Books
An unfinished life
William Trevor George Eliot: the Emergent Self Ruby V. Redinger (Bodley Head £6.95)
The trouble with writing in depth about novelists is that their novels are there to contradict you. With purely biographical information—birth, early days, growing up, growing old—all may be well. But when ambition nudges the biographer towards flights of fancy we are often in for a bumpy ride.
It's a journey down Temptation Lane and nearly always too little is resisted. There's the ascribing of influences—reality sparking the batteries of fiction: that very special moment on page eighteen, which perfectly reflects that other special moment, as mentioned in a letter. There is the supplying of a hopeful Who's Who of the characters: a gentleman known to have been wily cannot have failed to inspire the character of a second wily gentleman. Echoes and connections are thrillingly everywhere. There is a dislike of prunes that is surely meaningful. A prose style shows signs of childhood deprivation.
But novels are themselves autobiographical: little is added when they are seen side by side with life. A page of P. G. Wodehouse is more telling about the late Mr Wodehouse than six months of seminars. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd charts the mind of Agatha Christie. You meet James Joyce, with the flesh and the Devil, in Dubliners and Ulysses. Who could read Dickens without getting to know him to a degree? Or Jane Austen? Or Ivy ComptonBurnett ? It's fun to know that James Joyce had a fancy for unlaundered knickers and that Agatha Christie ate pounds of apples in her bath. It's fun but little else.
The relationship between-the writer and his novels is further complicated because autobiography in fiction, affected by a contemporary fashion, has become an area of misunderstanding. The 'autobiographical novel' is an expression that appears to simplify and in fact confuses. In its modern form it is generally presented as a shapeless account of someone's desires, thoughts, feelings, sense of failure or guilt, the whole lot larded with sex. Having closed a volume containing all this, an imaginary figure is meant to stand before us in what George Eliot called 'the gymnasium of the mind'. Inwardly we are meant to applaud, the better for knowing these desires, thoughts, feelings, sense of failure or guilt, the whole lot larded with good old sex. More often than not, though, we do not applaud all that much because there is no one standing there, with desires or anything else. The gymnasium is empty; the ropes hang
listless, even the horse is unreal.
The truth is that in writing a novel there is no need for conscious self-projection, because the ego cannot fail to make itself felt. What there is need for is communication, and story, and people who appear to be no reflection whatsoever of their author but who, of course, are. Their author is there in the style, in the selection and and rejection of detail, in voices speaking, in the places where he lets comedy in and where he keeps it out, in his demands for pity, in his pouring of scorn. One man's compassion is another's cloying sentiment. One man's cruelty is another's moment of truth.
Which brings me to the matter in hand. Miss Redinger has called her biography of George Eliot The Emergent Self. What new facts, I wondered as I opened it, are going to emerge from this self? Is the self itself going to emerge? What more shall I know when I have finished it than I know already through the novels and the bare bones of George Eliot's life? And is it necessary to know more? Do the novels then become richer, better, all of a sudden more illuminating? An American reviewer, stating that this work was 'the most insightful' account yet of the evolution of George Eliot, goes on to say that one does not have to be closely acquainted with the fiction to enjoy and 'benefit from' Miss Redinger's biographical artistry. Does that mean that in the pages of this book George Eliot will seem more remarkable than her remarkable novels have already made her?
The book is long—five hundred and fifteen pages, with notes—which accounts for the fact that it took Miss Redinger fifteen years to write. Unfortunately, as I settled down to it, I began to feel it was going to take me fifteen years to read. It is rightly and thickly packed. The blurb says it is marvellously readable, bilt the blurb is lying in its teeth. It's a hard read because there is so much of it, because the labour of love is laboriously obvious on every page, because not a single ■ pebble remains unturned and only one in a hundred has something interesting beneath it. It is also difficult because there is a tendency to dart about in time. Adam Bede, for instance, has been written and published, yet some pages later—to indulge a fresh academic argument—it hasn't been, and one is held up by chronological confusion. This is not helped by sentences like: 'Sensitiveness to the presence of Notself is of supreme importance in the development of the moral sense'.
The facts are simple. Mary Anne Evans was a religious girl. She looked after her father in a dutiful manner, but quite out of the blue she refused to go to church with him on the first Sunday of January, 1842. She was not beautiful. She did not marry Herbert Spencer, but might possibly have. She lived with George Henry Lewes. She married John Cross, who wrote her biography. Lewes was married when she met him, and remained so, sharing his wife in a bohemian manner with a man called Thornton Hunt. All that was very different from Mary Anne's strict Victorian upbringing, with its heavy Evangelical influence. But Mary Anne herself was very different from the strict Victorians around her. No one who thinks of the mind as a gymnasium is going to settle down to a life of terraced ordinariness in Nuneaton.
Miss Redinger sees an equally simple story, but does not tell it so. Mary Anne Evans escaped the shackles of a repressive society and what might have been a lonely spinsterhood. In this flight she became George Eliot, her genius inspired by her actions. This may or may not be so: no one can possibly tell. Nor is it easy to accept, as Miss Redinger suggests, that if George Eliot had married Herbert Spencer her novels would never have come into existence. Henry James believed that no matter what style of life George Eliot settled for or had foisted upon her—even if she had remained ordinary on the surface—her novels would have been written. There seems no reason to argue with that: novels are written because people find they can write them, making that discovery often by the merest fluke. George Eliot discovered that she loved words. She loved the feel of them weaving about in her gymnasium; but she saw them, too, as power that had to be tamed if it was to be of use to her. It was that exercise, not considerations as to whether she was 'psychically free to write', that drove her. Her single, huge problem was that she was a woman. 'You may try,' she wrote in Daniel Deronda, 'but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.'
In her investigation of that genius Miss Redinger takes as her springboard the biography of John Cross. It, too, was a labour of love, but Miss Redinger rightlY points out—and repeatedly, for there are many instances—that Cross repainted the picture, introducing warmth and loveliness where they did not always belong. Miss Redinger goes on somewhat in her refutations, scoring bull's eye after bull's eye, but it's a game that is hardly worth the candle: Mary Anne herself, only too well aware that gardens contain toads as well as flowers, contradicts Cross less fussily.
Telling all there is to tell in her scholarly way, Miss Redinger is true to herself and to her task. Her book is a document, but it is not a human one. It belongs in some grove of Academe: no self emerges, no human spirit confirms or denies the presence that shadows the novels.
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