B07BDJY6Y9, page 16
I teach myself, over time, to decipher the variety and tenor of Story’s moods through his handwriting: the calm, dreamy tilt of his happier moments, the frantic scrawl of a note dashed off in bitterness. Perhaps, after all, I am reaching a kind of intimacy with my subject. And then I find a poem, so messily written that hours of staring at certain words don’t help me decipher them.
What avails in the end all our striving my friend
I ask what’s the use of it all
In struggle and strife we [battle?] through life
And our climbing all ends with a fall
Thought comes to its flower at times for an hour
In a moment – then withers and dies
And strive all we will with our utmost of skill
The [??] we seek, Life denies.
For at best, what is fame, but a breath of a name
And success, but an empty vaunt
We all are pursuing, in hoping and doing [??]
?? phantoms that lure but to taunt / lurk but to haunt?? / Live but to haunt?
Like the waves of the sea [??] [??] [??] restlessly
We strive scarcely knowing for what
But to shirk from life’s Light – to be [??] out of sight
To be dashed on Death’s shore and forgot.
Later, I read a letter from Mrs Gaskell to Story and his wife, written in September 1857, a few months after she had left their house to return to Manchester. ‘It was in those charming Roman days that my life, at any rate, culminated,’ she wrote. ‘I shall never be so happy again. I don’t think I was ever so happy before. My eyes fill with tears when I think of those days, and it is the same with all of us. They were the tip-top point of our lives. The girls may see happier ones – I never shall.’
Will I see happier days? Has my life, at any rate, culminated? I am recovering from a year spent believing that it had, looking backwards as I trudged up the steps through Morningside Park, replaying moments, thinking I shall never be so happy as I swallowed the pills prescribed by Dr Maier. But it seems to me that I have reached a point of anticipation again: I can no longer be as certain as Mrs Gaskell was about the trajectory of my life. I can no longer accept without doubt that my happiness has peaked.
So here I am, waiting. I am optimistic. As I sit in the archives opening box after box of William Story’s papers, I am full of hope that the tip-top point of my life did not take place in Shu’s apartment when Max said, ‘I’m going to try something, OK?’, was not a moment on the Cape Cod beach with my toes touching his through the sand, but is ahead of me, unknowable.
1859
Sylvia’s Lovers
You lapsed into wistfulness. In the autumn, you left Mr Gaskell in Manchester and took a trip to Whitby. From a rugged little cottage on the coast, you gazed out every morning at the grey sea gnawing the grey rocks. You were looking towards the Continent, towards the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, but you imagined it was the Atlantic you were watching, that beyond the waves and the horizon was America. In the evenings, when the sun sank into the water behind clouds and lit up the sky in pearlescent streaks, you almost thought you saw it.
Twenty-five miles away, in Redcar, Nathaniel Hawthorne was working on a novel you had heard would be about Rome. It was to feature Mr Story’s statue of Cleopatra, which you yourself had seen in his studio. There were to be little sketches of all your friends in the city. The thought of Hawthorne being nearby, of the little bud of Italy that was blossoming from his pen, made you think of the place with refreshed intensity. It was a kind of homesickness – you used the German word, Heimweh, to describe it – the way your mind took you back, in dreams and daydreams and fantasies, to Rome. When Mr Norton wrote to you, I revisit in imagination the places to which we went together, I recall our drives & the beauties of the Campagna, I hear your words, & altogether I am passing a very delightful morning with you in Rome, you knew exactly what he meant. You were there too, at his side.
When the Hawthorne book was published, Norton wrote to you about it: I know nothing that has ever been written about Italy so admirably true not only to the reality of the country but also to all that it suggests to the imagination. Hawthorne’s remarkable fineness of perception & observation, and the intensity of his imagination have enabled him to put into words & to give form to what every lover of Italy & Rome has felt while there, but which very few have been able to express for themselves.
One morning, as you read The Times over your coffee, you saw an announcement that your old friend Eliza ‘Tottie’ Fox had got married in Rome. She was a painter, and had moved there the previous year, and you had become lazy about writing to each other since then. And now, all of a sudden, she was married. You held the paper in both hands and read and re-read the article. You were unsure what you were feeling.
Marianne wandered into the room and saw your face. ‘Mama, are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ you said, ‘yes, look. Tottie has got married in Rome.’
Marianne came over to look at the article, and read it quickly. ‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ she said, searching your face as though uncertain that this was the reaction you wanted.
‘Yes,’ you said. ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Your daughter’s words nudged your own emotions in the direction of delight, and soon your confusion left you altogether. You wrote a long, gushing letter to Tottie.
Fancy meeting your fate at Rome. (I dreamt of you and your husband at Albano, in the gardens of the Villa Medici – think of me if you go there.) Where were you lodging at Rome? What were you married in? Roman scarves and cameos? Oh, and is not Rome above every place you imagined? And do you go to the Pamphile Doria gardens, and gather anemonies, and watch the little green lizards as we did?
You tried to tell her, without saying so directly, that you, too, knew what it was to meet your fate at Rome.
Charles Eliot Norton: We have places here in our circle for you all. Why are you not here to fill them? How pleasant it would be to bid you Goodnight with the thought of meeting you tomorrow at breakfast. It is one of the hopes that I will never give up, that some day or another you will be here. . . . But will it ever be? Today at least my hope is strong.
Mrs Gaskell: I wish you would come to see us; every now and then we hear a rumour that you are coming, but you don’t come. I – we all – wish you would.
CEN: We are not so very far apart after all. – I will imagine myself sitting in your well-remembered pleasant parlor talking with you.
EG: If you were here I should have such numbers of things to talk over with you that scarcely seem worth putting in a letter; a letter too, that is to cross the Atlantic and so ought to be full of great subjects, greatly treated.
At your window in Whitby, looking out over the ocean, at the fishing crews setting sail in the morning, and returning with full nets at night, and at the road that ran around the harbour, where, sometimes, people waited for the men to return from sea, you began to think about a new story. Whitby gave a rhythm and form to your own longings. You began to shape the restless yearning you had grown so accustomed to feeling over the past eighteen months into a plot.
Your heroine, Sylvia, is a vibrant, impulsive girl, who falls in love and becomes engaged to a rakish sailor called Charley. Her dull, religious cousin, Hepburn, who is also in love with her, witnesses Charley being captured by a press gang, but decides not to tell Sylvia, letting her believe that Charley has died. Mourning and alone, Sylvia agrees, reluctantly, to marry Hepburn, but all the while her love is alive, at sea, desperate to come home to her.
When, when are you coming to England dear Mr Norton? you wrote. You were standing at the shore, waiting for a ship to appear on the horizon. I always look over the names of the American passengers, thinking you may have come.
EG: I have been hoping and hoping and wishing for letters from you.
CEN: Three years ago we met in Rome!
EG: The Campagna ‘bits’ in your letters always give one a sort of Heimweh.
CEN: For truly have you not made me feel at home with you, and how can one help desiring to know all home affairs & news?
EG: Yesterday . . . Meta and I were having a long, yearning talk about America, and our dear friends there. I am not sure that we did not shake hands upon a resolution that if we lived we would go over to America. I know we calculated time & expense, & knocked off Niagara, because we would rather see friends.
CEN: I am very glad that you are going to send me a photograph of yourself, and I shall thank you for it with warmest thanks if it be truly like you. I do not want to have to suit the truthful portrait in my memory to any unfamiliar look, and I would keep that image unchanged until the time when I may see you again.
EG: I think Rome grows almost more vivid in recollection as the time recedes. Only the other night I dreamed of a breakfast – not a past breakfast, but some mysterious breakfast which neither has been, nor, alas! would be – in the Via Sant’Isidoro dining room, with the amber sunlight streaming on the gold-grey Roman roofs and the Sabine hills on one side and the Vatican on the other. I sometimes think that I would almost rather never have been there than have this ache of yearning.
2015
Sleep Study
I am registering with a doctor in Austin when I see the advert for the Sleep Study. It is printed on pink paper, and pinned to the noticeboard in the doctor’s waiting room. The language is what catches my eye at first, glaring and familiar. It is written in the same, apparently universal, optimistic tone of the equivalents I saw in London: Sad and struggling to sleep? Sad and sleeping soundly? Seeking volunteers with mild to moderate depression to participate in residential study. Volunteers will be awarded $1000 on successful completion of the study. The bottom of the flyer has been cut into tabs, each printed with an email address. Two have already been torn off.
I go in to see a doctor, who tests my urine, confirms that I really do not have a UTI, and suggests I may have something called interstitial cystitis, which is like cystitis, except without the presence of any real infection, and therefore not really treatable.
‘What causes it?’ I say.
‘We don’t know.’
‘Is that a way of saying it’s in my head?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘How do I get rid of it?’ I say.
The doctor says I should stop taking vitamin tablets, which I previously considered as my one truly healthy habit.
On the way out of the medical centre, almost without really deciding to, I tear off an email address from the bottom of the Sad and Struggling to Sleep poster.
The study will be carried out over a two-week period during which you will not leave the Sleep Centre. Prior to commencing participation in the study, you will be interviewed by a researcher about your personal history of depression, as well as your sleep cycle and habits, to check you are eligible to participate. At this time, you will be assigned a subject number, by which you will be referred to for the duration of the study.
The sleep research unit is bunker-like and echoey. On the day of my screening appointment, I follow the doctor down a flight of stairs into a fluorescent-lit, controlled environment, where the walls are painted a disconcertingly dark shade of green. It feels a little like how I imagine a submarine to be. I sit on the edge of a bed to have my blood taken by a nurse who glares disapprovingly at my forearms and complains that I ‘do not have good veins for cannulization’. The doctor, waiting by the door, makes a note of this. I watch my blood turn the syringe dark.
The residential session will take place in the Research Center’s Sleep Unit. It will last fourteen days (three hundred and thirty-six hours). When you arrive at the unit your bag will be searched and any items not allowed e.g. medication, chewing gum, will be stored safely and returned to you on discharge. You will be asked to perform a breathalyzer test to ensure that you have not been drinking alcohol.
You will only be able to use your phone between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day. Cell phones, watches and laptops will be collected by staff each evening and returned to you in the morning. You will sleep alone in an individual sleep cell. Your posture, meals and the lighting levels will be carefully controlled during the study.
In the doctor’s office, he hands me an information pack, and then proceeds to read the whole thing out loud, word for word. I don’t know where to look as he reads. There are no windows to gaze out of. For a while I follow along on the page as he describes procedures for checking into the unit that sound more like admission to prison than to a voluntary medical study. My mind begins to wander: I am in the midst of constructing a fantasy experiment in which Mrs Gaskell and William Wetmore Story and Harriet Hosmer are all inhabitants of the Sleep Unit, willing participants in my research, on hand to answer questions as I complete my thesis, when I hear the doctor mention that there can be no caffeine consumption for seven days prior to, and throughout, the study.
‘Like, really none?’ I ask.
‘Absolutely none.’
‘I will get such bad headaches,’ I say.
The doctor looks as though he does not know what to do with this information, and then says, ‘If that’s true, you should probably consider cutting down in any case,’ and continues to go over the other regulations: no anti-inflammatory drugs, no non-prescription drugs, no alcohol, no strenuous exercise.
He gives me a questionnaire to fill out – the kind with which I’m quite familiar, following the Body Study in my first year. In the past two weeks I have felt: angry / peaceful / jittery / lonely / energetic / playful / hopeless / grouchy / composed. I mark each emotion out of ten.
In the daytime, study participants are able to move freely between their individual sleep cells and the communal area. You are able to socialize with other participants. You are not allowed to leave the Sleep Unit. At 6 p.m. each evening, participants must return to their sleep cells. You will not leave your sleep cell until 9 a.m. the following day. On odd nights, you will sleep between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., lying on your bed in darkness. On even nights, you will sit up in bed in dim light, and will remain awake. You will be awake from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. the following day (forty continuous waking hours). On both odd and even nights, you will have electrodes attached to your head and a cannula (fine plastic tube) inserted into a forearm vein. We will measure your EEG (brain waves). Blood samples to be taken at regular intervals.
Of all the studies in which I have participated since the beginning of my Ph.D., this is the most extreme. I have never in my life stayed awake for forty hours straight, and I genuinely do not know if I have it in me to do it. It was all I could do to drink a glass of amino acid. It is, of course, also by far the best paid of all the studies I’ve seen, but now that I am no longer scrimping and saving to buy Eurostar tickets or transatlantic flights, perhaps it isn’t necessary.
The doctor gives me a tour, showing me the communal area with sofas and a television, and then an ‘individual sleep cell’. If the whole unit feels like a submarine, the sleep cell looks like the place they keep the missiles. It is a metal-walled box, with cameras in each corner of the ceiling pointed towards a narrow white mattress. The doctor shows me dials that control the temperature, light level and bed angle. There are small tubes trailing through the walls towards the bed. These, he says, connect to the cannula in the subject’s arm, and allow for blood to be drawn from outside the cell without disturbing the subject if he or she is asleep. This, more than anything else, disturbs me. Sleep deprivation, living underground for two weeks, these things are challenges; an invisible person, on the other side of a metal wall, sucking blood from my sleeping body feels intimate, vampiric.
It is a relief, when the screening is over, to emerge out into the yellow Texas light. The world up at ground level is warm and bright and unsanitized and haphazard; cars pass by on the road and trees sway and when I get back to Norma’s house the chickens have escaped their coop and she is running around the yard trying to coax them back in.
A few days later, while I am in the reading rooms leafing through Elizabeth Barrett Browning letters, my phone buzzes. A librarian looks over, not exactly disapprovingly, but pointedly enough to make it clear that this should not happen again. I slide my phone onto my lap, silence it, and then open my inbox. There is an email from the Sleep Study researcher.
Dear Nell,
Thank you for your interest in participating in our research study on sleep disruption and depression. Unfortunately, following your screening appointment at the unit, you were found to be ineligible for the following reason(s):
Reason for non-inclusion of subject: depression is not present in the subject.
Thank you again for taking the time to attend the screening appointment.
I read the message through again, and have to repress the urge to laugh. It had not occurred to me, at least not in such unequivocal terms, that I might not be sad any more. Months have passed since I last sat in Dr Maier’s office, overlooking Broadway, telling her about my grief. And when I think about my life since then – the move to Austin, the treehouse, the comfortable wistfulness I feel reading the letters and notes left behind by William Wetmore Story and his friends – I realize that the researchers are right. Depression is not present in the subject.
