NURSE HELPS ME TO SIT UP AND BRINGS ME MY CUP OF TEA ON A tray. The cup trembles in my hand and a few drops splash onto my quilted bed jacket. The hours of the day will be dealt out like a pack of cards, always the same hand. Nurse will go out to do the marketing and bring back eggs from a nearby farm and buns from the bakery. Miss Clarke will bring up the post, straighten pictures, and talk about her nieces. She will try to find out who my correspondents are without revealing that she has studied the postmarks with a spy’s single-mindedness. Nurse will return. The midday papers will arrive. The sky will grow cloudy. Perhaps it will rain. By noon I will be exhausted and will most likely “go off.”
But this is my holy hour. Nurse pulls back the heavy velvet curtains and the morning light gushes over my quilt like a river, bright white some days, pearly or opalescent if the sky is overcast. For a short while the earth and the heavens are brand-new again, unspoiled, like the Garden of Eden or the pure light of infancy. My cup runneth over, compensating me for whatever horrors or tedium will inevitably come. And Nurse thinks I am an unbeliever!
Everything I think about is saturated with strong feeling now, as in significant dreams. Scenes of Cambridge, Newport, Paris, even fragments of New York City when I was an infant, flash through my mind. To an observer it looks as if I am immobilized, but I am a traveler with a spectral Baedecker, visiting all the places and the people I have known.
In 1866, when I was seventeen, our family moved from Boston to 20 Quincy Street, Cambridge, across the street from the Harvard president’s house on the edge of Harvard Yard. When the wind blew from the Harvard direction, you could smell the row of privies on the far side of Mr. Eliot’s house. Cambridge was a small, ingrown world then. On a stroll you might run into the legendary Mr. Agassiz, or Professor Sophocles, who had been teaching Greek for as long as anyone could remember, or Mr. Childs, who collected ballads, or Mr. Eliot, with his port-wine birthmark and brusque remarks. (In Cambridge when you spoke of “the president,” you did not mean the President of the United States.)
George Ticknor (Harvard Professor of Modern Languages) famously compared Boston to ancient Athens, and the period just before our family moved there was referred to, without irony, as the Periclean Age. Bostonians took their city and its institutions seriously and were ravenous for culture. The poet James Russell Lowell’s Harvard course on the English poets was repeated the next day in the afternoon for those who had not got there the evening before and printed in the newspaper the day after. There were dozens of Browning Societies in Boston, exceeded only by the number of Dante Circles; there were lectures on every subject under the sun, and so many of the city’s grand dames were committed to Hegelism that it was rare to get through a Back Bay dinner party without hearing about “the dialectic.”
Oratory was inculcated in the young in the belief that every young man of good family should be prepared to mount a pulpit and stir the citizenry with an exhortation of some sort. To hear Bostonians talk, you’d think that such institutions as the Saturday Club, Papanti’s dancing school, the Ether Monument, and the water side of Beacon Street were on a par with Salisbury Cathedral, Versailles, and the Sistine Chapel, and a newcomer had best acquaint himself with them in a hurry.
Mr. Eliot’s first cousin, Charles Eliot Norton, editor of the North American Review and future Harvard professor of fine arts, resided in baronial splendor on his estate, Shady Hill, north of Harvard Yard. It provoked considerable mirth in Cambridge that the two cousins had staked out antipodal positions on the great questions of the day. Pragmatic, scientific, and utilitarian, Mr. Eliot, a chemistry professor before becoming president of Harvard, declared on more than one occasion, “The most useless people we see are the Americans who live abroad without any profession or occupation but that of time-killer.” His cousin, meanwhile, spent long periods abroad, preferring Italy to all other cultures. Of all parts of Europe Italy was the most decadent in Mr. Eliot’s view. “Rome stinks,” he was heard to say. Also: “Cathedrals are bad things, being costly and not well adapted to other uses when no longer needed for idolatry.” Meanwhile, Charles Norton suffered daily, hourly, from the newness, crassness, tastelessness, ignorance, and barbarism of America.
It was to Charles Norton, his formidable mother, and his two cultivated unmarried sisters, Jane and Grace, that our family was principally beholden in those years. Charles was the Platonic idea of the pedant. An autocrat on intellectual matters, he was fond of saying that “two institutions—Harvard College and the New York Nation—are the only solid barriers against the invasion of barbarism and vulgarity.”
If you conversed with him, you’d be subjected to utterances like, “Like Antonio in Twelfth Night, I can no answer make but thanks, and thanks, and thanks.” He would confide over his after-dinner brandy, “What I have suffered most from in my life is the omnipresence of vulgarity.” The real cause of his suffering, I thought, was that he lived cut off from his feelings and then blamed society for the hollowness he felt. He, of course, believed he was a deep thinker and never understood that he merely skimmed the surface of life.
Charlemagne, as I liked to call him, became the butt of Father’s jokes, and the two remained in a genial state of war for years. I recall Father lifting his gaze to heaven and saying, “How that man does wither every green and living thing!”
For me, the great gift of the Nortons was that through them I met Sara Sedgwick. Until then, Fanny Morse had been my closest friend. I loved Fanny dearly, but I soon loved Sara more. She was, you might say, the best and the worst thing that happened to me in those years.
The four young Sedgwicks were orphans, left in the care of a pair of kindly British maiden aunts, the Misses Ashburner. When Susan Sedgwick gave her hand in marriage to the much older Charles Eliot Norton, the two families became inextricably linked. Father could never accept the May–November union between Susan and Charles. “To think of that prim old snuffers imposing himself on that pure young flame!” he would say with a dyspeptic wince. “What a world!”
Charles was a man stricken with a perpetual melancholy, perhaps due to his belief that culture had been going steadily downhill for the past three or four centuries. Renaissance and baroque Venice was the apogee of civilization, and Tintoretto the greatest of artists. Although Charles’s private art collection included several Tintorettos and other masterpieces, nothing could seem to console him for the absence of art museums, Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, and even gentlemen (according to him) in America.
As we became friends, Sara and I read the same books, passing them back and forth with notes inserted in the pages, often in a private code. Like many eighteen-year-olds, we were affected in a deeply personal way by our reading and came to feel that we suffered from grave ennuis. These were triggered almost daily by the mind-numbing calls a woman had to make on infirm old ladies, distant relatives, and anyone who left a calling card in the brass bowl in your hall. Also by the Boston pieties, such as the habit of quoting other Bostonians (e.g., Julia Ward Howe, Miss Elizabeth Peabody, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes) as if no one else in the world had ever produced a memorable utterance. Above all we scorned the syrupy cult of womanhood embodied in such magazines as Godey’s Lady’s Book, which Sara and I would sometimes leaf through, hunting for the most moronic passages.
We were gorging ourselves, meanwhile, on subversive French ideas. We savored the scandalous worlds of Flaubert and Zola, and quoted Baudelaire as other Bostonians quoted Mr. Emerson. Opium and absinthe poets, natural realism, decadence, corrupt men, fallen women, kept women, cocottes—things that did not exist, as far as we knew, in Boston—thrilled us. We idolized George Sand, a woman with a man’s name who scandalized the bourgeoisie by smoking in public, leaving her husband, carrying on tempestuous love affairs with Chopin and the poet Alfred de Musset, among others, and threatening suicide at the drop of a hat. Most glamorously in our eyes, she dared walk around Paris at night dressed in men’s clothes.
“George Sand writes gracefully, but why, oh why, do they have to translate books about adultery and such things where any young person can get hold of them?” Mother said at supper one night when Sara and her sister Theodora were dining with us.
“You are forgetting, Mother, that we can read French. Sara has been very much corrupted by taking on Les Liaisons Dangereuses at a tender age.”
Puzzlement clouded the maternal brow and Father unleashed one of his great belly laughs, pointing his fork in my direction as if to award me the point.
“Well, leaving them in French would at least make them more difficult to read,” Mother persisted.
“Logic has never been our mother’s strong suit,” William remarked to Sara.
Father then said amiably that George Sand’s latest book made his gorge rise. “I don’t think I ever read a thing that reflects a viler light on her personal history. How bestial that woman must be, to grovel spontaneously in such filth.” Such abrupt changes in the conversational weather were par for the course at our house, and visitors were often taken aback. Sara had become very still, looking from face to face to judge the gravity of the quarrel—if it was a quarrel.
William said, “Whatever you do, Sara, don’t take our father seriously. No one does, you know.”
Father laughed heartily at himself as he went back to cutting up his meat.