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What Goes Wrong When We Write Ghazals in English

Bradford Johnson, Auto Arborescent (Blue). From the portfolio Photographs of Past Paintings, which appeared in issue no. 168 of The Paris Review (Winter 2003).

Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what Westerners would call medieval. Many famous Persian poets are famous for their ghazals. Likewise, Arabic poets, Turkish, Urdu … The ready-to-hand comparison is with the Italian sonnet. Ghazals are a lot like that: song length, rhyme heavy, lots of lovey-doveyness, lots of over-the-top cosmic reasoning.

It took forever for modern English-language poets to pick up on the existence of the ghazal, but once the word got out, plenty of smart people started trying to write original ghazals in English, with differing commitments to the formal rules. I’m one of these poets.

This piece is about translation, but it’s also about writing original poetry in one’s own language while following the rules developed for a different language. I want to talk about English ghazals, but (for lots of good reasons) I’m going to start in left field … with haiku.

You know all about it. Three lines, seventeen syllables: five and seven and five. Lots of people, that’s the one thing they know.

But ask the editors of Modern Haiku what they think of that. They will say: naive. And sure enough, open any issue of Modern Haiku or any other high-profile English-language haiku magazine. You won’t find any five-seven-five.

See, people who are serious about the art of haiku all know a Japanese syllable is not equivalent to an English syllable. This is because English absolutely teems with one- and two-syllable words—and words of five or more syllables tend to come off as supercalifragilistic. Meanwhile, five-syllable words in Japanese are perfectly commonplace.

English       Japanese

cuckoo         hototogisu

cricket          kirigirisu

And so on. Or put it this way: An English syllable tends to have more information in it than a Japanese syllable does. This is why, when you translate Japanese haiku word for word into English, you get way fewer syllables, like

you fire burn
good thing will show
snowball

This is why I was taught that, instead of going by the numbers, you should follow the Japanese principle that’s at stake, which is extreme minimalism. If English had been the first language of the people who invented haiku, the rule would have been three-five-three or maybe four-six-four. They would have considered five-seven-five too roomy. The concept behind five-seven-five in Japanese is that it leaves zero space for filler. It forces parataxis.

There are other things that could be said here. The different status of stressed syllables in English compared to Japanese, the smaller palette of vowel sounds in Japanese—and so on. But all to say: These differences matter. The person who translates Bashō into an English five-seven-five is mistranslating. What happens—what has to happen in order to achieve syllabic parity—is they translate the meaning and then add syllables to fill out their five-seven-five. So you get a floobery haiku, which should be a contradiction in terms.

Ghazals—it’s a similar problem.

The rule says: Couplet after couplet should end with the same word or phrase and with a rhyme sound right before the repeated bit. Can this be done in English? Yes. But has no one noticed that it’s an awkward mess when you do it in English? Could it be that the grammar of English differs from the grammar of Urdu and Farsi and Arabic in important ways, making it a bad idea to imitate the formal specifications at the expense of the principle that animates them?

I’ll give an example in a minute, but first I’m going to say something deep and deeply upsetting: Contrary to what you were told by teachers all your life, the formal parameters of poetry are not arbitrary, are not rules for the sake of rules, are not there as barbells for the poet to lift to show how strong she is. No, they are all designed to play to their languages’ strengths. They secure desirable effects—that is their warrant and their glory.

Because of the syntax of English, it is easy/graceful/elegant to start sentence after sentence with the same word, but it is not easy/graceful/elegant to end sentence after sentence on the same word. You wind up ending on some weak prepositional phrase that you would never be tempted to deploy in that way, except for the rule. You get no pleasure writing it; the reader has no pleasure reading it.

It should worry people very much that if you translate Urdu ghazals into, say, English, simply repeating back in English what the Urdu verses say, it is virtually never the case that the words at the end of the Urdu strophes stay at the end in English. What does that tell you?

Look, you don’t have to learn Urdu to see my point. All you need is to look at an Urdu ghazal transliterated into Roman letters. You will see the repeated phrase; you will see the rhymes. Let’s do this.

Here is an authentic ghazal by my favorite twentieth-century Urdu poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri (1896–1982). Unless you speak Urdu, you’re not very likely to have heard of this guy. That’s why I picked him. I’m hoping somebody will do a new translation of his poems. Here is my source text:

Photograph courtesy of Anthony Madrid.

I love that photo. And now here is the ghazal, with the repeated phrase in italics and the rhymes in bold:

Humnawa koi nahin hai woh chaman mujh ko diya,
Hum watan baat na samjhen woh watan mujh ko diya.

Muzhda-e-Kausar-o-Tasneem diya auron ko,
Shukar, sad shukar, ghum-e-Gang-o-Jamun mujh ko diya.

Par farishton ko dieye tu ne, tau kya ghum iska,
Yahi kya kum hai, ke insaan ka chalan mujh ko diya.

Wahdat-e-aashiq-o-maashooq ki tasweer hoon main,
Nal ka eesaar, tau ikhlaas-e-Daman mujh ko diya.

Mil gaya tujhko jamaal-e-rukh-e-rangeen ka chaman,
Dil-e-sozaan ka yeh tapta hua bun mujh ko diya.

Khatam hai mujh pe ghazal-goi-e-daur-e-haazir,
Dene wale ne woh andaaz-e-sakhun mujh ko diya.

Shair-e-asar ki taqdeer na kuchh poochh Firaq,
Jo kahin ka bhi na rakhe woh fun mujh ko diya.

And, now, here is K. C. Kanda’s translation (2000), in every detail identical to the text below; I have altered nothing:

I am given such a grove where fellow-warbler I’ve none,
Such a country is my home when none understands my tongue.

To others you have held the promise of the wine of paradise,
Thank God, to me is given the grief of Ganga and Jamun.

If angels are endowed with wings, I’m unconcerned.
That you have made me man, is my recompense.

The unity of love and beauty lies in me condensed.
I contain the love of Nal as well as the troth of Daman.

To you is given a radiant face, garden-like abloom,
To me is given a barren heart that desert-like doth burn.

I represent the ultimate in the field of modern verse,
The style given to me by God is the envy of everyone.

Ask me not the poet’s fate in the modern age,
Thanks to my poetic gifts,—I have been undone!

I’m not saying that’s a great translation. But anyway, can you identify, in the English version, the phrase that is repeated verbatim at the end of every Urdu couplet (“mujh ko diya”)?

It’s not easy to spot! Let’s see what happens if we feed those three words through Google Translate:

مجھ
mujh = me

کو
ko = to

دیا
diya = given

It translates, roughly, to “to me is given.”

Look at the poem again. Now you can see: it’s part of a verb construction, bound up in a bunch of idioms. No surprise to find it at the end of the line in the original because Urdu is an S-O-V (subject-object-verb) language. English, unfortunately, is S-V-O. Which means: When it goes into English, that V has got to move.

Are you starting to see? If English syntax allowed you to elegantly end sentences with the main verb, you could end your ghazal couplets with a more satisfactory word or phrase. But, in English, satisfactory endings tend to be nouns. And if you end every couplet with the same noun, how are you going to get that ghazal dynamism, where each couplet becomes its own thing, every charm on the charm bracelet different?

I know, I know. I’m overstating. I’m acting like all this is “always” when I should be saying “most of the time.” Also, I’m needing you to trust me that the Firaq poem instantiates a typical phenomenon in Urdu ghazals.

I’ve been gazing at this stuff for twenty years, this whole time trying to figure out how one could follow the spirit of the ghazal form without getting shipwrecked by the IKEA instructions, so to speak. I’ll share a couple ideas. In order to do the rhyme so that it’s subordinated (i.e., not allowed to act like any kind of rhythmic end stop), you could do something I call “hand-off rhyme.” The last word of line 1 (in a couplet) could rhyme with the first word in line 2. Or, if not the first word, almost the first word. The rhyme will still be audible, but it will run by you the way it does in Urdu.

And since the repeat word is so hard to install at the end without messing everything up, what about untying it from the end but making it a very sticky-outty verb or adjective or adverb, such that the reader will be able to experience it as a repetition clear as anything?

Let me see what happens if I retranslate the Firaq, above.

My portion is a stand of trees, and I am the only songbird in it.
The minute I sing, my portion on earth is an uncomprehending stare.

It is for others to drink and to cherish the wine of Paradise.
The paradox is my portion is to drink from these Hindu rivers.

If the angel’s portion is a pair of wings, what is that to me?
You see I’m content that my portion be the shape of a humble man.

… That’s not that bad. I’m stuck with repeating a noun, but the rhymes aren’t forced, and the verbal repetition is not only respected, but made to deliver.

Anyhow, you can cut me some slack; these are improvisations. And if you’re thinking portion sticks out too much, then you really are understanding my point. Firaq did not put a noun in that slot, and maybe by this point you’re starting to see why.

At any rate, these are the questions the writer of an English ghazal should contemplate.

There’ a part of me that longs to quote some choice specimens of original English-language “ghazals” from respected national magazines over these past ten years or so, but that would be like when I show my students examples of rhyming couplets written by beginners. Every other line: godawful awkwardness. Every other line: words and phrases the poet would never have used in a million years, except they had to hustle that rhyme word to the end of the line.

All this is bigger than ghazals, of course. Bigger than haiku. I’m saying we have to graduate from pastiche and mimicry to something higher. We have to stop looking at somebody like Firaq and saying, I must do what he did. We should be saying to ourselves, I must do what he meant.

Firaq! you are bones, you are no more to be found. Yet, listen to my words.
The birds in the trees are asking that all this be forgiven me.

 

Anthony Madrid’s writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Lana Turner Journal, and Poetry. He is the author of three books, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, Try Never, and Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise.

Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon

Collage. US Postal Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Project Apollo Archive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Look closely at any moon landing photograph and you will find fine gray plus signs in a grid across each one—plus signs that allowed for distortion to be corrected + for distance and height to be calibrated from space as well as on the moon’s surface. That could stitch a panoramic sequence of images + plot the moon. Each Hasselblad camera the astronauts brought was fitted with a clear glass plate etched with this precise network, a réseau of stitches—pin­ning the moon to the moon to keep its surface and the vast black horizon in line. Reseau: a grid + a ref­erence marking pattern on a photograph or sewing paper + an intelligence network + a net of fine lines on glass plates + a foundation in lace.

+++

Look closely at many Emily Dickinson poems and you will find + signs that indicate a variant in a line. A variant may appear + above a word + to the side of a line + underneath a word + at right angles to the poem + stacked at the end like a solution to an equa­tion. Whole poems + sequences may be variants of one another. Dickinson did not choose among her variants, offering them as concurrent alternatives— evocative lace constellations left for us to hold up to our future sky as we try to align the wild nights + noons of her poems + epistolary impulses. Stitched across the surface of her work—plus signs that allow for + stray signals + distortion + that calibrate inte­rior vastness.

+++

Rather than the stunning aluminum-coated fabric of the Mercury crews stepping out of comic book frames of imagined interstellar travel, the astronauts who planted their feet on the moon were outfitted in the same glaring white as a wedding dress. A color in the future that will become as synonymous as silver with the zeitgeist of sixties space-age fabrics—avant-garde apparel made of paper and metal and mirrors and all that lamé, every garment a mise en abyme reflecting and replicating a future possible. Silver and white, twin colors that wax and wane in popularity across time, reappearing again and again when we most need to transport ourselves beyond whatever present moment in which we find ourselves suspended. Colors that carry us across the thin gray twilight line that separates us from a speculative future.

Fifty years into that future, it’s difficult to undo the images of those sonogramic white suits. The ghostly bulk of the astronauts’ bodies adrift on the moon now an afterimage in our collective consciousness. The exterior garment as luminous and otherworldly every day and intimate as the era’s conic Playtex bras. Chosen in part for the fabric’s superlative heat resistance, in part because its less reflective surface kept astronauts safer from the risk of dazzling themselves with their clothing while facing the unfiltered sunlight. Underneath this bright white micrometeoroid layer, underneath the layers and layers of nested silver insulation, the main pressurized body of the space suit is a simple Earthly blue.

+++

The year we landed on the moon a documentary is screened detailing the seemingly impossible technological processes involved in getting us there. Over looped footage—a modified sewing machine moving stitch over stitch over a seam—a sheet of mylar pulled from a roll until its silver fills the screen—a pair of gloves being constructed blue finger by finger—there is audio of women talking. Chatting back and forth with each other as if they were doing any day’s work. The hidden intimacy of the moon is in this small loop: the space suits with their otherworldly specifications had to be sewn one by one.

The seamstresses hired to help fabricate the space suits first had to learn how to read engineering blueprints, to understand construction and seam lines from drawings rather than the pattern of a previous garment. There was no previous garment to take apart, no way to learn where hidden seams and extra protection from friction might be required. No lines or creases or details to close read what happens to fabric on the body when worn on the moon, the intricacies or possible failures of a former design. The seamstresses had to sew the space suit together in their minds. Undo it to imagine it again as flat fabric. Understand how to cut, piece, dip, coat edges of ever more wild fabrics to keep them from fraying, tearing, coming undone in space while being worn.

Given the unfathomable demand for stitches so meticulous they would allow a body to safely endure a lack of breathable air, the seamstresses learned to sew at a level of precision even the most spectacular Earth garment would never call for. They learned to sew with almost no use of straight pins to tack together their fabrics and keep them from slipping as layer after layer of delicate fiberglass heatproof fabric was run through the machine. That even a single misplaced stitch might call for a suit to be fully restarted. Learned an errant pin and an infinitesimal hole in the pressurized suit were the only difference between—and—. And no Earthly rehearsal before the seamstresses’ trick of turning flat fabric into an airtight heirloom was performed live by astronauts in front of a national audience.

Pinned down in grief, and imagining I have landed on the moon, I hear them. Their voices bounced down fifty years in the future like stray signals from the night sky. As if I am overhearing a garment in process across multiple moments in time.

+++

Emily Dickinson’s one white dress is a copy. Of which there are actually two. Dickinson’s one white plus twin replica dresses—make three. Three white dresses are not literary lore. They are the beginning of a bedtime story: In the great green room there were three white dresses, three dresses in white that were acceptable to be worn around the house though not around town, sewn in a nineteenth-century style called a wrapper housedress, meant for housework and harder wear and more often than not made of darker fabric. Though obviously not Dickinson’s. Even if by then white cloth was considered easier to clean than fashionably bright aniline dyes and prints, might even have been considered more practical, her many white dresses still invited hot gossip. After all, other than brides and mourners, who only wears white? Dickinson’s unlikely white dress is often speculated to be bridal, as if she considers herself wed to her poetry—or to God—or to herself. Dickinson’s one white dress, in which she was always talking to death.

But a historical artifact cannot be taken apart at the seams in order to make a pattern for twinning, cannot have its stitches cut one by one. To make a new pattern from an existing garment that must remain intact is called “lifting” or “rubbing off.” The dressmaker hired to twice replicate and lift Dickinson’s one white dress had to imagine the pattern from seeing the dress already put together. Had to take it apart in her mind. Plan it backwards. The language of producing a facsimile dress is the language of the writer at work: drafted, corrected, proofed. Though only the first was likely a collective effort, drafted, patterned, and stitched in a room with other women in intimacy.

It’s difficult to know when entering the exhibit of her house which dress has been pulled out intact for display—the dress that embodied Dickinson’s body or the dress that suggestively embodies her mind. The dress and the story we tell about her round and round. Hard to know in which she’s hidden herself. In a white dress where would she hide? Three white dresses, each with fourteen yards of trim like the frill of a stamp’s edge along the collar, the cuffs, the unexpected note-size pocket with its envelope-flap closure. Only one with original embroidered lace. The iconic, dead-ringer dresses, one or the other, resting on a dress form in the East bedroom, arms bent as if about to take off. Her fair copy is kept safe in a glass case across town.

+++

How many worlds can a garment inhabit at one time? Let me reverse some of its stitches. In the city where I will be born an inventor will begin a humble company making latex bathing caps and swimwear. The company will grow larger, move cities, divide itself into different cells, some for the war effort and some for more commercial manufacturing. After the war, women from surrounding towns will be hired to work on the lines at a newly announced division, Playtex, stitching bras and diaper covers and latex-dipping “living” girdles. Twenty plus years into the future, it’s seamstresses at Playtex who are initially tapped to move over to the handcrafting of space suits for the NASA astronauts.

Every other company’s proposal for dressing and encasing the interstellar body in a military-engineered solution will fail. Their armor-like designs incapable of mimicking the human form or allowing a body to move with enough grace in low gravity. Hard-shell relics unsuited to carrying anyone to the moon. Playtex’s flexible rubber girdle and the bra’s nylon tricot was, is, and will be the secret to fitting women’s earthly bodies into the restrictive garments of Dior’s postwar New Look and the astronaut’s bodies into space suits. A garment that holds both a future and a past body in its fabric. An impossible, other-worldly, fantastical body achievable only through an adept understanding of how to alter the figure underneath the architectural lines of the clothing. In other words, through the illusion technology of undergarments.

Much of the language for the technical components and construction of the lunar space suits will be of the body: bladder, ribbed rings, webbing, joints. A language of intimacy and interiority. A language the seamstresses will already understand. Closer to earlier forms of embodiment in which we clothe a spirit with a body—a space suit: both an embodied body and an intervention of the body. The interior of the space suit touching the exterior of the body. The exterior touching endlessness. Each latex-dipped component a well-guarded technique to a fragile body dazzling us while bouncing through airlessness. Each of the space suit’s seventeen concentric sheets of mylar glued by the seamstresses, thinner than single-thread lace. A body kept safe in the vastness of space through couture handiwork—a reseau of women rendering the moon possible with precision stitching and cutting and gluing. An abundance of hours.

+++

At any given time just one of Emily Dickinson’s white dresses is planted in her bedroom like a flag on the moon, stiff and awkward, trying to float on a breeze that does not blow. A room that has been celebrated for housing a mind that looked like no one else’s mind ever. A mind capable of making poems like lace, full of gaps and pauses and absences. All those variants letting us listen in as she works out a live problem on the page. All those em dashes with dots over the top, turning connective pauses into birds, inviting us to leap from one space to the next. To keep the vast horizon of her mind in line. As if her words were signals bounced from places more vast than we can imagine—reflected off the moon’s surface—returned to us overheard.

+++

Listen closely to any worn garment and you will find fine lines that mark details of construction + patterns of wear + indications of more than one wearer. Signs of possible variation + annotation + distortion—initials embroidered along a pocket + the strain in a buttonhole that might indicate a garment was worn during early stages of pregnancy + the ellipsis of holes showing stitching has been undone—seams and hems let down + let out + in. These lines will allow you to draw the garment + take it apart in your mind + translate its cut and composition onto the page. Create an image + a pattern + help calculate the relationship of one part or one wearer of a garment to another.

Listen. I am reading the garment out loud.

+++

For over a century there has been just one verifiable photograph of Dickinson. In the iconic black and white silver daguerreotype, she is not wearing the white dress. She’s a teenager fixed in a dress she will live in forever. And that dress is made in an undefinable dark printed fabric with a slight sheen. Not surprising, given dark fabrics were considered more suitable as it kept sitters from becoming spectral blurs—there and not there. But people will mostly forget this first dress. There’s nothing spectacular or singular about it. The daguerreotype era produces millions of replica dark dresses. There’s no narrative we can attach to its common folds. The white fabric arrives in the future.

One hundred years of one documentary photograph and one surviving white dress going round and round, depicting Dickinson as an ethereal-looking teenager superimposed over an ethereally dressed adult. Even as it’s been told round and round that neither her family nor her considered the image a particularly good likeness. Until a second possible daguerreotype is uncovered. In the image there are two women, two dresses. One dress a griever’s black speculated to be worn by a recently widowed friend. The other, when magnified, revealed to be checks—a grid of fine lines woven through the fabric. A pattern that was considered best for daguerreotypes, a perfect contrast in the folds between light and dark. Like the original, the portrait is so small it requires intense forensic attention to gather information about the possible wearers and their dresses.

The Dickinson Museum textile collection is searched. A possible copy of the pattern and sheen of this second daguerreotype dress is found. Fabric with light gray and white threads creating a reseau on a stunning blue background. Swatches of a blue dress that were saved, deconstructed and stitched onto paper backing to be reused, along with other snips of bright dress silks and plaid satins, as part of a hexagon quilt block. A match that might verify Dickinson is the wearer and begin to unfasten the afterimage of a monochromatic era of Victorian mourning wear.

Difficult to then undo the collective image of Dickinson the artist in her singular, sonogramic white dress. What would we do with her, would we recognize her if she came to us in blue? This new future possible Dickinson would be a Dickinson in process and in sequence—stitching and unstitching—patterning her poems and not yet on the moon. A variant twin Dickinson that changes ages, changes dresses between acts from dark to blue to white—who might allow for distortion, for distance between the first dress and the last and now. A panoramic view of her materiality that pins herself to herself. In the absence of a physical dress, we have to reimagine her in a blue wider than the sky, in the long seconds she was suspended and exposed—there and not there—sitting impossibly still as the camera’s lens remained open, arm around a mourning friend, before the salt fixes and gathers her back into black and white like moonlight on the daguerreotype’s silver surface.

+++

So many needle holes and needles + errant pins left in Dickinson’s poems. Not all for sewing. Some used to wound + puncture + stab + mark. And the way she chose to stitch her poems—leaving audible pinholes in their fabric—morse code notes poked straight through the pages—that allow us in the future to take all those undone white sheets, restitch and unstitch them back together in sequence. A panorama of poems + a mind in the gray line between daylight and darkness. Undo each poem + dress and what’s left are the ellipsis of pinholes—dots and dashes—traveling across the fabric + page.

The dressmaker hired to multiply Dickinson’s one white dress first would have made a toile, a practice or draft dress made in muslin, meant to be taken apart to turn into a pattern that could be twinned and twinned and twinned, turning one dress into many. Meaning there are or were likely four possible dresses: the original, the two replicas, and the toile that would have been undone—a speculative future dress + a ghost of the final dresses returned to its prestitched state. A toile is a garment made to be altered, to never be worn. Each of these duplicate heirlooms that will never contain Dickinson’s or anyone’s future body. Or her reason for adopting such dazzling fabric for workwear. Dickinson’s multiplying variants + dresses + pinholes, turning her into many, keeping mourners from creaking across her soul. Dickinson, who was constantly more astonished that the Body contains the Spirit + or that clothes could then contain the body at all.

What a pity that instead of a flag we did not plant a copy of Dickinson’s paper white dress on the moon—symbol of the common poem—+ which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all. + Each month going round and round—turning from light to dark to the moon’s silver glint and back again depending on whether it’s waxing or waning. As if underneath her one luminous white dress is its exact space-black lace replica waiting to hurtle back to Earth.

 

Cori Winrock is a poet and multimedia essayist/artist. Her second collection of poetry, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, was awarded Editor’s Choice for the Alice James Books Prize. Her debut book, This Coalition of Bones, received the Freund Prize. 

Rehearsal Scenes

The New Chamber Ballet in rehearsal. Photo by Diego Guallpa.

Three dispatches from the New Chamber Ballet’s poet in residence, Diane Mehta, who has observed their rehearsals nearly every week for the past year and a half.

1: The Lift

In the delicate center of the action, each dancer rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder. Expectation slows, tragedy softens, the center holds. They are barely touching. The lean is superficial; they do not need each other yet. This is the prelude to the enormous tension that comes next.

The lift, when it comes, originates in the deepest part of the hips and resembles the ritualistic crouch of a sumo wrestler. The lifter’s thighs look enormous, but she is slim. She plants her legs below her shoulders and extends her arms. The trick is to hold up the rear without sticking it out so that the dancer being lifted settles onto the lifter’s back without a hitch. The memory of the playful lean in the beginning returns.

Each dancer depends on the other to be precise and reliable in a way that life is not. The arriving dancer leans back across the shelf of her partner’s lower back and is immediately secured by an arm clamped around her waist. Her own arm grazes the floor. Her leg points up like a traffic light. When I flatten the image, I see Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso realizing that the shape of one woman combines pieces of many. The two ballerinas resemble a chair with a straight back for two people, a love seat in wood.

It is the last week of rehearsals, and the musicians are here with the composer for the first time. The three pairs of ballerinas struggle to balance one another, then switch to new partners. It is a lesson in creating an approach and making adjustments with each companion. Every weight-sharing experiment in becoming one body is improvised because no amount of training can anticipate what has unfolded this morning, when these minds and spines crossed the street or exited the subway. No lift—not next take this rehearsal nor one two months later—will ever be the same as the one in progress now

Watching the women sweat, I realize that an enormous strength is being distributed. Their bodies are talking so loudly that I can hear them: Don’t fall! Put your hip here! Leave me because I’m leaving! When a dancer slides precariously to the off-ramp of her partner’s rear, the partner tilts a hip ceiling-left or ceiling-right or lowers her back to prevent her from falling off and to help her get higher. The tension is explosive because they are really in the middle of the motion of falling down while staying together. What is amplified is need. The work of caring for someone is a duet, and it changes you. Being in the lift will be the centerpiece of the performance.

The choreographer seems pleased. No one is defeated, no one has succeeded; they are becoming a shape. This is the slow motion of mechanics with the interference of time, gravity, and music. The journey from lean to lift travels from the beginning to the end of a marriage, from childhood to experience, and I am already thinking that when I leave I’ll notice that the day is mild and crowds mingle at the corner—but all of life is already here, in a sun-boiled studio with sixteen-foot-high ceilings and windows that swim across two walls, repeating themselves in the mirror.

 

2. The Floor

From a distance, it might have looked like childbirth, when you shoot up on all fours to loosen the pain of the beast you are carrying, but it was only a dance between the floor and her. The two-minute routine she is performing is a kind of Pinocchio story: a wooden surface being brought to life and invited to be a legitimate partner. Her job is to make this solo into a duet.

The relationship between a human partner and the floor is intimate but physically demanding. It is about gravity. It is a ballet dancer’s collaboration with the inanimate and the floor’s experiment in becoming an invisible partner who responds to her body parts as they touch down and lift away.

She flings herself on the sprung vinyl floor like a tossed doll. Prone, she fixes her head in the center and begins the counterclockwise floorwork sequence, moving her body on and off the floor: she spins, rolls, softens, jerks her hips into the air while the floor holds down her shoulders. (“I have waited a century for a partner like you,” the floor yells.)

She has fierce muscles that ripple down her back and hips, and her spine is fixed in space while she turns. With the emotional progress of the music—the tempo quickens, the violin gets louder and drops out for the high notes on the piano—she widens her strides to build momentum and lift into a shoulder stand, cheek to floor, while her skirt falls to her knees and her legs scissor open into a split. We are watching all the ways in which a woman becomes more than her desire, and we, the audience, recede into perversions while she folds her legs and continues on her way.

In the mythologies of love we rely on, hearts pound: blood in, blood out. She is the opposite of every reclining woman in a painting. The lines of her body twist like Egon Schiele’s erotic expressionist figures. Her relationship with the floor is not the ceremonial collapse that happens in Pentecostal churches and Yoruba rituals, yet I wonder if she is possessed. I fall into the trance of trying to memorize each movement as it springs away. A sequence is an erasure of moments that came before, yet every move is another beginning.

She is a protractor. The pencil (the dancer), with the aid of a mechanical tool (her body), makes dozens of circles of equal diameter. Watching her recalibrates our own relationship with the floor. We see her spinning on a flat surface that itself seems to be spinning, the two partners tied up in physics and the jagged Newtonian world where everything is at work: momentum, inertia, conservation of energy, torque.

The two minutes have ended. She reverses direction, and in a slow vertical ascent, she corkscrews her body up. By the time she reaches her full height, en pointe, she has raised the tip of her pointer finger, bent it loosely in a rendering of Michelangelo’s muscled God’s gesture to Adam—and in an enormous transfer of power, she hands off her solo to another dancer.

 

3. The Fight

The action of love is forward motion. Two dancers slide toward each other on the floor and sit on their knees. The music stops. The violin breaks into the scene—fast, high-pitched. The woman in blue strikes, and the dancer in purple blocks. They jab with openhanded strikes. They lean into each other at maximum force with their forearms as they block. If they sever the connection, everything collapses. All four arms are constantly in rotation, like oars. The sequence resembles kung fu—close range but designed to keep an opponent at a distance.

If there is an opponent for these dancers, it is air: they move it between them like a miniature tornado. Then they become the tornado. They are thousand-armed Achilles in a blur on the battlefield, the chaos of swords clashing. The women on the outside pirouette and circle the purple and blue dancers on the floor, as if to egg on the audience for the evening’s entertainment. (“Sailors fighting in the dance hall!” belts David Bowie in “Life on Mars?”) Purple and blue let go at the same time and redirect the momentum of their upper bodies to the left and right of one another, as if dodging strikes.

Choreography is a way of organizing chaos. There is no pattern without chaos, no love without fight. The lean is a kind a lift, but the movement is horizontal. Each body depends on the other, and each dancer’s job is to pay attention to her partner’s gestures and timing. They let go at the same moment. Blue pulls her weight backwards, which brings purple forward, and blue wraps her around her own body. Who is the cobra, and who is the prey? They are still on the floor, tied up in each other. Blue lets go and purple picks her up, then blue wrestles purple to the floor and purple rolls away.

All along, they face one another, not the audience. Dancing is about moving with another human. Performance is theater, while rehearsal is a conversation that the dancers are having for and with each other. They tolerate one another five hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, sometimes for a decade or more, and that is love. I do not see their legs tremble, but I know they are using every muscle to fight gravity while continuing to jab and block in the process of standing up. Purple strikes an arabesque. Blue moves in quickly to embrace her, and purple folds up her legs. They are Aeneas cradling his father when Troy is burning or the stranglehold in a bronze by Henry Moore or the mothers in Mary Cassatt’s paintings who always love their children so much. They are Virgil wrapping his mother-father arms around Dante in the Inferno and leaping to escape certain death. This is the choreographer cradling all the dancers in his heart to give them comfort and strength. This is my own child in the early years, when it was easy to keep him safe.

Is the purple dancer the father, the mother, the lover? It is so intimate that I don’t notice the three outside dancers sitting cross-legged on the floor with serious expressions. The purple dancer slides down the blue dancer, deflating onto the ground. Suddenly everyone is laying down except the blue dancer who struck first. She grabs a different dancer by the forearm and pulls her off the floor. She falls back without looking, certain she will be caught, before they begin to fling one another around. There is no end to the tension in the choreography of interacting with people we love.

 

Miro Magloire and Diane Mehta’s first collaborative ballet premieres June 20–21 at the Mark Morris Dance Center.  

Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt and grew up in Bombay and New Jersey. She is the author of Happier Far: Essays and two poetry books: Tiny Extravaganzas and Forest with Castanets. She has written for The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, VQR, A Public Space, and The Southern Review. 

Catching up with Geoff Dyer

Young Geoff Dyer and a lawnmower. Photograph courtesy of Geoff Dyer.

Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book. There’s an indelible ordinariness to this coming-of-age story, which, with a few detours, follows Dyer’s early life until he reaches the age of eighteen, in the world of working-class Gloucestershire of the sixties and seventies. Any readers hoping for shocking revelations about the author’s childhood will not find much to titillate them. But of course from another point of view, everything happens. Dyer—has written many books, including Out of Sheer Rage, Jeff in Venice, and most recently The Last Days of Roger Federer—describes in great detail the period in which he became himself, in all the erudition, playfulness, and creativity we might already be familiar with. (Out of Sheer Rage, nominally a book about trying to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, is essential reading for any writer of nonfiction: a funny, moving account of the creative process in its frustrations and joys.) In Homework, Dyer turns his attention to his early life, down even to the accessories his Action Man figurine wore: “the plastic lace patterns on Action’s boots; the khaki elastic strap of his carbine; the little buckle on the helmet strap and the plastic niche into which it was anchored; the genetic logo embossed on his back: Made in England by Palitoy under Licence from Hasbro © 1964.”

Even more impressive is Dyer’s ability to give narrative life to this archive of detail, half a century later. His mother and father are sharply drawn characters, along with the rest of the family. “It was said of Joe that if you filled a bath with beer he’d drink it,” Dyer writes about an uncle. “(I heard this said many times. In Shrewsbury few things were said only once. Everything was repeated over and over.)” Anecdotes are recycled, gaining a kind of mythic status, like “little Audrey Stanley” who used to work with his mother in the school canteen. With these repeated sayings and formulations and anecdotes Dyer conjures something deeper than detail: the lost world of his childhood, but also the lost world of the particular time, place, and class he inhabited. (“Class itself is not a thing, it is a happening,” E. P. Thompson writes, a quote Dyer includes as a postscript to the book, for indeed, it is something that happened to him.) Dyer’s Art of Nonfiction interview appeared in the Paris Review in 2013. We caught up on the phone a few weeks ago about Homework—and about how he managed to render childhood without being boring.

INTERVIEWER

This is a highly detailed, specific memoir about your early life, but also one that describes a bygone era in a particular time and place. How did you balance those two threads, of the personal and social history?

GEOFF DYER

One of the earliest impulses I had was to do something like Annie Ernaux’s The Years, a kind of generational autobiography. I thought it would be cool to do a Gloucestershire, English version of that French book. It ended up being quite different, but the key thing is that there’s nothing interesting about my story. It’s not like I’m a celebrity whose life people are interested in. Also, there are no great revelations. I haven’t discovered I have an illegitimate brother. There’s no abuse. It’s just my story, which is pretty uneventful. But it contains a larger social history of England and a particular phase of English life which I believe is worth preserving. It was my wife who kept saying that I should write this book for that reason, not just out of self-indulgence. The paradox, and it’s a well worn one, is that I could write this larger social history only by telling my own story. When I was discussing this with my American editor, he said, “Should you have an introduction that makes it clear that this is really a book about class?” And I said no, because every detail in the book is so steeped in class. However microscopically, if you look at the evidence, it’s all there.

INTERVIEWER

How did you go about the process of remembering, in such a high degree of detail?

DYER

Obviously I am the world’s leading authority on the subject matter of this book, which is my childhood and adolescence. But with any kind of writing, it’s always about the detail. There were scenes and details that, for whatever reason, often no reason at all, have remained very vivid in my memory. I don’t know why—they weren’t special moments, but they lodged in my mind. In their mysterious way they were my “spots of time,” as Wordsworth calls them in The Prelude. But whereas he offers an explanation of their significance—you know, “This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks …”—I’ve not been able to determine their significance beyond the fact of their tenacity and, on that basis, I happily submitted to their insistence, their quiet lobbying, on the right to be admitted. Also, when I was about seventeen or eighteen and, through reading, became interested in trying to write, I had nothing to write about but my adolescent and family life, and I kept those pages. The writing was of zero literary value, of course, but it comprised a wonderful archive of details I could use.

INTERVIEWER

Were there other kinds of research or self-research involved?

DYER

I never think of anything I do as involving research. It always feels to me like having a hobby. I know a great deal about Bob Dylan, for example, because I’m interested in Bob Dylan, but I don’t do research on Dylan. The other thing is that it has never been easier to write an autobiography or to write about recent history—pictures of every little thing you’ve ever owned are on the internet. I’m an inept user of the internet, but I was amazed at the amount of data about the clutter of my life—of my g-g-generation, as the Who put it—preserved in Cyberia. Now, what none of this can do—this virtual prop cupboard—is give us narrative. That’s provided by people and by the emergence of an individual consciousness at a particular moment of history—moment in, this instance, in the extended sense of the period from 1958 to 1977.

INTERVIEWER

There’s quite a bit in the book on your collecting of objects as a child and a teenager—Action Men, model airplanes, bubblegum cards, records. How did you think about these objects, as tools for memory but also as things that might be put literally in the book?

DYER

The objects are part of a larger universal specificity, as it were. It was related to Ernaux’s project in The Years, where there’s a lot of information about various gadgets that became available at defining moments for her generation. The mistake some memoirists make is to write “We would go down to the shops,” or “We would go for walks.” It’s all generalized. But the continuity has to be particularized, and the objects in this book are all tied to particular moments. It’s about substantiating a time and place. In The Age of Innocence, for example, you hear all about the furnishings of a room, but something is always happening in that room, and the stuff happening is complex human and economic interaction. What’s happening in my book—in my rooms—is more self-centered, but I am the locus of social and economic forces. Sticking with toys for a moment, my fondness for inventory is such that my American editor Alex Starr said, “I’ve had enough of all these toys, can’t we move on to the human relationships?” And I said, No, you don’t understand, because you have brothers and sisters. But if you’re an only child, it’s things that you have relationships with. There’s a line in Billy Collins’s poem “Autobiography” in his book Water, Water—he’s an only child, too—where he writes of an ironic ambition to compile “a catalogue raisonné of my toys.” In this book, I surrendered to the same urge. To make a piece of writing interesting, obviously, the catalogue needs to be imbued with narrative potential. In my case that potential lies in the way toys and cards and the solace they bring to the only child is replaced by books and the discovery of reading in my mid-teens, which whooshes into the vacuum left by my having grown out of a kid’s toyhood. And reading and school lead to Oxford and to an eventual understanding—which came to me only in the period after the book ends—that the process I had been through was actually one defined by class, by social and economic forces which had been at work on everything in the book—the stuff, the things, the people, the culture, the history, that had formed me. This is made explicit by the quote from E. P. Thompson which appears at the very end, as a kind of closing epigraph, because I only understood this process retrospectively, in my mid-twenties, beyond the completed timeframe of the main part of the book.

INTERVIEWER

Childhood can often be a boring subject. How did you think about making it interesting?

DYER

It wasn’t boring to me, but then of course when you meet bores in real life, they’re not bored by what they’re saying at all, even as they’re boring the pants off anybody who is obliged to listen. But yes, I’m in full agreement—when I read biographies, I always skim through the childhood stuff. It’s not until we get to adolescence that it becomes interesting. And of course all the stuff about grandparents is even more boring. I can’t make any progress with Proust, all that childhood stuff is so boring—I just find myself thinking, Go kick around a ball or something. I’ve never had any interest in having children, and in fact have never had any interaction with other people’s children. So on the one hand childhood bores the crap out of me, but I’m interested in the idea of the formation of the self. What makes that interesting to the reader? It depends on the quality of writing and perception—which, I suppose, is what people say when they’re banging on about Proust!

INTERVIEWER

How did you approach structuring this book?

DYER

Originally, I had the idea of it being an extended version of this map of Cheltenham I had made for an anthology. That map, which appears in a box set called Where Are You, is a version of the Ordnance Survey maps of my part of the world. But instead of a symbol where the post office would be, in my map I had a symbol like a fist, in the place where I got punched in the face. Or there were lips to show where I’d had a romantic episode. I liked the idea of the memoir being arranged spatially like that, but unlike with the anthology version, the explanation of those sites—the so-called legend—was going to be much longer, and the words would have taken over. It would have been a very unconventional way of doing a memoir. I wrote a lot—I always think that’s the important thing, to amass a lot of material—and I kept coming up against this structural premise. Instead of being enabling, that structure started to feel like an impediment to arrangement. So I ended up defaulting to the most old-fashioned way of all—proceeding chronologically from my birth, and ending up where it ends, at the age of eighteen. There’s a Roy Fuller poem called “The Ides of March,” which includes the lines “And now I am about / To cease being a fellow traveller, about / To select from several complex panaceas, / Like a shy man confronted with a box / Of chocolates, the plainest after all.” So, after having found a complex panacea, I ended up with the plainest after all.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about coming to the ending. The final section includes a long passage on your mother’s birthmark, which was a source of great shame to her in her youth, and which she always kept covered. You describe it to someone as “the most important thing in her life,” and writing about it as a kind of betrayal. How did it feel to write about it?

DYER

I knew always that the end was going to involve my mother’s birthmark. It was very upsetting to write about. The element of betrayal to it was because of the completeness of my parents’ privacy and because it so defined my mum’s entire life. I would never have written about it while she was alive. The only thing I would say to justify it is that writing is a private thing for me. I’m always writing my books for me. I want them to end up being published, obviously, but I never write in public, never write in cafés, and I never do a proposal. I often feel while writing that it’s just about articulating to myself something which is important. But I’m conscious, as I’ve started doing public events for the book, that I’m not able to talk about my mother’s birthmark, partly because I know I’ll become upset about it, and because when you’re doing a public event you’re there to entertain the troops. So that would be inappropriate.

INTERVIEWER

Will you write another memoir, picking up at the age of eighteen after you’ve gone to Oxford?

DYER

Absolutely not. Alan Hollinghurst is a great writer, of course, but I think the Oxford scenes in Our Evenings prove that a scene of punting in Oxford is really undoable. It’s often a good idea to stop at some point with autobiography. When celebrities write memoirs, it’s best if they stop when they make it. After that, as Steve Martin said, it all becomes “And then I met …”

INTERVIEWER

Are there memoirs of childhood you love?

DYER

Yes. Martin Amis’s Experience, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life … It’s not a genre that I’ve turned to that often, really. In general, I go to memoir for a literary experience, not to find out about a life. Another, which I would almost call a first-person biography, is An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. That both is and isn’t an impersonal memoir. I reread it recently with my students because I was teaching a whole course devoted to Annie Dillard, and it’s really a remarkable and at times inscrutable book.

INTERVIEWER

Was there any change in how you saw your younger self by the time you finished writing the book?

DYER

I feel very close now to my fourteen-year-old self, but that’s a path that my writing had been taking anyway. The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign—immaturing with age.

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor at The Paris Review.

“Everything is Enchanted”: Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens

Left: Andy Kaufman as Latka Gravas in Taxi, 1979. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Right: Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman, 2009. AP Photo/Danny Moloshok.

Andy Kaufman and Paul Reubens both appeared on the hit TV show The Dating Game, but not as themselves. If you had tuned in on a Wednesday night in 1978, you might have seen a rather weird bachelor amid the usual roll call of dudes with disco medallions. While the other contestants were all throwing scripted innuendos at one lucky lady, there was Andy Kaufman! Except it wasn’t him, not exactly. He had shown up as his squeaky-voiced Foreign Man character, Latka Gravas, whom he would soon make famous on NBC’s show Taxi (1979–1983. But no one knew who that was yet. On the show, it all got pretty discombobulating. He was grinning like a boy who’d just discovered what fire could do to his Action Man; he deliberately misunderstood the jokes, and squealed “I won!” when he didn’t win, all somehow earning him the gleeful indulgence of the studio audience. What the hell was that?

A year later, a certain Pee-wee Herman was on the same show, a then-unknown overgrown boy in a glen plaid suit and red bow tie, played by a twenty-seven-year-old actor called Paul Reubens. Looking like Buster Keaton’s unhinged son, sounding like a hyperactive imp on a sugar high, he had the audience giggling like drunk hyenas soon, too. Crashing The Dating Game wasn’t some sort of elaborate scheme Andy and Paul hatched together, but it’s nice to think about them in split screen: two cartoonish instigators of live-action anarchy, tricksters without any malicious purpose, making comedy out of these unusual characters.

It’s a good time to investigate the paradoxes and special strangeness of Kaufman and Reubens, who are oddly alike in some ways and so different in others. Two fascinating new documentaries try to puzzle out the stories of these two much-missed entertainers. (Reubens died at age seventy after a battle with cancer long-kept secret, in 2023; Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984, when he was just thirty-five.) Matt Wolf’s Pee-wee as Himself and Alex Braverman’s wacked-out portrait of Kaufman, Thank You Very Much, provide the best accounts of what powered their singular shenanigans, not to mention the trouble they got themselves into once they crash-landed in the world of showbiz.

Personally, I like to imagine a documentary about both of them. Or a great buddy movie, maybe with Nicolas Cage as Andy and Timothée Chalamet as Paul. Two Inscrutable Jews! Andy Kaufman from Great Neck, Long Island, and Paul Reubens from Sarasota, Florida. Two oddball products of Eisenhower-era suburbia, who spent their childhoods in staring contests with the TV, bewitched by fun-for-all-the-family entertainment: The Howdy Doody Show, I Love Lucy, The Little Rascals. Kaufman, the Philip Roth–level satyr with a sweet tooth (“He was kind of a sex addict,” his former partner Lynne Margulies cheerily remembers in the documentary); and Reubens, the willowy boy who dressed up as a princess on Halloween.

In a 2009 chat with Reubens for Interview magazine, Paul Rudd observed the Kaufman-esque vibe of that Dating Game appearance and wondered whether he was an influence. “I was very influenced by him. I liked his work, and I knew him a tiny, teeny bit,” Reubens said. I couldn’t find any quotes of Kaufman talking about his contemporaries. That wasn’t really his style.

But among other things, Andy Kaufman may have been the architect of Reubens’s Saturday morning TV masterpiece, Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Kaufman made a six-minute skit called “Uncle Andy’s Funhouse” for the TV show Buckshot in 1980. Kaufman’s best friend and coconspirator, Bob Zmuda—a man who used to run around the Central Park Zoo with Kaufman, screaming, “The lion’s out!”—once called it “a kids’ show for adults” that never got made into a full-grown show. An IMDb trivia page claims that before he died, Kaufman approved of Reubens mutating the Funhouse into the Playhouse before he died. While the formats are similar, the two shows are weird worlds unto themselves, two “houses” that are alike in their eccentricity but it may be the only contest where Kaufman comes out looking slightly more “normal”: he runs upstairs in a hula skirt to yell at his parents (actors); Pee-wee chats with a talking globe. They’ve both disappeared into characters that seem to have beginnings and no ends.

***

Inscrutability can be a performer’s best friend—it makes everything more real and unpredictable—but Kaufman’s and Reubens’s careers also offer lessons in its potential risks and pitfalls. In the interviews with Matt Wolf that make up Pee-wee as Himself, combined with thousands of hours of material from Reubens’s personal archive, Reubens comes off as, yes, a total sweetheart and a congenital mischief-maker, teasing and bedeviling Wolf at every turn. It’s wild fun to watch, but you also know he’s also hiding things he feels the need to conceal, including the cancer diagnosis he kept secret from the public and from Wolf. Previously deeply private about his sexuality, he discusses his deep romance with the handsome painter Guy Brown before the creation of Pee-wee. Severely freaked out by how he “lost [his] entire personality by being involved with someone else,” he swore off any long-term romantic relationship, dedicating himself to his career. His famous creation materialized not long after, partially shaped by Brown’s mischievous spirit. But Reubens was in love and ached from the loss. He’s close to tears when recalling Guy’s death from AIDS-related illness four decades earlier.

Reubens also admits he’s quite the control freak, and secretive as a Cold War spy. “I’m not a trusting person,” he tells the director, straightforwardly. Fathoming the reasons for this isn’t exactly rocket science. “My career,” Reubens observes, “would have absolutely suffered if I was openly gay.” Eventually, he stops cooperating with Wolf on the documentary, uncertain about whether it will tell the story he wants, keen to shape the entire thing himself.

Maybe Reubens is sometimes coy because he’s baffled by the inexplicably charmed story of Pee-wee Herman. The character was solid gold right from the beginning, a hit with audiences as soon as Reubens slipped into the outfit he found in a cardboard box backstage at the Groundlings headquarters. He was ready to show you his cool toys, offer wisdom (“I was using my imagination. I was being creative. You can do it at home, too”), cackle with glee, or yell a snotty playground insult: “Act your age, not your IQ!” By 1981, he was the star of a sellout show. De Niro and Scorsese came to check it out one night, maybe taking notes for The King of Comedy (1982).

Soon he was a real pop-cultural phenomenon, he was on on school lunch boxes; he was a doll you could get for Christmas. But in retrospect, none of that success seems to have been guaranteed. Reubens was a CalArts alumnus enthralled by the Warhol superstars. After college he was all set to join an offshoot of the legendary anarchist drag collective the Cockettes. He played a “mermaid version of Cher” in a trippy video long before Cher appeared in a movie called Mermaids (1990). In Super 8 footage of Reubens as a stoned sylph wreathed in sequins and fur, experimenting with various drag looks, it’s giving Rrose Sélavy via Peter Hujar. He referred to his Pee-wee act as “performance art” plenty of times.

And then there’s the matter of his two arrests: the first for public exposure in a Florida porno theater while Pee-wee’s Playhouse was on hiatus in 1991; the second on trumped-up child pornography charges in 2003. He owned a vast quantity of vintage erotica, much of it stashed in unopened boxes. Keen to make headlines during election season, the LAPD desperately isolated one potentially ambiguous image out of thousands and tried to skewer him with one count on the reduced charge of obscenity. Reubens protested his innocence in both cases and pled no contest.

You might say he became a victim of his own too-successful character. Reubens was wholeheartedly invested in and identified with being Pee-wee, almost never interviewed or making any sort of public appearance out of character. Wolf’s documentary includes footage of Connie Chung referring to Herman’s lawyer in a news bulletin, as if the character had been arrested, Reubens not even mentioned. The wicked dissonance between the public sprite and the meth-lab Gandalf in his infamous Florida mug shot felt acute indeed. Was it Borges or Liz Taylor who said, “Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst?”

And indeed, forty years later, nobody seems to know who Andy Kaufman really was, either, not even Zmuda. Remembering Kaufman from our own deranged present in Thank You Very Much, Zmuda says, “It was like working for Harry Houdini. They weren’t jokes, they were illusions.”

Kaufman was a great actor: fearless, able to convince you he really meant whatever he did. And yet he didn’t seem interested in playing anybody that didn’t come out of his head. But that’s a flaw only if you’re interested in the usual way of doing things. It’s fun to imagine Kaufman doing what Reubens did in Blow (2001), for example, and giving a sly and sensitive performance as a campy, drug-trafficking hairdresser. But maybe he would’ve shown up as somebody who wasn’t even in the script, just for fun. Why does the performance have to stop “here” rather than “there”? And decided that, anyway?

If Kaufman felt that what he was up to was performance art, of course, he wasn’t telling. There’s no record of him talking about Fluxus; there’s just his friend Laurie Anderson in Thank You Very Much telling the story of hanging out with him at a Coney Island funfair and deliberately antagonizing ferocious carnival workers. Performance art, a goof, a mad risk, or all of the above. He went on TV and told David Letterman about three men who’d mugged him recently, and announced he was going to adopt them as his adult sons. Or he slow danced with his beloved Grandma Pearl. Maybe it was just a private game he was playing, and he was totally untroubled by anything other than his own personal definitions of success and failure. Consider this scene from Julie Hecht’s account, in her book Was This Man a Genius? Talks with Andy Kaufman (2001), of trying to profile him for Harper’s Magazine at his peak, circa 1979. It sounds like hanging out with Don Quixote. Author and subject show up at a Manhattan restaurant just before closing time. He tells the maître d’ they have a reservation, but in the voice of a fusty aristocrat.

“I’m very sorry but I just phoned and was told I would be served if I arrived before one.”

“It is almost one now,” said the maître d’.

Sir Andrew of Kaufmanshire retorts in his faux-British accent, “Almost—but not yet one.” Dinner is served. Robin Williams noted on the 1995 TV special A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman, “Andy made himself the premise, and the world was the punch line.”

***

Does anybody else feel high? Perhaps it isn’t a surprise to learn that Reubens and many members of the production design team on Pee-wee’s Playhouse were sustained by plenty of Cali weed. The set for the show was one of the great artworks of the eighties. Every inch was psychedelic, from the acid-flashback patterns in the carpet to the butterscotch-colored sphinx on the roof, which was designed by the William Blake of LA’s punk artists, Gary Panter. Pee-wee is talking to a hot Black cowboy who was in Apocalypse Now. (Laurence Fishburne!) Ah, the walls are melting. Is Chairry a mint-green talking chair or a mint-green talking hippo? Every episode’s secret word makes the whole set explode (“Fun!”), just like when you and your pals get tickled into Jell-O by a stoner in-joke.

Meanwhile, led astray by too much On The Road in his teens, Kaufman ran away from home and spent a year living in a Long Island park, transmogrifying from nice boy to wastoid on a diet of brain-frying substances that would’ve spooked Dennis Hopper. LSD, DMT, STP, Dexedrine, rivers of booze “every day!” as he recalled in an interview. “Every day!” Luckily, Transcendental Meditation tweaked those brain waves to a different frequency, and from 1969 onward, he was almost a parody of a new age person in his squeaky-clean disavowal of anything remotely “toxic.” (Except when he was being his lounge singer alter ego, Tony Clifton, bellowing like a hungover sea lion—then it was time for cigarettes and whiskey.)

Pretty much everything Kaufman did was trippy, though, because he messed with the whole concept of funny. Once, at a comedy club, he ate a bowlful of chocolate ice cream onstage. The act was the classic Cheshire Cat switcheroo: the normal way of doing things was suddenly revealed to be nonsense. You could toil for years to nail three minutes of sassy one-liners, or you could go somewhere can name. Like Syd Barrett asked, “What exactly is a joke?”

At the same time, much of their material was uncannily familiar. Reagan was in the White House and everybody was getting flashbacks to the fifties. Cute surfaces, strange depths: all-American aesthetics rendered darkly or sweetly perverse. David Byrne wandering around Texas in a Stetson like a Martian at a barbecue in his movie True Stories (1986). The Norman Rockwell suburbs seething with psychosexual nightmares in Blue Velvet (1986). Cindy Sherman, the all-American girl from Glen Ridge, New Jersey, mutating every time she raided her dress-up box. Was she a scared bobby-soxer or a femme fatale from a film noir that you half remember? Pee-wee materialized with a delicious party bag full of chaos. What was he up to? Like Kaufman, he was creating demented echoes of his childhood programming, equal parts vaudeville and avant-garde, simultaneously wholesome and weird, a heartwarming tribute to tradition and a sly parody of it. Look at Kaufman lip-syncing to the theme song from Mighty Mouse: “Here I come to save the day!” Or see the touching spectacle of Kaufman talking with Howdy Doody on his 1977 special Andy’s Funhouse, as if the puppet were a real person: “The first friend I ever had.” If they make you feel like you’re zonked on psychedelics, it’s partly because they crack open a portal to a certain childlike wonder. It’s a world in which, as Glenn O’Brien pointed out in his epic exegesis on Pee-wee for Artforum, “everything is enchanted.”

As soon CBS gave Reubens the green light, he was on a mission. He tells Wolf that he knew at once that “I can be the beacon of being like, It’s okay to be different.” No big deal was made out of the fact that the cast was multiracial at a time when this was extremely rare. When Reubens confesses “there was gay subtext in Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” he can barely hide his mirth: a big reveal of the most obvious thing in the world. Who’s that knocking at the cherry-red door at the height of the ultrahomophobic Reagan era? A who’s who of LGBTQ royalty: Cher! Grace Jones! Little Richard! And that’s just the Christmas special. It was kind of radical, given that the president didn’t even say the word AIDS until 1985.

As gentle as he could be, Kaufman had a compulsive appetite for creating scandal and confusion that was baffling then and would be career suicide now. The man who canceled himself! A troll before troll meant that. He got himself voted off SNL for being so infuriating. Imagine somebody today publicly seeming to turn their comedy career into a side hustle while they become the “Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the United States,” a loudmouth schlub who insists he fights only women on various TV wrestling franchises, taunting the audience, feasting on their boos and getting rewarded with a hailstorm of popcorn and Coke.

Everybody’s grown familiar with the concept of actors staying in character off set but this was way before all those stories about Daniel Day-Lewis making his own canoe for The Last of the Mohicans. You’re falling fall through a whole other trap door when you remember that Kaufman caused all this trouble as “Andy Kaufman.” It’s not as if many people were even in on the joke. The actress Carol Kane told me that after he was pile-driven by Jerry “The King” Lawler during a wrestling match and bundled off to the hospital, the cast of Taxi “thought he was actually in [the] hospital, and we sent him magazines and fruit baskets. And then Danny [DeVito] watched the tape of the match and slowed it down—it was fake!”

Some people still think Andy Kaufman isn’t dead. He’s been sighted, among other places, at a Walmart in New Mexico. Zmuda cryptically suggests that “if he wasn’t dead, he’d be faking his death.” Is he secretly watching Nathan Fielder’s reality-mangling antics on The Rehearsal and giggling with approval? Why did he work as a busboy while he was on Taxi? He was like some mythological creature that exists just to bewilder people and bask in their responses.

Underneath all the chaos, there may have been peace, maintained by a deep internal purpose. Thank You Very Much points out the influence of Transcendental Meditation: The straitjacket of the self does not exist. Rather than lamenting what you supposedly are, explore what you could be, whether that’s Elvis, a wrestler, or somebody who screams “You’ll Never Walk Alone” while thrashing a hi-hat on The Mike Douglas Show. Forty thousand dollars is only a financial loss; it doesn’t mean real failure. Accept good or bad reactions as beautiful in their own way. “Let be be finale of seem,” in the words of Wallace Stevens, but in front of a live studio audience, ideally. “He was so courageous,” Kane told me, “because he never broke character. He was so honest and true to whatever he wanted to construct as an artist. He never let on. He never winked.”

***

I called Kane, the sui generis Upper West Side Good Witch from such classics as Scrooged (1988), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Addams Family Values (1993). She knew them both. She acted with Kaufman as Latka’s girlfriend, Simka, on Taxi, and was pals with Reubens for years, stepping out with him for his first public appearance in LA following his infamous Florida arrest. They had dinner at a restaurant; the press was there. “Paul arranged it all,” she said. “He did it very elegantly.” Happily recalling Kaufman, she said, “He felt that rehearsal was not the best thing for his particular process. During the week you had to rehearse with a young man with a cardboard sign around his neck that said andy on it. He was a lovely young man but the chemistry wasn’t the same.”

How were Kaufman and Reubens alike? Were they alike? “Kindness,” Kane said, “is something they had in common.” Giving people delight is a very generous act. See Andy’s wide-eyed boy-at-the-carnival glee when he’s chatting with Orson Welles on The Merv Griffin Show. He was a goofy kid from Great Neck, and now he’s talking with a legend as if he were talking to his grandpa. There’s footage of him, toward the end of his life, greeting a happy crowd at the Improv in Los Angeles. He’s the cheeriest person you’ve ever seen in a punk leather jacket and a Travis Bickle Mohawk. (And probably the only person whose Mohawk was concocted from post-chemotherapy hair.)

In the heartrending audio that concludes Wolf’s film, recorded by himself the day before he died, Reubens declares that his work as Pee-wee was “based in love and glee.” Kane said, “Paul was one of the sweetest people on the face of the earth.” The sweetest moment in Wolf’s documentary comes when we see Reubens as Pee-wee at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards. “Rave response” would be an understatement of the audience’s reaction. He tries to goof with the crowd, telling them again and again, “Shut up! Stop!,” but the roar keeps coming. An expression moves across his face that isn’t an especially Pee-wee one: he’s touched, as if he’d just stumbled into a huge surprise party being thrown in his honor. But he recovers and asks, in that trademark whine, “Heard any good jokes lately?”

Kane told me her two old friends “were magical, both of them, in different ways.” Different brands of magic; similar kinds of spells. They conjured up wild new spaces to perform inside where things were multicolored, discombobulating, hysterical. Just like in the theme tune for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, “you’ve landed in a place where anything can happen,” and you can make it into your home. Magical indeed.

 

Charlie Fox is a writer and artist who lives in London. His book of essays, This Young Monster, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. He curated Flowers of Romance for Lodovico Corsini in 2024. 

Miss Bingley’s Burberry Bikini

Mia Goth’s eyes look naked. In every image, no matter how many times this face is reproduced, the vulnerability startles. Doe-eyed, doll-eyed, fair brows, hardly any visible lashes, she is sweetness in a rancid world and, in Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 adaptation of Emma, my favorite Harriet. She may deviate from some of the specifics of the Harriet that Jane Austen writes in Emma. Her eyes are brown, whereas Harriet’s are blue. Goth is not plump, but she is soft. It’s through Harriet that Austen writes the soulfulness that undercuts her story’s satire. This is what Goth delivers—Harriet’s “flutter of spirits.”

Being a Regency-era gentleman’s “natural child,” Harriet never had the privilege of innocence. Not knowing whose daughter she is, she has had to be okay with the unknown—a foil to Emma’s need to be in control. Goth shares a likeness with Brittany Murphy, whose Tai is Harriet’s proxy in Clueless. Both actresses are bubbly, blissful, but present to the universe’s darkness—it’s not the same as being naive, even if the qualities are sometimes confused. While there’s no bloodshed in de Wilde’s costume drama, Goth brings something from her scream queen résumé: her ability to edge between purity and madness. She plays Harriet with an openness to the intensity of desire and an appreciation of its absurdity

There’s a tabloid soap opera that Goth’s casting conjures, her real-life entanglements mirroring an Austenian plot tailor-made for TMZ. In 2018, seventeen months before the Emma remake’s release, when Goth was promoting a film with Robert Pattinson, their respective exes Shia LaBeouf and FKA twigs were in the news for being photographed together. “Awkward,” reported People. LaBeouf and FKA twigs eventually broke up (there’s an ongoing lawsuit about his alleged abuse of her), and LaBeouf and Goth got back together. Today, they’re married. Like Harriet, maybe Goth could have played her hand differently and landed a better match. Harriet wedded a farmer, Goth a canceled movie star. On both fronts, you could say, in the end love won—but at what cost? Austen is a cynic, after all.

—Whitney Mallett

 

We will never be free from Pride and Prejudice. Its tale of class-traversing romance has remained so ardently with us that Darcy and Elizabeth’s love has become the blueprint of a type of romantic narrative itself. For over two centuries, every weird, pretty brunette in art and literature (her beauty always orthogonal to her braininess) who has received great romantic providence has been a daughter of Lizzie Bennet. We would have no horny One Direction fan fiction without Pride and Prejudice; there would be no Fifty Shades of Grey, most definitely no Twilight; it’s likely that brunettes would possess none of the cultural purchase we enjoy now had Jane Austen never given it to us.

We certainly wouldn’t have Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 Bollywood adaptation of the 1813 novel and perhaps my favorite thing to come out of Austen’s infinitely elastic multiverse. Much of its success is owed to Aishwarya Rai, whose perspicacious Lalita Bakshi (the movie’s Lizzie Bennet) is perhaps a woman of greater beauty than Austen intended. In the book, Lizzie is a little plain; her “fine eyes,” as Darcy puts it, are her primary attraction. Casting Miss World 1994 as the second-prettiest sister would make the metaphysics of their romance totally unrecognizable were it not for the racial difference that Chadha’s adaptation introduces into it. It doesn’t matter that Rai is Bollywood’s Bellucci with limpid green eyes, nor that her brown hair is dyed a curious auburnish shade in the movie—she’s not white, and Darcy is, so her generational beauty is still relegated to the status of subaltern brunette.

Casting Rai is just one way Bride and Prejudice manages to adapt Austen’s political inquiries around pride and prejudice into an Indian context and market it back to an Anglophone audience as a Bollywood musical, a form that is, in many ways, the dialectical opposite of Austen’s nineteenth-century British novel. Chadha’s film explodes the plot of Pride and Prejudice’s into a jubilant smorgasbord of song and dance, and expounds upon its core concept—the uneasy path romantic love charts through social structures—by portraying a romance that surmounts not only class difference, but also modern iterations of colonialism. When Darcy shares his plans to purchase a hotel in Goa, Lalita bristles, shouting, “I thought we’d gotten rid of imperialists like you!” “I’m not British—I’m American,” responds Darcy, the ignoramus. “Exactly!” Lali responds. Chadha’s ushering Austen into 2004 also produces other succulent details—grainy photos of McMansions peered at on flip-phone screens, a Burberry bikini with matching visor, rimless glasses. Astute brunettes rejoice: As Bride and Prejudice demonstrates, the Austenian blueprint is versatile enough to celebrate Lizzie Bennets across all epochs of history, in either of the earth’s hemispheres. Her ingenious formula is one that is—forgive me—tried and dexterous.

—Arielle Isack

 

There have been, by my count, nine screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the author’s final and posthumously published 1817 novel. The most recent and maybe worst attempt to retell the story of Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth—two old people in their late twenties who are brought back together seven years following the dissolution of their engagement—is Netflix’s 2022 production starring Dakota Johnson, whose serviceable performance does not spare this film from the vulgar polyester taint of our Temu sensibilities. I notice that whenever people decide that they want to update something from the past so that it appeals to the contemporary eye, they talk about the “timeless” qualities of the source material. But this particular production seems to roil with the time traveler’s horror. There is something incredibly 2022 about director Carrie Cracknell’s take on Austen’s Regency era story of regret, restraint, and eventual reunion, relying as it does on a number of conventions more redolent of TikTok than literary canon. Would Anne Elliot eavesdrop on her would-be lover while peeing against a tree? Would she swill red wine or directly address her audience or throw her dignity to the wind with soliloquies about how much it sucks when the boy you like won’t sit next to you at a dance? Maybe, but not in public! Straddling the distance between an episode of Lizzie McGuire and an expensively produced luxury fragrance ad, this film is the Pet Sematary of Austen-inspired cinema. By Anne’s seventeenth fourth-wall shattering complaint, I thought Stephen King’s words had a lot of wisdom about what it means to believe things from the past are suited to the present; sometimes, this film seems to prove, dead is indeed better.

—Alissa Bennett

Life in Jane Austen’s Goshen

C. E. Brock, illustration from Mansfield Park, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

“This is Goshen,” my mother and father would frequently say. The idea—that our home was the equivalent of the Biblical land of Goshen from Exodus—was simple, perhaps, but it said as much about my parents’ perceptions of the outside world as it did about their vision for our home. The world was unfeeling, unsparing, loud, chaotic—or, in their view, simply “evil.” It was in Goshen, after all, that the enslaved Israelites found refuge amid Egyptian brutality.

That pursuit of peace shaped their pivotal decision—when I was seven my Jamaican family left New York for Oklahoma. New York was, in some important sense, the world—its sophistication, its temptation, its unapologetic secularism. Oklahoma, by contrast, was in the world but not of it. It offered what my parents craved: stillness. Its flat plains, its grass more often brown than green, and the red-tinged soil of its western stretches conveyed a kind of geographic manifestation of sanctity. Its boringness was its spiritual appeal. Our neighbors prayed over their meals in public. Walmart greeters accompanied their smiles and hellos with unprovoked God bless yous. Oklahoma’s simplicity and relative silence wasn’t just a feature of the move—it was pitched as our family’s saving grace.

And yet, Tulsa—the city we came to call home—had its own darkness. Tulsa’s prosperity was built on erasure. On the dead bodies and stolen futures of Black and Indigenous communities. On the devastation of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a history that was deliberately shielded from our view. I would grow up in a city that claimed quiet as a virtue, but wielded silence as a weapon.

From the outside, it might also have seemed contradictory for our family to call our home a place of refuge. It was undeniably loud, often filled with more extended family than bedrooms. By the time I was six, when my younger brother was born, I had grown accustomed to being an only child in name alone. Cousins arrived in droves, often suddenly, each wave bringing more individuals bound to me by blood yet from whom I was divided by circumstances I could scarcely comprehend. Their parents—my aunts and uncles—had sent them away or found themselves unable to care for them, either from legal affliction, illness, or indifference. They sent them to our home, believing it would provide a better chance at life, one grounded in piety. I never fully understood how my parents managed to afford the revolving doors of our home. My father had a steady job in IT at a local hospital, and my mother was a licensed nurse. But the expanding number of dependents strained our resources—something I could observe without tangible insight into our finances. My father took on extra jobs, sometimes cleaning restaurants late at night and other times delivering newspapers before dawn, while my mother would sometimes pick up extra shifts from the nursing agency.

But Goshen was not an attempt at charity. It was, according to my parents’ interpretation of scripture, a tangible manifestation of holiness—defined by the original Greek word as something “set apart.” To my parents, being holy meant maintaining a distinct separation from the secular world. Our family’s rules, by even the most fervently Christian standards, were strict: no cursing, no movie theaters, no card games, parental controls and time limits on television, and no secular music. These restrictions were meant not just to maintain morality but to solidify our identity as distinctly different, apart from worldly contamination. Yet the cousins who filled our home brought with them new tensions: they were, after all, of the world. With their protests, whispered critiques, and open defiance, they revealed how peculiar, and even unnatural, our rules appeared from the outside. Their presence forced our household into a constant dialogue with the world beyond its walls. Every day in our household unfolded like its own novel of manners, conflicts occurring in miniature around deeply held beliefs on morality. And I began to see Tulsa itself and our home as analogous to those in Mansfield Park, one of the first books I came to read and love.

***

Summers in Goshen were extensions of the academic year, and even during the school year our school-assigned homework was always accompanied by mom-assigned additional homework. My mother didn’t quite understand why schools weren’t more intense. (This post-homework homework was one of the requirements against which my cousins grated most.) In the morass of stress that would come from filling out algebra workbooks during the summer—activities to which I attribute whatever success I’ve achieved—I would occasionally select a work of fiction during our weekly visits to the library. The library—which came in second only to church in my parents’ reverence—was the closest to recess during my childhood summers. In the stacks of the library my imagination ran wild, untethered, even briefly by the strictures of our regimens.

It was during these visits that I began to read Jane Austen’s novels in chunks while in the stacks. I knew that if I checked out these tomes, my mom might be tempted to assign reports based on these books. And those book reports would be vulnerable to my mother’s unsparing grading (a current events report, written at six years old, received a 56.5 percent in red ink—which I also credit with what modicum of success I’ve achieved and built familiarity with comfort with editorial marks). So, I confined my reading to the stacks. One book, Mansfield Park, seemed the least loved, the cleanest, the least bunny-eared of them—perhaps because it’s one of Austen’s less heralded works.

In Mansfield Park, I met Fanny Price, the quiet, poorer relative brought to live among wealthier kin. She wasn’t outspoken or conventionally heroic. Instead, Fanny had quiet dignity, an inner strength that readers often mistake for passivity. As I observed her careful navigation of Mansfield’s social structures, I saw not submission but subtle resistance—that mirrored the struggles my cousins faced within our family home. Fanny was never fully integrated into the family; she was cared for but never claimed.

Discovering that Austen herself was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman—a child of the rectory, like me (though my father and grandfather were lay ministers)—changed my understanding of her work. Austen’s father, George, was a cleric in the Church of England; she was raised in a house where faith, moral discipline, and careful discernment were daily practices rather than abstractions. Her structured moral worlds, fraught with the undercurrents of quiet resistance, spoke directly to my own experiences.

I have grappled personally with the tension Fanny’s character embodies: Should I have been more like her—quiet, accepting, obedient—or should I, like my cousins, have resisted openly, challenging my parents’ stringent rules? I wondered if the first movie I saw in theaters, The Fellowship of the Ring, really necessitated a full analysis of its Christian themes presented to my parents, to convince them that I should be permitted to go. I’m not sure. I didn’t find the gumption to rebel until college, where my separation from my family felt significant enough to architect a life of holiness, or even just goodness, on my own terms. Austen’s novel held up a mirror to my internal debates about identity and belonging, obedience and rebellion. Austen articulates this struggle through Fanny while encouraging the book’s characters—and by extension all of us—to consider our internal moral compasses: “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” This made Austen’s subtle moral interrogations deeply resonant with me at thirteen, as I was learning about the guide inside me.

Not all readers and critics have found this ambivalence convincing. Edward Said, among other things, criticizes Austen for remaining relatively silent about the source of Fanny’s extended family’s wealth: Caribbean slave plantations. For Said, this silence isn’t neutrality but complicity; it shows how British literature helped normalize imperial power by making its foundations seem natural and unspoken. This reading is compelling. But I never felt comfortable discounting the narrative power of silence in Austen’s work. In the scene, after her uncle Sir Thomas returns from Antigua, Fanny asks him about the slave trade. Austen offers no reply from Sir Thomas and instead records only that “there was such a dead silence.” That phrase—dead silence—is jarringly final. It doesn’t just denote a pause in conversation; it registers a refusal. Fanny isn’t scolded for asking—her question is simply swallowed. Rather than having her character castigate slavery, Austen lets that absence ring out.

It reminded me of the silences at our dinner table whenever someone, usually a cousin and eventually me, would ask an uncomfortable question. Sometimes these were trivial, about a so-called curse word (to be clear: the command “shut up” could fit into that category). But even in more critical moments, we were forced to reconsider how we thought about holiness and our world apart. It often wasn’t outright confrontation but rather questioning and ambivalence. Fanny became for me a model of this kind of engagement, her work not only reflective of but formative for my understanding of literature’s moral possibilities.

Austen made me feel like I belonged in the making of literature. This was partly because of Fanny—not because she was a writer but because she was an observer, a careful reader of her social world. She recognized the inconsistencies around her, and quietly challenged moral complacency. Literature and scripture, I came to realize, both require interpretation, and a willingness to engage with contradiction and ambiguity.

Through Mansfield Park, she gave me words for the some of the silences and ambivalences I grew up with.  Literature could make legible the consternation between the holiness we were taught to aspire to and the duty to live in the world.

 

Caleb Gayle is the author of the forthcoming book Black Moses coming out in August. He is a professor at Northeastern University, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

How Jane Austen Pulled It Off: On Emma

Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1909, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time capsules from an era before even trains, gas lights, or telegraphs—the first in a stampede of inventions that transformed nineteenth-century life and are vividly present in the work of many novelists emblematic of that century. Born in 1775, a year before American Independence, Austen has preserved for us an epoch when indoor illumination required candles, remote communication took place by messenger or mail, and locomotion meant walking or engaging at least one horse—more if, like Emma’s protagonist and namesake (and indeed every woman in that novel), you didn’t ride, and needed a carriage to travel any distance.

Austen’s fourth published novel is the most physically constricted of her works, which makes it also the most virtuosic. Unlike Austen’s other protagonists, Emma Woodhouse never spends a night away from home. That home is in fictional Highbury, “a large and populous village almost amounting to a town,” whose sixteen-mile distance from London might as well be six hundred. There is no sense of change in Highbury—neither past nor immanent; sociological nor technological—but rather of generations quietly living out their lives. The action occurs mostly indoors except for two group outings—one to pick strawberries and another to picnic nearby. The men move about more freely, coming and going on horseback, but the women mostly stay put, and Emma is especially stationary. She seems never to have traveled in her life, and remarks at one point that she hasn’t seen the ocean.

The causes of Emma’s insularity are structural. She is the only Austen heroine to occupy the pinnacle of the society she inhabits. Her family is old and estimable, placing much of the population beneath her notice and leaving her with little to aspire to—particularly as she has vowed never to marry. Her mother died when she was a child; her elder sister has married and moved to London and is now a mother of five. Emma is left to serve the wants of their fussy, demanding father, a comically fearful hypochondriac to whom she is deeply devoted. Mr. Woodhouse requires his daughter’s constant presence to entertain, reassure, and protect him from a world where nearly everything registers as a life-threatening danger, be it a dusting of snow or a slice of wedding cake.

The wedding cake is a feature of the novel’s catalyzing event: the marriage of Emma’s erstwhile governess—now intimate friend—to Mr. Weston, a cheerful widower. Mrs. Weston’s removal from the Woodhouse estate to begin married life a half mile away is seen as catastrophic by Mr. Woodhouse, who opposes change of any kind, but the real catastrophe is Emma’s. Despite taking pride in believing she “made the match” between the Westons, the removal of her friend costs Emma a beloved confidante and intellectual equal; a surrogate mother-cum-sister; and a companion and helpmate in dealing with her querulous father. “How was she to bear the change?” Austen asks in the first pages of the novel, and the question is existential.

Anxious to fill the chasm left by her friend, Emma hastily embraces Harriet Smith, a girl of uncertain parentage (i.e., someone’s extramarital child) just finishing at a local boarding school. Pretty Harriet is Emma’s social and intellectual inferior, which allows Emma to commandeer the younger girl as a kind of project, with the goal of raising her tone, awakening her intellect and getting her well married. Emma’s condescension toward her subservient friend is cringe-inducing, as Austen well knew; even before beginning Emma, she wrote, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Emma is imperfect to be sure, prone to snobbery and hauteur and far too confident in her own faulty judgment. Her most vocal critic is Mr. Knightley, brother of Emma’s sister’s husband, an old family friend and neighbor sixteen years Emma’s senior. “Mr. Knightley in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them,” Austen writes. Mr. Knightley warns both Mrs. Weston and Emma of the wrongheadedness of her fast friendship with Harriet and is proven right: that friendship initiates a series of miscalculations by Emma that form the engine of the plot.

Emma has been called a detective novel, and with good reason: the fun of first reading it consists largely in scrutinizing the suspects and trying to figure out not whodunnit but whowilldoit—as in who will marry whom. Austen’s ability to mystify the reader on this point despite her tiny cast of eligible singles and the limits placed upon their choices by rank and class, is something close to magic. As with any good detective story, the reader cascades through a series of misapprehensions that snap away like trapdoors, prompting a delicious sense of free fall as one assumed reality yields to another. Finally, Emma and the reader arrive at the biggest surprise of all: the answer to a mystery we didn’t realize were trying to solve until the moment of discovery.

The pleasure of rereading Emma lies partly in seeing how Austen pulled it off—the red herrings and double entendres that mislead both Emma and the reader about what is really going on. But because the pleasure of first reading Emma requires obfuscation, I urge first-timers and those who have forgotten the novel’s details to set down this introduction and return to it after you have finished. Why forfeit the delight of surprise?

***

Along with setting in motion Emma’s plot, the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Weston introduces an axiom of its fictional world: marrying outside one’s rank, even for love, is unlikely to produce happiness. Mr. Weston, “born of a respectable family, which for the last two or three generations had been rising into gentility and property” fell in love as a young man with a woman from “a great Yorkshire family.” Her brother opposed their union, but she loved Mr. Weston and married him anyway. “It was an unsuitable connection, and did not produce much happiness,” Austen writes. “[Mrs. Weston] had resolution enough to pursue her own will in spite of her own brother, but not enough to refrain from unreasonable regrets at that brother’s unreasonable anger, nor from missing the luxuries of her former home.” She died three years later, leaving him a son, Frank—whom his childless brother- and sister-in-law offered to raise as their own and make their heir.

Less explicit but equally present is an assumption that genuine love must be felt on both sides for a marriage to succeed. Such stringent competing demands would seem to ask the impossible from the tiny world of Highbury; where are qualified candidates supposed to come from? Small wonder that Emma can’t conceive of ever meeting a man who could satisfy both—though she does harbor a faint romantic inclination toward Mr. Weston’s absent son, Frank Churchill, largely because she has never seen him. In a community where social interaction consists largely of repetition, outsiders are a source of fascinating novelty.

Emma is more immediately entertained by matrimonial pursuits by proxy. Convinced that she has a gift for matchmaking, she persuades the pliant Harriet to reject a marriage proposal from Robert Martin, the gentleman farmer she is clearly in love with, and manages to reroute her friend’s affections toward Mr. Elton, the newish vicar of Highbury and an attractive bachelor. But Emma badly misreads Mr. Elton’s attentions; she, not Harriet, turns out to be the object of his ardor (the scene of his failed proposal is exquisite), and Harriet is left crushed.

Emma’s destructive meddling, not to mention her ugly expressions of snobbery, can be hard to take. Of Robert Martin she loftily declares, “The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me … but a farmer can need none of my help, and is therefore in one sense as much above my notice as in every other he is below it.” Her alienating qualities are offset by laudable ones, however: infinite patience with her difficult father; the vulnerability inherent in being so often wrong; an unsparing willingness to own up to her mistakes, and a total lack of personal vanity. As Mr. Knightley puts it, “Considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way.”

This rare instance of praise for Emma from the hypercritical Mr. Knightley is the first in a trail of breadcrumbs Austen lays toward the startling revelation, late in the novel, of their mutual love. Balancing surprise with inevitability is the holy grail of successful fiction, and it’s worth looking closely at how Austen pulls this off—especially since Mr. Knightley is the only man in the novel who meets the dual criteria of belovedness and class equality with Emma. Austen uses literary sleight of hand to obscure this obvious truth: She introduces Mr. Knightley as an elder; a quasi–family member (Emma refers to him once as a brother, which he immediately disavows: another breadcrumb); a confirmed bachelor; and above all, as being nonplussed by nearly every aspect of Emma’s character. At various points he deems her overindulged, thoughtless, headstrong, callous, unfulfilled in her potential, and damaging to Harriet. His cleareyed assessment of Emma’s flaws, and her readiness to hear him out and stand up to him, have the happy effect of making both more sympathetic, as well as strengthening our awareness of their subtle affinity.

Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax operate as narrative foils for Mr. Knightley and Emma, scrambling the inevitability of their eventual union. Frank and Jane have similar biographies; both were half or fully orphaned as young children and have been raised outside Highbury by surrogate families. Frank proves handsome and charming when he finally arrives, and Emma briefly believes she is in love with him. Jane Fairfax, a longstanding object of collective local reverence, is presented as a more perfect version of Emma: an acknowledged beauty; a diligent and accomplished musician (compared to Emma’s desultory efforts); and immediately sympathetic—for, despite her high birth, she is consigned to a future as a governess. Mr. Knightley praises Jane at Emma’s expense, and Mrs. Weston speculates to Emma that he may be in love with Jane. Naturally, Emma detests Jane and Mr. Knightley detests Frank, and the breadcrumbs continue to fall.

The almost mathematical symmetries of Emma’s architecture belie the suspense and lively humor of reading the novel. Much of the comedy surrounds the vicar, Mr. Elton, who repairs to Bath after being rejected by Emma and returns with the fantastically awful Mrs. Elton, a pretentious blatherer who refers to her husband as her “Cara Sposa” and “lord and master” and brags obsessively about her well-married sister’s estate. Watching Mrs. Elton’s coarse self-regard collide with Highbury’s strict class hierarchy is endless fun. Mrs. Elton refers to Mr. Knightley as “Knightley” and dares to suggest that she and Emma form a musical group—presumptions that, in today’s parlance, make Emma’s head explode.

***

In the end, Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley affirms the notion that class parity is essential to happy wedlock. Shortly before Emma realizes that she is in love with her brother-in-law, she experiences a kind of epiphany while gazing upon his property: “Emma felt an increasing respect for it, as the residence of a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding … [her sister] had connected herself unexceptionably. She had given them neither men, nor names, nor places, that could raise a blush.”

Reverence for untainted blood is likely to land uneasily among present-day readers, along with the revelation that Mr. Knightley has been in love with Emma since she was thirteen (and he twenty-nine). The latter would not have shocked in Austen’s time; girls often married as teenagers. But Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley would seem to ratify her faith in the superiority of pure blood, and raises the question of whether Emma, the novel, partakes of Emma Woodhouse’s class arrogance. It’s true that Emma walks back some of her haughty positions; she accepts a dinner invitation from the trade-affiliated Coles rather than be excluded (pleased, on arrival, to be “given all the consequence she could wish for.”) And her early disparagement of Robert Martin gives way to a more generous sentiment, “It would be a great pleasure to know Robert Martin,” when Emma learns that he and Harriet will marry after all. Still, the novel makes clear that the class difference between Emma and Harriet will hereafter be observed. “The intimacy between her and Emma must sink; their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill; and, fortunately, what ought to be, and must be, seemed already beginning, and in the most gradual, natural manner.”

If we knew nothing of Austen’s life or works outside of Emma, we might be excused for supposing the author herself to have embodied Emma Woodhouse’s hermetic aristocratic leanings. But as Claire Tomalin’s wonderfully readable biography, Jane Austen: A Life, and Lucy Worsley’s recent, lively Jane Austen at Home make clear, nothing of the sort was true: Austen was one of eight children born to a clergyman in Steventon, a town comparable to the fictional Highbury. To earn extra income for his immense family, her father boarded male pupils in the manner of Mrs. Goddard, whose school Harriet Smith attends in Emma. Austen came of age in a boisterous household teeming with boys (she had one sister, Cassandra, her inseparable life companion). Later, as an unmarried woman without an income, Austen lived at the pleasure of her parents, who housed her, and her brothers, whose many children she was expected to entertain during frequent visits.

When Austen’s parents made the choice to leave the family home in Steventon and move to Bath, Jane—twenty-five and still unpublished despite years of writing—had no alternative but to go along. She is said to have fainted when told of this move, and its disruption seems to have jarred her from her writing for many years. Only after settling a decade later into a house belonging to her brother Edward (who, like Frank Churchill, was raised by wealthier relatives as their heir) did Austen begin to publish. During her many years of financially dependent adulthood, the unmarried Austen’s worldly status would have been closer to that of Miss Bates, the logorrheic spinster in Emma, than to Emma Woodhouse. When Emma tells Harriet, “A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls,” she might have been describing Jane Austen. Toward the end of Austen’s short life (she died of an illness at forty-one) the success of her novels finally granted her a first taste of financial freedom. Emma was the last novel published in her lifetime; Persuasion and Northanger Abbey appeared posthumously.

Apart from Emma Woodhouse, all of Austen’s protagonists grapple with some form of uncomfortable financial dependence. Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice is one of five unmoneyed sisters; Anne Elliot of Persuasion is punished and rejected by her pompous aristocratic father for falling in love with a ship captain (the profession of two of Austen’s brothers); Fanny Price of Mansfield Park is a second-class citizen in the home of her wealthy aunt and uncle; Elinor Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility is considered beneath the man she loves and viewed as a threat by his family. And Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey is turned out of the house of the man she hopes to marry when his father discovers that she is one of a clergyman’s ten children. All of these heroines triumph by marrying for love across class, thus defying the marital logic presented, in Emma, as natural law.

Emma is anomalous among Austen’s oeuvre for not taking on class elitism as one of its subjects. Rather, the novel transports us to a hierarchical enclave so ancient and inflexible that it cannot be defied without damage. Despite the rigid predictability of this world, Austen manages to keep us guessing to the end. And she inhabits Emma’s point of view so persuasively that her own colorful, populous, contradictory history is impossible to detect. There is a word for all of this: genius!

 

This essay is excerpted from the introduction to a new edition of Emma , to be published by Vintage Books in July.

Jennifer Egan is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of  The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, The Keep, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach, The Candy House, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

Cents and Sensibility

Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1908, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

 

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor …

If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own fault.

—Jane Austen, from The Letters of Jane Austen

 

How does a woman writer make her own money? How does she find the time to write? As a young woman, I scoured every book-jacket biography trying to decipher this secret.

My mother, a Depression baby, gave me sound advice: “Make sure you earn your own money. Especially if you’re married, do you hear me?” I did indeed. Once you’ve been poor, you’re forever hounded by the fear you’ll be poor again.

Jane Austen lived in a time when ladies of her genteel class had few options to acquire wealth, much less manage it themselves. If lucky, she might inherit a legacy like her brother Edward, adopted by wealthy cousins seeking an heir. She could marry money, possibly. Or she might seek a position in a prosperous household as a governess. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published a generation later, would document why the governess route was unthinkable.

What was an educated woman with no dowry to do? Take up sewing? We know Jane Austen was gifted with the needle from what her nephew tells us in his memoir and from what she herself admits in her letters. All well and fine to make shirts for your father, brothers, or the poor, but to practice any handicraft for income was considered vulgar for a woman of her class. Jane was the daughter of a vicar. With neither land nor money, theirs was the bottom rung on the gentry ladder.

In Sense and Sensibility and throughout Jane Austen’s oeuvre, we witness a recurring theme, the dilemma yet again of women without property. The first few chapters of Sense and Sensibility are all about money, and money is mentioned throughout the novel. Who has it. Who doesn’t have it. How much someone is worth. How much someone needs to keep up appearances and not slip into penury.

From Sense and Sensibility’s opening paragraph, we are introduced to an unmarried man of wealth whose household is managed by—a spinster sister. It’s the death of this sister that sets off a series of events that plummet the Dashwood women into poverty. Their loss is exemplified by their eviction from a grand mansion, Norland, to dumpy, frumpy Barton Cottage.

Life imitates art. Jane, her sister Cassandra, and their mother found themselves in financial straits with the death of the family patriarch, just like the characters in her novel, a story she had started a decade earlier. But what if your several brothers don’t invite you to manage their household? What if they desire you only to serve as a live-in babysitter for their eleven kids? What if it never occurs to them that you might need a quiet space of your own? Kin can be complacently myopic. With no one coming to their rescue for some time, Jane Austen undoubtedly had to think of a way to find work. Real work. Not the “work” of the ladies of her class with the needle, but with something sharper. Her pen.

For years, the trio of Austen women wobbled in temporary lodgings, living as frugally as they could manage, sometimes inviting a destitute spinster to join them, until finally Jane’s affluent brother woke from his torpor and offered them lodging at a laborer’s cottage he owned in Chawton. He also had a mansion in the same Hampshire neighborhood, not to mention a manor house in Kent to rival Norland. Why he didn’t offer his own mother the big Hampshire house is beyond me. Maybe like the characters in Sense and Sensibility he thought, “Their housekeeping will be nothing at all. They will have no carriage, no horses, and hardly any servants.”  And just as in her novel, visitors to their humble abode were of the opinion it was charming, totally suitable for a widow and daughters, not comprehending that the word cottage is simply, in the optimistic vocabulary of realtors, a hovel.

I once lived, as a girl, in what was termed a bungalow, and I can say with authority it is nothing more than a house with not enough bedrooms nor bathrooms for its inhabitants. We packed ourselves in our three-bedroom home like the old lady who lived in a shoe, with nine people having to make do. Barton Cottage, with its four bedrooms and a garret, sounded luxurious to me.

Bungalows, like cottages, are damp with condensation and cold in the winter, and a multitude of invading pests: flies, cockroaches, mice. Add several men at home, and it’s as noisy as a zoo. Jane Austen records one brother’s unforgettable visit by his habit of banging doors and ringing the servant for water at all hours. But at least they had doors! And servants.

Add to all this the upkeep of a country cottage. In Sense and Sensibility, a visitor remarks on the dirty country roads around Barton Cottage. This means mud brought indoors during rain. With no indoor plumbing, someone had to haul buckets from an outdoor pump, not easy work in summer and total hardship in winter. And I haven’t mentioned the labor required to heat this drafty basket.

The Dashwood sisters no doubt were raised with servants lighting their bedroom fireplaces before they rose out of bed. Their reduced circumstances allowed them to keep only three employees; imagine what the three employees had to say about their added duties. To make matters even worse, the family’s economic descent happened just when Elinor and Marianne were at that crucial age of shopping for husbands. Fashion added to their anxieties with flimsy dresses made of lightweight muslin, the very worst fabric to wear when you’re on your period.

And what, I wonder, was the standard euphemism of the time when nature called? Jane Austen is too much of a lady to satisfy my coarse curiosity, so I have done my research. In one of their temporary lodgings in Bath, the Austens rented a house with an earth toilet in the garden. I learned this reading Lucy Worsley’s excellent Jane Austen at Home, where she also mentions their mahogany convenient stools; “seat-less stools for placing over a chamber-pot.” I suppose that was why social visits then were not more than a quarter of an hour. In an emergency you could claim a nervous headache as Elinor does for her sister when the Sharpe sisters threaten to descend.

Sense and Sensibility was an unfinished manuscript rescued from Jane Austen’s work basket. Her first version, drafted in 1795, was told in a series of letters, like the novels popular in the eighteenth century. But during the next ten years, she unstitched and resewed, designing a new garment from the old, perhaps emboldened by economic necessity after her father’s death. At long last, when she felt satisfied with her handiwork, she sent it to a publisher. It was accepted and presented to the public in 1811, eventually earning Jane a small profit. Even more important, its success inspired her publisher to take a chance and accept her next novel, Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen was thirty-five years old, finally earning a little money. From her pen! And I can tell you, that’s a feeling that makes up for life’s exploding cigars.

With the publication of Sense and Sensibility, Jane could claim her right to write. I wonder if she missed the tranquility of the vicarage countryside of her youth. Chawton Cottage, unlike Barton Cottage, sat directly upon a main road with stagecoaches rattling and rumbling past causing the whole house to shake. I know what that’s like. The last house I lived in with my parents was next to a commuter train station. During rush hour, our house shivered like a Mexican earthquake. You got used to it. But that doesn’t mean you liked it.

What was privacy in Jane Austen’s time? Jane slept all her life in the same room as her sister, sometimes in the same bed. I shared a bed with little brothers as a child and with my mother as an adult. This was normal to our family as it was no doubt normal to Jane’s. Living alone or living with a circus, a writer searches for a house of her own, sometimes finding it inside herself.

The move to Chawton, near family, must have been both a blessing and a curse, I suspect. Jane may have channeled her complaints when she wrote: “Little had Mrs. Dashwood or her daughters imagined … that they should have such frequent invitations and such constant visitors as to leave them little leisure for serious employment.”

I don’t believe the official version of Jane Austen’s life as told by her brothers and their offspring. I’m not convinced Jane politely hid her writing when they stomped in and joyously entertained them while mother hogged the sofa. I think the Austens painted a pretty pastel memory of Chawton Cottage to relieve themselves of their guilt. Where were they when the widowed matriarch of the family and spinster aunts wandered about homeless searching for cheap lodgings? No wonder Jane Austen wrote about displaced women so sympathetically in Sense and Sensibility and in the novels that followed.

All the same, Jane Austen’s move to a permanent address, however bustling, was enough to allow her the liberty to return to her pen. A writer needs long stretches of runway for her imagination to gather speed and attempt magnificent leaps. And to do this she needs no interruptions. What every woman writer needs is to feel safe and secure enough to play.

What were Jane Austen’s fears? Just like the women in her stories, money was forever a big issue. Even when her father was alive. She would always have to consider living with her mother and her sister. Cassandra vowed, when her fiancé died, never to marry. Marriage could be risky; two Austen sisters-in-law died in childbirth. Added to this, Jane must have known if she married, there would go her brilliant career. After all, she did say yes to one suitor, and the next morning changed her mind.

There might also have been another fear for Jane the writer in her third decade, the fear of mortality, the fear of not finishing her work in her lifetime. Turning thirty is a big wake-up call for a woman writer. It’s when she reviews her life and asks, What have I got to show for myself? It’s when she finally quits trying to please everyone and starts pleasing herself.

The only other person whom Jane could confide in with the frankness of her pen was her beloved Cassandra. On paper, as with her sister, she could speak her thoughts uncensored, however scandalous. She could laugh. And laughing is a form of triumph.

I believe that writing empowered Jane to reimagine the world in a way that allowed her as a woman to defeat life, this at a time when women could not win. Writing was her “otro modo de ser,” another way to be, as the writer Rosario Castellanos so accurately put it. Sense and Sensibility ushered Jane Austen into a safer and more secure world than the Regency England of her time.

Every woman writer could use a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote. But what really serves a woman, in my opinion, is a house. One she doesn’t have to share. One she doesn’t feel obliged to serve. A house that serves her.

To do battle for women like the Dashwoods, the Bennetts, the Miss Bates, the Fanny Prices of society, Jane’s victory was inhabiting the house of the imagination. I understand this. A great din is banging in my heart as I write today; the roundup of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., the disregard for the planet’s well-being, the loss of women’s rights and civil liberties, especially freedom of speech. To address the injustices of my times, I am, like Jane, trying to inhabit my imagination.

A woman writer needs money, she needs quiet, she needs solitude, the liberty to ignore the intolerable noise of company to better attend the society inside her head. She needs to give herself permission to run about with her hair uncombed, to wander all day in pajamas, to ignore the unmade bed, the dishes in the sink, the unanswered emails, the annoying, buzzing phone. She needs the luxury to think of her own needs because since birth she has been trained to deny she has any. She needs to become Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of creation and destruction, a monster so terrible the conquistadores were forced to rebury her after they had unearthed her.

A woman writer needs to feel no guilt about transmogrifying into Coatlicue. Above all else, to save herself from self-destruction, a woman writer needs to write.

 

This essay is adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Sense and Sensibility , to be published by Vintage Books in July.

Sandra Cisneros is is a poet, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. She is the author of The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, and A House of My Own, among other titles. 

I Can Read You Like a Book: On Northanger Abbey

Tinted line drawing by H.M. Brock for Northanger Abbey, 1898. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Once, many years ago, I was listening to somebody I knew describe why a potential romantic partner was an utterly hopeless prospect. He’d signed his email to her with “best,” she kept repeating. Best!—said with deepest disgust. For her, that fact was enough to communicate his unsuitability for human companionship to any sane person. Obviously, it wasn’t really about “best.” She just had no interest in him, and the email signature represented whatever it was that made them incompatible from the jump. But it also was about “best,” a little; it wasn’t just that he’d signed his email that way but that he was precisely the sort of person who would.

The process of getting to know another person, whether romantically or for some other reason, consists of small tests. These tests are not deliberate trials—ideally, at least. They’re just little moments in which you think to yourself “Speed up” or “Slow down.” Such tests can be arbitrary (as with email signatures) or imbued with wisdom (tipping well being, among Americans, the universally recognized sign of a good heart). Under the guidance of folk wisdom and our own instincts, we try our best to make judgments about who people are before we know who they are, because once we know, it’s too late for that knowledge to do we any good.

And there’s also the other side to this dynamic, which is that we believe that, as we ourselves are complicated individuals of great importance to ourselves, we may not always be accurately represented by such minute interactions. Maybe we miscalculated the tip that one time, or maybe we never sign our emails with “best” but did as a flirty joke, or maybe we were in a bad mood. Even if we jokingly type ourselves, it’s another thing to be typed by others.

Toward the end of Jane Austen’s first completed novel, Northanger Abbey, its heroine, Catherine Morland, is faced with just such a puzzle. Her love interest, Henry Tilney, is to host her; his father, General Tilney; and his sister, Eleanor at his home in the nearby village of Woodston. General Tilney has stressed to his son that he is not to take any great pains with the dinner he will serve them; Henry is therefore leaving ahead of the rest of the family to make sure all is in readiness. To Catherine, who doesn’t understand why the mismatch between what the general has requested and what Henry is doing, he explains that his father’s repeated statements that any old meal will do are simply not true. In his absence, Catherine is left to puzzle over “the inexplicability of the General’s conduct … That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood?”

How are people, at any rate, to be understood? And how are we to read the shifting sands of our relationships with others? One reading of Northanger Abbey is that it is a satire about a silly girl who reads so many Gothic novels she begins to think she’s in one. (She believes General Tilney murdered his wife. He didn’t.) But after a good laugh is had at Catherine’s expense, all is well. Instead of being offended by Catherine’s beliefs about his father, Henry teases her. Such things, he tells her, don’t happen in England—not “in a country like this … where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies.” (True to form, Catherine fails to catch the joke and retreats to reflect very seriously that such things must simply happen only in Italy.) Such a reading is not wrong, but it’s not complete either. Catherine’s Gothic-novel habit has nothing to do with the book’s final crisis, in which she is abruptly evicted from Northanger Abbey for reasons she doesn’t understand. It turns out that General Tilney has thought all along that she was a wealthy heiress; when he realizes she isn’t, he tries to end the match he has so assiduously encouraged between herself and Henry. Catherine is not the only person to have misread the situation.

In an essay on Northanger Abbey, Elizabeth Hardwick notes that reading Austen is generally much more fun than reading about Austen—where Austen is assured and humorous, her partisans tend to be defensive and ponderous. It’s not my intention to turn Northanger Abbey from a gleeful romp into a treatise on human judgment. It is a light novel—Austen’s lightest—and that lightness should be burdened as little as possible through overthinking it. Nevertheless, at risk of weightiness, it’s worth exploring how Northanger Abbey is more than a satire of other novels. Managing disastrous first impressions, discerning the sincerity of another’s intentions, seeing into somebody’s character: these are all here, explored in just as nuanced a way as they will be in Emma or Pride and Prejudice. Northanger Abbey is not Austen’s best novel, or even her second best. But it is, far and away, my favorite.

So, to reiterate our problem: Given that people often say and do different things, and say and want different things, how are we to read them? It is crucial, particularly for Austen’s young women when evaluating marriage prospects, to know how to tell if somebody deserves your trust before you actually need to trust them. Yet you’ll only ever know if you made the right decision when it matters. Everything else is a judgment by proxy. But given that life is not a novel, Gothic or otherwise, what do we do with all these signifiers of character that we steadily collect as we go? You cannot read people like a book. But what if, sometimes, you need to?

***

When Catherine bonds with a newfound friend, Isabella Thorpe, over their shared tastes in literature, she exclaims that “while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable.” I will confess up front that, once I opened up Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to see what had Catherine in such ecstasy, I did not share her experience. Even to a person like myself, who has a great appetite for long and boring novels nobody actually reads, Udolpho is a slog. It may be the classic Gothic novel par excellence, but for a book in which a girl is whisked away to an ancient Italian castle, surprisingly little ever really happens in it.

Despite its spooky atmosphere, where nothing is what it seems, the actual “mysteries” of Udolpho lie first in introducing things that appear to be supernatural (but are not), and then in introducing people who appear to be sinister and untrustworthy (and they are). That is, people in Udolpho are mostly what they appear to be. One of the few mistakes its heroine, Emily, makes is believing the villain of the book, Montoni, to have murdered the previous owner of the castle of Udolpho. Though Montoni is grasping and cruel and unafraid to kill, he is innocent of that particular crime. Thus when Catherine thinks of the general that he has “the air and attitude of a Montoni,” she is more on-target than she thinks. First, because General Tilney, like Montoni, is wrongly suspected of murder. But secondly, because, much like Montoni, he is a greedy and calculating man whose love of money ultimately causes him to act brutally toward a young woman who is a guest in his home. For Austen, there are no huge mysteries lurking in country houses, ghostly or otherwise, but people are unknowable.

Austen plays this same game more subtly with Catherine’s two love interests, Henry Tilney and John Thorpe. We like Henry from the start because, when he meets Catherine in Bath, he joins her and Mrs. Allen, the older woman she’s with, in a conversation about women’s clothing. “Men commonly take so little notice of those things,” Mrs. Allen (whose main interest is clothing) says. Henry goes on to display not only interest in but genuine affection for the novels that Catherine is reading, saying that he has read “hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas.” John Thorpe, on the other hand, is pretentiously and defensively masculine, declaring to Catherine that “I never read novels; I have something else to do.” Catherine does not like John, but she continually lies to herself that she does; she ignores what she can plainly tell to be true about her own feelings because he’s her friend’s brother and thus must be a nice person.

In other words, we like Henry because the novel lets us know, through novel code, that he is a sympathetic and intelligent individual, one who is interested in women and the things that interest women without being scornful of them. And we don’t like John because his dismissiveness of Catherine’s interests is one clue that he’s a boor who doesn’t care about her. And we don’t like his sister, Isabella, either, because she seems a lot like her brother. In all of these judgments, we are correct.

But in real life, such broad-minded tastes mean nothing about a person’s character. Even professed beliefs don’t tell us anything about how somebody treats the other people in their life; that’s why practically every week we see a story of some idealist or another who is revealed to be brutal to the actual people around them. At this point it’s more surprising to us when somebody professes a high ideal and then sticks to it. A man who says on his Bumble profile that he shares some feminine tastes (Taylor Swift, Gilmore Girls, Emily Henry) could still be cruel, manipulative, violent, dismissive, bad with money, unfaithful, or dishonest. In other Austen novels, in fact, men who present themselves as sympathetic through their more refined tastes, like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, are not trustworthy at all. (Her most feted hero, Mr. Darcy, is socially graceless.) That Henry’s signaled character and his actual character coincide is an accident. Like Catherine, we are just filling in the gaps.

Catherine herself makes a series of terrible impressions on Henry Tilney, including not only leaping to the conclusion that his father is a killer but accidentally standing him and his sister up early in their acquaintance, apparently for another man. Where somebody hunting through Catherine’s actions for tells to her character might write her off quickly, Henry is always willing to hear her out. When Catherine frantically apologizes and explains why she stood him up, Austen comments: “Is there a Henry in the world who could be insensible to such a declaration? Henry Tilney at least was not.” Henry is given ample evidence that Catherine is unreliable and flighty, but he disregards it—because he already likes her. It works out.

Where another writer might pretend that such a mismatch between proxy and reality does not exist, or moralize her readers by admonishing them not to judge, in Northanger Abbey, Austen does neither. She examines a flaw in human perception and judgment but offers no solutions. We do judge others through proxies that are often useless and wrong, but we also have to judge by something. The alternative would be to remain naively open to everybody, incapable of drawing conclusions, which is neither possible nor really desirable. This position is, in fact, the one Catherine occupies at the beginning of the book—she doesn’t have enough experience to judge good friends from bad and assumes good intentions from others even on the thinnest of evidence. When she does try to listen to her gut, as with General Tilney, she doesn’t have enough life experience to know that what would be the answer in a Radcliffe novel is unlikely to be the answer anywhere else. And yet, perhaps there is another kind of novel—a novel like Northanger Abbey—that can provide insight into human choices. Austen’s narrator boldly declares that a novel is “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

Austen’s spirited defense of the novel—as something that is worthwhile not only for entertainment but for its study of humanity—serves as a manifesto for the books she would go on to write after Northanger Abbey. All six of her novels are not only entirely devoted to the subject of character but take place in a world in which the whole possibility of happiness revolves around the task of judging another person correctly. The women in particular cannot afford to marry the wrong person, and they don’t have very much to go on in making their decisions, but nevertheless some tools are better than others. Taste in literature, as it turns out, is a pretty bad test. How somebody treats their social inferiors, or administers their affairs, or keeps promises they wish they hadn’t made—these are all good tests of character, albeit not ones always on display.

Still, people do choose badly in Austen’s novels all the time. They judge by the wrong things. Sometimes they are rescued by an outside circumstance; often they are not. The curdled marriage of the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice looms over every romance in that book like a memento mori. At some point, inconceivable as it might be, these were happy people who liked each other. Now look at them.

***

If I were to list things that people have done to set me off, most of them would sound as trivial as signing an email “Best.” A particular pet peeve of mine is people saying “You should try X” without any acknowledgement that I might have tried whatever they’re advising already, but, really, unsolicited advice of any kind will find me hitting the ceiling.

At one time I did construct elaborate theories as to why trespassing on my own annoyances demonstrated something bad about others: if this person meant well, they would have done this and not that, or they would have done the same thing but in a slightly different manner. In some cases, it even might have meant something bad, but who can say? It’s much more likely that they just irked me. But I don’t regret my decisions to avoid people who annoyed me, only the need I once felt to assume that annoying people must, secretly, be sinister. Somebody can be a bad host without having killed his wife.

Of course, when things do go wrong, we often go back into the past to find the signs. Perhaps if I did overlook an email signature, years later I’d be sitting in a bar muttering to myself: I should have known. I should have known the first time he wrote “Best.” In such a case, I like to think that Jane Austen would have found that funny, though in a sympathetic spirit: You’re right, she would say, leaning on the bar. You should have known. But then, how could you? Austen knew better than I did—but only, really, in the sense that she knew that none of us will ever know any better.

 

B. D. McClay is an essayist and critic. She has written for Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. You can follow her work at Notebook.