The Honeymoon, A Novel

Abstract

I had dinner last night with a friend, who happens to be a well-regarded forensic psychiatrist, whose clients therefore tend to be both criminal and insane. As the plates were being cleared away I mentioned the book I was reviewing, whose dramatic center was the defenestration of Johnnie Cross, George Eliot's new husband, on the Venetian leg of their European honeymoon. My friend's immediate response was completely unexpected: “Did he jump, or was he pushed?” Wow, there's the difference between an expert and a layman. The thought that Eliot had bundled Cross—twenty years her junior—out of the window and into the Grand Canal below had never crossed my mind. “Have you ever heard of a newlywed trying to kill themselves during the course of a honeymoon?” I asked. “Honeymoon suicides are unheard of,” said my friend, “but not murders.” It's still hard to imagine, but you do have to admit that Eliot does have form; just think what she does to Tom and Maggie Tulliver at the end of Mill on the Floss. And I have heard of a gentle-seeming woman who threw her new husband out of the bathroom window after repeated refusals to consummate their marriage. Seductive as they are, such cold-case suspicions have no part in Dinitia Smith's new novel, even though she describes the creating of it—in an afterword—as a “little like writing a detective story, a search for clues, a piecing together of facts and inferences.” Such an endeavor is perhaps better left to the likes of Patricia Cornwall, who has convinced herself (if no one else) that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.In truth, Dinitia Smith's efforts are only partly directed toward solving that puzzle, her novel being far more True Romance than True Crime. Let Henry James spell out George Eliot's impediment to finding the former. His first impression of her was of someone “magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous.” But after conversing with her he moderated his view, declared her to be so sympathetic that ugliness was transfigured into beauty. “Behold me,” he wrote, “literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.” With this double take we are at the heart of Dinitia Smith's book: an ugly woman's search for love and fulfillment.If The Honeymoon were a movie, it would be full of those wavy sequences that indicate a flashback. In fact, fewer than one hundred of the novel's generous 415 pages are dedicated to the eponymous honeymoon, and the groom's leap into the Grand Canal does not occur until page 354. The majority of its pages are a sort of bildungsroman, mapping the transformation of Marian Evans—a country girl—into George Eliot. Dinitia Smith's chief fictional liberty is to gift her with a volcanic libido, quite at variance with her appearance, as if the green hills of England were covering up Mount Vesuvius. Whenever there are whispers or hints of desire or dalliance in the biography, Dinitia Smith gives her the full monte. In her alternative universe, the man who deflowers her (as they used to say) is Charles Bray, who somehow manages to live the life of a Californian hippie in that industrial city. He is, as Smith puts it, “the sun around whom the entire household revolved.” For sure you'd need No. 50 sun block to resist his chat-up lines: “You've got the temperament of a genius. You're the most delightful companion I've ever known.” He and his wife have that handy thing: an open marriage. Bray's first kisses cause Eliot to feel “a fierce sensation shoot up through her from her legs to her breast.” So expectations are pretty high when he enters her but three lines later: an eruption at least, if not an actual flow of hot lava. But no: “What happened next occurred so quickly that there was no thought involved, only urgency. It was her first taste of this pleasure, and once that taste had been taken and that boundary crossed, there was no going back.” A writer should be wary of that phrase, “no thought involved,” lest it turn round and bite her. In an effort to avoid salaciousness, Smith has reduced her characters to anonymity. Did they leave their five senses with their shoes at the end of the bed? Having crossed this Rubicon there follows seduction and betrayal by the wicked Dr. Brabant (father of her good friend, the beauteous redhead Rufu), and heartbreak at the hands of the solipsistic Herbert Spencer. John Chapman, the London publisher, is next. Moving to the capital, she completes a menage à quatre in his house. Only after all these romantic and not-so-romantic adventures does she find True Love with George Lewes, described elsewhere as, the “ugliest man in London.”His only drawback is that he is already married. However, this does not prevent them flouting all conventions and setting up home in that ill-considered suburb called Sin. They are universally shunned, though once Eliot's fame increases, so do the visitors (predominantly male). Not only is George Lewes the bedmate of her dreams, he is also—according to Smith—the eminence grise whose encouragement enabled his namesake to fully realize her genius. We have to take Smith's word for that; Eliot's writing process is described as perfunctorily as her lovemaking. Her fame notwithstanding, Eliot continues to stalk the world with her features partly concealed by a lace mantilla. This seems to have infected Dinitia Smith, whose over-respectful show of restraint sometimes verges on the coy. And so when it comes to the novel's climax—the mystery of Johnnie Cross's leap into murky waters—we are offered only hints of a possible cause.Let us consider them. By way of contrast to Eliot, he is constantly described as a paradigm of male beauty, verging on the Grecian. And we all know what the ancient Greeks got up to. Corradini, their private gondolier, is a decidedly queer fellow, who escorts his manic employer to the Rialto on the night before his suicide attempt. We are not told what went on there, but whatever it was it was clearly unheimlich, and had something to do with what Lord Alfred Douglas called “the love that dare not speak its name.” Though why Smith also elects not to speak its name, I do not know. It is equally plain that back home in England there is an unrequited passion between Cross and his muscular brother-in-law. But apart from dropping hints, Smith's lips remain sealed on that too.So why did Cross sell his bride-to-be such a bill of goods? Was it that he wanted to prove to himself that he was not gay? Another solution is proffered in Cynthia Ozick's short story, “Puttermesser Paired”: that Cross was in love, not with Eliot, but with Lewes. As its title suggests, Ozick's tale is one of doublings: first comes the pairing of Eliot and Lewes, second that of Eliot and Cross, and finally that of the eponymous Puttermesser and her much younger beau. Through a series of accidents Ruth Puttermesser meets Rupert Rabeeno, who makes a living copying Old Masters, though he rejects the word “copy” and maintains that he is producing “reenactments of the Masters.” Despite the age difference the couple bond over George Eliot, whose life Puttermesser endeavors to reimagine: “Whatever had happened once, she conspired through a destiny of purposefulness to redraw, redo, replay; to translate into the language of her own respiration.” Hearing about the ill-fated honeymoon, Rabeeno proposes that they recreate it. In his eyes Johnnie's infamous jump into the drink was never a suicide attempt, but a bid to escape the sexual advances of a bride he did not desire and could never satisfy. Rabeeno does not wait for Venice to head for the window, after they are wed, but chooses instead Puttermesser's New York apartment, never really intending to leap. Left alone before the open window, Puttermesser thinks, “A copyist, a copyist!”It is a charge that must ring in the ears of all who elect to make fiction out of the lives of famous people. And one, I think, to which Dinitia Smith is not insensible. While in Venice, but before the debacle, she has Eliot and Cross visit the workplace of Ruskin's disciple, Mr. Bunney—a raised platform in St Mark's Square, from which vantage point he is painting an exact replica of the Basilica. He hands them the canvas to inspect. Johnnie thinks it “wonderful,” but Eliot is not so sure: “It showed the facade of the Basilica, each column carefully articulated, the mosaic figures above the entryways exactly rendered, even the planes and girders of the dome. Not wonderful, she thought, mechanical. No romance in the light, the sky dull, the whole thing devoid of life. Indeed, there wasn't a human being in sight. ‘Very nice indeed,’ she said politely. She couldn't be unkind.” Dinitia Smith has not quite managed to translate Eliot's life into the “language of her own respiration,” but it is, nonetheless, very nice indeed.