Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  Austen’s Shakespearean inwardness, culminating in Anne Elliot, revises the moral intensities of Clarissa Harlowe’s secularized Protestant martyrdom, her slow dying after being raped by Lovelace. What removes Clarissa’s will to live is her stronger will to maintain the integrity of her being. To yield to the repentant Lovelace by marrying him would compromise the essence of her being, the exaltation of her violated will. What is tragedy in Clarissa is converted by Austen into ironic comedy, but the will’s drive to maintain itself scarcely alters in this conversion. In Persuasion the emphasis is on a willed exchange of esteems, where both the woman and the man estimate the value of the other to be high. Obviously, outward considerations of wealth, property, and social standing are crucial elements here, but so are the inward considerations of common sense, amiability, culture, wit, and affection.

  Austen’s major heroines—Elizabeth, Emma, Fanny, and Anne—possess such inward freedom that their individualities cannot be repressed. Austen’s art as a novelist is not to worry much about the socioeconomic genesis of that inner freedom, though the anxiety level does rise in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. In Austen, irony becomes the instrument for invention, which Dr. Johnson defined as the essence of poetry. A conception of inward freedom that centers upon a refusal to accept esteem except from one upon whom one has conferred esteem, is a conception of the highest degree of irony. The supreme comic scene in all of Austen might be Elizabeth’s rejection of Darcy’s first marriage proposal, where the ironies of the dialectic of will and esteem become very nearly outrageous. That high comedy, which continued in Emma, is somewhat chastened in Mansfield Park, and then becomes something else, unmistakable but difficult to name, in Persuasion, where Austen has become so conscious a master that she seems to have changed the nature of willing, as though it, too, could be persuaded to become a rarer, more disinterested act of the self.

  No one has suggested that Jane Austen becomes a High Romantic in Persuasion; her poet remained William Cowper, not Wordsworth, and her favorite prose writer was always Dr. Johnson. But her severe distrust of imagination and of “romantic love,” so prevalent in the earlier novels, is not a factor in Persuasion. Anne and Wentworth maintain their affection for each other throughout eight years of hopeless separation, and each has the power of imagination to conceive of a triumphant reconciliation. This is the material for a romance, not for an ironical novel. The ironies of Persuasion are frequently pungent, but they are almost never directed at Anne Elliot and only rarely at Captain Wentworth.

  There is a difficult relation between Austen’s repression of her characteristic irony about her protagonists and a certain previously unheard plangency that hovers throughout Persuasion. Despite Anne’s faith in herself, she is very vulnerable to the anxiety, which she never allows herself to express, of an unlived life, in which the potential loss transcends yet includes sexual unfulfillment. I can recall only one critic, the Australian Ann Molan, who emphasizes what Austen strongly implies: “Anne…is a passionate woman. And against her will, her heart keeps asserting its demand for fulfillment.” Since Anne had refused Wentworth her esteem eight years before, she feels a necessity to withhold her will, and thus becomes the first Austen heroine whose will and imagination are antithetical.

  There is no civil war within Anne Elliot’s psyche, or within Austen’s; but there is the emergent sadness of a schism in the self, with memory taking the side of imagination in an alliance against the will. The almost Wordsworthian power of memory in both Anne and Wentworth has been noted by Gene Ruoff. Since Austen was anything but an accidental novelist, we might ask why she chose to found Persuasion upon a mutual nostalgia. After all, the rejected Wentworth is even less inclined to will a renewed affection than Anne is, and yet the fusion of memory and imagination triumphs over his will also. Was this a relaxation of the will in Jane Austen herself? Since she returns to her earlier mode in Sanditon, her unfinished novel begun after Persuasion was completed, it may be that the story of Anne Elliot was an excursion or indulgence for the novelist. The parallels between Wordsworth and Persuasion are limited but real. High Romantic novels in England, whether of a Byronic kind like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights or of a Wordsworthian sort like Adam Bede, are a distinctly later development. The ethos of the Austen heroine does not change in Persuasion, but she is certainly a more problematic being, tinged with a new sadness concerning life’s limits. It may be that the elegant pathos Persuasion sometimes courts has a connection to Jane Austen’s own ill health, her intimations of her early death.

  Stuart Tave, comparing Wordsworth and Austen, shrewdly noted that both were “poets of marriage” and both also possessed “a sense of duty understood and deeply felt by those who see the integrity and peace of their own lives as essentially bound to the lives of others and see their lives of all in a more than merely social order.” Expanding Tave’s insight, Susan Morgan pointed to the particular affinity between Austen’s Emma and Wordsworth’s great “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The growth of the individual consciousness, involving both gain and loss for Wordsworth but only gain for Austen, is the shared subject. Emma’s consciousness certainly does develop, and she undergoes a quasi-Wordsworthian transformation from the pleasure of near solipsism to the more difficult pleasures of sympathy for others. Anne Elliot, far more mature from the beginning, scarcely needs to grow in consciousness. Her long-lamented rejection of Wentworth insulates her against the destructiveness of hope. Instead of hope, there is a complex of emotions, expressed by Austen with her customary skill:

  How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been,—how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence!—She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

  Here learning romance is wholly retrospective; Anne no longer regards it as being available to her. And, indeed, Wentworth returns, still resentful after eight years, and reflects that Anne’s power with him is gone forever. The qualities of decision and confidence that make him a superb naval commander are precisely what he condemns her for lacking. With almost too meticulous a craft, Austen traces his gradual retreat from this position, as the power of memory increases its dominance over him and as he learns that his jilted sense of her as being unable to act is quite mistaken. It is a beautiful irony that he needs to undergo a process of self-persuasion while Anne waits, without even knowing that she is waiting or that there is anything that could rekindle her hope. The comedy of this is gently sad, as the reader waits also, reflecting upon how large a part contingency plays in the matter.

  While the pre-Socratics and Freud agree that there are no accidents, Austen thinks differently. Character is fate for her also, but fate, once activated, tends to evade character in so overdetermined a social context as Austen’s world. In rereading Persuasion, though I remember the happy conclusion, I nevertheless feel anxiety as Wentworth and Anne circle away from each other in spite of themselves. The reader is not totally persuaded of a satisfactory interview until Anne reads Wentworth’s quite agonized letter to her:

  “I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan.—Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?—I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrate
d mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others.—Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F.W.

  “I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening, or never.”

  I cannot imagine such a letter in Pride and Prejudice, or even in Emma or Mansfield Park. The perceptive reader might have realized how passionate Anne was, almost from the start of the novel, but until this there was no indication of equal passion in Wentworth. His letter, as befits a naval commander, is badly written and not exactly Austenian, but is all the more effective thereby. We come to realize that we have believed in him until now only because Anne’s love for him provokes our interest. Austen wisely has declined to make him interesting enough on his own. Yet part of the book’s effect is to persuade the reader of the reader’s own powers of discernment and self-persuasion; Anne Elliot is almost too good for the reader, as she is for Austen herself, but the attentive reader gains the confidence to perceive Anne as she should be perceived. The subtlest element in this subtlest of novels is the call upon the reader’s own power of memory to match the persistence and intensity of the yearning that Anne Elliot is too stoical to express directly.

  The yearning hovers throughout the book, coloring Anne’s perceptions and our own. Our sense of Anne’s existence becomes identified with our own consciousness of lost love, however fictive or idealized that may be. There is an improbability in the successful renewal of a relationship devastated eight years before which ought to work against the texture of this most “realistic” of Austen’s novels, but she is very careful to see that it does not. Like the author, the reader becomes persuaded to wish for Anne what she still wishes for herself. Ann Molan has the fine observation that Austen “is most satisfied with Anne when Anne is most dissatisfied with herself.” The reader is carried along with Austen, and gradually Anne is also persuaded and catches up with the reader, allowing her yearning a fuller expression.

  Dr. Johnson, in The Rambler, Number 29, on “The Folly of Anticipating Misfortunes,” warned against anxious expectations of any kind, whether fearful or hopeful:

  because the objects both of fear and hope are yet uncertain, so we ought not to trust the representations of one more than the other, because they are both equally fallacious; as hope enlarges happiness, fear aggravates calamity. It is generally allowed, that no man ever found the happiness of possession proportionate to that expectation which incited his desire, and invigorated his pursuit; nor has any man found the evils of life so formidable in reality, as they were described to him by his own imagination.

  This is one of a series of Johnsonian pronouncements against the dangerous prevalence of the imagination, some of which his disciple Austen had certainly read. If you excluded such representations, on the great critic’s advice, then Wordsworth could not have written at all, and Austen could not have written Persuasion. Yet it was a very strange book for her to write, this master of the highest art of exclusion that we have known in the Western novel. Any novel by Jane Austen could be called an achieved ellipsis, with everything omitted that could disturb her ironic though happy conclusions. Persuasion remains the least popular of her four canonical novels because it is the strangest. Poised as she is at the final border of the Age of Sensibility, she shares with Wordsworth an art dependent upon a split between a waning Protestant will and a newly active sympathetic imagination, with memory assigned the labor of healing the divide.

  CHAPTER 7

  I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) (1827, 1840)

  ALESSANDRO MANZONI

  ANYONE WHO HAS LIVED in Italy for protracted stays will encounter the aura of Alessandro Manzoni. Though he wrote only a single novel, The Betrothed: A Tale of XVII Century Milan, and a few memorable poems, he is for literate Italians a cultural titan akin to Dante, Verdi, Leopardi, Ungaretti.

  When Alessandro Manzoni died at the age of eighty-eight on May 22, 1873, Italy observed a day of mourning. In the United States, it is inconceivable that there should have been a day of mourning for Walt Whitman or Herman Melville, to this moment our most enduring writers. Manzoni is hardly of Dante’s eminence, but, then, who is, except for Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne? Yet in Italy, where alas so few now read Dante, Manzoni still finds an audience.

  Though he sets The Betrothed in the seventeenth century, Manzoni writes for his own era of romanticized Christianity and for what he hoped would be the future. He found his desired precursors in Virgil and in Dante, but actually he could not have composed his novel without the example and procedures of Sir Walter Scott. His essay On the Historical Novel, on which Manzoni labored from 1828 to 1850, was an apologia for his novel, which he kept revising until 1840. He never mentions The Betrothed but relies implicitly on his readers to know his hidden theme: can the historical novel survive?

  A great poet and a great historian may be found in the same man without creating confusion, but not in the same work. In fact, the two opposite criticisms that furnished the lines of argument for the trial of the historical novel had already showed up in the first moments of the genre and at the height of its popularity, like germs of an eventually mortal illness in a healthy-looking baby.

  And is the historical novel still popular? Is there the same desire to write historical novels and the same desire to read those that are already written? I don’t know, but I can not help imagining that, if this essay had come out some thirty years ago, when the world was eagerly awaiting and avidly devouring the novels of Walter Scott, it would have seemed eccentric and brash in its treatment of the historical novel. Nor can I help imagining that, if anyone now were willing to trouble himself enough to call it these names, it would be for an altogether different reason. And thirty years ought to be no time at all for a genre of art that was destined to live on.

  (trans. Sandra Bermann)

  I remember pondering this matter in 1984, when I reviewed Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and judged it to be something close to a legitimate revival of the historical novel. Years later, I visited Vidal and his partner near Rome and enjoyed his reaction to Manzoni and to Calvino. It seems likely that Manzoni was an accurate prophet; even the most talented historical novels now seem tainted by a lack of freshness whenever they appear.

  Manzoni’s The Betrothed, as I reread it, does not seem like a historical novel. The man is the book. What comes through on every page is the warmth, Christian compassion, wry humor, and gentle yet surprising strength to deal vividly with horrors like the plague, famine, riots, random violence, and the painful separation of the young peasant lovers Lucia and Renzo, who are menaced by the dreadful Don Rodrigo, a Spanish nobleman who lusts after Lucia and who has frightened the parish priest Don Abbondio into refusing to perform the marriage of the betrothed couple.

  Don Abbondio is a comic weakling, unique in this novel because all the rest of the clergy are wise, benign, and even heroic. Sometimes I think that the most surprising achievement of Manzoni is to overcome my skepticism in this regard. The Capuchin monk Fra Cristoforo is superbly heroic as he confronts Don Rodrigo:

  ‘Well, advise her to come and put herself under my protection. She’ll have everything she wants, and no one’ll dare molest her, or I’m no gentleman.’

  At this suggestion the friar’s indignation, which he had held in check with difficulty till then, burst out. All his resolutions of prudence and patience went to the winds; his old self joined up with the new: in such cases, in fact, Fra Cristoforo really had the energy of two men.

  ‘Your protection!’ exclaimed he, recoiling a couple of paces, leaning proudly on his right foot, putti
ng his right hand to his hip, pointing the other with outstretched forefinger towards Don Rodrigo, and fixing on him a pair of blazing eyes—‘your protection! It’s a good thing you said that; it’s a good thing you made such a suggestion. You’ve gone over the limit: and I’m not afraid of you any more.’

  ‘How dare you talk to me like that, friar!’

  ‘I’m talking as one talks to one abandoned by God, who cannot frighten any longer. Your protection! I well knew that innocent girl was under God’s protection; but you—you’ve filled me with such a certainty of it now that I no longer need to take care what I say to you. Lucia, I say—see how I pronounce her name with head high and steady eyes.’

  ‘What! In this house…!’

  ‘I pity this house. A curse hangs over it. You will see if the justice of God can be kept out by a few stones, or frightened off by a pair of sentries. You think God made a creature in His own image in order to give you the pleasure of tormenting her! You think God won’t be able to defend her! You’ve spurned His warning. You are judged for it! Pharaoh’s heart was as hard as yours, and God found a way to crush it. Lucia is safe from you; I—a poor friar—I tell you that; and as for yourself, listen to what I foretell for you. A day will come…’

  Up to now Don Rodrigo had been standing rooted there, speechless with rage and amazement; but when he heard this beginning of a prophecy being intoned, a vague, mysterious dread was added to his rage.

  Quickly he seized that lifted, threatening hand, and, raising his voice to drown that of this prophet of ill-omen, shouted: ‘Get out of my sight, you impudent peasant, you lout in a cowl.’

  Don Rodrigo, though more than nasty enough, is dwarfed by the book’s grand villain, known only as the Unnamed. He is based upon an actual historical monster, Francesco Bernardino Visconti, a scion of the Dukes of Milan, famous for being converted from iniquity to goodness by the benevolent Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, Manzoni’s authentic hero. Until that transformation, the Unnamed is all but hilariously wicked: