Gotham Diary:
The Post Office Revenue
May 2018 (II)
8 and 11 May
Tuesday 8th
Lady Susan, an epistolary novel, appears to be Jane Austen’s first complete work of mature fiction. She made no attempt to publish it, however; her nephew appended the text to his 1871 memoir. So it exists in a limbo, between Austen’s juvenilia and the canon of six novels that begins with Northanger Abbey and ends with Persuasion. The Penguin edition, edited by Margaret Drabble, packages it with fragments of uncompleted projects, The Watsons and Sanditon. Austen abandoned The Watsons, but work on Sanditon was, in Drabble’s incisive phrase, “interrupted by her death.”
Although formally finished, Lady Susan ends with an abandoned air, too. There are 41 letters in all, but I suspect that there were a few more, which Austen scuttled with a Conclusion. Having brought her tale to its climax, she may have lost interest in laying out the dénouement in letters that could no longer shock or surprise. There was also the problem of a nice young man’s affections. Like those of Edwin in Mansfield Park, these required time to shift attention, from one lady to another, and the Conclusion informs us of this with a similar caginess as to how long it took. However long, it was time that the quick short term of Lady Susan didn’t have.
Lady Susan Vernon is a widow. Her father’s title is never disclosed, a detail that encompasses the mystery of how she came to be what she is. Still beautiful at 35, and more accomplished at coquetry than ever, she is in the middle of a torrid, adulterous affair when she writes the opening letter to her brother-in-law, announcing her intention to visit him. The reasons behind her decision to pay the visit are suggested in the second letter, written to a a bosom buddy in London, but Lady Susan is too intelligent to incriminate herself explicitly, so the full extent of her misconduct with Mr Manwaring, the tranquillity of whose home she has disturbed, emerges only at the end, when this lover, who like almost all the men in the novel does not write letters, is seen to be entering Lady Susan’s abode. In the third letter, we learn that Mrs Vernon, the wife of Lady Susan’s brother-in-law, is unhappy to receive her, given her notorious reputation, but feels obliged to yield to her husband’s generosity. Thus Lady Susan is marked as an eighteenth-century fiction. In the Victorian era that followed, Mrs Vernon and her real-life counterparts would not suffer such oppression. We don’t know if Jane Austen lived to see the full transformation; it is, after all, Sir Thomas Bertram, and not his wife, who refuses to take the disgraced Maria back to Mansfield Park.
In the fourth letter, Mrs Vernon’s brother, Reginald de Courcy, writes to his sister to “congratulate you and Mr Vernon on being about to receive into your family, the most accomplished coquette in England.”
… but by all that I can gather, Lady Susan possesses a degree of captivating deceit which must be pleasing to witness and detect. I shall be with you very soon …
Reginald’s leering, sneering tone is designed to set him up as a target of Lady Susan’s conquistatorial ambitions, and so rapid is his tumble that his father, in the twelfth letter, feels obliged to intervene. Sir Reginald’s formal understatement is almost funny.
You must be sensible that as an only son and the representative of an ancient family, your conduct in life is most interesting to your connections.
Just as almost-funny the outrage in Reginald’s climactic letter to Lady Susan:
But since it must be so, I am obliged to declare that all the accounts of your misconduct during the life and since the death of Mr Vernon which had reached me in common with the world in general, and gained my entire belief before I saw you, but which you by the exertion of your perverted abilities had made me resolve to disallow, have been unanswerably proved to me. Nay, more, I am assured that a connection, of which I had never before entertained a thought, as for some time existed, and still continues to exist between you and the man, whose family you robbed of its peace, in return for the hospitality with which you were received into it!
This from the thirty-sixth letter. In response, Lady Susan briskly dismisses Reginald with the expectation “of surviving my share in this disappointment.” The four shortish letters that follow make it clear that, with Lady Susan’s conquest of Reginald undone, the story has run out of air. Was Austen too squeamish to compose an ending similar to that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, upon whose Marquise de Merteuil Lady Susan seems at times to be so clearly modeled (in the tone of her ruthlessness, especially)? In that book, the beautiful villainess is disfigured by a horrible pox that, together with her public disgrace, force her to retire entirely from the world. Her partner in crime is killed in a duel. Lady Susan has no partner in crime. Austen simply does not believe in melodramatic finales: the wicked, in Austen’s world, are made ridiculous. But none of her correspondents, save perhaps Lady Susan herself, has the wit (or the malice) for ridicule. If Lady Susan is to be condemned to marry the rich and foolish Sir James, whom she intended to foist upon her daughter, Frederica, whose dullness may be attributed to Lady Susan’s mistreatment and neglect, and if Frederica is to capture the affections of Reginald, then Austen is going to have to step in and tell us all this herself, as she does in the Conclusion.
In the Conclusion, almost-funny gives way to funny.
This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer.
One is put in mind of a powerful nanny who is breaking up a tiresome children’s game and sending her charges to bed, or at least to dress for dinner. The crack about Post Office revenue is pure Austen, as we know not only from the established novels but from her youthful sketches as well. Exploding the artifice of dramatically offended respectability, it is the joke of a well-behaved lady who has taught herself to write down what she cannot say, so that when the reader laughs, she is not in the room to scold. The satisfaction of Lady Susan lies in seeing how long Austen can carry on writing prose that, like her correspondents, does not seem to know what is really going on — the enrichment of the Post Office — and in enjoying how almost-funny the temptation to tell the truth occasionally makes her.
***
Friday 11
Duly, then, we watched Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Lady Susan: Love and Friendship.
It is, above all, a Whit Stillman story. The principal characters are attractive and at least apparently affluent young people, or youngish. (The only older woman, Lady de Courcy, is meltingly played by Jemma Redgrave; she sounds almost exactly like her aunt.) They are clever. Their manners are polished beyond effortlessness, to the point of unconsciousness. They regard enthusiasm as a bore. Aside from Frank Churchill, there is nobody like them in Jane Austen’s novels, not even the Crawfords.
A fair amount of the conversation is lifted from the letters, although, so far as I could tell, all the almost-funny bits were replaced by realistic remarks that weren’t even mildly amusing. Indeed, all of Love and Friendship‘s fun was invented especially for the movie itself, and put in the mouth of Sir James Martin. In Lady Susan, as I recall, we’re not given much in the way of examples, even indirect ones, of this man’s allegedly foolish speech; his boorishness is evidenced simply by his uninvited arrival at Churchill. He materializes with equal spontaneousness in the film, but then he never shuts up. He goes on and on about getting lost on the way to the Vernons’ house, because he could see the church, but not the hill; that this might be intended as wit is suggested when he collapses into mention of the great family of Blenheim, mumbling “no connection,” presumably but not certainly with reference to the Vernons. Later, when corrected about the number of Commandments — he thinks there are twelve — he wonders, then, which ones will have to go. Personally, he’d be happy without the commandment to honor the Sabbath, because it interferes with his hunting. Tom Bennett, the actor who impersonates him, punctuates Sir James’s fatuities with a perfect whinnying laugh, the likes of which I haven’t heard since Alice Brady. He’s really marvelous, but. It is impossible to surmise Jane Austen’s reaction to the cinema, but I really cannot imagine her sitting through the show.
I do wonder what she would make of Kate Beckinsale, whose Lady Susan is fetching enough but really rather harmless. She is obviously Stillman’s favorite character, and he can’t treat her harshly. The film’s sympathies turn to Lady Susan as flowers to the sun. It is she who breaks with Reginald de Courcy (an interesting, but possibly dim, Xavier Samuel). Far from suffering with Sir James, she imports the strong, silent Manwaring (upgraded to a lordship) into her immediate circle. There he is, standing alongside her, rather like — but in key ways not like — a Wooden Indian, at her daughter’s wedding reception. One wonders if the husband will ever learn that his favorite interlocutor has made him a cuckhold.
We rented Love and Friendship, and felt glad that we hadn’t bought it. It’s handsome and reasonably entertaining, and it has its funny bits. But it hangs uncertainly, like one of those rickety rope-and-plank bridges in action movies, between two aesthetic realms. Whit Stillman is no cynic; his beautiful young people face genuine moral problems, and try to do their best, even if the lamp that he burns for virtue is not as steady as Austen’s. But he is a filmmaker. No filmmaker since the Thirties, arguably, has filled his scripts with such intelligent badinage, but the point is that this badinage pours forth from men and women even more self-confident, and possibly better looking, than Myrna Loy and William Powell. As for Austen, the ruler of the land on the other side of the bridge, she is a writer. And the tale that wobbles over the chasm is the last one that she will allow her characters to dictate. Henceforth, she will tell the story, impersonal, invisible, neither rich nor beautiful perhaps but in complete command of the English language, and with a great deal more to say than any of her inventions. All that can be said for Lady Susan is that it is a milestone in Austen’s development, tremendously interesting as such but only as such. The true climax occurs only after she has rounded up all the quill pens, poured all the ink down the drain, and stated her regrets — her regrets, not those of Lady Susan or Reginald or anybody else among her correspondents — for the Post Office revenue.
Love and Friendship is the title of a late entry in the catalogue of Austen’s juvenilia; like Lady Susan it is epistolary in form, but its tone is entirely mock-gothic, and it was apparently intended to be read to the Austen family, provoking choruses of laughter. I think that it was a mistake of Whit Stillman to borrow this title for his Lady Susan — possibly a curse. The more I muse on the difference between the achievements of his film and her novella, the more like Sir James he looks. Had he consulted me, I’d have urged him to call his movie Finding Churchill instead.
Bon week-end à tous!