By Dan Read
Grandson Vinny had been running around all day and had taken two messy poops. So, it was bath time after dinner. I ran the bath and gave him some cups to play with and got him in the water. We washed up in a few minutes, and then I asked him if he was ready to get out or if he wanted to play in the tub. He said he wanted to play. When our own kids Quentin and Dino were little and I was on bath duty, I looked for a book with short chapters that I could read while they played in the tub. That’s when I started reading Jane Austen. My sister had given me a paperback collection of the six novels (plus Lady Susan). I pulled it down from the shelf—perfect! I got hooked quickly, and the book lived in the guest bathroom where I read and reread it until it finally fell apart, long after the kids started to take their baths alone.
Thus, it was a retro move to pick up a volume of the collected novels (they are still always at the ready in the bathroom) and start reading Emma while Vinny played with his cups. I finally had to put the timer on to get him out of the bathtub. It went off just as Mr. Knightley came in to console Mr. Woodhouse on the gloomy prospect of life without “poor Miss Taylor!”
All this got me to thinking about Jane Austen in particular and books in my life in general. I read mostly military history and science fiction when I was a young teenager. What really first introduced me to literature was being admitted to prep school in 1967. Deerfield sent me a list at the beginning of the summer of great books that we were expected to have read. My mom, always a great reader herself, skimmed over the list. The only woman author listed for English and American literature was Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. (I do not remember if I noticed—I don’t think so–or she commented.) Mom, never one to follow the rules, told me I definitely had to read Pride and Prejudice. I did and it did not make much of an impression. That was 1967: the romantic adventures of the English gentry just were not “relevant” (a favorite word of the time) in the shadows of Vietnam war protests and Jimi Hendrix. I dutifully plowed through a fair number of the books on the list; they never asked us about them once I got to Deerfield.
I read literature for classes in high school and in college. I didn’t really read much outside of that. My real awakening to literature came after I had dropped out of college in 1974 and joined the Army. I was stationed in Germany, and on one of my first free days I went downtown to a local bookstore, Buchhandlung Herwig. My high school and college German was decent, but I knew I needed something fairly simple, so I asked one of the young women clerks what I should read. She recommended the works of Heinrich Böll. Böll was born in 1917 and was a veteran of the war. Like many German postwar writers, he rejected traditional style and became a devotee of Hemingway. Short crisp sentences and simple words made him very accessible (later when I helped our son Quentin prepare for a year in Dresden, Böll’s Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Diary) was the first thing we read.) Over the next few years I read pretty much everything he ever wrote. I have been a big fan of literature ever since.
My wife often calls Jane “the other woman.” She prefers Jane Eyre and modern women writers. I don’t bring Jane to bed any more—Maria probably got tired of me cackling over Mrs. Bennet’s silly antics. But, I read the novels again and again (so far this year I have “only” read three), devour sequels and spinoffs, and feel the living presence of Elizabeth and Darcy and their colleagues. My sister, who re-introduced me to Jane, and I can talk at any time about Jane without need to explain relevance or context.
So why do I like Jane Austen so much? That is hard to answer. I think there are several reasons. I like her style, especially the ironic tone and comments that she makes. She has no overt mission or lesson to teach us, life itself will teach us if we are willing to learn. She just creates life in real and believable ways (why Charles Dickens, with his crude caricatures and unbelievable plots, is more popular still makes me scratch my head).
And with the exception of Emma, these books are all about outsiders trying to gain acceptance. Granted they are about the English gentry, who were by definition insiders, but the main characters are all struggling to find a place in that world that will give them a good life without compromising their principles or their identity. I was always the shortest, youngest, dumpiest kid in my class and struggled for acceptance throughout my first two decades. Battling my father’s gigantic ego was another huge hurdle on the road to acceptance. My father made a career out of trying to subdue my mother (so it’s not surprising to me that Emma was his favorite Austen novel); my older brother and I fought many battles with him as we moved into adulthood. Like Fanny Price in front of Sir Thomas, I so often felt unworthy around him. I can relate to Fanny and Elinor and their looking on from the margins.
Thinking of my mom, and her battles to maintain her principles and identity, gives the struggles (and ultimate triumphs) of Austen’s women resonance. Mom would, I am sure, have loved to have been able to cut Da down to size like Elizabeth rejected Darcy—she was not going to be his Fanny.
And, these books all end happily. Marriage not only works but is right and true for both partners. That’s not something I experienced growing up. My mom and dad fought a lot, and they wound up getting divorced when I was 17 after my dad had a flagrant affair with a graduate student. All of my father’s sisters wound up getting divorced. My grandparents were married for almost 70 years, but I think their marriage worked because my grandmother put up with and accommodated the difficult man that her husband was. It became a game for her, and she got very good at it. (My mom loved to tell the story of how she had a big fight about money with my grandfather, and then she came out triumphantly waving a $20 bill.)
Nowadays, I am a very lucky man. I thought until I was over 30 that I would never find real happiness in marriage—someone who truly loved me back (cue Luther Vandross, “She Loves Me Back”). I did. I still do. I’m glad to join Elizabeth and Darcy and Anne and Frederick and all the other happily married Austen characters. Reading their stories again affirms my life!