Rereading Vanity Fair

I've been rereading _Vanity Fair_, and getting a lot more out of it this time. In part I've become a better reader over the last maybe fifteen years (including immersion in Austen), in part I read the introduction by Joseph Warren Beach in my ancient Modern Library edition. In _Tom Jones_ or _Tristram Shandy_ the constant presence of the author didn't bother me, perhaps because the writers were more sympathetic characters than Thackeray, with his moralizing and heavy-handed disdains. But Beach points out that the readers of the day were unable to read _Barry Lyndon_ with sophistication and Thackeray had to bear that in mind. It's not simple but there's a way of reading _VF_ that takes that into account and picks up irony in the very heavy-handedness noted above. How to clearly distinguish the layers of intention, though? It's probably not possible for the casual even close reader without knowing the literary and social environment of the time, but I'm seeing a richness of levels I don't recall in Dickens.

Nabokov, Turgenev, Yeats, pwnage

In Ada, or Ardor Nabokov writes, apropos of nothing of particular interest to me,

We now pass into the music room with its little-used piano, and a corner room called the Gun Room containing a stuffed Shetland pony which an aunt of Dan Veen’s, maiden name forgotten, thank Log, once rode. On the other, or some other, side of the house was the ball-room, a glossy wasteland with wallflower chairs. "Reader, ride by" ("mimo, chitatel’", as Turgenev wrote).

On reading the supposed quote by Turgenev I was struck by its similarity to Yeats's self-written epitaph, "no conventional phrase": "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!". I wondered that was an intentional reference, if I was seeing things, if anyone else had noticed, if Yeats's phrase was in fact conventional; so I decided to investigate, but couldn't immediately figure out how to search Turgenev's works based on a short transliterated Russian phrase. As it happens, there are amazing resources on the web to be found using the most naive google possible, resources that mock my ability to do research. (More notes on the passage starting here.) If I understand the Ada Online notes, the French translation of the novel makes the likely intentional Yeats reference explicit, and I'm told Nabokov checked his French translations for accuracy.

Presumably the careful reader interested in things Nabokov is interested in finds such delightful surprises on every page of the novel. So far I've been noticing cross-references and small felicities (including some stuff about Mansfield Park) but mostly I'm finding the style tiresome, which wasn't the case in Lolita or Pale Fire that I can recall (it's been 15 or 20 years, yikes). Also the Borgesian theme makes me want to put the book down and pick up Ficciones instead. Probably not the right frame of mind to read in.

More on Nabokov in (I think) a similar mood from James Wood here.

Mansfield Park and Bush again, and Jane Austen

Here I had a little fun with a few sentences of Mansfield Park. I never got around to making a(n even) better comparison:

Mrs. Rushworth, a well–meaning, civil, prosing, pompous woman, who thought nothing of consequence, but as it related to her own and her son’s concerns [...]

puts one in mind of Barbara Bush's comment

But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer.

Also,

It is quite settled. I am to leave Mansfield Park, and go to the White House, I suppose, as soon as she is removed there.

is amusing.


Also I should note that the last section of Chapter 11 is as beautifully-written a passage as I've read anywhere - the characterization and description are just perfect. It's with some mortification that I recognize this, having failed to on two previous readings. Jane Austen only grows deeper.

Mansfield Park and the Bush Administration

In the following excerpt from early in the novel, Miss Crawford (who I noted here ) asks Edmund about the estate of Mr. Rushworth, a young man of no good quality (the name now sounds to me like someone worth the stuff one strews on the floor) who has recently come into possession of great wealth:

“I collect,” said Miss Crawford, “that Sotherton is an old place, and a place of some grandeur. In any particular style of building?”

“The house was built in Elizabeth’s time, and is a large, regular, brick building; heavy, but respectable looking, and has many good rooms. It is ill placed. It stands in one of the lowest spots of the park; in that respect, unfavourable for improvement. But the woods are fine, and there is a stream, which, I dare say, might be made a good deal of. Mr. Rushworth is quite right, I think, in meaning to give it a modern dress, and I have no doubt that it will be all done extremely well.”

Miss Crawford listened with submission, and said to herself, “He is a well–bred man; he makes the best of it.”

“I do not wish to influence Mr. Rushworth,” he continued; “but, had I a place to new fashion, I should not put myself into the hands of an improver. I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of my own choice, and acquired progressively. I would rather abide by my own blunders than by his.”

As it turns out, making the best of Mr. Rushworth turns out very badly.

The great slit in Lydia Bennet's skirt

Jane Austen has a way of kicking the reader in the head at the end of novels. I just reread a few and forgot to duck. In particular, there's Lydia Bennet, the out-of-control vulgar man-chasing girl who precipitates _Pride and Prejudice_'s closing actions, writing to a friend, "... tell Sally to mend a great slit in my worked muslin gown ..."; there's Mary Crawford's "saucy playful smile, seeming to invite in order to subdue me" in _Mansfield Park_; there's Emma's slip of the tongue on Box Hill. The first two are surprising because of the intrusion of open sexuality, the third because few people get to say the simple truth in these novels. I was also greatly surprised by Darcy's "I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men" - it's just too rude to be consistent with the later part of the novel. Also Mary Crawford's late letters are impossible to imagine being written to Fanny - she's a modern character forced into a 1790s-1800s or whenever it is era, but even so she should be aware enough not to tell the kind of people scandalized by the idea of friends and family performing a play that an act of adultery was stupid or that an older brother's death has the positive benefit of making the younger son wealthy. But she's a wonderful character - I wonder if some later author has freed her from her bonds and seen what she could do.