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Simplicity by Marilyn Butler
Simplicity
Marilyn Butler
- Jane Austen : A Life by David Nokes
Fourth Estate, 578 pp, £20.00, September 1997, ISBN 1 85702 419 2 - Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin
Viking, 341 pp, £20.00, October 1997, ISBN 0 670 86528 1
London Review
of Books – Vol.20, No. 5 – 5 March 1998
Do we need another Life
of Jane Austen? Biographies of this writer come at regular intervals,
confirming a rather dull story of Southern English family life. For the first
century at least, the main qualification for the task was to be a relative –
Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ to Northanger
Abbey and Persuasion (1818), the Rev. J.E. Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (1870)
and W. and R.A. Austen-Leigh, Jane
Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913). These pioneers had two main
messages to convey: that the author was a very domestic woman, and that outside
her family she had no profound attachments or interests. Subsequent biographers
rightly complain that this puts a damper on the exercise. But the nine hundred
new pages on Austen’s life do not, in the event, significantly change what is
still a family record.
How can the Nineties
reader, so often resistant to history, gain access to this most secretive and
parochial of writers? Claire Tomalin’s publishers credit her with discovering
an Austen who is the heroine of a modern story, one of a family of meritocrats
struggling to get ahead in a competitive, money-driven society. At it happens,
much academic work on the Romantic writers, Austen included, has been obsessed
with money for over a decade now. Edward Copeland’s Women Writing about Money (1995) gets more
thoroughly into the topic than a biographer can, and David Nokes provides even
more insights than Tomalin into (say) Austen and legacy-hunting. In fact
Tomalin’s considerable strengths are surely of another kind – to do with her
modern, matter-of-fact tone of voice and her narrowed focus on Jane Austen as
the story’s heroine. If anything she plays down her family and still more her
society, at any rate as direct material for the novels, in favour of an Austen
who is essentially solitary. Tomalin tells each well-known incident of the
life, and instantly follows up with Austen’s response. Or, rather, with what we
might feel in such circumstances, a response couched in the language and shaped
by the attitudes of today.
After her mother had
breast-fed her for three months, how did the newest Austen take being parted
from that breast, to be spoon-fed by a foster mother in the village? At two,
did the scream on being taken away from her foster mother and village family?
How did she react to being packed off to two fairly unsatisfactory boarding
schools, at seven and nine? Or to the news, abruptly delivered to her at the
age of 25, that her father was retiring from his country parish and moving with
his wife and two daughters to the fashionable resort of Bath?
Tomalin neatly uses
these conventional but intensitive parental ‘ejections’ of Jane from childhood
on to explain the withdrawn, self-protective manner of the adult woman. They
were ‘frightening and unpleasant experiences over which she had no control and
which required periods of recovery; they helped to form the “whimsical girl”,
almost always well defended when it came so showing emotion.’ Tomalin’s Jane
was reticent and unopinionated in company, even in family gatherings. She
participated, but protected her privacy, while she joked in her letters,
enjoyed acting, invented stories for children, and played children’s games. She
had several longstanding women friends who corresponded, and she wrote to all
her siblings except George, her mentally retarded older brother. But, Tomalin
thinks, the reserve may not have been breached even in the unrecorded
conversations and letters, many afterwards destroyed, which passed between Jane
and her closest friend, her sister Cassandra.
Nokes virtually omits
the novels from his story. Tomalin makes more use of them than most
biographers, and indeed relies on them for her boldest innovation, a
reconstruction of Austen’s inner life. Here Tomalin makes some risky moves.
Arbitrarily chosen characters from the novels – Lady Susan, Marianne Dashwood,
Mary Crawford – speak for their author’s repressed desires. Unsupported
guesses, strategically placed in the story, take the weight of the biographer’s
argument. Of Austen’s first months in Bath, Tomalin remarks: ‘Jane was schooled
to keep up appearances, even if she was screaming inside her head.’ Austen
stays put or moves without audible protest, as though serving a long term of
house-arrest. The world she makes in her novels stands out by contrast at open
and animate, indicating its function, Tomalin thinks, in Austen’s fantasy-life:
As a child recovering
from the school years, she found the power to entertain her family with her
writing. Through her writing, she was developing a world of imagination in
which she controlled everything that happened. She went on to create young
women somewhat like herself, but whose perceptions and judgments were shown to
matter; who were able to influence their own fates significantly, and who could
even give their parents good advice. Her delight in this work is obvious.
It’s pity that this Big
Idea, the organising principle of Tomalin’s book, nowadays comes almost too
readily to hand in writing any artist’s life. A highly stylised genre doesn’t
necessarily express a particular writer’s inner life: how can it, when the
features of plot and character Tomalin lists are standard in classic comedy,
romance and fairy tale? Tomalin’s psychoanalytic use of the novels reduces the
effect of the letters, where Austen at least speaks for herself. The comedies
take the Life over, by virtue of the idealised spirit of comedy, not the
toughness, irony and frequent cynicism that more particularly characterise
Austen’s writing. This pleasing, polished book goes some way towards a mixed
mode – fictionalised memoir or biographical novel.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n05/marilyn-butler/simplicity
Burying Scott by Marilyn Butler
Burying
Scott
Marilyn Butler
- The Life of Walter
Scott: A Critical Biography by John Sutherland
Blackwell, 386 pp, £19.99, January 1995, ISBN 1 55786 231 1
London Review
of Books – Vol 17, no. 17 – 7 September 1995, p. 10-11
John Sutherland’s pithy,
cynical Life of Scott
is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in
a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at
least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its
kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott
(1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives
is in opposite directions. Sutherland has come to bury Scott, while Lockhart,
the great man’s son-in-law, praises him in a public-relations exercise calculated
to maintain the family’s prestige and income. Yet Lockhart in the 1830s was
quite as committed as Sutherland in the 1990s to a commercially-driven real
world, as he proves by his mastery of its classic plot-line, ‘making it’.
Lockhart presents Scott’s
rise and rise as an exemplary fable for a commercial age, heavily reliant on
its author-hero’s middle-class virtues – hard daily work, bonhomie and of
course family values. Each success comes lightened by homely, humorous touches
that bring out not Scott’s towering genius but his ordinariness and niceness.
Before his years of fame, an Edinburgh neighbour is traumatised by the
apparition, which he sees towards dawn from his window, of a disembodied hand
travelling tirelessly across the page: no ghost story, but the neat framing of
Scott’s life in terms of the homely myth of the Industrious Apprentice. In a
series of transformations Lockhart’s Scott becomes both the Wizard of the North
and the rich Laird of Abbotsford, graced with titles (baronet and sheriff),
broad acres and his own baronial hall.
Success is the central
theme of John Sutherland’s book too. But step by step he unwraps Lockhart’s
packaging, beginning with the anecdotes. Too many couldn’t have occurred at the
date specified: Sutherland refers drily to Lockhart’s ‘usual pragmatism about
chronology’. Place can also be a problem: there isn’t a local vantage-point,
apparently, from which Scott’s novel-writing hand could have been seen.
As for the great man’s
amiability, Sutherland wheels out his own tales of Scott the cold-hearted and
neglectful son, brother, husband and father, a paterfamilias with a
track-record of absenting himself from key family deathbeds and funerals. In
dealing with his betters, from clan chiefs to politicians in power, he was
obsequious and manipulative. He stole the materials and labour of writer
friends and co-authors. He deceived creditors, and manipulated or where
necessary sacrificed his business partners. Sutherland swings the hatchet, for
the same reason at least one recent biographer has hacked at Scott’s
contemporary Jane Austen, another writer bleached by 19th-century family
laundering. And reviewers have taken it personally, as though an old and close
friend is being traduced, which indeed is close to the mark.
Sutherland has one good
answer to those who hate his book: his subtitle, which is in fact the
series-title of a list of new literary biographies under Claude Rawson’s
general editorship. If you want an uncritical biography, Sutherland might say,
don’t buy this one but stick to Lockhart, or to some other modern academic
biography (such as Edgar Johnson’s two volumes, 1970) which essentially accepts
Lockhart’s facts and interpretations. At its best this book establishes that
received literary history, often based on biography, is too credulous, and that
writers and their advocates may have interests in lying. It can’t replace
Lockhart or Johnson as a detailed biographical record (it’s a fraction of the
length of either), but can and does target the ways in which they and their
kind deceive.
Rather like saints’
lives, to which they have a family resemblance, literary biographies exist to
exalt a writer and recruit admirers for an oeuvre. The soft focus hasn’t been
an absolute requirement (witness Lytton Strachey), but the soft pedal is common
to academic and nonacademic authors. It’s not Sutherland’s style to debate what
literary biography mostly does or what his will do. He is, however, already the
biographer of Mrs Humphry Ward, a personality he found at least as
objectionable as he finds Scott. He chooses to work against the grain – by
insisting that his subjects are anything but admirable characters, and by
adding that their fame exceeded their talent.
Sutherland cuts Scott
down to size in his trim discussions of each of the longer poems and novels in
their chronological place. Partly because Scott was so prolific, these
discussions can be bite-sized, at not much more than a page. Even at the
maximum eight pages, they come several to a chapter. It’s conventional in a
biography to give priority to hard facts – information about the first idea, if
any, then composition, publication and reception. But it seems to me a fault in
Sutherland’s method that he takes a consistently narrow view of the first and
last of these categories. First ideas tend to be something external that just
turned up – a crisis in the Peninsular Wars, a visit to the field of Waterloo,
or one or more grandees Scott wanted to compliment. Reception is less likely to
include a book’s reviews than its sales figures.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n17/marilyn-butler/burying-scott
Devil take the hindmost by John Sutherland
Devil take the hindmost
John
Sutherland
- Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science
Fiction and Prophecy by Patrick Parrinder
Liverpool, 170 pp, £25.00, July 1995, ISBN 0 85323 439 6 - The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot
Doubleday, 318 pp, £20.00, October 1995, ISBN 0 385 40366 6 - A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells,
edited by Krishan Kumar
Everyman, 271 pp, £5.99, November 1994, ISBN 0 460 87498 5
London Review
of Books - Vol 17, No. 24m 14 December
1995, p. 18-19
Among other certain
things (death, taxes etc) is the rule that no work of science fiction will ever
win the Booker Prize – not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine had no
chance against ‘literary’ authors like Hardy and Conrad. In the twenty-five
years it has been running, no SF title, as I recall, has even been shortlisted
for Martyn Goff’s real thing. In 1940, T.S. Eliot struck the recurrent
establishment note when he labelled Wells a ‘popular entertainer’.(Dickens was
stigmatised with the same term by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition.) Patrick Parrinder has
been opposing such anti-Wellsian prejudice for the best part of a quarter of a
century. His opposition takes the form of scholarly works which patiently mount
the case for critical respect. Parrinder’s contributions include the Critical Heritage volume
(1972), a study of Wells’s composition methods, H.G. Wells under Revision (1990, co-edited
with Christopher Rolfe), and the reissue of Wells’s scientific romances
currently appearing under the World’s Classics imprint. (For copyright reasons
– Wells having died in 1946 – this series will probably only be available in
America.) Parrinder’s more theoretical interventions include Science Fiction, Its Criticism and
Teaching (1980), a work which places Wells as ‘the pivotal figure
in the evolution of the scientific romance into modern science fiction’.
Shadows of the Future (a title which plays with the equivocal initials ‘SF’) is Parrinder’s
most forceful critical plea so far for the importance of Wells. He begins by
staking a claim for The Time
Machine as ‘one of the Prophetic Books of the 19th century’, a work
which ‘casts its own shadow over futurity’. In fact, two claims are made: one
for Wells as a prophet novelist, the other for prophetic fiction (PF?) as a
significant literary genre. Parrinder’s own discursive method, as he tells us,
is modelled on the Time Traveller’s – a series of ever further ranging
intellectual explorations. Wells is praised as the Edward Gibbon of his day,
and he is also celebrated for writing parodic fiction of Bakhtinian subtlety
whose designs are indistinguishable from the current hypotheses of theoretical
physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Parrinder’s chapters take the
form of free-wheeling meditations on Wellsian topoi – ‘Possibilities of Space and Time’,
‘The Fall of Empires’, ‘Utopia and Meta-Utopia’. In Part Two of Shadows of the Future, he
branches out into ‘Wells’s Legacy’ – which he takes to be the whole corpus of
20th-century British and American science fiction. There is a wealth of
massively informed insight in the book, but more impressive – and more
convincing – is the high seriousness with which Parrinder approaches his
subject.
There are, however,
three problems in joining Parrinder on his high critical road to a full
rehabilitation of Wells. The first is Parrinder’s advocacy of the early
scientific romances (the only works by Wells which have currency nowadays) as
‘prophecy’. A prophet wanting to communicate his forecasts to mankind might
engrave them on stone tablets; he might buy billboard space in Leicester Square
or an advertisement on Sky Television; the last thing he would do would be to
wrap his prophecies up in popular science fiction – a genre which ranks in
cultural authority with the fortune cookie and the cracker motto. A second problem
is SF’s appalling record in accurately predicting scientific discoveries and
future events. After the usual genuflections (‘Wells foresaw the future wars
and anticipated the weapons of war, notably the aeroplane, the tank and the
atomic bomb’) any comparison of, say, The
War in the Air with what actually happened aeronautically in the
world wars, or The First Men
in the Moon with Cape Canaveral in 1969, reveals how wildly wrong
science fiction invariably is. Nostradamus, Old Moore and Mystic Meg have SF
beat every time. (Parrinder sportingly quotes against himself Fredric Jameson’s
paradox that science fiction’s role in life is ‘to demonstrate and to dramatise
our incapacity to imagine the future’.) The third, and most intractable,
problem is the non-fiction prophecy which Wells wrote in the early 20th
century, during the period when he felt he was outgrowing scientific romance,
and put novels like The Time
Machine away as childish things. It is an embarrassment for
Wellsians that the master should so disvalue what his admirers, and posterity
generally, have seen as his masterwork.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n24/john-sutherland/devil-take-the-hindmost
Kids Gone Rotten by Matthew Bevis
Kids Gone
Rotten
Matthew Bevis
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by John Sutherland
Broadview, 261 pp, £10.95, December 2011, ISBN 978 1 55111 409 5 - Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion
Cape, 404 pp, £12.99, March 2012, ISBN 978 0 224 09119 0 - BuyTreasure
Island!!! by Sara Levine
Tonga, 172 pp, £10.99, January 2012, ISBN 978 1 60945 061 8
London
Review of Books – Vol 34, No. 20 – p.
26-28
John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885).
The first return to Treasure Island
was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was
published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in
which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the
32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story’.
Stevenson has the two men wonder whether there is ‘such a thing as an Author’,
and – if there is – whose side he’s on. The captain berates Silver for being a
‘damned rogue’; the rogue retorts: ‘Now, dooty is dooty, as I knows, and none
better; but we’re off dooty now; and I can’t see no call to keep up the
morality business.’ The captain is sure that the author is ‘on the side of
good’ (he means on his side). ‘“And so you was the judge, was you?” said
Silver, derisively … “What is this good? … by all stories, you ain’t no such
saint … Which is which? Which is good, and which bad?”’ As the captain starts
to denounce Silver again, the piece ends with the captain saying: ‘“But there’s
the ink-bottle opening. To quarters!” And indeed the author was just then beginning
to write the words: chapter xxxiii.’
Matthew Bevis teaches English at Keble College, Oxford.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n20/matthew-bevis/kids-gone-rotten
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