My Life in Middlemarch (25 page)

T
HOSE
who cared best for Eliot approved of Cross; literary posterity has been less generous. Scholars have been frustrated by his destruction of the early portions of her diary—the pages dating from 1849, her trip to Geneva, until 1854, when she and Lewes left for Weimar, have been excised—and for the sanitized version of Eliot which he presented in his selections from her letters and journals in his
Life,
a book which William Gladstone disparaged as “a reticence in three volumes.” He wasn’t her intellectual equal: his one literary production outside of the biography was a volume published in 1893 with the unprepossessing title
Impressions of Dante and of the New World, with a Few Words on Bimetallism.
(This book begins, winningly enough, with an apology: “I confess that it is difficult to find a valid excuse for republishing old magazine articles, and in my own case I cannot plead that any host of admiring friends has put pressure on me to collect mine.”)

Perhaps, having become accustomed to veneration in the later years of her literary celebrity, Eliot liked having an adoring acolyte—although it doesn’t seem that she made the Casaubon-like demand that he compile her biography after her death, the book being Cross’s own enthusiastically embraced project. Or perhaps, as the scholar Rosemarie Bodenheimer has persuasively argued, Eliot knew she needed a caring and invested manager, particularly after seeing how complicated her affairs had become after Lewes’s death, when she had distressing difficulty accessing
the money she had earned because it was all in a bank account under Lewes’s name. The marriage may have been surprising, even to its participants, but it made a certain kind of sense as well.

One lurid detail of Eliot and Cross’s brief life together threatens to overwhelm their marital history, as the obituary of a politician will be dominated by the retelling of the embarrassing personal indiscretion that besmirched an otherwise distinguished reputation. While on their wedding trip, a month’s meandering tour through France and northern Italy that brought them eventually to Venice, Cross jumped from a window into the Grand Canal. In his
Life
of Eliot he said that the poor air in Venice and the lack of exercise there were to blame. Contemporary gossips and later biographers have speculated that his illness was grounded in psychology, evidence that the scandalous marriage was indeed a dreadful mismatch of temperaments and desires.

Cross’s plunge
is
perplexing, and to admirers of Eliot it remains embarrassing—an anomalous digression in what can otherwise be cast as a heroic life’s journey. Many critics have been tempted to assume a position of post-Freudian superior knowledge, and to suggest that there must have been a compensatory element in Eliot and Cross’s attraction for each other, a submerged desire that was elusive to the participants and that could not survive the ordeal of a bedroom scene. This approach seems to me to be both arrogant and inadequate, and not just because Cross and Eliot had survived bedrooms all across Europe before they got to Venice. Whatever hidden or repressed motives may have influenced Cross’s wish to marry Eliot are obscure to us, given how little we know about him, but the suggestion that he sought in Eliot a mother-replacement—and was horrified to discover that
his mother-replacement made sexual demands—seems a little too quick, and too pat. What we do know is that Eliot was the author of the most psychologically penetrating novels yet written in the English language, and while all of us are capable at any age of acting upon impulses we don’t understand, it seems to me unlikely that Eliot would blunder into a marriage under such a tremendous psychological misapprehension, about her own motivations or about Cross’s.

My own inclination is to step back from the bedroom—as a Victorian novelist would have been obliged to do—and to let the event stand in its singular, perplexing strangeness, one episode in Eliot’s life, but not its defining one. I prefer, instead, to notice the strange consonance of Cross’s leap into the canal with the deaths by water that recur in Eliot’s novels: characters drown in
Adam Bede
,
Silas Marner
, and
Daniel Deronda
, and, of course,
The Mill on the Floss.
That novel famously ends when Maggie Tulliver, who has been shamed by an attempted and then aborted riverboat elopement, drowns in the floodwaters of the river powering the mill in which she grew up. Unlike her creator, Maggie cannot escape the provincialism of the world she has been born into.

I prefer to reflect upon something that occurred to me while visiting Eliot’s childhood home, where a small pond has now been dug to suggest the one that inspired the Red Deeps in
The Mill on the Floss
—that for all the time Eliot spent living by ponds or canals and visiting seashores, it’s unlikely that she ever learned to swim. She never experienced that sense of physical freedom, moving with and against the waves: the elemental awe, the exhilarating solitude that for me is a summertime commonplace. There are areas of experience we take for granted today that for Eliot and her
contemporaries were unavailable or obscure. Whatever she and Cross discovered about themselves and each other in their marriage must surely be in some ways unavailable or obscure to us.

What is clear is that Eliot’s letters from her wedding journey are those of a woman surprised by joy, and held by it. In Paris they went to La Sainte-Chapelle and to the Luxembourg museum, neither of which Cross had ever seen; they wandered the Champs-Élysées, “looking at our fellow mortals who seem, like ourselves, immensely improvable,” and enjoying the late-spring blossoms everywhere. Near the city of Chambéry they gathered roses in the garden that had belonged to Rousseau. In Turin they stayed in a palatial apartment with blue satin draperies and marble baths. Her letters to Cross’s family are barely short of blissful. “We seem to love each other better than we did when we set out, which seemed then hardly possible,” she wrote to one of her new sisters-in-law.

Letters to Charles Lewes were similarly filled with enthusiasm for the sights she and Cross were seeing and the companionship they were sharing, though her reported happiness was not entirely without qualification. She had but one regret in seeing the beauty of the Alpine foothills, she said, and that was that Lewes had not seen it. “I would still give up my own life willingly if he could have the happiness instead of me,” she wrote.

To Barbara Bodichon, the least prejudiced, most broad-minded auditor she knew, Eliot attempted to articulate what this marriage meant to her, coming when she thought that her life might as well have been over. “Deep down below there is a hidden river of sadness but this must always be with those who have lived long,” she wrote. But in spite of that sadness, she said, she was
able to enjoy her renewed life. She felt that she would be a better creature—less selfish, more open—than she could have been had she remained in solitude. “To be constantly lovingly grateful for the gift of a perfect love is the best illumination of one’s mind to all the possible good there may be in store for man on this troublous little planet,” she wrote. Her novelistic powers had taken root in the fertile soil of her domestic happiness with Lewes, and she had no faith in her ability to produce anything else without re-creating, as best she could, that sense of connectedness and interdependency.

Eliot’s sudden death from kidney failure in December 1880, seven months after the wedding, obviated the question of whether life with Cross could prove as generative as her union with Lewes. Cross was left, as he wrote to a friend of Eliot’s immediately upon her death, “alone in this new House we meant to be so happy in.” That house, in which they lived together for just three weeks, was 4 Cheyne Walk, on the Embankment in London—an impressive terraced structure behind a high locked gate, which today has swagged curtains visible through its graceful Georgian windows and artfully pruned shrubs in its front garden.

I walked there one rainy afternoon through the dauntingly elegant streets of Chelsea. I lived in this neighborhood once, for a few months, working for a British newspaper when I was in my midtwenties. It was a period of professional turbulence: the job in London was better than the one I had in New York, but I had hated to wrench myself away from my New York life, and I returned within a year. It was also a period of personal confusion: romantically speaking, at least, I was tripping over myself with conflicting impulses toward commitment and toward freedom.
I hadn’t yet discovered the two conditions need not be mutually exclusive, and that I might find freedom within commitment.

As I now walked through the wet streets with my head down and umbrella up, recalling that melancholy and lonely time, I pictured my husband on the other side of the Atlantic, imagining him reading on the couch in our living room, under an enormous mahogany bookcase that must have been installed more than a century ago. This bookcase was one of the reasons my husband and I wanted to buy this particular house—it was one of the things that made us think it could be a home to us, our first together, and we filled it with the books that we merged into one collection. A year later we celebrated our wedding in this room, with friends dancing to a band that my husband had recruited from a subway platform. I thought of him, and of Eliot’s sober, moving characterization of the conditions of marriage, its demand for self-suppression and tolerance; and I remembered what it is sometimes easy to forget in the busy midst of marriage, that I had promised my husband the support and love that Eliot and Lewes found in each other, and that I was grateful for all the ways he granted me that, and more.

This was an area of London that was once home to all sorts of writers and artists, though judging by the property values it seems unlikely that many remained. Houses were marked with plaques for their illustrious former inhabitants. On Tite Street there was one for Oscar Wilde, who lived there with Constance, his wife, while eventually finding other interests elsewhere; and another for John Singer Sargent, who lived alone, very private about his private life. On Cheyne Walk, a few doors down from Eliot’s address, is the house to which Dante Gabriel Rossetti moved after
his wife, the painter Elizabeth Siddal, died of an overdose of laudanum. I thought about the often complicated personal lives of artists—about those who have needed to be free of personal encumbrances, or whose spouses have suffered neglect, humiliation, or worse. Perhaps the model of the artist who is willing to sacrifice all for his or her art—the artist who is not culpable for his or her domestic ruthlessness, because it is in the pursuit of something so much more significant—is the one to which the most romance is attached.

Domestic and familial ties are time consuming, and it’s easy to imagine all the things that might be accomplished with fewer of them, particularly after breaking off midparagraph to cook a child’s dinner, or setting work aside to help a partner worry over his or hers. But I find Eliot and Lewes’s model of a life of work embedded in a life of domestic commitment much more appealing. It gives me greater hope for my own life, with all its obligations. Having endless hours of free time in which to create is hardly useful if most of those hours are spent in a paralyzing torpor of loneliness, overwhelmed by anxieties about that loneliness lasting forever, as I am surely not alone in having discovered.

Eliot wrested for herself an alternative course. Her best work began in being beloved, while middle age granted her an expansion rather than a diminishment of possibility. I cannot exactly call this a comfortable doctrine: the physical and mental exigencies of growing older deny us the prospect of ease, as Eliot knew, too. But even so, I think, it is one worth trying to believe.

O
ne day on my journey through
Middlemarch,
I found myself in Coventry with an hour or two to spare, and so I went to a bookstore in a pedestrian shopping center to see if it stocked any volumes about the city’s most celebrated author. I was looking for something local—something that I might have missed in my varied hunts through the holdings of secondhand booksellers and the shelves of academic bookstores.

The store was part of a national chain, and had a chain store’s usual priorities: plenty of cookbooks, and shelves filled with established bestsellers. There was, as I expected, a section dedicated to Eliot, though I was surprised at how small it was, and at the simple, hand-lettered sign on it, that read “George Eliot was born in Nuneaton and grew up in Coventry.” I thought she deserved something professionally printed, at least.

But among her familiar novels there was one book I hadn’t seen before: a volume with the dismaying title
“The Mill on the
Floss”: In Half the Time.
It turned out to be one of a series of abridgements of Victorian heavyweights, designed for readers unwilling to countenance the five-hundred-page version of the novel. I flicked through it, trying to see what the editors had deemed dispensable. I could understand the impulse to make the novel more accessible—I want as many people as possible to read
The Mill on the Floss,
too—but, like paperback editions of classic novels issued with updated covers resembling those of
Twilight,
it seemed a pandering and misbegotten effort, as if no young reader today might possibly pick up a novel written 150 years ago unless the book were in sexy, neo-Gothic drag.

As I left the bookstore I wondered idly if I would be alone in welcoming a volume called
“Middlemarch”: In Twice the Time.
“What’s your favorite book?” is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services—and favorite isn’t, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that
Middlemarch
has in mine. I chose
Middlemarch
—or
Middlemarch
chose me—and I cannot imagine life without it. My husband, the most avid reader I know, would choose
In Search of Lost Time
as his most treasured work. One friend insists on the primacy of
David Copperfield,
while another goes back to
The Portrait of a Lady,
and I know them better for knowing that about them.