My Life in Middlemarch (31 page)

In
The Great Tradition,
F. R. Leavis notoriously suggested that Eliot’s last great work,
Daniel Deronda,
would be much improved if half of it were discarded. (He wanted to keep the glittering, high-society half that pertained to Gwendolen Harleth, the novel’s troubled heroine, and to discard the half that was concerned with Jewish life and history, which he saw as flawed and uninteresting.) Unlike Leavis’s provocative proposal, the mutilation of
Middlemarch
that produced
Mary Garth
grew from a pedagogical impulse rather than from a judgment of literary worth. As the book’s adapter explained in a preface, the intended purpose of
Mary Garth
was to introduce young readers to George Eliot. After
Mary Garth,
Page recommended, readers could go on to
Adam Bede
,
The Mill on the Floss
,
Silas Marner
, and
Scenes of Clerical Life
, before approaching the monumental
Middlemarch
itself. “They will thus be growing up with George Eliot, their minds enlarging as hers enlarged,” he wrote.

I can’t be sure what I would have made of
Mary Garth
when I was twelve or fourteen, the age for which it seems to have been intended. Perhaps I would have welcomed it; those years were tricky ones in which to find the right books, with the satisfactions of Frances Hodgson Burnett outgrown but the subtleties of Jane Austen still inaccessible. As a Radipole schoolgirl I might have been enchanted by the warmth of the worthy Miss Garth and amused by her good-hearted suitor. But by the time that I did first read
Middlemarch,
several years later, the characters that were of absolutely the least interest to me in the whole novel were Fred and Mary.

They were utterly lacking in glamour. Feckless, harmless Fred was just the sort of raw, fair English boy who left me cold: so un-intellectual, so outdoorsy, so buoyantly optimistic, so resiliently uncomplicated. Mary, that clever brown patch, I should have had a greater interest in, but I was too busy identifying with the passionate, aspiring Miss Brooke to recognize my kinship with the shrewd, satirical Miss Garth. I found her brand of goodness boring. I did not share her sense of duty, or feel as she did the intense importance of family ties. “I consider my mother and father the best part of myself,” Mary says. Like many children of my generation, I suspect, I rather fancied that
I
was the best part of
them.

Most of all, I could not conceive of falling in love with a boy I’d grown up alongside and had known all my life. I had only vague notions of what I wanted from romantic love, but I felt sure that it involved passionate struggle on exotic frontiers. There was nothing I could imagine wanting less than the predictable domesticity of marrying a childhood sweetheart.

That was what my parents had done. They met in 1944, the year my mother turned thirteen and my father fourteen. My mother, a slender, pragmatic girl with fine brown hair and a broad smile, attended the girls’ grammar school, to which she was permitted to ride her bike so long as she rode with an older cousin, who attended the boys’ grammar school nearby. My father, a quiet, cricket-obsessed boy with black curly hair and olive skin, rode with them every morning, too. That was their beginning, and they married in the summer that he turned twenty-two and she twenty-one.

In their wedding picture, taken at the gate of the local church, my mother isn’t wearing a bridal gown, but a belted dress—it was heavy, pale blue silk—with three-quarter-length sleeves and a knee-length skirt. Slim and elegant, she wears a pillbox hat with a chic fringe of veil. The dress comes from Harrods department store, in the advertising department of which she works, having left school at fifteen to become a messenger girl. From her work she has learned how to stand for the photographer, with one foot in front of the other, her firm chin slightly cocked.

My father stands square, hair gleaming, his new, imposingly formal gray suit hanging off his slender frame, smiling, looking vulnerable. He is already a civil servant, having left school at sixteen. His exam results were good enough that he could have continued his education into the sixth form, and then into college, but in his family that wasn’t even a consideration: no one ever had. In his teens he had ambitions to become a sportswriter—he went to evening classes to learn shorthand and typing—but his own father had died, and a relative advised him to enter a more secure line of work. He did, and stayed a civil servant for more than forty
years, never letting my brother or me suspect that any sacrifice had been involved in our family’s foundation.

The wedding photograph was tucked away in an old album, which was rarely brought out. My parents were not the type to have their wedding pictures on display, or to make a display of their marriage. They were undemonstrative in their affections to each other, but I never saw them arguing. They lived together in what looked like functional, contented complicity. If as a teenager I had stopped to think about it I would have said they were happy together, but I rarely stopped to think about it. They provided the steadying, untroubled background to my own inward drama of growing up—giving me, in their understated English way, the opportunity to aspire to a life very different from theirs. It did not occur to me to think much about what their own dramas were, or might have been.

“M
ARRIAGE
, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning,” Eliot writes in the conclusion to
Middlemarch.
The novel that ends with a wedding was conventional in Eliot’s time, and has become only more conventional since.
Middlemarch,
though, is punctuated with weddings: it begins with one, features one in its middle, and ends with two more. None of them functions as an ending. Each suggests, instead, the start of a story, not its conclusion. With her quiet, majestic turn of phrase, Eliot writes that marriage is “the beginning of the home epic.” It is “the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of the complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.” Every marriage—which we can
take from Eliot’s example to include every committed relationship, not only those sanctioned by church or state—amounts to an epic journey, an adventure of discovery.

From this perspective, the course upon which Fred and Mary are about to embark in the last chapter of
Middlemarch
is no less grand, in its way, than Dorothea’s early aspirations for a life of significance, or than Lydgate’s ambitions to make scientific discoveries. Throughout
Middlemarch,
Eliot has shown from different angles the demands that marriage makes. She has argued, in effect, that a good marriage is the expression of sympathy in its smallest unit. “Marriage is so unlike everything else,” Dorothea says toward the end of the novel. “There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” The chosen adjective is deliberately ambiguous, connoting at once a sublime state and also one conducive to dread.

Of all the marriages that are made in
Middlemarch,
the one over which Eliot casts the most golden, glowing light is that of Fred and Mary. Eliot—who did not marry her young love, nor stay in her childhood home—gives Fred and Mary what many readers have felt is the one truly romantic love story in
Middlemarch,
a story that is free of regret or disappointment. (We might have wished for Mr. Farebrother’s sake that Mary had chosen him, but it is hard to begrudge Fred.) They produce three sons, the same number that Eliot helped Lewes raise, and both Fred and Mary, surely not coincidentally, become authors—she of a book of tales for children taken from Plutarch, he of a work called the
Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding.
(The residents of Middlemarch are convinced that each of them wrote the other’s book. “There was no need to praise anybody for
writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else,” Eliot writes, in a private joke about her own peculiar history of pseudonymous authorship.)

Fred becomes the picture of uxorious devotion, the kind of man it is easier to see the attractions of at forty-five than it is at twenty. Having failed to inherit Stone Court, the house he hoped Mr. Featherstone, his rich, grumpy uncle, would bequeath him, he has an opportunity to gain the house anyway, through his own hard work and application. He maintains his love of hunting but risks the derision of his companions by refraining from jumping the highest fences, “seeming to see Mary and the boys sitting on the five-barred gate, or showing their curly heads between hedge and ditch.” As a young reader, I skipped past this line without pausing, but now when I read it a lump always comes to my throat, so acute a description is it of familial fidelity.

Strikingly, Fred and Mary are the only characters in
Middlemarch
to whom Eliot refers in the present tense in the book’s conclusion—as if, after all, they were real people a reader could go and track down, not characters formed by her imagination. Anyone who seeks to inquire, she writes, might find that Fred and Mary are still living at Stone Court, where “the creeping plants still cast the foam of their blossoms over the fine stone-walls into the field where the walnut-trees stand in stately row.” For the first readers of
Middlemarch,
which was published some forty years after the period it describes, Fred and Mary, living beyond the pages of the novel, would have been in their midsixties. For the rest of us, Eliot’s belated readers, Fred and Mary are the representatives of our unassuming elders—watching over us, making no explicit imposition upon us, knowing and feeling far more than
the young can ever imagine them capable of. They are as solid as those fine stone walls, and as connected to the land as the walnut trees in the fields. Fred and Mary dwell in the landscape of childhood, and they are the landscape of childhood, too.

“On sunny days the two lovers who were first engaged with the umbrella-ring may be seen in white-haired placidity at the open window from which Mary Garth, in the days of old Peter Featherstone, had often been ordered to look out for Mr. Lydgate,” Eliot writes. This passage had no particular resonance for me when I was young, but now it thrills with depth and suggestion. Now I can see what I could not see as a teenager—the romance, and the epic dimension, of long-lasting marriage. It begins at the church gate, a bold embarkation in formal clothes and self-conscious smiles, and it ends with the fastening of buttons on the shirt of a spouse whose trembling, liver-spotted hands can no longer manage the task. What would it be for love to be rooted in a single place, for a life’s length? This, of all experiences in love, is one I will never have, even if it is mercifully granted that I grow old together with the husband I met on the brink of middle age.

From where I stand in the middle of my own home epic—my own mundane, grand domestic adventure, in which I attempt to live in sympathy with the family I have made—I now look upon the accomplishment of early-dawning, long-lasting love with something like awe. When I turn the last pages of
Middlemarch
and read about Fred and Mary, I think of my parents, who met when they were barely past childhood, and who grew white haired together; until in the hours before dawn one winter morning, nearly sixty years after their wedding day, my father died with my mother at his side, holding his hand and speaking softly to
him of sweet memories in common.
Middlemarch
gives my parents back to me. In the pages of my imagination they are still together, watching me and watching over me from the window of their lives, under the pale sunlight of the place I came from and still call home.

I
N
the end, more romance is attached in
Middlemarch
to the accomplishment of enduring love than to the trials of young love, the follies of which are so ably dissected. In Fred and Mary, Eliot gives a glimpse of what a contented old age might be like. The final chapter of Book Eight, by which time their marriage is decided, is prefaced by an epigraph in French, from Victor Hugo. The epigraph is not about the excitement of new love, but the gratifications provided by love in old age. “The heart is saturated with love as with a divine wit which preserves it; hence the undying attachment of those who have loved each other from the dawn of life, and the freshness of old loves which still endure,” it reads. “This, then, is old age: a resemblance of evening with the dawn.”

By the time Eliot was finishing
Middlemarch
she thought of herself as incipiently elderly, and within less than a decade she would join Lewes in Highgate Cemetery, where a bed of wild-flowers now covers her tomb. Her diaries from her later years show that she entered what she regarded as old age with less than the complete equanimity that is recommended by the passage from Victor Hugo. In real life, her sunset years were filled with bodily aches and pains, as well as anxieties about work that she feared she would inevitably leave undone.

“As the years advance there is a new rational ground for the
expectation that my life may become less fruitful,” she wrote in her diary, on the last day of 1877. “Many conceptions of works to be carried out present themselves, but confidence in my own fitness to complete them worthily is all the more wanting because it is reasonable to argue that I must already have done my best.” Still, in her old age, she felt the familiar spur of inspiration. “In fact, my mind is embarrassed by the number and wide variety of subjects that attract me, and the enlarging vista that each brings with it,” she wrote.

She had come so far from her girlhood and youth, in geographical distance and in mental and moral capacity, with her mind surveying an ever-widening horizon. But thirty years earlier—still in the Midlands, still uncertain as to what would become of her—Eliot had characterized herself by an image precisely opposite to this one, in a letter to a friend. “It seems to me as if I were shrinking into that mathematical abstraction, a point—so entirely am I destitute of contact that I am unconscious of length or breadth,” she wrote then.