother’s life: her powerlessness to reach her children, her conviction that Miss Balfour had stolen our love. Miss Balfour had thick, wavy hair, a fresh pink face and beautiful grey eyes; if she had been as kind to us as she was to our brothers, I would have loved her, but she was short-tempered and sometimes downright mean. Sometimes, in order to make some moral point, she slapped us or pinched our arms just above the elbow as we walked down the street on either side of her. We became deceitful to outwit her, and this must have been exasperating, not to mention the awful frustrations of our family life.

After Miss Balfour left us, she took care of a series of little boys, and we would go and visit her. When I saw how tender she was with one of them, how patient, I wept, broke down completely, and Miss Balfour was loving and patient with me. By then, she had suffered the torments of tic douleureux, had been operated on so that her face was partly paralyzed, and her hair had turned white. I realized how we are formed by the relation we have one to the other, how the words “governess-charges” had made Miss Balfour an overseer; and us, her slaves, how she was ruled by the idea of what she thought we should be, how she thought we should behave, how perhaps she hated having two sneaky and loveless little girls as “charges” and her essential good nature was twisted and deformed. And I remember how happy we were to become friends, to be able to behave as friends. In the same way, our mother was held in the iron frame of the words “mother-governess” and “mother-children.” As the years went on and Miss Balfour made herself indispensable, our mother tried more and more frantically to get out of the trap she had made for herself. She suffered torments of jealousy. For a time, until she put an angry stop to it, our older brother used to go and kiss Miss Balfour goodnight as she lay in bed in her schoolgirl nightgown. In any other family, things would have gone further than this, but in ours, the act of kissing your governess goodnight if you were a boy of sixteen was as scandalous as fornication. Yet after this episode, Miss Balfour stayed with us for five more years. Even after she left, her ghost haunted my mother. My father, who had always defended Miss Balfour and considered her a necessary part of the family, arranged for her operation after she had left, and visited her after it in the palatial mansion of her new family to see how she was getting on. This got to the ears of my mother (he had evidently not dared tell her, a fact of some significance, if one is searching in the shadows for truth) and caused another upheaval. Looking back, I remember a period when my mother was continuously in her black state, when she cried day after day. A worldly-wise reader might say that something was certainly going on between my father and Miss Balfour, a reader who did not know my parents or Miss Balfour, one who did not know that the idea of sexual wrong-doing was as terrible as if the act had been committed. It was precisely because there was no accusation my mother could make, because there was no pretext for firing Miss Balfour, that her torment was more acute.

Our poor mother spent the years after Miss Balfour’s departure yearning for her lost children and not knowing how to go about getting them back. By then, we were miles away from her, keeping our lives a secret from her, punishing her, it would seem, for having given us away. After my father’s death, she lived alone in the big house, trying to carry on her old life, as brave as a soldier, and I can’t think of it now without pain. How little we knew of each other; how incapable we were of talking! I remember again the bitter accusation that shot out of her, when, questioning the imminent marriage of a friend and her doubts, I said, “Does she really love him?” “Cold heart,” she said, “what do you know about love?” I hated her at this moment—and yet, what evidence did my unloved mother have that I knew anything about love? And if she had any evidence, wouldn’t her bitterness have been even greater, as it was on another occasion (I was going to visit a friend I loved, but of the love I could say nothing) when she said, “Another woman?”

Even my sister was unapproachable, embarrassed and cool when our mother suddenly said to her (they were sitting on a park bench and it was after our father’s death), “Can’t you love me a little?” We all felt—and I knew—that she couldn’t possibly understand our lives, that there was no use in trying to talk to her, for hadn’t she always been shocked by even the tiniest infraction of her rules? It was much easier to stay on safe ground, to talk about my teaching, about my painting, to go to concerts with her—yes, like schoolgirls—and stay away from dangerous subjects. But why did even these safe subjects create conflicts? Why did it seem to me that there was nothing in the world about which my mother and I agreed when, now, I have the impression that I never bothered really to draw her out? Hadn’t she read all the French classics, seen innumerable operas and plays (my mother liked naughty drawing-room comedies and laughed at behaviour that shocked her in real life. “But it’s a play,” she said when I pointed this out to her); couldn’t she recite the names of the kings of England and France? Didn’t she love chamber music, and go, year after year, to the concert series at Coolidge Auditorium? But something prevented me from believing that this cultivation of hers was real, for she was unable to discuss why or how she loved books and music. A few years before her death, when she was paralyzed and talked with difficulty, I arranged with a violinist friend to come and play for her in her house and warned him that she might be impatient, or even rude, as she was at times with visitors. He played the Bach partita in B minor, perhaps the most exacting of all Bach to listen to, and my mother, far from being impatient, sat enthralled and afterwards thanked him with all the words she could muster. Once again, I felt horribly ashamed of my arrogance, of the false idea I had had of my mother’s feeling about music. And I realized that even if she found the Bach partita hard to listen to, there was something graciously receptive at the very core of her being, stronger than her sickness, that recognized great music played by a master.

My mother had always been humble—much too humble, I thought. She was impressed by any kind of accomplishment, as long as it was accomplished by an outwardly virtuous person, and this humility appeared in her either as a strength or a weakness. In its strong aspect, it made her capable of listening to the Bach partita, of a silent worship of great art. But her character was fatally shaped by the humility that made her deny her own value and accept the impersonal judgements of society. When she married, because my father was a Democrat, she switched her political allegiance from Republican to Democrat, and from then on, she accepted everything the Democrats did without question. Humility was her primal matter and out of it was fashioned her self-denial, her ferocious loyalties and her snobbishness. She had been humiliated by Mater because she came from a small town and her life in Washington was one long effort to keep a high place on the social ladder. But her friends were often not the great ladies of Washington, but rather relatively simple people of sterling character, who gave me the impression of having stepped from the pages of Dickens, and whom she never called by their first names.