A Jane Austen Education(53)
And yet there wasn’t the slightest spark, on either side, of sexual interest. Austen was daring us to expect that the two would get together, and she was doing so to teach us a lesson. A man and a woman, even two young, available ones, could talk to each other, understand each other, sympathize with each other, be drawn to each other, even share their intimate thoughts and feelings with each other—as Anne and Benwick did—without having to be attracted to each other—as Anne and Benwick clearly weren’t. They could, in other words, be friends.
Nor was Benwick the only man the heroine befriended. Captain Harville was another—someone safer, perhaps, as a married man, but no less unusual as the friend of a woman, and even to this day, almost as liable to raise eyebrows. Their big scene came toward the end of the novel. In the midst of a crowd of other people, Harville, with “the unaffected, easy kindness of manner which denoted the feelings of an older acquaintance than he really was,” invited the heroine over for a chat. Their talk soon turned to the relative constancy of the sexes. Who loved longer and with deeper feeling, men or women? The two each argued, of course, for their own side, until Harville produced what he thought to be decisive evidence: “Let me observe that all histories are against you; all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”
“Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
“The pen has been in their hands”: but not, of course, anymore. The moment was exhilarating—Austen’s crowning declaration as a writer, the feminist flag she planted on the ground of English fiction. But the scene did not just make a feminist argument, it was a feminist argument. Anne and Harville shared a common footing in the conversation, debating each other with mutual respect and affection and esteem. Men and women can be equals, Austen was telling us, so men and women can be friends.
Fortunately, blessedly, I already knew that. (It was one of the things I had learned in youth movement.) And it was through that same best friend that I began at last to be drawn into the kind of friendship circle, the kind of floating community, for which I’d been longing for so many years. She had a friend from graduate school whose family owned a place in New England—the sweetest old house you could imagine, with a wide front porch that opened up like a grandmother’s lap and a big, cozy living room where they used to hold the dances when the place belonged to the town. The kitchen clock was stopped at 10:36—the perfect time, we used to joke, A.M. or P.M.—not too early and not too late.
The situation bore uncanny resemblances to Persuasion. The house was by the water, like Lyme. (In fact, it wasn’t far from Lyme—the one in Connecticut.) The guy whose family owned it was a sailor, with a sailor’s bluff practicality and the kind of unpretentious warmth that so delighted Anne among the people of the navy. Like the Harvilles, he invited from the heart. Like the Harvilles, he accommodated as many friends as wanted to come, and anyone who came became a friend. Like the Harvilles, in short, he made you feel at home.
On weekends when the weather was mild, his friends would be drawn to the place from all over the Northeast. I would come up from the city, my friend would drive down from New Hampshire, a few Connecticut people would stop by, and we’d spend the weekend just being lazy and silly together. The light would slant in from the water, the gulls would call and circle overhead, we’d pass the days playing ball and eating clams, the nights drinking beer, playing guitar, and talking, talking, talking. As time went on, we became as comfortable with one another as a pair of old shoes. We listened to one another’s stories, met one another’s boyfriends and girlfriends, and tolerated and even grew fond of one another’s faults.
We were all drawn there for the same reasons, all feeling that sense of loss that comes, in your early thirties, when you’ve finally separated from your parents. Some of us were already paired up in long-term relationships, some of us weren’t—it didn’t matter, in that sense. In another sense, of course, it mattered very much. So when, the autumn after I finished my Austen chapter, our host fell suddenly and deeply in love, we all came up one weekend—they were already living together, it happened so fast—to meet his girlfriend.
There were about eight of us sitting around the kitchen table that night, smacking our lips over some dessert she had made. The candles were burning low, her cats were nosing their way among our legs, someone had just cracked a joke. I leaned back, I looked around, and I thought, Yes, I’ve found my family.
CHAPTER 6
sense and sensibility falling in love
I had now been in Brooklyn for nearly three years, and I had a great deal to be thankful for. I had worked out a way of dealing with my father that enabled us to have a reasonably positive relationship. I no longer worried about his approval, and I had come to accept the fact that he was never going to change. Having completed my Austen chapter and written some hundred pages on Middlemarch, I was more than halfway through the dissertation and was beginning to think I might actually finish someday. And I had found my way to a real circle of friends.