A Walk with Jane Austen (18 page)

A guy with a thick down coat (it's hardly that cold) and a backpack gets on, so in the name of self-preservation I get on a different car, holding my breath nearly the whole time, thinking how the world has gone awry.

The British Library sounds dull enough, but Jane's writing desk and a manuscript chapter from
Persuasion
are on display, so I thought I might as well stop by.

Now I can hardly walk straight, all tingly and in awe, as though my breath has been taken away. I thought perhaps I might throw up, like a silly little romantic heroine upon walking into a ballroom and seeing her long-lost love.

I went to the information desk, asked where the Austen material was, and began to think,
Of course, they have far more than just J. A. material.
When I walked into the display room—the Sir John Ritblat Gallery—I began to get a sense of how much I had underestimated the library. I had to walk past the music case to get to the literature—I skipped the Beatles stuff and stumbled on to find original scores, quickly and greedily realizing that they were Beethovens
Ninth
,Handel's
Messiah
,Bach's
Well-Tempered CUvier
,and something from Mozart.

To be so close—on the other side of thick glass, looking through dim light—to these manuscripts that they actually touched, that they wrote. I determined to stand there until I had them memorized.

Beethoven's is a huge thick book done by one of his copyists; it includes Beethoven's corrections, but I can't tell which notes are his. Bach's is a single sheet of music, and the notes themselves are musical, almost joyful—neat, full round notes with squiggly lines connecting them. They have
Messiah
open to the “Hallelujah Chorus,” and Handel is gloriously messy. Jane said once, half-joking to Cassandra, “An artist cannot do anything slovenly.”
¹
But sometimes it's too difficult to be neat and create. Handel's writing is large and scrawled, with the words not entirely written out: “And he shall reign for ever and eve… Alleluia Alleluia.” I suppose Jane would have known all these composers. Her great-great-uncle, the Duke of Chandos, was actually one of Handel's patrons.
²

In the literature case is a copy of
Beowulf
from the eleventh century—the only surviving manuscript—individual disintegrating pages with a brown script I cannot read glued into a big book. There's romance literature from Italy, writing from Alexander Pope. Charlotte Bronte's notebook with
Jane Eyre
—tiny perfect writing with tons of space in between the lines, open to the part where Rochester proposes. Next to Brontë, Austen. Her small script with lines crossed through
and words corrected looks like a mess compared to Brontë. Then there is Lewis Carroll, the original
Alices Adventures Underground
,which he illustrated himself and later became
Alice in Wonderland.
An early edition of Dickens, a typewritten page of Virginia Woolf with her husband's notes.

In the middle of the room is a lease that Shakespeare may or may not have actually signed. A ship's log has an account of Nelsons death from a French musket shot on the deck of the
Victory.
Nelson actually thought very highly of Jane's brother Frank, who was then captain of the
Canopus.
Frank just missed the Battle of Trafalgar, where Nelson died. He regretted it all his life. He had been assigned to protect a convoy to Cartagena and turned back as soon as he got word of the enemy fleet leaving Cadiz, but by the time he got back everything was over.
³
Perhaps his life would have been completely different had he been there. He had survived battles enough—regular routs where he captured or destroyed multiple ships that should have completely overpowered him within shooting distance from cliff-side batteries
⁴
—but perhaps he would not have been so lucky at Trafalgar. As it was, he was safely and regrettably away, and Nelson was lost.

I felt as though I had walked into a sacred space, and everywhere I turned there was something new to inspire awe. I wondered about all of these people, the people whose work is here. Aside from genius, and a great gift, I think what they must have in common is a great energy for life, a not holding back. They kept going—whether it was art, or science, or music, or all of the above, they were determined to seek things out, to create. And to go in their given direction. (Had Jane attempted to write Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier
—or even Brontes
Jane Eyre
—she would have failed miserably. She knew what her realm
was, what she called her “little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”
⁵
I could feel their energy. Perhaps the gift inside them could not be silenced. Perhaps they could not help it. Madeleine L'Engle says you know you are a writer if you can t help but write, if you feel like you must.
⁶
I feel like I must. I want to obey that calling. I'm not a genius. I would be content simply to do some good work. It's possible to stifle things like this from laziness, or to choke them with fear or even misplaced humility. But when you can be brave, what a joy to have a chance to discover and create. That's how I felt wandering through all this greatness.

I found a speech written by Queen Elizabeth I on the subject of her proposed marriage. It is a mess—large writing, words and sentences crossed out, things written in the margins, sideways, so that the page is all filled up. And I turned around to see the actual Magna Carta. Unbelievable. I stared almost unseeing at a page from da Vinci's notebook until my mesmerized brain was absolutely full.

Then, as if to make everything else seem unimportant, I wandered over to King's Cross to have a look at Harry Potter's dear Platform 9¾.

Jane was not beautiful. I think this is one of the reasons I like her, or the idea of her. Actually, really, we don't know what she looked like. The only sure likeness we have of her face is a little pencil and watercolor drawing her sister did that looks like just the work of an afternoon and that no one thought looked especially like her at the time. The proportions seem off—the shoulders slope, the eyes and mouth and shape of the head and neck are not quite right—yet nearly every image we have of her has been adapted somehow from this. They probably never imagined it would make it outside their little family circle. And now it sits in a little case in the National Portrait Gallery in London, the light going off and on from time to time to protect it. It is softer and fainter than I imagined it would be.

Jane's neighbors thought she was “a very pretty girl,”
¹
but her niece Anna, who grew to be very close to her aunt in spite of their seventeen
On Beauty
125

years difference, presents a slightly harsher view. She talks of her “Figure tall & slight…her quick firm step,” her “clear
&c
healthy” complexion, “the fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark; the bright hazel eyes to match, & the rather small but well shaped nose.” Which all sounds very nice. Then Anna adds: “One hardly understands how with all these advantages she could yet fail of being a decidedly handsome woman.”
²

I've often felt that way myself—there are parts that should add up to a good-looking whole but don't entirely. Tall and thin, with lovely eyes, a decent complexion (not as much of that smooth tan as I would like to have gotten from my Norwegian forebears, but still decent), thickish brown hair that looks good when I do something with it, although that's not very often, and cheeks that are “a little too full,”
³
which is how another family acquaintance described Jane. My ears are definitely crooked, and there are moments when I look in the mirror and think the jowls are beginning. I've often thought that if there is beauty here, it is with a kind of weirdness underlying it—like the disproportions of Cassandra's sketch—that throws everything off.

This is one difference between my brother and me—he seems entirely assured of his own good looks, and I am always questioning mine. I think this must be one of the thousands of settings God tweaks when we are being made—the tendency to confidence or to doubt. On most anything, my brother's bent is to be completely sure of himself; mine is to question.

Our world prizes physical beauty like nothing else. As a woman, to attain perfection—that antithetical starved yet voluptuous look that is the current American fashion—is the highest good. Other normal sorts of bodies—other normal sorts of people—are not as valuable. And you
can tell yourself hundreds of times that this is all ridiculous, which it is, but it creates a gnawing self-doubt that is ready to welcome you anytime you start to feel weird.

We all have our insecurities. Mine, aside from my amazing disappearing chin, is my stomach, which I would actually prefer to disappear entirely. My friends think its ridiculous. I try to tell them that I am actually a fat little skinny girl, and they don't believe me (until one of them saw me in a bathing suit and said, “I can see why you say that.”) Actually, I have been surreptitiously watching at Pilâtes classes and such, and I'm beginning to think that “fat little skinny girl” is an entirely normal body type. There are thousands of us, skinny girls that look ridiculous in bikinis.

The thing is, it's easy to hide this particular fault with a good outfit, a series of carefully constructed optical illusions. But it is still there, in my mind, this weird little body, my skinny little frame with the stomach of a much larger woman, and I know it even when other people don't.

I don't believe in plastic surgery. For one thing, I think it's far easier to learn to be content with your body than to have someone knock you out, cut you open, and suck things out or stuff foreign objects inside you. Maybe I've got that wrong. Maybe surgery really is easier than contentment. But I think contentment is healthier and more admirable and in some way much more attractive. So I'm trying not to be ridiculous, trying to be content with a little beauty, choosing to believe that my stomach looks big only because the rest of me is so very small.

My sister-in-law, who is wise and witty, tells me that women are supposed to have stomachs. Jane probably had a stomach and couldn't have cared. But then they were (and I think the British still are) much
more satisfied with normal sorts of bodies than we are. I don't think Jane would have wanted to be the most beautiful person in the room. I imagine she was incredibly content with her own little blend of beauty and intelligence and wit.

She does not give her characters detailed physical descriptions. Our introduction to Lizzy is simply that “she is not half so handsome as Jane.”
⁴
In the first sentence of
Emma
,we learn that she is “handsome, clever, and rich.”
⁵
Enough to get an instant impression and all we need to know for the moment, but details of hair or face or clothes are clearly unimportant. More carefully drawn is
Persuasions
Anne Elliot, who “had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early.” In spite of her “delicate features and mild dark eyes,” she is “faded and thin.”
⁶
With just a few words we know what Anne was like. Jane tells us little but everything we need. She didn't labor over this. We get to know her characters mostly through what they say, their friendships, their place in society, the choices they make.

Characters actually—as in moral character, not fictional creations— are described with much more detail in Austen's writing than faces ever are. Long before we know of Elinor's “remarkably pretty figure”
⁷
and that “there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness”
⁸
in Marianne's eyes, we learn of Elinors “strength of understanding and coolness of judgment” and that Marianne is “everything but prudent.” She has resolved never to learn to govern her emotions and is “sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.”
⁹