Meanwhile, as I stumbled in and out of the social elite, I spent the bulk of my time slaving away at, procrastinating on, whimpering about, and otherwise slogging through my dissertation. There’s nothing quite like writing a dissertation. You’ve gone through almost twenty years of school, including your first few years as a graduate student, and you’ve always had someone there to tell you what to do: take these courses, do this reading, answer these questions. You’ve also always had other people around to share the experience with—sit next to in class, bitch to about your teachers, study with for exams.
Then, all of a sudden, you’re on your own. It’s like being left in the woods without a map. Good luck, sucker. Drop us a line if you make it out alive. All you know is that you have to go off by yourself for four or five or six years and write what amounts to a book. You’ve never written a book, you have no idea how to write one, and no one, you quickly realize, is going to teach you, because the only way to learn is just to do it. Plus, you have to make up your own topic. And, oh yes, it has to be completely original.
I had decided to write my dissertation about community in nineteenth-century English fiction. The Austen chapter would be followed by ones on George Eliot (yes, the once-dreaded Middlemarch) and Joseph Conrad (my old standby). It was a very personal decision. The most important experience of my life had been the years I had spent in a Jewish youth movement during high school. For most people, that kind of thing is an eye-rolling waste of time—a nerd festival that your parents force you into when you’d rather be out behind the mall, smoking cigarettes and trying to get to second base.
But this was different, at least for my friends and me. We ran the thing on our own, more or less—even the “adults,” who had gone through the movement themselves, were mainly in their early twenties—and it was about discovering our own values and developing our own sense of authenticity. It was a national movement, too, with chapters and regions and camps, and kids who came from exotic places like Oregon and Illinois. It was, to the extent that we could manage it, a complete world, or at least, a complete worldview, and we were there because it gave us all the things we couldn’t find in the high-school jungle: a feeling of acceptance, an outlet for idealism, a sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves.
In a word—and it was a word that we used all the time—community. The dream we all had was to move to Israel and live on a kibbutz, a sort of Jewish version of a commune. It was a dream about sharing everything and being together forever. But however naïve the idea might have been, it meant that while we were dreaming about community, we were also living it. We would come together, in our dozens or our hundreds, for meetings and weekends and trips and summers; for songs, games, campfires, and an endless string of nights when we just stayed up and talked.
We talked about social justice and social action, idealism and identity, being Jewish and being human. We talked, until we could barely keep our eyes open, just to have an excuse to stay up together, just to feel each other nearby. We were going to change the world, but along the way, without even noticing it, we changed ourselves. It was the place where I made my closest friends, found my voice, and learned to think about the world. Where I kissed my first girl one summer and lost my virginity a couple of summers after that. Where I felt more at home than I did in my actual home.
We were escaping from high school, but it was not lost on us, even then, that a lot of us were also escaping from our families. That’s a natural thing to want to do when you’re a teenager, but I, like many of my friends, had a good deal of extra incentive.
Things were not good at home, and they never had been. The same emotional violence that my father inflicted on us, he also inflicted on my mother. I’m not sure which was worse for me. With me and her, it had always been the most primitive, unspoken kind of monkey love—the deep comfort, even as a teenager, of just being around her. We’d hang out in the kitchen sometimes after school, and I would listen to her stories, which were all about the happy life she’d lived growing up in Toronto, before she met my father. (She, too, had been in a Jewish youth movement, and she totally understood why it meant so much to me. My father was more ambivalent. He liked that it kept me affiliated, so long as I didn’t take that kibbutz stuff too seriously.) Even then I sensed that somehow, by listening, I was making it up to her for my father’s rage and ridicule, just as she had always tried to shield and solace me. We were secret allies with a common foe, even if we couldn’t come right out and say it.
But then my father would explode into the house, and all bets were off. He was really quite inventive when it came to finding ways of tormenting her. A memory from early childhood: My mother comes into the living room to announce that supper’s ready—the supper she’s been working on the whole afternoon. My father ignores her and keeps on reading the paper. He’ll be damned if he’s going to give her the satisfaction. Something like half an hour later, so much later that my mother’s announcement has started to feel like a dream—he couldn’t have just ignored her, right?—I realize how hungry I am and dare to ask, “Didn’t Mommy say that supper was ready a long time ago?”
Such was the level of emotional discourse, and that was a relatively placid evening, because they hadn’t been screaming at each other from the moment he’d come home. A lot of days were like a running battle, a knife fight with words. Years later, I was bickering with a girlfriend one night before dinner. As I sat down to eat with a gut so clenched that I could barely choke back the food, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia. Yes, I thought, I know this feeling. This is what my childhood felt like.
Was it any wonder that I clung to the movement like a cat on a tree? We clung to each other, my friends and I; we were all, in some way, in flight.
But youth movement ended, because youth does. Like a lot of my friends, I became one of those “adults” myself in college—a counselor, a leader. But eventually we all just, so to speak, ran out of movement to be part of. We had no choice but to go our separate ways, and I was left wandering the world to mourn that titanic experience, wondering how I was ever going to find something like it again. By the time I moved to Brooklyn, seven years later, I was going in the opposite direction fast, into the solitude of my apartment and the loneliness of my work. College itself was long gone, my grad-school classmates were tunneling into their own dissertations, and what friends I still had, from the movement or elsewhere, had scattered themselves across the country.
One was in Boston, doing a postdoc; one was in Chicago, studying religion; one was in Kansas, becoming a mom; one was in California, working in film. My very closest friend, the one who knew me better than I knew myself—she was also just about my last remaining link to the movement—had settled in New Hampshire and was starting her own design business. They were all living their separate lives, and the older we grew, the worse it got. The prospect of recapturing that sense of community, that feeling of belonging to something, seemed more remote than ever. So when I had to choose a topic for my dissertation, I decided to study what I couldn’t experience. It was a classic academic move. Since I didn’t have community, I would spend my time thinking about it.
Two years into Brooklyn, I was still working on my Austen chapter. The thing was like a chronic illness, my only comfort being the grad-school adage that once you’ve finished your first chapter, you’re halfway through the dissertation, because writing the first one teaches you how to write the rest.
I had chosen to begin with Austen not only because I loved her work so much, but also because she seemed to me to represent the perfect starting point for my investigation: a writer who had celebrated community in its most basic and traditional sense—the settled, stable rural world, that good green place where everybody knows you and everybody belongs, the exact image of what I was trying to recapture in my own life. I had also decided to focus on my two favorite among her novels—Pride and Prejudice, of course, and the book that had long since won a special place in my heart, and now increasingly reflected my state of mind, Persuasion.
Austen’s final work, Persuasion was unique among her novels for its layered emotional texture and profound depth of feeling. The mood was wistful, melancholy, autumnal, projecting an atmosphere of nostalgia and regret that was unlike anything she had created before. A work of loneliness and loss, the novel was completed less than a year before Austen’s death. Whether she knew that she was dying by then—the illness that came upon her in the middle of writing the book was mysterious and, for a long time, intermittent—it was impossible to say. What seemed clearer—Austen turned forty during the novel’s composition—was that Persuasion reflected the ripened outlook of a woman who felt herself to be passing into the next phase of life.
The novel’s special place among her work was clear from its very first chapter. The heroine, Anne Elliot, was not a blooming girl of seventeen or twenty, a Catherine Morland or Elizabeth Bennet springing lightly over the threshold of adulthood and into the adventure of romance; she was already twenty-seven, still young by our standards but well past her prime by those of Austen’s day. Anne had already had her novel, so to speak, and it had ended in failure. Eight years earlier, she had fallen rapidly and deeply in love with a dashing young naval officer named Captain Wentworth. Wentworth was modeled on Austen’s brother Frank. Both made captain at a young age; both fought in the great Battle of San Domingo. Even their first names were similar: Wentworth’s was Frederick. Both also came ashore after that momentous engagement to get themselves a wife, but while Frank did marry his bride in that summer of 1806, Anne and Wentworth’s romance only led to grief.
He was “a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy.” She was “an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling.” But she also came from a family of aristocratic snobs that made the Bertrams of Mansfield Park look like socialists. A young man without wealth or pedigree was just not going to do. Anne’s father, the odious Sir Walter—spiteful, shallow, and vain—“thought it a very degrading alliance” and “gave it all the negative of great astonishment, great coldness, great silence, and a professed resolution of doing nothing for his daughter” (that is, refusing to give her a dowry). Anne’s mother, Lady Elliot, a warm and decent woman whose excellent judgment had saved her husband from the worst consequences of his character, might have seen to it that justice was done after all, but she had died when Anne was fourteen, and her place in Anne’s life had been taken by Lady Elliot’s best friend, Lady Russell.
Lady Russell appreciated the heroine as her father never did—Anne’s virtues were far too fine for Sir Walter to know how to value them—but she was no more cheerful about the match. “Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen! . . . Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune!” It was the same snobbery with a kinder face. And so, without a friend to take her side, Anne was pressured into breaking the engagement. Wentworth went off in anger and resentment, and Anne, her bloom ruined and her spirits sunk, was left to waste her youth in the bitterness of futile regret.
Flash forward eight years, and the heroine was more alone than ever now, alone in a way that none of Austen’s other characters were. Even Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, had her cousin Edmund and her brother William and the genuine if lazy affection of her aunt Lady Bertram. But while Anne still had Lady Russell, for what she was worth, that was all she had. Having never gotten over Captain Wentworth, she had refused the hand of a local gentleman a few years later, and she seemed to have no chance of ever being offered someone else’s. Her younger sister, Mary, had gotten married herself (to Charles Musgrove, the same local man whom Anne refused). Her older sister, Elizabeth, was as cold and mean as their father—one of the things that made her Sir Walter’s favorite—and equally awful to Anne. Isolated in her own family, the heroine “was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way: she was only Anne.”
Fanny also had Mansfield Park to hold on to, but now Anne was even going to lose her own beloved home. Sir Walter, with a very high opinion as to what so great a man deserved, had run himself into such a morass of debt that he was forced to rent out the family manor and move to Bath. Elizabeth would be coming along, of course, but her chosen companion would be, not the sister whose excellence she could never perceive, but an oily young widow named Mrs. Clay, all flattery and compliance, who had worked her way into Elizabeth’s affections.
Anne would go to stay with the Musgroves and play the role of spinster aunt that Austen knew herself by then so very well. She would take care of her nephews while Mary, a world-class whiner, complained about how put-upon she was; she would play dances for Charles’s lively, lovely younger sisters Henrietta and Louisa (who resembled Austen heroines far more than Anne now did); she would listen to everybody’s grievances about one another; she would make peace between them when she could; and above all, she would stay in the shadows, where a spinster belonged. It was to be a lesson, she mused, “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”—not that Anne was much of anything even in her own circle.
My circumstances, needless to say, were very different from Anne’s, but I shared her feelings of loneliness and melancholy. I hadn’t lost a parent or a home, but I had done what I could—what I had to do—to distance myself from both. I had wanted to be on my own, and now I was. I just didn’t realize quite how on my own I was going to be. When you’re young—when you’re in high school and college and even your early twenties—you take your friends for granted. Of course they’ll always be there. You take friends for granted. Why would you ever have trouble making new ones? Then all of a sudden—and it can feel very sudden indeed—everybody’s gone. Some have moved, some have married, everyone’s busy, and the crowd of potential friends by which you’ve always been surrounded has evaporated.
I still didn’t want to get married, but I didn’t want to be alone, either. Yet just as it was for Anne, that’s how it was starting to look like it was always going to be for me. I still loved living in my own place and being out from under my father’s shadow, but my Austen chapter wasn’t taking me forever just because it gave me so much work to do. A lot of days, I didn’t even have the strength to face it. I would drag myself out of bed, only to sit around and stare off into space. The air would sag, the clock would point its contemptuous hands, my cat would look at me and seem to wonder why I wasn’t moving. I would feel ugly and worthless. Anne was depressed—that’s what it meant for Austen to say that her spirits were low—and let’s face it, so was I.
Austen herself had lost a home, a circumstance that Anne’s experience undoubtedly reflected. Right around her twentyfifth birthday, Austen’s parents suddenly announced that her father would be retiring—he had been rector of the same parish for forty years—and that they and the girls, Cassandra and Jane, would be picking up and moving, just like Sir Walter, to Bath. The news came as a terrible shock, and there was little time to get used to it. Within a couple of months, the household in which Austen had lived her entire life was going to be broken up.
Friends would have to be taken leave of, a world of familiar feelings left behind. Most of the family’s things were not even transferred to Bath, but sold or given away to Austen’s brother James and his wife, Anna, who were coming to take possession of the house: the piano on which Austen had learned to play; the family pictures and furniture, companions of many years; her father’s library—“my books,” as she called them—whose value to her we can only imagine. Austen was even pressured into surrendering one of her own important possessions, a move she defied with tart indignation. “As I do not choose to have Generosity dictated to me,” she wrote to Cassandra, “I shall not resolve on giving my Cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.” From a life of rural rhythms and settled routines, she was being hustled out of the only home she’d ever known.
Four years later, years of upheaval and adjustment, came another blow that would echo through Anne’s story: Austen’s beloved father died. “The loss of such a Parent must be felt,” she wrote to Frank, “or we should be Brutes.” “His tenderness as a Father, who can do justice to?” Austen’s mother was no Sir Walter, but she was a difficult, hypochondriacal woman whom Austen poked fun at to Cassandra, and there seems little doubt that her father was the author’s favorite, just as Anne’s mother was hers.
After the Reverend Austen’s death, four more years of uncertainty followed before Austen’s mother and the girls would find a permanent home. The young woman who had tossed off three novels before the age of twenty-four—early drafts of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey—was virtually silent, artistically speaking, during this entire eight-year stretch. The one piece of work that survives, the beginning of a novel called The Watsons, was abandoned after a few dozen pages. Was Austen discouraged at the fate of her previous work? (Pride and Prejudice was rejected sight unseen; Northanger Abbey was bought for ten pounds but never published.) Did she need stability to do her work?
Both undoubtedly were true, but Anne’s story makes us suspect that the formerly ebullient young writer was also suffering from her own feelings of depression. The Watsons, about a group of poor, unmarried sisters trying to figure out how to save themselves from destitution before the death of their ailing clergyman father—and thus a frighteningly close parallel to Jane and Cassandra’s situation—has been called “grim,” “bleak,” and “pessimistic.” Austen, said one critic, “seems to be struggling with a peculiar oppression, a stiffness and heaviness that threatens her style.” And that was before her father died—an event itself preceded, by only a couple of months, by the death of Anne Lefroy, the surrogate mother who had been a crucial figure in Austen’s life since childhood. No wonder she couldn’t summon the will to write.
One more circumstance must have contributed to Austen’s portrait of Anne, as well as to the novel’s somber atmosphere as a whole. At around the age of twenty-seven, the same age as the heroine, Austen rejected what she must have known would be her last chance at marriage. The man in question was Harris Bigg-Wither, brother to a trio of old friends and heir to a large estate, but a shy and awkward young man who was five years Austen’s junior. She accepted his proposal one evening, agonized about it the entire night, then rescinded her acceptance the next morning. It was, she surely knew, a decisive step. From there, says Austen biographer Claire Tomalin, she “hurried into middle age,” embracing the role of maiden aunt for once and for all. She was not lonely, but in a profound sense, she would always be alone. Now, in Anne, she created a heroine who was staring over the same cliff.
It was no accident that the novel began in autumn, or that Anne dwelled, like none of Austen’s other heroines, in the past and her own mind. On a walk with Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove and some of the other young people, while the rest of them chattered away, Anne mused wistfully on the declining year. Austen’s language swelled with unaccustomed feeling here, its normally satirical accents drawn, almost against their will, into a slower, more pensive rhythm. Anne’s own pleasure in the walk, we learned,
must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn,—that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness,—that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
And when something happened to interrupt her train of thought, a reminder of her own exclusion from the dance of youth, “the sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.”
But by then her memory had had a very different kind of work to do. When Sir Walter had decamped for Bath, he had rented the Elliot manor to a navy man, Admiral Croft, whose wife turned out to be none other than the sister of a certain Captain Wentworth—the very man the heroine had loved and lost those eight long years before. “A few months more,” said Anne when she had heard the news, “and he, perhaps, may be walking here.”
And so indeed it proved to be. And when the dreaded meeting came,
a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. . . . Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s, a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice; . . . the room seemed full, full of persons and voices, but a few minutes ended it. . . . The room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.
“It is over! it is over!” she repeated to herself again and again, in nervous gratitude. “The worst is over!”
Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met. They had been once more in the same room.
Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. . . .
Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.
But if the past was instantly revived for Anne, the case was very different for her former fiancé. “Henrietta asked him what he thought of you,” reported Mary in her passive-aggressive way, “and he said, ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again.’”
Yet painful as the meeting was, Wentworth’s arrival began to draw Anne away from her awful family and toward a very different group of people. Wentworth’s fellow officer and close friend, Captain Harville, was now living with his wife in the nearby seaside town of Lyme. When the whole group decided to pay them a visit—Henrietta and Louisa, Charles and Mary, Wentworth and Anne—the heroine discovered a kind of togetherness that she had never suspected.
Captain Harville’s sister had been engaged to a third officer, Captain Benwick, but she had died before the couple could be married. And yet, Anne learned, “The friendship between him and the Harvilles seemed, if possible, augmented by the event which closed all their views of alliance, and Captain Benwick was now living with them entirely.” It was the same note, and the same word—“friendship”—that marked every description of this group of naval companions. When Wentworth had complained to his sister, Admiral Croft’s wife, that women are too delicate to have aboard a ship—she herself having passed many a voyage aboard her husband’s—she pointed out that Wentworth had once transported Captain Harville’s wife and children himself. “Where was this superfine, extraordinary sort of gallantry of yours then?” she teased. “All merged in my friendship,” Wentworth replied. “I would assist any brother officer’s wife that I could, and I would bring anything of Harville’s from the world’s end, if he wanted it.”
Again, when the Harvilles met the visitors in Lyme, “nothing could be more pleasant than their desire of considering the whole party as friends of their own, because the friends of Captain Wentworth, or more kindly hospitable than their entreaties for their all promising to dine with them.” And when “they all went in-doors with their new friends,” the visitors “found rooms so small as none but those who invite from the heart could think capable of accommodating so many.” “Friendship,” “friendship,” “friends,” “friends”: the point was not lost on the heroine, but the more she was pleased by what she saw—the more the captains and Mrs. Harville revealed their mutual warmth and generosity and goodwill—the more she was pained. “‘These would have been all my friends,’ was her thought; and she had to struggle against a great tendency to lowness.”
Anne found, at Lyme, what she did not know that she’d been searching for: something to belong to. And as I thought about the novel more deeply than I ever had before, thought about what it was saying about the ways that people attach themselves to one another, the ways that they belong together, I realized that this, and nothing else, was Austen’s image of community—this group of friends.
I had been looking in the wrong place, both in her novels and in my own life. I had come to Austen imagining that I would find a picture of that idyllic rural community that we all carry around in our heads. And I had dimly supposed that if I was ever going to find another community myself, it was going to have to resemble something like that. Now I saw that community, in the modern world, would never be a structure you could put your hands on—something regular or stable or permanent. It would not resemble a kibbutz or a commune, both of which made that exact mistake of trying to turn back the clock to an earlier state of existence. Nor would it resemble a youth movement, which, like the other communities that young people pass through (and which, like me, they often later pine for)—a high school or a college, a sports team or fraternity or summer camp—is the kind of all-encompassing environment that can only exist when you’re young. The modern world, I began to understand, was far too unstable for anything like that, modern relationships too fluid. For adults today, it seemed to me now, community can only be a circle of friends.
Still, that was relatively easy for me to see, two centuries into the modern age and with the help of Austen. The wonder was how she had managed to see it herself, at a time when modernity was still just getting off the ground, and from her little perch in rural England. Because what Persuasion dramatized, I now saw, was nothing less than the passing of the traditional world. The community that Austen was rejecting—or at least, bidding farewell—was rural England itself: the very thing I had come to her to find. Rejecting its hierarchy, the feudal order that the smug and pompous Sir Walter, like the odious Bertrams of Mansfield Park, embodied. Bidding farewell to its sense of rootedness and intimacy and continuity—which she had indeed celebrated, but only once, I now saw, only in Emma, her one truly idyllic work.
Now, the strange thing was that Emma was written immediately before Persuasion. Only four months separated the end of work on one novel and the beginning of work on the next. But Austen could think extremely fast. From her picture of a timeless England she moved in one step to a picture of England in the middle of head-spinning change. Emma, which contained no dates, seemed to occur outside of history. Persuasion, which began with a flurry of dates, was set at a very precise historical moment: the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Austen saw, with amazing clairvoyance, that the world she had always known was about to start to disappear. The old order was yielding, however slowly, to the new. Sir Walter was packing his bags and moving aside for Admiral Croft. Aristocracy was giving way to meritocracy, hierarchy to equality. People would henceforth be bound, more and more, not as master and servant or landlord and tenant (or even as husband and wife, in the traditional, unequal fashion) but rather as friend and friend.
Yet the traditional system that put a Sir Walter above a Captain Wentworth was not the only thing, I saw, that Austen turned away from in Persuasion. As hard as it was to believe, she seemed to turn away from family itself. By gravitating toward the men and women of the navy, Anne was hoping that she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life putting up with her miserable father and sisters. In fact, she avoided her family more and more as the novel went on. After the trip to Lyme, the day finally came for her to join Sir Walter and Elizabeth in Bath—not that anybody really wanted it, but she couldn’t stay with her sister Mary forever—yet she tried, when she got there, to spend as little time with them as she could. Instead, she immersed herself in the company of her new friends from the navy, who had come to Bath on holiday, as well.
Indeed, Anne’s disaffection with her family achieved remarkable heights. Late in the novel, she got wind of an intrigue that severely threatened her father and sister’s peace. Ordinarily that sort of development would have moved to the center of the plot, with the heroine hastening to spread the news and avert disaster. Here she never even got around to passing it along. Her family simply didn’t matter to her anymore.
How could this be, I wondered. How could Austen, the great novelist of romance, the great maker of marriages, be against family? Yet when I thought back to her other books, I realized that there was scarcely a happy family among them—ten unhappy ones, by my count, and no more than one of the other kind (and that was only Emma and her father, as much a kind of marriage as a family). And while she always got her heroines married, she never followed their stories beyond the bliss of couplehood and into the complications that followed, the battle of children and parents. Her own family, by all accounts, was happy, and she clearly enjoyed her nieces and nephews, but when she imagined felicity, she always drew a picture of a bond among adults—couples and friends and the little circles, the miniature communities, they make together.
For once I saw this pattern in Persuasion, I looked and found it everywhere. Yes, Austen made sure to find her heroines a husband, but she also took care to build them a community—a sphere of husbands and wives and brothers and sisters to live their marriages within. Pride and Prejudice ended, not with one wedding but with two, a pair of sisters marrying a pair of friends and gathering additional siblings to them. Emma ended with three, and the heroine’s, we were told, was sped along by “the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony.” It was no surprise that one critic called friendship, for Austen, “the true light of life.”
Friends, Austen taught me, are the family you choose. But while the notion has become a commonplace of late, Austen, I realized, saw a step further. We make our friends our family, but we also make our family—or some of them—our friends. William Price, in Mansfield Park, was Fanny’s “brother and friend.” Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, made friends with Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who were friends with each other but not with their treacherous older brother. Elizabeth Bennet was friends with Jane and her father but couldn’t stand her mother or her other sisters; the community that formed at the end of Pride and Prejudice included some relatives but pointedly excluded others.
Anne herself, Austen told us, found no reason to be jealous of Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove, her sister Mary’s sisters-inlaw—pleasant, pretty girls who didn’t have a whole lot going on upstairs—except for this one thing: “that seemingly perfect good understanding and agreement together, that good-humoured mutual affection, of which she had known so little herself with either of her sisters.” The Harvilles, one of the few happy families in Austen’s work, included a friend, Captain Benwick, as part of their household; the circle of nautical friends included a brother and sister, Captain Wentworth and Mrs. Croft. Friendship and family can blur together, Austen was showing me—the groups intersecting, the feelings intermingling.
No one understood this more intimately than Austen herself. Everywhere in her letters, the terms and accents of family and friendship intertwine. What was her impulse to accept the hand of Harris Bigg-Wither, misguided though she soon realized it to be, if not a desire to create a family with his sisters, her friends? Her own sister, Cassandra, of course, was her very best, her lifelong friend, but her favorite niece won entrance to the circle at the early age of fifteen. “I am greatly pleased with your account of Fanny,” Jane wrote Cassandra. “I found her in the summer just what you describe, almost another Sister, & could not have supposed that a niece would ever have been so much to me.”
Later, with Fanny in her twenties, niece and aunt exchanged letters of exquisite intimacy, in one of which the older woman exclaimed, “You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me, to have such thorough pictures of your Heart.” But, she added, fearing that the circle would someday be broken, “Oh! what a loss it will be, when you are married.” Cassandra surely knew that she was speaking for both survivors when, in the wake of Austen’s death, she wrote her niece—“doubly dear to me now for her dear sake whom we have lost”—“I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can be surpassed.”
Jane and Cassandra’s household, the one they shared with their mother for the last twelve years of Austen’s life, was itself a little community of family and friends, just like the Harvilles’. The role of Captain Benwick was assumed by Martha Lloyd, a childhood friend who grew closer to Austen than anyone but her sister. The two had laughed together in bed when Austen was a teenager, and Martha moved in with the Austen women the year that both Jane’s father and Martha’s widowed mother died—an arrangement that was not uncommon at the time. She stayed there until her marriage to Austen’s brother Frank—being dragged by Jane to the theater, listening to the author’s views on politics, royal scandal, and her own career, and generally being, as Jane told Cassandra, “the friend & Sister under every circumstance.”
Friends may be the family you choose, but I was still no closer to being part of such a circle than Anne had been at Lyme. In fact, I was having as much difficulty as she did simply finding individual friends, let alone a whole circle of them. The terrain had shifted when I wasn’t looking. People were not just busier than they used to be, they also weren’t as open. That youthful flexibility, that eagerness for new experiences and new people, that Austen celebrated in Northanger Abbey—it seemed to be draining away as we rounded the corner and headed into our thirties. You could no longer just meet someone and dive right into a friendship, as you’d been able to when you were fifteen or twenty or even twenty-five. The people I met now, potential friends, seemed cagier, less trusting, more defended. Making a friend had become a whole project, like a high-level diplomatic negotiation or a complicated puzzle that you could only fill in a couple of pieces at a time.
Austen herself cared far too much about friendship to make the mistake of idealizing it. She knew all about what Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, referred to as “the different sorts of friendship in the world,” and she had written about them from the time she was a girl. In her teenage years, the fashion had been for what they called romantic friendships—histrionically passionate attachments designed to show off your susceptibility to fine emotion. Love and Freindship, the most famous of her adolescent satires (“as fast as she could write and quicker than she could spell,” as Virginia Woolf remarked about them), was designed to deflate that exact cliché:
After having been deprived during the course of 3 weeks of a real freind, . . . imagine my transports at beholding one, most truly worthy of the Name. . . . She was all sensibility and Feeling. We flew into each other’s arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our Hearts.
One can only imagine the fun that Austen would have made of Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, with their comparable illusion of instantaneous intimacy. Isabella Thorpe tried to pull the same kind of thing with Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, but in her later books, Austen moved on to more adult forms of insincerity. Social climbers, she knew, can exercise their limbs on friendship as well as marriage, and the world of Persuasion was crawling with them. The town of Bath was a full immersion in the tepid waters of social ambition. Mrs. Clay, the oily widow, had hooked herself onto Elizabeth Elliot to see how far the ride would take her, her ultimate purpose being to inveigle Sir Walter into making her his second wife—at which point, we could be sure, the new Lady Elliot would no longer bother being deferential to her “friend.” “Frenemy,” we sometimes call this sort of person now, the kind who’s nice just long enough to get whatever they think they can out of you.
The novel’s most avid lickspittle, however, turned out to be none other than Sir Walter himself. This made perfect sense once I thought about it. Anyone that invested in distinctions of social rank had to be as obsequious to those above him as he was contemptuous of those below. Just as bullies are cowards in disguise, snobs are secret grovelers—another reason Austen so adored the aristocracy. The object of Sir Walter’s particular veneration was a cousin, the Viscountess Dalrymple, and her daughter, Miss Carteret, a pair of mediocrities who turned out to have nothing going for them but their pedigree:
Anne had never seen her father and sister before in contact with nobility, and she must acknowledge herself disappointed. She had hoped better things from their high ideas of their own situation in life, and was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen,—a wish that they had more pride; for “our cousins Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret,” “our cousins, the Dalrymples,” sounded in her ears all day long.
But the friendship of a Sir Walter or a Mrs. Clay was not likely to take in anyone less susceptible to flattery than their intended targets. Far more dangerous, Austen wanted us to know—and far more insidious—were the friends who actually did mean well but couldn’t tell the difference between what was good for you and what was only good for them. Such a friend was Lady Russell, and the saddest thing about Anne’s relationship with her, her surrogate mother and only intimate, was just how much the heroine actually valued her, how little she could afford to let herself see the older woman’s limitations. Anne thought, early on, “of the extraordinary blessing of having one such truly sympathising friend as Lady Russell,” but only after the perfectly blasé reception she received at the Musgroves’ (that lesson “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”). Even her sister Mary had treated the whole trauma of surrendering the family estate, which Anne had been suffering through for weeks, as a matter of utter indifference. Anyone was going to look good compared to that.
Yet it was that same Lady Russell who had pressured the heroine into making the worst mistake of her life, rejecting Captain Wentworth. Of course, she did it for what she thought were all the right reasons. Still, late in the novel, when she was presented with the same kind of situation again, she gave, unbelievably, the same advice—even though she knew perfectly well how terribly alone Anne was and how miserable she had been for all those years. But even Anne, by then, could see the truth. Lady Russell, whether she recognized it or not, was trying to protect her own dignity, not her friend’s. She was the person she was trying to save from being connected with someone as lowly as a naval officer.
This was a woman, after all, who thought that kissing up to the Viscountess Dalrymple sounded like a really good idea. Indeed, once the heroine took a hard look at her friend, she figured out that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference, in their ideas about class and manners and what really mattered in a person, between Lady Russell and her own father. And so, once Anne had made up her mind about how she was going to live her life—uninfluenced, this time, by any of her “friends”— “there was nothing less for Lady Russell to do,” if she wanted to stay on good terms with the heroine, “than to admit that she had been pretty completely wrong, and to take up a new set of opinions.” In plain language, Anne told Lady Russell to go soak her head. The heroine had walked away from her father and sisters, and she was strong enough now to do the same to anyone else who stood in the way of her happiness.
I saw this kind of thing all the time back then—friends who thought they were looking after your happiness when they were really just trying to protect their own. People pressuring you to break up with someone they didn’t like, or stay together with someone they did. People wanting you to get married already, like they had, or stay single, because they didn’t want to be the last ones left alone. I’m sure I did that sort of thing myself. There’s nothing deliberate about it, as Austen knew; it just takes a lot of self-awareness, as well as a lot of generosity, to remove your own desires from the equation.
The couple who introduced me to the private-school crowd, needless to say, did not possess a great deal of either. “Thank God that’s over!” they said when I told them about a certain new relationship—“that” being my long string of romantic failures, the source of all those funny stories I used to entertain them with. However kindly it was meant, the statement came to exert an unmistakable pressure, as the months went by and the relationship soured, to stay coupled up. “That” was supposed to be over; I couldn’t disappoint them by going back to “that.” And when I did finally break off the relationship, their response, while undoubtedly well intentioned, was not exactly consoling. “We’re just sorry that there won’t ever be any little Billys running around.” Wait—ever? You mean you’re closing the books on me? It sure sounded like they were—like I had proved to them, for once and for all, just how completely hopeless I was.
True friendship, like true love, was pretty rare in Austen’s view. “Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial,” said a character in Persuasion, “but generally speaking . . . it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world!” The person who made that statement, a Mrs. Smith, had had a difficult life. She had traveled, Anne reflected, “among that part of mankind which made her think worse of the world than she hoped it deserved”—that is, than Anne hoped it deserved. But that was all that she could do—hope. She knew that Mrs. Smith, who “had lived very much in the world,” had seen a great deal more of life than had the sheltered heroine herself. And after all, her new acquaintance with the people of the navy notwithstanding, her own experience offered precious little with which to dispute the other woman’s views.
Yet Anne’s relationship with Mrs. Smith turned out to be one of those rare, true friendships itself. The two had known each other at the boarding school where Anne was sent in the wake of her mother’s death, “grieving for the loss of a mother whom she had dearly loved, feeling her separation from home, and suffering as a girl of fourteen, of strong sensibility and not high spirits, must suffer at such a time.” The future Mrs. Smith, three years older, “had shewn her kindness, . . . had been useful and good to her in a way which had considerably lessened her misery.” Usefulness and kindness—those same standards of human decency that Austen had championed in Mansfield Park, and that mattered to her more than all the wit in the world.
Now it was the turn of Mrs. Smith to need some kindness. Having lost her husband, her money, and even the use of her legs, she was living, when Anne rediscovered her, in a couple of dark, comfortless rooms with scarcely a soul even to help her get from one to the other. Sir Walter couldn’t believe his ears when he got wind of the fact that his daughter had taken to seeing such a person. “‘Westgate Buildings!’ said he; ‘and who is Miss Anne Elliot to be visiting in Westgate Buildings? A Mrs. Smith. A widow Mrs. Smith. . . . And what is her attraction? That she is old and sickly. Upon my word, Miss Anne Elliot, you have the most extraordinary taste!’”
But the truest act of friendship belonged, in the end, to Mrs. Smith herself. She knew something, it turned out: something about someone very close to Anne, something that all the rules of propriety—and far more important, something that her own dire self-interest—dictated that she not reveal. Yet Anne’s own welfare did dictate that she reveal it. Mrs. Smith was no saint. She struggled with what to do. She had very few hopes of improving her wretched situation in life, and by revealing what she knew, she would destroy the newest and the best of them. It would have been far better for her if she had simply kept her mouth shut. But she took a deep breath, and she said what she had to say.
Putting your friend’s welfare before your own: that was Austen’s idea of true friendship. That means admitting when you’re wrong, but even more importantly, it means being willing to tell your friend when they are. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that notion, because it flew so strongly in the face of what we believe about friendship today. True friendship, we think, means unconditional acceptance and support. The true friend validates your feelings, takes your side in every argument, helps you feel good about yourself at all times, and never, ever judges you. But Austen didn’t believe that. For her, being happy means becoming a better person, and becoming a better person means having your mistakes pointed out to you in a way that you can’t ignore. Yes, the true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same things. In fact, they can sometimes be diametrically opposed. True friends do not shield you from your mistakes, they tell you about them: even at the risk of losing your friendship—which means, even at the risk of being unhappy themselves.
My commitment to this frightening new idea was put to the test the summer after I had finally finished my Austen chapter. My best pal from college had gone off to graduate school in another city, and as the years went by I started to feel as if I knew him less and less. Not because we lost touch, but because he never seemed to say anything real about himself when we were in touch. Not coincidentally, it became more and more clear to me, the few times I did see him, that he was becoming a pretty serious alcoholic.
One weekend he was back in the city, and we arranged a night to catch up. His wife was on his case about the drinking by this point, but she let him out on my recognizance for a harmless beer at the local bar—or so at least we all imagined as the two of us set out.
Well, before we could make it through the initial pleasantries, he had managed to get three drinks down his throat. By about the middle of the second, he had completely checked out of the conversation, at least as far as anything personal was concerned. Before long, I was trying to get the evening over with as quickly as possible and wanted nothing better than to call a cab. But he insisted on driving me home, if only to maintain the pretense that everything was perfectly fine, and I was so afraid of a confrontation that I let him do it.
Then, on the way, he made a wrong turn and ended up—what do you know?—in our old stomping grounds of the East Village. We just had to go to the Blue & Gold for old times’ sake, didn’t we? So he had another bourbon while I sipped my beer and watched him and wondered what the fuck had happened to the friend I used to know, and then another quick one, and then, what the hell, one more for the road.
We both managed to make it home in one piece, but once my anger wore off, I realized that I had failed him too—not just because I’d let him drive, but because I hadn’t had the guts to tell him the truth about himself. Yet we were really still just college buddies, and we simply had no vocabulary with which to talk about anything that grave. I tried to write the next week, starting off all breezy as usual, pretending once again like nothing had happened, but I quickly ground to a halt. There was an elephant in the room that we weren’t talking about, and I finally understood that we weren’t going to be able to talk about anything else anymore until we did.
It took me another month to screw up the courage to try again. I didn’t even tell him that he needed to deal with his drinking. I just told him that I didn’t feel like we had a relationship anymore, and that that was really too bad. I knew that he would understand the rest.
Months went by without my hearing from him. I thought our friendship was over. But when he did finally get in touch, it was to tell me he had gotten sober—joined AA and everything—and that my letter had been one of the reasons why. Few things had ever felt better or made me prouder. But as I knew perfectly well, that letter had a coauthor, and it was Austen.
However glad I was that I could be a true friend to someone else, I was even gladder to realize that I had always had one myself. She was that last remaining friend from youth movement, the person who knew me better than I knew myself. The one thing that had always bothered me about her was her tendency to call me on the stupid things I did. Like the time she cut me off—“Billy, she’s already heard them all”—before I could make those idiotic puns about her friend Honour’s name. She always tried to do it as unobtrusively as possible, but it invariably stung, would make me feel a little small and foolish. Only once I had learned Austen’s lessons about humiliation, on the one hand, and friendship, on the other, did I realize how much reason I had to thank my friend for having been on my case for all those years. She had been trying to make me into a presentable person—maybe the person she thought I could be—and she was willing to have faith that it might someday happen.
Predictably, people used to ask me why the two of us didn’t get together. The question made me mad. Couldn’t men and women be friends without having sex? Apparently not, according to what everyone seemed to believe. I finally did see When Harry Met Sally . . . , only to discover that the whole point of the movie was that men and women can’t, in fact, be friends, “because the sex thing gets in the way.” It was the same wherever I looked. People of the opposite sex might claim to be “just friends,” the message was, but count on it, there was always something going on underneath.
The most annoying thing about this apparently universal belief was that it implied that sex was all that men and women could really be interested in each other for. Conversation or collaboration or any other kind of common activity seemed to be out of the question. As if we weren’t just different genders, but different species.
Well, that was another idea that Austen refused to believe. In fact, as I learned, she was one of the first to challenge it, and she never challenged it more directly than she did in Persuasion. Once the people at Lyme got properly introduced to one another, on that visit—Anne and Mary and so forth on the one hand, the Harvilles and Captain Benwick on the other—the heroine always seemed to find herself with Benwick. The two had a lot in common. Both were grieving for lost loves—Anne for Wentworth, Benwick for his fiancée, Captain Harville’s late sister. Both were shy, gentle, thoughtful souls. And both, it turned out, were great readers of poetry. Not once or twice, but three times in the space of an evening and a morning—“Anne found Captain Benwick getting near her. . . . Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her”—the two young people, both single and unattached, fell into deep, heartfelt conversation about the leading poets of the day, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.
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.