In Praise of Messy Lives (15 page)

Back in 1905, Henry James complained about “the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of magazines, which have found their dear, our dear, everybody’s dear Jane so infinitely to their material purpose.” Imagine how James would feel today were he to witness the blossoming commercial manifestations of our current Jane Austen craze. Over the past few years, Austen’s quiet courtship novels have been made into Hollywood movies, analyzed by fashionable male writers like Martin Amis, and displayed above front counters of Barnes & Nobles across the country.

Though she has long been a staple of high school English classes, our recent affection for this writer born over two centuries ago has less to do with the transcendent literary merit of her novels than with what she has come to represent. In the midst of our contemporary confusion about gender roles and sexuality, Jane Austen has come to symbolize clarity and order. In a world in which millions of women buy books like
The Rules
or
He’s Just Not That into You
in order to gain insight into their romantic lives, where the majority of babies born to women under thirty
are born to single mothers,
Pride and Prejudice
promises a few hours of calm and certainty. Jane Austen is best loved for the lost romantic world she describes, for the bright green lawns of a distant English countryside, where the virtue of marriage was a truth universally acknowledged, and love was formal, restrained, and inevitable.

Most of us are intimately acquainted with Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet, and the Dashwood sisters, but we tend to know very little about their creator. Jane Austen lived as a spinster in what is tactfully referred to by her biographers as “genteel poverty.” Her books were published anonymously—“By a lady”—because it was considered inappropriate for a woman of her class to write novels. And though they did achieve a certain amount of critical success and notoriety during her lifetime, it was not until after her death that they became immensely popular. Austen lived her whole life dependent on relatives and plagued by financial worries, and she died of what was most likely Addison’s disease at forty-one.

There is a certain amount of irony to the title of the new biography——
Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart
tells us almost nothing about the author’s heart, obstinate or otherwise. It’s the kind of biography that casts aside troublesome questions of psychology and motivation for the more tangible details of roast-beef dinners, yearly incomes, and lace-trimmed cloaks. Valerie Grosvenor Myer offers a responsible, if plodding, account of the minutiae of Austen’s daily life while studiously ignoring issues of potentially greater interest—like how she felt about her romantic involvements or her art.

To be fair to the biographer, the information we have about Jane Austen’s inner life is somewhat limited. Her family destroyed
crucial passages from her letters, including an intriguing one she wrote on her deathbed about her “domestic disappointment.” As a result, any portrait of Jane Austen is necessarily sketchy and speculative. As Myer points out, we don’t even know with any certainty what the author looked like. With conflicting accounts of her appearance and no authenticated professional portrait, we can only piece together her features like police artists making a composite sketch of a criminal.

The Jane Austen who emerges from the pages of this new biography is cranky and unpleasant. Myer is so eager to discredit the already much discredited myth of Jane Austen’s sugar-sweet femininity that she bends too far in the opposite direction: she dwells almost entirely on what she admiringly refers to as the novelist’s “vinegary” side. The reader may be alerted to this not-entirely-balanced view of Austen’s character by the biographer’s assertion, in the very first paragraph of the book, that her subject looks in one drawing like “a peevish hamster.”

The greatest flaw in
Obstinate Heart
, however, is that the biographer largely neglects what is probably the richest evidence of Jane Austen’s inner life: the novels themselves. Readers seeking a more satisfying account of the novelist’s life and how she processed her life into art should read Park Honan’s lively and passionate
Jane Austen: Her Life
.

In spite of what Honan calls her subject’s “comic violence,” her gift for social satire, her ability to cut down her characters in a single sentence, Jane Austen was also the master of the happy ending—the implausible, heartwarming happy ending. Vladimir Nabokov called
Mansfield Park
, which he greatly admired, a “fairy tale,” and in some sense all of her novels are fairy tales.
None of Jane Austen’s heroines is disappointed in love. None of them ends up with a man of less than perfect character, with less than a large estate and income, or a gracious country parish.

But it is precisely this type of happy ending that eluded the author in her own life. She dreamed up Emma and Mr. Knightley’s flirtatious banter, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s electricity, and Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth’s constancy, but she herself remained alone. And it is the contrast between her fantasies and her days, her fiction and her life, that is the central mystery of any biographical study of Jane Austen: Why did the author of our quintessential marriage plots herself never get married?

As a young girl, Jane Austen was interested enough in marriage to make imaginary entries for herself and a fictional husband in her father’s parish register. With her auburn curls and bright brown eyes, she was by almost all accounts attractive. She never fit the stereotype of the shy, reclusive female writer who shuts herself off from human company, and instead loved dances, clothes, and flirtations. In fact, one gossip actually referred to one of the century’s most brilliant novelists as “the prettiest, silliest, most-affected, husband-hunting butterfly.”

It appears that she did have a few romances, or what passed for romances in that more restrained era—a shadowy man she met by the seaside who died, an Irishman who ran away because of her lack of money, another who bought her a present of silk stockings, a reverend, and a wealthy landowner with a stutter. But she never ended up attaching herself to anyone. She often responded to the rise and fall of romantic expectations with the lightness and humor that would later enter the tone of her novels.
She wrote to her sister Cassandra about one of her suitors, “I rather expect to receive an offer. But I will refuse unless he promises to give away his white coat.”

In this age of transgressive biographical speculation, the predictable rumors that Jane Austen was a lesbian made their way from the quiet pages of the
London Review of Books
to a glossy item in
Newsweek
several years ago. But that is far too convenient an explanation of Jane Austen’s psyche. In one of her rare attempts at psychological insight, Myer writes that “despite her youthful popularity, all Jane’s relationships with men came to nothing. Her obstinate heart forbade her to marry except for love.” But the question remains: Why
didn’t
she fall in love? The answer may be a combination of pennilessness and bad luck, but it may also be more emotionally complicated. It may be that Jane Austen, the author of the nineteenth century’s greatest tributes to married happiness, herself had deeply ambivalent feelings about the institution.

In the imaginative universe of her novels, marriage is the ultimate goal toward which all of her independent, spirited heroines are pulled as if by a natural force like gravity. Although she mocks Mrs. Bennet’s eagerness to marry off her daughters in
Pride and Prejudice
, the author herself seems equally eager to marry off the Bennet girls.

But it turns out, if you read her letters, that Jane Austen had quite a different attitude when it came to real life. She writes to her favorite niece, Fanny Knight, “Oh, what a loss it will be when you are married! You are far too agreeable in your single state—too agreeable as a niece. I shall hate you when your delicious play of mind is all settled down into conjugal and maternal affections.” This playful lament betrays larger concerns about what
marriage actually entails; it may be that Austen was worried about her own “delicious play of mind” and the terrible toll that marriage and childbirth take on the independent spirit.

Though it seems like a feminist cliché conjured up by a professor at a conference, Jane Austen really did seem to respond to the realities of nineteenth-century married life with something very much like horror. She watched the women around her have eleven, twelve, and thirteen children and give up their entire lives to the process of childbearing. She also saw four of her sisters-in-law die during or shortly after childbirth. “Poor animal,” she writes of her vibrant niece Anna on learning that she is pregnant, “she will be worn out before she is thirty.” It is also telling that Jane Austen referred to her novels repeatedly as “my own darling child” or “my suckling,” and it may be that in her own mind she exchanged maternity for creativity, children for novels.

Austen’s ambivalence toward marriage reveals itself in her more obscure novellas and in the subplots of her major works. She attaches a kind of glamour to the women who manage to elude, even for a while, the traditional marriage plots that dominate most of her books. Her memorable flirts, like the manipulative Mary Crawford in
Mansfield Park
and the protagonist of her little-read novella
Lady Susan
, live outside of the conventional domestic order. “I cannot easily resolve on anything so serious as marriage,” writes the formidable Lady Susan, “especially as I am not at present in want of money.”

Both Lady Susan and Mary Crawford are portrayed as villainesses, but their freedom to float above the rest of the characters, their independence, their ability to control their own lives and manipulate reality, are described with a certain relish and fascination. Lady Susan is “clever and agreeable, has all that knowledge
of the world that makes conversation easy, and talks very well with a happy command of language, which is too often used, I believe, to make black appear white.” Jane Austen’s coquettes are powerful. They invent their own lives in ways that the Emmas and Elinors and Fannys never can, and in that sense they may perhaps be more of a reflection of the author herself.

There are two Jane Austens—the Jane Austen who glorifies domestic order and the Jane Austen who struggles against it. Though we tend to look at her novels nostalgically, as pretty dreams of order and harmony in our own world of chaos and loneliness, they seemed in fact to serve the same psychological function for the author herself. Beneath the idealized romantic universe she sets down with her ivory quill pen are the same yearning and ambivalence as those of her present-day reader. It is the tension between fantasy and life, between the desire for happy endings and the suspicion of happy endings, between conventionality and a deep uneasiness with conventionality, that marks Jane Austen as a truly modern writer and accounts for the continuing power and immediacy of her novels, and the enduring fascination with her world.

Three years after his death, it’s sad to see that John Updike has subtly fallen out of fashion, that he is left off best-novels lists like the Modern Library’s, and that a faint sense of disapproval clings to his reputation, even as his immense talent is recognized.

In fact, his immense talent is part of what people seemed to find suspect about him in the years before his death. Critics and writers seem to hold the fact that he writes beautiful sentences against him, as if his writing is too well crafted, too flamboyantly, extravagantly good. James Wood wrote a decade ago, “He is a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys what a novelist must convey.” Here, of course, one has to wonder about that special handbook of “What a Novelist Must Convey,” and the rules and regulations contained therein.

And yet many other writers over the years have harbored the same odd objection. Take this critique in
The New Republic:
his “sheer verbal power, the cormorant-like ingestion of experience and its seemingly effortless conversion into ‘brilliant’ language
isn’t itself sufficient for great fiction. It may even in some ways be inimical to it.” Or this one in
Commentary:
“He simply can’t pass up any opportunity to tap dance in prose.” The idea is that we should somehow distrust Updike because he is too good a writer. The word “stylish” in this way of thinking becomes a slur, as does the word “beautiful.”

The faux-democratic ideal of plainspokenness, the sense that a novelist should not write too beautifully or he will sacrifice some vaguely articulated, semi-mystical claim to honesty, is not a million miles away from the Sarah Palin–ish suspicion of East Coast liberals, or a Harvard education, or people who know the dates of wars. This is not to say that writing beautifully or elaborately is
necessary
for good fiction, but that one can’t deny that there are writers (Henry James, Nabokov, Flaubert) who write beautiful or elaborate sentences without any sacrifice to some mysterious, indefinable fictional mission.

In an interview with the
New York Times
’s Sam Tanenhaus a couple of months before his death, Updike addressed this cluster of issues in his own gracious way: “I don’t really think of myself as writing stylishly. I think of myself as trying to write with precision about what my mind’s eye conjures up.” Of course, his critics might object to even this phrasing as perhaps a little fancy. Why can’t John Updike speak in plain English? But it is exactly the poetic precision in his writing that his critics seem to find so unnerving.

Updike has also been repeatedly attacked for “misogyny,” for two-dimensional women, for mistreating his lady characters. (Frederick Crews complains that Updike’s male characters are “routinely unfaithful, maddeningly indecisive and self-absorbed”; David Foster Wallace calls them “incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering,
self-contemptuous and self-pitying … they never really love anybody.”) These characters are not, in this view, very lovely to their wives and girlfriends. But even if this is true, and it’s arguably not the full and nuanced truth, this has always seemed to me a strange objection, as great novels from
Crime and Punishment
to
Lolita
to
Wings of the Dove
often delve into the consciousness of someone not quite savory. In fact, novels portraying the minds of totally fair-minded, upstanding, liberal people with very few conflicts about conventional life, who treat everyone around them extremely nicely, seem destined or at least highly likely to be sort of blah.