My Life in Middlemarch (29 page)

In her novels, Eliot sought to elicit simple emotion through complex means. She certainly wanted her readers to respond to her novels as more than compelling stories. She wanted to edify, but she wanted to do so without lecturing or hectoring. Alexander Main, her dangerous acolyte, sought to dispel the nebulous complexity of her work by deliberately reducing her to bright apothegms that eliminated her subtler shading. This was something that even he seems to have recognized, however dimly, was an act of violence. Blackwood sent him an edition of her works from which he could physically cull his quotations. “Had anybody told me a few weeks ago that I should live to
cut up
George Eliot’s works, and not only so, but to take pleasure in the operation, I fear I should have knocked him down,” Main wrote to Eliot. “But here I am clipping and slashing great gashes out of writings every line of which I hold sacred, and finding a
delight
almost fiendish in the work of destruction.” I am reminded of him wielding the knife dangerously at the publisher’s dining table. This is a letter that must have made Eliot quietly glad her great admirer was several hundred miles away.

Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings
was published in January 1872, a month after the first volume of
Middlemarch
appeared. “Had your new and great work been to see the light just three or four weeks later than its proposed appearance—why, you and I might have made a
bona fide
exchange!” Main wrote to Eliot in the weeks before publication, with delusions of parity. He seems to have seen his work not only as an honoring of Eliot but also as
an expression of his own creativity, claiming a kind of joint authorship with her, his idol. He pointed out to her, after receiving his copy of the first installment of
Middlemarch,
that his book had been advertised on its back page, and relished that their names would “go down the stream of time together, in loving fellowship, the one behind, the other before, as travelers on horseback used sometimes to journey when the world was not so nice as it now has become.”

Over the next year, as
Middlemarch
was published, his letters multiplied. He cataloged his evolving responses to the work as he consumed each volume, which he seems to have read with his second edition very much in mind, always looking for passages to excise. He had firm ideas about plot and character, which he conveyed with an air of intimate confidentiality. “My dear Mrs. Lewes, you really must get that Casaubon quietly, decently, and gravely of course,
out of the way,
” he wrote, after receiving a presentation copy of Book One. After reading Book Two, he wondered worriedly what would become of Dorothea. “I keep asking myself what I think she will
do,
when her sorrows become too great for passive endurance,” Main wrote. “Will she
write,
I wonder?” Book Three prompted an extravagant fourteen-page letter in which Main exalted Dorothea’s sacrifice in her marriage to Casaubon. “Less trial would mean less victory; less sorrow would mean less joy; less struggle would mean a smaller nature,” he wrote. “She may indeed leave the world at least ‘foundress of nothing’—but only in one sense; in another, foundress of a great moral empire, a kingdom within her own soul.”

Upon receiving this last letter, Eliot sent a kindly warning.
“Try to keep from forecast of Dorothea’s lot, and that sort of construction beforehand which makes everything that actually happens a disappointment,” she wrote, with impressive restraint. Main didn’t take her admonition to heart. In yet another disquisition, he wrote in impassioned detail of what he saw clearly: that Dorothea and Ladislaw must be morally impelled to renounce each other, in spite of their mutual love. “She faithful and he faithful, they will keep their souls, like consecrated vessels pure and spotless, for each other’s use,
some
where or
some
where, in some other corner of this mysterious Universe, in some other section of this mysterious Time,” Main wrote, in a prediction that turned out to be as erroneous as it was overblown.

Reading these letters about
Middlemarch
was a disquieting experience. Main’s assumption of intimacy with Eliot made me cringe, and yet I recognized in his enthusiasm for her works enough of my own admiration for her to feel an awkward fellowship with him. Main is the naive reader writ large—the kind of reader who approaches a book not with an academic’s theoretical apparatus or the scope of a professional critic, but who reads with commitment and intelligence, and with a conviction that there is something worth learning from a book.

In his excessive, grandiose, desperately lonely letters, Main does something that most of us who love books do, to some extent or another. He talks about the characters as if they were real people—as vivid, or more so, than people in his own life. He makes demands and asks questions of an author that for most of us remain imaginary but which he transformed, by force of will and need, into an intense epistolary relationship. He turned his
worship and admiration of George Eliot into a one-sided love affair of sorts, by which he seems to have felt sustained even as he felt still hungrier for engagement. He claimed Eliot as his.

E
LIOT
and Main never met, though he urged her and Lewes several times to visit him, promising to show them the sights of his part of Scotland, with its peculiar enticements. “Nineteenth century refinement has had very little do with Auchmithie. It is a bit of savage-land three miles from a civilized town,” he wrote. He wanted to take her for a fish supper at an inn where Sir Walter Scott had stayed.

At one point in 1874, when Eliot was beginning to sketch her ideas for
Daniel Deronda,
Main floated the idea that he might make a trip to London, and asked if he might visit her and Lewes there. Might he have “one quiet meeting with you two alone: not a party, but one delicious evening by our three selves?” he petitioned. “The sight of you, dear friends, would constitute one glorious memory in a life not like to have many such.”

The proposed trip evaporated, and the following year, Main was still writing to Eliot in a dreamy way about the possibility of an encounter. He told her that if he did not disclose more about himself when writing it was not for lack of trust in her, nor for a deficit of devotedness, but because it seemed impossible to do so in a letter. “But perhaps I shall visit you some day, and then your sweet look of willing helpfulness will draw it all out in the most natural way imaginable,” he wrote.

He didn’t ever experience her sweet look of willing helpfulness. Getting to London may have been beyond Main’s capacities
or budget, but it also seems likely that he preferred to keep Eliot as a deferred ideal to whom he could speak at length in a letter without the emotional demands that would be placed upon him were he actually to find himself face-to-face with her. Though in the surviving recollections of those who made Eliot’s acquaintance there are few testimonials of specific pieces of advice or personal insight that she delivered, she seems to have engaged even passing strangers in conversations that showed the same degree of psychological acuity and sympathy that characterizes the depiction of the inner lives of her characters. William Hale White, her co-lodger at 142 Strand, remarked that when she was talking with any sincerely engaged person, “she strove to elicit his best, and generally disclosed to him something in himself of which he was not aware.” In a pretherapeutic age, she instinctively initiated the kind of conversation that went below the surface of things. She wanted to know how people worked—not to expose them or embarrass them, but to move them toward a greater self-understanding, and to achieve with them a greater intimacy, however fleeting. “I have never seen anybody whose search for the meaning and worth of persons and things was so unresting as hers,” White wrote. She would have made a great interviewer; and if I could spend an hour in her company, I think that, instead of hearing her answer questions about her own life, I would almost rather listen to her putting questions to a stranger about his or hers.

And so perhaps, Main’s evasion of her questions—a characteristic that at first seemed to me so off-putting—actually helps to further illuminate Eliot’s sympathetic response to his attentions and her approval of the
Sayings.
There may have been something about the glimpses he offered into his circumscribed, lonely life
that resonated in her novelistic imagination. Slight, opaque Mr. Main—the onetime would-be minister with the secret inner life of which he cannot bring himself to speak—is kin to that family of frail, flawed clergymen who appear throughout her fiction.

They appear in her very first book,
Scenes of Clerical Life,
where stories revolve around the Reverend Amos Barton, who is defeated by the disapproval of others, and the Reverend Maynard Gilfil, whose young disappointment in love has left him inwardly maimed. “It is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk,” Eliot wrote in “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story.” “The trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may but be as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.”

Main has been dismissed as trivial and erring by Eliot’s biographers, but his letters suggest that he, too, felt his young life to be maimed—that he feared that his life-juice was being wasted. In this respect, he was Eliot’s perfect reader, in whom some of her most preoccupying novelistic themes were embodied. As I spent long hours in the library in Edinburgh with Main, reading letters Eliot would have devoted long hours to reading, I saw how little deserving he is of harsh blame. And I came to wonder if he affected Eliot not because of his glowing words about her work, after all, but because of what he quietly suggested to her—in all that he left unsaid—about mortal limitation, disappointment, and loss. Perhaps Eliot took him seriously because she recognized that even if he misread
Middlemarch, Middlemarch
had not misread him.

T
he Priory, with its walled garden and its books and its red-and-green study, is long gone. It was torn down at the very end of the nineteenth century to make way for the Great Central Main Line railway, which ran from Marylebone Station over Regent’s Canal and up through the Midlands to Sheffield in the north of England. At one point on its route, the railway passed within fifteen miles of Coventry. “Now, my lads, you can’t hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not,” Caleb Garth warns a group of truculent farm laborers, who seek to interrupt the work of surveyors who are measuring the land around the town. “It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven. But the railway’s a good thing.”

One day in late summer, I descended a stairway down to the
north bank of Regent’s Canal, passed under the railway tracks that ran overhead, and emerged onto a sunny towpath. George Eliot’s garden would have been close by this path, but there was nothing to be seen of it now: just a high wall beyond which was a block of flats. Houseboats were moored all along the canal’s bank, and some of the occupants of the boats had built small gardens along the path. There were plots with runner beans climbing up bamboo canes, and tomato plants laden with ripening fruit, and stalky sunflowers turning their open faces to the sun, simple and beaming, like a child’s drawing of a flower. It was peaceful on the bank, with few people to be seen—only one or two slightly bedraggled dogs slumbering on the roofs of houseboats. A barge slid by, and I noticed its name,
Mr. Pip
—a passing tribute to Eliot’s literary peer, glimpsed in an environment changed beyond recognition.

I went back up to the street, where, around a corner, a short stub remained of the road Eliot and Lewes lived in. It terminated suddenly at the entrance to an electrical substation that lay behind a high brick wall that was topped with a wire fence. Yellow and black hazard signs were posted along the wall’s length. “Danger of Death,” they read, and in that melancholy moment, as I discovered Eliot’s home not only gone but her street erased, the sign took on the aspect of a grimly humorous memento mori.

But I hadn’t really expected to find any trace of George Eliot on North Bank, and perhaps this was no place to look, anyway. Eliot lived in London for most of her adult life, from her early days as a striving young editor at 142 Strand to her late years surveying the streets from a carriage as she was driven through town, wearing a fashionable hat. But she always insisted that she preferred to
be in the countryside, which had the power to remind her, however obliquely, of the unexceptional terrain of her youth, with its primrose-filled hedgerows and its useful pastures and its creeping waterways. Like Wordsworth, whom she revered in adolescence and reread throughout her life, Eliot found regenerative inspiration in the remembrance of the landscape of her childhood. Her love for the deep green England of Warwickshire was the foundation of her belief that the love we have for the landscape in which we have grown up has a quality that can never be matched by our admiration of any environment discovered later, no matter how beautiful.

This love of a childhood landscape is exquisitely evoked in
The Mill on the Floss.
In one of that novel’s most celebrated, and most Wordsworthian, passages, the narrator describes in an authorial aside a walk she has taken “on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky.” She details the plants she sees on her walk: the starflowers and speedwell and ground ivy. “What grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene?” she asks. “These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows—such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them.”