Camp Austen_My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

by Ted Scheinman

  “A bootlegger-patrician.”

  “Yes! The aristocratic gangster—his natural mode.”

  “If there were a P&P sequel, Gable would have made an excellent older Wickham.”

  “Or perhaps an older Willoughby.”

  “No! He isn’t melancholy enough. Willoughby is supposed to look a bit like Chatterton, I feel, a sort of suffering poet who wandered into an inheritance.”

  “I could buy Clark Gable as a sensitive poet.”

  Several women warmed to the idea. “I’d certainly like to have seen him try.”

  One lady removed an iPad from a tote bag and, after a short web search, pulled up the advertisement for the 1940 film:

  Bachelors Beware! Five Gorgeous Beauties are on a Madcap Manhunt!

  We passed around the iPad, mindful to keep it clear of the crumbs, and some of the Janeites shook their heads and muttered over the spuriousness of this advertisement. “They always feel the need to sell Austen by selling sex,” one Janeite lamented. A woman at her side disagreed.

  “But isn’t that better than not selling Austen? The film was huge,” she said simply, adding that certain Janeites of her acquaintance might never have joined the fold if the Garson/Olivier film hadn’t inspired their parents to buy cheap editions of the original novels.

  The lady’s point was undeniable. As the film critic Kenneth Turan reminded JASNA at the society’s annual meeting in 1989—several surviving cast members attended that year to celebrate the movie’s fiftieth anniversary—there were five mass-market editions brought out thanks to the film, including a twenty-five-cent paperback that enjoyed twenty-one printings in the eight years following the Olivier version. American audiences may have come for the promised “Madcap Manhunt,” but many of them left the theater and bought the book. However mediated one’s first experience of Austen, in the end—as always—we return to the Word.

  There were Janeites at the summer camp who expressed discomfort with various adaptations and reinventions that they said had taken too many liberties and thereby distorted the true Austen. Within this conservative camp, I met those who refused to watch any of the films, their argument being that the inevitable concessions to a mass moviegoing audience, especially an American one, were distortions that muddled the real thing; I also met those who frowned on explicitly cheeky efforts, such as Amy Heckerling’s brilliant retelling of Emma in the film Clueless, or even YouTube pastiches such as The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. The seemingly limitless options for fan-fiction, unofficial sequels, and so forth are a real source of anxiety to some people who distrust the apparent infinitude of possible Janes. They worry that too many people now discover Austen through the movies, and that such people end by confusing the movies for the books. Or, as one Janeite put it to me: “I worry that people will decide to rewatch Bridget Jones’s Diary rather than reading Pride & Prejudice.”

  Still, I found it hard to share these concerns in any lasting way; far more persuasive were those hard-core Janeites who nonetheless exulted in the open-source way that Austen has of giving us limitless possibilities for reimagining the author. As one woman remarked over the clotted cream, plenty of people in the Victorian age read Shakespeare first through the synoptic work of Charles Lamb, while more than a few medievalists say that their first contact with the material that became their life’s work was a childhood viewing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “It’s the same as Clueless,” another woman interjected. “I showed the Heckerling movie to my daughter, and she promptly read Emma in a single day.” For foreign viewers (added the woman who spoke of Charles Lamb), film versions such as Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It), a Tamil adaptation of Sense & Sensibility, or the Bollywood-inflected Bride & Prejudice, might offer the first glimpse of a world they will then rediscover when they open the books in translation.

  This more optimistic view struck me as wise, and I was encouraged by the idea that one can enjoy apocryphal Austens without losing track of the original; that, in fact, engaging with others’ conceptions of Austen brings you closer to the real thing. The profusion of possible Janes, the infinitude of Austens (one pictures them amassed like a Roman legion) gives options to the modern reader: Here’s how other people have found access to Austen, and discovered her on their own terms. It is right and good, goes this account, to make your own version and play with various ideas of Jane. The author is more powerful than her mediators, and will always overcome them. This striving toward the original is the work of textual editors from Chapman to Claudia Johnson, but it’s also the province of fans. It is why we study Austen’s fiction together, why we rewrite and subvert it, and why we enact it onstage wearing anachronistic wedding dresses and fake mustaches. Through the imagined possibilities of what she might have been, we involve ourselves, however whimsically, in discovering who she really was.

  The Janeites who were huddled around the tea table had their disagreements, but the tone remained attentive and cordial: a band of rational siblings, negotiating yet another small codicil in a shared literary inheritance, all over crumbs and cream.

  * * *

  If the summer camp allowed us to dramatize Austen’s Juvenilia, her juvenile notebooks themselves dramatize the hyperbole of sentimental literature that Austen clearly read by the basketful, and in which she found ample material for tuning her gifts of literary parody and moral satire. While the Juvenilia are off-color, coarse, and concerned with drunkenness and occasional cannibalism, they are best and most simply described as theatrical: they are overblown; characters do not experience scenes so much as perform them; and most important, the epistolary novellas are funniest as dialogue, which I suspected but didn’t discover until Adam and I began the adaptation. Looking at the theatrics of the Juvenilia, even the nondramatic works, you begin to appreciate (and soon to adore) how Austen is examining, enjoying, and testing the limits of the most popular sensibilities and forms of her day: that is, the heroic picaresque or sentimental romance, delivered in histories, plays, playlets, novels, letters.

  It’s here that you suddenly start to realize how Jane Austen developed the mature craft that has bewitched all these people. To understand Austen—and thereby understand Janeism—you must understand the Juvenilia. In every one of these, Austen’s youthful energies overwhelm the form and exhaust the performance of emotion—yet they remain controlled performances, every bit as controlled as the later, more emotionally continent novels. The Janeite who has been awakened to the playhouse inflections in those novels can return to the Juvenilia and observe how Austen joyously dismantles the histrionic conventions of sentimental literature, sending up her favorite books by rendering their subtext in surreal dialogue: Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint!

  Once the video of our summer camp performance appeared on YouTube, I began to get odd requests via e-mail, phone, and even letter. One woman called to ask whether I could tutor her children in “the ways of Jane Austen.” Another wrote me a long letter to ask for help in preparing a coffee-table book about Jane Austen and theater. Two parents in Canada asked whether the grad-school players would be willing to stage a one-act that their daughter had written. And Syrie James, author of historical fiction and several Janeite pastiches, asked whether I would come play Henry Crawford—a charming and quite wicked character in Mansfield Park—for a play she was preparing with Diana Birchall at the following year’s general meeting of JASNA, to be called ‘A Dangerous Intimacy’: Behind the Scenes at Mansfield Park. This last request was in many ways typical of my time in Austenworld: as a young man who cleans up nice and can recite Austen when properly motivated, I met certain minimal requirements and was thereby elevated to a sort of absurd exoticism. I was again enjoying the affirmative action afforded to the men of Austenworld, in being asked to play a handsome but fundamentally dangerous gentleman—flattering and false.

  “Henry Crawford is a smooth operator,” I wrote to Syrie. “I fear you may be giving me more credit than I deserve.”

  “Yes, p
erhaps,” Syrie responded. “Or perhaps less.”

  When a Janeite asks you for a favor in service to the Cause, there is only one proper answer, and at the AGM in Montréal the following year, you would have seen me onstage as Henry Crawford, acting scenes from Mansfield Park and flirting outrageously with the Maria Bertram character, played by Syrie herself. Syrie’s husband (who, to confuse matters further, was playing her father) watched from the wings of the banquet hall as Syrie and I stroked each other’s faces and pantomimed a very un-Austenian makeout scene. In a final apocryphal stroke, Syrie arranged for a ruddy-faced English gentleman to play the Prince Regent, who swept onstage at the end of the play to make a couple of racy jokes and to steal Maria from me, to the delight of the several hundred Janeites in the room. The prince was the one character who could upstage Henry Crawford—and the permanently smiling man who played him was Patrick Stokes, a direct descendant of Jane’s younger brother Charles. The theatricals at the North Carolina camp had taken us to the heart of the Austen household of Jane’s youth; now, in Montréal, I was face-to-face with that family, the living legacy of her blood. I wished that Adam or Ashley or Michele could be there to enjoy the brief moment with me where we had no need of Claudia Johnson’s ghost—Austen’s DNA was quite literally with us.

  FIVE

  The Ball

  Like the Bennets, the Austens took a relaxed view of what it meant to be out. This was the country; the Austen daughters had been joining in country dances at home from their earliest years, and knew all the neighbours’ sons and daughters; children took part in dancing, brothers danced with sisters, girls with one another.

  —Claire Tomalin

  She enjoyed dancing, and excelled at it.

  —Henry Austen, 1818

  I should say—indeed, I would disgrace myself as a narrator if I pretended otherwise—that Austenworld was not always a comfortable place. This might seem odd, given how warmly I was received into that world, how quickly my shortcomings were forgiven or ignored, how generously everyone taught me their recipes and dances, and shared with me the versions of Austen that seem, to them, most real. These are all deep intimacies, and I remain unworthy of many of them. Austenworld was kind to my academic career while giving me ample material for magazine freelancing, but I knew that at some point there would be a reckoning—I have been told that there is no such thing as a half-Janeite, just as there’s no such thing as a half-scholar. Yet in the end, I turned out to be both.

  “You must be a great comfort to your mother, sir,” I was told on various occasions—a corruption of Mrs. Allen’s line to Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. This was true. But I could never escape the feeling of also being a fraud. The Janeites’ love of the author, their expert and honestly gained knowledge of her age and its manners, their delights in dances that bored me after an hour or so—these all came to feel like an accusation, an indictment, of my own dilettantism. Whereas the others at Camp Austen had discovered Austen themselves, for me she was merely an inherited or even genetic eccentricity; a set of allusions; an affectation; a second language that I spoke carelessly and would likely never master. For I am hardly an intrepid Janeite, as Chapman was in Macedonia; still less was I a worshipful Janeite, like Forster with his Bloomsbury panegyrics to the novelist; nor a snooty Janeite, like Henry James—I do not wish to protect her from the masses, nor the masses from her. Unlike Harding, I am fairly untroubled by misreadings or by the soft, acritical self-congratulation of the Janeite in company. In other words, I have no loyalty. I am, indeed, a half-Janeite by blood, one who hasn’t attended an Austen function in more than eighteen months at the time of this writing, a Janeite who knows the novels and the major criticism quite well but who unforgivably does not particularly enjoy Emma, widely regarded among true connoisseurs as the height of Austen’s technical achievement. (Which it is—but I’d still rather read Persuasion.) In dark moments, during my time in Austenworld, I would reflect that it was largely accidents of birth, and dislocation, that made it possible for me to perform Janeism like a parlor trick. A different choice of graduate school—or a mother with healthier knees—would have sunk my chances altogether.

  When friends have asked why I no longer frequent this world, I have avoided an explanation that I assume they cannot understand: that I became increasingly uncomfortable with the affirmative action that I continued to receive in Austenworld, whereby a straight, quasi-eligible male represents a desirable minority. From a literary standpoint, this weird return to the normative ideal of the patrician hero is understandable nostalgia, but from a political standpoint, it’s utterly reactionary. The age when such men could be heroes has passed, and even if it hasn’t, such a role is not for me.

  Reading Austen helps keep you aware of your hypocrisies and vanities. Increasingly, I felt like a hypocrite when I put on the clothes, pretending to the honest enthusiasms of someone else. There are many paths to the one true Jane—many Janeisms rather than a single prescriptive orthodoxy—and mine is not the world of reenactment; it is the quiet moment reading Persuasion. Still, even if you’re no more than an accidental Janeite—an imperfect reader or a bad dancer who is sometimes so selfish that he skips the whole ball because he knows if he hears the Dashwood family name one more time he’ll have a nervous collapse—even for such lost souls, there is a place in the inheritance, a good set of clothes, a seat at the table, a role in the action, and (most important) a partner at the ball, even if she’s just a three-foot-tall version of Fanny Price in miniature.

  I stand before you a failed Janeite.

  Which is to say, a Janeite.

  * * *

  Arraying my costume ahead of the ball, I looked at the garments and winced slightly—what an odd figure I was about to cut—and then I thought of Chapman, whose example chastened me: if he could write for the TLS with bullets whizzing past his ears, why was I staring at this costume as though it were a Turk who wished me ill? I removed all items of twenty-first-century clothing and descended into the tights. The occasional frantic yelp would emanate from the ladies’ room next door. Manfully, I closed the barn door of my breeches and exited the water closet. “Ashley? Is everything—okay?”

  Ashley’s head slowly appeared around the door she was clutching like a shield.

  “Ted! Wardrobe malfunction.”

  There ensued a pause, as Ashley evaluated my delicacy, and I evaluated my ability to help.

  “Perhaps you could—”

  “… find Michele?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  Michele was duly summoned and gave me a gentle look as she entered the ladies’ room, a sort of consolatory smile. “Don’t take it personally,” is what the look said, and I didn’t. A man who can barely clothe himself will hardly bridle at the suggestion that he isn’t an expert in women’s apparel. Before long, several female colleagues had entered the bathroom and converged on Ashley, later assuring me the process was similar to the scene in Cinderella where the birds flock to the heroine and prepare her for the ball.

  By comparison, Adam and I faced more modest difficulties. He helped me with my “foolproof” cravat, and we considered ourselves in the mirror.

  “Bingley, good man.”

  “Darcy! Second soul to my own.”

  “Shall we away?”

  “Yes.” Adam smiled. “High time we meet our new neighbors. To the ball?”

  To the ball.

  * * *

  The Meryton Assembly began at 7:00 p.m. the final evening of the camp. The heat of late June abated very little, and my principal fear was that, during the ninety-second walk between Pemberley and Gerrard Hall, I would drench my four layers (even the wool topcoat!) with the telltale sweat of a nervous neophyte. An inventory seemed appropriate. Top hat? Check. Cocked eyebrow and snooty expression? Check. Reporter’s notebook that will double as my dance card? Check. Ashley, a vision of eighteenth-century marriageability, materialized in her new gown and was now as convincing a Caroline Bingley as any TV or film a
daptation has given us. She gave her “brother” (Adam) a kiss on the cheek and curtseyed to Darcy (me), adding a very patrician wink. Well done, Miss Bingley. Well done indeed.

  The brain trust had instructed us to enter fifteen minutes late and fifteen miles aloof, in direct imitation of the Mertyon Assembly scene in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride & Prejudice. As we met en route to the dance hall, Caroline with Adam on her arm, I removed my top hat and bowed so low that the breeches popped a button, and our exotic little party proceeded ball-ward. Outside Gerrard, we met one of my undergraduate students, Nathan, a talented young writer with an intense fondness for David Foster Wallace. Nathan was handing out programs and serving as usher in his capacity as an intern for the Theater Department, and his glee in my raiment was unbounded. Nathan would later circulate several photos of this moment to a coterie of my journalism students. Like all tourism, time travel has its inevitable minor embarrassments.

  As our music cue approached, it was time to get in character. Our brains addled from heat, little sleep, and too many panels, we reverted to utter parodies. Adam’s wife, Blanche, looked on as Ashley and I offered pitying pronouncements about “poor Charles.”

  “Oh, Mr. Darcy, what tiresome company this evening will afford us.” (Her Caroline Bingley was very good.)

  “Indeed—why Charles insists on laying hands on the local peasantry has always baffled me.”

  Adam was a saintly good sport about the whole thing.

  “I say, Darcy, I intend to dance with every young lady in the neighborhood tonight,” he simpered. “Every last one of them. How I do love a ball.”

  “Why confine yourself to the neighborhood, Bingley? Surely there is some stable-girl in a nearby shire whom you have yet to call a goddess.”

  “Oh, Darcy, you … you so-and-so.”

  Caroline and I then whispered behind her fan about its being past Charles’s bedtime. You’ll pardon this descent into caricature, I hope. We used real lines as well, of course, though it was all dangerously casual, and I did not feel entirely comfortable delivering Darcy’s snide (and racist) proclamation “Every savage can dance,” which passed my lips only once that evening. Nor did I dare to employ Aldous Huxley’s variation on this bit of dialogue in his 1940 screenplay of P&P: “Any hottentot can dance,” a line that heightens the ugly colonialist hauteur by virtue of specificity. The Janeites assembled outside the dance hall seemed pleased if unsurprised by our approach and even flattered us with an ovation, though at the door I was justly chastised by two women for smiling too much. “Mr. Darcy has no business looking so happy,” one of them told me.