The Madwoman Upstairs (15 page)

Notebook with a reddish hue

Used by Emily Brontë in 1842

Donated by Unknown

I didn’t see any “abundant fearlessness.” The book was comprehensive, careful, and chronological, but it was dull. I felt a note of relief, and then a small sense of triumph. The book was as dead as its subject matter. I flipped farther and farther until suddenly, halfway through, I landed upon a blank page. I frowned. In place of a photograph was a big, empty white space. Above it was a bit of text:

Sketch of fern

Painted by Anne Brontë at Thorp Green in August 1840

MISSING

And then—

Believed to be in the possession of the Whipple family

I let out a small, punctured wheeze. Slander? Libel? Lawsuit? I looked up from the book, to my left and to my right, thinking for a moment that everyone must be watching me. But the guests were carrying on as they should have, oblivious. I looked down and flipped through the next pages. I saw more and more blank boxes, proliferating like baby rats:

Day dress

Worn at Thorp Green by Anne Brontë in September 1842

MISSING

Believed to be in the possession of the Whipple family

My cheeks flamed. Every single missing artifact was attributed to us. What kind of personal vendetta was this? I flipped through more and more pages, furious. They were all lies. My family did not own “sketch of fern,” as riveting as it sounded. Nor did we have “mug decorated with birds,” or “painting of woman wearing ring.” Sir John had published the Vast Brontë Lie. My breathing became labored, agitated. If I was angry, it was only because anger is a good cover for complete terror. I was being attacked for a reason I could not fathom, by someone I had never met, and by someone who also happened to be far more powerful than I was. I glanced at Orville, hoping he might be able to see my overheated face and wide gecko eyes and leap to my rescue. But he was examining something underneath his fingernail and couldn’t be bothered. I replaced the book on the floor and tried to kick it farther under my seat. I don’t think I had ever felt quite so alone.

In a moment, a tiny Chihuahua of a woman with forcefully blonde hair took the makeshift stage in front of us. Her cheeks were taut and shiny, like the skin of an apple. She gave Sir John an obsequious introduction. I didn’t know he had attended Cambridge, Oxford, and then Cambridge again; nor did I know that he had published a total of seven books on the Enlightenment, which seemed unnecessary. He had been knighted for his cumulative body of work, including his “significant contributions to the study and theory of literature,” and had received several other awards that sounded equally severe and important. The more I listened, the more hopeless I felt. There would be no contradicting someone of his caliber. The great reward given to intelligent people is that they can invent all the rules and equate any dissent with stupidity. The lady onstage went on to list so many accolades that I imagined them all stacked on top of each other like pancakes. No one could fill Sir John’s shoes, not even he.

At last, the Chihuahua stopped talking and Sir John took the floor. I crossed my arms, almost instinctively. There he was: the Son and Heir of a Mongrel Bitch. I could almost hear Dad’s bacon frying in the pan as he muttered insults under his breath. Sir John was nothing like I had imagined. I had pictured a corpulent blond who looked like Nero. On the contrary, the man in front of me was thin, old, and tall—surprisingly handsome—with long hair the color of trampled snow. He had pulled most of it back with a hair tie and let it flop behind him like a beaver tail.

He walked to the podium with a slow stride. I had never seen an old man loom quite so tall. I sank back down into my seat. He had clearly been very attractive as a young man, and was neither as visually grotesque nor as interpersonally awkward as I would have hoped.

I turned to Orville and whispered, “How do you know him, again?”

“He’s very famous.”

“How famous?”

“It’s time to be quiet.”

I shut my mouth. Despite the raucous applause, Sir John did not look happy. In fact, he looked strangely irritated. His intellect must have impressed everyone but himself.

“Thank you for the introduction,” he said. “It is a pleasure to be here.”

He didn’t sound pleased at all. He had a clenched accent and spoke as though his jaw had been cemented shut at some point during his adolescence. I wondered briefly if his teeth were fused. We watched as he tried to adjust the microphone to fit his height. When it didn’t work, he wrenched it out of its socket. The speakers made a ferocious shriek.

“This afternoon,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you about the genesis of this book, and the proper relationship between textual criticism and authorial intent.”

I leaned over again and tapped Orville on the shoulder. I whispered, “Sir?”

“It’s time to be quiet,” he repeated.

“What’s textual criticism?”

“You don’t know?”

“Is it when you insult people using bits of text?”

Orville ignored my comment—I assumed I had been incorrect—and returned his focus to the stage. There was something familiar about Old Man Booker that I couldn’t quite place—the ghost of someone I knew, perhaps, lurking behind his features. Maybe my father had introduced us after all, once upon a time.

“As many of you know, the subject of authorial intent has been at the center of academic debates for decades,” said Sir John in a bored drawl. “There are those who would argue that our interpretation of a text should not be influenced by external factors, such as biographical information about the author, historical circumstances, or even words the author may have written to encourage a certain perception of his or her work. These people contend that the intention of the author is not only unimportant but entirely irrelevant, and that the only clues of value in literary criticism are the words on the printed page.”

He gave a dramatic and well-timed pause.

“These people,” he said, “are incorrect. So incorrect, I might add, that to espouse this philosophy is to surrender logic and regress to a savage, primitive time.”

I could feel audience members around me shuffle in their seats. A few people whispered to each other excitedly, as if Sir John Booker had just proposed the end of worldwide oppression. I glanced at Orville for an explanation, but to my surprise, he looked livid. I had never seen him show this much emotion before, but there it was. He was watching Sir John as if the man were a literary terrorist. I didn’t understand. Had Orville somehow been insulted? I guess I wasn’t used to textual criticism.

“When we read a work of fiction,” Sir John continued, “we enter into an implicit contract, one requiring us to infer, to our best ability, the author’s desired message. One might then ask: How are we to find out with certainty what a writer wanted to convey, if that writer is now dead? The least imperfect method we have is to look for evidence in the earliest versions of an author’s work. If we can identify any incremental additions and omissions between drafts, we can begin to remove errors in the dissemination of an author’s message. In my own study of the Brontës’ writing, I have come across ample evidence of self-censorship in their first, second, and third drafts of their novels, indicated by a few large, illegible sections that were entirely scratched out. What can this allow us to infer? Can we suppose that the novels’ original intent was to expose something the authors later decided to conceal?”

There was an air pocket of silence, which I’m sure he calculated for effect. It was the result, perhaps, of being in front of a classroom for most of his life. Sir John stared directly at the audience. Directly at me, I thought.

“A second method to arrive at an author’s true intent—which I have practiced for years—involves looking beyond the earliest drafts of a text, or anything the author wrote, for that matter, and finding instead the influences that shaped the author’s most mundane daily life. Clothing. Paintings. Yes, even dishware. We cannot separate the Brontës from their lives on the moors any more than we can extricate Jane from Charlotte, Agnes from Anne, or Cathy from Emily. The censorship we find in their writing is nowhere to be found in their unpublished, unscripted ‘doodles,’ sketches, and in some cases, letters. What did they exclude from their novels, and is it possible to piece together those omissions by carefully examining their revelatory old possessions?”

The word
doodle
was wonderful in a British accent, but no one else seemed to notice. I wasn’t making it up this time—Sir John did look at me, albeit briefly. I tensed.

“In my book, the one you see in front of you, you will not find a series of objects,” he said. “You will
find a true portrait of three of our most enigmatic authors, one that helps us unlock the riches inside their most cryptic novels. Thank you, and good afternoon.”

And with that, he gathered his notes and walked off the stage. The speech was over. It had barely lasted three minutes. The audience indulged Sir John with hefty applause until his lanky old-man body had left the stage. He did not look happy or proud; rather, his expression had the implacable apathy of a Byzantine portrait. I thought, perhaps, that he might be hiding something.

In any case, I believed I had found the source of disagreement between Sir John and my father, or at least one of them. For the most part, Dad fell in the camp of the “incorrect” people—the ones who believed in the sanctity of a text and judged a novel only on the words on the page. Dad, though, had a somewhat mutated version of this theory. To him, books were living, breathing things. Once a book left the brain of the author, it took on a life of its own, and served as the only liaison between the reader and the author. If you read carefully, the book could tell you all sorts of secrets—sometimes about its characters, and sometimes about its creator. Sir John was studying the Brontës’ lives for clues about their texts; my dad used the texts, and only the texts, to arrive at the truth about the Brontës.

I turned to say something to Orville but stopped myself. His cheeks were bone white and his jaw was twitching, ever so slightly. He was straightening the cuff of his sleeve, over and over.

I said, “You look angry.”

Orville said, “This was a preposterous discussion.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” He turned to me, face flushed. “Has it ever occurred to you that I might dislike the Brontës as much as you do?”

My brows lifted. No, the thought had not occurred to me. I sat back in my seat, silent. Orville turned his gaze back to the spot that Sir John had just vacated, his lips arranged in a hard, thin line. Then, without saying another word, he got up and left.

Sir John was standing to the right of Adonis’s half-naked statue when I approached him after the book signing and reception. I had waited until the crowd around him had thinned and scattered. One of his arms was dangling limply at his side; the other was clutching his opposite elbow as though containing a leaking wound. His cheeks looked like sunken battleships. There was no passion in his expression—just cool, collected anger. I wondered if he were secretly a Calvinist.

I was at an automatic disadvantage on crutches. By the time I hobbled near him, I was panting. He seemed to know exactly who I was. Perhaps he had taken one look at the crutches and the sweat pouring off my face and knew that I had to be my father’s daughter, trying to span a great, great distance between two people in the hardest way possible.

I introduced myself. “Samantha Whipple.”

He fixed his dark eyes full upon me. There was an unceremonious directness to his face that I recognized from somewhere—where?

“You look like your father,” he said, impassive. “Same veins in your eyes.”

Up close, I could see the fragile wrinkles around Sir John’s brow, left over from years of frowning. I waited; he waited. Both of us, I imagined, were expecting my father to materialize as a ghost in between us.

I said, “How are you?”

“Let’s step outside.”

It was late afternoon, and the sky was an even shade of white. Sir John walked in the detached way of someone who was accustomed to having students trail behind him. His body was frail and seemed much older up close than it had from a distance. When we reached the steps of the Ashmolean, he stopped, turned, and looked my way. I’d never thought I would fear a man’s brain more than I feared Orville’s, but here was a man whose intellect was even sharper—sharper because I was not yet sure of its full scope, and everything looming and undefined seemed terrifying.

Dad used to tell me that Sir John’s main faults included not knowing how to read, and not knowing how to think. He credited him with being the least imaginative man he knew. I wondered, now, if Dad had been wrong. Sir John was unfortunately the more respectable scholar of the two of them. Dad wrote the occasional “academic” article here and there, but he had never bothered to go to college and had spent the majority of his time reading and writing fiction in his hovel of a study. Sir John, meanwhile, had spent his career accumulating academic degrees, developing well-articulated theories with the support of the oldest and most prestigious institutions in the world.