Of Books and Bicycles

I had a lovely snow day today — well, except for the snow — in which I did a lot of nothing: some reading, some email writing, some napping, some gazing out the window. There was some work I could have done, but I didn’t do it. It was great.

So, I finished Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austena few days ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s less than 300 pages, which has something to do with the scarcity of information on Austen’s life, surely, but at the same time is a welcome change from the usual thick biographical tome. I am reluctant to read those long biographies because as a slow reader, they take me forever to get through.  It’s a pleasure to feel that I’ve gotten a good glimpse into Austen’s life without it taking months.

Tomalin has an engaging prose style and offers a good mix of material — enough information on Austen’s family and friends to give a sense of what her milieu was like, for example, without overwhelming the reader with names and relationships that few will remember. She quotes from Austen’s letters frequently — which are always a pleasure to read — and also gives examples of Austen’s poetry and poetry written by her family members, especially her older brother James. She offers brief readings of the novels, which are always well-done and insightful, and with each novel she considers the question many Austen lovers ask: to what extent does Austen resemble her heroines?  The answer is, generally, not a whole lot.  Tomalin notes possible sources for Austen’s inspiration, both in the people around her and in her own life and experience, but she argues strongly for Austen’s imagination as her chief source of material. As much as we might like to, we shouldn’t imagine Austen as Elizabeth Bennet. (I’m not quite ready to give up this idea, though — ready as I am to believe Tomalin, what I’ve learned about Austen’s sense of humor and liveliness does make her seem like Lizzie, my favorite.)

One thing that stands out in the biography is the way Austen depended on particular conditions in which to write and — most significantly — the fact that she had almost no power to create those conditions for herself. Up until the age of 25 she lived happily in her family home in the village of Steventon and was able to do a lot of writing while she was there, completing drafts of three of her major novels, but at that point her parents decided to leave Steventon and take up residence in Bath, and the news came as a complete surprise and unpleasant shock. Tomalin’s description of the time is sad:

There is a briskness and brightness in Jane’s letters at this time, much keeping up of spirits, but no enthusiasm. She is doing what she has to do, making the best of a situation over which she has no control, watching the breaking up of everything familiar and seeing what was left eagerly taken over; fitting in with plans in which she she has no say, losing what she loves for the prospect of an urban life in a house not yet found; no centre, no peace, and the loss of an infinite number of things hard to list, impossible to explain.

What happened is that she spent the next ten or so years of her life living in Bath at times, but also spending a lot of time traveling from one friend or relative’s house to another, and doing very little writing. Tomalin argues that she wrote best when she could live a quiet, regular life, settled comfortably in one place, but this she couldn’t arrange for herself, as she depended on her parents and other relations for her livelihood.

Eventually her mother (after Austen’s father died) settled in a house at Godmersham where one of her brothers was living, and Austen’s life quieted down enough to allow her to pick her writing back up again, arranging to have Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudiced published and finally getting some recognition and earning a little bit of money for her work. And here is another one of the interminable “what if” questions — what if Austen hadn’t lost those ten years of writing time?  What other masterpieces might she have produced?

There is also the fact that she died when she was only 41, a very young age. What might she have produced if she had lived another few decades? The cause of her death is unknown, but is possibly a lymphoma such as Hodgkin’s disease. Tomalin writes that she was brave and energetic until the end; she suffered for some months before she died but was still writing her unfinished novel Sanditon and towards the very end she wrote some lines of comic poetry, which she dictated to her sister Cassandra.

It seems possible that Austen could have written so much more than she did, but, of course, we do have six wonderful novels and some fun juvenilia, and that’s plenty.

I haven’t had much time to read further in Claire Tomalin’s bio of Jane Austen (my limited reading time lately has gone to finishing up Gaudy Night for this Sunday’s mystery book group meeting), but there are still a few things I found interesting I wanted to share with you.

The first is about Tomalin’s treatment of Austen’s relationship with Tom Lefroy, her potential love interest.  The main evidence we have about Austen’s feelings comes from a few references to Lefroy in letters she wrote to her sister Cassandra.  The story is simple in outline — she met Lefroy at a ball when she was 20, she dances with him on a few separate occasions, they have conversations about books, she makes a few jokes about it in her letters, his family gets nervous about this and arranges to send him away, and they never see each other again.

What all this means, though, is another issue.  I’ve read interpretations of Austen’s letters that play down her feelings for him, arguing that her tone is so ironic and joking that it seems unlikely her feelings were very strong, but Tomalin argues unequivocally that Austen was in love with Lefroy, and also that he was in love with her.  In reference to the letter in which Austen says she and Lefroy have done “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together,” Tomalin says this:

… it is also the only surviving letter in which Jane is clearly writing as the heroine of her own youthful story, living for herself the short period of power, excitement and adventure that might come to a young woman when she was thinking of choosing a husband; just for a brief time she was enacting instead of imagining.  We can’t help knowing that her personal story will not go in the direction she is imagining in the letter … but just at that moment, in January 1796, you feel she might quite cheerfully have exchanged her genius for the prospect of being married to Tom Lefroy one day, and living in unknown Ireland, with a large family of children to bring up.

Thank goodness for our sakes that she didn’t have the large family of children, but it’s very sad to think of the heartbreak Austen might have experienced after she realized the relationship was going nowhere.  The problem was money.  Lefroy needed to marry a woman who had some, and Austen was basically penniless.  It’s not that Lefroy was mercenary, but that he was dependent on an uncle who had provided for him and that he had siblings who were dependent on him for their livelihood.  It’s unromantic but entirely true that his life ran more smoothly without Austen in it.  And her heartbreak means that we have the novels.  But it’s still a sad story.

The other interesting thing I discovered was that Austen’s younger relatives thought of her as unrefined and a tiny bit embarrassing.  I was aware that the Victorians sometimes thought of Austen’s novels as a little crude, a little too open and honest for their prudish tastes in fiction (although I wish I knew exactly what the offending passages were, as it’s hard to imagine seeing her novels as anything but models of propriety).  Austen’s niece Fanny wrote that she:

was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent … They [the Austens] were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes … Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of “common-ness” (if such an expression is allowable) & teach herself to be more refined … Both the Aunts [Cassandra and Jane] were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion &c) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent … they would have been, tho’ not less clever & agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good society & its ways.

Fanny was fond of Austen, Tomalin makes clear, but Austen was still very much the poor relation.  On the surface, Austen’s life seems so calm and quiet, but after reading Tomalin’s description of how often Austen must have felt insecure and on the margins of society, I can see that it really wasn’t calm and quiet at all.

My book group met today to discuss Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle.  I have this idea about myself that I don’t like horrible-childhood memoirs, but I’ve read two of them recently and liked them both (this one and Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica, although Diski’s book is a travel book as well as a memoir).  Perhaps I need to revise my opinion?  I don’t like the idea of these memoirs, but the secret truth might be that I really do enjoy reading about other people’s difficult lives.

Walls’s book is a fantastic read.  She is a good writer who knows how to tell a story, and I had trouble putting the book down.  The “stars” of her story are her parents, both of them highly intelligent, capable, imaginative people who never should have had children, although they wound up having four of them.  The father has a wealth of knowledge and a genius for mechanical things, but he’s also an alcoholic and can’t seem to hold down a job for very long.  Soon enough he is stealing money from the family to spend at the bar.  The mother is a painter.  She has a teacing license, which she uses occasionally, but she really wants to devote her time to her art — and she believes she has a right to do this, no matter what is going on in the family.

Walls spends her early years moving from place to place, but the family eventually settles for a while in Phoenix, and later in West Virginia.  It’s the West Virginia part of the story that’s the most harrowing.  Here they buy a place that might charitably be called a shack, which slowly deteriorates from very bad to much worse.  It’s tiny, the roof leaks, they only occasionally have electricity, and their toilet is a hole in the ground.  Walls tries to improve the place by painting it bright yellow, but she can’t reach the whole house and no one will help her out, so she ends up making everything look worse.  The stairs to the front door fall apart until they can no longer use them and have to enter the house through a window.

I could go on and on with the harsh details — I haven’t mentioned any of the worst ones — but what is so memorable about this family is that the parents seem completely unbothered by all the troubles.  The mother transforms all their problems into opportunities for adventure or for learning experiences or for character-building.  She is supremely self-absorbed, angry when she is pulled away from her art.  The father escapes partly by dreaming impossible dreams about the future (the book’s title refers to the castle he plans to build for the family), but mostly through drinking.  Neither of them are able or willing to face up to and take responsibility for their children’s suffering.

It’s easy to get angry at these parents, but they evoke a more complicated response.  They both, especially the mother, have a free-spiritedness about them that is admirable, and they are counter-cultural in all kinds of good ways — they are anti-consumerist, they value creativity and art, they are willing to be brave and take risks, and they raise very smart, creative, and talented children who are years ahead of their classmates (whenever they are in school to actually have classmates).  They are happy living on very little, being squatters in an abandoned building in New York City, for example, finding all they need from dumpsters.  I, at least, admire people who can happily live on the margins of society in this way.  They spend a good chunk of their lives homeless, but it’s by choice — they have the skills and resources to live solidly middle-class lives if they wanted, but they don’t care about how the middle class lives.

But my God, if people want to live this way, they shouldn’t have children!  It’s not just that the children led unconventional lives — which would be difficult enough but not uncommon or unbearable — but their lives and health were regularly in danger.

Walls sticks to fast-paced story-telling and rarely stops to reflect on her experience.  I understand why she has done this — it makes for a tense and exciting reading experience and it allows the story to speak for itself, making it even more gut-wrenchingly powerful.  I did want to see some more reflection, though, if only because I’m fascinated by how people process their childhood experiences and integrate them into their adult selves.  What I liked about Jenny Diski’s suffering-childhood memoir was the way she told the childhood story but also described how she’s dealt with it (or failed to deal with it) as an adult.  But this is asking Walls to have written an entirely different book than what she wrote.  Actually, it strikes me as possible for Walls to write a second book on the subject, this time telling how her adult self has dealt with this childhood legacy.

I also can’t help but wonder if Walls feels that she has exploited her family’s eccentricities and her siblings’ suffering for her own gain.  I’m not criticizing Walls for telling her story; it’s just that I felt odd at times reading about her harsh life with a certain amount of enjoyment, and it’s strange to sit around a table with solidly middle-class friends chatting  pleasantly about just how awful those poor people had it.

But, on the other hand, I’m glad that Walls has found success and made what is probably a fortune on her book, after all she experienced, and I’m glad for the opportunity to think a little with friends about parenting and childhood suffering and materialism and free-thinking.  Maybe I won’t become a fan of childhood memoirs, but I should recognize that there are very good ones out there.

I just began Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen, and so far it’s been great fun to read.  I was surprised to find just how much Tomalin emphasizes Austen’s energy, spirit, and attitude in her life and in her youthful writings.  She was no quiet, solemn figure at all — quite the opposite.  An important influence, Tomalin claims, were the young boys her family took in as students for her father to teach:

Jane Austen was a tough and unsentimental child, drawn to rude, anarchic imaginings and black jokes.  She found a good source for this ferocious style of humor in the talk she heard, and doubtless sometimes joined in, among her parents’ pupils, bursting out of childhood into young manhood.  If she was sometimes shocked as she listened, she herself was learning how to stock by writing things down.

I’m imagining Austen surrounded by rowdy boys playing their rowdy boy games, and thinking about her observing what went on and taking part now and then.  I never thought of her as drawn to black jokes, but I kind of like the idea.  I can certainly see her being unsentimental, especially when I think about the sharply satiric tone she uses in her novels.

I haven’t read much of Austen’s juvenalia, but I’m curious about it after reading Tomalin’s descriptions.  Comparing Austen’s stories to the moral tales of Arnaud Berquin, some of which Austen owned, Tomalin says:

Where he sought to teach and elevate, she plunged into farce, burlesque and self-mockery, and created a world of moral anarchy, bursting with the life and energy Berquin’s good intentions managed to squeeze out.  Berquin’s plays are dead on the page; some of Austen’s juvenile stories could go straight into a Disney cartoon.

She wrote stories with all kinds of bad behavior; her characters are rebellious and do things like steal, get into debt, have affairs, drink too much, gamble, and elope with married people.  Her stories sound wild and fun.

I was also interested to read more about Austen’s own reading and influences.  One of the most important books she read is Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, which unfortunately isn’t easily available today.  Apparently history has judged it not as good as Pamela and Clarissa, but Austen valued it highly, and there has to be a reason for that.  She also read a lot of Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson (especially his essays and his novel Rasselas), and Charlotte Smith, whom Tomalin calls the Daphne du Maurier of the 1780s and 90s. (I’m very happy to have a copy of her novel Emmeline on hand.)  Frances Burney was also very important, especially Evelina. Here is what Tomalin says about Burney’s influence:

She admired Burney’s comic monsters and her dialogue, but most of what she learnt from her was negative: to be short, to sharpen, to vary, to exclude.  Also, to prefer the imperfect and human heroine to the nearly flawless one.

Tomalin argues that even with these influences, Austen never wrote anything in the style of these authors — she kept her own voice and her own vision.  I’ve enjoyed reading Burney’s novels, but I can see what Tomalin means about learning a negative lesson — Burney has some great social satire, just like Austen does, but her main characters tend to be models of perfection, and Austen’s imperfect people are much more interesting.

I’m now moving into the sections of the biography that get into her adult life, and I’m curious to see what I’ll learn.

Elizabeth Hardwick’s collection of essays Seduction and Betrayal is fascinating reading.  She has essays on the Brontës, three women from Ibsen’s plays, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Carlyle, and she finishes the book with the title essay, an examination of the figure of the betrayed woman in fiction.

Hardwick’s style is clear and direct; she writes forcefully, in sentences that seem to get straight to the point.  I’ve read Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights, and while the prose style may be similar (I don’t remember well what the sentences were like), the novel seems much more diffuse, more wandering and suggestive, than the essays.  I have to say I like the style of her essays much better.

Hardwick’s sentences are direct, but she still takes time to build up her argument about each author; she tends to make her case slowly, looking at instances from the life, some examples of the writing, and then slowly putting together a picture of how the life and writing fit together.  It’s as you reach the end of an essay that the picture comes into focus, and one of the most satisfying parts of the book is how this picture is both crystal clear and complex.

One of my favorite essays is about Dorothy Wordsworth.  In this essay, Hardwick describes Dorothy as extraordinarily dedicated to her brother, William; her life was focused on helping him write his poetry — taking long walks with him, reading and talking about poetry together, sharing descriptions of local landscapes and people:

Dorothy Wordsworth is awkward and almost foolishly grand in her love and respect for and utter concentration upon her brother; she lived his life to the full.  A dedication like that is an extraordinary circumstance for the one who feels it and for the one who is the object of it; it is especially touching and moving about the possibilities of human relationships when the two have large regions of equality.

As the essay goes on, Hardwick adds to this description of Dorothy a more troubling picture — she could be peculiar and intense and something like a Brontë heroine.  She was vulnerable and needed an outlet for her great amounts of energy.  We learn from De Quincey that she sometimes stammered and that her education had large gaps in it; he implies that she might have been happier had she not been quite so dependent on William to be the center of her life.  Hardwick ends the essay discussing the very impersonal tone of Dorothy’s journals, questioning why it was Dorothy revealed so little of her inner life:

One of the most striking things about the record she left of her life is her indifference to the character of her “dear companions.”  She could not, would not analyze.  There is more to think about the poets in a paragraph of De Quincey’s Reminiscences than in all of Dorothy Wordsworth …. We cannot imagine that she was incapable of thought about character, but very early, after her grief and the deaths, she must have become frightened.  Her dependency was so greatly loved and so desperately clung to that she could not risk anything except the description of the scenery in which it was lived.

And so we end up in a very different place than where we started, with a full and complicated understanding of what motivated Dorothy to write what she did.  Many of the other essays proceed in this manner, including essays about real people and about fictional characters.  Hardwick argues that Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is wrongly seen as foolish and flighty and suddenly turning serious at the play’s end, when really she is full of energy and a love of life and freedom all the way through.  Her carefree attitude at the play’s opening is an expression of this energy, as is her final dramatic decision at the play’s end.  Hardwick’s conclusions about Sylvia Plath are powerful and convincing:

In the end, what is overwhelming, new, original, in Sylvia Plath is the burning singularity of temperament, the exigent spirit clothed but not calmed by the purest understanding of the English poetic tradition.

Hardwick is also good at dealing with literary groups; she captures the spirit of the Brontë family and of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set very well.

All in all, if you like reading well-written literary criticism, this is an exellent book to pick up, and if you are unfamiliar with the genre and want to get a taste of it, this is a good place to start.