A Kind of Redemption

I’ve been a passionate reader all my life, be it of labels on jam jars or the small print on the back of tax forms, aged copies of free newspapers left on seats on the London Underground, Peter Rabbit or Plato. Reading is more than pleasure, it’s like breathing. Generally, though, I read for aesthetic reasons (literature, to enjoy the writer’s skill), to keep up (newspapers and periodicals) or for escape (thrillers, the blacker the better). Or that was true before my mother died.

She too loved to read and, though not formally educated past the age of 16, had read all the great canonical works of English literature from Shakespeare to Lawrence. She especially loved poetry: nineteenth-century romanticism was meat and drink to her and she would quote reams of Meredith and Hopkins and Rossetti as well as the poets she always referred to as ‘Sheats and Kelley’. A perfect poetry reader in the Keatsian sense – ‘poetry is not poetry until it is proved upon our senses’ – she took it all personally. After she died, in remorse and regret I began a pilgrimage through the books she had loved, following her trackless feet, looking for clues. Clues as to what to do, how to bear it. George Eliot is especially suited to this thirsty reading. Whilst receptive to the surfaces of life, with her lush landscapes and crackling comic scenes, she stares seriously into the heart of things, where the small actions and feelings of daily life add momentously to good or evil. She is not shy of drawing out moral questions and setting them in an eternal frame. It’s not fashionable to be ‘moralistic’ and take a firm stand, to say ‘falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult’ as Eliot does, or to skewer our practices of self-exculpation as she does when observing in Adam Bede of the false lover Arthur Donnithorne: ‘our deeds determine us, much as we do our deeds’. Yet, strangely, if one feels, as I did, frozen on the thorns of misery, the kind of world view that says ‘It’s not so bad really’ or ‘You did your best’ or ‘What does it matter anyhow?’ is not the least bit comforting, whereas what Eliot called (in a letter of 1860) ‘conscious clear-eyed endurance’ does offer balm by way of that constant Eliotian virtue ‘fellow-feeling’. In Adam Bede George Eliot held out her hand, helped me scramble to the shore. The story is simply outlined. In mid-nineteenth-century rural England, Adam Bede is a young master craftsman, whose brother Seth is in love with Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher and protofeminist. When his drunken father dies in an accident, Adam’s remorse pulls Dinah in to help his mother. Adam is in love with Hetty Sorrel, the kittenishly pretty (but not beautiful) niece of his neighbours, the Poysers. The hardworking Poysers are tenants of old squire Donnithorne who, despite the voice of conscience represented by Parson Irwine, is a harsh landlord. Donnithorne’s spoilt, handsome grandson, Arthur, flirts with Hetty, turning her head and his own. One day, as the lovers are parting, Adam surprises them, follows Arthur and knocks him down in a fight. Ashamed, Arthur breaks off with Hetty but not before, unbeknownst to him – and her – he has got her pregnant. Hetty agrees to marry Adam, but on the eve of marriage she runs away, seeking Arthur. Alone and friendless, she gives birth to her baby and abandons it in a wood. Adam searches for her until he finds the truth. Shame and horror reverberate around the village, ‘the little world’ which Eliot has created. Adam is disgusted and wounded. He forces Arthur to confront his guilt. Hetty is tried for murder, refuses to confess until the last minute, is reprieved and transported. Arthur joins the army, Adam and Dinah marry, and the Poysers continue to farm. Nothing is as before, yet all continues. At key moments in this chronicle, Eliot turns a spotlight on individuals: Hetty, ‘a cherry with a hard stone inside it’ as her aunt puts it, self-centred, none too bright, exquisitely sexual; Arthur, wriggling away from knowledge of his own misdeeds – ‘Self-accusation was too painful to him: he could not face it. He must persuade himself that he had not been very much to blame’; and Adam’s jealous mother Lisbeth – ‘She wished all the old troubles back again, for then it mattered to Adam what his mother said and did.’ Yet here, too, is theconstant underlying current of compassion:

Your fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions, and it is these people – amongst whom your life is passed – that it is needful you should tolerate, pity and love; it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire.

Is such talk out of date in these ironic post-modern times? Are such stories, where sexual adventures are so harshly punished, relevant to our more sophisticated views? In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot makes a telling point about sophistication and irony when pain strikes. Life, she says, in ‘“good society” . . . floated on gossamer wings of light irony’, but such life is costly, based on social injustice, relying on misery among those who live ‘in a chill, uncarpeted fashion, amidst family discord unsoftened by long corridors’. When you are miserable, you need a tonic, ‘something that will give patience and feed human love when the limbs ache with weariness, and human looks are hard upon us’. What could that be? Eliot gives a very unmodern answer: ‘something clearly that lies outside personal desires, that includes resignation for ourselves and active love for what is not ourselves’. What does she mean? God? Maggie, the heroine of The Mill on the Floss, at first finds this answer unpalatable. ‘Her own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded for herself that her part should be played with some intensity,’ as Eliot says, with a touch of asperity. Maggie is a romantic figure, lovable but wrong-headed. The reader feels for her. The Mill on the Floss is a more perfectly realized novel than Adam Bede. But I could not identify with Maggie. I did not feel lovable. Adam is less educated than Maggie, less complex, apparently less akin to contemporary us, and yet I felt like Adam, who wishes he could have done better by those he loved, who messes up and tries again and messes up and tries again. Of course the two of us could not be superficially less alike – a big, young, strong, handsome carpenter who has taught himself maths, and a small middle-aged Jewish writer from London who has a fit when a window breaks. And yet, and yet. Suffering is universal, however much we wish it otherwise. Personality is somewhat irrelevant when the night comes falling from the sky. Picking through Adam Bede, time and again the insights crash like chords resolving themes in a symphony. Though the modern reader shrinks at some of the religiosity of Dinah’s speeches (and, interestingly, George Eliot herself was no longer a believer when she wrote the novel) or dissents from the castigation of sexual shame (by a woman who lived happily outside legal marriage for most of her adult life), so much transcends its era. Here is Adam musing on his relationship with his father:

Adam’s mind rushed back in a flood of relenting and pity. When Death, the great Reconciler has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

And here is the same thought, reworked into the situation of the funeral:

Adam thought but little today of the hard work and earnings he had spent on his father: his thoughts ran constantly on what the old man’s feelings had been in moments of humiliation, when he had held down his head before the rebukes of his son. When our indignation is borne in submissive silence, we are apt to feel twinges of doubt afterwards as to our own generosity . . . ‘Ah, I was always too hard’‚ Adam said to himself, ‘there’s more pride than love in my soul, for I could sooner make a thousand strokes of my hammer for my father than bring myself to say a kind word to him . . . it’s allays been easier for me to work nor to sit still. It seems to me now if I was to find father at home tonight I should behave different, but there’s no knowing – perhaps nothing ’ud be a lesson to us if it didn’t come too late . . . there’s no real making amends in this world.’

Despite her sympathy, Eliot’s clear gaze spares no wrongdoing. Irwine warns Arthur, in the tones of Greek tragedy: ‘Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry with them their terrible consequences . . . consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.’ Adam confronts Arthur: ‘I don’t know what you mean by flirting, but if you mean behaving to a woman as if you loved her and yet not loving her the while, I say that’s not the action of an honest man.’ And later, Arthur trembles into wretched self-awareness: ‘All screening self-excuse, which rarely falls quite away while others respect us, forsook him for an instant, and he stood face to face with the first great irrevocable evil he had ever committed.’ Adam becomes chastened into looking outwards through loss. He tries to learn through his mistakes: ‘I’ve known what it is to repent and feel it is too late: I felt I’d been too harsh to my father when he was gone from me – I feel it now, I’ve no right to be hard towards them that have done wrong and repent.’ Even in his happy ending he reflects: ‘Other folk were not created for my sake, that I should think all square when things turn out right for me.’ Despite her sternness, George Eliot does offer a kind of redemption, hardly won. ‘But it is not ignoble to think that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our own personal share of pain.’ It’s a redemption based on draughts from a bitter cup. It’s not God, but making as good a life as possible, a better hope for this suffering mortal than pie in the sky when we die. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it – if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering . . . Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy – the one poor word which includes our best insight and our best love.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 7 © Victoria Neumark 2005