Lessons, p.38
Lessons, page 38
The professor read rather beautifully one of the poems, a sonnet from The Dolphin. It was disorienting to acknowledge that the poem was very fine and might not have existed had Lowell been more sensitive to Hardwick’s feelings. Then the lecturer read a passage from a sad letter of hers on which the poem was based. Parts of it had been lifted word for word. Then he read letters to Lowell from friends—Elizabeth Bishop: “shocking…cruel,” or from another, “too intimately cruel,” and another, the poems “will tear Hardwick apart.” Other friends thought he should go ahead with publication, believing that he would do that anyway. In partial mitigation the lecturer showed how Lowell agonised over his decision and for how long, with various changes of plan, including many rewrites and restructurings and an idea for a limited edition only. In the end perhaps those friends were right, he did what he was always going to do. Elizabeth Hardwick, not consulted, saw her own words in book form for the first time. Her daughter with Lowell, Harriet, was also represented. To one critic she appeared as “one of the most unpleasant child figures in history.” The poet Adrienne Rich condemned The Dolphin as “one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry.” So how did it stand now, thirty-seven years later?
It was the professor’s view that The Dolphin was one of the poet’s finest works. Should it have been published? He thought not and believed that there was no contradiction in saying so. As to whether one’s view of Lowell’s behaviour should be tempered by the quality of the outcome, he thought it was irrelevant. Whether cruel behaviour enabled great or execrable poetry made no difference. A cruel act remained just that. This judgement ended the lecture. A murmur ran through the audience—of pleasure it seemed. To feel ambivalence in such a civilised context was agreeable.
A woman stood to ask the first question. There was an elephant in the room, she said. Surely what was under discussion was the behaviour of male artists towards their wives and lovers and the children they had helped bring into the world. The men abandoned their responsibilities, had affairs or got drunk and violent and, for just cause, hid behind the demands of their high calling, their art. Historically, there were very few cases of women sacrificing others for their art and they were likely to be condemned harshly for it. Women were more likely to turn on themselves, deny themselves children, in order to become artists. The men were judged more kindly. Where art was concerned, poetry, painting or whatever, this was merely a special case of banal male entitlement. Men wanted everything—children, success, women’s selfless devotion to male creativity. There was loud applause. The professor seemed baffled. He had not considered the matter in these terms, which was surprising given that feminism’s second wave had established itself in the universities a generation ago.
While he and the woman argued it out Roland was thinking of the intervention he was about to make. It was causing his heart to beat harder. He already had his first line—I am a male Hardwick. It might get a laugh but he did not have a question. He had a statement to make, just the sort of thing the chairman had at the start of the open session asked the audience to resist. I was once married to a writer whose name will be familiar to you. No manifestos please. She abandoned me and our baby and I can tell you for a fact that you are wrong. You have to live it to know it—the quality of the work absolutely matters. Sir, will you please come to your question. To be left for the cause of mediocre work would be the ultimate insult. Next question then. Yes, I forgave her because she was good, even brilliant. To achieve what she did she had to leave us.
But he did not raise his hand quickly enough. Other hands went up for other questions. The moment passed and as he listened Roland began to doubt himself. He had not thought closely about this business in years. Perhaps he no longer believed in his version. Time to reconsider. Such virtue in forgiveness could have been his way of protecting his pride, of arming himself against humiliation. What was true of Robert Lowell in the professor’s view had to be true of Alissa Eberhardt. The novels brilliant, the behaviour inexcusable. Leave it at that. But he felt confused.
On the way home in a minicab he acknowledged that what had passed between Alissa and himself was irrelevant. Too much time had passed. It was dead business. What he or anyone thought made no difference. If there was damage, it was done to Lawrence. Their son represented another problem, as he tunnelled, crashed or soared through his late teens and early twenties, much as his father had. Various jobs, various lovers in sequence, an adopted country, Germany. For a while he had wanted to settle somewhere and finally get some A levels and a degree. It was going to be Arabic. Then, he had to make a living, so, computer science. After that he rediscovered his passion for maths, for an ethereal branch of number theory that had no practical application—precisely its allure. But gradually over the last four years the focus had been tightening. It was the climate that troubled him. He understood the graphs, the probability functions, the urgency. He had drifted towards Berlin, to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Miraculously, given German thoroughness in these matters, he had persuaded people there, by way of some interesting mathematics, to accept him as an unpaid coffee-bringer and low-level research assistant until he had a good degree. In the evenings he waited tables in Mitte.
How was success in the young to be judged? He kept himself in shape, was kindly, reticent, trustworthy, often, like his father, short of money. Not everyone needed a degree in maths from somewhere like Cambridge. For Lawrence, much followed from meeting when still sixteen a French girl on a train.
Roland thought his son had poor judgement in his women friends. Lawrence would deny it but he preferred danger, rawness, instability, emotional extremes. Some were single mothers with complicated stories. Like Lawrence, like Roland for that matter, they had no profession (Roland did not think of himself as a musician), no tradeable skills, no money. Lawrence’s affairs often terminated in an explosion, each starburst with its own spectacular quality. His ex-lovers did not remain in his life as friends. There, at least, he differed from Roland. Everyone said that Lawrence would make a wonderful father. But each affair as it ended looked like a lucky escape for both. Lucky too that so far no child was left behind.
Roadworks had closed Vauxhall Bridge and an accident was blocking traffic by the Chelsea embankment. It was past eleven thirty by the time Roland’s minicab pulled up outside his house. As he entered where his gate used to be—someone had stolen it two years ago—and walked under the robinia that now blocked direct sunlight from the second floor, Roland felt himself to be unusually restless for the time of night. He would have liked to call someone but it was far too late. Besides, Daphne was in Rome for a housing conference. Peter was with her, scouring the city’s political scene for Europhobes. Mere sceptics were not enough for him. Too late to call Lawrence. He too was an hour ahead. Carol’s days started early and were long. She ran an entire channel for the BBC and was usually asleep by ten. Mireille was in Carcassonne tending her dying father. Joe Coppinger was in South Korea for a conference. Roland’s old Vancouver friend, John Weaver, would be deep into his afternoon teaching.
On the kitchen table was the debris of his lunch. As he carried a couple of token dishes to the sink he sensed that he would not sleep easily. The Lowell event had stirred up old stuff, a reminder of his own shapeless existence. Usually around this time Roland made a mint tea and took it to bed and read into the night. Tonight he allowed himself a Scotch. The bottle took some minutes to find. A five-month-old Christmas present, almost full. He took it along with a jug of water and a glass into the sitting room.
A year before her death, after she had fallen out with her daughter, Jane had got in touch with Roland. She assumed they shared a villain. When he told her how much he admired the novels she pretended not to hear him. Her own process of re-evaluation was complete and final: Alissa’s fiction was boring and overpraised. Jane and Roland kept up occasional phone calls until her illness became too serious. She would remember to ask after Lawrence and would want to know just a little about Roland’s life but her true interest was Alissa’s perfidy. Jane felt profoundly misunderstood, even persecuted. Dark suspicions were troubling her. Certain small objects of sentimental value had gone missing from the house. It was likely, she thought, that Alissa had come in the night.
“All the way from Bavaria?”
“Writers have time on their hands. She knows the house and she knows how to hurt me. I’ve changed the locks but she still gets in.”
Mental decay of some sort. Paraphrenia. He had noticed before this irritable paranoia in the elderly. But Jane was right in the essentials. Alissa had come at her with a knife—she had named and blamed her mother in a bestselling memoir. It would be in print for years, Jane said. Its harshest passages, diffused across the Internet in book-blogs, retweets, reviews and on Facebook, would last as long as civilisation. Nasty letters from anonymous locals had appeared in Jane’s post. The lady in the Bäckerei smirked whenever she came in. Friends gave their support but were appalled by what they had read and did not know what to believe. She was probably right when she said that she was gossiped about.
In Murnau described a rural Bavaria in which small-town Nazis, too low down the pecking order to be of interest to the Nuremberg courts, slipped back during the late forties and early fifties into local government and industry and into the networks of agricultural administration. Alissa named them all, their roles during and after the war. Everyone at every level remained in denial about what had happened. One passage in the book was just as Alissa had described it once to Roland—certain streets, certain empty houses, filled with the ghosts of those who had been taken away to unmentionable destinations. No one talked about them. Everyone remembered the names and faces of their neighbours who were once there, so they knew well the ghosts and the children of the ghosts. There was hatred for the Americans at the local bases even as their Marshall Plan money was welcome. Somehow donor and donation were separated. As the economy started to recover, so began a scramble for stuff, for consumer goods that buried deeper the collective memories. A new house was being built by murderers on a foundation of corpses. Territory well charted by historians and novelists—Alissa made reverential references to Gert Hofmann’s novel, Veilchenfeld. What was new was her exceptional prose, its lyrical bitterness. She was contemptuous of the view that in the early years after the war, Germany could only be rebuilt by means of collective amnesia.
Then she went in closer. The chapters narrowed down to the personal. Alissa was torn in two directions. The exaggerated fame of the White Rose angered her. It was a fig leaf for the obscenity of national denial. At the same time, she accused her father of disowning the movement to which he had given brave support, if only from 1943. Heinrich was the solid burgher who grew fat and lazy and feared the bad opinion of the closet Nazis who were his clients or who ran the nearby town halls or law associations. The way she described him, Heinrich was a barely animated drawing by Georg Grosz, far from the man Roland remembered by the fire, pouring schnapps, amiable, tolerant, good-natured, baffled and to a small extent intimidated by his wife and daughter. By her account he was disappointed to have a daughter not a son. He had little to do with Alissa’s upbringing, never encouraged her in anything she did, looked bored whenever she spoke. In fact, he never seemed to hear her. He left her to the mercies of her mother.
Here the real damage began. In Murnau presented Jane Farmer as an embittered woman hollowed out by a sense of failure. Her literary potential and ambitions were not destroyed by her own decisions. It was her child who ruined everything. Little Alissa was made to suffer in the loveless cold. Maternal punishments were frequent—sharp smacks to the legs, hours confined to her bedroom, rare treats withdrawn on a whim for crimes she could not remember. She struggled for her mother’s affection and grew up in the long shadow of her rancour. Her childhood was without outings, holidays, jokes, special meals, bedtime stories. No one ever cuddled her. Her mother lived in a cage of unspoken resentments. Even when Alissa broke away and went to London her mother’s dead hand was heavy on her own sense of purpose. It took so long to write those two early novels, so weak in conception, so timid and apologetic.
The day Alissa as a young mother left her London husband and child behind and went to Liebenau to confront Jane was one of the most vivid moments in the book, dramatic, intense, seething with emotions too long held back. It was the scene that critics lingered over. Only Eberhardt, they agreed, could manage so adroitly, with such delicate evocation of pain and anger, the many cross-currents of feeling, of mutual misunderstanding. What interested Roland was that Alissa’s account was close to the one Jane had given him so many years ago, on that warm evening in her garden.
Alissa’s memoir was a bestseller in Germany and other countries, including Britain. The vile childhoods of others were not only a comfort to many but a means of emotional exploration, and an expression of what everyone knew but needed to keep on hearing: our beginnings shape us and must be faced. Roland was sceptical and not out of loyalty to Jane. In the fifties many fathers were not much involved with their children, especially their daughters. Embraces, expressions of love, were thought too showy, too embarrassing. His own childhood was typical. Smacks to the legs, to the bottom, were common. Children, however loved underneath it all, were to be managed, not listened to. They were not there to be engaged with in serious conversation. They were not beings in their own right, for they were just passing through, transient proto-humans, endlessly, year after year in the graceless act of becoming. That was how it was. That was the culture. At the time it thought itself too soft. A hundred years before, the duty of parents had been to break a child’s will with a beating. Roland thought that those in his own country who itched to get back to those times, the eighteen or nineteen fifties, should think harder.
He believed that In Murnau, however engrossing, was Alissa’s least good book. Untypically self-dramatising. He was aware of Jane’s asperity but she was not cruel. Naming her, specifying the village and the house, was a bad mistake. A month after her funeral Roland met up with Rüdiger in the dusty American bar of the Stafford hotel by Green Park. The success of the memoir had prompted in its author some guilt. It grew stronger at her mother’s funeral, where Alissa saw for herself that many of Jane’s friends had not turned out for her. At the wake afterwards Rüdiger told her about the abusive letters Jane had received.
“But only because Alissa asked me. Otherwise, I would have said nothing.”
“What was her reaction?”
“She’s like a lot of brilliant writers. There’s something naive, you know? She was burning to write this book. She didn’t think about the consequences even when we warned her.”
Rüdiger, completely bald, rather stout and grand in manner, was now CEO of Lucretius Books. He could afford a little distance on his famous author. He had others. “She decided after the funeral that she wanted the book withdrawn, the unsold copies pulped. We persuaded her that this would look bad for her. Like a confession of a terrible mistake. We told her. The damage was done. She had to move on. Perhaps write a different book about her mother.”
* * *
It was 1 a.m. Roland’s Scotch, a small measure, heavily diluted, had been intended as a nightcap, a modest shot. But the bottle was at his elbow and he poured a larger one and was cautious with the water. Alissa’s unlikely defender was Lawrence. He had been moved by the memoir, he told his father on the phone. He thought Roland’s scepticism was “out of order.” He was unusually forthright.
“You weren’t there. You met Oma and Opa years later when they’d softened, the way people do. And it’s irrelevant that this was how it was at the time, that this was how people treated their kids. It was her experience. If you want you could say that she’s speaking for a whole generation. If the culture was crap that’s not on the mind of an eight-year-old sent to her room without supper. This was her life and she has a right to describe how it felt.”
“Her truth.”
“Don’t put that one on me, Dad. The truth. I have friends who’ve told me all about their shit childhoods with horrible parents. Then I meet them and they’re sweet as anything. I don’t then go thinking my friends are self-deluding liars. Anyway, I think you’ve got other reasons not to like this book.”
“You may be right.”
For this conversation Lawrence was somewhere in the American Midwest for a conference on farming and climate change. Roland had not seen him in six months and did not want a serious argument over the phone. His son had better reasons than he did not to like the memoir. That he was touched by it was admirable, generous. But if Jane had harmed her daughter, what of the harm that daughter had done her son? Where was the novelist’s honest reckoning? And as with the mothers, so with the father. Roland’s restless marginal life of truncated education and serial monogamy had become Lawrence’s. It wasn’t exactly a gift.
Whenever he entered a pleasing neutral zone such as a Scotch might bring on at the end of a tiring day, he tended to think that the lifelong mystery of Alissa was at the very least always interesting. There was no one remotely like her in his life. Miriam apart, no one so extreme. To most people, including himself, life just happened. Alissa fought it. He had not seen her since that night in a Berlin alley, when the Wall was falling in fifty places. Almost twenty-one years. He doubted that he would ever see her again. That in itself had a fairy-tale element. She was big. In forty-five languages she took up space in the minds of several million people.
