by Martin Amis
The subversion or pre-emption of his dream-life is a kind of moral tragedy for Don Quixote. It is a hideously protracted humiliation, as cynical reality steadily usurps and degrades the knight, divesting him of his once rampant creativity. Encountering many a symbolic hell and dungeon, Quixote is jeered and hounded back to his village, savaged by cats, pinched by governesses, teased by maidens, unhorsed by guttersnipes, vanquished in arms, trampled first by bulls, then by swine. We leave him ‘pensive, melancholy, mauled, and meagre’, crushed by actuality, as the Manchean music fades.
Had he lived, Quixote would have repaired to a pastoral setting, to give ‘full scope to his amorous sentiments’. These have been directed throughout the novel at a woman he hardly knows. She is just a country wench, but Quixote has adorned her with the name Dulcinea del Toboso and also with a beauty she has never possessed. ‘I am enamoured’, he tells Sancho, ‘for no other reason but because it is necessary that knights-errant should be in love.’ On one level he knows her to be what she is, and yet ‘I paint her in my fancy, according to my wish’. All his exploits were committed in her name, though she neither knew nor cared. It is the saddest story. Don Quixote de la Mancha, the great artist manqué: he attempted to live what he could not write.
Incarcerated in convention and garrulity, Don Quixote remains a beautiful idea. And it should be stressed that when a great book enters a period of dormancy in any particular age, then the age is the loser: the age is judged, as well as the book. Tobias Smollett’s neglected translation is astonishingly vigorous, a work of genuine symbiosis, though perhaps erring on the side of Anglo-Saxon joviality. He gives us a Quixote for the eighteenth century; what he cannot do is give us a darker, more Hispanic Quixote for the twentieth. I suggest with respect, and some spite, that Carlos Fuentes or one of his peers should now face such an enterprise. It will require much cutting and mauling and chopping and slicing. It will require infinite drubbings.
Atlantic Monthly March 1986
Force of Love
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The first challenge you face when writing about Pride and Prejudice is to get through your first sentence without saying, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’ With that accomplished (with that out of the way), you can move on to more testing questions. For example: why does the reader yearn with such helpless fervour for the marriage of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy? Why does the reader crow and flinch with almost equal concern over the ups and downs of Jane Bennet and Mr Bingley? Jane and Elizabeth’s mother, Mrs Bennet (stupid, prattling, coarse, greedy), is one of the greatest comic nightmares in all literature, yet we are scarcely less restrained than she in our fretful ambition for her daughters. Jane Austen makes Mrs Bennets of us all. How?
And, even more mysteriously, this tizzy of zealous suspense actually survives repeated readings. Finishing the book for perhaps the fifth or sixth time, the present writer felt all the old gratitude and relief: an undiminished catharsis. These days, true, I wouldn’t have minded a rather more detailed conclusion – say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well. (Such a scene would take place, of course, not in a country inn or a louche lodging house in town but amid all the comfort and elegance of Pemberley, with its parklands and its vistas and its ten thousand a year.) Jane Austen, with her divine comedies of love, has always effortlessly renewed herself for each generation of readers (and critics, too: moralists, Marxists, myth-panners, deconstructors – all are kept happy). One may wonder what she has to say to the current crop of twenty-year-olds, for whom ‘love’ is not quite what it was. Today love faces new struggles: against literalism, futurelessness, practicality, and nationwide condom campaigns. But maybe the old opposition, of passion and prudence, never really changes; it just sways on its axis.
Let us begin by pinpointing the moment at which love blooms – for Mr Darcy, and for every male reader on earth. It blooms on page 33 of my edition (the Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, 1923). We have had the Meryton assembly, the straitlaced thé dansant, at which the local community thrills to the entrance of the eligible gents and their entourage; and we have protectively endured Mr Darcy’s audible humiliation of our heroine: ‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me …’ Soon afterwards Jane Bennet – meek, sweet, uncomplicated – is invited to dine with the fashionable newcomers. ‘Can I have the carriage?’ she asks her mother. ‘No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to rain; and then you must stay all night.’ Jane rides, it rains, she falls ill – and cannot be moved. Elizabeth’s anxiety is one we can easily share: experienced in the ways of nineteenth-century fiction, we know that these frail beauties can fall apart more or less overnight. So, the next morning, impelled by sibling love, Elizabeth strides off through the November mud to Netherfield, that fortress of privilege and disdain. She arrives unannounced, and scandalously unaccompanied, ‘with weary ancles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise’. By now the male reader’s heart is secure (indeed, he is down on one knee). But Darcy’s palpitations are just beginning.
As for female susceptibilities – as for falling in love with him – Mr Darcy, I think, ravishes the entire gender on his very first appearance:
Mr Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year.
That, plus this –
‘You have a house in town, I conclude?’
Mr Darcy bowed.
– will about do it. Auden, among many others, was shocked by Jane Austen’s celebration of ‘the amorous effects of brass’: that is, of money, and old money, too. Money is a vital substance in her world; the moment you enter it you feel the frank horror of moneylessness, as intense as the tacit horror of spinsterhood. Funnily enough, our hopes for Elizabeth and Darcy are egalitarian, and not avaricious, in tendency. We want love to bring about the redistribution of wealth. To inspire such a man to disinterested desire, non-profit-making desire: this is the romantic hinge.
Elizabeth Bennet is Jane Austen with added spirit, with subversive passion, and, above all, with looks. Although writers’ lives are no more than optional extras in the consideration of their work, the dull fact of Jane Austen’s spinsterhood – her plainness, her childlessness, her virgin death – invests her comedies with disappointment, and with a sense of thwarted homing. It also confirms one’s sense of the diminishing physicality of her later heroines: inconspicuous, undetectable Fanny Price; the regal Emma (with her avuncular Mr Knightley); the poignant staidness of Anne Elliot. Incredibly, Jane Austen was about the same age as Elizabeth when she began Pride and Prejudice (‘I am not one and twenty’), and Elizabeth remains her only convincingly sexual heroine. Even her father, indolent Mr Bennet, is sufficiently aware of her passionate nature to deliver an exceptional warning: ‘discredit and misery’ would await her, she ‘could be neither happy nor respectable’, in a loveless marriage. His marriage is loveless, and so is everybody else’s; and they have all settled for it. But he knows that Elizabeth would never settle for anything less than love.
How do we get a sense of this society, this universe, with its inhibition, its formality, its echelonized emotions? It comes to us most clearly, perhaps, in its language. Mr Darcy’s first name is Fitzwilliam, which is a nice name – but Elizabeth will never use it. She will call him ‘Mr Darcy’ or, occasionally, ‘My dear Mr Darcy’. You call your mother ‘Madam’ and your dad ‘Sir’. When the dance floor is ‘crouded’, young ladies may get a ‘headach’. You may ‘teaze’ a gentleman, should you ‘chuse’, and should he consent to be ‘laught’ at. If it be the sixth of October, then ‘Michaelmas’ will have been celebrated ‘yesterday se’nnight.’ ‘La’, what ‘extacies’ we were in! Everyone is much ‘incumbered’ by ‘secresy’ and the need to watch their ‘expences’. A ric
h man must marry a rich girl, to avoid ‘degradation’ or even ‘pollution’. But a poor man must marry a rich girl too, in order to achieve a ‘tolerable independence’. So who is to marry all the poor girls – the poor girls, how will they find ‘an husband’? How will they swerve between passion and prudence, between sensibility and sense, between love and money?
Two extreme cases are explored in Pride and Prejudice. Or, rather, they are unexplored, unexamined; they define the limitations of Jane Austen’s candour and, perhaps, the limitations of her art. First is the marriage that is all sense, all money (and not very much money either): the marriage of Mr Collins and Charlotte Lucas. Charlotte is Elizabeth’s neighbour and her closest friend. Mr Collins is, of course, a world-class grotesque; he has a slimy vigilance that Mr Podsnap might have envied. ‘Can he be a sensible man, sir?’ Elizabeth asks her father, having acquainted herself with Mr Collins’s introductory letter. Mr Bennet responds with typically droll and fateful laxity:
No, my dear: I think not. I have great hopes of finding him quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter, which promises well. I am impatient to see him.
Mr Collins comes to stay. Because of the famous ‘entail’ in Mr Bennet’s estate, the girls will be bypassed, and cousin Collins is next in line to inherit. He therefore feels obliged to marry one of the many Bennet daughters. His gaze first alights on Jane, then (one day later) on Elizabeth, to whom (eight days later) he unsuccessfully proposes before fixing on Charlotte Lucas (one day later). He proposes to her one day later. And she accepts him.
Jane Austen expends little energy on physical description. Her characters are ‘handsome’ or ‘pleasing’ or ‘not at all handsome’. The feature-by-feature inventory she leaves to the hags and harpies (this is Miss Bingley on Elizabeth: ‘Her face is too thin … Her nose wants character … Her teeth are tolerable, but not out of the common way’). She deals in auras, in presences; her creations fill a certain space with a certain personal style, and they are shaped by their idiolects. Of the Reverend William Collins we are told only this: ‘He was a tall, heavy looking young man of five and twenty.’ But his immense physical dreariness is none the less fully summoned. (The twenty-page sex scene is in this case not sorely missed. ‘I crave your indulgence, my dear Mrs Collins, if, at this early juncture …’)
Anyway, Charlotte repairs to what Collins calls his humble abode. And that’s her life gone. Jane Austen interprets the matter with a kind of worldly savagery: Charlotte accepts Collins ‘from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment’; marriage is ‘the only honourable provision’ for women so placed, and ‘must be their pleasantest preservative from want’. Elizabeth is not so hard-barked about it, but her ‘astonishment’ at her closest friend’s expediency soon modulates into the quiet conviction ‘that no real confidence could ever subsist between them again’. And by the time she pays a visit to the newlyweds, she has decided that ‘all the comfort of intimacy was over’. Isolation, then, is part of the price Charlotte pays, and expects to pay. Elizabeth feels she can discuss her best friend’s situation with Mr Darcy, whom at this stage she thoroughly dislikes (‘[Mr Collins’s] friends may well rejoice in his having met with one of the very few sensible women who would have accepted him’); but she doesn’t feel she can discuss her best friend’s situation with her best friend. Why not? Well, people didn’t, then. There is no reason why it should occur to Elizabeth to question this miserable silence. But perhaps it ought to have occurred to Jane Austen. Elizabeth is quick to find rueful humour in the business, and Jane Austen is even quicker to find non-rueful humour in it (we hear Charlotte’s mother enquiring ‘after the welfare and poultry of her eldest daughter’). The marriage is pitiful and creepy; but it is routinely pitiful and creepy. It is everyday.
The other escape from the love–money, passion–prudence axis is the escape undertaken by Elizabeth’s youngest sister, Lydia: all love, or at least all passion, or at any rate no prudence (and certainly no money). Little Lydia elopes with the feckless Lieutenant Wickham. Now, in Jane Austen’s universe, elopement is a tractable delinquency, provided the absconders marry very soon, preferably before nightfall. Should she neglect the wedlock end of it, however, the woman will face an isolation far more thoroughgoing than Charlotte Lucas’s: ‘irremediable infamy’, ostracism, demi-mondainedom. Lydia languishes for two whole weeks with Wickham before the affair is patched and pelfed together (largely by Mr Darcy, it transpires); thus Lydia’s virtue is precariously and, as it were, retroactively preserved. Wickham consents to make an honest woman of her, after heavy bribes.
So what are we meant to feel about Lydia? Slimeball Mr Collins writes to Mr Bennet, at an early stage in the scandal, ‘The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this.’ In a later letter, having ‘rejoiced’ that the ‘sad business has been so well hushed up’, Collins adds,
I must not … refrain from declaring my amazement, at hearing that you received the young couple into your house as soon as they were married. It was an encouragement of vice … You ought certainly to forgive them as a christian, but never to admit them in your sight or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.
‘That’, says Mr Bennet, ‘is his notion of christian forgiveness!’ But what is Jane Austen’s notion of it? We may well believe that as a Christian she forgives Lydia. But we will want to know whether as an artist she forgives her.
Installed in ‘all the comfort and elegance’ of Pemberley, Elizabeth sends the Wickhams odd bits of spare cash, and ‘occasionally’ receives her sister there. Lydia, so to speak, is wheeled off on to a siding, lost to serious consideration, and lost to her sister. And this despite the following mitigations (which gallantry, as well as conscience, obliges one to list): that Lydia’s fall was precisely and vividly foretold by Elizabeth; that its likelihood was blamed on parental and familial laxity; that Elizabeth was at one point entirely gulled by Wickham’s charms and lies; and that Lydia, during the course of the novel, only just turns sixteen. Calling on her privilege as the local omniscient, Jane Austen consigns Lydia’s marriage to the communal grave (‘His affection for her soon sunk into indifference; hers lasted a little longer’), underlining her exclusion from the circumambient happy ending. Lydia, so beautifully evoked (brawny, selfish, clumsy, wholly transparent: after the ball at Netherfield ‘even Lydia was too much fatigued to utter more than the occasional exclamation of “Lord, how tired I am!” accompanied by a violent yawn’), is now summarily written out. And here, I think, the reader begins to feel that artists should know better than that; we expect them to know better than that. We expect artists to stand as critics not just of their particular milieu but of their society, and of their age. They shouldn’t lose sight of their creations at exactly the same point that ‘respectability’ – or stock response – loses sight of them.
For all its little smugnesses and blindspots, despite something airless and narrow, Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most sociable book – and, strangely, her most socially idealistic. The impulse is in fact strongly present. And because this is a romantic comedy, the impulse expresses itself through the unlikely personage of Fitzwilliam Darcy. Darcy doesn’t account for the novel’s eternal humour and élan, but he does account for its recurrent and remorseless power to move. Elizabeth’s prejudice is easily dealt with: all she needs is the facts before her. Yet the melting of Darcy’s pride demands radical change, the difference between his first declaration (‘In vain have I struggled’) and his second (‘You are too generous to trifle with me’). The patching-up of the Lydia business involves Darcy in some expense, but it also forces him to descend into the chaos of unrestrained dreads and desires – an area where Jane Austen fears to linger, even in her imagination. The final paragraph gives us the extraordinary spectacle of Darcy opening his house, and his arms, to Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle, who make what money they have through trade. Darcy, Jane Austen writes, ‘really loved them’. Thi
s is the wildest romantic extravagance in the entire corpus: a man like Mr Darcy, chastened, deepened, and finally democratized by the force of love.
Atlantic Monthly February 1990
The War Against Cliché
Ulysses by James Joyce
This year’s new edition of Ulysses incorporates about 5,000 emendations, most of them ‘accidentals’: slips and skips, previously unretrieved corrections, errors caused by the incredulity of earlier typesetters or by the author’s failing eyesight or faulty memory – gremlins, of one kind or another. True, some corrections are quite substantial: the summoning telegram that Stephen received in Paris, ‘Mother dying come home father’, now reads ‘Nother dying come home father’, ‘heave under embon senorita young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan Winkle red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return’ is, I suppose, a clear gain on ‘heave under embon senorita young eyes Mulvey plump years dreams return’, and ‘Nes. Yo’ certainly makes a change from ‘Yes. No’. But the new edition will not reverberate far. It will scupper the odd doctorate, embarrass a few commentary footnotes, upend one or two learned articles, and that’s about all. If, like me, you have tried Ulysses before, and got about halfway through (its common fate with the common reader), then the refurbished text simply provides another excuse to try again. Take my word for it: you won’t notice the difference.
What, nowadays, is the constituency of Ulysses? Who reads it? Who curls up with Ulysses? It is thoroughly studied, it is exhaustively unzipped and unseamed, it is much deconstructed. But who reads Ulysses for the hell of it? I know a poet who carries Ulysses around with him in his satchel. I know a novelist who briefly consults Ulysses each night upon retiring. I know an essayist who wittily features Ulysses on his toilet bookshelf. They read it – but have they read it, in the readerly fashion, from beginning to end? For the truth is that Ulysses is not reader-friendly. Famously James Joyce is a writers’ writer. Perhaps one could go further and say that James Joyce is a writer’s writer. He is auto-friendly; he is James Joyce-friendly.