Vindication (41 page)

‘I suppose you mean to drink tea with me,
one
of these day[s],' Mary grumbled on 2 August. ‘How can you find in your heart to let me pass so many evenings alone…I did not wish to see you this evening, because you have been dining, I suppose, with Mrs Perfection, and comparison[s] are odious.'

Amelia Alderson was yet another. Mary spent the next evening with her, and was tantalised to hear that Godwin had made overtures to this lovely writer ten years younger than herself. In this case, however, there was no jealousy, for Amelia had turned him off.

‘You, I'm told, were ready to devour her–in your little parlor,' Mary accosted Godwin next day. ‘
Elle est très jolie–n
'
est[-ce] pas?
'

It was a jolt, yet in a way reassuring. Godwin was not, then, impervious to women. She and Amelia put their heads together over the question of whether he had ever ‘kissed a maiden fair'. Mary asked him to answer only after an hour-long visit from Amelia, intended to try his defences. Could a reserved man of middle age, whose beliefs had distanced him from sexual bonds, change his habits, as in Boccaccio's tale of Cymon, an uncouth man transformed by love?

She put this to Godwin. ‘I was making a question yesterday, as I talked to myself, whether Cymons of forty could be
informed–
Perhaps, after last night's electrical shock, you can resolve me–.'

The clear-cut Clarissa voice of her relations with Imlay is no more. A more nuanced voice falls into hiatus, a listening silence or invitation–not to sex in the usual sense, but to some preliminary ‘
informed
' state in a wordless space between the sexes. Sentences are incomplete, and silence is a sort of language–the meaning silence of a creature in the process of evolving new modes of communication with a man selected for alertness.

In order that Godwin might know her more fully, she loaned him
Mary; A Fiction
, and teased him to discern her secret self. Godwin read it on 3 and 4 August. Could he recognise her as a philosopher in her own cause, in this sense his counterpart? Could he
see
a woman so near to his eminence? ‘I
called on you yesterday, in my way to dinner, not for Mary [the novel]–but to
bring
Mary–Is it necessary to tell your sapient Philosophership that I mean MYSELF–'

Two days later, on Saturday 13 August, they discussed their position. ‘It was friendship melting into love', Godwin said later. ‘When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to disclose to the other.' That day there appears to have been some rational agreement to be patient and ‘considerate' with temperaments so at variance: Mary active and eager; Godwin sedentary and cautious. When they met again the following Monday in Godwin's lodgings, Mary laid her head on his shoulder. She recreates this scene in her new novel: ‘there was a sacredness in her dignified manner of reclining her glowing face on his shoulder, that powerfully impressed him. Desire was lost in more ineffable emotions…' Darnford, the lover, feels at this moment that to make Maria happy could be the foremost duty of his life. Maria is scarred by ‘recollected disappointment'. Her fear of outrunning this new affection gives way, now and then, to ‘the playful emotions of a heart just loosened from the frozen bond of grief'. All we can say for certain is that this was Mary Wollstonecraft's version of what seems to have been an emotional exchange. Next morning she sends to ask if Godwin had felt ‘
very
lonely' in the night, and invites him to kiss Fanny when she and Marguerite deliver this letter. Mary's tone is confidently hopeful.

His reply strikes an unexpected note: mentor and humorist have turned away. He is wary, even prickly. He had been unwell, he claims, and she had mortified him–unintentionally, he concedes. Godwin was clearly not ready as yet to act as lovers, as they tried that Tuesday night, 16 August 1796, recorded in his diary: ‘chez moi'. It went badly wrong.

Afterwards, Godwin admitted to Mary that during the last few days he had been wrapped up in a private fantasy. ‘I longed inexpressibly to have you in my arms,' he confessed, but this fantasy had been self-contained. So her offer to stay the night had taken him by surprise. To men who would expect to choose the moment, and particularly to one of Godwin's biblical training, no respectable woman would take the initiative. Yet reason told him that Mary was more than respectable; desire, in her terms, was ‘pure',
even ‘sacred'. That they could love, yet be so awkward, left them shaken. For once, Mary could not speak. She departed in silence, and sat in Judd Place West, brooding over her breakfast, unable to eat. She even shut the door on Fanny.

Could she have been responsible for an act against Godwin's better judgement? He had appeared emotionally withdrawn, unaware of the risk she had taken in trying to make love in the aftermath of Imlay's desertion. Godwin's theory of sex could not have been further from her experience: he thought we should be ‘wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse a very trivial object', and cohabitation a mistake–bound to blunt what feelings there were. Unlike Mary, he was anti-domestic, with the self-protectiveness of the bachelor. All the same, he was not quite as logical in practice as in thought. Logic dictated that if sex were as trivial as he believed, then partners might change with little trouble. In practice there was fidelity in all Godwin's relationships and, given his respect for women, it would be natural for him to extend fidelity to ‘the sensual intercourse'. There was another discrepancy between theory and actuality: although, theoretically, sex was trivial and marriage out of the question, in actuality Godwin was shaken to find himself in the grip of fantasy, as Mary's warm cheeks and rounded arms came into focus. He was not a man of impulse; his mind led him, and it worked with a measured deliberation. Mary, who was spontaneous, did not fathom his uneasiness when feelings threatened his control.

‘Full of your own feelings, little as I comprehend them, you forgot mine–or do not understand my character,' she wrote to him that Wednesday morning. What she feared most was to have lost Godwin's respect: ‘Mortified and humbled, I scarcely know why–still, despising false delicacy I almost fear that I have lost sight of the true. Could a wish have transported me to France or Italy, last night, I should have caught up my Fanny and been off in a twinkle, though convinced it is my mind, not the place, which requires changing. My imagination is for ever betraying me into fresh misery…I am hurt–But I mean not to hurt you. Consider what has passed as a fever of your imagination…' For her own part, she would follow Rousseau's
Solitary Walker
, and take her way through the world alone.

‘Do not hate me, Godwin asked. ‘Do not cast me off. Do not become again a
solitary walker
…You have the feelings of nature, and you have the honesty to avow them.'

He reproached himself that during the many hours he had longed to hold her in his arms, he had made no move. ‘Why did I not come to you? I am a fool. I feared still that I might be deceiving myself as to your feelings.' Then, too, he had fantasised a different drama, possibly closer to the conquest he had spoofed in his letter from Norwich: ‘When I make love, it shall be in a storm, as Jupiter made love to Semele, & turned her at once to a cinder.' His wish to ‘terrify' was misplaced. Mary looked for tenderness and Godwin was, thankfully, a sensitive man.

‘At one point we sympathize,' he wrote, ‘I had rather at this moment talk to you on paper…I should feel ashamed in seeing you.'

Shame did not prevent a brilliant answer to sexual failure that turns it around. He reveals his own character; sees into hers; reassures her; lays out the ground for compatibility; and commands her recovery:

Godwin left this letter at one o'clock. Mary replied within an hour:

Though she finished the letter at two, she sat on it for another hour or two. Meanwhile, at three, Godwin ‘suddenly became awake' to the mistake he had made in response to her offer: ‘I was altogether stupid & without intelligence as to your plan of staying, which it was morally impossible should not have given life to the dead.' It was not, he explained, proof of indifference to her, but of thoughts ‘obstinately occupied' and intent upon ‘an idea I had formed in my own mind of furtive pleasure'. He was struck by the absurdity of his oblivion, and wondered if it was ‘too late to repair it'.

He was sinking into ‘self-abhorrence' when Mary suddenly appeared at his door. In response to his ‘Suffer me to see you', she had come in person to deliver her letter, which closed with an invitation to dine that day at half past four. It proved now possible to face each other. After she left, Godwin decided to pass on his analysis of their sexual differences because he wanted her to know him for what he was; on the other hand, he wished to secure her calmed state of mind. ‘Take no notice of it for the present,' he added at the bottom.

When he arrived to dine, Hays was visiting but left, as she always did, before dinner. Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft dined alone after the day's exchanges, and parted for the night.

By the following night, Thursday, they were emboldened to try again, this time at Mary's lodgings–‘chez elle', in Godwin's code–and again, sex was not a success. Godwin was ‘tortured' by Marguerite's presence in the next room. He was unused to assignations. What would the nurse make of this? Would she give him away? Mary, for her part, was disconcerted again by the ‘hoar frost' of Godwin's reserve–the phrase came to her with a fable she made up the morning after, as she walked with Fanny before breakfast. She pictures herself as a Sycamore tree, denuded of leaves, amongst a cluster of evergreens. The Sycamore envies the foliage that shelters other trees from the blasts of winter. She craves sun, and at every sign, pesters her neighbours to know if spring has come. One day in February, the sun appears and the Sycamore's sap mounts. She holds out one more day, and the sun darts forth again. Feeling it is spring, the tree's buds ‘immediately come forth to revel in existence'. But alas, next day ‘a hoar frost…shriveled up [the Sycamore's] unfolding leaves, changing in a moment the colour
of the living green–a brown, melancholy hue succeeded–and the Sycamore drooped, abashed', for she had mistaken February for April. The fable ends with the dashes common in Mary's communications to Godwin: ‘whether the buds recovered, and expanded, when the spring actually arrived–The Fable sayeth not–.'

She sent this to Godwin that same day, Friday 19 August. It was a simple plea for warmth, but Godwin could not or would not ‘read' it. His bristles rose.

‘I have no answer to make to your fable, which I acknowledge to be uncommonly ingenious & well composed. I see not however its application,' he told her, and it ‘puts an end to all my hopes. I needed soothing, & you threaten me. Oppressed with a diffidence & uncertainty which I hate, you…annihilate me. Use your pleasure. For every pain I have undesignedly given you, I am most sincerely grieved; for the good qualities I discern in you, you shall live for ever embalmed in my memory.'