“Sometimes, in anger or rebellion, I had felt that it was at best a frustration and at worst a misfortune to be the son of such a possessive and sharply gifted teacher,” James Wood writes. “But my father knew better.”
For the same reason, she only warily encouraged my desire to be a writer. I might just be able to pull it off, but only if I worked at it, with devotion and Protestant modesty. The profession of letters was generally admirable, but the idea ofbeing a writer made her anxious: How would I earn a living? What sort of social status could I ever achieve? Was writing, at bottom, even a moral activity? I tried to make my case, aware of how flimsy and amoral my ambitions sounded.
It was a joke in our family that my mother and Muriel Spark’s great fictional creation, Miss Jean Brodie, shared a certain temperament, as well as a profession that was really a vocation.
A few months after the funeral, I got an e-mail from one of her former students, Katrina Porteous. I knew her name, because she is a poet, who has written eloquently about the North of England, in particular about the Northumberland coast, where she lives.
It was strange to receive this message, so soon after my mother’s funeral, as if Katrina had some eerie premonition that all was not well, as if the long silence were speaking to her, laden with significance. It was strange, too, to be communicating as two middle-aged people. In my mind, my mother’s “old girls” were still girls, as I was still my mother’s boy. What linked us was lost in our far-off childhoods; and here we were, two graying adults talking across a waste of gain and loss.
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