He reads the Agricultural Reports, and some other books – The Best Books of 1815

We are looking at an 1815 drawing by Hokusai that I copied from p. 194 of Hokusai by Gian Carlo Calza (1999, English translation 2003).  Calza suggests that the scene depicts the Azumaya bookshop.  The owner is on the right, a delivery boy with a bundle of text on the left, and a customer in the middle, choosing a book.

What book do you think he will buy?  Will it be one of the best Japanese books of 1815?  What were the best Japanese books of 1815?

I have picked up from what I have read about Japanese literary history that the 19th century is not thought of as a good period, a helpful judgment in that it gives me a good excuse to stay ignorant.  I enjoy playing with Best Books posts at the end of each year, but they are mementoes of my ignorance.

How many books from 1815 have I read?  I believe three, or perhaps only two, but I did read those books in particular because a long line of readers have kept them alive.  If not the best, they are the survivors.

In December 1815, Walter Scott would have topped the Best Books lists with his second novel, Guy Mannering.  Well, not Scott, but rather “The Author of Waverley.”  I do not know how high The Author of Pride and Prejudice &c. &c. would have ranked with Emma, but she was becoming pretty well-known by this point.

One of these novels is currently among the most popular in the world, while the other has retreated to graduate school, although Scott Bailey read it last spring and made it sound pretty good, if “very plotty.”  I’ve read seven Scott novels, but not Guy Mannering; what do I know.

The big celebrity bestseller of the year was Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, a collection of song settings of original lyrics published in an expensive edition.  Byron was so popular that he could immediately sell ten thousand copies of even this book.  Current selections of Byron, even fat Penguins and Oxfords, come close to ignoring Hebrew Melodies, but it is the home of “She Walks in Beauty.”

It’s the next year, 1816, when miracles start to happen in English poetry.

I know of two great books in German literature from 1815: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (or just its first half – I never got this straight), and Part II of the first version of Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (Part I is from 1812).

The Hoffmann novel is great fun and a standard classic for German-language readers.  No idea why it has never done much in English.  Too weird?

The Grimm brothers’ book is of the highest importance.  Which book has generated the most additional books, Emma or Grimm’s’ Fairy Tales?  This second volume has “Hans My Hedgehog,” “The Goose Girl,” “The Golden Key” with its unending ending.  I have read the complete Fairy Tales, but not in this early form.  That would be worth doing someday.

So, within the bounds of my ignorance, then: after two hundred years of erosion, three great books left.

The title is borrowed from Emma.

After a little more discourse in praise of gruel… - Emma's food, Emma's jokes

From Chapter 12, part of the hypochondria theme, where Emma’s father tries to bully everyone into eating gruel before bed.

“You and I will have a nice basin of gruel together.  My dear Emma, suppose we all have a little gruel.”

Emma could not suppose any such thing…

There is a surprising amount of gruel in Emma, but also more appetizing food, almost all of it attached to her father and his attempts to deny the pleasure of others. 

“An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome.  Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body.  I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else – but you need not be afraid – they are very small, you see – one of our small eggs will not hurt you.”  (Ch. 3)

Ah, this is the passage where Mr. Woodhouse says “’I do not advise the custard’” – this is the custard served at his own house, at his own table.

Later discussions involve pork loins eaten with “’a boiled turnip, and a little carrot or parsnip,’” and sweetbreads with asparagus.   Emma has the latter prepared for a guest who particularly savors it, even though she fears her father will ruin the pleasure in it (which he does).

Almost every previous fiction writer, and all too many subsequent ones, would not bother to specify the dish.  “Emma had a special dish prepared for her” or something like that would be sufficient.  Similarly with the level of detail about the gruel or pork or baked apples.  Why include anything so ordinary and boring?  Or the scene where Emma and Harriet are fabric shopping, how can that be interesting?

Samuel Richardson, Austen’s favorite novelist, would never have included any of this.  In his hands, it would have been so tedious.  In hers, the passages are full of jokes and insights into characters.  It was Austen who taught me to pay attention to the kind of transportation under discussion, that chaise and barouche-landau are not just types of carriages but contain a lot of meaning, particularly about class and status.

Walter Scott was at the same time working through some of the same issues.  He realized that the materiality of his fictional world made up a good deal of the difference between the past and the present, and between Scotland and England, so he began packing more stuff into his books.  Austen was doing something trickier.  What reader, even the Prince of Wales, needed to read about boiled eggs?

I do not want to argue that Austen and Scott represent progress, exactly.  They had all read Robinson Crusoe (1719).  Talk about a material novel.

Maybe next time I read Emma I will collect more of her jokes.  Everyday comedy, aphorisms (“Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of,” Ch. 22), jokes of character:

Mr. Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile; and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs. Elton’s beginning to talk to him.  (Ch. 36)

I know it is not everyone’s Austen, but mine is the one with a sting.

Thanks to Dolce Bellezza for getting a readalong moving.

Emma's resources - she was not unwilling to have others deceived

How does Austen restore goodwill towards her heroine after mocking her for snobbery, callowness, and junky reading?  And her painting, I forgot about Emma’s portraits.

She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived…  (Ch. 6)

That’s Austen rubbing it in, although Emma delivers her own kind of self-mockery when, examining one of her portraits she declares, honestly enough, “’ The corner of the sofa is very good.’”  Not the highest priority in a portrait.

I mean, Dolce Bellezza was afraid she “would throw the book down in disgust at [Emma’s] interfering, meddlesome ways.”  Austen has some work to do.

Emma acquires some self-knowledge as the novel moves along, which is a big help.  A better musician moves to town, good enough the sentiment in the above quotation is no longer true.  And then Mrs. Elton moves to town – so many characters suddenly move to this little town – and provides a contrast so severe that the acquisition of self-knowledge is greatly furthered.

Meaning, it would be too embarrassing to sound like Mrs. Elton.  In Chapter 10, it is Emma who brags about her “active, busy mind, with a great many independent resources” (music, reading, and so on).  Later, it is the vain, aggressive, vulgar newlywed who cannot stop talking about her “resources”:

“Blessed with so many resources within myself, the world was not necessary to me.  I could do very well without it. To those who had no resources it was a different thing; but my resources made me quite independent.”  (Ch. 32)

At the same time she practically boasts of not practicing the piano, of not doing anything except visiting.  “’Insufferable woman!’ was [Emma’s] immediate exclamation” – immediately once in private, that is.  Meeting a living self-parody can be a great aid to reform.

The problem of “resources” is real, especially for the women in Emma.  Not just women – Emma’s father made insufficient “mental provision” for “the evening of life,” and as a result he is an enormous pain for everyone else.  It is the women, though, especially those of a higher class, who have great trouble simply finding enough to do within the narrow constraints they are allowed.  The mental provision – skill at the piano or the discipline to read a difficult book – is to allow them to sit alone in a quiet room, as Pascal wrote.

Otherwise, much of the remaining activity is gossip.  In Giovanni Verga’s Sicilian novels of small town life, The House by the Medlar Tree and Mastro Don-Gesualdo, the main entertainment, the true entertainment for most people, is gossip, the more poisonous the better.  The town in Emma is a friendlier, healthier place than Verga’s Sicily (understatement), more truly social, but much of the story is about the dangers of too much gossip.

Thank goodness for the invention of television, which allowed people at all levels to direct their gossip at imaginary people. 

And very good lists they were - Emma should read better books

The other clever structural device I noticed in Emma, aside from the inset detective novel, is that it made real use of the three-volume novel format forced on Jane Austen by her publisher.  The first volume is practically a standalone novella.

Smart, restless, bored Emma Woodhouse, having successfully played matchmaker for her best friend, decides to give it another go with a cute, dim-witted protégée, Harriet Smith.  Along the way she misinterprets every possible romantic signal from every possible direction, makes a (mild, comic) mess of things, and learns a (mild, comic) lesson about hubris.  Several key characters are mentioned but kept offstage; they will be brought on in Volume 2 as part of a more complex version of the story rehearsed in the first volume.  The first volume would have been a minor comic classic on its own.

Early on, Emma’s older friends spend the most tedious chapter in the novel (Ch. 5) criticizing her – what? her lack of wisdom and discipline – her youth, I am tempted to say.  This chapter more than any other reminds me that Austen is an 18th as well as a 19th century novelist. 

Is this Emma or Émile?  Is Harriet suitable as a friend of Emma?  She “’is not the superior young woman which Emma’s friend ought to be’” – meaning, Emma is bright and Harriet is dim.  But “’[t]hey will read together’” – “’it will be an inducement for [Emma] to read more herself.’”  Emma’s friends are saying she does not read enough.

“Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old.  I have seen a great many lists of her drawing up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly – and very good lists they were – very well chosen, and very neatly arranged – sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule.   The list she drew up when only fourteen – I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time…”

Many book bloggers, including this one, will read this passage with some wincing and grimacing.  The lists would be of improving books – this is the 18th century idea.  In the previous chapter, Harriet and Emma dismiss Harriet’s farmer suitor because he does not read – well, he reads, “the Agricultural Reports and some other books,” and also The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel but one that would count as a wholesome, improving book, as 18th century novels go – but he does not read Gothic novels, in fact “’[h]e had never heard of such books before I mentioned them.’”

Here we have Austen attacking her own characters for their backwards snobbery, their dismissal of a man for not reading popular trash.  She does not even give them the excuse that he doesn’t read novels.  Austen can be so mean.  Several chapters later, Austen adds to the insult:

[Emma’s] views of improving her little friend’s mind, by a great deal of useful reading and conversation, had never yet led to more than a few first chapters, and the intention of going on to-morrow.  It was much easier to chat than study…  the only literary pursuit which engaged Harriet at present, the only mental provision she was making for the evening of life, was the collecting and transcribing all the riddles of every sort that she could meet with…  (Ch. 9)

The phrase in bold is the author openly mocking her characters.  The heck with free “indirect” style!

Note that the riddles are an early thematic reference to the idea of the detective novel which will be developed in the next volume.  Emma is a well-controlled novel.

She only gave herself a saucy conscious smile about it, and found amusement in detecting - Emma as undetectable detective fiction

Emma, the anonymous novel by “The Author of Pride and Prejudice &c. &c.,” published two hundred years ago this month, the great “novel of deceit and detection” as P. D. James calls it.  Many people are doing a bicentennial reading.  Me, too.

When I first (also last) read the novel, I did not know that it was detective fiction.  The mystery novel structure was undetectable.  This time, knowing the story, it was so blatant I might have called some of the devices clumsy if I did not know that it was, really, fundamentally, invisible.  The magician had taken me backstage to show me some of her tricks.  The demonstration of those may well be themselves tricks, the existence of which will be revealed the next time I read Emma.

I sometimes wonder if I should ever write about books I have only read once.  The errors I must make.

A young woman moves to a small town to live with her aunt and grandmother.  The detective in the title tries to figure out why – was she, for example, romantically involved with her best friend’s husband?  The substance of the mystery is not that exciting, but for structural purposes it hardly matters.  There are clues, red herrings, mysteries within mysteries, mysteries alongside mysteries, revelations, all of that stuff, all before there was any such thing as a detective novel.

Then there is the comedy, more to the point.  Inspector Emma turns out to be a terrible detective, a great comic blunderer, Clouseau with an English accent.  And this is part of the ethical meaning of the novel, which is itself a good trick.

For example, in Chapter 34, secondary characters spend two pages arguing about who will pick up the mail, a scene just as dull as it sounds:

“The post-office is a wonderful establishment!" said she. – “The regularity and despatch of it! If one thinks of all that it has to do, and all that it does so well, it is really astonishing!”

“It is certainly very well regulated.”

[blah blah blah]

The varieties of hand-writing were farther talked of, and the usual observations made.

I wonder what I was thinking a decade ago when I read that sentence.  Probably something like “man, what a dud sentence; The Author of Pride and Prejudice &c. &c. is kind of overrated.”  This time, though, it was amusingly obvious that the entire scene was full of clues to the mystery, and that, even better, Detective Emma realizes that it is full of clues – “She could have made an inquiry or two, as to the expedition and the expense of the Irish mails; – it was at her tongue’s end – but she abstained” – but as a bad detective she misinterprets them, and as a worse detective and obedient reader, I followed right along after her.  She is the smartest character in the novel, so of course I trusted her.

The first time, it was entertaining to try to solve the mystery along with the detective; the second, it was even more enjoyable to see how The Author of &c. &c. had so skillfully led me along by the nose.

The title quotation is from Chapter 51, remorselessly torn from its context.

What’s needed, it seems, is the right verisimilitude - Alcott, Baudelaire, Austen, and Knausgaard - highlights from The Hudson Review

Now I am going to look at the highlights of the Winter 2015 issue of The Hudson Review, my favorite literary journal.

For a long time, The Hudson Review had nothing online, and then a few things, and now quite a bit.  But not everything, so I can only insist that poet David Slavitt’s peculiar idea to write fake choruses to lost Sophocles plays, based only on the titles of the plays, is promising; or that classics professor Bruce Heiden’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Chats” is perfect.  I can give a hint of the latter, I guess:

Their haunches emanate unnatural fires;
And golden speckles, fine as desert sand,
Constellate the marble of their eyes.

And I bought the Slavitt book, so more of that later.  The poetry in this magazine is usually strong.

Even with more articles given away online, I never see anyone promote it.  The piece that should be circulating widely is Bruce Bawer’s review of the Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle novels, the best thing I have read on them.  Bawer has the advantage that he has 1) read all six books, 2) read them in Norwegian, and 3) read them in Norway.  The latter point especially:

Sometimes it can seem as if every second or third novel you pick up in an Oslo bookstore is about a man (a literary type, naturally) in late middle age who’s lived alone in some remote place since his divorce and who, one day in dark midwinter, is given a grim diagnosis by his doctor, after which he goes home to reflect on his life – his failed marriage, disappointing career, estranged children – and to contemplate stoically his impending death.   (588)

While jolly Knausgaard is seen by Norwegian readers to offer “a naïve, credulous, American-style enthusiasm about life.”  How can an American reader know that Knausgaard was writing a complex parody?  By the way, anyone who has commented on the oddity of the English translation – Bawer says you are right: “innumerable errors that are minor but whose cumulative effect is distracting” (594).

I have not read Knausgaard, so I only care because the review is so good.  Of more direct interest was a long piece on “Mind and Mindlessness in Jane Austen” by Wellesley English professor Timothy Peltason, a careful ethical argument that pushes well past Austen’s romantic plots towards the inner lives of her characters, including those with no inner lives, or “inner lives that are astonishingly unvaried and unimaginative, so much so that the narrator pauses frequently to wonder, and obliges us to wonder with her, what it can possibly be like to inhabit such a consciousness, or such a lack of consciousness” (611).  Lady Bertram from Mansfield Park or the awful Elliots from Persuasion are examples.  “[T]he comic horrors of inward vacancy,” Peltason calls the theme.

The larger point is to contrast the mindless characters with the mindful, the heroines and their successful suitors.  The marriage plot is not just about the search for love, but the search for morally intelligent life in the universe.  Austen fans should seek out the magazine for this one.

Alexandra Mullen’s review of the latest Library of America collection of Louisa May Alcott novels is also excellent, and luckily it is online.  If Work or Rose in Bloom are not first-rate works of art, they are still of high interest, moralistic, improving fiction with artistic ambition and real humor.

One of her sons makes the argument [for Horatio Alger novels!] from verisimilitude: “A bootblack mustn’t use good grammar, and a newsboy must swear a little, or he wouldn’t be natural.”  His mother replies: “But my sons are neither bootblacks nor newsboys, and I object to hearing them use such words as ‘screamer,’ ‘bully,’ and ‘buster.’”  Genteel fictions meet with her disapproval when both the virtue and rewards lack verisimilitude – when boys run away to sea and behave so nobly that Admiral Farragut invites them to dinner.  What’s needed, it seems, is the right verisimilitude…  (680)

And even I agree with the aunt on that.  Mullen’s and Peltason’s  essays are model for something I never do but maybe should, working through the ethical argument in good fiction with clarity and force.

For The Hudson Review, routine stuff.

The Best Books of the Year: 1814 - neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners

What were the Best Books of the Year in 1814?  What I have usually done in a post like this is scrounge together every book of any literary consequence at all from a given year, which is not as hard a task as it seems since two hundred years culls the herd of books so brutally (as does twenty years; as does two).  But 1814 was unusual because its best books were so influential.

Another change is that I did more anniversary reading than usual this year (usual: none), so I will just link back to some recent posts.  One of these influential, foundational works was E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, for example, which is back here.  Another German novella from the same year, Peter Schlemihl by Adelbert von Chamisso casts almost as long a shadow.  It’s about a guy who sells his shadow to the devil.  That’s why I said – ah, never mind.  It’s good, too, if narrower than Hoffmann’s fantasy.

Then there’s Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s best book, which is more read now than anything else I will mention, but the influence of which is complicated by the fact that it is Jane Austen’s worst book.  At the time it was published, Austen was something like what we would now call a midlist writer, not a bestseller, but a seller, a writer with a lot of good readers, including Walter Scott and the dissolute Prince Regent who would later become King George IV.  If she had only lived a few more years, she would have been a guest of the king, and then she could have written a hilarious novel about that.  And she could have finished Sanditon.  And, and, and.

We do not have enough Austen novels, but we have more Walter Scott novels than anyone wants to read.  The first was Waverley, from this year, the novel that went viral, as the youngsters say, that did not literally invent the idea of the historical novel but in effect did so.  Waverley must have directly inspired hundreds of novels; further Scott novels must have led to thousands.  Within twenty years Balzac, Hugo, Gogol, Pushkin, Manzoni, and Dickens had written historical novels that were clearly Scott-like.  Dumas and Cooper made careers out of the form.  On and on, to the present, even if the amount of Scott in contemporary novels has become homeopathic.

And Scott really was doing something innovative, and he knew it.  That’s why he spends the first chapter, and plenty of later passages, describing what he is doing:

I would have my readers understand, that they will meet in the following pages neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners…  (Chapter First)

Just the kind of thing many readers find deadly.  Scott certainly never seems to be in any hurry.  But Waverley is nevertheless a fine novel, funny, perceptive, and in some places fairly exciting.  I am rereading it now, so I will likely poke at the book more in the new year.

The final case, making at least four, is Lord Byron, who published some works key in the other viral phenomenon of the time, Byronism.  I want to save these for tomorrow, though.

So that’s: the novel that created historical novels, Byronism, Hoffmann fantasies, and an Austen novel.  Plus Peter Schlemihl.  And the earliest known Keats poems, but we have to wait two more years for the good stuff.

One final example, the reverse of the above.  The consensus Book of the Year in England, appearing on all of the lists, if there had been lists, would easily have been The Excursion by William Wordsworth, a book of great Significance and greater Tediousness.  It is close to unread now, and the curious thing is that it was made obsolete by Wordsworth himself, by the publication of The Prelude in 1850, a poem which does everything of value that The Excursion does except better – with more beauty, more narrative interest, and much less artificiality.  It took some time, but The Prelude eventually murdered The Excursion.  I doubt this happens very often.

From this distance, the number of surviving books from 1814 is hardly the point.  A good year.  I put a page from John Constable’s 1814 sketchbook, owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, up top.

Why is Mansfield Park Jane Austen’s worst book? - Put yourself in Miss Crawford's place, Fanny.

Oh, there are so many reasons.  The priggishness of the heroine, Fanny Price, for example; the priggishness of one of the male romantic leads, Edmund Bertram.  There are a couple of scenes where they lecture each other on the faulty sense of duty of other people (not each other, not themselves), where even I thought boy, you two deserve each other.  Just be warned that at least one of your children will get so fed up with your righteousness that he’ll run off to join the circus.

My title question often turns into something ruder – “Why do so many people read Mansfield Park so badly?”  Sarah Emsley argues that readers mistake a tragedy for a comedy.  I cannot accept this as the answer, since I, too, take the book as a comedy, primarily because it is written in a comic tone, excepting those dreary lectures mentioned just above.  I laugh all the way through;  I even laugh at Fanny’s alcohol problem (“Never had Fanny more wanted a cordial,” Ch. 46).

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single reader in possession of the wrong idea about a book is reluctant to let it go.  So readers convinced for some reason that Mansfield Park is a romance – meaning the kind of book about troubles of the heart we now label romances – often persist in the notion that it is that kind of romance even when the text fails to do the things romances commonly do.  In this sense, Mansfield Park is a mediocre romance novel.  It botches the proposal scene.  A lot of what might seem like the primary action occurs offstage at the end, communicated to Fanny by letter.

I see now, though, that much of the confusion is built into the novel by Austen, likely deliberately.  I have written as if it is obvious that Fanny Price is the heroine of Mansfield Park.  It would be perfectly reasonable for the reader not previously warned to assume that Mary Crawford was the primary heroine.  She is introduced early in the novel, in Chapter 4, the outside observer at Mansfield Park.  Fanny Price, the poor cousin, has by this point lived there for many years, so how can she be the outsider?

Fanny is quiet, Mary is loud.  Fanny is a prig, Mary is fun and funny, more fun and smarter than the other women at Mansfield Park.  She is self-centered and snobbish, but what is the novel for if not to correct those flaws?  If I have picked Mary as the heroine, I might wonder why the point of view shifts to Fanny Price so often, but Fanny is apparently going to be a foil to Mary, and anyway the point of view moves around a lot.  Fanny will provide the B-plot, in which she will likely learn to assert her strength of character against the family that has mistreated and misunderstood her.

I think it would be possible to carry this idea at least halfway through the novel.  Mary will end up marrying, by the way, Fanny’s sailor brother William, overcoming her snobbishness etc. in the name of love etc.  See Chapter 24, and follow the theme of the loaned horse.

Around this point, Mary Crawford drops away and Fanny’s point of view takes over to the extent that Austen moves Fanny to a new setting with entirely new characters, as if to make even the stubbornest reader admit that the book is now permanently and fully Fanny’s, and has therefore been Fanny’s story all along.  “You have shown yourself very, very different from anything that I had imagined,” as one of the character’s says to Fanny in Chapter 32.

I take all of this as a testament to Austen’s ingenuity at storytelling and structuring a novel, the way she keeps so many possibilities alive for so long, long enough for readers to make guesses and develop preferences, some of which will be disappointed.  Readers are perhaps not reading badly but instead really entering the spirit of the thing.

The title is from Chapter 16, completely out of context.

Why is Jane Austen so mean?

No, I am not going to write that piece, although there is a lot to it.  Someone else can write it.  Mrs. Norris, the horrible aunt in Mansfield Park, is perhaps Austen’s greatest monster, and Austen could hardly be more explicit that some of her characters are truly stupid, like Mr. Rushworth and Lady Bertram, so unimaginative that she names her pug Pug.  The 18th century satirical strain was still healthy in Austen.  It obviously suited her temperament.

Now, here we have, at the beginning of the novel, two well-to-do little girls learning to get along with their poor cousin Fanny:

They could not but hold her cheap on finding that she had but two sashes, and had never learned French; and when they perceived her to be little struck with the duet they were so good as to play, they could do no more than make her a generous present of some of their least valued toys, and leave her to herself, while they adjourned to whatever might be the favourite holiday sport of the moment, making artificial flowers or wasting gold paper.  (Ch. 2)

In case anyone thought Mary Delany’s papercraft flowers were a pure fluke.  It is the word “wasting” that jumps out.  It can belong to no one but the narrator.  She is even mean to little girls.  They know no better; they were badly raised.

The girls are likely up in their schoolroom, the East Room, that is later given to poor mouse Fanny Price when the girls are old enough to no longer want it:

Her plants, her books — of which she had been a collector from the first hour of her commanding a shilling—her writing-desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within her reach…  (Ch. 16)

Is it not well-known that Jane Austen had no such room and no such desk, that she wrote her novels to some extent in the very presence of her family?  Fanny is sorely treated by the exigencies of the plot, but Austen in recompense gives her this lovely fantasy room of her own.

The room was most dear to her, and she would not have changed its furniture for the handsomest in the house, though what had been originally plain had suffered all the ill-usage of children; and its greatest elegancies and ornaments were a faded footstool of Julia's work, too ill done for the drawing-room, three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the three lower panes of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy and a moonlight lake in Cumberland, a collection of family profiles, thought unworthy of being anywhere else, over the mantelpiece, and by their side, and pinned against the wall, a small sketch of a ship sent four years ago from the Mediterranean by William, with H.M.S. Antwerp at the bottom, in letters as tall as the mainmast.

William is Fanny’s beloved brother who spends most of the novel drinking rum, eating salt horse, and sinking Napoleon’s navy.

Those transparencies are fascinating.  I should look them up somewhere, find out what they are.  Is it possible that Tintern Abbey and the Lake District are not expressions of interest in the poetry of Williams Wordsworth?  Fanny is a great reader of poetry, memorizing and quoting William Cowper and Walter Scott, so she is keeping up with recent stuff and is interested in Romantic poetry.  “Susan had read nothing, and Fanny longed to give her a share in her own first pleasures, and inspire a taste for the biography and poetry which she delighted in herself” (Ch. 40) – note that Fanny is perhaps a bit snobbish about fiction.  It is her shallow cousin Maria Bertram who alludes to Lawrence Sterne.

I have wandered from the 18th century into the 19th.  Sensibilities are changing, and so is literature.  I feel that I am rooting around in the components of what I find new in Mansfield Park.  But I do not really know.  I need expert help.

Why is Mansfield Park so filthy?

The novel, not the park.  Just one setting, really, Fanny Price's parental home in Portsmouth.

I am still on the road from Austen to Flaubert.  This is a very narrow approach to Austen, yes, absolutely.  Indirect, too.  I am pretending that art progresses, which of course it does, but only in retrospect.  If I first pick a fixed point, say Madame Bovary, I can then cast back and look for writers who were already doing whatever it is that I think is unusual about the point of reference.

My position is that most innovations in literature are closer to discoveries than inventions.  The “innovation” was there all along.  The innovator has just emphasized it more.  I do not know about you, but I am a reader who can use the help.  It may have been there all along, but I did not see it until the innovator pointed it out.

So it is Flaubert who helps me see this sentence in Mansfield Park:

She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust, and her eyes could only wander from the walls, marked by her father's head, to the table cut and notched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it.  (Ch. 46)

If this were a Zola novel I would be treated to a three page symphony of filth, but Austen only occasionally reminds us how her heroine is repelled by the filth of her parents’ house.  Rebecca is their lone servant, either useless (according to Fanny’s mother) or making the best of a difficult situation.

[Fanny] was so little equal to Rebecca's puddings and Rebecca's hashes, brought to table, as they all were, with such accompaniments of half-cleaned plates, and not half-cleaned knives and forks, that she was very often constrained to defer her heartiest meal till she could send her brothers in the evening for biscuits and buns.  (Ch. 42)

The milk is especially good, isn’t it?  Disgusting, but well described.  It reminds me of a passage of opposite purpose from a few chapter earlier, with Fanny now outdoors, observing the Portsmouth ships:

It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and everything looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea, now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound, produced altogether such a combination of charms for Fanny, as made her gradually almost careless of the circumstances under which she felt them.  (Ch. 42)

Both the first and last passages could be compared to paintings, a domestic scene and a sea scene.  Both are in reality static, but both create a sense of motion.  In the filthy parlor, Fanny is looking around, the disgusting bits are bobbing in the milk, and even the bread is somehow noticeably changing.  Even the still items have active verbs attached to them – notched, wiped.  And in the sea scene it is all motion, dancing waves and shadows playing tag.

I wonder where Austen got this.  Her 18th century favorites, Samuel Richardson and Oliver Goldsmith and Fanny Burney and so on, they were not writing like this.  I have only read Evelina (1778); maybe Burney changed.  Lawrence Sterne, alluded to in Mansfield Park, was working on entirely different problems.  Gothic novelists had a certain instrumental interest in detailed settings but I doubt the quality of their prose.  I assume Austen was picking this up not from fiction but from poets like William Cowper (also in MP) and perhaps nature writers like Gilbert White.  I don’t know, but there they are, more passages like these in Mansfield Park than in any other Austen novel.

A different kind of Austen reader is now saying “You literary aesthetes with your light and shadow effects!  Who cares!  If you like that so much, just look out the window.  People, this book is about people!”

Why is Mansfield Park Jane Austen’s best book?

I’m going to use nothing but contentious, aggravating titles while writing about Mansfield Park.

This one has an easy answer, though: Mansfield Park is the best written Austen novel, and it is best written because it has the most stuff in it.  I knew a professor who had taken Vladimir Nabokov’s European Literature class many decades ago.  He remembered an exam question that asked the student to identify what two characters in Mansfield Park had had for breakfast.  Nabokov was asking students to remember this sentence from Chapter 29:

After seeing William to the last moment, Fanny walked back to the breakfast-room with a very saddened heart to grieve over the melancholy change; and there her uncle kindly left her to cry in peace, conceiving, perhaps, that the deserted chair of each young man might exercise her tender enthusiasm, and that the remaining cold pork bones and mustard in William's plate might but divide her feelings with the broken egg-shells in Mr. Crawford's.

Fanny is the heroine; William is her brother; Mr. Crawford is in pursuit of Fanny.

What a lot there is to like in this sentence.  Four characters are invoked, two of whom are not really there, made present by their breakfast, the remnants of a scene that is implied but not depicted.  No dialogue is necessary.  Note the change in point of view after the semi-colon; as with Flaubert, the point of view of Mansfield Park moves fluidly and sometimes quite subtly.  The scene is not really made visible – I have to fill in a lot to complete the still life, but that is imaginatively easy once Austen gives me the hooks.  Austen is writing like Flaubert, not Zola.  She is not going to describe everything.

But she describes a lot, far more than in the novels she had written previously (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey), and still quite a lot more than in the two she wrote subsequently (Emma and Persuasion), although the unfinished Sanditon fragment makes me wonder if Austen was going to try the more dense approach again – see the amazing Shandian butter-and-toast passage.

I do not just mean description, although Mansfield Park has most of Austen's finest descriptions, but rather that she has populated the world not just with people but with objects and places, and once she has done that much of the action and talk can be built around those objects.  Characters in Pride and Prejudice talk about each other; characters in Mansfield Park talk about apricots, cream cheeses, necklaces, whether the turkey needs to be cooked tonight, horses, who gets to sit in which seat of the carriage, and which child gets to play with the knife.  That last one does not sound safe.  And, setting aside the special case of the parodistic Northanger Abbey, there are more books, too - the plays; Fanny’s William Cowper quotations.

I will continue to write about Mansfield Park’s pleasing detail.  Feel free to remind me of examples from other Austen novels.  The toothpick-case from Sense and Sensibility, for example, or the pianoforte in Emma.  I do not think that Mansfield Park is more ethically complex nor that the portrayals of the characters are so different than in Austen’s other novels, but that the creation of a thicker fictional world, and the characters’ interaction with it, is itself a major artistic achievement.

An Austen reader might object, saying that he does not care about stuff in fiction, having plenty of that in his basement; that he hates Flaubert and is pained by the comparison; and that I have ignored everything that makes Mansfield Park so irritating.  Of course, I know, I read book blogs.  In that case, one of the others is likely Austen’s best book.

Mansfield Park was published on May 9, 1814, so this is the bicentennial and lots of people are reading the novel and writing about it.  Professional Mansfield Park expert Sarah Emsley is hosting an academic blog party with, eventually, many guest posts.  I hope someone is writing about those Cowper poems.

A whiff of the providential - Austen and Eliot, for example, changed my life

Today I look at two recent books that directly mix memoir and criticism, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) and William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter (2011).  Maybe I should omit the subtitle so as not to prejudice readers of Wuthering Expectations, who are mostly thinking “yuck.”  Not the target audience.

I have not read the entirety of either book, but have rather spot-checked them.  I do have them at hand, so you cannot just say “Well, the part you did not read is completely different.”  I can check.

Deresiewicz’s book is organized with a chapter per Austen novel, while Mead has a chapter per Middlemarch chapter.  Mead loved her book from childhood and finds that the meaning of the novel deepens as life goes on, while Deresiewicz despised Austen until he had a graduate school epiphany, after which he became an Austen scholar and began learning various lessons from Austen.

Love, I saw, is a verb, not just a noun – an effort, not just another precious feeling.  (158)

Sorry, I did it again, as if I am trying to sabotage the book.  Let me get this out of the way.  Deresiewicz is writing a graduate school memoir, which in and of itself is a mistake.  Graduate students are the worst (the link is to a 30 Rock clip).  Then the structure of linking the events of his life to a particular novel, followed by a series of character-improving lessons, is bizarrely constricting, even if true – no, especially if true.  Deresiewicz presents himself as one strange bird.

If I just ignore the memoir, though, it turns out that his writing about the Austen novels is excellent.  His plot summaries are outstanding, his character portraits swift and vivid.  They are clear, efficient, and expert at deploying details and quotations from the text with enough elegance that I at first did not notice how many little slivers of the book he was really using.  The above “love” passage is preceded by a one-page run through the importance of the words “exertion,” “duty,” and especially “useful” in Mansfield Park (157-8).  If I had written that page as a blog post, I would have been pleased.

He does this first-rate close reading, and then writes about how he began to hang out with some wealthy Brooklynites, which made him appreciate Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and learn that rich people can be jerks.  I don’t get it.

Deresiewicz’s book is memoir plus close reading (with some biography) – Deresiewicz constantly links himself to Austen characters.  Rebecca Mead’s book is really a short Eliot biography with her autobiography and some criticism folded in, so she more often makes connections with Eliot herself.  In the old days, if a New Yorker writer wanted to write an Eliot book, all of the memoir would have been compressed into the foreword or afterword.

This is Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Chace Family Professor of English at Yale, reviewing Mead’s book in the April 24, 2014 New York Review of Books:

What is nonetheless a bit disheartening about My Life in Middlemarch is the apparent assumption that literary criticism and even biography will be most appealing to contemporary readers when packaged as memoir.  In George Eliot’s novel, few words carry a more consistently ironic charge than “Providence” or “providential”…  Though Mead is scarcely under such a delusion, there is still a whiff of the providential about some of the connections she traces between her own history and Eliot’s.  (59)

Or, less politely, the memoiristic passages should have been cut, some of the connections are inventions, and the fault is likely that of an agent or publisher (true for Deresiewicz, too, I’ll bet).  The review is otherwise pretty glowing, although it is mostly about how deeply interesting Eliot is.  And really, at this point, Eliot vs. Mead is not a contest, right?

I think I will just point towards Rohan Maitzen’s recent review for more, including lots of useful quotations that show Mead’s skill and some of her better and worse attempts to justify the exercise.

Neither of these books is a bad book, and I can imagine plenty of readers getting a lot out of them.  But I can also imagine the shadow books where the authors got out of the way, with all of the autobiography moved to the end, for example, so the artificial demand for connections is relaxed.  Those books seem like they would be better.

Next I want to look at Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010), which does much of what I am complaining about here, but I think with more success.  That will have to wait until Monday.

The Best Books of 1813 - who am I kidding, the Best Book - I cannot prate in puling strain

“Frosty Morning” by J. M. W. Turner, courtesy of Tate Britain.  Turner liked it so much he never sold it, for which I do not blame him.  It was completed in 1813, a sparse year for surviving literature.

Only one lasting novel, for example, but what an example.  Pride and Prejudice has become an inescapable book, even a best-selling book.  I wish I could remember where I read that – you have to add all of the different editions together to get it onto the bestseller list, but then Jane Austen would be side by side with James Patterson.

It was not always so.  Pride and Prejudice was never anything like a forgotten book, but it was not so gigantic until recently, surprisingly recently.  I turn to my favorite problematic but simple tool for quantifying status, the MLA International Bibliography, a database of articles, monographs, etc. reaching back to 1947, where I count 505 articles, etc. with a Pride and Prejudice tag.  The distribution by decade, roughly:

1947-1973: 13
1974-1983: 32
1984-1993: 112
1994-2003: 116
2004-2013: 232

In other words, a full 45% of the academic articles, etc. about Pride and Prejudice have been published within the last ten years!  That is amazing.  Austen was not always so ubiquitous.

My guess would have been that the 1980s Austen revival was owed to feminist criticism, and perhaps that was the first spark, but a glance through the article titles from the 1980s suggests that all kinds of approaches were making good use of Pride and Prejudice.  It is such a rich text.

1813 was an important year for English poetry.  Percy Shelley’s first major work, the allegorical radical fairy poem “Queen Mab,” was published to no interest; a decade later it had become a central text for English laboring-class reformers and revolutionaries, a story almost as surprising as the long, slow rise of Pride and Prejudice.  I am afraid, or perhaps happy to say, the contents of the poem itself have slipped from my memory.

Lord Byron had hit the jackpot in 1812 with the first parts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he followed in 1813 with two long Orientalist romances mostly in rhyming couplets, The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale and The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale, both immensely popular, both pretty silly, and both quite a lot of fun for readers who enjoy the poetry (if not, they are unreadable).  It is all just an excuse for Byron to show off his gift:

‘The cold in clime are cold in blood,
    Their love can scarce deserve the name;
But mine was like the lava flood
    That boils in Ætna’s breast of flame.
I cannot prate in puling strain
Of ladye-love, and beauty’s chain:
If changing cheek, and scorching vein,
Lips taught to writhe, but not complain,
If bursting heart, and madd’ning brain,
And daring deed, and vengeful steel,
And all that I have felt, and feel,
Betoken love –  that love was mine,
And shown by many a bitter sign.’  (“The Giaour,” 1099-1111)

In some sense I have still only come up with a single book for 1813.  What was going on in literature outside of England?  I do not know.  A number of European countries were understandably preoccupied.  Spain was being destroyed in the Peninsular War, yet Francisco Goya was creating the etchings that make up The Disasters of War and paintings like The Madhouse (none of these have firm dates).

It seems I often turn to Goya in these Best of 181X posts.  Well, of course.

The Best Books of the Year - 1811 - I shall not cease from Mental Fight

I love Best of the Year lists, and believe that they are valuable, even if they do not quite do what they think they are doing.  For example: let us look back 200 years and catalog the Best Books of 1811.

As usual for the first couple of decades of the 19th century, the bulk of the Top 10 action is in German literature, where three major, long-lasting books were produced:

1.  The second volume of Heinrich von Kleist’s short stories, which included his longest piece of fiction, the novella Michael Kohlhaas.  Kleist ended the year by shooting himself in the chest.

2.  The novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.  Aside from the difficulty of the author’s preposterous name, I do not know why this story, among the greatest fantasies of the century, is so little known in English.  Fantasy stories are still popular, I believe.  This one, about a water spirit who falls in love and becomes more or less human for a while, is light and fluid and not burdened with allegories of Kant or Masonic flimflam like some fairy stories I could mention.  George MacDonald called it the ideal fairy tale, which it is.

3.  The first volume of Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth.  I do not remember how far he gets in the first part.  The childhood section is a marvel, even delightful.  Much of the recent movie Young Goethe in Love is presumably drawn from this memoir.  Goethe was 62 or so when this book was published.

German “Top 10 of 1811” lists, if there had been such things, would have regularly included these three books.  Kleist would be more common on the lists of young firebrands, who might well omit Goethe to declare their independence from orthodoxy.  The omission of Undine by the avant or rear-garde would simply have been a failure of judgment.

What else was going on in 1811?  Napoleonic France was for some reason bad for literature, so I do not know of anything there.  American literature, by which I mean lasting literature, had not quite been born yet, although I am sure a number of highly praised poems about Niagara Falls were published.

I wonder what the English Top 10 lists would have looked like?  Novels were not quite respectable yet, and crackpot visionary poets much less so, so the two greatest works of the year would have been omitted.

The image atop the post is the title page of William Blake’s Milton: a Poem.  One might note the 1804 in the lower left and wonder why I place the poem here.  My understanding is that Blake had been working on the poem since 1804, and that complete versions of these extraordinary handmade objects did not exist until 1810 or 1811.  And then I am arbitrarily picking the latter.  This is as good a place as any to remind myself that although I do double-check dates and so on, these year-end wrap-ups likely include some pretty grim errors.

Milton: A Poem is among the less complex of Blake’s mythological poems, which does not mean that I remember it well , or that the summaries I have used to jog my memory have been much help.  The spirit of Milton enters Blake’s foot and is united with his Female Principle?  ???*  Even if the entire poem is rarely read, the preface is the source of a genuinely famous poem, “Jerusalem” (see left):

I shall not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

As famous now, more famous, is the only English novel of the year whose title or author mean a thing to me.  Sense and Sensibility, by “A Lady,” was published in 1811, and I amuse myself thinking of how baffled all but a few readers of the time would be at the book’s life, that it is not only read 200 years later, which is rare enough, but hugely popular, both beloved and esteemed, while so many books that got so much more attention have been forgotten.

Which 2011 Top 10 list includes our contemporary Sense and Sensibility?

The Blake images are borrowed from the Milton page of the William Blake Archive.

*  ?????

Jane Austen’s record collection

“Record collection” is a metaphor.  The collection that does exist is of sheet music, songs and piano pieces, in eight books, two in Austen’s own hand.  Of those two, one contains nothing but piano music, the other nothing but songs.  I have been listening to recordings based on these books.  For reference:

Jane Austen’s Songbook, Albany, 2004, featuring soprano Julianne Baird and others.
The Music and Songs of Jane Austen, Isis, 1996, performed by The Windsor Box and Fir Company.
The Jane Austen Collection, Divine Art, 2007, performed by the Concert Royal.

The first album presents the entire book of thirty-seven songs,  beginning to end.  The other two mix the piano music with the songs.  The Jane Austen Collection also includes relevant spoken excerpts from Sense and Sensibility and Emma (who gave Jane Fairfax that piano?) and Austen’s letters, extremely irritating interruptions during ordinary listening.  I have library copies, and therefore booklets for the first two.

Each album pretends to simulate a musical evening at the Austen house, or perhaps, if the moon is full, at a neighbor’s place.  I found this plausible, and Janites or Janists or whatever they call themselves will likely find a lot of charm in any of these performances.  The piano pieces are generally worse than the songs, either curiosities or etudes; a five minute theme-and-variations on “Deck the Halls” was almost unbearable.  The fact that it was likely composed by Austen’s own piano teacher makes it no less grating.   A couple of pieces are by Haydn; I am not complaining about those.

The songs have lyrics, and the lyrics allow annotators and fantasists to squeeze biographical meaning out of them.  The only song shared across all three albums is “The Irishman,” which surely held a special place in Austen’s collection because of her romantic entanglement with the Irishman Tom LeFroy.  Well, who knows, but I am more amused imagining Austen and company belting out these lyrics:

The turban’d Turk, who scorns the world,
May strut about with his whiskers curl’d,
Keep a hundred wives under lock and key
For nobody else but himself to see.
Yet long may he sway with his Alcoran
Before he can love like an Irishman.

The second verse, about corrupt London, is almost smutty.  The songbook has several more supposedly Moorish songs, borrowed from forgotten operas like The Mountaineers or Alcanzor and Zaida, as well as a number of French songs.  “The Marseilles March” is another that, in this context, makes me laugh:

Aux Armes, Citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchez, marchez!
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!

To Arms, citizens!
Close your ranks,
March, march!
Let their impure blood
Soak our fields!

How I would love to root through the record collection of all of my favorite writers, even though I am perfectly aware that the useful information in a collection is limited, not much more than trivial correspondences – Borges loved the Beach Boys!*  Me, too!  Even here, the assumption that Austen particularly loved the songs in her own hand, compared to the ones in the other books, copied out by a sister or friend, is just wild guesswork.  All I am sure that I learned here was that Austen’s musical tastes were of her own time, although it is nice to be able to listen in.

All of this is a response to an invitation by the Sparkling Squirrel to Austenize a bit without necessarily reading Austen.

*  Plausible, but an invention.

The Sympathy Project

How crazy is it to say this: The development of the idea of sympathy in 19th century literature was one of the great achievements of the time.  I'm slighting the 18th century Germans.

The success of Pamela (1740), the first modern novel, depended on a very crude idea of sympathy.  Richardson identified or chanced upon a new audience, newly literate female servants who were primed for a story with a female servant for the heroine, with a protagonist just like me.  For non-servant readers, the new experience was to identify so strongly with someone not like me. Not that it's so easy to identify with Pamela today.

I don't think, though, it was until the 19th century that many writers discovered just how powerful the novel was, just how easy it was to direct readers' sentiments towards or away from almost any character. And more importantly, just how artistically and ethically effective these techniques could be when employed by a really skilled writer.

I'm thinking, for example, of Dickens, and especially Hugo.  The condemned murderer in The Diary of a Condemned Man (1829), the Gypsy and hunchback in Notre Dame of Paris (1831), the whole range of urchins, orphans, and thieves in Les Miserables (1862): Hugo wanted action from his readers. Political reform at most, copious tears at the minimum.  The reader was really supposed to regard various categories and behaviors of his fellow man differently after closing the novel.

By mid-century, most of the great writers were working on The Sympathy Project.  Not just Hugo and Dickens: George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Theodor Storm, Adalbert Stifter, Henry James, Mark Twain ("All right, then, I'll GO to hell"), Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky.  All of those Naturalists.   Poets and playwrights, too.  Not everyone.  But an unbelievable amount of artistic and intellectual effort was devoted to creating these incredibly complex patterns of human fellow-feeling.  Excrutiatingly complex, thinking of certain works by Henry James.  The careful reader's sympathetic response to Anna Karenina, for example, ought to be complex.

In Silas Marner (1861), George Eliot carefully directs her reader into the thoughts of every major character, including the candidate for "villain."  We are likely to end up with more understanding of everyone, regardless of their mistakes, eccentricities, or bad actions.  But Eliot is also making an argument about sympathy, enforcing some limits.  The villain crosses a moral line, and we're not with him when he does, a minor key variation on poor pregnant Hetty's "Journey of Despair" in Adam Bede (1859), where the reader and the author are with Hetty, really with her sympathetically - but only up to a point.  Sympathy is withheld, and she's on her own.

I know an English professor, an 18th century specialist, who taught a Jane Austen seminar that, he said, was a complete failure.  He could not penetrate his students' love, love, love for Austen and her characters.  For some reason, he never has this problem with the Vicar of Wakefield, also a likeable fellow.  As Rohan Maitzen suggested a couple of days ago, sympathy can be as bad for the reader as antipathy.  Both can inhibit critical thought.  Elizabeth Bennett, wonderful, amazing Elizabeth Bennett, is not allowed to be ethically compromised.  What, then, do these loving readers make of the last part of Pride and Prejudice? On the other hand, she is one of the greatest creations of imaginative literature.

I was thinking this would be a good place to discuss Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Heart (1877), perhaps his single serious attempt at a sympathetic character, an amazing character, created using the exact same techniques he uses on his horrible people. But I think I've written enough.  The 19th century International Literary Sympathy Project is beginning to look to me like one of the great achievements of civilization.  But literature can do other things, too.  That's all I'm saying.

Pride and Prejudice and Yentas - cameo by Saul Bellow

Jane Austen in Boca (2002) by Paula Marantz Cohen is the only novel I've ever read featuring a blurb by Joan Rivers. Cohen is an English Professor who has now written three novels, all quite funny, all romances wrapped around plots borrowed from elsewhere. I wrote a bit about the other two, Much Ado About Jesse Kaplan, and Jane Austen in Scarsdale, or Love, Death, and the SATs, back here.

This one is Pride and Prejudice set in a Boca Raton retirement community. Is it necessary to say "Jewish retirement community"? I didn't think so. It's Boca Raton, FL, for Pete's sake.

So Elizabeth Bennet becomes Flo, a widow, a former University of Chicago librarian. Sweeter, prettier sister Jane becomes May, Flo's sweeter, prettier friend. Darcy is a curmudgeonly retired English professor at Florida Atlantic University, who falls for Elizabeth, sorry, Flo, because she's interesting. Other correspondences are created, modified, or discarded as needed. Great fun, and mostly just an excuse to put a plot around a gentle, humorous novel about life in a Florida retirement community.

Near the end of the book, Darcy, no, Stan, leads a seminar on Pride and Prejudice at the retirement community. I suspect the resulting chapter is nothing more than a transcription from Paula Marantz Cohen's own seminar. Some samples:

"Once you get used to the Old English, it reads very fast."

"I didn't know they were sarcastic back then, but I guess being sarcastic isn't necessarily modern."

"I had four sisters, too. My mother didn't stop shvitzing until we were all married. I feel for that Mrs. Bennet."

One more, and I'll stop:

"'Herb was like that [like Mr. Bennet] with the children ,' noted Dorothy Meltzer, whose deeply tanned visage was decorated with several Band-Aids marking the removal of the latest basal-cell skin cancer. She wore them as proudly as a German officer sported his saber scars. 'He went into the den with a sandwich whenever Melissa and I would start screaming. Even now, when there's noise, he can't digest.'

Several women nodded. They, too, had known men to hide in the den with a sandwich. Mrs. Bennet had their sympathy." (p. 250)

Jane Austen in Boca is definitely in the chick lit genre, retiree subcategory. I maintain - prove me wrong! - that it's the only chick lit novel that features a cameo by Saul Bellow.* Now I've read all three of Paula Marantz Cohen's novels, still the only examples of chick lit I've read. One might think that I was slumming in my vacation reading. I was, but not with this clever, light novel. Next week, the slumming.

* Since Flo / Elizabeth was a librarian at the University of Chicago. That reminds me, I should tell my Saul Bellow story. So one time, around 1994 or 1995, I stood behind Bellow in the checkout line at the Regenstein library. I didn't realize it was him until he turned to leave, so I didn't see what books he had.

Yeah, that's the whole story.

Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter, - and Non c’ è latte, this is the answer he makes me - Arthur Hugh Clough's Rome

“Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it.
…
Ye gods! What do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,
Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she failed in?
What do I find in the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars.
Well, but St. Peter’s? Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!” (I, 35 & 41-44)

Alas! Claude, hero of Clough’s Amour de Voyages (1849), is a restless youngster. He’s a tourist in Rome, and not happy about it, but the passage above, nominally a letter to his friend Eustace, suggests that the problem might just possibly not be the fault of Rome, exactly.

Fortunately, for Claude and the reader, two things soon happen that interest even him. First, Claude is forced to spend time, much against his well, with other English tourists, and is surprised to find himself falling in love, although he thinks it can’t possibly be serious. He’s a bit like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the distant man who cannot quite believe that he has met a woman who is actually interesting. One wonders what kind of company these fellers had been keeping before, but that’s beside the point.

Second, this is 1849, so Claude and the other tourists wake one morning to discover that the city, under the control of Garibaldi’s Republic, is besieged by the French army (Murray is Claude’s Lonely Planet):

“Yes, we are fighting at last, it appears. This morning as usual,
Murray, as usual, in hand, I enter the Caffè Nuovo;
Seating myself with a sense as it were of a change in the weather,
Not understanding, however, but thinking mostly of Murray,
And, for today is their day, of the Campidoglio Marbles,
Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter, - and Non c’ è latte,
This is the answer he makes me, and this the sign of a battle.” (II. 95-100)

I detect a hint of a future generation of useless men abroad, those of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford, or Turgenev's fretful young intellectuals. Claude begins to find things – the Roman Republic, Mary– interesting, but he has great trouble doing anything, which eventually leads where one would expect. As goes the Roman Republic, so goes the romance of Claude and Mary.

I don’t want to overemphasize the romance, although that’s quite good, and would have made a fine plot in the hands of Jane Austen or E. M. Forster. Amours de Voyage consists mostly of Claude philosophizing and ironizing, and whining and moping, and wandering around Rome, all in his overbaked Oxford style. What he has to say, what he thinks, is interesting. What he does, that's Claude's problem.

Wonderful poet, Arthur Hugh Clough. Not quite like anyone else.

Best Books of the Year - 1818

1818 was one of the greatest literary years of the 19th century. It saw the publication of two Jane Austen novels, Persuasion and, sadly, Northanger Abbey (sad, of course, because it was only published as a result of Austen's death). Walter Scott published The Heart of Midlothian, one of his best books. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a novel so rich in ideas that I forgive its infelicities. Finally, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey, which is not what it sounds like.

Meanwhile, Byron, Keats, and P. Shelley were all in peak form. Byron published the Venetian adultery comedy Beppo, not a favorite of mine but enjoyable for its light touch. Keats published the long, mythical Endymion, very far from a favorite. For P. Shelley, it was a highly productive year, but for most of us only one poem will really matter: "Ozymandias."

It's funny how central Percy Shelley is here. Besides his wife's book, Byron and Keats and Peacock were close friends, and Shelley is even the central character of Nightmare Abbey, a tiny little novel-like thing that should be read more:

"When Scythrop [that's Shelley] grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head: having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonized Latin." (Ch. 1)

So that's five novels with some life today. Two (Persuasion and Frankenstein) are among the best of the century. Two, by coincidence, are Gothic parodies with "Abbey" in the title; one of these is sadly neglected. And major work by three great poets. This did not happen most years. Note that if magazines back then published "Best Books of the Year" lists, the only one I'm sure would make the lists is Walter Scott's.

This has all been awfully British. What else was going on? In America and pre-Romantic France I will go ahead and say, confidently, nothing. In the German principalities, there was quite a lot, although Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann seem to be between books this year. Either one may have been, and probably was, publishing in journals. Giacomo Leopardi was writing his Cantos and essays at this time, I am sure, but I have never sorted out his confusing chronology.

Still, there aren't that many years in the 19th century which contain five still-read novels from all of Europe, so I don't fell too bad about ending my researches here.

Nevertheless, I put an engraving of Francisco Goya's 1818 The Giant up top, just to make the year a little less British.

In which I fail to comprehend the religious ideas in Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice

So I have a problem understanding the religious ethics of 17th century Japanese fiction and 8th century Chinese poetry. I am ignorant of traditions, and I don’t know how to read all sorts of signals that would have guided contemporary readers. I’ll bet that some aspects of 8th century Chinese poetry looked pretty foreign to the 17th century Japanese reader, but I’m too distant from it all to guess which ones.

Adalbert Stifter’s novella Limestone stars a strange, saintly priest. Re-reading the story recently, I realized that part of the strangeness of the character was that he did not seem quite Catholic. There were oddities of dress and habit that made me think he belonged in a Bergman film. What a delight to later read that when the story was first published, the priest was actually a Lutheran minister. Stifter changed some of the details about the character, but not all of them. Perhaps it was an oversight, perhaps he valued the strange effect.

With Chinese or Japanese literature, I don’t recognize those signals. If Ihara Saikaku dressed his 17th century monk like an 8th century Chinese hermit, how would I know?

But I have the same problem, actually, with European and American literature. It’s worse in a way, more insidious, because it’s easier to assume that then is basically like now. In classical Japanese literature (or medieval European or Classical Greek) the foreignness, the strangeness, is hard to ignore. I can’t be as glib about what I don’t understand. When I read, I fill in the background with what I know, and in the 19th century, I am less likely to see when the background and foreground clash.

Even in European literature, religious content presents the greatest challenge to me. I want to denature religion too much. I don’t want to punish Clarissa Harlowe for the sin of disobeying her parents, or Jane Eyre for the sin of idolatry. And I don't have to. These books have plenty of strengths – they’re complex masterpieces, packed with meaning. But I know that I am missing a piece if I look away from ethical aspects with which I am uncomfortable.

Jane Austen puts a mortal sin right there in the title of Pride and Prejudice. Today, pride is as often thought of as a virtue as a sin, and it’s hardly appealing to think of Elizabeth Bennet as a sinner. She’s so wonderful. But maybe the clergyman’s daughter put some of this into her novel. It's worked into the ethics of the novel, I can see that much.

This would be a good place to link to The Little Professor, who makes her living with this sort of thing, and to My Life in Book’s headfirst dive into the religion of Jane Eyre.