I only desire to be myself
Kate Field
It was a small funeral, with a procession stretching from Welbeck Street, round the corner of Portman Square and left onto York Street. Then the long route north-west, along the Marylebone and Harrow Road, to the cemetery. The mourners made their way through the winding London streets by carriage, and some by foot, a light drizzle in their faces, to bury Trollope alongside Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Babbage. Although it was a private affair, many gathered near the gates to pay their respects. It was, according to the papers, a plain mourning coach, drawn by two horses that carried the kindly and inimitable writer to Paradise, by way of Kensal Green. Rose, his wife, did not attend.
Trollope had married Rose, a bank manager’s daughter, one June day, just before his thirtieth birthday. They ran like a well-oiled machine, give or take, for forty-two years. My marriage, he wrote, was like the marriage of other people. It’s a simile that seems to close a door, while opening up a vortex in its central panel. What are other people’s marriages like? For Trollope, they are made up of a thousand tiny repetitions. Marriages are worlds of likenesses. Married characters in Trollope’s novels go to bed in the usual way, walking up the stairs of their red-brick town houses, putting on their tasselled nightcaps and their nightgowns. The Trollopian day is full of statutes and planning, of laws and gossip, people passing by one another on the street, arrangements being made. The Trollopian night is characterised by its regularity of movements – the allotted portion of domestic pillow talk, the setting the world to rights, the deliberate turning of backs.
Living together can be like this – a passing of bodies, a ticking off of tasks, a relay of surface and bottom wiping. We become diminished versions of ourselves, fading like photos that have been too long in the sun. Apparitions. Only last Thursday I was carrying home some shopping when my husband rode past me on a bicycle as if I wasn’t there. It was a really windy day, the sort where you are forcing your body against something that feels as if it is pushing you back with every step, but you have to get the pint of milk, the orange juice and the ham for the children’s packed lunches for the following day as the fridge is empty.
And he sped past as if I wasn’t there. He was back from work early. I was late. We weren’t expecting to see each other, and he didn’t see me. Watching his figure disappearing into the distance, shrinking moment by moment, I thought of the fact that we hadn’t touched each other – at least in any way that mattered – for longer than usual. It had been the usual gavotte around the kitchen of a morning. A pattern of bedtimes just ever so slightly syncopated. That absence of touch had felt OK to me. I was tired. (I am still tired.) I wanted a holiday. The timing wasn’t right. I didn’t want to be held. But I could sense it didn’t feel OK to him, and that morning he had told me so as he scratched the thumb of his right hand against his palm. And now he was riding past me in the wind, like we’d never met – helmeted, impervious, untouchable, accidentally, with deliberation.
Later that evening, I go to dinner and talk to a friend. We order an unfeasibly large selection of tapas. I drink two glasses of wine and I worry that our usual is unusual. I worry that we are not normal. She looks sympathetic, so I take out our Normal and explain it. She thinks our Normal is quite normal. But she drinks water and keeps hers quietly under the table, so that I can’t quite see it. I wonder if her Normal might be bigger and more frequent than ours. Or perhaps her Normal is sleek and small. A waitress comes over to see if we have finished, and I think about asking about her Normal, but realise that this would be inappropriate. I put our Normal back into my handbag, embarrassed that I’ve shown it to her in the first place. Normals, I sense, are not normally for sharing. Normals are not like Losses.
The idea of a regular sex life can mean many things. It requires something akin to нежность, an untranslatable Russian word that comes closest perhaps to tenderness, or softness. An almost heroic understanding between two people, finding a way to come together, being gentle with each other’s sense of time and space. The phrase hides a multitude of complex negotiations, of kindness and compromise and sudden delight in finding that two people might want to be doing exactly the same thing at the same time, and can look forward to feeling that way again. Sometimes, though, it means something bleaker. Sometimes regular becomes regularised. Anna’s husband, Karenin, ends up making marital sex look crushingly dull. His come-hither advances are made with measured steps. He is freshly washed and combed. He is wearing his slippers, and carries a book under his arm. He smiles a special smile. It’s time, he tells her. It’s time. You just bet he’s folded his socks up. Everything, we sense, goes like clockwork.
I suppose one reason why Barthes thinks those Greek idiorhythmic monks have such a good time is because they don’t have to find a mutual agreement about this most intimate of questions of time and space. Bedtime is, for them, a space and time of their own, a space of silence. (Unless, of course, these monks are less celibate than we think.) A monk (or a nun) doesn’t have to explain to another monk (or nun) that they felt quite in the mood for it this afternoon, but tonight they’d prefer to go to sleep. The other monk doesn’t have to negotiate the sense of intense rejection felt when they advance towards a partner, only to hear them say, not now. The spurned monk doesn’t find himself wide awake beside a sleeping body, wondering if he can handle going through it all again.
Later that night, my husband and I lie in bed and share our imagined irregularities. They are often predictable in their form. The banality of the pornographic imagination, the regular well-timed cliché of fantasy. A woman enters the bedroom. A man films us. There are mirrors on the ceiling and blindfolds and endless fucking. In a moment of impossible, physical ecstasy, everyone in the room comes together, in an enormous shuddering mass, then vanish into the folds of the night. I get out of the bed and pad down the corridor, navigating my way past the laundry baskets, to pee. As I turn the bathroom light on, I wonder where they all would have parked.
The buffet cart glides past, after getting stuck on someone’s coat – a tower of disposable cups and Kettle Chips, and packets of Rowntree’s Randoms pinned to the side. The tannoy begins the litany. Starbucks coffee, Twinings tea, Aero hot chocolate. Pastries that are normally £2.50 are only £1 with any hot beverage. There is also a selection of alcoholic drinks, a mix and match offer of 3 for £10, white wine, rosé, red wine and also prosecco. The way she says it, all in a rush, as if embarrassed, makes me wonder what the take-up rate for and-also-prosecco is on CrossCountry services. What celebratory moment makes you crack open a mini bottle on the line from Birmingham New Street to Leamington Spa?
One day, one of us will turn to the other side of the marital bed, and find it empty. The pillow creased and marked by one stray hair. The pile of books beside the bedside lamp. An imperceptible dent in the mattress where a body used to be. Or automatically reach for the phone to dial and realise there is nobody there, just a flat line, caller not available. One day, like Rose Trollope, one of us will discover what it feels like not to be a couple any more, not to be a pair. I find that hard to imagine.
The tombstone listed him as a loving husband, a loving father and a true friend. Trollope was sixty-seven years old when he died. One December night, he was laughing over a book about the idea of swapping lives. Then he was gone. No life left to swap.
Kate Field would have trailed his illness from afar, in the pages of the New York Times. On 6 November, listed after reports of a violent earthquake in Constantinople and the false news about horse trading in St Petersburg, she would have learned that he had been seized by something that had the nature of a fit. A little over a week later, his condition was said to have recovered except that the power of speech has not yet returned. Foreign news now focused on terrorists in Madrid and the fact that the Marquess of Queensberry was causing a disturbance in London theatres. A fortnight later, with Central Park’s lake two inches deep in ice, Kate Field’s business assets were failing. Anthony Trollope was losing his strength, then critical. Then dead.
We have no record of what she said, or wrote, when she heard the news. Or if she even recognised the man they described in the long column – an author at once so comfortable and so pleasant. There are so many of our selves, after all, to recognise. I imagine that when she heard the news, she took out the copies of the books he’d given her and turned them over in her hands. Perhaps she ran her fingers lightly over his handwritten inscriptions. He grew larger in her mind in his final absence. Failings, as she once wrote, disappear in longitude. Longitude brings longing. We hold on to our dead and dying, and magnify them.
Nor do I know if she had anyone to tell. What does one person do to mourn another, when they have no particular right to mourn? Especially when that person’s death seems to belong to the world. And even more so when they must grieve alone?
I press my finger against the train glass, and think of you again. How am I to mourn you when the time comes? What form could it take? How shall I even form it? I can imagine your funeral even now, in that morbid Tom Sawyer-like way. A chapel full of people from your world, talking about their memories of the versions of you they knew. A comedy vicar. A cluster outside the door, smoking. A full pub.
And it will not be my place to say that I had a small place in your story, or that you have one in mine. I will, no doubt, resort to stalking your virtual ghost. Reading the notices on Twitter and websites. Standing in an empty playground as I push my daughter on a swing, shouting to the wind. I knew him. I was adored once, too.
Perhaps all of us hide our lives in fictions. Many books are love letters. Perhaps this one is too. For the more you look into any book, the more secrets it contains. They open up before us, like a series of Russian nesting dolls in reverse, taking us into ever larger worlds.
What is hidden in Tolstoy’s? The stories that exist between the lines and under the covers. One love story is in plain sight. We don’t know the title of the novel that Anna is reading, but it’s not hard to guess from the way Tolstoy describes the plot – a woman riding to hounds, a Member of Parliament giving a speech – that we are meant to think that it is something in particular, something that might really exist. Anna, the evidence suggests, is reading a book by Anthony Trollope. Not one particular novel of his, to be sure. This ‘book’ is a fiction – not so much lost beyond recovery, as unfindable and indefinable. It is an imaginary Trollope novel – a mixture of several of his works, criss-crossing the plots from his fictional world.
It’s not hard to imagine why Tolstoy would choose Trollope. It’s partly a matter of creative convenience. Anna reads Trollope, we can imagine, because as Tolstoy sat in his study, there would have been a few pocket-sized copies of Trollope’s novels in his eyeline, each just the right size to imagine fitting neatly into his heroine’s handbag. Anthony Trollope was the English novelist who came immediately to hand, and to mind. But there’s more to it than that, I think. Tolstoy chose Trollope for Anna to read as he adored his work. There are volumes and volumes of the little Tauchnitz editions of Trollope in the library at his home in Yasnaya Polyana. Trollope kills me, Tolstoy wrote in his diary. Trollope kills me with his excellence.
But if we throw away the scholarship, and free Anna from her maker for a moment, then there’s another answer to the question of why she is reading this particular English novelist. Anna Karenina reads Trollope because he’s so good.
Before I began to read anything by this most prolific of Victorians, I thought Trollope to be something like the Woolworths of classic fiction. Steady. Dull. And always bidding for a comeback. Placed against the passion of Wuthering Heights and the pathos of Oliver Twist, I imagined that Trollope’s books would be as unglamorous and sensible-looking as their bearded, waistcoated Victorian author. I was wrong. Trollope is a roman-fleuve of passion and chaos. He’s Jilly Cooper meets Ibsen. He writes about a world of wronged love and moral uncertainty, of infidelity and human weakness. So if we imagine a flesh and blood Anna walking through the snow of a grey-skied St Petersburg, imagine her dancing at balls, watching the races and the opera, and nursing her children – if we imagine her thinking of marriage, and of love and affairs, then Trollope makes sense.
When he sat down at the end of his life to write his autobiography, Anthony Trollope admitted – nearly in public – what one particular American woman had meant to him. She is a ray of light to me … I do not know, he adds, that I should please her or do good to any one by naming her. Field runs through every one of Trollope’s novels. Every one of Trollope’s heroines looks like her. Every one of Trollope’s heroines looks to her. You could, if you want, see his books – as so many books are – as one enormous declaration of love. A hidden proposal. A gift.
When Anna reads her book, then, on the seven o’clock to St Petersburg, perhaps she leaves her anguish behind – just for a moment. Even if she doesn’t, she is in good company. For in the pages she turns, Anna Karenina meets a world of someone else’s making, a world steeped in the actual pain of someone else’s actual love affair. The stories of Kate and Anna collide. Within that imaginary handbag, then, there’s something real.
The snow melted, and when spring came, Field took to the road, or at least the tracks. She was forty-four years old, and thinking again of marriage. This time, it was thinking that was done not about herself, but for others. Field had long since dismissed marriage as an experiment that she was not willing to risk. She headed two thousand miles west, to Salt Lake City, on a mission to research and publicise what she called the Mormon monster. Field, who was destined never to be a wife, set out to make sure that nobody had more than his or her fair share.
It’s a funny thing, monogamy – no less strange than polygamy in many ways. Some people seem to believe in it as if it’s a kind of religion. The idea that each of us should have a love of our life is all too comfortably trotted out. A liturgy with little room for those who find themselves wandering off piste. Field’s problem with Mormon marriages was not so much the number of people in the marriage, as the inequality of balance. Mormon marriage, Field wrote, was domestic abuse. Why, she wondered, should a man have many, and a woman only one? It seems a fair point. (Don’t talk to me about the equality of the sexes, she once wrote, when men have a dozen or more pockets and women have none.)
But there is something about Field’s mission that makes it seem as much a personal journey as a political fight. And a complex one, at that. Field may not have been committed to a person, but she was engaged with something – married to something, if you wish. She stuck by the idea of being free. Many tried to capture her. An American poet, a few hotshot newspaper editors, Trollope. But she stood by singularity, in sickness and in health. This wasn’t easy. But it had its rewards. Anything, as Auden writes, which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will is infinitely more interesting … than any romance, however passionate.
If you are married to more than one thing or person at a time, is it really a marriage, or just a series of beginnings? Is it possible to be committed to keeping your options open?
Loading her trunks and bags onto the Pennsylvania through-train from Grand Central, Kate Field changed at Chicago, to see the new doll-like town of Pullman, with its straight roads and red brick and limestone trim. She was there by special invitation, to give a lecture, and admire the factory works. She spent a night at the Florence Hotel, then made her way to the station and got into the sleeping car, heading westward into the night. Her car was called Pioneer.
I am swimming alone, Field said.
It takes courage to do this. To decide not to form a pair. Or to recognise the self as a layering of loves, floating in water, each transparency laid upon the last. Refusing to choose any one image from the flickering gallery that revolves before our eyes like a magic lantern. To keep steady on your own track. Keeping your options open can go both ways, like the escalator game.
Soon after this, Field settled down with a woman called Lilian Whiting. Nearly. They are buried side by side. Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Massachusetts, lot 8 and 9 on the Acorn Path. But still she travelled alone, companionless, apart from her camera, a Club no. 2 with its special lens. I can glimpse her now. Kodak-distant, but still there. I wish I could touch her. I’ll salute her at least, through the window of my train, as she sits in hers, surrounded by all the French plate mirrors and mahogany. She is just visible behind the sleeping car curtain now, settling herself down in her neat compartment. She opens her book and begins to read: All happy families resemble one another. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.