Sophie and the Sibyl (5 page)

She uses the famous Chapter 17 to deliver a lecture on ‘the secret of deep human sympathy’, in which I, for one, have never believed. And were that all the Sibyl had to offer I might never have returned to her books. But she presents her readers with other lavish gifts, her garnered knowledge and her massive, cunning intelligence; she never abandoned her jolly taste for melodrama, and we love her for it. Yet the Sibyl insisted on maintaining genteel fictions in her life that she seldom countenanced in her novels. She was never really Mrs. Lewes; that respectable identity, as the old Countess well knew, was a sham. She answered to a multitude of names, Mary Ann Evans, Marian Evans Lewes, Polly, Mutter, Madonna, and she wrote under a masculine pseudonym, her most famous name of all. And the one that lasted. No one describes Charlotte Brontë as Currer Bell, unless they are constructing a literary argument in a learned journal. The Sibyl turned out to be a master of pretence. Her fiction championed the honesty she preached, but never practised.

Realism of course, as a literary mode, has largely degenerated into tired commercial cliché, produced by lazy writers out to make a fast buck and consumed by readers in airports. That high moral purpose, championed by the Sibyl in 1859, doesn’t cut much ice now. And we are swamped by what she so memorably described as ‘silly novels by lady novelists’. The tendency to discipline and punish errant or ignorant characters lasted all through her writing life, and therein she was no different from her contemporaries. But the sexual sins which resulted in grisly deaths for most of the fictitious ladies in male masterpieces – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Lady Dedlock in
Bleak House,
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – I could go on and on – were by and large excused by the Sibyl, indeed often accommodated and forgiven. Tessa, the chubby little
contadina
in
Romola
, never knows that she wasn’t really married to Tito Melema, and the Sibyl’s portrait of Florence in the 1490s is riddled with coded references to sodomy, for which the city appears to have been famous. Take another careful look at Nello the Barber and his coterie, and there you will find the Sibyl’s queer community. Adultery, no, thou shalt not die for adultery, not in her novels. But you will be punished mercilessly for greed, misplaced ambition, hypocrisy, domestic cruelty, and moral betrayal. I am deeply impressed by the sins she refused to forgive. Grandcourt gets away with keeping a mistress and fathering four illegitimate children, but his creator refuses to condone his failure to marry Lydia Glasher when at last he could have done so. The discarded mistress turns all her thwarted rage on the new wife, Gwendolen. And the latter deserves all she gets, because she married him knowing that his wealth was infected with moral corruption.
You will have your punishment. I desire it with all my soul
. That is Lydia Glasher’s curse, sent with the poisoned diamonds, and I have heard our own author muttering this splendid formula to herself in the bathroom, when she thinks no one is listening.

The Sibyl entered this world in 1819, a world moving at the slower pace of coaches, a world lit by oil lamps and candles upstairs. The railways had not yet reached her local town; the Channel was traversed under sail and no one had ever heard of the telegraph, the telephone or the bicycle. Lavatory paper had not been invented, and so it fell to her, when their kitchen maid succumbed to a bilious attack, to cut up the gazetteer, and the cattle auction posters into little squares, thread them into a plump and fluttering mass and suspend them from a nail on the inside wall of the jakes. No bathroom ever existed in that house. Everyone managed with enamel chamber pots, or a brisk dash through the walled vegetable garden to the little house above the septic tank. The faint scent of urine, faeces and dark menstrual blood drifted through the rooms in summer, but without central heating, human excrement seldom festers with flies, as it would now. The Sibyl felt the cold; she wrapped herself in shawls, mantles, woollen stockings, fur-lined boots. Thrift is an admirable moral quality, but she adored discomfort for its own sake, and only ordered a fire when the windows threatened to freeze on the inside.

Behold the onset of modernity! The Sibyl witnessed the inventions of Alexander Bell and saw the last years of gas light before the advent of electricity. And one thing supported her magnificent advance into the world of celebrity and the ranks of those writers who gained great wealth through their intelligence and genius. An increasing mass within the population could now read. No mysteries here. The Education Acts of the 1870s began with the creation of ‘school boards’ to construct and manage schools where they were needed, to build upon the work of philanthropic charities, religious foundations and working-men’s associations. The 1876 Royal Commission on the Factory Acts recommended that education be made compulsory in order to stop child labour. And the 1880 Education Act did exactly that. Thou shalt attend school between the ages of five and ten. But of course the reforms took time to enforce. Most children worked outside school hours and their families could not live without that income. Revolution follows literacy with giant strides; if the people can read then they must be carefully influenced by the right opinions. They must also be brainwashed into making extensive purchases. The front and back pages of the newspapers were given over to advertisements for hoses, corsets, dental fixtures and tennis lessons. Look at the first printed versions of
Middlemarch
. The frontispiece and back flaps were surrounded with adverts for the very tonics, purges, vitamin tablets and chest expanders against which Lydgate inveighed with such fruitless zeal.

And here comes the age of cheap editions: pocket editions, abridged editions, one-guinea editions, with illustrations, and magnificent collected editions in embossed covers. Buy the lot for a knockdown price. Cheap wood-pulp paper and one-penny-a-week subscription libraries nourished a universal desire for self-improvement. Reading is good for the bowels and enlarges the soul. The self-help message proved unbeatable.

But what of the young Countess, Sophie von Hahn, whose vivid sexual energy enticed Max into a sequence of sentimental fantasies, which went no further than undoing her plaits and allowing his fingertips to brush her flushed and angry cheeks, as he rocked home in his brother’s carriage? Sophie von Hahn was born in the Year of Our Lord 1854, the same year in which the self-styled Mr. and Mrs. G.H. Lewes first visited Frankfurt, Weimar and Berlin. Lewes achieved fame in Germany as the biographer of Goethe. He interviewed many friends and acquaintances of the Great Man. The Sibyl aided his researches. She had yet to write a word of fiction. The couple arrived in Berlin in November 1854, delighted with the city, when Sophie was barely a month old. Her father, driving home at speed, anxious to see his beloved wife and tiny daughter, actually passed before their very door, where they were reading
The Merchant of Venice
aloud to one another. Lewes took the part of Shylock, which, given his love of theatre, he performed with resonating gusto and exaggerated affectation.

Sophie and the Sibyl belonged to two very different generations of Victorian women. Thirty-five unbridgeable years lay between them. They were born in different countries, grew up in different social classes, and learned to think in different languages. The Sibyl earned her wealth; Sophie inherited cash and lands in plenty. The Sibyl taught herself languages and philosophy; Sophie studied at home, surrounded by tutors of every nation. One woman assumed her right to wealth and privilege, the other clawed her way back into Victorian respectability by denying her fictional women the satisfied ambitions and desires that she claimed for herself. Cautious, conservative, of uncertain health and confidence, the Sibyl peddled a sententious wisdom that proved utterly seductive. Her novels sold and sold and sold and sold.

And Countess Sophie von Hahn, bewitched by the writer’s omniscient authority, lost in adulation and illusions, continued to be one of her most enthusiastic readers.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

in which Our Hero strives to redeem himself.

Wolfgang Duncker lurched to and fro between his desk and his father’s towering bookshelves, fuming with wrath against his younger brother. The rage achieved parental dimensions. Too many piled books and boxes of manuscript cluttered the floor to allow the infuriated publisher an unencumbered free passage round his office. But his fury required movement. And so he blundered between the curved oak steps, which enabled him to reach the upper levels of the shelves, and the fireplace, which contained nothing but a few charred sticks. He kicked the coal scuttle, sending a little puff of black dust into the air. Max, cowering on the low chair in the corner, tucked his boots beneath him, and attempted to remain invisible.

‘You live off this firm, Max. And I think you might try to contribute something useful rather than bringing us all to ruin.’

Wolfgang thumped the desk.

‘Think of everything our father put into this house. All his time, all his savings. I don’t think he ever set foot in Hettie’s Keller. In fact I’m quite sure he didn’t.’

Max agreed. His father didn’t need to do so. He kept a mistress in some style, even purchased a new apartment in Leipzig for her. Rumour had it that she was still alive, furnished with an adequate pension, that she paid visits to and received them from respectable ladies of means, and worshipped her benefactor’s portrait in the evenings. But Wolfgang had now reached his climax of righteousness.

‘Where do you think I am going to dig up the ready cash to pay off these debts? The end of the rainbow? The terms you agreed with Graf von Hahn are far too generous. This is the third edition, Max. The third! Everybody who wanted to do so has already read it. It will sell, but slowly, and we have to cover our costs.’

Wolfgang began rubbing his tonsure and swallowing hard. The office closed in around him, small, hot, stifling. And the clerk, lying low in the first room off the entrance hall, which also served as a warehouse, was listening hard to every thundered denunciation of the spendthrift brother. Wolfgang thought about his original reasons for sending Max out to the Jagdschloss and the charming letter he had received from the old Countess, urging him to visit them all again very soon, and be sure to bring Max. Sophie will be delighted to see him. All going well in that quarter, at least. He glared at Max, and then lowered his head like a belligerent bull. Max saw the tonsure approaching at speed.

‘And when you marry? Even if she does come with a handsome settlement? What are you going to do?’ Wolfgang’s hot breath billowed against his cheek. ‘Get through it all at the card tables and let your wife live in the street?’

Max shrank deeper into his chair. Gambling, he assumed, flourished as a pleasure among bachelors and military men, one of the many delectable things he must forgo, when he entered that realm of enchantment, which surrounded the vivid, shimmering person of the young Countess, Sophie von Hahn. The loss of the card tables would be a small price to pay for the treasures gained. The brothers gazed at one another. That profligate sum for the continuing rights and expanded edition of
Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse: Lebensweg eines Liberalen
might well prove to be a prudent financial investment. And they both knew it. Wolfgang shrugged, bit his lip and prowled back and forth.

The promissory note for Max’s gambling debts had fallen due and must be honoured. They had not yet settled terms with Mrs. Lewes and that canny, grasping not-quite-husband of hers. He managed her like a racehorse, well groomed and stabled and only brought out for races where the first prize was above one thousand guineas.
Middlemarch
had been sold for something like that sum to Osgood, Ticknor and Co. in America, who originally intended to bring out the novel in weekly instalments in a paper called
Every Saturday
– handsomely illustrated. But his spies informed him that the copyright must have been sold on, for the Great Work was even now appearing in
Harper’s Weekly
. Lewes, impervious to irony, published the bimonthly English version surrounded by advertisements for cordials, tinctures and surgical corsets. He actually sold space to cures for every disease of the eye by Ede’s patent American Eye Liquid! Hedging his bets, that crafty little ape of a man! The Sibyl loomed before Wolfgang, a great Atlantic ship, her funnels gusting steam, while Lewes leaped around the engine room, shovelling coal and pumping the bellows. What on earth could he offer for the Continental reprint? Before Tauchnitz sprang in ahead of him?

He inspected his brother through narrowed eyes. Max was folding and refolding his gloves. Max. Once more the Sibyl had asked for Max. He had a secret weapon tucked away in his office, which he wasn’t yet using to his best advantage. The Sibyl manifested many little weaknesses, and one of them, which seemed bizarre to Wolfgang, who calculated her sales figures on a regular basis, was her craving for admiration and praise. She needed a young man, a handsome young man, attentive at her elbow, holding her shawl, and confirming her charismatic magnetism with every devoted glance. But could Max be trusted? Wolfgang glowered at the warm red rug and a hole bored by an escaped coal. Max must be sent on a mission and made to realise that this was his chance, his one chance, to redeem himself.

‘All right,’ snapped Wolfgang, ‘I’ll write you a cheque and you can pay your debts. But you’ll have to earn the money. You’re going to Homburg, either tonight or on the morning train. The Leweses are already there, drinking the waters and wallowing in the baths. They’ve rented the first floor at Obere Promenade 14. Here’s the address. I heard from her today. They’re besieged by the English, but you can deal with the adoring crowds. Her new work is all but finished, and we must have it, both the Continental reprint and the translation rights. I’ll give you a margin and an upper limit. Never negotiate with Lewes if she’s not there. He’ll hound you into a corner. If he pushes you up, withdraw; say you need to speak to me. You can’t shake hands on any deal without my consent. Is that clear? On the other hand we must secure the rights. She wants to come back to us. Loyalty means something to her; she has a sentimental streak. But he doesn’t. And he’s the business brain. He’ll talk her up. Remember, they’re rich now. And everybody wants to know them.’