Camp Austen_My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

by Ted Scheinman

  “That is another point,” replied he. “We must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock—though that someone does rap at the door, I am partly convinced.”

  The circumstances of the larger story have little bearing on the virtuosic comedy of this tableau. (“Unoffending” and “partly” are especially satisfying.) I will merely say that the visitor is a mysterious stranger who proposes to the narrator, Laura, within four minutes of meeting her, a spoof on what the critic Marvin Mudrick calls “the lachrymose novels” of the eighteenth century. The scene is a wicked jab against certain fastidiously boring conventions of polite conversation—precisely the sort of conversations in which Austen haters suspect Janeites of being forever involved.

  It is hard not to make a further deduction, like the mother who has lost her fingers: namely, that this family is utterly mad, unfit for the public, quite possibly dangerous.

  Often, this fireside scene reminds me of the academic cloisters I have known, where residual high theory and subatomic specialization can preclude engagement with simple social realities—the arcane scholar or absentminded professor more concerned with principles than with people. Scholars are parsing, deskbound creatures. Even after the partial recession of high theory and Saussurean linguistics, the public profile of the learned academic is closely associated with deconstructive instincts, “moral relativism,” and every species of twenty-first-century sophistry, leaving us at once suspect and laughably shortsighted, prone to the microfixations of Mr. Collins, that cold fish who directs houseguests through his Kentish garden “with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind.” I’m not merely parroting mindless stereotypes here; any scholar of a healthily self-critical bent will see herself, on occasion, as the punch line in this fireside tableau. Laura’s father is quite literally an armchair philosopher, too satisfied with his own logic games to do the decent thing and just open the door. At the summer camp, when I mentioned this scene during tea, one of our nonacademic Janeites turned to me with a look of deep seriousness. “This is the scene I picture every time I e-mail a hotshot professor with one of my foolish questions.”

  In the summer of 2008, the scholar and avowed Janeite William Deresiewicz published an essay in The American Scholar on “the disadvantages of an elite education,” in which he complained that he didn’t know how to speak with his plumber:

  There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.

  “So unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language”! The thing reads like a conquistador’s report from the New World. (One wonders what the plumber made of Deresiewicz.) On its publication, the piece was justly maligned for its snobbish heresies, but hardly any critics took time to praise its candor. More than a few academics have trouble socializing beyond the academy; Deresiewicz merely admitted it. It is natural to think here of Darcy 1.0, who acknowledges in the second volume of Pride & Prejudice that he lacks “the talent which some people possess … of conversing easily with those I have never seen before.” In the case of Deresiewicz, the difficulty is in “conversing easily” with someone who hasn’t earned multiple Ivy League degrees. At the tender age of thirty-five, an American public intellectual was forced to admit that, like Laura’s father, he didn’t know precisely how to open the door. From my limited experience, Austen not only encourages us to open the door—she shows us how.

  It should also be noted that when a decorated Janeite neglects to open the door, whether through snobbery or through a lecture full of needlessly complicated dialectics, the hoi polloi will have words to say about it. I learned this on the first night of the summer camp, during dinner, where our conversation ranged between assessments of the chicken (“Delicious, and not at all rubbery,” as one of my table companions noted with surprise); hopes and fears for the ball; and fascinated apprehension among those who would be cosplaying for the first time. But the assembly also tended to lapse into extended quotation—as I learned for the first time in North Carolina, there are few scenarios at a Janeite conclave for which attendees cannot summon a line from Austen. “Evelyn, that dress is divine, you are a paragon of fashion—” “Lud! I deserve neither such praise nor such censure,” and so on.

  Once we had finished dinner (those who had forgone coffee looked ready to faint), our postprandial chatter was delayed by a lecture from a distinguished professor from Duke, who told us all about “The Networked Novel and What It Did to Domestic Fiction.” I thought it was grand stuff, if a bit high-flying. The nonacademics on either side of me disagreed forcibly. It had been a heady address, full of technicality and shop talk that mystified what should have been a lucid, accessible argument, and a handful of our nonacademic visitors seemed ready to fume. These objections were largely, I think, the result of the speaker’s somewhat preening lexicon, which felt borrowed more from Silicon Valley than from mainline literary theory: by this account, in the eighteenth century, the domestic novel was secretly being subverted from within by something called the “networked novel”—a mode of realist fiction that unsettled easy ideas of hierarchy, of the possibility of stability in a closed community. This so-called networked novel then “disrupted” normative notions of a self-sufficient domestic world. No wonder the Janeites were ready to disrupt the speaker in question—perhaps even to expel her from the network.

  At table talk perhaps more than anywhere else, the Democratic Republic of Janeites is in control—not the academic gatekeepers. This scholar had “talked down” to them, and political equilibrium would not be restored until the Janeites had prosecuted the case against her and dissipated the offensive taste left behind—a taste, apparently, that no volume of hot tea could wash away.

  * * *

  On the second night, once we had finished our discussion of the mad earl and were nearing the end of soup, conversation turned to the delicate subject of Austen fan-fiction. “There’s a book called Second Impressions,” said the older lady in the blue bonnet, “and it’s really quite clever.” (The title is a riff on First Impressions, Austen’s original title for Pride & Prejudice.)

  “I have yet to read Second Impressions,” rejoined another lady in between slurps. “But those books simply lose me when they become overtly sexual.” We laughed; she didn’t. “I am as happy as anybody to speculate on the domestic felicity of the Darcys, but I balk when it comes to…” She broke off at the most respectable point.

  “… awful sex scenes?” I offered.

  “Yes. Awful. It just starts to feel all … icky.”

  “Like walking in on your parents,” said a younger participant. The first lady considered this last remark.

  “You know, I think that’s true,” she said. “It isn’t so much that sex doesn’t happen—of course it does—but the magic is somehow broken when the descriptions become so clinical, and Mr. Wickham starts to sound like something you’d watch on pay-per-view in a hotel.”

  “Well, now I’m curious what you’ve been watching when you retire to your room each night.”

  I found myself somewhat out of my depth in this conversation, having read only one piece of pornographic Austen revisionism, Ann Herendeen’s homoerotic rendition, Pride/Prejudice, in which Darcy and Bingley needle each other for being gay. (“When have you ever looked at a woman but to find fault?” Bingley asks Darcy in an early chapter. “As far as marriage is concerned, my fundament is as close to a wife as you’ll ever come.”)

  But the table was in agreement about the general boringness of Austenian smut, though we were each careful to speak sotto voce. Many of the writers who traffic in this occasionally seamy idiom will often appear at dinners like this one, and, as we learn more than once in the novels of Austen, it is important at a cou
ntry assembly to pass judgment as quietly as possible. There was something coy, too, in these complaints, an implicit acknowledgment that our own respective Janeisms were no less frivolous or whimsical than the fan-fictioners’, and a recognition that Janeism is a big tent that takes all kinds. The formal and informal mix together, as do high and low, Marxist analysis rubbing shoulders with culinary history and fan-fiction. Janeism is a pastiche or palimpsest, or a quilt, like the giddy genre-mix of the Juvenilia: deep psychology and potty humor.

  The marriage of opposites is not merely an aesthetic fixture, or a plot device from the early novel—it’s also a model for living and for accommodating other people; a model for withholding judgment and banishing prejudice; and a model for high-flying academics who could learn a great deal from the civilians who live just around the corner. Pride & Prejudice for this reason is the ideal text for bringing different stripes together. As Donald Gray wrote in 1993:

  Pride and Prejudice, like [Austen’s] other novels, is a story about people who learn, or fail to learn, how to be, do, and recognize good in the ordinary passages of lives that would be unremarkable if Austen had not made it clear that a kind of moral salvation depends on what Elizabeth and Darcy make of themselves by learning about one another.

  This is the most succinct answer to why Jane Austen’s apparently modest domestic fictions carry such weight—why their appeal, at least among bourgeois readerships, is so universal and so firm. There is nothing frivolous in what we “make of [ourselves] by learning about one another”—the true frivolity is to sit around the fireside, debating epistemology instead of opening the door. As James put it to me later: “Austen is a kind of lingua franca that enables people to talk to one another.”

  * * *

  At the dinners, one also began to notice the couples for whom the summer camp doubled as a romantic getaway. Some, in the tradition of Chapman and Metcalfe, had fallen in love with each other in part through discovering a mutual love for Austen, and there are various academic power-couples across the world whose unions owe their beginning to an indiscreet moment at an Austen conference; as Kipling’s narrator says in “The Janeites,” Austen remains a “bit of a match-maker” even in death, and at the larger conferences I occasionally met a child conceived (the parents told me) with the aid of Austen’s prose as aphrodisiac.

  Most of the couples, though, are “mixed” marriages, wherein one partner (often but not always a woman) is the true believer and the other partner a willing or sporting participant. On the first evening of the summer camp, I met one such couple, a vivacious pair of sixtysomethings, the woman slim and glamorous in her bonnet and evening gown and the man stout and kindly in an officer’s jacket, rarely taking his eyes off his wife, whom he regarded at all times with a smile of mingled deference and infatuation. While we sat together over a late dessert, they explained their routine. The husband had performed theater in his college days, the wife said, distinguishing himself in yellow stockings as Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “He had never read a word of Jane,” she told me, “but the first time I asked him to join me at a JASNA ball, he didn’t blink—he went to have his costume fitting the very next day!”

  The husband nodded at her and addressed me without looking at me. “It is a bit like playing a role,” he conceded, sounding almost bashful. “And of course we have our games—”

  “He means courtship,” she translated. The man grinned as if at his own foolishness and put down his cake fork.

  “Sometimes we will separate before the ball, and observe one another from across the room—” he began.

  His wife, unable to hold back, cut in: “—and sometimes we dance with other people!” The statement had a quality of risqué confession, and she raised her eyebrows as though we were discussing a major scandal. The husband giggled.

  “She lends me out,” he explained. “She won’t tell you this, but I think it’s because there are often so few men around, and she likes to see the women dancing.”

  “Liar!” she declared in triumph. “He’s being very bad—the reason I have him dance with other people is so I can watch him.” She squeezed his hand. “He’s very good.” Her mate shook his head.

  “We’ve been taking lessons for some years, and I can claim only competence.”

  The wife persisted. “It is thrilling to watch him charm the others.” They looked at each other and she coaxed him. “You can be so charming and I’m not sure you even know it.”

  “But we always end up together,” the man continued, dodging the compliment. “After we’ve spun the room with other people, that is.”

  His wife leaned toward me and spoke in a stage whisper, widening her eyes suggestively: “We always pretend that it’s the first time we’re meeting.”

  “That actually sounds really fun,” I said.

  “It is. My friends tease me about it”—she paused and laughed—“they say that we are kinky.”

  “That’s not what it’s about,” the man said quickly. “That’s not why—”

  She now held his hand in both of hers. “It’s nothing improper, just a little game, a vacation almost…” She broke off and they looked at each other, and it was difficult not to think of Admiral and Mrs. Croft in Persuasion, one of those older couples whose mutual good humor and evident marital bliss make such an impression on Anne Elliot. Like the Crofts, this couple have no children, and like the Crofts, after many years of marriage they are still visibly in love.

  After a long, private pause—for its duration there was no one in the room except for the two of them—the husband turned to me as though awaking and said: “It can be a pleasure to meet one’s wife as a stranger.”

  The following day, while stealing a quiet moment in the shade of a tree, I spotted the wife in close conference with two other women, one on each of her arms as they traipsed across the quadrangle en route to a plenary discussion on “Mothers and Daughters in the Novels of Austen.” The husband followed them at a distance of a few paces, laden with various objets: under his right arm, he carried a clutch of hardbound books, while his wife’s reticule—a tiny period handbag—dangled from his wrist. On his left arm was a tote bag with an image of Colin Firth scowling in a frilly collar, and he busied his left hand snapping photos of the three ladies in procession. Occasionally he would stop to request that they turn around to effect a tableau. The ladies smiled and pretended to primp their hair, like Betty Boops of the Regency. Before the quartet exited my field of vision, I saw the husband bounding in pursuit of the three women, yelping a bit and waving the reticule in the air. When we bumped into each other the next day, he told me he was worried his wife had forgotten her heart pills.

  “My wife’s friends said I had made a spectacle of myself,” he said, smiling at the figure he had cut. “Still, it would hardly have been good manners not to inquire.”

  FOUR

  Theatricals

  My uncle’s barn is fitting up quite like a theatre, and all the young folks are to take their part.

  —Jane’s cousin Phylly Walter, describing preparations for the Austen family theatricals, 1787

  The first lady arrived at Pemberley that evening a quarter before seven. A declining sun warmed the room, which would become something of a furnace once the other guests had arrived. The lady, short, with gray hair like a pageboy and a tweed suit that the sunlight rendered colorless, approached us quizzically.

  “Oh dear—have I missed the theatricals?”

  I took as deep a breath as my waistcoat would allow. Ashley, wearing the wedding dress from her recent “semi-elopement” with her military beau, hid a smile behind her fan.

  “No, but never fear—there’s still time.”

  The lady smiled, adjusted her shoulder under a tote bag stuffed with paperbacks, and tilted her hips in a game posture. “Well, aren’t you funny. I can pick out a seat then, a really plum seat?”

  “Madam, you have your pick of the house.”

  It was 6:45 and curtain was at
7:00 (“curtain” here being pure metaphor), and I knew I ought to remember this woman’s name because we had bantered before. The previous evening she had observed part of our rehearsal from a surreptitious perch in the back of the room; afterward she told me that watching the grad students flitting around delivering faux-tragic monologues put her in mind of the Austen family. “Isn’t that just perfect,” she observed. “I feel as though I’ve just been eavesdropping on James and Henry and all the dashing young people of Steventon—you know they used to mount plays in the rectory.”

  “And sometimes the barn!”

  “Yes,” she said with a sort of dreamy look, “and sometimes the barn. I used to act, you know; never anything so farcical as this. And have you been flirting terribly?”

  I shook my head and told her that I’d been flirting rather well. She giggled. “You’re all trouble,” she scolded, wagging her umbrella with mock gravitas. “You’ll end up just like the Bertrams, if you keep having too much fun.”

  The woman was correct on every score. The rehearsal she had observed was a bit of a mess, even if the players looked dazzling. Adam was sporting a darker version of my own gentleman’s ensemble, with his wire glasses that lent him the air of a clergyman. Michele had rustled up a shapely turquoise Empire-waist gown, the sort of thing that could break up a marriage. And of course there was Ashley, the newlywed in ravishing white, whom we had asked to play Laura, an elaborate caricature of a wedding-crazed eighteenth-century heroine. As Ashley said during rehearsal: “I just had a surprise wedding to a soldier, so yes, I think I’m in character.”

  James and Inger had tasked the graduate students with staging full-costume theatricals. Our brief had been to adapt one of the tales in the Juvenilia to be performed on the second night of the summer camp, in the same tradition whereby young people in Austen’s own time would perform popular plays, or stage adaptations of their favorite novels, for their own amusement. In the Regency, amateur theatricals offered the younger gentry a way of being literary without appearing too ambitious or pompous, while the traditional license of the theater also let them flirt openly (or “terribly”). In Mansfield Park, one marriage is destroyed before it ever takes place thanks to loose behavior among a group of young people putting on a semi-racy play called Lovers’ Vows. Explaining our duties to us ahead of the summer camp, James assured us that he trusted the group to perform a respectable piece, and that any scandals arising from it would merely further the weekend’s verisimilitude. He told us that flamboyant theatricals were a fixture—and a highlight—of the big annual JASNA meetings, and that if we distinguished ourselves here, perhaps we should take the show on the road.