by Anne Fadiman
My school librarian was not entirely wrong. There was a good deal in the book I was too young to understand. I skipped over hard words and long epistolary passages. Nuances of character and the delicate mechanics of plot were lost on me. Like a water insect I skated the surface of the text, scarcely dimpling the rippling current underneath. But I do remember laughing as I read. “Come here, child,” Mr. Bennet tells Elizabeth, after her mother orders her to reconsider the odiously officious Mr. Collins. “An unhappy alternative is before you … . From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.” I understood that wry proposition perfectly. If nothing else, Austen’s buoyant wit came through.
The second time I read the book I was in high school and taking a summer English course that sandwiched Pride and Prejudice unappetizingly between Of Mice and Men and The Catcher in the Rye. Laughter had given way to diligence, three-to-five-page essays, and much class discussion about the individual and the community. I do not remember the text this time as much as the small print and the pulpy paper. I had oral surgery the week we “did” Jane Austen, and I read the book while lying on my pink bed, in my pink-carpeted bedroom, with tea bags packed into my mouth to stop the bleeding. Sliding mirror doors on my closet reflected a swollen-mouthed and melancholy fifteen-year-old. I stood out among the Polynesian and Asian kids at school because of my extremely fair skin. “Why are you so white?” everyone asked me; if my classmates were in a mood to tease, they called me “shark bait.” I tried to imagine myself among the fair-skinned girls in Pride and Prejudice, but such escapism cut into my self-pity, so I didn’t allow myself to enter Austen’s world for long. Surely, I thought, Elizabeth’s younger sisters would have dismissed me as a “freckled little thing.”
I did not open Pride and Prejudice again until I was in college. I had exchanged the tropical island of my childhood for the bricks and snow of Cambridge, where I was an English and philosophy concentrator at Harvard. I had many friends in college, and to my great joy, my complexion was no longer a topic of conversation. My first story had been accepted for publication; I had earned advanced standing and placed into a sophomore English tutorial. All this had restored my self-confidence. Once again a precocious initiate into the mysteries of English literature, I now looked at Jane Austen from a critical perspective. My tutor was a Henry James specialist, and my father had given me a volume of the novelist’s book reviews, in which, always incisive but rarely generous, James turned a jaundiced eye on his literary predecessors. It was in college, with James on my reading list and my own professional aspirations in mind, that I began to consider the strengths and weaknesses of Pride and Prejudice—the liveliness of Lizzie and her sisters, against the inarticulate stiffness of Darcy.
Granted, Darcy is supposed to be proud and rigid, silent in his dignity, but on this reading I faulted Austen for failing to provide a better view of his mind and heart. I felt she spent more time describing the contents of Darcy’s house than developing his character. Darcy is shown early as a figure of unapproachable hauteur and later as a Prince Charming. His motives and interests are objects of intense speculation, but he himself remains a cipher. I began to think him a weak point in the novel, to feel that, as James says of Daniel Deronda, “He is not a man at all,” but a construct. Even at the end of the book, when his transformation is complete, Darcy cannot, or, more accurately, is not allowed to, explain how he came to love Elizabeth. She insists on speaking for him, telling him exactly why he was attracted to her. “The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them.” Elizabeth’s bossy, authorial little speech only calls attention to the shameless fairy-tale ending Austen has set up. The novel originally titled “First Impressions” leaves the reader with a final impression that the noble, handsome, fabulously wealthy Darcy is indeed a figment of his author’s lively, feminine imagination. He has moved from grudging to admiring appreciation of Elizabeth’s performances. But he is always quiet—a passive character, if an excellent audience.
My professors taught me to consider the cultural context of literary works, the social mores delineated, and the position of the author in her world. The more I learned about Jane Austen’s England, the more I understood how unrealistic Darcy’s second proposal is. The more I learned of Austen’s own life, the more I understood how improbable Elizabeth’s conquest would have been. At nine, I’d loved Pride and Prejudice for its humor; at fifteen, I’d read it with melancholy; but in college, I spurned it with feelings akin to those of my roommate when she broke up with her high-school sweetheart. Henry James was so much darker, so much more worldly, so sophisticated. Austen’s art seemed merely sunny. She was a watercolorist, while James was the brilliant mannerist, dazzling with his chiaroscuro. The Portrait of a Lady numbed me, then stung me, and finally overwhelmed me. The Wings of the Dove entirely turned my head. Pride and Prejudice slipped, along with Huckleberry Finn, into the pile of slim books from home that I’d enjoyed when I was younger. I glanced through it only to dismiss it, and then I left it behind—seemingly forever.
I’d written books and more stories of my own, drafted my dissertation on Samuel Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare, married, had two children, and moved back to Cambridge by the time I picked up Pride and Prejudice again. I’d just come home from my mother’s funeral. I was twenty-nine and had never felt so old. My mother had died of brain cancer soon after turning fifty-one.
It was October, raining hard, and I was alone in the house with our baby. My brother-in-law was getting married that weekend, but I’d found I couldn’t force myself to go to the wedding. My husband flew with our four-year-old to Philadelphia.
The rain poured down all the first night and kept coming the next day. It was too wet to take the baby out, so he played on the floor and I listened to the rain. It rattled on the skylight in the stairwell and thrummed the roof, and I began to reread Pride and Prejudice. I read the book slowly and uncritically, lying on our new blue sofa in our new sparsely furnished town house. I read it because my mother had loved Jane Austen and because rereading it for solace was something she might have done. I read it because my mother was like Jane Austen in her wit, her love of irony, and her concision. My mother was shrewd like Austen, and ingenious; she flourished in difficult professional situations. And like Austen, my mother had died young with her work unfinished.
It rained all day, and I kept reading steadily. I didn’t laugh, but I smiled at Mr. Bennet and Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Mr. Darcy didn’t bother me at all, but strode into the book, a dashing hero brooking no doubt or literary disappointment. Perhaps he was only a figure of romance, and perhaps Pemberley was just Austen’s castle in the air. The romance and the castle were no less powerful for their escapist construction. Indeed, what I found irresistible this time was the way Austen combines astute social satire with fairy tale. The combination did not seem awkward to me, but inspired. The satire is exquisite, while the fairy tale is viscerally satisfying. How delightful to watch Elizabeth rise like Cinderella above the impediments of her mother and her younger sisters! Her mother is not wicked, but she is thoughtless and vulgar. Her sisters, with the exception of Jane, are pedantic, insipid, and lusty, and, as such, throw as many obstacles in Elizabeth’s way as if sabotage had been their intent. And, of course, Mr. Bingley’s sisters supply their own venom. Naturally, the obstacles make Elizabeth’s victory more delicious. Hers is the triumph of wit over vulgarity, self-respect over sycophancy. Until this reading, I had never appreciated Austen’s fairy tale so well, but perhaps I had never needed it so much. No one dies in Pride and Prejudice—not even of embarrassment, as feckless Lydia and Wickham demonstrate. I no longer faulted the book for its cheerfulness or made invidious comparisons with
Henry James. A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness.
It is the joining of satire and fairy tale that continues to draw me to Pride and Prejudice, and I have been thinking about this aspect recently, after my fifth reading. This time, Elizabeth’s tour of Pemberley with her aunt and uncle drew me particularly. I wondered at Austen’s extensive discussion of the house—“a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills”—and grounds, which are described both from the perspective of the visitors driving into the estate and through Elizabeth’s eyes as she looks out a window at “the hill, crowned with wood, from which they had descended.”
Austen does not generally layer on description. Her chapters are airy, uncluttered rooms, not the heavily draped, fringed, and flocked apartments of Dickens. Thus, the detail she devotes to Darcy’s estate is striking. Certainly, Austen is providing a catalog of all the riches Elizabeth has refused. She allows Elizabeth to contemplate the beauties of Pemberley with a poignant mixture of admiration, defensive pride, and regret. As Elizabeth and the Gardiners visit and then revisit Pemberley at Darcy’s invitation, Austen reports on the stream stocked with fish, the fine woods, and even the splendid food served: “cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the finest fruits in season.” All these demonstrate Darcy’s wealth, and also his graciousness, as he extends an invitation to Mr. Gardiner to come fishing, takes the ladies walking, and insists on bringing Elizabeth to meet his sister. Before, these scenes at Pemberley had seemed to me unduly fanciful. I’d felt the action slow, and grown tired of the contrivances by which Austen brings Elizabeth back to Darcy. On this reading, however, they seemed to me the most interesting in the novel, for here Austen truly defines the union between Elizabeth and Darcy, joining liveliness and formality, the bourgeois and the aristocratic, new forms and old in a utopian reworking of the world.
As I read the description of Pemberley, I saw Austen adopting the grand literary tradition of the country-house poem to describe Darcy’s noble countryseat. Through Elizabeth’s admiring eyes, Pemberley is nothing less than a Penshurst in its natural beauty, order, and elegance. Ben Jonson had praised Penshurst as a house not “built to envious show,” and Pemberley succeeds as well in surpassing lesser, and newer, estates like Lady Catherine’s Rosings, which are merely ostentatious and fashionable, filled with “uselessly fine” furniture. Pemberley has every virtue that Jonson listed as essential for the great country house: the grounds, the woods, the fish, the fruit in season, the bounty of nature tamed into proportion and elegance.
I had read “To Penshurst” in college, and again in graduate school, but I’d never made the connection between the poem and Austen’s book. As a student of the novel, I had always looked forward. I’d studied the “rise” of the novel, the development and growth and refinement of the genre. My forward thinking was also the product of my own impatience and ambition as a writer—my eagerness to dart onto the literary stage. As a reader, I’ve looked forward so much that I’ve been surprised recently by how pleasurable it can be to look back again to earlier forms, and, as Austen might have said, to rediscover the elegant and pleasing landscapes to be found there.
Like Penshurst, Pemberley is staffed with grateful servants and surrounded by respectful townspeople. It is both a productive estate and a symbol of order for the larger society. The only thing Pemberley lacks is a mistress, and in Elizabeth, Austen provides one. Elizabeth moves Darcy to show that he can be not merely great but gracious and good. This joining of greatness and goodness defines true nobility for Austen, just as it did for Jonson. And yet she goes much further than Jonson, for in her novelistic version of the country-house poem, it is not only the lord who can say he dwells there, but the middle-class admirer who will succeed in dwelling there as well. Elizabeth, the cataloger of Pemberley’s beauties—and, by extension, Austen, Elizabeth’s author—takes possession of them. Elizabeth, who grows to appreciate Darcy’s virtues—and, by extension, the reader, Elizabeth’s confidant—comes to marry him. Ah, the wish fulfillment here is wonderful indeed, once you begin unfolding the wish in earnest.
I think unfolding is what rereading is about. Like pleated fabric, the text reveals different parts of its pattern at different times. And yet every time the text unfolds, in the library, or in bed, or upon the grass, the reader adds new wrinkles. Memory and experience press themselves into each reading so that each encounter informs the next.
Is it possible that if you read Pride and Prejudice too young, the book is ruined for you? At what age should you read Jane Austen? At fifteen? Or twenty-nine? At thirty-six? Austen wrote the novel when she was just twenty. It would be strange for the reader to wait until she was older than the author. Can children grow into or out of books, as they grow into and out of clothes? I reread the novel because I read it at nine. I return to it not because it is the best novel I have read, or the most important, but because of the memories and wishes I’ve folded in its pages—because on every reading I see old things in it.
PICO IYER
Lawrence by Lightning
The Virgin and the Gypsy, by D. H. Lawrence
Growing up within the tightly guarded confines of a fifteenth-century English boarding school, my friends and I took as our tokens of accomplishment the somewhat recherché gray volumes known as Penguin Modern Classics. When I was in college, in the mid-1970s, Picador books would become the rage (Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Richard Brautigan—outlaw American energy packaged as real literature!); and, a decade later, in the sleek Manhattan of the 1980s, the Vintage Contemporaries series (born, it seemed, out of Bright Lights, Big City) would have a special cachet as some of us hobbled off to Area at 3:00 a.m. But in 1972, in rural, changeless England, where our allowances were scarcely large enough to stretch to three packages of McVitie’s digestives every six months, and where we had to attend chapel twice a day, Latin hymns on Sunday nights, and class at 7:30 a.m.—all in white tie and tails—we could think of no better way to distinguish ourselves than through amassing these formidable gray paperbacks on our shelves.
Canetti, apek, Svevo, Vian: even now the names, nearly all foreign and unpronounceable, reek of forbidden cigarettes and the cafés we weren’t allowed to visit. To this day I remember next to nothing of these books, and even the authors’ names are increasingly strange to me. But in anxious adolescence, they were the last word, so it seemed, in worldliness and sophistication, to be displayed beside our beds like the conquests (in this all-male internment camp) we hadn’t made. The funeral-black Penguin Classics—Xenophon and Sir Thomas More and Plutarch—were too much like everything we were trying to escape; the jaunty contemporary orange Penguins—Laurie Lee and Keith Waterhouse and Kingsley Amis—seemed too much a part of the dreary English landscape all around; but the Penguin Modern Classics—The Magic Mountain, The Counterfeiters, Nausea—were everything we sought (and found most efficiently, as it happened, in the cinema, among Pasolini renditions of Boccaccio and Chaucer)—namely, grown-up European works of high culture that packed the punch of illicit magazines.
Occasionally, almost flukily, a volume would surface that had so much to do with adolescent boys escaping from their military surroundings (and brandishing, as status symbols, philosophical tomes) that we would actually read it in its entirety and with a palpitating, almost awestruck sense of recognition. Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes was one such work, inevitably, with its haunting evocation of a paradise glimpsed in boyhood and never found again; Raymond Radiguet’s Le diable au corps (or The Devil in the Flesh, as it was translated for us) was another, a highly French tale of an eighteen-year-old boy taking on an older mistress, which convinced us all we were actually Frenchmen under the skin. A fifteen-year-old housemate (now, of course, one of England’s most distinguished moral voices) once slipped me a copy of Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund with the blunt Anglo-Saxon commendation, “It’s got a hundred screws.”
I read it i
mmediately, and almost instantly felt at home in it: not only because of its austere gray cover, depicting a chestnut tree outside a wintry monastery that looked uncannily similar to the monastery-in-mufti where we were working on our chastity, poverty, and obedience; and not only because of its earnest, almost sacramental hallowing of a friendship between two young men, one immersed in the world of books, the other committed to finding the meaning of life through a series of adventures (in short, as my friend had promised, an archetypal Hellenic quest with R-rated props); but also, I suppose, because—like all our favorite books—it was about a seeker pledged to the holiness of the heart’s affections and committed to individuality at any cost. (Much later, I would see that part of its appeal might even have had to do with the fact that it was the only common link between my surplice-choired medieval school and the vagrant hippie California of my parents’ home, to which I returned on holidays—and, of course, it took that very commute, the dialogue between Apollo and Dionysus, as its theme.)
But before I could fall completely under Hesse’s spell, another book came along that touched a sudden flame in me in some more mysterious way. D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Virgin and the Gypsy (written not long before his death, in France, in 1930, and found only after it) was an orange Penguin of the kind we affected to despise, and came from someone as much of the countryside around us as the Huxleys and Orwells we were force-fed in class (and the poems that rhymed with the memorial plaques that surrounded us—“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”). Yet it had to it something foreign and subversive that seemed to place it among the gray books we regarded as canonical. Part of its attraction came no doubt from the photograph it bore on its cover—of the Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus, as ethereal and undefiled as a Botticelli angel, looking into the distance as she is approached by a movie Minotaur (Franco Nero, then at the height of his fame). Part of it no doubt came from its bringing together of young English girl and alien wanderer—as if Narziss and Goldmund were of different sexes, and could interact in newly electric ways! But whatever the source of its magic, as familiar and unfathomed as a loved one, I opened the book on the afternoon of my fifteenth birthday, and closed it that evening, feeling that a chapter in my boyhood now had ended.