Yours Ever (44 page)

DURING THE SAME ERA
when Abbott’s metamorphoses briefly intrigued the public, Jean Harris became even more famous for an even more improbable transformation.

For ten years after the headmistress of the Madeira School was sentenced to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for murdering her lover, the famous “diet doctor” Herman Tarnower, the letters she wrote to the journalist Shana Alexander functioned as Harris’s “steam vent.”
Marking Time
, a selection of them from 1989 to 1991, is not without Abbott’s tendency toward apologia (Harris refers, for instance, to the “New York gulag”), but the collection is generally so much more measured and proceeds from an earlier lifetime so much more imaginable than Abbott’s that it does manage to read like a collection of letters instead of documents.

Jean Harris’s prison sufferings are undeniable: her depression; her fear of stroke; her failure to get one of the pardons handed out, year after year, at Christmastime. Her powers of evocation usually operate by inversion: the smaller the humiliation, the more finely observed and affecting her rendition will be. One day, for no reason, a favorite blouse is deemed an infraction of the rules: “suddenly its cowl neckline was called a turtleneck, and I couldn’t see my visitor until I walked back up the hill to my cell to change it. I was too angry to sit and visit. For the first time in nine years I told them to send my visitor away.” What she can never get used to is “being considered a liar and a cheat and being treated like one every day. A whole lifetime to the contrary is as nothing.”

About prison’s hierarchical chemistry, Abbott wrote: “Among themselves, the guards are human. Among themselves, the prisoners are human. Yet between these two the relationship is not human.
It is animal.”
If Bedford Hills is less brutal than the array of penitentiaries from which Abbott gained his experience, the general impossibility of relating to the guards still provides Jean Harris’s letters with one of her major themes. The system runs on expensive, petty cruelties. Mulberries growing on the grounds of “this ridiculously overfenced pen” cannot be eaten because they are “supposed to go to waste.” One guard, doing nothing to change Harris’s opinion that the female officers are worse than the male, insists on calling her “Princess Di.”

The “ladies” she refers to are her fellow inmates, with whom she has nothing and everything in common. The teaching she does—parenting classes—may be “a minor drop in the ocean,” but a reader sees what was once a mere profession for Harris becoming something more like a true vocation. Thrown amidst sadder souls than she ever knew existed, she has enough respect for the ladies not to take them on their own terms: “How do you measure the emptiness of a life of, say, twenty-five or thirty years that has not somehow stumbled across the knowledge that birds build nests? Don’t ask me who am I to look askance at another person’s culture. Don’t tell me a tree never grew in Brooklyn. Don’t tell me they’re street smart. Today I consider that an oxymoron. I’ve seen too many of the street smart, and heard them, too, to be moved by their much-touted smarts.”

She learns humility during her dozen years at Bedford Hills, but one can’t say she overdoes it or that the crisp contempt her old job sometimes required doesn’t serve her even better in prison. If nothing else, it helps her make plain to Alexander a whole cellarful of unpleasant realities: “There’s something about sharing a tub in an institution where herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, and TB are on the rise and one in five test positive for the AIDS virus that quenches one’s desire for a nice hot bath.” A reader who appreciates her considerable wit can’t help wondering what Harris, in her past life, might have said about her own crime, what bons mots she might have discharged, on better stationery, about the boarding-school head who iced her lover.

The new world she moves in is squalid and scary, but she does
her best to be its Madame de Sévigné, evoking its elaborate customs and hidden structures. The longer letters become not manifestoes like Abbott’s, but small essays. There’s a mordant tour de force on the actual similarities of prisons and country clubs, and a primer of recidivism: “Prisons work the way companies do that build obsolescence into their products so you have to buy them again and again.” She worries about the egocentrism of what she mails to Alexander—“what I care about, what I find interesting, what I just learned”—but the letters don’t strike a third party that way, not when they contain the observations of someone with no choice in what she observes. They actually are a kind of grand, ongoing rise to the occasion.

It was a truly egocentric letter—a pained, frantic and pathetic one—that helped send Jean Harris to prison. At her trial in 1980–81, the district attorney attempted to establish deliberate intent in the murder of Herman Tarnower by introducing the “Scarsdale Letter,” written to the doctor by Harris just before the shooting. It is a long cry against Tarnower’s indifference; against the misbehavior of his new and, of course, younger mistress; and finally, against Harris’s own neediness and vanished pride. She wrote to Tarnower for probably the same reason she shot him: relief.

“I am distraught as I write this—your phone call to tell me you preferred the company of a vicious, adulterous psychotic was topped by a call from the Dean of Students ten minutes later and has kept me awake for almost 36 hours. I had to expel four seniors just two months from graduation and suspend others. What I say will ramble but it will be the truth—and I have to do something besides shriek with pain.” She lists Tarnower’s “years of broken promises,” involving everything from financial help with dentistry to the apartment in New York he never bought for the two of them. “It didn’t matter all that much, really—all I ever asked for was to be with you—and when I left you to know when we would see each other again so there was something in life to look forward to. Now you are taking that away from me too and I am unable to cope.”

Once displaced from his paltry attentions, she had to sustain
their long-distance affair entirely at her own expense, financially and otherwise: “All our conversations are my nickels, not yours—and obviously rightly so because it is I, not you, who needs to hear your voice. I have indeed grown poor loving you, while a self-serving ignorant slut has grown very rich.” The younger mistress’s alleged harassments (cutting up Harris’s clothes) and the older one’s admitted retaliations (“I have, and most proudly so … ripped up or destroyed anything I saw that your slut had touched and written her cutesie name on”) sound eerily like a preview of the pointless prison vendettas that lie ahead for Harris to witness.

Strung out on pills the doctor dispensed with his only evidence of liberality, Jean Harris began to feel desperate. “To be jeered at, and called ‘old and pathetic’ made me seriously consider borrowing $5,000 just before I left New York and telling a doctor to make me young again—to do anything but make me not feel like discarded trash—I lost my nerve because there was always the chance I’d end up uglier than before.” Declarations like this one rendered her claim that she went to Tarnower’s house to kill herself, not him—and that he died by accident in a struggle over the gun—almost plausible.

After her conviction, Jean Harris would use the prison mails to provide herself with another, less explosive, release (“I write because there’s no one to talk with, except you, my friend”) and also to do a bit of good from where she was. Her new return address commanded attention when seen by recipients like Barbara Bush, her fellow Smith alumna, to whom Harris wrote about childcare legislation in May of 1990. In her 1981 book about the shooting and trial, Diana Trilling argued that prison might afford Jean Harris an opportunity to be “splendid” than she had never had before. At moments in
Marking Time
she comes close.

THE BLOATED
, graying debtor who died in the Hôtel d’Alsace with a few friends and some champagne (a pleasure he referred to by its slang name “Boy”) had for the previous quarter century dispatched letters with as much deliberateness as he had squandered life. We
shall never know how many of Oscar Wilde’s letters were destroyed in 1895 during fits of puritanical rage and fear by their once-delighted recipients, but when Sir Rupert Hart-Davis’s collection of the surviving correspondence appeared in the early 1960s, W. H. Auden—who believed such publications were generally an invasion of privacy and who a decade later would ask that his own letters be destroyed by all who had them—pronounced Wilde’s letters an exception: “From the beginning [he] performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands. Drama is essentially revelation; on the stage no secrets are kept. I feel therefore, that there is nothing Wilde would desire more than that we should know everything about him.”

Wilde’s early letters from Oxford roll along on the gentle sort of humor he would later banish to make room for wit. To his mother and his friends Reginald Harding and William Ward, he writes mostly of college routine, vacation travels, and a flirtation with Roman Catholicism: “I now breakfast with Father Parkinson, go to St Aloysius, talk sentimental religion to Dunlop and altogether am caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman—I may go over in the vac.” He didn’t. At the end of his life he would still be a self-aware sucker for ceremony and costume. From Rome, in April 1900, to Robbie Ross:

In the Oxford letters, Wilde hasn’t yet learned to throw away a line or resist explaining his own jokes, and the bombast still hasn’t gone successfully over the top. What survives from his first brief London period (1879–1881) is still more ambitious than outrageous.
(In between responding to and issuing invitations, he sends his verses to Arnold, Browning—and Gladstone.) It’s only during his 1882 trip to America that Wilde discovers his true ability to perform, both on the platform and in the mails. The buoyant poseur and paradox-maker is now up and running. “They were dreadfully disappointed at Cincinnati at my not wearing knee-breeches,” he informs his lecture agent, and his confidence only grows as he moves further west. In San Francisco, where four thousand people meet him at the depot, he is “really appreciated—by the cultured classes.” By the time he is back in Boston, after famously charming the Colorado silver miners, his name is six feet high on the placards, “printed it is true in those primary colours against which I pass my life protesting, but still it is fame, and anything is better than virtuous obscurity.” The same bons mots, self-plagiarized, begin showing up in several letters all at once.

Returning to London, he declares that “society must be amazed,” but for a time, though he’s rising at a fast, steep grade now, he does what is expected of him, editing
Woman’s World
and marrying Constance. (The only surviving letter of any length to her is a pleasant, entirely conventional, love note.) He so delights in his children that he urges Norman Forbes-Robertson to “get married
at once!”
But the paradoxes at the heart of his wit begin emptying themselves toward perfection. As he writes Arthur Conan Doyle, “I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth.”

The letters from 1890 often argue the moral case for
Dorian Gray
, and in a running battle with the
St. James’s Gazette
, Wilde defends his novel in a way that previews his response to the marquess of Queensberry’s eventual provocation: “To say that such a book as mine should be ‘chucked into the fire’ is silly. That is what one does with newspapers.” The next few years give Wilde his successful comedies, his money and fame, and the spoiled-brat love of his life, Lord Alfred Douglas, first mentioned as being “quite like a Narcissus—so white and gold … he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him.” By 1893, Wilde is tossing off homosexual slang (“Who on earth
is
the editor? He must be rented”) and writing
Bosie the purple letter that will be used against him during the Queensberry trial: “it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry.”

The rush to disaster has its giddy charm. Wilde vacations at Babbacombe Cliff in February 1893 with his sons, Bosie, and Bosie’s tutor, Campbell Dodgson, reveling in this all-male world of boys and children. He fantasizes about the “Babbacombe School”—he is the headmaster, and this is the evening schedule:

Bosie, however, must be asked not to “make scenes … They kill me, they wreck the loveliness of life.”

By 1894, Wilde understands that in his own novel, “Basil Hall-ward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Just a year later, Queensberry will be throwing down his misspelled but quite unlibelous card (“To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite”), and its recipient will be going off “to fight with panthers.” Only a few emergency telegrams and notes will remain to be written before it’s time for the letters dispatched from Her Majesty’s prisons. “With what a crash this fell!”