All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen Read Free Book Online Page B

both echoes and critiques that ideal of self-abnegating service, whether to the needs of a husband and family or to a laudatory text about a significant male progenitor. Writing about the bitterness of literary guardianship and the elusiveness of reputation, Wharton is of course thinking about different approaches to writing a life—and perhaps about the terror of living one’s own. Paulina’s aunts, Orestes Anson’s daughters, are the archivists of his daily life and his fans. When pilgrims arrived at the “historic dwelling,” these women pointed to his desk and dispensed facts about “what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off his boots in the hall.” But if Wharton is scathing about their devotion—“as pious scavengers of his wastepaper basket, the Misses Anson were unexcelled”—she is also skeptical about Anson’s achievement and its commemoration. Paulina’s years of dedication are a folly in which the “rock of her grandfather’s celebrity” turns out to be something less than durable. “‘It ruined my life!’” Paulina tells the young writer; “‘I gave up everything,’ she went on wildly, ‘to keep him alive.’” Her encounter with this researcher is apparently a happy outcome, a turn of the screw in which the valuable, become worthless, regains value—albeit for reasons other than those that first established its importance.
    Although it is not the case that Esther “gave up everything” for any of her biographical subjects, the ways that she was exceptional had everything to do with a similar readerly devotion. And her life and work, like Wharton’s story and the genre of biography itself, continually beg the question of reputation. Djuna Barnes’s barb notwithstanding, it was not “great Women in History” who caught Esther’s imagination but women whose reputations were not at all secure. Or perhaps it makes more sense to say that in Esther’s lifetime a biography of a “great woman” who was not a religious figure was necessarily a book about a woman whose reputation was not secure. Esther’s first subject, Lady Blessington, rose from an impoverished Irish girlhood to a series of dubious liaisons with powerful Englishmen, socially advantageous marriage, and friendship with Lord Byron. She spent much of her life in a threesome with her husband and another man; weathered scandal and was shunned by society, but patronized by writers; wrote a book about Byron; and was the hostess of the most intellectual literary salon of mid-Victorian England. Although Esther referred to her in a 1922 letter to Wilson as “a dull enough person, I think. Really, a thoroughgoing mediocrity, save for her extraordinary personal beauty,” she must have become intrigued, because in April 1928 the publisher Payson and Clarke announced “‘The Life of Lady Blessington,’ by Esther Murphy” as “scheduled for future publication.” Reading and writing about Madame de Pompadour and then about Madame de Maintenon, as Esther did for the second half of her life, she was focused on women whose status at the French court was uncertain, who were maligned by contemporaries and historians, and for whom judgments about their sexual conduct had long been part of even the scholarly work on their lives.
    In “The Angel at the Grave,” failure is overdetermined. There is Orestes Anson’s early failure and the failure of perception about that work (“the specialists of the day jeered at him”). Paulina’s biographical failure is steeped in a “sense of wasted labor” and “fruitless toil.” Her inability to reconcile the two parts of Anson’s career (“after a hurried perusal she had averted her thoughts from the [scientific] episode as from a revelation of failure”), Wharton suggests, was one reason her biography failed. Her guardianship was a success, however, because she kept the evidence of that episode from the flames. Her aunts had “said it was of no use,” she tells the