The Madwoman Upstairs (7 page)

All true histories contain instruction
;
though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself.

It is a curious opening paragraph, which is perhaps why my father wrote in the margin:
CURIOUS
. Anne begins a piece of fiction by calling it a “true” history. I wouldn’t normally conflate Agnes’s words with Anne’s, but this was one of the most poorly masked autobiographies I had ever read. Agnes’s “true” history is, in many ways, Anne’s. The author is hiding behind her protagonist, desperate to blurt out something important, but unable to expose her true self. The only thing she can do is ask her readers to read her novel carefully, so we gain the “instruction” that will help us discover the “hard to find” treasure. What has Anne hidden inside the text? Did my father know, or was that what he was trying to decipher, alone in his study? Anne, like all good teachers, must have known that a discovery was valuable only if you figured it out on your own.

Her novel ended with the cruelest joke:
And now I think I have said sufficient.

Hah.

James Orville wrote me an e-mail the following week. It always surprised me to think of him using technology. It was the same surprise I would have felt upon seeing Odysseus whip out Google Maps.

To: “Samantha J. Whipple” [email protected]

From: “James Timothy Orville” [email protected]

Subject: Necessary Improvements

Dear Samantha,

I did not enjoy your essay on
Paradise Lost.
My recurring concern is the way in which you craft your sentences. Have you ever taken a course in creative writing? I think it might help ease the banality of your prose.

All best,

O.

From: “Samantha J. Whipple” [email protected]

To: “James Timothy Orville” [email protected]

Subject: RE: Necessary Improvements

Dear O,

I’m sorry you dislike the way I write sentences. Have you considered that it might be because you’re not reading them aloud, in a Russian accent? Usually I find that helps.

I have done creative writing before. I greatly dislike it.

Best,

Samantha

To: “Samantha J. Whipple” [email protected]

From: “James Timothy Orville” [email protected]

Subject: RE: RE: Necessary Improvements

It surprises me that you dislike writing, given your family history. In addition to next week’s assignment, I would like you to read the writing the Brontës penned as small children—you will locate it in the library under “Brontë Juvenilia.” Have you read
The Chronicles of Angria
? Or
The Tales of Gondal
? I think you will discover that reading stream of consciousness will help ease your inner critic.

I couldn’t think of a nonhostile response, so I chose not to respond at all. There was only one reason my “inner critic” was so well nourished: James Orville. Nothing squashes creativity quite like a frowning British man. And yes, I had read the Brontës’ juvenilia, thank you. All of it. The Brontë siblings began writing as very small children, before they even developed the full vocabulary to express their thoughts. As a child, I had read those stories cover to cover, over and over again. I did not have any brothers or sisters, and as a result, I would dream myself into the Brontës’ darkened living room and pretend that I was there, too, on those stormy evenings, in the middle of all the chaos and all the tantrums as the Brontë siblings wrote their very first stories.

In my mind, I would always be sitting next to Anne on the east side of the dining room table. Emily would be to my right. There would be blank parchment in front of us, because whenever you walked into the Brontë home, there was always blank parchment in front of you. Occasionally, Branwell or Charlotte would stand up by the fireplace to recite their latest masterpieces. I had never liked Branwell. He was confident, swaggering, bigmouthed, and incurably in love with himself—the kind of person who would never have been nice in high school. He was a young man in a world that existed to benefit young men. Twelve-year-old Charlotte would be small, compact, and quarrelsome, like a Viking child. The two of them would often act out the latest adventures from Angria, the imaginary world they had created together, one inhabited by swashbuckling adventurers and plagued by the political intrigue of the rakish Lord Northangerland. Emily, Anne, and I—seated at the table, glassy-eyed—would watch patiently as the latest drama unfolded.

I knew why Orville wanted me to read
The Chronicles of Angria
. Charlotte and Branwell’s prose was wild, passionate, and unencumbered. This was imagination in its purest form, perfectly transcribed from two young, uncorrupted brains. Historians later discovered
The Chronicles of Angria
and concluded that Charlotte and Branwell’s imaginary world was a sweet, playful, grammatically terrifying yet overall beautiful expression of childhood. Orville, I’m sure, would agree. I saw it quite a different way. Anyone who had spent time in that darkened living room with the girls and me would have seen how earnestly Anne and Emily would have loathed the writing of their two self-righteous siblings. Anyone who paid attention would know that Anne and Emily disappeared every night after midnight to develop their
own
imaginary land. Under the covers of Emily’s bed, they would exchange the daily news from Gondal, a glorious world of dueling dragons, ruined castles, haunted buildings, fainting heroines, underground passageways, crypts, catacombs, labyrinths, omens, villains, curses, and magic. The imaginary kingdom of Gondal became Emily’s pride and joy, more so than any of her future poetry—more so even than
Wuthering Heights.
It took months before Branwell and Charlotte found out about it. When they did, that’s when all the problems began.

Despite what historians (or Orville) might say on the subject, I knew that Angria and Gondal were not innocent fantasies. Each was an empire wrought of competition, whose outlandishness existed solely to vanquish the other. It was Charlotte and Branwell versus Emily and Anne. Whose fantasy world was better? Who had the best-developed characters, the most vivacious and fantastical plots? It was a war between imaginations, and it lasted far longer than any of the siblings could have anticipated. Angria and Gondal set the foundation for the central, unspoken conflict of the Brontë lives: which Brontë was the best?

At first glance, the answer was Branwell—that is, until he reached his twenties and drowned his talent in alcohol. The next-best bet was Emily, but she soon detached herself from real life, preferring her imaginary worlds to this one. That left just Charlotte and Anne. The Viking versus the Nobody. Who would be the greater success? Which one—Anne or Charlotte—would write their family into immortality? Could a small, timid child ever go up against the Great Charlotte? The competition between Anne and Charlotte was the silent struggle of their lives, and their best-kept secret.

I explained all of this to my mother once, but I stopped when I realized how deeply my intimate friendship with my father’s dead family frightened her. She had come to live with me soon after the funeral, in the non-charred half of the house, and assumed I was going mad, just like my father. She said, “Imaginary friends are not good, Samantha, not good at all.” I was beginning to sound too much like my dad, I suppose, and Mom hated every part of him she found in me. She viewed Dad as something radioactive that had exploded and left little pieces of himself lodged in the people around him. As the body closest to him, I had borne the brunt of the toxic aftermath. To be fair, her worries weren’t entirely unfounded. I used to pace around my father’s destroyed library in small circles for hours, like one of those crazed tigers at the zoo that only knows one path. The only thing that had survived the fire was the handwritten sign over the library door, which now read:
If you’re careful enough, nothing good or bad will ever.
Apparently, the fire had singed off the “happen to you.”

During those few months, I began writing. “Creative writing,” as Orville might call it. Every night, I wrote a new story and recited it to my mother. The plot would always involve me in the Brontë living room, talking to Emily about plants, dogs, or the rakish Lord Northangerland. Mom would clap after I read her my stories, then ask me if I was sure I didn’t want to be a doctor. I understood her concern. My stories were not very good. They didn’t have much of a story line, and, in the way of all serious fiction, they ended with the untimely deaths of everyone.

Mom grew worried. The more I wrote, the more I imagined she thought I’d go on to drink myself to death and set the house on fire. I resented her lack of trust. Occasionally I would walk around with deliberate facial tics, just to keep her on her toes. In retrospect, I should have been more sympathetic. Mom was, after all, only thirty-seven at the time. There were days when I’d find her sitting at the edge of the paddling pool, jeans rolled up, filling the air with old songs by The Carpenters. I didn’t realize how terribly sad she was, because at the time Terribly Sad was something only I had ownership over.

One evening, I was sitting in her bathtub, and she was brushing her teeth in an ankle-length cotton nightgown and gray socks. “We’ve Only Just Begun” was playing in the background. It was the most morbid love song I knew, the kind that played at funerals during slideshows and made you thankful to be alive but deeply conscious that Karen Carpenter was anorexic and had died of a heart attack at thirty-two. I was in the middle of reading her my latest story, “Life Is Pain, Mother.” She interrupted me before I even hit the climax:

“Just stop. Please, stop.” She flung a bit of toothpaste against the mirror.

“I—”

“Stop! Goddammit, do you hear me?” she snapped. “You sound like a human grenade.”

We didn’t speak of it ever again. Soon, I went to boarding school. She went to France. One of us was looking to grow up quicker; the other was looking to stay young.

I stopped writing after that. I feigned outrage at my mother, yet I was secretly relieved. I knew, deep down, that I had no talent. It was the same way guests at weddings secretly knew the couple would be divorced within a year. I was incapable of writing anything non-autobiographical. No matter what I tried, the protagonist ended up being a tall brunette who secretly longed to be outside her own skin. Even when the main character was short and blonde, she was actually tall and brunette. I had read Nabokov and I had read Milton and I marveled at their ability to create characters that bore no resemblance to their own selves whatsoever. Were they geniuses in a world of losers? Or were there glimmers of themselves in even their most outlandish fictional creations? My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them—even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage.

My lack of literary talent was more a tragedy than a disappointment. The real problem was this: my father was in the grave, and I could do nothing to write him out of it. I had no sweeping statements to make about loss, or life, or their inextricable link. His death was not beautiful, and I couldn’t pretend it was. At the same time I knew that, untreated by art, his death would go unacknowledged. It would be flat, useless, real, and forgotten. And if there was anything I disliked, it was waste. I began to dislike every author who ever lived. Hemingway, Keats, Pinter, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tolstoy. Rumi, Euripides, Roth, Poe, García Márquez. Homer too, because
The Odyssey
was so long, and so good. These were writers who could take life’s biggest disasters and turn them into something beautiful and universal. They could repurpose abandonment and morph it into an enduring form of connection.

More than anything, I began to resent women writers. Burney, Austen, Browning, Shelley, Eliot, Woolf. Brontë, Brontë, and Brontë. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte—my old friends—with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn’t seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn’t allowed them to write, yet they had spun fiery novels in spite of all the odds. Meanwhile, I was failing with the odds tipped in my favor. Here I was, living out Virginia Woolf’s wildest feminist fantasy. I was in a room of my own. The world was no longer saying,
Write? What’s the good of your writing?
but was instead saying,
Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me.
And yet I couldn’t produce anything of value. Now that I could say anything I wanted, I had nothing to contribute. I was unable to take advantage of the intellectual emancipation for which my own ancestors had struggled so fearlessly. I had taken the freedom Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë and Mary Wollstonecraft had sent me, and thrown it right back at them.