Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,29

it in the bin on top of the past-due notices.

That week I make a few trips to the public library to research Cuba. Each time I end up in the biography stacks, reading about writers and their dead mothers.

George Eliot’s mother died of breast cancer when she was sixteen. ‘Mother died,’ are her only preserved words on the subject. She had been called home from boarding school when her mother got sick, and after her death Eliot lost all hope of further education. She became her father’s partner in work and home, traveling with him on trips to Coventry, mending his clothes, and reading him Walter Scott in the evening.

D. H. Lawrence told a girl who loved him that he would never love her back because he loved his mother ‘like a lover.’ He was twenty-five when a tumor was discovered in his mother’s abdomen. Lawrence stayed at her bedside for the final three weeks, reading and painting and working on what would become the novel Sons and Lovers. During that time a galley of his first novel, The White Peacock, arrived at the house. His mother looked at the cover, the title page, and then at him. He felt her doubt of his talents. Her pain worsened and he witnessed her increasing agony. He begged the doctor to give her an overdose of morphia to set her free, but the doctor refused. Lawrence did it himself. He wrote later, ‘From the death of my mother, the world began to dissolve around me, beautiful, iridescent, but passing away substanceless. Till I almost dissolved away myself, and was very ill, when I was twenty-six. Then slowly the world came back: or I myself returned: but to another world.’

As a child Edith Wharton had been scolded by her mother for wanting to be alone to make things up, and forbidden to read novels until after marriage. When her mother died, she sent her husband to the funeral. She stayed home to write. She was thirty-nine, and she published her first novel the following year.

Marcel Proust was thirty-four when his mother died. Apart from a year of military service, he had lived with her his whole life. After she was gone he went to a clinic outside Paris for nervous disorders where he was forbidden to write. He considered suicide but believed it would be killing his mother again if he destroyed his own memory of her. When he left the clinic he began to write a critical essay about the writer Sainte-Beuve, fueled by an imaginary conversation with his mother. In the piece he reaches back to memories of his childhood, to saying goodnight to his mother, and it becomes the beginning of Swann’s Way.

‘Hold yourself straight, my Little Goat,’ were Julia Stephen’s last words to her daughter, thirteen-year-old Virginia. Woolf’s mother lay dead in bed for several days after that and when Virginia was led in to kiss her for the last time, her mother was no longer on her side but on her back, in the middle of her pillows. Her cheek was like cold iron, and granulated, Virginia wrote later. A few days later she went to Paddington to meet her brother’s train. It was sunset and the glass dome of the station was lit up a blazing red. After her mother died, her perceptions were more intense, she wrote later, ‘as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant.’ That summer she had her first breakdown. It lasted two years.

I’m delivering two blackened bluefish and a Turkish roast pigeon to table 13. They’re arguing about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, and the woman says he was a Howdy Doody manqué, which I think is a good line, but the two men don’t hear it. I slide the pigeon into place and a creepy sound comes from every direction in the room, like an alien invasion.

Ooooooooooooooooooo.

A lean boy in a tux and floppy red hair comes running into the center of the dining room and people flinch and gasp and the redhead flings out his arms.

‘Here’s my story, sad but true,’ he croons. ‘About a girl that I once knew.’

Along the perimeter of the room other boys in tuxes are still ooooing. When the song changes tempo, they switch to ‘hey, heys’ and ‘bop, bops’ and ‘whoa oh, oh, ohs’ and start closing in on the lead in the middle and the dining room erupts in applause that reaches a crescendo when they all come together