Camp Austen_My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

by Ted Scheinman

  “Is it—Miss Marie Sprayberry?” I asked. (The Henry Fielding–est moment of my life.)

  “And Mr. Scheinman!” She shook my hand with vigor and leaned in with noddings of the head, which I learned was her way of sharing confidences. “You do your mother proud. I see you will chair ‘Austen and Romance’?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “And you are a guest film critic on the plenary about the adaptations?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, I can’t say how excited we all are”—indicating a smiling cabal of upstaters—“to be here, and I only wish your mother’s poor knees had permitted her to attend.”

  “That’s very kind of you. I’m ashamed to say I think you see her more than I do.”

  “I assure you,” Marie said, actually producing and unfurling a fan, “I will send her a full report, on all aspects of the weekend.”

  I had no doubt she would—though I could not have known that this report would cause me some small trouble.

  * * *

  There exists a category of citizens best described as Janeites-for-life, a scattered band of acolytes who troop around the country and jet-set to London or Bath or Mumbai or Tokyo, luggage bursting with petticoats and paperbacks and Norton editions and hand-annotated Event Schedules and endless spools of laminated nametags. They attend the big annual Jane Austen Society of North America meeting, but they also bop through a less-trafficked circuit that, if one has the stamina, need never end. There is always another symposium at the local chapter of JASNA, or a talk by a professor at a nearby university on “Austen and the Real Housewives of Uppercross,” or a screening of the Bollywood smash Bride & Prejudice. Like members of any secret society, they can identify each other through subtle or silent codes, and initiates all carry their motley badges of membership in the global Austen circle, from novelty pens to silk-screened T-shirts (KEEP CALM AND FIND MR. DARCY) to playful indicators embedded in e-mail addresses: ElinorDash1811@BartonCottage.net will inspire trust among all similarly devoted correspondents. They come to laugh and to learn, to dance and to listen, to admire and to be admired, to teach and to be taught, to question their assumptions about Jane and to confirm them.

  The democracy of Austen gatherings is the thrilling and disarming (and only slightly anarchic) secret of it all. The snobberies of the high academy toward hobbyists, emulators, and people so prosaic as to look for a moral in a story resolve themselves, or go briefly on sabbatical. The guiding principle of such gatherings is the yes-and of improvisational comedy. If a gentleman raises his hand during a question-and-answer session and offers, instead of a question, a winding and irrelevant homily on the author and actress Elizabeth Inchbald, the speaker will acknowledge the offering and thank him for it and find a way to navigate back to the subject at hand without any deprecation. This is not to say that judgment suspends itself at an Austen gathering—far from it; there will be whispered remarks about that gentleman over supper—but merely that an attitude of expansive inclusivity is the foundational premise. Such is the hospitality prescribed in the novels, and such is the shared delight among people who otherwise would remain utter strangers, that resentment and unpleasantness achieve only brief, and rare, appearances. The Janeites would not have it otherwise.

  There is something rarer, too, made possible in the society of the Janeites: an evenhanded commerce between representatives of the academy and their civilian counterparts, whereby the professors do honest trade with the costumers, and the costumers in turn are scrupulous in attending talks and panels. In many cases, thanks to the air of camaraderie and a general mash-up of eighteenth- and twenty-first-century fashion, the distinctions tend to blur. On one particularly embarrassing occasion, I stood for a full quarter of an hour next to an elegant lady in bonnet and gloves before recognizing that this woman was in fact a prestigious professor and close friend. We laughed over it, because where else would you glance at someone and say, “Oh, just another person dressed as Henrietta Musgrove”?

  Some are born Janeites, some achieve Janeism, and some have Janeism thrust upon them. My own case is an amalgam of all three propositions. My full Christian name, Edward, will indicate my mother’s Anglophilia, but when I tell you my sister’s name is Jane there can be little mistaking the matter. My mother recalls two of our conversations during my sister’s gestation. In one, Mom is lying on the couch, telling me she needs a nap. “Mommy’s a little tired,” she says. “Mommy’s a little pregnant,” I respond. In the second, she is at her desk and I approach, the miniature portrait of a snotty undergrad during office hours. “You love Jane Austen,” I say, with a note of accusation.

  “So?”

  “So if it’s a girl you should name it Jane.”

  * * *

  One of my sister’s friends recently asked her if she had been named for the novelist. Omitting the secondary consideration that Jane is also a family name, my sister admitted this to be the case. The friend offered a sunny observation: “Well, it could have been worse; she could have named you Fanny!”

  “You don’t know how close you are to the truth,” Jane replied.

  Fanny was the family dog.

  My mother, indeed, could hardly have groomed me better for Janeism. A professor of English at a very small private university in upstate New York, she has been teaching and writing about Austen for nearly forty years. (Mom is, bless her heart, a neoclassicist, and what she lacks in conventional Austen elitism she more than recoups in distaste for the Brontës.) Under her tutelage, I was raised on a partial survey of the Brit Lit canon. One particularly painful moment found me in tears at the tender age of ten when, upon rereading the last chapter of David Copperfield, I became convinced that I would never find my Agnes, much as Dickens often despaired that he would never marry his wife’s sister. (He didn’t.) When we lived in England, before I had read much Austen or had any notion of the ongoing fealty she inspired, I was dragged along to see Austen’s plaque in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, and the little Chawton cottage where Austen spent so many years, and even her grave in Winchester Cathedral. For a brief period, any childhood illness experienced by my sister or me was treated with six installments of the 1995 BBC Pride & Prejudice, plus DayQuil to taste.

  Austen was so pervasive that I rarely picked up one of the novels; at thirteen, I began my first, Mansfield Park, probably her oddest and least popular, and I enjoyed it without too much reflection, noting the narrator’s general distrust of charm and her satisfying instinct for retribution. My sister and I were similarly aware, in a dim way, of the larger Austen world in all its finery, but our contact with it was limited. I would notice a Jane Austen action figure in Mom’s office (packaging materials: “comes with writing desk and quill pen!”), sent by a former undergraduate mentee who had contracted my mother’s affection for Austen—an affection that defends itself with the tools of lampoon: the placement of that action figure on a bookshelf says, “Yes, I am inordinately fond of this curious author, and yes, the very idea of Austen-as-superhero is delightfully absurd, and I’m acknowledging that absurdity by displaying her action figure pristine in the box, as though it were a collectible Batman doll or something, when in fact this figure has no grappling hook nor freakish muscle definition; her superpower is the ability to sit at a desk with a quill pen, which is both hilarious and the greatest superpower of all. I am quite serious about all of this, and quite aware of how frivolous it might seem to the uninitiated, and I make no apology.”

  I think I also understood the impulse to apologize, or to roll one’s eyes at the Janeites. How else to explain the strong note of accusation in my suggestion that Mom name my sister Jane? It was an accusation of weakness, of predictability. Even at four years old, a boy in America has learned not to trust the softer, womanly enthusiasms of Janeism; if I had been somewhat precocious in terms of reading, I was at least equally precocious in reflexive anti-Janeite misogyny.

  One way or another, I made it to university without ever reading Prid
e & Prejudice and thought very little about Austen until I found myself at age twenty-five suspending a career in journalism to study political literature of the early eighteenth century at the University of North Carolina. My advisor was James, an authority on Austen who does not fit the Janeite stereotype. First, he is male. Second, he commutes to campus on a sleek motorcycle, which, in the summer, also takes him through the Black Hills of South Dakota and other rugged, windswept places on America’s frontier. If someone requested proof that serious Janeism can coexist with serious emblems of masculinity, I would proffer James as Exhibit A. You know those THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE T-shirts? I have always wanted to make one for him that says THIS IS WHAT A JANEITE LOOKS LIKE.

  When James taught Austen’s Juvenilia and six novels to a small group of doctoral students in our third year, he also used the occasion to recruit us. Under his and Inger’s supervision, a troupe of us agreed to spend part of May and June launching the four-day “Jane Austen Summer Camp,” with the basic rules I have described: we would welcome lay readers as well as professional scholars, the food would be good, the punch would be fortified, and the dancing would rival that of any of the film adaptations. James and Inger had been planning to launch a yearly Austen camp ever since reading Jill Lepore’s 2011 account in The New Yorker of her visit to the “Dickens Universe,” a weeklong conference-slash-celebration that has been a fixture for more than three decades at the University of California in Santa Cruz. As he read about this learned extravaganza, James told me, “It sounded wonderful—as it says in the books, this darted through me with the speed of an arrow, that we should do this with Austen.”

  As James put it, after he and Inger returned from a scouting expedition in Santa Cruz: “It has an entirely different feel from a regular, professional conference, where everyone’s trying to discourse at the highest intellectual levels—the Dickens camp does that, in what the philosophers would call ordinary language. So high-level, sophisticated, very subtle arguments can be made without jargon, without technical terminology, without endless genealogies of critical points and so on and so forth. And I loved that concept—it seemed a great opportunity for people who spend their lives in the library to learn how to talk to normal people again.”

  Austen is the rare sort of author who makes possible this unaccustomed exchange between academics and civilians; those who think of her as primarily a domestic novelist might be surprised at the extent to which Austen is able to kick scholars out of their armchairs and into action. Throughout the short summer camp, and for a long time thereafter, concerned friends would get in touch via social media, responding with a mix of mockery and alarm to a profusion of photos in which I was dressed like an early-nineteenth-century gentleman. One of my favorites came from my friend Max in Los Angeles, when he heard I was embedded with the Janeites: “Oh man, here I thought you were just reading Latin all day,” he said. “Turns out you’re reporting directly from the trenches!”

  It was a lovely compliment, and Max’s little note set off a bell that he could not have anticipated. There is, in England, a proud tradition of reading Austen during times of war, a tradition that became something like gospel during World War I, when, along with so many of his generation, one promising young scholar decamped from his armchair to mix with enlisted men and fight the Central Powers. In his bag could be found sodium tablets, instant tea, a few packets of cigarettes, and the complete works of Jane Austen, of whose literary estate he would soon become a sort of unofficial executor.

  * * *

  R. W. Chapman spent July 1918 on the left bank of the Vardar River in Macedonia, shooting Bulgarians, reading Samuel Johnson, and thinking very seriously about Jane Austen. In literary circles, Chapman already constituted a big gun: A star classicist from a young age, he had won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose in 1903 while still a student at Oriel College, Oxford. By 1906, he was assistant secretary at Oxford’s Clarendon Press, where he helped launch the Oxford English Texts series, establishing authoritative versions of writers deemed central to British civilization. In the following years, he would become one of England’s most ambitious lexicographers, write learned but amiable essays for The Times Literary Supplement on authors ancient and modern, and pay his court to Katharine Metcalfe, a fellow admirer of Austen who was an assistant tutor at Oxford and had edited the Clarendon Press’s 1912 edition of Pride & Prejudice. In 1913, they wed—a partnership both romantic and scholarly, one that would reward all future readers of Jane Austen. If you’re reading Sense & Sensibility in paperback—really, in any edition that postdates 1923—you’re almost certainly reading the Chapman-Metcalfe version.

  Though his primary project during the Vardar front was an edition of Johnson’s travel journals, Chapman was also beginning collations for his eventual editions of Austen, including a supposed restoration of Austen’s texts—plus notes elucidating matters political, religious, and military—and would write the occasional mordant essay from Macedonia to castigate previous dabblers in the Austen canon: “The writer has seen the late Dr. Verrall’s copies of Jane Austen (modern reprint) and compared his marginal suggestions with the original editions. Some of them seemed to be unnecessary; of those which seemed probable, almost all were to be found in the readings of the first edition.” Even at the front, Chapman kept burrowing in his books, seeking some more authentic contact with Austen. As for many Englishmen fighting abroad in the Great War, the nation’s literary canon—and Jane Austen in particular—offered a reminder of home, of what England was fighting for. And back in Oxford and London, Austen’s clarifying reminder of English virtue sparked a reshaping and expansion of her popularity. In the first decades of the twentieth century, England herself was feeling “manners envy,” and modern Janeism arguably began with late-colonial nostalgia for a fictional age.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, the scholar and critic George Saintsbury coined the term “Janeite,” referring to the devotees whom Austen’s novels had come to attract or inspire. Borrowing the coinage, Rudyard Kipling published “The Janeites” in 1924, a short story about a band of Brits in World War I who establish a secret brotherhood premised around a cult of Austen. In the story, a lumbering working-class veteran named Humberstall is sweeping the floors of a Masonic lodge in London after the war, where he regales his fellows with recollections of reading Jane at the front. Humberstall is an amiable raconteur but quite clearly shell-shocked, with the “eyes of a bewildered retriever.” It was Macklin, Humberstall’s “toff” of a commanding officer, who initiated Humberstall into an arcane club of “Janeites”—men who would obsessively reread and circulate the six novels among themselves in the mess halls and the gunneries of their corner of the French front. Warming to Jane, Humberstall says, he consoled himself from the stresses of war by renaming his regiment’s three big guns “Mr. Collins,” “General Tilney,” and “Lady Catherine de Bugg”—a truly wonderful malapropism for “Catherine de Bourgh,” the imperious dowager in Pride & Prejudice. When Humberstall goes so far as to paint these names on the guns, he is called to a disciplinary tribunal: “They said I was wrong about General Tilney. ’Cordin’ to them, our Navy twelve-inch ought to ’ave been christened Miss Bates … But they give me full marks for the Reverend Collins—our Nine-point-two.”

  Why have Kipling’s Janeites clung so fiercely, so joyously to Jane? Because it kept them sane, and it kept them alive. “She was the only woman I ever ’eard ’em say a good word for,” Humberstall says of his former officers, then quotes Macklin: “It’s a very select Society, an’ you’ve got to be a Janeite in your ’eart, or you won’t have any success.” Upon hearing the account back in London, his fellow Masons express marvel, and jealousy: “No denyin’ that Jane business was more useful to you than the Roman Eagles or the Star an’ Garter”—honors conferred by Masons among themselves. “Pity there wasn’t any of you Janeites in the ’Oly Land. I never come across ’em,” laments a veteran of the front against the Turks in Palestine. What Humberst
all’s new companions envy isn’t the reading; it’s the fellowship that the reading made possible. “You take it from me, Brethren, there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place,” Humberstall says. “Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.” Kipling’s story suggests that you don’t need to be a “toff,” or even educated, to draw pleasure from Austen and the community that she encourages.

  * * *

  In 1915, Kipling had gone with his family to Bath, where, in between trips to the pump room, he reread the novels. In a letter from the period, Kipling writes, “The more I read the more I admire and respect and do reverence … When she looks straight at a man or a woman she is greater than those who were alive with her—by a whole head … with a more delicate hand and a keener scalpel.”

  His son, John, would die in France later that year, and as Kipling lacerated himself for having been a drumbeater for the war, Austen proved a balm. In a January 1917 diary entry, Mrs. Kipling expresses “delight” at her husband’s habit of reading the novels aloud to the family. Here, as so often, Austen’s novels functioned as something between entertainment and a kind of moral therapy. If Austen is a keen anatomist of bad fatherhood, a possible prick to Kipling’s conscience, she is also the author who brings people together. “I believe Jane was a bit of a match-maker in a quiet way when she was alive,” the narrator of “The Janeites” says. “I know all her books are full of match-making.” This remark is confirmed by the Chapman-Metcalfe union, and the many couples who attend Austen conferences together, or who meet one another there—not to mention the platonic affection between Janeites who otherwise would have very little to talk about.

  * * *

  Chapman recalled his wartime in Macedonia with a warm nostalgia—he had, after all, survived and returned to his wife—and his reverie of reading Johnson in the high Balkan winds offers a winsome caricature of the solitary scholar:

  I had a camp behind Smol Hill … and a six-inch gun (Mark XI, a naval piece, on an improvised carriage; “very rare in this state”), with which I made a demonstration in aid of the French and Greek armies, when they stormed the heights beyond the river; I think in June … I had a hut made of sandbags, with a roof constructed of corrugated iron in layers, with large stones between … and here, in the long hot afternoons … a temporary gunner, in a khaki shirt and shorts, might have been found collating the three editions of the Tour to the Hebrides, or re-reading A Journey to the Western Islands in the hope of finding a corruption in the text. Ever and again, tiring of collation and emendation, of tepid tea and endless cigarettes, I would go outside to look at the stricken landscape—the parched, yellow hills and ravines, the brown coils of the big snaky river at my feet, the mountains in the blue distance, until the scorching wind, which always blew down that valley, sent me back to the Hebrides.