Peterson asked about our mother, her insanity. He wondered if Elena had ever feared that she herself was going mad, and she replied that she hadn’t. “Others have found me reclusive from time to time,” she said, “and they may have worried about me. But I have never worried about myself in that regard, nor have I ever thought the reclusive impulse to be anything but sane.”
Peterson then turned to her life in Standhope, her relationship to the town. Predictably, Elena’s attitude had softened with time, a change Peterson noted. “You seem to have grown almost wistful about your hometown,” he said lightly.
“Wistful?” Elena said. “No, I don’t think I’ve grown wistful.”
“Well, you’re certainly not as angry about it as you once were.”
“No, perhaps not,” Elena said, “but anger is not a sustaining emotion.”
“There was anger in Calliope,” Peterson said.
“That was outrage, not personal anger. There is a difference.”
“Which is?”
Elena shifted in her seat. “Outrage is propelled by a sense of justice,” she said, “but personal anger is propelled by a sense of personal insult, something like that.” She shifted again, and I saw her wince with pain. “I was glad to be angry with Standhope. The anger made me determined to leave it behind.”
Peterson nodded. “But what about all those people who feel the same kind of resentment but can’t leave it behind, who just smolder.”
Elena shrugged. “I would hope that if they come across a copy of New England Maid, reading it will help them to turn their phosphorescence into flame.”
Peterson then asked my sister about the time she had lived alone in Standhope with our mother. Elena explained that too much had been made of that period of her life, particularly in certain essays about her early work. For the first time, she spoke in some detail about her life on the road with our father. It turned out to have been less sordid than I had imagined, my father ever alert to her protection, steering her away from what he called “low types who just want one thing,” men, that is, not very different from himself. Her trips with him were also more rare than I had previously thought, and so for the greater part of those years she had, in fact, remained closeted in the house on Wilmot Street.
“And what about loneliness?” Peterson asked. “Were you lonely during this period?”
“Perhaps.”
“There is a persistent loneliness in your work.”
“If there were no loneliness in an artist’s work, then it would not be true,” Elena said. “But again, there is a difference between personal loneliness, which is debilitating, even pathetic, and metaphysical loneliness, the loneliness one feels as one who shares the human fate.” She stopped and took a drink from the glass of water beside her. “This second loneliness is something I feel all the time. The first I feel only on occasion, but never with such depth as to make me very knowledgeable on the subject.”
Peterson seemed to take this as a final pronouncement and moved on, this time to Elena’s early years in New York. Here she seemed almost to glow as she related her arrival, her years at Barnard, the gift she had received from Dr. Stein. “For Dr. Stein, learning was a mission,” she told Peterson, “a task of moral passion, something that had to be done not because it was fun, or even because it was noble, but because it was a mitzvah, a requirement of the highest order.” She smiled. “Once he said, ‘Elena, remember this, when Adam took a bite of fruit from the tree of knowledge, he did the right thing.’”
Peterson continued to question Elena about her life in New York for almost another hour before finally going on to the publication of New England Maid.
Elena was surprisingly dismissive about her first book. “It’s very dated, now,” she said.
“It’s still in print,” Peterson reminded her. “And very popular on college campuses.”
“For me it is dated,” Elena said. “And I don’t mean simply because many of the things it protested against no longer exist. It is dated as a part of my own development. It seems to me little more than a portrait of a girl resentful of her past and struggling to escape it. As such, it may be useful to people in the same predicament. But as a document of intellectual worth, it is more or less useless. It is filled with passionate attitudes and responses, some of which are legitimate, some of which are not.”
It took a moment for Peterson to get into the mood necessary to defend a book to its author. “Well,” he said at last, “it seems to be a book that at least suggests some early gifts, literary gifts, that sort of thing. The language is very beautiful in parts.”
“And overwrought in others,” Elena added. “I know my thundering passages are the ones most often quoted, but I think that my works fail to the extent that I forget that subtlety can be more eloquent than rhetoric.”
Peterson seemed somewhat uncomfortable with all this, as if Elena had robbed him of his purpose. “Do you like anything you have written?” he asked helplessly.
“Of course I do,” Elena said. “I like much of Calliope. I still read parts of Quality because I think what I said in certain places was true. I glance through some of my essays and short stories from time to time. I believe that Inwardness is a good book, as is To Define a Word.”
Peterson clearly had reservations, but he kept them to himself. “Well, since you mentioned Calliope,” he said, “why don’t we go on to that. Not the book, but your experience in the thirties.”
Under Peterson’s careful and intelligent guidance, Elena relived the thirties. She spoke of the distress but also of the glory of those times. Following the theme she had established, she said, “There is personal history, which is narrow, and for some of us the Depression will always be the happiest time of our lives, for reasons that could hardly be more obvious. It was a time, as they say, of commitment, and one never entirely forgets one’s own commitment. Long after the cause is dead, one’s stand is still remembered.”
Peterson mentioned Elena’s long association with Jack MacNeill. She told him about their cross-country journey in the middle of the Depression and laughed over its more inane moments: Jack passionately speaking to a crowd of farmers who, as he found out later, understood not one word of English; one night in Omaha when they were denied access to a mission soup kitchen because, as the minister explained, “the woman’s too pretty, you know, and these men here, they’ve lost enough”; Jack’s being roughed up at a labor meeting because he spoke so well that he was suspected of being a government agent.
It was almost noon before Peterson finally asked his last question about the thirties and Jack and all those things associated with that time in my sister’s life. I could tell that Elena was weary, even though her voice remained strong.
“Perhaps some lunch?” I suggested.
Elena nodded. “Yes, that would be good.” She turned to Peterson. “You will join us, I hope?”
Peterson agreed, and for the next hour or so we all sat around the kitchen table, talking of various things, carefully staying away from anything having to do with Elena’s life or work. By the time lunch was over, I think we were all bored with trivial conversation, and so it was with some relief that we walked back into the other room to resume the interview.
Unfortunately, Elena appeared very tired by the time Peterson began to question her again. Her hand trembled quite noticeably, and after a moment she discreetly tucked it beneath one of the folds of her dress.
Peterson smiled brightly. “Well, I’ll start the afternoon with an easy one: Did you like Paris?”
“Yes,” Elena said. She bent forward and began to rub her eyes. “Forgive me, but I’m a bit tired.”
“Of course,” Peterson said. He looked at me. “Should we stop?”
“You should ask Elena,” I told him.
He turned to her. “Should we stop, Miss Franklin?”
Elena straightened herself in the chair. “No, I don’t think so. I’d rather continue, Mr. Peterson, if you don’t mind.”
/> Peterson glanced down at his notes. “Some people have written that your stay in France made you somewhat anti-American, and that this attitude permeates Quality. Do you think that’s true?”
“I cannot make American writing better than it is, nor American culture more respectable,” Elena said. “In Quality I tried to perceive the real depth and range of American letters. This was not an easy task. One person, of course, could not really hope to do it. This accounts for lapses in the text, for its spottiness. Still, I did try to give an overview of America’s intellectual achievement, such as it is. This meant that some authors, the ones with few ideas, came off rather badly — Jack London, for example, and Hemingway, to some extent, and certainly poor Theodore Dreiser. Some critics thought Jefferson came out looking like an amateur philosopher and Hamilton a cynical genius. The point was to come to grips with what these people had actually said after the flags and drapery had been pulled from the edifice of their work. Some of these esteemed writers came up with very little in the hand and almost nothing in the mind. Some, less well known, came up with a great deal. And still others, like Melville, emerged intact. If any of this makes me anti-American, I don’t know why, and really, Mr. Peterson, I don’t care. Intelligence is not a soldier to be called forth by the bugle and the drum, nor is it an alchemist whose task is to turn baser metals into gold. To be attacked as an inadequate scholar is one thing; to be attacked as a traitor is another. I take the first criticism seriously, but for the second I feel nothing but contempt.”
“Well,” Peterson said, subdued, “I have always thought that charge unfair.”
Elena looked at him sternly. “So have I.”
Peterson cleared his throat nervously and glanced down at his notes again. “Perhaps we should discuss your life in France for a while.”
“Fine,” Elena said crisply. She looked at me, and I could not keep from smiling back at her. She was still my little sister, throwing her shoe at Dr. Houston.
Peterson then directed Elena through her life in Paris. She had little to say about it, however, and of all the episodes of her life it appeared the one she felt to have been the least significant. “Expatriation is a worthwhile experience, I suppose,” she said, “if expatriation is your theme. But it has never been mine.” She did talk about certain French writers of the time, however. She had most admired Simone Weil. “The Need for Roots has always seemed to me a genuinely remarkable book,” she told Peterson, “It has a kind of nostalgia for the good on every page. It struck me in reading it that a great moral voice doesn’t have to be dogmatic or didactic or even rhetorical.”
Elena was rapidly growing weary, but since both she and Peterson knew that this would be her last interview, the two of them pressed on to the fifties — her decision to return to the United States, her first encounter with Jason Findley and the relationship that ensued.
Elena revived somewhat at this point, speaking in a strong voice of her early efforts to write Quality, of her conceptual failures, and finally of Jason’s role in the making of the book.
“He encouraged me to write something of large scope,” she said, “and this was an important step for me. I needed to try something that required concentrated thought, specifically applied to specific works. Imaginative thought is different, so the writing of Quality was an experiment in reorienting the nature of my sensibility. The experiment served me very well, I think, because when I came to write a novel once again, it was with a precision that would not have been possible for me before. Whatever worth there is in To Define a Word is owed in part to Quality, and Quality is owed in part to Jason Findley.”
It was late afternoon by the time Peterson reached that time in Elena’s life which could roughly be thought of as the present. He asked her why she had left New York, and Elena dodged the question, saying only that she was in need of a rest and that Sam had offered this house. This seemed to satisfy Peterson, but I believe he must have known that my sister was gravely ill.
Before he left, however, he engaged Elena in a brief discussion of To Define a Word. Again, Elena seemed to revive slightly as she spoke of it.
“The better part of this book,” she told Peterson, “is not what Owen tells his daughter. These are often simple things. But the book is also a portrait, I hope, of the impulse to teach through memory and experience, to guide not by rules but by displaying to another — as Owen displays to his daughter — the fruits of a considered life.”
Peterson smiles. “Which are?”
“Complex, to say the least.”
“Some examples?”
“Well,” Elena said, “Owen understands that to say to an inexperienced person, ‘You must think, you must read, you must know, you must not allow yourself to be driven by uninformed impulses’ — to say this to the inexperienced is meaningless. So he tries instead to portray his own life in such a way that while he seems at times a failure and at times rather stupid, a nobility still emerges, apparent not in what he does, what he acquires in either wealth or fame, but in what he actually is. His is a plain life that only thought has enriched and made beautiful. In the end, his daughter at last grasps this, that had her father’s life been less considered, it would have been less full.” She smiled. “Lear is not tragic until he is no longer foolish. He might have died a senile old man, instead, he died a great one. Understanding makes all the difference, not just in a literary figure, Mr. Peterson, but in every human being who ever lived.”
Peterson left a few minutes later. He relinquished his formality for a moment and actually kissed my sister on her cheek when we said good-by to him on the porch.
“I hope you don’t find that impertinent,” he said with a smile.
“Not at all,” Elena said. “I have enjoyed this day with you, Mr. Peterson.”
“At last, call me Michael.”
“And you call me Elena.”
“That will be hard, but I’ll try,” he said. He turned to me and offered his hand. “Good-by, Mr. Franklin.”
I shook his hand. “Good-by, Michael.”
He laughed lightly, then got in his car and drove away, waving back to us as he disappeared behind a row of hedge.
“Are you tired?” I asked Elena.
“Very.”
“Want to go to bed?”
“It’s so early.”
I started to go back into the house but stopped because Elena lingered outside, still watching the road.
“It went well, I think,” I told her.
“So much left out, William,” Elena said. “Elizabeth, Harry Morton — so very much left out.”
“Still, it was a very good interview,” I said.
“I tried to tell the truth.”
“That’s all that matters.”
Elena shook her head. “No, it also matters for you to know just how far that is from what is real.”
“You can’t ever escape subjectivity, Elena,” I said.
“We must, William,” Elena said firmly. She turned to look at me. “We must.” Then she walked quickly back into the house and to her room.
Jack MacNeill came to visit us a few weeks later. Elena’s weakness was more visible by then, and I think that Jack recognized it right away, although he said nothing to Elena about her health. He must have known that he had only a short time left himself. He had already suffered several small strokes, which had left a slur in his speech and had half closed one eye. But his voice was still strong and his mind was as keen as ever.
Elena’s face brightened as she saw him ease himself from his car.
“Here he is,” she called.
I walked out of the kitchen, drying my hands on a dishtowel. “Right on time.”
Elena turned from the window. “Remember now that he’s not to know about me,” she said. She opened the door as he came up the stairs to the porch. When he saw her he straightened himself, then offered her a large smile.
“Elena,” he said. “Still radiant. Are you still smart, too?”
“S
marter than ever,” Elena said.
Jack stepped into the house and gathered Elena into his arms. “I never found anything better than this,” he said, looking at me.
Elena stepped out of his embrace. “Are you hungry, Jack?”
“Damn right, for life and victory.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of food,” Elena said with a laugh.
“That too,” Jack said. He offered me his hand. “Ah, Cold Bill, you must love this northern climate.”
“It suits me.”
“I knew it would,” Jack said. He looked at Elena. “But how about you?”
“It suits me, too.”
Jack glanced back and forth from Elena to me. “So, two kids from Standhope begin their bleak retirement,” he said. He smiled at Elena. “I read your latest book. Didn’t understand a word of it. It must be very great, Elena.”
Elena took his arm. “Come into the kitchen. I had William buy some raspberry tarts — your favorite, I believe.”
At the table, Jack energetically munched at his tart while Elena and I sat amazed at his appetite.
“I could give you two a good ribbing about leaving New York,” Jack said. “Hell, Bill, I might even offer you a quote, the one from Dr. Johnson: when you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life. Isn’t that what he said?”
“Yes. Really, Jack, you don’t have to play the illiterate farm boy with me.”
“True enough, Bill,” Jack said. “But you’ve always put me in that role.”
“Never intentionally.”
Jack waved his hand. “Ah, forget it. That’s stale bread, right?” He looked at Elena. “Anyway, I can’t really rib you too much about leaving New York, because I’m doing the same thing. Only I’m going to Connecticut.”