Mansfield Park, the (almost entirely predictable) Conclusion

Avid readers may recall a recent blog post in which I complained about Miss Jane Austen's tedious build up (some 37 chapters or so) to the resolution of Mansfield Park. She did go on about it--but that was the point. Country life was a maddening reiteration of similar days, followed by tea.

Who wouldn't have wanted a little amusement? Some amateur theatricals perhaps? But (apparently) they were immoral--so we knew what the end must be. We ought to have braced ourselves for it. But lulled into a stupor by thirty-seven chapters of Fanny's life as a poor relation--we weren't quite prepared for divine retribution.

We fully expected the eldest son to be stricken--and stricken he was, but Miss Austen fooled us by not entirely disposing of him. Almost fatally chastened, he was kept alive for the sole purpose of preventing his younger brother, Edmund, from inheriting the title, thereby forcing Edmund to become a Church of England clergyman (notwithstanding the absolutely conclusive arguments of his would be girl-friend, the beautiful and wealthy Mary Crawford, against it.)

But Edmund doesn't care about her, really. She's too worldly and ambitious. She actually hopes his older brother will die so Edmund can become the Baronet (a social rank once described, as '...neither a gentleman nor a lord...' but still, not bad, compared to being a Church of England clergyman.)

Never mind--she'll get over him--because she's got what it takes to succeed in London--beauty, money and the kind of low morals that can't see any objection to amateur theatricals.

And the rest of them must be similarly dealt with. It's like a family gathering in Afghanistan, thirty-seven chapters of boring, and suddenly, for hardly any reason at all, a drone strike!

The eldest daughter is chivvied into marrying a complete idiot, because he has the big bucks. She can't take it for long, however, and soon has a torrid affair (we assume 'torrid' although it happens in London, beyond our horizon) with Henry Crawford, the very same amateur thespian who is either trifling with, or in love with, Fanny. [He is the brother of Mary Crawford, who is either trifling with or in love with Edmund, Fanny's cousin. Try to keep up!]

Fanny's other cousin, Julia, elopes with the other thespian, Mr. Yates, pretty much a 'no-good' although not charged with anything except acting. Julia is thereby doomed to spend her life with somebody completely 'ineligible'

It's all rather shocking, but it is interesting that divine retribution, which takes the form of grotesque marriages of convenience, scandalous divorces, elopements and general degradation, should also be the reward of virtue, for (as we had long suspected) Fanny marries her cousin, Edmund, dooming themselves to a cheese-paring life in the Parsonage. Happily, they were so virtuous we can assume a sexless marriage, thereby avoiding further genetic damage to the ruling class.

Having brought you to the end of Mansfield Park I am obliged to confess that I cheated a little. Just to be sure I finished the story in my lifetime, I got the film, starring Frances O'Connor. It was quite good. Film Fanny is a bit more 'gamine' than Book Fanny, but all the more charming for that. At a brisk 112 minutes, the film must be about 900 minutes shorter than the book--cutting away a vast over-burden of subtlety--much of which we could do without.

They could have cut another 10 or 12 minutes by leaving out scenes, totally without any basis in the book, suggesting that Sir Thomas tortured and raped his slaves.

But who knows? We can't assume much from what Miss Austen leaves out of her stories. Maybe, in 1812, all Baronets with sugar plantations were known to be rapists--so that the film people felt obliged to clarify what Miss Austen considered common knowledge.

As for the veiled sexuality, Austen was a country girl. She (and Fanny) knew where the kittens came out--and how they happened to be in there. As absurdly innocent as her heroine appears to us, Fanny lived in an age when adult women were pregnant half their lives, and babies were born at home. It wasn't a mystery--just another unpleasantness which, in books at least, could be avoided.

Reading Miss Austen

I've been reading Mansfield Park. Last week I read Sense and Sensibility.

There is something to be said for Miss Austen's story (she only wrote one, apparently.) She noticed everything about her characters, and brought it all to our attention. Her story has given rise to many excellent movies, and her detailed explanation of her character's feelings must be a great aid to the actors assigned to play them.

The movies are much to be preferred to her books, where characters of the utmost delicacy speak to each other in full paragraphs (sometimes several paragraphs at a go) made up of sentences whose brilliantly chosen words, are arranged in four or five clauses each--so that, on a Kindle, you are likely to lose track of whether you are still at Mansfield Park, or perhaps at Downton Abbey, or some country parsonage, where more or less identical characters are agonizing over the same dilemma ('three thousand a year' versus 'true affection'.)

It is no wonder that Americans consider the British upper classes (as depicted in British fiction) twits and poltroons, redeemed only by our envy of those high-waisted Empire gowns and the libraries and stables of their country estates.

It is hard to believe that Britannia ruled the waves for the satisfaction of Miss Austen's characters, that India had to be enslaved, the Welsh forced to mine coal, the Irish to dig canals, so that these mannered fellows, and their tiresome women, could fuss about their amateur theatricals, send starving poachers to Australia, misuse their poacher's daughters before ousting them into the streets, thereby condemning their bastard children to miserable (but, hey! at least they were short) lives as annoying street 'urchins' (albeit less annoying, because less frequently encountered, than their recognized children, confined to nurseries until exiled to school, there to be buggered by upperclassmen and whipped by sadistic Masters, with only the 'heir' (and possibly 'the spare') having any hope of enjoying life thereafter.)

All fiction, we are told, is about conflict, but never in the course of western literature have so many excellent words been devoted to such trivial agonies, or so dexterously avoided genuine human suffering. It makes us reflect upon how much of our cultural heritage is owed to 'markets'. Austen's stories exist because there were Austen characters, no doubt wearing high-waisted Empire gowns, to read them.

Their half-siblings (the 'street Arabs', pick-pockets and prostitutes) were illiterate and penniless. No use addressing their reality, and certainly not in sentences of twenty-seven carefully chosen multi-syllabic words, divided into several subordinate clauses.

Who knows how much Miss Austen knew, or even suspected, of those darker realities, but Mansfield Park, no matter how boring and lengthy, rings truer to our ears than Dickens. Maybe her keen sense of how much conflict would be plausible to her readers is the reason we prefer her.  Or perhaps it is the absence of special pleading--that pervasive, suffocating social consciousness, by which Dickens constantly abjures us to 'feel' for his characters--who nevertheless remain paper dolls. 

Miss Fanny Price's dilemmas, the trivial problems of a poor relation, what to wear to her first ball, how to politely reject an unpleasing suitor, how to deal with her hots for her first cousin (the boring and priggish Edmund, a second son and a C of E clergyman, the only fates worse than the guillotine) are amazingly 'real' by comparison to Mr. Carton's nobility.

I'm just beginning Chapter 37.

Still over twenty to go.

Not sure I'll make it.

From Bath to Schuyler Springs

If you escaped a meaningless life in a dying town in upstate New York, you might hate Richard Russo's latest novel, “Everybody's Fool”. Still, you'd have to laugh. That's how good a writer Russo is.

In this version of small town America the characters from “Nobody's Fool”--are ten years older, the men even more feckless, the women still grimly capable, still despairing (several of them in and out of the madhouse at Utica, and no wonder.)

Like the Greeks at Ilium everyone is subject to the random torments of the Gods (these days, 'luck'.) Sully, the unhero of 'Nobody's Fool' (played by Paul Newman in the movie version) has become rich through no virtue of his own, while the venal building contractor, Carl Roebuck (played by Bruce Willis) is now poor.

Otherwise they are the same as they were. Sully remains a loiterer in life, hanging around, no use to to his family, no longer appealing to his lover. He's dying, and suffering (fleeting) regrets for the damage he has more-or-less unintentionally done, in his unintentional life.

Roebuck is also the same, an incompetent contractor, a chiseler and cheat, but now his wife has left him, taking all his money. He has remained behind in Bath, a city with an inferiority complex. The mayor, a former academic (by definition, incompetent) has hired Carl to restore an abandoned spa, the relict of a previous era of hubris when Bath tried to copy Schuyler Springs, a sparkling place where tourists take the waters, watch horse racing, eat rugula, and do whatever the just must do in heaven.

It is somehow reassuring to find Sully and Roebuck still at it, although, as in real life, the heroes of one story are the subplot of another.

This story belongs to Police Chief Douglas Raymer, a laughingstock who ran for office on the misprinted, slogan “We're not happy until you're not happy.” He is grieving the death of his wife Becka. In her haste to leave him last year she slipped on a throw rug and tumbled downstairs 'like a slinky'. He found her folded up on the bottom step, neck broken—together with a note urging him to forgive her and to 'be happy for us'.

He's possibly the only person in town who doesn't know which 'us' she meant.

He has a clue. An electronic garage door opener was found in her car—an opener for somebody else's garage. The problem for adulterers, in Bath as elsewhere, is not so much time and opportunity, as discovery. Small town neighbors are likely to recognize your car, note that it's parked on the wrong street, and draw the correct conclusion. Solution: borrow your lover's garage door opener. Dash inside when nobody's looking.

But can the Chief of Police go around town trying the opener on everybody's garage? Not very dignified, maybe not even legal. And what good would it do? The right garage might not even be in Bath. The Chief's assistant, a typical Russo female, more intelligent, sympathetic and devious than any male, suggests Schuyler Springs. Alternatively, she says, the same opener might work on a dozen garages. Becka's dead. Let her go. Get rid of the opener.

It's a dilemma, and dilemmas were never Chief Raymer's strong point, even before he got so depressed and confused. Did things get worse when he fainted at the funeral of the local Judge, falling into the grave, losing the opener under casket? Not really.

Did they get better when he persuaded Sully and Carl to dig up the grave to find it? Of course not, things always go from bad to worse in Bath.

There's lots more. There's an ex-con with a list of people who need to be paid back—including BITCH (ex-wife), MAMA BITCH (former mother-in-law) NIGGER COP (the elegant Jerome Bond, or as he puts it, 'Bond... Jerome Bond') SULLY himself, and OLD WOMAN (a former teacher, ten years dead, who haunts the men in the story, asking them to think.)

There's Sully's friend 'Rub'--a man barely within the definition of human, yet filled with longing and devotion, and his counterpart, Sully's dog (also named 'Rub') the world's most disgusting canine.

There's murder and mayhem.

Any reader who has made the hard slog from Bath to Schuyler Springs might spend most of the book as confused as Chief Raymer. It's not so much that you can't go home again, it's more a question of 'Why would you?'

Except ... it's so funny.