Authors on Authors (Part 3)

A lot of books I'm mentioning this year seem either to be about Jane Austen or by Sylvia Townsend Warner... so it is appropriate that one of them is Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner!  It's in the same Writers and Their Work series as Pamela Hansford Johnson's pamphlet, mentioned yesterday, and I'll write a similarly swift post about it.

PHJ on ICB nabbed the Century of Books slot for 1951, so STW on JA will just have to wait on the sidelines... but I rather suspect it will appeal to more of you.  Austen has more adoring fans than Dame Ivy, but are also significantly more spoilt for choice... This is, perhaps, hardly the only or foremost resource for information about Austen's life and work, but I am a sucker (as this mini-series demonstrates) for authors talking about authors.  The combination of Warner and Austen is my favourite yet, and I loved reading Warner's thoughts on the various novels.  She more or less bypasses biographical detail, which was fine by me - there are plenty of other places to go for that.  Instead we get to read Warner's insightful responses to Austen's work.  She doesn't propose dramatic or revisionist readings of the novels, but there are lots of gems along the way.  I loved this:

though sense distinguishes Elinor Dashwood and sensibility her sister Marianne, the contrast is between two ways of behaving rather than between two ways of feeling

and, a bit longer, this:

Of all Jane Austen's novels, Emma must fully conveys the exhiliration of a happy writer. As the arabesques of the plot curl more intricately, as the characters emerge and display themselves, and say the very things they would naturally say, the reader - better still, the re-reader - feels a collaborating glow.  Above all, it excels in dialogue: not only in such tours de force as Miss Bates being grateful for apples, Mrs. Elton establishing her importance when she pays her call at Hartfield, but in the management of dialogue to reveal the unsaid; as when Mr. John Knightley's short-tempered good sense insinuates a comparison with his brother's drier wit and deeper tolerance; or as in the conversation between Mr. Knightley and Emma about Frank Churchill, whom neither of them know except by repute: Emma is sure he will be all that he should be, Mr. Knightley's best expectation is "well grown and good-looing, with smooth, plausible maners" - and by the time they have done, it is plain that Emma is not prepared to fall in love with Frank Churchill, and that Mr. Knightley has been, for a long time, deeply and uncomfortably in love with Emma.

It is a shame, given Warner's sensitive and alert reading of Austen's writing, that she does not recognise the irony dripping when Austen wrote about her 'little bit (two Inches long) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.'  Read in context - or even out of context -  it is clear that Austen has tongue firmly in cheek, and it's curious that Warner (herself so often ironic) does not spot this.  Never mind.

What I think I love most about Warner's writing in any context - her novels, letters, this pamphlet - is her exuberant use of imagery.  I probably mention it every time I review something by her, but it is delicious - usually quite surreal, but somehow fitting, and often animalistic.  She writes extensively about Austen's juvenilia, and says that they 'have a ringing brilliancy, like the song of a wren'.  Lovely!  And later she writes:

G.H. Lewes, when he recommended Charlotte Bronte to "follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's mild eyes", was unaware of Lady Susan, where Miss Austen's eyes are those of a hunting cat. 

Oh, Warner - you and cats!  She can turn anything around to cats, given enough time - and is thus, in my eyes, a kindred spirit.

As I said earlier, there are many other places to read about Austen.  This pamphlet was issued at a time when a more or less complete bibliography could still be compiled (and one is included - with less than three pages of critical material) but now it proliferates.  The reason I would recommend Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner amongst this extensive canon is for the particular insight one excellent novelist is able to shed upon another.  STW and JA have been perfectly matched.

Authors on Authors (Part 1)

I'm away this week, off up to Newcastle to give a conference paper, then to one of very my best friends' wedding in Worcester at the weekend (very exciting!) so I've prepared a mini-series of posts to appear in my absence.  It's not another lot of My Life in Books, I'm afraid, but it isn't too far away... the next three posts will be on books about books.  Or, more precisely, authors discussing authors: each of the three books/pamphlets are about famous authors, by our sort of middlebrow authors.  Fun!

First up, and taking the spot for 1943 in A Century of Books, is Talking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern.  My housemate Mel gave this to me for my birthday in 2010 (thanks, Mel!) knowing how much I'd enjoyed its sequel, More Talk Of Jane Austen.  Yes, I'm doing these things the wrong way around, but it doesn't much matter which order you read these books in - except that I would argue Talking of Jane Austen is even better.

The book is divided into fifteen essays, alternatively by Kaye-Smith and Stern.  Proceedings kick off with 'Introducing Sheila Kaye-Smith to Jane Austen' and 'Introducing G.B. Stern to Jane Austen', where our esteemed authoresses recount how they first came to read Austen - sheepishly admitting their early disregard of her, and triumphantly rejoicing in the moments (both with Emma, incidentally) where they discovered their lasting affinity with Jane.  Their love of Jane shines through every paragraph - this is an appreciation, but one from calm hearts and careful minds.  They do not run mad nor faint, rather they love both wisely and well.

To enter that world is to visit a congenial set of friends, and I still find that in their company I lose my own cares, much as I lost them on my first visit, thirty years ago.  Jane Austen is the perfect novelist of escape - of legitimate escape, such as are our holidays.  She does not transport one into fantasy but simply into another, less urgent, set of facts.  She tells no fairy-tale which might send us back dazzled and reeling to our contacts with normal life, but diverts us from our preoccupations with another set of problems no less real than our own, but making no personal demands upon us.  In fact it is her realism which provides the escape, for the fantastic and improbable only irritate certain minds and send them hurrying back unrefreshed to their own business.

Amongst the topics addressed are the education of female characters; a re-evaluation (now a fairly standard argument) or Henry and Maria Crawford; dress and food in the novels; the device of letter-writing... a wide-ranging group of intriguing minutiae.

Perhaps the bravest section is where Stern and Kaye-Smith turn their attention to characters which they consider failed.  Avert your eyes if you consider St. Jane to be infallible.  Even more bravely, this is how Stern prefixes the discussion:

When an author fails with one of her characters, it must, I think, be defined as a lack of perception, a certain bluntness of outlook where this particular character is concerned.  For where the author is aware she has failed, she will be compelled to do something about it: alter it, cut it, add to it, so that it will remain an uneven lop-sided conception with some irrelevant good scenes and some hopeless; showing traces of exasperated tinkering.  Where a character is a plain failure, evenly spread, we can usually detect some slight complacency in its creator.

And whose names are suggested?  Well, Stern and Kaye-Smith cannot agree on some of them, but amongst their nominations are Colonel Brandon, Eleanor Tilney, Lady Russell, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  Since those final three characters are amongst my favourite in all the novels, I shall maintain a dignified silence on the topic.  (How could they!)  Ahem.

Perhaps the most fun section is at the end, where is all becomes something of a miscellany.  There are twenty pages of incidental comments and observations, or thoughts which were not quite sufficient to be developed into a whole chapter.  Here's just one of 'em, courtesy of Sheila Kaye-Smith:

No two authors, you might think, would be less likely to have their work mistaken for each other's than Jane Austen and Aldous Huxley.  Nevertheless I have recently seen a quotation from the author of Pride and Prejudice attributed to the author of Eyeless in Gaza.  It was in a review of the screen version of Pride and Prejudice, for the script of which Hollywood, with its fine sense of fitness, had made Mr. Huxley responsible.  The critic, having congratulated him on the complete suppression of his literary personality in this task, goes on to say that one piece of dialogue, however, stands out unmistakably as his own.  He then quotes Sir William Lucas's commendation of dancing as "one of the first refinements of polished society", with Darcy's reply: "Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world - every savage can dance."

If you're not already a Janeite, this probably isn't a good place to start.   Indeed, you should probably have read all of Austen's books at least once before you even consider reading Talking of Jane Austen.  The authors are contentedly aware of this themselves, and welcome anyone (is it you?) who fits the description below:

We are not prowling round, my collaborator and myself, searching for converts; only for those insatiable legions who find the same mysterious pleasure as we do in talking Jane, discovering Jane, arguing Jane, quoting Jane, listing Jane, and for ever and ever marvelling at Jane and grateful for her legacy.

And so say all of us!