The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy Read online

  Levy's world is clearly the world of books, although she also seems comfortably familiar with the visual arts (including, as demonstrated in The Romance of a Shop, the relatively new art of photography) and with the broader social and political issues of her everyday world. Still, when her heroine in Reuben Sachs, Judith Quixano, faces the critical moment of her life, the scene is unfolded primarily through her encounter with books. First she rejects, as empty of consolation, her favorite books up to this time, books Reuben had given her, Blackmore's Lorna Doone, Carlyle's Sterling, Macaulay's Essays, Kingsley's Hypatia, The Life of Palmerston, a Life of Lord Beaconsfield; instead, she turns to Leo's library:

  Leo was an idealistpoor Leo!

  There were books on a table near, and she took them up one by one: some volumes of Heine in prose and verse; the operatic score of Parsifal; Donaldson on the Greek Theatre; and then two books of poetry [Swinburne's] Poems and Ballads, and a worn green copy of the poems of Clough.

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  It is, finally, in Swinburne's "Triumph of Time" that Judith finds her own situation and her own moment of Jamesian insight. Judith Quixano is not, unfortunately, a character as richly developed as is Isabel Archer, but she does make one sorely regret the twenty or thirty years Levy did not allow herself to ripen as a writer.

  The most extensive biographical and bibliographical discussion of Amy Levy remains a long essay by Beth Zion Lask, presented to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1926 and published two years later. Lask opens with a glance at the same political "conspiracy" posited by Kraidman some sixty years later, what she calls the "wilful neglect on the part of her co-religionists":

  Indeed, the extent of this neglect may be gauged from the fact that at a recent lecture on "Jewish Women Writers in England," the name of our greatest contributor to English literature was not even mentioned, while other writers, less able, less poetic, rather inclined to the prosiness that makes the early Victorian novel such a nightmare to the present generation, were praised. 8

  Amy Levy, the second daughter of Lewis Levy and Isobel Levin, was born on November 10, 1861, at Clapham and received her early education at Brighton. The Levys later moved to 7 Endsleigh Gardens, where Amy took her own life on September 10, 1889;9 it is interesting to note that the first address suggests separation from the Jewish community, while the second is in the heart of Bloomsbury, where middle- and upper-class Anglo-Jews settled in large numbers during the 1860s and 1870s. This district lies within a few blocks of the University of London on Gower Street and the former site of Jews' College in Tavistock Squarethat is, near the two centers of higher learning for Anglo-Jews in the Victorian era.10

  Levy attended Newnham College, Cambridge (established in 1875 and incorporated in 1880), probably between 1879 and 1881. As with so many aspects of her life, she was breaking quite new ground, both as a Jew and as a woman. The so-called local examinations by which one could qualify for Cambridge were not opened to women until 1865; for Oxford, until 1870. Before 1871, Jews could matriculate at Cambridge but not proceed to degrees; at Oxford, professing Jews could not even matriculate until after

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  the University Tests Act of 1871. 11 At both universities, women could not proceed to degrees well into the twentieth century.

  Levy seems to have dedicated herself to a writing career very early; a poem, "Ida Grey," appeared in a short-lived journal, The Pelican, in 1875 when she was only fourteen, and "Run to Death," which I have included in this collection, in The Victoria Magazine four years later.12 In 1880, she published what may be her most successful poem, "Xantippe," in the Dublin University Magazine,13 and her story ''Mrs. Pierrepoint" appeared in Temple Bar in June of that year. While that story seemed to me too weak overall to be included here, the protagonista twenty-two-year-old woman who has married for money and now relishes the death of her husband because it frees her to propose to her former young loveris a surprisingly perceptive portrait for a writer not yet twenty years old. Here is Mrs. Pierrepoint retiring to her room after the funeral:

  She would stay there alone that evening, and would not dine. Not that, as a rule, she was indifferent to delicate cookeryon the contrary, there was a good deal of the epicure in her nature; it was this very epicureanism which kept her fasting tonight. She had a subtler, more exquisite feast in store for herself; she would not spoil the effect of either banquet by indulging in both at the same time.14

  The sharpness of observation and moral pessimism exhibited in this passage are hallmarks of Levy's later writing; in this instance, she unskillfully blunts her own insight by having the young lover, an idealistic clergyman, reject Mrs. Pierrepoint's offer.

  Levy's first collection of verse, Xantippe and Other Verse, was published in 1881 in Cambridge. The title poem is a dramatic monologue in blank verse of almost three hundred lines; the speaker is Socrates' shrewish wife, Xantippe, and the poem attempts, quite imaginatively, I think, to see the world through her eyes. Her early awareness of the inappropriateness of being an intellectual woman is well stated:

  Then followed days of sadness, as I grew

  To learn my woman-mind had gone astray,

  And I was sinning in those very thoughts

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  For maidens, mark, such are not woman's thoughts

  (And yet, 'tis strange, the gods who fashion us

  Have given us such promptings).

  In joining herself to Socrates, she had hoped to share his world of ideas, but soon discovers his limitation:

  the high philosopher

  Pregnant with noble theories and great thoughts,

  Deigned not to stoop to touch so slight a thing

  As the fine fabric of a woman's brain

  The subtlety of Levy's poetry is suggested by the word "Pregnant," which plays effectively against her suggestion of the homoeroticism within the Socratic circle, especially Alcibiades, with his "laughing lips / And half-shut eyes, contemptuous shrugging up / Soft snowy shoulders, till he brought the gold / Of flowing ringlets round about his breasts." Xantippe's own personality is shaped in response to the exclusivity of this male society (but also, in a splendidly cruel insight, to the way in which it does open itself to one woman, the beautiful Aspasia, mistress of Pericles; "wives need not apply!"); and in the poem's finest image, the domestic life at the loom becomes an emblem of her bitterness:

  I spun until, methinks, I spun away

  The soul from out my body, the high thoughts

  From out my spirit; till at last I grew

  As ye [her maids] have known me,eye exact to mark

  The texture of the spinning; ear all keen

  For aimless talking when the moon is up,

  And ye should be a-sleeping; tongue to cut

  With quick incision 'thwart the merry words

  Of idle maidens.

  Of this poem, Lask writes: "It bears the impress of the Feminist movement, the ideals of which were then agitating so many women of intellect. A note of passion surges through the poem, touches of tragic intensity, of the thwarting of youth's dreams. The treatment is strong, the versification finisheda mature production that is indeed surprising when one re-

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  members she was yet in her teens" ("Amy Levy," p. 170). I believe that is a fair assessment. 15

  From this first collection I have also included "A Prayer," a love poem that gives us our first glimpse of the lyric voice that will eventually dominate Levy's poetry. Her use of the short trimeter line, rhyme, and a variety of rhythmic forms are all characteristics of her later work; and the brooding tone is one we must finally accept, if only because of its unrelenting presence in the canon and the final fate of the author: "To liveit is my doom / Lonely as in a tomb."

  The poem "Felo De Se" (i.e., self-murder) is offered by Levy "With Apologies to Mr. Swinburne" and is a splendid parody of his characteristic style in, say, "Hymn to Proserpine" or ''Hymn to Man." Swinburne had, of course, brilliantly parodied himself in "Nephelidia'';
we might compare, for example, the opening line of that poem, "From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine," to some of Levy's more successful parodies: "I was weary of women and war and the sea and the wind's wild breath," or "Repose for the rotting head and peace for the putrid breast," or, my favorite, "Could fight fierce fights with the foe or clutch at a human hand; / And weary could lie at length on the soft, sweet, saffron sand." At the same time, this poem is Levy's first encounter with a dominant topic of her writing, suicide, and perhaps offers one of her best statements of the pessimism that is at once so characteristic of the final decades of the nineteenth century and yet so uniquely personal a voice in her own work.16 What separates Levy, however, from the mere cries of anguish of poetasters is her constant attention to form and to style, her self-discipline as a poet, most especially in her diction and ever-present self-ironies. Note also that the poem is not an attack on Swinburne but a self-conscious play with his style as a means of approaching her inaccessible subject; it is the lesson of much of Swinburne's own poetic experimentations, and Levy seems to have grasped it well.

  Levy also tried her hand at the sonnet, and I have included one example from Xantippe, reprinted in Unwin's second edition of A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1891); it might be said to encapsulate almost all the themes of her later poetry. The final poem selected from Xantippe is "Run to Death," which is subtitled "A True Incident of Pre-Revolutionary French History." In this

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  narrative poem, Levy uses long heptameter lines, often rhymed, to tell the story of a hunting party of French noblemen who chase down and kill a Gypsy woman and her child in the absence of better game. A volume that begins with "Xantippe" and ends with "Run to Death" is a feminist treatise before its time, whatever other purposes Levy might also have tried to fulfill; we shall probably never fully understand how she could reach so angry and anguished a perspective on her society at so early an age, but one might suspect that we have here an avid reader, whose family placed no restrictions on her books. 17 The spadework of two generations of nineteenth-century feminists encountered in Amy Levy a most fertile soil.

  I have included two efforts published in 1883: the short story "Between Two Stools," which appeared in Temple Bar, and an important critical effort, "James Thomson [B.V.]: A Minor Poet," in The Cambridge Review. Lask's analysis of the latter is quite perceptive:

  Indispensable to any study of the work of Amy Levy is [this essay]. James Thomson is the poet of that phase of life which in its morbid mental suffering, in its "pain inane," resultant of modern life and conditions acting adversely on a hypersensitive being, makes him cry aloud for "the pain insane."

  To Amy Levy, already conscious and resentful of that unevenness of life which helps to preserve the world's balance, James Thomson appeared as a martyr to his unhappy lot, a moody being at the mercy of his temperament, " a passionate[ly] subjective being, with intense eyes fixed on one side of the solid polygon of truth, and realising that one side with a fervour and intensity to which the philosopher with his bird's-eye view rarely attains." ("Amy Levy," p. 172)

  James Thomson (B.V.) (18341882) is rarely read today, but he did attract a following in his own day, including George Eliot and George Meredith. For Levy, he was almost surely a primary intellectual influence, for reasons she is able to define with sympathy and self-prescience:

  "The City of Dreadful Night" [Thomson's major work, published in 1874], his masterpiece, as it is a poem quite unique in our literature, stands forth as the very sign and symbol of that attitude of mind which we call Weltschmerz,

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  Pessimism, what you will; i.e., the almost perfect expression of a form of mental suffering which I can convey by no other means than by the use of a very awkward figureby calling it "grey pain," "the insufferable inane" which makes a man long for the "positive pain."

  This is precisely the subject matter of "Felo De Se": Thomson experiencing in life what the suicide of that poem discovers is the ultimate agony of deaththe total inability to respond to the "Circle of pain" in which one continues to find oneself. Levy argues that Thomson has "caught the spirit of his spiritual kinsmen Heine and of Leopardi, as no other poet has succeeded in doing"; she reveals in this statement the source of her own appreciation, since one might well argue that they are her "spiritual kinsmen'' as well. 18 Levy's commentary makes the reader want to look again at Thomson's work; nothing more complimentary can be said about literary criticism.

  "Between Two Stools" is a clear illustration of Levy's antidote to her own "mental suffering" and tendency to dwell on her own "pains." The protagonist, Miss Nora Wycherley, now living in the Bayswater section of London, writes to her college friend, Miss Agnes Crewe, Newnham College, about her readjustment to "philistine" society after life at Cambridge, where they ''puzzled over Plato on the lawn, and read Swinburne on the roof in the evenings." One cannot read two paragraphs of Nora's correspondence without appreciating Levy's self-parody of intellectual pretensions, her recognition of and amusement over the incipient snobbery and self-importance that almost surely accompanied a career as successful as hers gave promise of being. In the best Swiftian style, for example, she makes use of the well-placed lacuna:

  Oh, what a relief to get back to solitude, even when solitude means the old terrible pain, the old awful longings! Yet is it not something to have "known the best and loved it"?to have seen what is noblest, highest, and purest in the world, and to have felt it to the depth of one's being?

  [Here follow several pages which, for the reader's sake, we have thought best to omit.]

  To be sure, Nora is sufficiently educated so that her views are perhaps not far removed from Levy's; she recognizes, for example, that a woman in her

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  circle "is held to have no absolute value; it is relative, and depends on the extent of the demand for her among members of the other sex. The way the women themselves acquiesce in this view is quite horrible." It is clear to the reader, however, that she has already fallen in love with one of the philistines and that the tug of acquiescence is hard upon her. It is precisely this self-blindness that makes "Between Two Stools" one of Levy's better short stories.

  One additional story that appeared in 1883, "The Diary of a Plain Girl," has not been included here, but it does introduce several ideas that emerge in Levy's work, most specifically the relationship between physical appearance and happiness. In this story, as elsewhere, Levy's protagonist, Milly, is the "plain" sister, a young woman who attributes her loneliness and moodiness to her looksand to competition with a dazzling beauty, her sister. On the one hand, the subject seems quite mundane, the stuff of fairy tales and adolescent romances; on the other hand, it is so pervasive in Levy's writings that one is tempted to pursue it as a clue. The surviving portrait of Levy does not suggest plainness, but there seems to be enormous sympathy between herself and Milly in such a passage as this:

  I don't think the saddest music ever composed can be half so sad as waltz music when you're not waltzing, only looking on at other people. It is torture music, and the happy people dancing round are torturers, exquisitely cruel torturers. 19

  In her fiction, Levy always provides an indication of the "attractiveness" or "unattractiveness" of her characters as part of her initial description, and always condemns those who judge by appearances or who live by such judgments. The women with whom we are to be sympathetic are almost always described as "below'' the standard of beauty, the contrast often being between beautiful and interesting. There is, in short, an awareness of the foolishness of the commodity-driven mentality behind these judgments, as well as a perhaps surprising inability to escape them. In The Romance of a Shop, Levy's weakest moment may be the seduction and killing off of the beautiful sister, an act of "revenge," perhaps, quite unjustified, as Oscar Wilde points out, by the tone of the story itself.20

  I do not mean to imply that Levy necessarily saw herself as the "plain" sister. An
equally plausible scenario might be written in which she plays

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  the attractive but painfully sympathetic observer of a sister's miseryand one might well assume much difficulty for the sister of an "overachiever" like Levy. 21 The point is that in any commodity-driven society, appearance seems to increase in importance and thus serves well to indicate social hollowness and the failure of human relationsfor Levy, it is clearly one aspect of the "Circle of pain" into which she plunges both herself and her characters.