Thinking About T.S. Eliot Today

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

Typing Chapter 14

I am quite excited, excessively diverted, about Chapter 14. It wrote itself, as we like to say in the newspaper business (a strange phrase, if you really think about it). Chapters 1 through 13 were produced with varying degrees of pain and suffering, while Chapter 14 ...well, it wrote itself. I seem to have just sat back and watched the words emerging from the end of the pen.

I would like to think this will continue to be the case, but it seems unlikely. I also wonder if my infatuation with Chapter 14, which seems amazingly exciting and full of energy at this moment, will survive the cold light of revision.

Whistling in the Dark

If reading fiction involves a willing suspension of disbelief, how much more writing it? I am in theory somewhere more or or less halfway through the rough draft of my novel, yet I still don't really feel like I know what I am doing. 

Usually afraid (because it might turn out to be so god-awful) to go back and reread what I have written so far, today I did, with the aim of putting it all in a giant file (giantfile.doc), which is how I learned I am up to 66,609 words.

Wow.

 Never mind the faintly satanic whiff of that word count. And never mind that I estimate one-half to one-third of those words are not needed (if only I know which ones.) It's a lot!  That's through Chapter 13! And the thing is, it is mostly  kind of interesting, even if I repeat myself at times (one sign that I wasn't looking back as I went along) and well,  if I don't find it interesting, how can I expect anyone else will?

Writing a novel, more than anything else I have ever done in life, is about making something from  pretty much nothing, as opposed to merely assembling something from constituent elements, the way lumber and concrete and pipes and nails come together to be  a house (not that I have ever built a house) or eggs and flour and sugar and a leavening agent, properly combined, can result in a cake. (I have made cakes, though not well, and not recently. Hey, I am busy here.)

But this is the thing. If you were halfway through a house, it would start to seem like a fait more or less accompli. People would drive by and see it, and ask, how's your house coming? Or the smell of the baking would fill your  kitchen and maybe waft down the corridor, if you lived in an apartment house, and you would notice it as you walked up from walking the dog or checking the mail. I'm not really having that feeling with The Jane Austen Project (though the support of my readers has been exemplary and more than I deserve: thank you, Carol, Bill and Czesia). It still seems like such a bubble, like a fragile thing that could disappear at any moment.

And that is why writing is like whistling in the dark, holding your breath past the graveyard, pretending everything is cool, because if you don't believe in it, who will?

England My England

It is mortifying to consider that I have been writing a novel set in England and had not actually been there for more than a decade, long before I had contemplated this project. Of course I am also writing a novel set in 1815, and I have not been there either, but there is less one can do about that. Last week I attempted to correct this oversight within the limits of my finances by flying to London. JA highlights:

A trip to the British Library, where Jane Austen's actual writing-desk, the one her father gave her when she was 19, is displayed under glass, along with part of the manuscript of "Persuasion,"and a bound version of "The History of England" with illustrations by Cassandra. (Wonderfully, the gallery has digitized this volume, and you can flip through it, magnify, and read a typed version of the handwritten work.

Chawton, home of the Jane Austen House Museum where JA lived from 1809 until shortly before her death in 1817. The graves of the two Cassandra Austens (sister and mother) are a short walk away in the yard of a beautiful old stone church, and the great house, still owned by descendants of Edward Knight, Jane's rich brother, can be glimpsed but not visited.

Winchester, where she sought medical care (in vain) and is buried in the cathedral.

Bath, setting of two novels and her home for about five years from 1800 to 1805. Also home to a Jane Austen museum, useful as an introduction if you don't actually know anything about Jane Austen, but not so much if you do. A visit to a museum of fashion history turned up a couple of circa-1815 dresses, but I was thwarted in my quest to learn more about Georgian underwear.

Bristol, not strictly JA-related, but home to a fascinating Georgian House Museum.

Hatchard's, booksellers since 1797, where I bought an interesting volume titled "The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England."

And, sort of on the topic, a very unusual museum about medical history.

I also took lots of pictures of Georgian houses, trying to imagine Rachel and Liam living in one, with sheep being driven through the streets instead of black taxicabs.

The Vicar of Wakefield and Jane Austen Ruined My Life

What can I say? I am stuck in Chapter 12, stuck like a whining Ford Fiesta at the bottom of a snowy, winding driveway. So I started reading "The Vicar of Wakefield," an ancient, musty paperback edition that has been sitting on the shelf of my childhood bedroom since sometime in the Reagan years.

Jane Austen read it for sure: according to Wikipedia, this work, by Oliver Goldsmith, was one of the most popular and successful novels of the 18th century. Which makes me wonder what the unsuccessful ones were like. As I read it, I kept asking myself, all the way to the end, what sort of novel it was trying to be. It is by turns satirical and sentimental, preachy and picaresque. What it never succeeds in causing, even briefly, is the willing suspension of disbelief. The amazing series of random events, coincidental meetings and set-pieces ensure that. It never attains either the pathos and immediacy of "Clarissa" or the wit of "Tom Jones." What it reminded me of most was "Don Quixote," though the similarity might not at first seem obvious and DQ is, to be sure, a more layered, meta, sophisticated piece of writing.

The engaging central character who is overtaken by disaster after disaster yet retains his fundamental faith in the world and in his God: yes, we have seen him before. The ramshackle plot, the colorful figures who come onstage for a chapter, speak their piece and disappear; we have seen them too, along with the improbable meetings, the disguises, the fortunes lost and found.

About a third of the way into "The Vicar," a book arrived in the mail from Amazon. "Jane Austen Ruined My Life" seemed worth risking $10 and a couple of hours of my life on. It came highly recommended by reviewers in the blogosphere, and is relevant to my own project in a number of ways, since the plot hinges, as mine does, on that Holy Grail of English majors, the quest for the lost letters of Jane Austen. It also features a heroine traveling around Southern England, hitting key Austen spots: Steventon, Chawton, Lyme Regis, Bath. It sounded a little like "Possession," from the reviews, except involving Jane Austen.

What it was, instead, was another lesson into one more of the multitude of ways a novel can fall short. A lovely volume: nice cover art and typography. Grammatical. Competently written. And yet seeming more like the plan for a novel, a rough draft or an outline, rather than an actual novel. It seemed to skitter along the surface of its themes like a water bug on a creek. It was oddly generic, everywhere lacking in specifics. Not for an instant could I believe that the narrator of the novel held a doctorate in English, for example. She did not speak that language.

Yet it was interesting, too, for in falling short one sees more clearly what it is necessary for success. "Possession," for example, takes you places you probably have not been: into the old reading room of the British Library, inside the mind of a doomed dogsbody literature graduate student in the late 20th century, to the old, old house of English country gentry, into the minds and letters of poets in the 19th century. However improbable these places might seem, how unlike one's ordinary life, they are utterly believable in the moment you are reading them. It is that old willing suspension of disbelief again. A.S. Byatt gives the wealth of carefully chosen detail that makes the highly unlikely seem possible.

Though they are both bibliophile mystery stories and each offer an homage to literary masters real or imagined, it might seem cruel or unfair to compare a Booker Prize winner with what BookPage damns with faint praise as "smart chick lit that is an absolute pleasure to read. " Indeed, I am wondering if it is not something of an insult to "Possession" as well as unfair to "Ruined." But doesn't a book that promise wit and lit have some kind of debt to the reader? Doesn't invoking the name of Jane Austen invoke certain expectations?

After this disappointing excursion it was something of a relief to return to "The Vicar of Wakefield" and its 18th-century problems.

Evelina

I finished Frances Burney's Evelina today. I read it long ago, in an 18th-century literature class, and I remember liking it very much, though I had forgotten everything but the premise: a young and beautiful girl of murky origins makes her entrance into the world, where her artlessness and apparent lack of proper adult supervision and fortune leads her into a variety of scrapes, from which she is usually rescued by the exquisitely polite Lord Orville, who finally marries her.

I remember what I liked about it: That, the cardboardy Lord Orville aside, it was all so bracingly astringent compared with Jane Austen (who I had read, of course, but was not yet a huge fan of). It was as if we had turned from the always-proper world of Jane Austen (and I believe people who don't like Jane Austen often suffer from the same misapprehension that I did at 21, that everything in Jane Austen is always excessively proper) and gone through the looking glass, into a rough-and-tumble world where sexual assault in a carriage, say, or in a dark lane at Vauxhall Gardens were very real risks to a young girl with beauty and no apparent social connections. Where people play rude practical jokes, behave with shocking rudeness to their presumed inferiors, drink too much, steal letters. If I had read Tom Jones or Clarissa first, this work probably would not have seemed so astonishing.

Alas, it does not improve on rereading. It is entertaining enough, but the comedy of the coarse Captain Mirvan and his attempts to torment Madame Duval and Mr. Lovel seems poorly integrated with Evelina's bildungsroman. The good characters are far too perfect, the bad ones very one-dimensional, and the whole thing gives off a moldy whiff of Regency farce. I could imagine it as play, in fact: It is very playlike, despite being a novel in letters.

But reading it does sharpen the sense of what Jane Austen achieved a generation later. Evelina was a sensation in its day, and led to the young author's becoming friends with people like Hester Thrale and Dr. Johnson. She was among the first avowed female novelists. And yet -- comparing her to Jane Austen, one cannot help being struck by how much subtler Austen's humor is, how much more successfully the illusion of realism is created.

Frances Burney was born in 1752 and lived to 1840, or about 50 years longer than Jane Austen. In addition to being friends with Dr. Johnson and many other prominent people of the age, she worked for Queen Charlotte as "Second Keeper of the Robes," married a French emigre at 41, gave birth in her 42nd year, underwent a mastectomy without anesthetic at 59 after she got breast cancer, which made medical history because she wrote about it in her diary, like nearly everything else in her long and eventful life -- she was a tireless diarist. All in all, a woman to be reckoned with, and a repudiation of the common notions of the circumscribed nature of women's lives before the 20th century. I just wish I could like her writing more!

Debating requesting Cecilia or Camilla. Will it reward the effort?

The Secret of the Castle Rackrent

Daisy: Are you in love with me? [...] Or why did I have to come alone?"

Nick: "That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour."

Daisy: "Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur, "His name is Ferdie."



Why does F. Scott Fitzgerald reference Maria Edgeworth's c.1800 work at the point when Nick invites his cousin to meet her long-lost love, Jay Gatsby? Had F.S.F. ever, in fact, read "Castle Rackrent," or did he just like the way it sounded? Not being an F.S.F. scholar, I have no idea.

I think I was riffing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, or just grasping at straws, at one point early in "The Jane Austen Project" when I needed Rachel and Liam to have something to read and I gave them "Castle Rackrent," as being of the era. I knew should go back and read it, since they had, but it took me a while to do so, probably because I was so busy with "Clarissa." Finally, I have.

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, God-awful. Trying to be funny (I guess) but failing. I don't think Liam would have tolerated it, since it is packed with insulting and stereotypical observations about the Irish, and we know he is sensitive about these things. For good measure, there is also an insulting, stereotypical portrait of a Jew (or a "Jewish," as the narrator refers to her) -- truly there is something to offend everyone in this brief work!

Being no stranger to literary irony, and informed by the introduction that Maria Edgeworth, though born British, lived much of her life in Ireland and apparently liked it. I have struggled to overcome my initial reaction to this work, but without success.

It is also, I learn from a cursory Google survey, one of the first works of fiction to feature an unreliable narrator, a device I am partial to and which ought to win me over, except it doesn't. A theme of the work that has struck some modern scholars is that of female imprisonment. A more prominent theme, though less academically fashionable, is the feckless nature of the Ango-Irish landowners, who squander their fortunes in drink, gambling, frivolous lawsuits and excessive entertainment, sucking their tenants dry while their estates fall into hopeless disrepair. Being in every way horribly un-British, in other words: The antithesis of restraint, order, duty, Empire, self-effacement and what Mr. Knightley would do.

Thinking about it this way, I find myself returning to "The Great Gatsby." Perhaps the reference is not so random. F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Irish descent himself and heir to the stereotypical Irish vices of drink and extravagance, is reminiscent of many characters in "Castle Rackrent." His eponymous Gatsby gives wild parties, much like Sir Patrick O'Shaughlin, the first of the doomed inhabitants of Castle Rackrent. A stereotypical Jew even wanders through the novel, too, in the person of Meyer Wolfsheim (whose human-molar cuff links have always stuck in my memory when so many more useful facts have been forgotten). Gatsby's mansion, like the Castle Rackrent, stands as a monument to hubris and excess even after its living residents have departed.