would begin to beat with fear at the thought of discussing with him my theory about James.
I blurted out my theory after Edmund had written me one of his fish cards, in which he said, “I saw Leon Edel in New York and he has worked out the rest of Henry James’ life in a way which I don’t doubt is correct, but he has pledged me not to talk about it.” It seemed to me that this could only refer to what I have already called James’ secret (i.e., his homosexual leanings), but in the fourth volume of his biography of James, Leon Edel produces both a young man to whom James wrote passionate letters and a woman friend who troubled him greatly by committing suicide. “I know what Leon Edel is going to say about Henry James,” I said. “That he was homosexual.” I was driving Edmund back to his house after he had had dinner with Barbara and me and there was such a long silence after the word “homosexual” that I thought he had not heard me. Then he said that James had suffered some kind of injury that prevented him from having a sexual life.
As long as it is thought disgraceful for a great man or woman to have been or to be homosexual, heterosexuals will use every means possible to deny it. Families destroy or conceal evidence or lock it away so that it is inaccessible; genders are changed in poems that have been written to someone of the same sex; biographers search for evidence that the great man loved a woman, or that the great woman loved a man. They consider it improper and shameless, an invasion of privacy, for homosexuals to keep insisting that so-and-so is one of their own, though it is not at all improper, for instance, to make public that Emily Dickinson sat on the lap of an eminent judge. Indeed, this piece of news is received with sentimental joy by all who care about Dickinson’s reputation and are worried about her “excessive” feelings for certain women. When I knew Edmund, I hadn’t thought much about this species of adamant denial which makes discussion impossible and conjecture indecent. But what if the intent of the biographer is an attempt to conceal something crucial to the understanding of a great man or woman, what if the view of him or her, as was the case of Walt Whitman, has been totally false? Is Virginia Woolf any less great a writer because it is now known that she fell in love with women?
Edmund was one of a host of people who accept homosexuals as friends, but for whom homosexuality is in contravention of some immutable law, people who, for the most part, have had a Christian upbringing. He loved Barbara and Marie-Claire and me, but he shared the community view that Lesbians are faintly ridiculous, that pairs of us are, in Gertrude Stein’s words, “like two left-handed gloves.” Because of our fear of men, we have settled, they think, for a half-life with its imperfect satisfactions. This view, which we cannot help but feel as a burden, made me uneasy in Wellfleet; it was always there—the unspoken mockery that attached itself to conventional problems, such as how to seat us at a dinner table or whether or not to invite us with heterosexual couples.
I will speak later of the period when Marie-Claire joined my life and my relation with Edmund became much more complicated and uneasy. Nevertheless, at the end of his life, he was still wistfully writing, “I miss you.” I did not dare, during all those years, to accept his friendship with the joy it should have given me, but clung to it with secret pride and suffered torments when he was cold, angry or seemingly indifferent. When he died, I was living in France, but I felt his absence with a sense of desolation. He had enlarged my life with his myriad enthusiasms, with his programs for the improvement of my mind, with his brutal truths; it was enlarged even by my resistance to him and by the anxiety I felt.
This is a Valentine note for Mary,
Of whom I am fond, and even very.
I sometimes dream we are sitting astride
A bicycle, taking a bicycle ride.
Edmund sent me this in 1960, one of a series of valentines we all exchanged to lighten the winter cafard in Wellfleet. He and I dreamt about each other now and then (I dreamt after his death that he was seated at a round table wearing the mask of Queen Victoria), and sometimes, we even dreamt the same dream. It was about going into a house full of old things, going from room to room, seeing depressing changes. And then, the house was threatened—by a super-highway or by sinister people surrounding it, or by crumbling walls. It was our past, that house, what we cherished of the past—stolen, mutilated or decaying.
We belonged to the same generation, he had said. We shared the ability to be moved to tears or to feel a rush of joyful emotion in the presence of something beautiful. Edmund read Yeats to us (when he had begun to walk slowly, groaning, up the hill to our house), his voice becoming unsteady at, “Till the wreck of the body,” and breaking at, “A bird’s sleepy cry,” unable to finish. Edmund was moved to tears by Yeats, who, bare as bleached bone at the end of his life, still used nature for his grandest image. “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.” These flies walk on water as blithely as Jesus, or a mind moving on insubstantial silence, where many minds drown; Edmund’s mind must have moved easily upon silence.
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