There are few pages remaining in the thick notebook of
email that Betty and I exchanged during our four years of correspondence. I
have not “read ahead” throughout this entire chapter—far too long, I know, for
any chapter—and I do not recall how our exchanges ended. There are 383 pages in
this notebook, and I am now looking at page 380. This part of the story will
end today, I know.
On June 20, 2002, I wrote to her with a quick question
about a trip Mary Shelley had taken to Paris in 1828. I added: Hoping each day brings you more strength.
And I ended with our now-customary Fondly.
Page 381:
Betty wrote back the next day with a thoughtful answer to my question. And … Fondly.
Page 382: I
replied a couple of hours later. Thanks
for the confirmation. I told her some more research and writing news, and
then this: Let me know if you’re seeing
visitors—for I will be in your area in the middle of July and would love to see
you. And … Fondly.
Page 383:
Here’s the whole thing—Hi, Dan—Do let me
know if you will be in the area in mid-July—Yes, I certainly am seeing
friends—just a question of schedules—Fondly, Betty
And that’s the end.
What happened? I look at my journal for mid-July 2002,
and I see that Joyce and I were indeed “in the area.” We were on an extended “literary”
trip—spending some of the summer research money that Western Reserve Academy
had given me. On July 16, our son’s thirtieth birthday, we were in Baltimore
looking at and photographing Poe sites, but there is not a word in my journal
about Betty, just the news that we drove on that day to Piedmont, West Virginia,
hometown of Henry Louis Gates, the town he’d written about extensively in his
wonderful memoir Colored People
(1994), a book we were teaching to juniors at WRA.
Did I think about Betty that day we were so near to
Washington, D. C.? I must have. Only a month before I’d written her with a
promise, a promise that I’d patently broken. And in my journal for June I’d written
this: sent e-mail back and forth to Betty
Bennett, with whom I’ve not corresponded much this year (my fault); she’s had lung
cancer and is now recovering fairly well; I’ll write more often now … But,
of course, I didn’t.
I’m thinking some ugly thoughts about myself right now,
about how I’d “moved on” to other interests, leaving behind a scholar and
friend who’d been surpassingly generous with me. But Mary Shelley was more or
less in my rear-view mirror; Poe lay before me (and I would indeed write a YA
biography of him in the ensuing years). Although I would eventually upload the
Shelley book to Kindle Direct Publishing in 2012, I hadn’t really dived back
into the Shelley Sea—just updated some things. In fact, it wasn’t until I began
this memoir that I rediscovered the pleasures of swimming (and diving) in that
rich ocean of people and information.
But wait. Maybe I’m not as much of an ungrateful jerk as I think. I just did a name search for
my 2003 journal—and found this from January 11: e-mail to Betty B to see how she’s doing and to let her know I’m
thinking of her; I’m worried about her and have not heard from her in quite a
while I obviously didn’t print that
one out—and it’s long gone (I’ve changed email accounts several times since
then).
And this from December 29: replied to earlier e-mail from Betty B re: how I’m doing. Again—I have
no copy.
May 18, 2004: e-mailed
Betty Bennett to see what’s going on with her No copy—just as there are no copies of any
subsequent messages.
May 16, 2005: e-mail
from/to Betty Bennett re: my health & some slides she’d like to use from
the Shelleys in Italy. “My health”—I was nearing surgery for prostate
cancer, just about a month away.
Christmas Eve, 2005: note from Betty Bennett (health problems from her, as well)—but warm
& amiable … I must have written her about the results of my prostate
cancer surgery in June 2005?
January 13, 2006: replied
to e-mail from Betty Bennett re: the slides she borrowed from me (I’d forgotten
she had them!)
February 7, 2006: wrote
to Betty Bennett re: the new book (sigh)
The “new book” is a Mary Shelley title I’d recently reviewed. (It wasn’t
very good—riddled with errors as I
said in an earlier journal entry).
I can find no other references to Betty—or to BB (as I
commonly referred to her in my journal)—after February 2006.
And then—August 12, 2006—Betty Bennett, 71, died of
lung cancer at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D. C. Most of the
obituary in the Washington Post is
about her Shelley work (rightly so), and there’s an intriguing sentence near
the end: She had completed work on a
literary biography of Shelley, which is scheduled to be released by Harvard
University Press. This can’t be true—I know she was not finished. I just
checked the HUP site: no such listing.
The New York
Times had only a brief “paid notice” about her death, posted by the Keats-Shelley
Association. We shall miss, it says, her creative energy, her keen intellect, her
kindness and her genuine friendship. Indeed.
The Post obituary
ends with these touching words: Through
her study of Shelley, Dr. Bennett said she learned what it was like for a woman
to be on her own in the 19th century. “I gradually learned to be better
able to be on my own in the 20th,” she said.
I flail myself with this thought: I’d not corresponded
her her since that February exchange—even though I knew she was suffering. And
worst of all? I did not even know she’d died until I began working on this
memoir and checked the Post’s
website. Can I ever hope to describe the rupture in my conscience—in my
heart—when I found that obituary?
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