Gotham Diary:
Sit up!
28 February 2014
It was as though I had never read the book — Sense and Sensibility. Only the opening chapters were familiar as writing; everything thereafter stood out as differing, in some way or other, either from what I remembered or from Emma Thompson’s screenplay. (Thompson wisely does away with several characters, such as Lady Middleton, who would clutter a movie but who garnish the novel.) Beyond that, the texture was uncanny. I expected something a little more serious than Northanger Abbey and a lot more satirical. I encountered instead something far more serious and not at all funny. There were smiles, to be sure, in Elinor’s wry resignation, but no laughs; all the surprises were horrors. By the end, I was reading Sense and Sensibility as a first run at Mansfield Park.
It’s easy to let antithesis carry you away; that’s part of its charm. But Austen uses antithesis (a well-worked device by her time) to deflate it. Elinor is reserved; Marianne is expressive. But if Elinor is sensible — in the predicate sense of the word that we use today — it is not the case, antithesis notwithstanding, that Marianne is frivolous. She is every bit as serious-minded as her sister. And if her passion for Willoughby is reckless, it is in dead earnest: there is no doubt but that she is in love with the man, and not at all with merely being in love. She has a capacity for deep attachment beyond her years, and she suffers accordingly. In the very middle of the book, Austen rips a gash in the polite text: Marianne,
though unable to speak, seemed to feel all the tenderness of this behaviour, and after some time thus spent in joint affliction, she put all the letters into Elinor’s hands, and then covering her face with her handkerchief, almost screamed with agony.
If Austen were not already at this stage in her career an expert writer, those last four words would seem excessive if not ridiculous, but as it is they pull us behind the screen of civility for an instant, to give us a brief but unblinking look at raw human misery unparalleled in her work.
In Fanny Price, Jane Austen would pack Marianne’s emotional vulnerability within Elinor’s composure. Sense and Sensibility, though not as great a novel as Mansfield Park, is nearly as powerful. Its principal defect is its garrulity; there are too many things that Austen says more than once. There are perhaps too many characters; at the same time, there is not really enough of Colonel Brandon. (There cannot be more of Edward Ferrars, for the same reason that prevents Elinor from being forthcoming about Lucy Steele.) Because such drawbacks would all be overcome in the later novels, they have a certain piquant interest: they foreshadow (in their elimination) the extent to which Austen would become a master of compression. And, despite them, Sense and Sensibility is a very strong read. I closed the book with a regret that the young Marianne Dashwood would certainly applaud.
***
I knew that I should be going out today, but my plans didn’t really make sense: I was going to have lunch with Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil, and then meet up with Mr and Mrs NOLA at the Museum in the early evening. What to do in between? At the last minute, Fossil had to cancel — owing to an emergency, he was needed at work. Having booked a table at Demarchelier, I went there myself. Then, as long as I was out, I proceeded to Crawford Doyle (for the new Fay Weldon, of all things, Kehua! I read Alison Lurie’s rave in the NYRB at lunch) and from there to the Museum, where I took in the Marville show. By now, it was half-past three, and I wanted to get off my feet. I texted my regrets to Mrs NOLA and walked to the Orpheum, where I saw a showing of The Monuments Men.
When I read Robert Edsel’s book of the same name late last year, I knew that the movie would be coming out, and that George Clooney and Matt Damon would star in it. I pasted their faces, as it were, on the characters of George Stout and James Rorimer, and this made the book even livelier. (It was impossible to do this in the case of the woman impersonated by the beautiful Cate Blanchett.) I expected the movie to be a roaring success. Now I see why it hasn’t been one. The connection between the monuments and the men lacks vitality, leaving us with a rather quirky pseudo-military expedition that real fighting men were probably right to scorn. There is plenty of reverence and awe in the face of great art, but as the movie doesn’t tell us what made these men passionate about art, they come across as only slightly more mature versions of Indiana Jones. (John Goodman and Bill Murray are particularly loopy.) For a climax, it is necessary to fall back on the swashbuckling attempt to preserve masterpieces from the Russians. I did not expect The Monuments Men to be a great movie, but I did expect it to be about grown men. Top marks, though, to Alexandre Desplat, for yet another dazzling score.