“Yes,” I said. “You know, the sort of dignified silence that is the only permissible response to an exaggerated compliment.”
Martha nodded. “Go on.”
“Well, Alexander then singled out the particular aspect of Quality he most admired,” I told her. “It was what he called the analytic quality of the book, its sharp precision.”
“Well, it certainly has that,” Martha said.
“Yes, it does. But I could see that Alexander’s comment bothered Elena. As he went on, she became noticeably agitated, and just before Saundra came into the restaurant, she held up her hand to shut Alexander up and she said, “Remember, Alexander, one does not find the truth simply by splitting veils.”
Martha regarded me expectantly for a moment, waiting for me to continue.
“That’s it?” she asked when I added nothing else. “That’s the whole anecdote?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Well, what does it mean?”
“I’m not sure, Martha, but I believe that it fits into her life somewhere.”
“Can you be more specific?”
I shook my head. “I wish I could, but everything seems to be floating right now.”
It was still floating when I drove Martha into Hyannis sometime later. I felt very tired by the time I got back to the house. It was not a specific weariness, just a general sense of being adrift in insubstantial atmospheres. To escape the discomfort of that feeling, I went to bed early, found that I could not sleep, and rose again. I sat for a long time in the back room, with nothing but the blackness of the nocturnal sea before me, that utter blackness which is like no other.
After a time I took down Elena’s copy of Quality once again, reading at random but searching for a clue, as some deranged Christian mystic might roam through the Bible, turning over verses, looking for the guidepost from the hand of God. Only one passage struck me, the final one of the book:
When one searches through the letters of our nation, its thought as written, spoken, or in law decreed, one finds no single strand of steady and precise reflection. Rather, the mind that presents itself to our concentration is one of shifts and undulations, full of praise and squabbling, duty and resistance, a consciousness vaguely groping for half-imagined answers to the questions of freedom, fulfillment, and existence. To these timeless questions, our men of thought have attached issues of justice and retribution, privilege and equality, labor and creation, community and individuality — these and scores of others, which are little different from the common thought of man. The study of our letters, therefore, suggests the weaknesses of our probing, both singly and as a people. For on this abundant continent, all things have been emboldened except the mind, and thus we have remained no more intellectually enriched than the far less privileged body of mankind. We have learned how to possess, but not how to nurture; how to acquire, but not how to cast aside; how to calculate, but not how to think.
I closed the book, alarmed by how stern that passage was, how severe and unforgiving. I opened the book again a few moments later and reread the paragraph. I looked carefully at each phrase, foolishly convinced that somewhere in the words was the key to her life. Here was the Rosetta stone lying open in my lap. I read it again and again, each time more slowly, pausing after each sentence as if waiting for an echo.
Suddenly, I saw Elena as she appeared on the cold, blustery day we buried Mary Farrell. The service was held in a chapel near the coast of Maine. I had an image of Elena rising and walking to the altar. I could feel the hush of the crowd as she moved forward. At the altar, she set her eyes firmly on the people who waited before her, her hands plunged deeply into the pockets of her black wool coat. And even as I sat in the back room of her house on the Cape, I could feel myself leaning forward to hear her, just as I had done that day in the freezing chapel. I knew that I was approaching what she must have meant, first in Quality, when she wrote of a material abundance which had done nothing to enrich the mind, and then, later, with Alexander, when she had alluded to the limits she had discovered in her own scholarship. It was clear that she was after larger game now. But I could not exactly name it. In my mind I saw her once again as she stood behind the altar. She took a deep breath before beginning. Then she spoke, and I knew it, the secret of my sister’s mind.
The Quality of Thought in American Letters was published by Parnassus Press in the fall of 1968. It could hardly have been issued at a better time. The nation was reveling in an orgy of self-immolation over poverty and racism and the war in Vietnam. Elena’s book could only be seen as another log on that fire. It was snapped up by student and teacher alike, quoted continually by the new wave of young historians, sociologists, and literary critics, hailed as a monumental attack upon the very foundations of American intellectual achievement, and generally regarded as a sweeping work of literary, historical, and intellectual criticism, a work of enormous insight and deep disaffection.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Elena found any of this a surprise. Certainly she knew what was in her book, and certainly she had by then had enough experience as a writer to know, as she said in the 1980 interview, that “that which is written is not necessarily that which is read.” But I believe the extent of the notoriety the book achieved did genuinely astonish her. She was deluged with requests for her attendance at various rallies, forums, symposia, and conferences. She received teaching offers from fourteen universities, was written about in the popular press (Time called her “the femme fatale of American letters” but at least buried the story in the back of the magazine; Newsweek, on the other hand, put her face on its cover), she even appeared on television one Sunday afternoon, looking very pale and edgy under the white lights.
For a time the enormity of all this seemed to distract her. She took a certain delight in the book’s success. She began work on a two-volume edition of her essays and short stories, a project Sam rushed into print, hoping to capitalize on Quality’s extraordinary success. She spoke to most of the groups that asked her, at least attempted to reply to her steadily increasing mail, and in general worked feverishly to measure up to what seemed expected of her.
Inevitably, however, the wave subsided, and as it did those concerns which had risen in the last passage of Quality, but which had been buried under the flurry of public acclaim that followed its publication, began to emerge again in Elena. She talked insistently about methods of literary and historical analysis. Epistemology became a passionate interest. She discussed the classics of moral philosophy as if she had only recently discovered them. As a mind, she was very much alive.
But she also grew more aloof. The early energy she had poured into the essay and short story collections quickly dissipated, and Barney Nesbitt, her latest editor, began to complain that Elena was intentionally avoiding him. Once, during a luncheon, he suggested that she might have caught what he called the “star syndrome.”
“Maybe she thinks she’s too big for Parnassus now, William,” Barney said.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Really? Well, she doesn’t return my calls,” Barney said. “I’m her editor, William, not some starry-eyed groupie, you know what I mean?”
“Of course.”
He smiled, leaned across the table, and patted me on the shoulder. “Do what you can with her, will you, old boy? She shouldn’t let fame go to her head. Like the Romans say, it’s fleeting.”
I nodded. “I’ll talk to her.”
But when I next saw my sister, I found that it was almost impossible to talk to her about anything even remotely touching on her career. Instead, over an extended dinner, she talked about Elizabeth and Julien Tavernier, about fatality and moral choice. She mentioned that she had written Jack MacNeill and was planning to visit him in Wales and that Mary had written her. But they seemed no more than distant references to her now.
Finally, I had had enough. I interrupted her in mid-sentence, actually grabbing her hand as I did so. “What are you look
ing for, Elena?” I asked.
To her credit, she did not pretend that the question surprised her; she simply answered it. “I don’t know,” she said.
“You must have some idea.”
She thought about it for a moment but came to no conclusion. “Maybe you just go through times when what’s killing you, William —” She stopped, as if she had grasped it. “When what’s killing you is your life.”
She flew to Wales a few weeks later and spent almost two weeks with Jack MacNeill. But when she came back to New York, she looked anything but refreshed. As it turned out, Jack had had a slight stroke only a month or so before her arrival. It had not permanently damaged him, but Elena could see other distressing effects — a certain weariness and dread, as she described it, a premonition of the end.
“He looked a great deal older,” Elena told me on the evening she returned. She looked at me as if hoping I might have some answer for all our inevitable decay. “He got very maudlin one evening,” she went on. “He said he was just a flicker now, not a flame, just part of the effluvia left in the wake of a revolution that never happened.” She shook her head. “It should not end this way.”
Elena remained in this somber mood for almost two years. There were no fits of uncontrollable depression, no excessive reclusiveness, and certainly no sudden explosions of rage or resentment, but her work grew darker, and the stories she wrote during this period are filled with a straining after an impossible exactitude. In “The Treatise,” an old professor spends his last days perfecting an essay begun in his youth; it remains unfinished when he dies. In “Attorney’s Fees,” a brilliant lawyer searches for that one precedent which on its own will win his case, rejecting all others because, as he says, “I am sick to death of standing on the trap door of ambiguity.” And in “Just a Line or Two,” a college student attempts to explain his decision to leave school to his father with such complete precision that it cannot possibly be misunderstood, but finds after reading the final draft of his letter that “there was nothing in it at all, except maybe a dreadful opacity resulting from my yearning to be clear.”
Elena was probably at work on the final version of “Just a Line or Two,” in March of 1971, when Mary Farrell died in San Francisco.
It was Martha who telephoned to let me know. I was sitting in my apartment, chuckling over the schoolboy gossip in a letter from David, when the phone rang. I suppose there was still an edge of amusement in my voice when I answered it.
“Mr. Franklin, this is Martha Farrell, Mary’s daughter,” Martha said. It was typical of Martha to introduce herself this way. I had met her many times, of course, but until she got her doctorate, she always addressed me with much formality.
“Well of course, Martha,” I said cheerfully. “How are you?”
“I wanted to let you know that mother died yesterday,” Martha said calmly.
All the world seemed to grow silent for the second or two I stood with the phone pressed to my ear.
“I was at Berkeley when it happened,” Martha added matter-of-factly.
I finally found my voice. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Martha.”
“You know, she had this small farm in Maine,” Martha said. “It was my father’s old place, or his father’s, or something like that. It goes back for generations. Anyway, there’s a little chapel on it, evidently. Unless somebody’s torn it down or something. Well, my mother visited it once. I guess she fell in love with the place. She’s put it in her will that she wanted to be buried there.”
“I see.”
“It’s not far from Portland.”
“So, you’re going to bring the body back East?”
“Yes,” Martha said crisply. “I think we can have the funeral a week from today. I suppose some of you would like to come.”
“Of course.”
“Well, just let everybody know about my mother,” Martha said. “I’ll send you all the details about the place in Maine. And I guess I’ll see you in a week.”
“Yes, you will,” I told her.
“And by the way,” Martha added quickly, “I think that my mother would have liked your sister to speak at the ceremony. There’s no minister, or anything like that. You know how Mother felt about religious things. But I do believe that she’d have liked for Elena to say something.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Good,” Martha said. Then she hung up.
I called Elena right away. She received the news of Mary’s death quite calmly. Her voice remained cool, measured, betraying nothing excessive in her grief. “Is she going to be buried in California?”
“No. A little chapel not far from Portland, Maine.”
“Oh yes, she once told me about that place,” Elena said.
“We’ll fly up. Sam will probably want to go with us.”
“Yes, of course,” Elena said. In my mind I could see her standing by the window, the phone trembling slightly in her hand, using all her strength to steady her voice.
“Martha would like for you to speak, deliver the eulogy,” I told her.
“All right,” Elena said.
I started to tell her more, explain that Mary had simply died in the park while staring out toward the bay, but I heard the receiver click down on the other side. Clearly Elena had already heard enough.
We all flew up to Maine the next week, Sam and Elena and me. Elena sat silently beside me on the plane. Several times she drew a few pages of lined paper from her purse and read them over to herself, making small changes with her pen. It was clear that she had given these remarks a good deal of thought.
Martha met us at the airport. She seemed pleased to see us, particularly Elena. I suppose that by then she thought herself rather a fan of my sister. She had read all her books and could discuss them with considerable knowledge. But she was not fawning in the least. Martha was far too much like her mother ever to play the sycophant. “Everything’s arranged,” she said, “and I hope it all goes off with a minimum of confusion.” I almost smiled at the directness of her manner. Mary would have understood it, perhaps even admired it, in anyone but her daughter.
Elena suddenly moved forward and drew Martha into her arms. “I loved your mother very much,” she said.
Martha smiled sadly. “Yes, I know.” She drew back, then took both Elena’s hands in hers. “You know, Mother and I weren’t that close, in some ways,” she said. “I always thought she could have been so much more.”
Elena drew her hands slowly from Martha’s grasp and sank them into the pockets of her coat. “We can never know what is possible for someone else, Martha.”
Martha’s face tightened. She understood that she had been gently scolded. “Well, I suppose we should go to the chapel now,” she said, avoiding any further discussion of her mother.
It was a small stone church. Mary’s coffin had been placed at the front, below the raised pulpit. It was covered with roses. There were no other flowers. Long before, Mary had decreed that her coffin be closed, since even in death she did not want her wrinkles to show.
The chapel was almost completely full. Even so, it was a small assembly. A few people had flown in from California. They were quiet and well-dressed, and in their manner appeared more to have been the friends of Mary’s husband than herself.
The ceremony began with a song played on a beat-up piano by an old woman Martha had hired for the occasion. Mary herself had selected the song, however. It was “Hail to the Chief,” and when it began, a round of quiet, nervous laughter swept the crowd.
Martha was smiling as she stepped up behind the lectern when the music stopped. “My mother was not high on ceremony,” she said. “She planned this funeral to be a simple affair. She only wanted one person to speak, Elena Franklin.” She glanced back at us.
The crowd shifted uneasily as Elena rose and walked to the front of the chapel. When she reached the altar, she turned slowly and lowered her hands into the pockets of her coat.
“I suppose that if I asked
any one of you to describe Mary Farrell,” she began, “at least part of that description would include her wit. She made it that part of her we remember most. Yet I think she knew how cynical and blind wit can be if it is not joined to other virtues.”
She stopped and glanced quickly at Martha, who sat in the first row, then back up at the rest of us. “Thought is the greatest achievement of the mind, hope the greatest achievement of the heart, and goodness the greatest achievement of the will. When wit diminishes any of these, it reduces our humanity. This was sometimes the case with our friend, as it is the case, to more or less degree, with all of us. The point, however, is that Mary used her wit to reveal herself, not to conceal. She had the peace that comes from being exactly what she seemed. She accepted her limits and ignored her possibilities. Her knowledge of herself was very deep, and she possessed what Emily Dickinson called ‘apocalyptic wisdom,’ the sort that will not be diverted from the terrifying implications of its understanding. She had stared down into that abyss from which so many turn their eyes, and in the face of that knowledge, her wit became her means of survival. It did not relieve her of her pain, but it kept her from imposing it on us.
“It has been said that a book can never be both great and angry, and the same can be said of a life. Anyone who knew Mary knew there was anger in her. Part of it flowed from the simple fact that she was a woman who understood the peculiar contradictions of that estate. She knew that the man’s world in which her life was imbedded would praise her dutifulness, then allow her only trifling duties; extol her intuitiveness, then bar her from the harder world of fact by sneering at her illogic; exalt her sense of service, then feed upon it. Particularly in her youth, Mary felt the constriction of her womanhood. But she also felt the larger human failure from which it came: the casual abandonment of that principle of moral thought which requires consistency between the admiration of a virtue and the treatment of it. And I think that she saw this as part of a larger debility: an indifference to suffering that is not your own. ‘Every man is an island,’ Mary used to say, laughing as she did so, ‘so make sure you check for whom the bell tolls, because if you’re lucky, it may not be for you.’’