Read Online The Eleventh Year by Monique Raphel High - Free Book Online Page B

from Harvard or Princeton. Jamie did research for Gertrude Buck, one of the English professors, and she loved her time in the stacks of the Thompson Memorial Library. She could lose herself in old manuscripts, wondering what it must have been like in Thackeray’s England, in Chaucer’s. She was so hungry for the written word that it hardly mattered whose word it was as long as it was well turned out. She wished beyond anything that she possessed the talent of a Virginia Woolf.
    When Lesley went back to New York for elegant parties thrown by one or another of the matrons of Fifth Avenue, Jamie stayed alone, appreciating the narrow room with its simple wooden furniture. She also liked the dignified professors, women in long ungainly skirts, their hair in simple buns, and men with clear, intellectual brows, mustaches, and beards. But when she imagined herself acting the role of Professor Buck, something made her draw back. First of all, there was a sexlessness about her that was sad. Life had to be a passion play, didn’t it? At some point a woman met the ideal man, someone of equal intellectual bent, and something happened. Besides, Professor Buck studied the words of others. Jamie wanted to write her own words, to break through to some sort of discovery, to some sort of verity that she and she alone could impart to her readers. The writer, she thought, was like a fine funnel. Life poured experiences haphazardly into him or her, and it was then through the writer that these experiences were ennobled and that tragedy and comedy emerged from the natural chaos of everyday existence. She envied Theodore Dreiser, who could write about a young man’s desire to conquer the world and how one false move turned this ambition into a disaster. She herself wanted not so much to conquer the world as to reach men’s souls—the very heart and guts of them. She felt dwarfed by those who had succeeded in reaching hers—yet also impelled even more to draw up the juices of her own creativity, pouring them out into a finished product that would strike each reader in the deepest part of his own being.
    It was difficult to get to know Lesley, and Jamie had to admit that she wasn’t quite sure she really wanted to know her. There were conflicting elements about her roommate. She read Freud, Maria Montessori, and the newly published Education and Democracy by John Dewey. But at Vassar there were other girls who affected interest in psychology and a writer-philosopher who was clearly in vogue. Afterward, when no one was looking, they reverted to their diet of The Atlantic Monthly or that staple of middle-class gentility, The Ladies’ Home Journal. Jamie wondered what Lesley understood beyond the obvious fact that Freud was obsessed by sex. How profound was she, after all? She drew good sketches but not outstanding ones. Yet how could one exist merely to exist, without pursuing a lifetime ambition, without wanting to distinguish oneself?
    In November Lesley joined the Woman’s Suffrage Club, and it was then that Jamie dared ask, piqued suddenly by new curiosity: “Do you think that women are more intelligent than men?”
    Lesley had just walked in, and she removed her hat, hung it on a hook, and threw herself like a graceful rag doll on her narrow cot. She was thoughtful. “Some women,” she finally replied. “It’s hard to tell. Men are out in the world and their wives aren’t. So it’s difficult to judge the intelligence of most women. But if we had the vote, if we were given confidence—then perhaps we’d come out of our shells and be our real selves, and then test the intelligence we’re not supposed to be allowed to use.”
    Jamie nodded. That was an excellent, perceptive answer. “If you were to choose the ideal way in which to exercise your own intelligence, what would you do?”
    Lesley smiled—that remote, dreamy smile that was at once so reservedly