A Jane Austen Education(21)

In any case, money wasn’t the point. He sensed, even if he couldn’t say it, what the real point was. By moving away from the neighborhood, I was moving away from him, and that’s exactly what he was trying to head off. Brooklyn? What was Brooklyn? Brooklyn was where he lived when he came over before the war. It was the place you got out of, not the one you went back to. Why would anyone want to move out there?

But I knew why. Moving to Brooklyn might turn out to be a huge mistake, but if so, it was a mistake that I was going to make on my own. I was tired of being infantilized, tired of being afraid: afraid to fail, afraid to disappoint him by failing. I had had enough of our old drama of criticism and defiance, protection and rebellion. I was ready for a new chapter. Like Elizabeth Bennet, I had found my freedom.





CHAPTER 3

northanger abbey learning to learn

From the beginning, my love for Jane Austen had been intertwined with my love for the professor with whom I had first encountered her. He was the one who had taught the seminar where I read Emma, he was the one who had shepherded me through my oral exams, and now he would be the one with whom I would undertake the inconceivable task of writing my dissertation.

But first he did the impossible by helping me find a great, cheap New York apartment. I had been schlepping around the city for weeks on end trying to figure out somewhere to live—filling out forms in shady brokerage offices, answering ads for fifth-floor walk-ups, auditioning for spots as the fourth roommate in apartments the size of a decent bedroom, checking out places where the bathtub was in the kitchen, the kitchen was in the living room, and the living room reeked of rotting fish from the Chinese market downstairs—when he mentioned that his next-door neighbor was looking for someone to rent one of the floors in her brownstone.

The place was a palace compared to the things I’d been looking at, and she was asking far less than she could have gotten on the open market, so it was way too sweet a deal for me to worry about the fact that I’d be living right next to the person who’d be supervising my work for the rest of my time in school. I did experience one little wave of panic, though. Smoking pot with some friends a few days after signing the lease, I stumbled into one of those moments of stoned clarity. Oh, my God! I thought. I’m moving in next to my professor! Could there be a more obvious way of telling the entire world—especially my professor—that I think of him as a father substitute? Nor was the irony of breaking free from one father only to go running into the arms of another in any way lost on me. I could practically feel the diapers growing on me as I sat there. But even in that state, something told me to calm down and stay with my first instinct. I had too much to learn from this man to back away from him now.

He was the youngest old person I had ever met. He was already old enough to retire by the time I took his class, but he was still going stronger than anyone else in the department. He advised a huge number of graduate students, taught courses on a vast range of subjects (nineteenth-century fiction, Romantic poetry, Native American literature, children’s literature, science fiction, Great Books, etc., etc.), helped run about eight professional journals, published a new book every three years or so, and even took on extra classes—an unheard-of thing and a testament to his incredible devotion as a teacher. A houseguest of his—a medical student, no layabout herself—once told me that she’d hear him hustling down the stairs first thing in the morning, getting a running start on his workday before she’d even had a chance to climb out of bed.

But it wasn’t just his energy. He had a young person’s ability to see the world with fresh eyes. His white hair shot up off his forehead like a jolt of discovery, and when he came across a new idea, all the lines in his face would stand at attention. He always wanted to hear what you had to say, no matter how much you stumbled while trying to say it, because he never missed an opportunity to learn something new.

It took me a while to figure all this out. In fact, I wondered at first if I had made a mistake by taking his class. That first day, as he came bustling into the room with a stack of books under his arm, a little old man with a white beard, his manner seemed oddly abrupt, almost jumpy, his eyes kind of squirrelly, and he gave a sort of chuckle, as if he were enjoying a private joke that he didn’t plan to share with us. He came across as eccentric, to say the least, if not actually soft in the head, and the impression was not dispelled by the questions he proceeded to ask. They seemed absurdly simple—silly, really, almost stupid, too basic and obvious to ask a class of freshmen, let alone a graduate seminar.

But when we tried to answer them, we discovered that they were not simple in the least. They were profound, because they were about all the things we had come to take for granted— about novels, about language, about reading. Questions like, what does it mean to identify with a literary character? I thought I knew, but did I really? Does it simply mean putting yourself in their place? Obviously not. Or approving of their actions? But we’re happy to identify with bad characters, given the right encouragement. No, the best I could come up with was that it seemed to be a kind of in-between state—you’re somehow them and not them at the same time—that can’t exactly be put into words. Which wasn’t really much of an answer at all.

Or again, he observed that there is one part of Madame Bovary that no one ever translates into English. Huh? Well, he said, the title—why is that? That one really brought me up short, almost made me angry, it was so audacious. Were you even allowed to ask a thing like that? On the other hand, how would you translate it? Lady Bovary? But she’s not an aristocrat. Mrs. Bovary? But that’s much too plain. The answer seemed to be that there is no English equivalent for “Madame,” not even “Madam,” which said more than I really wanted to know about the differences between the two cultures, and, therefore, my ability to understand the novel altogether.