Jane Austen's private world

Pride and Prejudice, the world’s favourite novel, turned 200 last month. And while we’re contemplating its great age, it’s worth remembering that Jane Austen was 21 when she wrote it. It’s hard to name what it is about her novels, this one in particular, that makes them so enduringly appealing. They’re exquisitely observed, of course; nobody skewers a fop, a bore, a ninny, or a flirt like Austen could in one short sketch. They’re comic as well as dramatic and romantic. They’re full of moral marrow, memorable characters, beautifully drawn scenes and finely turned phrases. But I think above all, the reason they delight and intrigue us still is their exploration of a rich and complex inner life. 

Nothing is more often pointed out about Austen than that she turned away from the wider world of history and politics to write about the confined, unvarying world of a small domestic or parochial circle. In fact what she wrote about was not an outer world at all, large or small, but an inner world of immense dimension and substance. Where else but in a fully realised psychological interior do pride, prejudice, sense, sensibility, and persuasion take form? For Austen’s heroines, the stakes are self esteem, personal virtue, rationality and contentment, not the social or pecuniary rewards for which the shallow, morally compromised characters play. Mechanically, the novels resolve in marriages and other social maneuvres, but the real movement of each novel happens in inward reflection, realisation, self-knowledge, and self-command.

Think of Emma’s, (or Marianne’s), blinding realisation of her own error, almost simultaneous with the realisation of her true feelings; Elinor’s bargain with herself to keep Lucy’s secret and prize Edward’s honour above her own happiness. Think of Anne’s tender revelation of her steadfastness to Captain Harville, overheard by Wentworth in that novel’s climactic scene. And think of Elizabeth compulsively re-reading Darcy’s letter: “Till this moment I never knew myself.” The letter is the novel’s turning point, and it’s not Wickham’s shortcomings but her own that shock her, and move her toward knowledge and love. It’s not a world of heroes and cads and dashing romances, but our admission to this private world of deep feeling, long suffering, painful reflection and dawning knowledge that makes these books so endlessly enjoyable. 

I love your verses with all my heart

So wrote Robert Browning, on the 10th of January 1845, to Elizabeth Barrett, a famed poet who was also an invalid and a recluse. She wrote back.

Their story is one of the most romantic to be found in literary history, but it's not the romance of tragic infidelities, wrenching separations, narcosis, tuberculosis, and early death that attend so many other literary heroes. It's the truer romance of genuine kinship, kindling intellects, a full and free exchange of idea and emotion, and a flight to Italy where health, happiness and fertility crowned their marriage. And it all started with this letter.

...since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me - for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration - perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter! - but nothing comes of it all - so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew [...] the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought - but in this addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart - and I love you too: do you know I was once not very far from seeing .. really seeing you? Mr Kenyon said to me one morning “would you like to see Miss Barrett?” - then he went to announce me, - then he returned .. you were too unwell - and now it is years ago - and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels - as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt, .. only a screen to push and I might have entered - but there was some slight .. so it now seems .. slight and just-sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be! 

Well, these Poems were to be - and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself

 Yours ever faithfully,

Robert Browning.  

Good shepherds

Two mass shootings in as many weeks have prompted the usual American impasse about the apparently intractable problem of guns.  Meanwhile just about everyone else in the world can see the solution. And it’s not the one proposed by the gun lobby: more guns. In fact it’s the opposite: fewer guns. Or, heck, how about just fewer assault rifles? That would be a good start. But the so-called second amendment rights of the gun nuts seem to trump the first amendment rights of, for example, the Sikhs. Their freedom to carry lethal weapons must not on any account be infringed by the right of their fellow citizens to live in peace and safety. “’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the god,” Shakespeare has Hector say in Troilus and Cressida. The one that got me, though, was philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s line: “Freedom for the wolves is death to the lambs.” That equation had a bloody resonance this past month. 

It has another kind of resonance this week, with the announcement of Paul Ryan as Romney’s VP pick. Ryan’s notorious Budget proposal, that, according to the independent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, would represent “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history”, argues from a purely ideological (and Randian) stance that America would genuinely be better off if the wealthy got breaks and the poor got broken. Obama’s called it “thinly veiled Social Darwinism,” but it’s worse. It’s aiding the wolves, and tying down the lambs. 

What Home could be

My favourite Saturdays are spent at home. There’s pleasure in housekeeping on these days, I think because I don’t have to do it every day. And after chores are done, there’s rest and solace. I’ve been beguiled lately by the images of home in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. In their little house in the big woods of Wisconsin, or on the Oklahoma prairie, there’s a sweet simplicity. Outside, wolves might howl in an immense darkness, but inside there’s a fire, a table, a book or two, and the music of Pa’s fiddle. Everything they have fits in one small room. Anything they need, Pa or Ma can make, or mend.  Life is rhythmic, simple, charming. 

Someone who never quite believed this picture, or never found it for herself, was Emily Dickinson, who was just a little older than Laura’s Ma. Readers of her poetry note the way she kept house and home at a conceptual distance from one another. Despite living out her days a deliberate recluse in the Amherst house she was born in, she once asked her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson “Could you tell me what home is?” This poem - fragmentary, grasping -  is a rare glimpse of what home seemed to her, or what she had learned a home could be. Strange at first, but lovely, vivid, blessed. In the end it’s beautiful, but unattainable. “This seems a Home - and Home is not.” The picture fades. 

I learned - at least - what Home could be -
How ignorant I had been
Of pretty ways of Covenant -
How awkward at the Hymn
 
Round our new Fireside - but for this -
This pattern - of the Way -
Whose Memory drowns me, like the Dip
Of a Celestial Sea -
 
What Mornings in our Garden - guessed -
What Bees - for us - to hum -
With only Birds to interrupt
The Ripple of our Theme -
 
And Task for Both -
When Play be done -
Your Problem - of the Brain -
And mine - some foolisher effect -
A Ruffle - or a Tune -
 
The Afternoons - Together spent -
And Twilight - in the Lanes -
Some ministry to poorer lives -
Seen poorest - thro' our gains -
 
And then Return - and Night - and Home -
And then away to You to pass -
A new - diviner - care -
Till Sunrise take us back to Scene -
Transmuted - Vivider -
 
This seems a Home -
And Home is not -
But what that Place could be -
Afflicts me - as a Setting Sun -
Where Dawn - knows how to be -

Tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings

I once took a class in watercolour painting. About the only thing I remember is that we learned the colour of shadows. The shadow of a green apple, for example, is not grey but blue; the shadow of an orange is violet, and so on. This strikes me as an apt image for the genius of Hilary Mantel: she can paint not only the things themselves but the colour of their shadows.

Her rendering of Tudor England, (anything but a still life), is deep and dense; not because she’s at pains to render every detail, but because she isn’t. Such is the vivacity of her recreation that when she writes “window” you picture lead-latticed casements without being told to. Glances through such windows are enough to suggest a totally different relationship to gardens, weather, herbs and crops. The materials of the Tudor world are very present: cold stone, embroidered silk, scented wood, air that’s damp, or clean, or plague-ridden. But the immaterial is equally present. Minds, spirits, consciences all straddling the break with Rome, the new gospel, the frailty of a divinely appointed king; it’s frightening how easily one acquiesces in the casual misogyny and debauchery of the court. Mantel’s characters, though necessarily fictive, bestride their world authentically. It’s the opposite of that strange quality that makes CGI animation never feel quite right, no matter how lifelike - figures look solid but seem weightless. Her figures, particularly her Cromwell, move in three dimensions, every movement fully weighted, every shadow faithfully coloured.

This, I think, is what sets her apart from the generality of historical fiction writers. Authenticity, far more than accuracy, is the real pull of successful historical fiction. It's fiction loosed in history, but not unmoored from truth. Fiction that kicks away the struts of accuracy without falling into error. This is what Shakespeare knew, when he shoved an actor onto the stage at the beginning of Henry V to deliver this prologue. It sounds like an apology for lack, but it's really a defense of the kind of imagination Mantel brings to her little kingdom.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i'the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.