Camp Austen Read online

  What’s so very important about this passage is how its fancy or ridiculousness fails to dilute—indeed, is bound up with—its seriousness of purpose: Chapman underlines the comical incongruity of a gunner nerding out to Samuel Johnson in a war zone, even as his lyrical transports—a sense of privileged dislocation, of being wrested from the present by the living breath of a previous age—are entirely earnest, and not unique to Chapman. Editing the text of Mansfield Park a few years ago, Claudia Johnson labored over the placement of a comma until she had a similar experience to Chapman’s: “Again and again, I read the two sentences aloud quietly to myself to settle this question until, finally, under these inauspiciously pedantic circumstances, a startling thing happened: I heard Jane Austen breathe.”

  The point is typographical—a comma indicates, among other things, where an imagined speaker will take a breath—but also quite literal: I believe she heard it. Textual recension is an ungrateful task but one of the worthiest in the academy, and the thought of Austen animating that task is irresistible. For two centuries, thousands of readers have shared such moments of unlikely revelation, of proximity to Jane or an illusory sense of her presence. To the more mystical Janeites, that same quiet intake of breath is our traffic with the ghost of Jane; it is the air we share when we come together. There is a toast at the annual JASNA banquet, with hundreds of attendees in period garb raising their glasses as Austen’s likeness is projected onto various screens around the hall, and the association’s president offers a few words, and there’s a brief pause before any cheers or clinks; slender silence amid so many people is bound to feel holy, and it’s in the space of that silence that I first felt the curious presence that Johnson describes.

  * * *

  E. M. Forster, one of the more conspicuous Janeites of his age, greeted Chapman’s editions with nothing short of rapture. Forster’s love for Austen would be lifelong: “I am so fond of her,” he said in a BBC broadcast in April 1944. “She’s English, I’m English, and my fondness for her may be rather a family affair.” He seems to have been particularly roused by the Clarendon editions, and their illuminating notes on the culture of Austen’s own time—notes that would prove especially helpful to scholars and admirers of Austen in the States, where such Regency terms as “curricle” and “entail” were not, even in the 1920s, terribly familiar among the general reading public. Chapman’s notes were further enlivened by his close attention to, and collation of, Austen’s surviving letters, which informed his editing of the novels just as deeply as any Oxonian principles of textual recension. Reviewing Chapman’s editions in The New Republic in January 1924, Forster told an American audience that the world of Austen worship had been asleep before Chapman, and now it was awake:

  I am a Jane Austenite, and, therefore, slightly imbecile about Jane Austen … One reads and rereads, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, one greets her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers. The Jane Austenite possesses none of the brightness he ascribes to his idol … For instance, the grammar of the following sentence from Mansfield Park presents no difficulty to him: “And, alas! how always known no principle to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in.”

  Chapman, in Forster’s self-effacing but not unserious account, is one of the few non-imbeciles in the world of Janeites; rather than greeting her “by the name of most kind hostess,” Chapman had edited her the way he and his Oxford mentors had edited classical texts in Greek and Latin: the same care and seriousness owed to Lucan was certainly owed to Austen. What a difference it makes, to treat Austen as a serious author! Instead of slumbering, criticism sharpens, and with his faculties intact the critic can pare away lines of dialogue that have run together (Kitty in Chapter II of Pride & Prejudice) or restore the sacred placement of a comma, while guiding readers into a fuller version of Austen’s world with helpful notes on her family and her age. Forster lavished praise on the utility of Chapman’s notes and described Chapman’s editing triumph as little short of wizardry: “Without violence, the spell has been broken. The six princesses remain on their sofas, but their eyelids quiver and they move their hands. Their twelve suitors do likewise, and their subordinates stir in the seats to which humor or propriety assigned them.”

  Then he offers a Janeite’s lament:

  Yet with all the help in the world, with a fine edition like Mr. Chapman’s and the best of literary criticism to our aid, how shall we drag these shy, proud books into the centre of our minds? To be one with Jane Austen! It is a contradiction in terms, yet every Jane Austenite has made the attempt. When the humor has been absorbed and cynicism and moral earnestness both discounted, something remains which is easily called Life, but does not thus become more approachable.

  Here, Forster outlines the paradoxes attending this particular area of readerly devotion: books at once shy and proud, and the contradictory impulse to be ourselves and yet to “be one with Jane Austen”—these are peculiarities that pervade the reading of Austen, and persist when we close the book. Needless to say, there is no traditional literary practice that can satisfy a curiosity so singular yet so widespread. “Something remains,” Forster says, with a mysteriousness that is not coy; it’s the same something that appeared in episodes such as the one Claudia Johnson describes, and that pops briefly into existence whenever Janeites gather.

  * * *

  It is important to emphasize that, were it not for my mother’s knees, I might never have entered Austenworld the way I did. Indeed, it took many years of genicular misfortune to land her where she found herself at the time of the Pride & Prejudice bicentennial: that is, temporarily crippled and in need of two titanium knee replacements within the space of six months.

  The knee stuff began when I was very young. We were living in England, and my mother had a nasty habit of falling, especially on cobblestone streets. Mom would trot along, occasionally allowing her toe to scrape the ground, and too often—all the time, in fact—her foot would catch, and down she would plunge. This habit begat a pattern of intensification. The more she fell, the more difficult it was for her to raise her feet above the stones on the street, and the more frequently she would tumble. She made a lot of jokes (“Oh look, I did my tumbling act again; why don’t I just join a circus”), but it was awful. I remember Mom in her English-professor uniform, paisley scarves and a nice gray little tweed jacket and those hard black walking heels or else a rugged pair of wood-and-leather clogs, which snagged the cobblestones of London or Oxford or Warwick, until the cycle of occasional tumbles became unbearable. There were lower-back issues, and hand sprains, and, eventually, worse. By 2013, a few months before the camp in Carolina, she needed new knees.

  This was no small loss for Austenworld, where my mother has been a semi-regular presence very nearly since the Jane Austen Society of North America began in October 1979 with a group of a hundred Janeites at the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan. And besides worrying me to death, her infirmities would soon send me as a surrogate speaker on her behalf.

  * * *

  Allow me to oversimplify. All of Austen is a story about inheritance, from the plays and novellas that she wrote as a teen, to her final compositions, including the last dyspeptic satirical romp of Sanditon, a satire on real estate development at an emerging coastal resort. Pride & Prejudice is no exception. The novel opens on the five Bennet sisters, who have been born into a fine estate—firmly within the sphere of the gentry—in the countryside of southern England, where they live with their busy and meddling mother and their charming but perilously aloof father. Their comfortable position is threatened only by an unhappy provision in the Bennet will that the estate must pass to a male heir; in this case, the sisters’ cousin, an awkwardly unctuous cleric named Collins. Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy, the grand patrician hero, must reconcile his own duties to a far grander estate with his love for the portionless Elizabeth Bennet—alongside his conviction that, despite her hot head and eccentric family, Elizabeth is the o
ne person whose love and wisdom can help him be a better steward. (Darcy is, of course, wildly, inconsolably attracted to her person and her wit—like the mid-twentieth-century critic Lionel Trilling, he can say that “I am meant to fall in love with Lizzy Bennet, and I do.”)

  But Pride & Prejudice is about more subtle modes of inheritance, too, including attitudes and prejudices and a general sense of your role in your neighborhood—in a word, manners. For much of the book, Lizzy emulates her father: from Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth inherits a distrust for affectation, an appetite for reading, a way with an epigram, and a deadpan instinct to enjoy the weaknesses of others. These are qualities that prove powerfully seductive to the reader, who approaches the book through Lizzy’s eyes and delights in her persuasive vision of what is what. Throughout the first volume, Austen is so delicate in substituting Lizzy’s opinions for your own that you might not notice it until the trick is done.

  Yet there is a sinister element to the posture she inherits from her father, who himself seems to alternate between a laughing, Democritean wisdom and something nastier. He mocks their mother right in front of her five daughters and encourages them to do the same; his lack of interest in his youngest daughters prompts him to placate them through innumerable indulgences, and with disastrous consequences.

  In the first volume of the novel, Lizzy is as disgusted by Darcy’s studious hauteur as she is pleased by her father’s ironic distance, and she abjures the one with the same enthusiasm with which she emulates the other. As the book proceeds, though, she recognizes that her father’s unremitting archness can be a social liability, while Darcy’s supreme emotional continence emerges as something of a virtue: In the novel’s first half, Lizzy is her father’s daughter, and follows him in deriding her mother’s grasping busyness. Only after recognizing how badly her father has mismanaged her younger sisters does Lizzy understand that she’s made an error—that she has abrogated practical responsibility in favor of a general superiority. She may have inherited all her father’s finest characteristics—his charm, his intelligence—but she also got the bum ones—the intellectual snobbery, the moral arrogance—that, uncorrected, would lead to a life of alienation and sadness.

  Again, I am oversimplifying, grossly. The fact remains that Austen’s best-known novel is primarily about managing two inheritances: an estate, and a moral sociability. Mr. Rochester attracts Jane Eyre by scowling; Darcy wins Lizzy’s love by treating the servants kindly.

  This is one reason that I am unmoved by readers who throw down the book and say it’s all just so much marriage plot. To quote Clueless: As if! Marriage is merely the capstone, the emblem that marks a moment of larger social renewal. The real business of the novel is not arranging the wedding—it’s about arranging a community such that it is ready to celebrate and be enriched by the new couple. There is something unbearably selfish about the two-person romance, about Romeo and Juliet or Heathcliff and Catherine. Austen’s novels do not belong to this species of love story. They are ensemble affairs, not duos against the world, and they’re far more concerned with the question of how to live among our fellow beings than how to marry your best friend. The books end in weddings, but that doesn’t make them love stories—it just makes them comedies.

  An iconic scene in Pride & Prejudice finds Lizzy in a copse of trees, reading a letter from Darcy that unravels nearly all of her prior beliefs about his conduct and character. At last, with a sort of awful clarity, she speaks aloud—“How despicably I have acted!… Till this moment, I never knew myself.” Certain contemporary readers accustomed to the rhythms of romantic comedy read this moment as the end of self-denial, the moment when Lizzy owns that, yes, she does have the hots for Darcy. Such readers miss the point entirely. Elizabeth has indeed arrived at revelation, but it’s nothing as silly or as selfish as shouting her love from the mountaintop; it’s a serious moment of self-censure for having misread nearly every social cue that she’s received throughout the book, and for having harmed those she loves as a result. This is not the self-seeking of intimate love; it’s the self-censure of a social conscience.

  I’ve come to think of this as the right way to understand why Austen is so particularly suited to a crossover conference that feels a bit more like a camp or festival. Austen makes a great deal of sense as a unifying pop figure who can bring together so many people. Her novels don’t offer us solitary rhapsodies so much as social possibilities, and Janeites don’t wander aimlessly but navigate together, tacking and then correcting, like any good Austen heroine, when we recognize that our path is askew, or that we’re bound for a collision. The arrangements for the conference mirrored the proceedings of a gentry house party from 1813 or 1793, with grad students playing the precocious children and younger set who provide the central energy and occasional scandal—and also stage a racy play, much as Austen’s family had done and the young Bertrams do in Mansfield Park; the professors were the parents, clergymen, and aunts, alternately making matches and decrees; the civilians became the neighborhood—Meryton or Highbury or so on—and the finely drawn secondary characters who reflect us back to ourselves. In Austenworld, even our roles—our duties—can feel inherited from the world of Jane.

  In the weeks ahead of the summer camp, I had tried to anticipate the scene, the dramatis personae, but imagination failed. I knew the novels, and much of Austen’s biography, but this scene of modern-day fanatics would be, to me, entirely new. Concerned friends were far more vivid in their forecasts. Upon hearing that I’d be nestled among the Janeites, one friend expressed alarm and another deep jealousy. Many who wrote me in advance of that first summer camp shared clear prejudices about Janeites. They seemed to think that anyone who went to these things would have to be insufferably pretentious, or insufferably boring, or both, or else pathetically unhappy in love and resigned to a life of cat-fancying and book clubs; joyless people without imagination; readers who long for the manners of a lost age because they can’t hack it in their own. This is all massively silly. You can level many accusations at someone willing to render themselves ludicrous by tripping on their evening gown or busting a button on their corset, but being “boring” isn’t among them. Anyone who cannot find entertainment and variety at an Austen conference is more to be pitied than censured, but there’s no reason we can’t do both. A lot of this widespread reaction is very clearly gendered—a requisite posture of disdain from all men from puberty onward. It would be an insufferable knitting circle, one buddy said; an old editor told me I would grow so sick of the Austen world I’d never read the novels again—or else (he mused) I’d find myself brainwashed and never read anything else; it would be a great place to pick up chicks; it would be a terrible place to pick up chicks, et cetera. Of course, everyone was wrong.

  * * *

  I had now caught my first glimpse of the Janeites. Soon I would see them in their private ecstasies and public rhapsodies: the secret love they steal in chaste kisses at the ball; the versions of Austen that they write and rewrite, adding sex or switching gender or extending the narrative beyond the happily drawn conclusions whose very artifice is so often a joke for Austen.

  The closest comparison is to a religious diaspora, a far-flung church, whose functionaries convene in heterodox worship—the group comes together over shared enthusiasm for its primum mobile, and at the same time, once together, comports itself (as best it can) by the letter of the text as handed down through Chapman and Metcalfe and Johnson and the rest. I do not mean to overstate, nor to mock, nor to imply immodest zeal among these good people. Janeism is a religion only in these two respects—reverence for the Godhead, and adherence to the text.

  * * *

  Friday morning saw ninety degrees before breakfast, and as I approached the brick eminence of Hyde Hall, with its octagonal faux-gatehouse and happy little cloistered gardens, an older woman eyed my nametag and green lanyard, the greenness of which indicated that I was an “organizer.” She waved me down with a retractable umbrella.

  “Youn
g man,” she observed, by way of summons. I smiled and squinted over my sunglasses.

  “Milady.”

  “I do not know what is happening.”

  “Yes?”

  “I wish to attend the plenary panel on ‘Austen and Romance.’”

  “It’s right inside,” I said, pointing toward the French windows of Pemberley. “You can’t miss it.”

  The lady shook her head. “But then I’m to proceed to Rosings, and I am confused.” She thrust her schedule of events in my direction.

  “The two venues are awfully close, and both inside. I’m happy to show you, if you like.”

  “I don’t see how we can remember all these rooms,” she said with a stare, as though I were guilty of some architectural misdemeanor. “Longbourne looks quite as nice as the others, and really it shouldn’t. Do you agree?”

  “I do see your point. But then, Hunsford or the Cheapside house wouldn’t quite have the same ring, you know?”

  She paused for a moment. “But what will you do for Sense & Sensibility?” she asked. “How will you keep all the rooms straight?”

  I laughed. “Well, that’s getting a year ahead of ourselves. Of course, we could hold a session on ‘the picturesque,’ but we’d have to find the right moor, and probably a fog machine as well.”