Great Books Archives - Page 14 of 26

A Second-Rate Potter

Late in his life, T.S. Eliot took to writing plays in verse.

I don’t know why; he was never going to be a great playwright.

But, I guess when you are famous, you can do whatever you want.

A couple of his plays have some amazing bits in them. Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party both work well if you think of them as verse in play form. That is entirely different from being great plays, though. A couple of his plays are not good verse or play, containing rather a few scattered interesting lines here and there (The Family Reunion and The Elder Statesmen).

The Confidential Clerk is only one of his plays that I can imagine making a good, you know, play. Acted right, it could be good. There are also some interesting philosophical matters in it. The ideas and the verse aren’t as good as in his best two plays, but there is actually a plot that makes the thing a play. I’m not entirely convinced I would go out to see a production of it, though.

How to describe it? “Sort of like Twelfth Night, but if J. Alfred Prufrock was the main character.”¹ The Prufrock comparison is perfect as the discussion below will show. Twelfth Night stands in for one of those plays where everyone is mistaken for someone else and in the end everything gets sorted out. I am not sure that Twelfth Night is really the best comparison, though. The Confidential Clerk is more like one of those drawing room comedies where we are surprised by finding out who all the characters really are. But Eliot would like the Shakespeare comparison more, so let’s give it to him. (Plus, we might as well be charitable to Shakespeare when we have the chance—he really is as good as Eliot.)

The philosophical problem around which the play is centered is the question of identity. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who do others think you are? One might think that it would be a good idea if the answer to all three of those questions is the same. But as the wealthy financier notes, he really wanted to be a potter, but he had to give up that dream:

Because I came to see
That I should never have become a first-rate potter.
I didn’t have it in me. It’s strange, isn’t it.
That a man should have a consuming passion
To do something for which he lacks the capacity?
Could a man be said to have a vocation
To be a second-rate potter?

Is there something wrong with being second-rate potter?

If your dream is to be a first-rate potter, but you only have the choice of being a second-rate potter or a first-rate financier, which is the better option? There is no doubt that the entire educational apparatus these days tells you to be first-rate. Thoreau, meanwhile, screams at you to proudly be a potter.

But, the deeper question is more than the old debate of what you should do with your life. Is it possible that your vocation, your calling in life, is to be a second-rate potter? Is it possible that being a second-rate potter isn’t just settling into a life you prefer, but actually the very best use of your time on earth? Is it possible that you will do more good as a second-rate potter than as a first-rate financier? Why couldn’t you have a calling to be mediocre? And, if that is your calling, your vocation, your purpose in life, shouldn’t you proudly pursue it?

As the young protégé replies,

Indeed, I have felt, while you’ve been talking.
That it’s my own feelings you have expressed,
Although the medium is different. I know
I should never have become a great organist,
As I aspired to be. I’m not an executant;
I’m only a shadow of the great composers.
Always, when I play to myself,
I hear the music I should like to have written.
As the composer heard it when it came to him;
But when I played before other people
I was always conscious that what they heard
Was not what I hear when I play to myself.
What I hear is a great musician’s music.
What they hear is an inferior rendering.
So I’ve given up trying to play to other people:
I am only happy when I play to myself.

Is he right to give up his dream?

Moreover, when you abandon the vocation you thought you had when you realized you would always be second-rate, can you really build a new life on make-believe?

My father— your grandfather— built up this business
Starting from nothing. It was his passion.
He loved it with the same devotion
That I gave to clay, and what could be done with it—
What I hoped I could do with it. I thought I despised him
When I was young. And yet I was in awe of him.
I was wrong, in both. I loathed this occupation
Until I began to feel my power in it.
The life changed me, as it is changing you:
It begins as a kind of make-believe
And the make-believing makes it real.

The problem is obvious. You can be successful by outward measures in your make-believe world. You may even move from success to success to success. But, inside, you’ll always know:

If you have two lives
Which have nothing whatever to do with each other—
Well, they’re both unreal.

There is the Prufrock problem:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

How long can you keep this up? If the person you are is not the same as the person you want to be, and if neither of those is the person the world sees, how long can you keep going? Is this triple life you are leading really better than just being a second-rate potter and feeling satisfied and happy in being a second-rate potter and having the world knew you are a second-rate potter?

Eliot’s solution to this problem in the play is cheating. It is, in fact, so transparently a cheat that Eliot surely knew it was. It is almost like Eliot knew he was a second rate playwright, but he really wanted to write plays.

¹Izzy Baird, personal communication, April 7, 2020.
[Yeah, Izzy really wanted a footnote.]

The Moral of the Story

I finally read Little Women.

This is one of those books I heard about a lot as a kid, but never read. It looked long. Very long. And it was, after all, about girls.

When I was young, I did, however, read Little House on the Prairie. The whole series! Combined, Little House is an even longer book about girls. So, why the difference? I suspect it was partly due to the fact that the Little House books are shorter individual volumes and partly that there was an enormously popular TV series about the books.

I think I would have liked Little Women when I was a kid. I enjoyed it as an adult. It’s not the greatest book of all time or anything, but it was a very pleasant read. One way of describing it: when I finished it, I did not immediately plunge into the sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, but I did think I’ll probably read them on one of those lazy days when it feels like the world has ground to a halt.

I read the book with one of my reading groups where the students picked the books. Talking with them about it was illuminating. A couple of reactions are well worth pondering.

First, one of the students noted the oddity of Laurie’s relationships with the sisters. Laurie grows up next door to the sisters. When he gets to of marriageable age, he decides he wants to marry Jo. But, when Jo refuses, he moves on…to Jo’s younger sister, Amy. It all seems so natural in the book itself. But, the student noted it only seems sweet and natural when you imagine that Laurie’s interest in the sisters is totally Platonic.

An early 20s Laurie interested in an early 20s Jo on a purely Platonic level? That is, to put it mildly, completely foreign to the experience of most college-age women. Imagine a real boy interested in a real girl at that age and you do not immediately think there is precisely zero erotic interest. OK, so Little Women was written in an age before the erotic overtones would need to be put on display. In a way that is nice. We all know why young men are interested in marrying young women, so leaving that all to the side is not really a bad thing.

But, if you allow for the fact that there is an unstated erotic attachment here, when Jo turns Laurie down and he immediately takes up with Jo’s little sister, suddenly it is, well, creepy. Imagine that in real life with some teenagers you know. Insert shudder.

Another interesting note on love. Jo’s interest in Professor Bhaer struck me as the oddest thinking in the whole book. This older German guy shows up and Jo is enamored with him, eventually marrying him. I could not for the life of me figure out why this German Professor was so interesting. One of my students told me the answer. Professor Bhaer is modeled after…Ralph Waldo Emerson! Louisa May Alcott grew up quite near Emerson and was fascinated by him. So, the character in the novel who is obviously Alcott’s avatar gets to marry the character in the novel modeled after Emerson. I guess that is one of the advantages of writing your own book.

The second curious observation made by one of the students was how much she loved the book when she was a kid and how disappointed she was with it now. The difference? When she was a kid, these were all just great stories about growing up. Now? Every story was so obviously designed to have a cute moral lesson at the end.

What fascinated me about that remark was that the transparently obvious cute moral lessons are part of the charm of the book. The girls all get tired of doing chores and start complaining. The always wise mother tells them one week that they don’t have to do any chores at all. A few days later, the house is a total wreck, nobody has clean clothes, and their pet bird died. Sadness ensues. The girls learn it is important to do your chores. Wise mom smiles. End of tale. Charming. It’s the kind of experiment every parent dreams of doing, but honestly, adults’ tolerance of absolute household chaos is much lower than kids’ tolerance of the same. But, maybe a story like this would alarm kids enough that they would be scared straight! If you don’t do your chores, your pet will die!

My student’s comment got me wondering. Can real life be turned into a series of moral tales? Could you take the episodes of your own life and spin them out as short chapters, each of which will end with a nice little moral? As I started to imagine doing that, it was surprisingly easy. Maybe Little Women isn’t so artificial after all. Maybe life really is a series of morality plays and Alcott just noticed that.

Alcott is certainly aware of what she is doing. Towards the very end of the book, we get this marvelous passage about Jo:

Now, if she had been the heroine of a moral storybook, she ought at this period of her life to have become quite saintly, renounced the world, and gone about doing good in a mortified bonnet, with tracts in her pocket. But, you see, Jo wasn’t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature, being sad, cross, listless, or energetic, as the mood suggested. It’s highly virtuous to say we’ll be good, but we can’t do it all at once, and it takes a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together before some of us even get our feet set in the right way.

Starting out denying that Jo is the heroine of a moral storybook, Alcott then proceeds to draw a moral from the fact that she is not one. That is, let’s be honest, incredibly brilliant.

The question I am still pondering: is it worthwhile finding moral lessons in all the stories of your life? Would it be a good use of my time to think back over my life and mentally construe it as a whole bunch of morality tales? Should we all do that? Would it do us any good?

I can’t help wondering if Alcott was doing a bit more than just writing a kid’s book to teach some moral lessons. Maybe she was providing a model for how to think about your own life.

Dickens in America

In 1842, C. Dickens sailed the ocean blue and landed in America.

Then he wrote a book about his journeys, cleverly titled American Notes.

This is not a well-read Dickens’ volume. For good reason.

Charitably, it is an uneven book. Uncharitably, it is a pointless ramble punctuated with some interesting things here and there. Dickens lands in Boston, heads south to Washington, then west to Cincinnati and the Great Plains, northeast by the Great Lakes into Canada, and then back down to Boston.

Without a doubt, the most curious feature of his journey is what he visits in each town in the first part of the trip. The whole first part of the book reads like a tour of…prisons. Yep. Roll into town and visit the prison (cf. Lady Malvern!). Dickens starts out liking American prisons. Boston has a great prison! Who knew? Boston is also home to a marvelous state hospital for the insane! Dickens loves these places. He devotes page after page to extolling their glories.

But, sadly, prison quality is not uniform. Philadelphia has an awful prison; truly awful. Everyone is in solitary confinement; never allowed to leave their cell; zero human interaction. Imagine being trapped in one place, never to leave, barely seeing another human being. Year after year after year for the rest of your life. Honestly, what were they thinking?

By the time Dickens gets to Washington, he is obviously getting really tired of his prison tour. (Truth be told, so are his readers.) Originally, Dickens had planned to go south from Washington, but he just can’t bring himself to do it. As he travels south, he is increasingly viscerally disgusted by slavery. The prisoners in Boston have it better than the slaves in the South.

So, he heads west instead, and book changes tone. Gone are the lengthy description of prisons. Insert sigh of relief. Now, we get a fairly lifeless travel narrative. Reinsert sigh of disappointment. Every now and then, you get a nice line:

Pittsburgh is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, wagons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works.

But, for the most part, the rest of the book is just a blur of anodyne descriptions of towns. The mood is captured perfectly when he takes a day trip out to see The Great Plains. He is underwhelmed.

It would be difficult to say why, or how—though it was possibly from having heard and read so much about it—but the effect on me was disappointment. Looking towards the setting sun, there lay, stretched out before my view, a vast expanse of level ground; unbroken, save by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great blank; until it met the glowing sky, wherein it seemed to dip: mingling with its rich colours, and mellowing in its distant blue. There it lay, a tranquil sea or lake without water, if such a simile be admissible, with the day going down upon it: a few birds wheeling here and there: and solitude and silence reigning paramount around. But the grass was not yet high; there were bare black patches on the ground; and the few wild flowers that the eye could see, were poor and scanty. Great as the picture was, its very flatness and extent, which left nothing to the imagination, tamed it down and cramped its interest. I felt little of that sense of freedom and exhilaration which a Scottish heath inspires, or even our English downs awaken. It was lonely and wild, but oppressive in its barren monotony. I felt that in traversing the Prairies, I could never abandon myself to the scene, forgetful of all else; as I should do instinctively, were the heather underneath my feet, or an iron-bound coast beyond; but should often glance towards the distant and frequently-receding line of the horizon, and wish it gained and passed. It is not a scene to be forgotten, but it is scarcely one, I think (at all events, as I saw it), to remember with much pleasure, or to covet the looking-on again, in after-life.

It’s odd. Here we have Charles Dickens, that masterful creator of caricatures who come to life in vivid descriptions of English cities, and he cannot muster any energy to capture the American West or the people of the American West. He has just run out of steam.

After his travels, what does Dickens conclude about America? As he has made abundantly clear throughout the book, even devoting the penultimate chapter solely to the topic, he detests slavery. But even here there is nothing in the book that really conveys that disgust in a Dickensonian fashion. The fate of the isolated prisoners in Philadelphia is conveyed with more pathos than the plight of the slaves. Again, Dickens has missed an opportunity. There is no moment akin to Oliver Twist holding out his bowl and asking for more.

But, it isn’t just slavery that bothers Dickens about Americans. He has a list of other complaints. But, first the good news. Americans aren’t all bad!

They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the possession of these latter qualities in a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends.

He likes us! He really likes us! But, before we get too excited about Dickens being positive, he immediately starts explaining what is wrong with Americans. He starts with three character flaws. Americans suffer from universal distrust, a love of “smart” dealing, and an undue love of trade. But these are nothing compared to the worst problem; “the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this.” (Yes, that is an actual quotation!)

What is the root of this foul growth, that thing which is the ultimate blemish on the entire nation? You will be excused for thinking the answer must be slavery. After all, Dickens did devote the previous chapter to that very problem. But, you would be wrong. Slavery is not the tangled root of the foul growth of America. There is something even more pernicious than slavery.

What is this thing? “But, the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this; and it strikes its fibres, deep in its licentious Press.” Yep, the Press.

Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through the land with giant strides: but while the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless. Year by year, it must and will go back; year by year, the tone of public feeling must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.

Some things never change…

There is at least one thing that is much better than in the mid-19^th century:

As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or ‘plugs,’ as I have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life. The stranger, who follows in the track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous tourists have exaggerated its extent. The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.

So, next time you are feeling bad about the world, just remember—at least there are no more spittoons!

Marriage is What Brings Us Together

Here is a controversial statement: Marriage is an important source of happiness for most people.

Once upon a time, that statement would have elicited a yawn. It is akin to a “people need food to live” variety of comment.

Nowadays, however, them’s fightin’ words on a college campus and many other places beyond the gates. Hold that thought.

That Jane Austen is wildly popular is a truth universally acknowledged. Why? I have been puzzling about devotion to Austen for years. After all, she is not the only person who wrote romantic novels in the era. Sir Walter Scott was, once upon a time, vastly more popular. He also writes ridiculously well and his novels are set in that bygone era full of romance, fancy balls, and evening outdoor strolls.

Reading Mansfield Park, it became obvious that there is a huge difference between Scott and Austen. Indeed it is so obvious I wondered why I never noticed it before. Scott’s novels are about all sorts of things; politics and love and freedom loom large. Austen’s novels? Well, it turns out they all revolve around precisely one topic: marriage.

A plot summary of Mansfield Park would simply be a list of engagements and marriages, both desired and actual. Our heroine, Fanny, spends the whole novel waiting for the love of her life to shake off his infatuation with the beautiful, witty, mean girl and discover the wonders of his quiet, pleasant, devoted cousin. Along the way, Fanny must ward off the advances of the callow, scheming bad boy.

“My dear aunt, you cannot wish me to do differently from what I have done, I am sure. You cannot wish me to marry; for you would miss me, should not you? Yes, I am sure you would miss me too much for that.”
“No, my dear, I should not think of missing you, when such an offer as this comes in your way. I could do very well without you, if you were married to a man of such good estate as Mr. Crawford. And you must be aware, Fanny, that it is every young woman’s duty to accept such a very unexceptionable offer as this.”
This was almost the only rule of conduct, the only piece of advice, which Fanny had ever received from her aunt in the course of eight years and a half. It silenced her.

Fortunately in the end, the match made in Austen happens, just like it should in any fairytale. This is of course exactly the same ending as in every other Austen novel.

He was my epiphany…well assuming the definition of epiphany includes a new question. What if the popularity of Austen these days is simply a longing for a day when the importance of marriage was indeed a truth universally acknowledged?

Talking with college students about marriage is a curious thing. Most of my students do indeed want to get married, but they know better than to say that in public. On a college campus, marriage is, of course, a heteronormative institution reinforcing the patriarchy. Students know that the only goals they can discuss in public are their career plans. If a student were to say “You know…getting married and having kids is actually going to be a greater source of happiness in my life than my career will be,” I am pretty sure the sky would fall.

Even in private when a student talks about marriage the preferred form is universal: “First, I need to establish my career. Then I can marry someone and have kids.” When I ask the optimal age to get married, the answer is almost always “27 or 28.” It’s like they are all in the same social circle.

Then, when I ask how they are going to meet the person they want to marry when they are 27 or 28, there is an instant look of terror. No idea. If I ask what makes a good marriage, again no idea. We have an entire generation which has never contemplated the nature of love and marriage. We talk all the time about careers, and nothing about marriage.

As one of my insightful students recently remarked:

There are no cultural or societal models to explain how couples should structure expectations into their relationships. The old model that has the man that goes to work and is the head of the household and the woman as the person who watches the children, cleans and largely follows the man’s lead is something most people reject. Heterosexual couples especially struggle because they feel compelled by both traditional dynamics but also feel the need to reject them because they do not work today and leave most people unhappy. However, there is no new model for people to use so most couples fail because they cannot figure it out. No one teaches you in any part of your life how to structure a long term relationship or how to gain fulfillment from a marriage. We are just kind of expected to figure it out.

Now this student is every bit as clever and poised as Jane Bennet, but it is inconceivable that Jane would ever say something like that. Everyone in an Austen novel knows what marriage is and they all spend an enormous amount of time dreaming about and planning their married lives.

What happens when an entire generation grows up having absolutely no idea how to think about marriage? One thing that seems to happen is a fascination with Austen (and, truth be told, the Brontes). I am beginning to suspect that there is an inchoate yearning for a society in which marriage is not treated as that thing you might do when you are old, but rather that thing you desire when you are young. Few of my students will agree with that statement…in public.

Childhood Wonders

“Growing up spoiled a lot of things.”

Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an examination of that thesis.

A novel (presumably semi-autobiographical) of a young girl growing up in Brooklyn in the mid-20^th century, it is a very pleasant read about a bygone era.

Historical bildungsromans are a genre unto themselves. Most of them are told as something akin to “How the caterpillar became a butterfly.” Set it in a romantic era with some charming historical details and a few funny relatives, and you have an instant novel. Not necessarily a good novel, though.

One of the things that sets A Tree Grows in Brooklyn apart is that it is never really clear what the moral of the story is. Our heroine, Francie Nolan, grows up, but the novel ends slightly before we find out what exactly she becomes. We are watching Francie change, but it is not clear into what. You can guess at the end about what happens next, but it is purely a guess. You just don’t really know what the butterfly will look like.

Think about your own childhood for a second. Does it have an overarching narrative plot? You might be able to impose one on it with the benefit of hindsight and the desire to have your story be a single plotline. But, when you were growing up, what was your life? It was a whole bunch of unrelated short stories. There was that thing that happened in school in third grade. There was that time you and your best friend got into a fight in 5^th grade. There was that discussion you overheard between your parents that made no real sense. There was that time you got in trouble for that thing you didn’t do. You can add to that list at your leisure.

Did all those events belong in the same novel, though? Of course not. They were just your life as a kid. None of it really made sense. None of it connected to anything else. It was just life in a strange world full of strange events that happened and then stopped happening.

The same was true of all the people in your life. Think of your peers. How many of them do you actually remember? Why do you remember the ones you do remember? Adults are even an odder set. There were your teachers; you probably remember most of them. You remember your relatives too. But what about the neighbors? Your friends’ parents and your parents’ friends? The doctor and the dentist and the mailman and the bus driver and the lunch lady and the guy who worked at the local 7-11? They are all just so many hazy memories of strange adults wandering through life. You never gave most of them any thought at all.

Remembering what it was actually like to be a child is hard. Looking back, we impose order on the whole experience. Knowing what came after, we trace back what were the important things and what were the irrelevant details. But, that storyline you have created is just that: a storyline you created after the fact. Your memories of your childhood are completely disrupted by your knowledge of what came later.

What is it like to think like a child? That is what A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is trying to craft. There are lots of episodes in the novel, but it is not at all clear that they all form a coherent whole. There are lots of people in the novel, but it is not really clear who were the important people and who were not. As you are reading the novel, there are no clues saying “This episode is important.” All the episodes are important to Francie; she is the kid living through them. But, which ones will have a lasting effect and which ones are just the normal experiences of a kid who never quite understands what is going on? You the reader, in other words, know more than Francie, because you, the adult reading the book, understand more about the world than the kid in the story does. There is a crossword puzzle feel to much of the book: can you figure out what really just happened from this kid’s view of what just happened?

There is thus a magic to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and it is no wonder it has proven to be such a beloved novel. The world seen through the eyes of Francie is an amazing place. Wonder is everywhere. There is pain too, but the pain fades and is dulled; kids can be remarkably resilient to pain. There is tragedy and comedy, but neither one dominates the scene. Mostly, there is just another day and another month and another set of things to do. Adults never make much sense. Things just happen. And Francie just keeps moving along.

Growing up spoils a lot of things. There is a magic in the world that simply does not exist when we start imposing order on it. There is a blessed ignorance of the world that no longer exists when we understand the world of adults. Kids just take things as they are. Adults, well, we don’t. And that is most certainly a loss.

The beauty of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that it captures that element of childhood. This is the power of books. As the novel itself put is, when Francie learns to read:

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

Here is the book to read when you start feeling cynical and jaded and think that there is no magic left in the world. This is a book that reminds you that life is wonderful even when it seems like it isn’t.

Want Some Advice?

“Should I read Persuasion?” you ask.

How shall I reply?

It is rare that a book creates such a problem of recommendation.

The novel is, as you know, by Jane Austen. Generally speaking, it is always a simple matter to recommend Austen. Pride and Prejudice is a serious candidate for Best Novel Ever. So, presumably if someone can write the Greatest Novel of All Time, the rest of her output is at least minimally worth reading. Right? Ah, but can I answer that?

Now only a churlish sort of person would ever disrecommend Austen. She writes beautifully about beautiful people in a beautiful world. There is a reason that a Jane Austen Ball has the tinge of the romantic hanging about it. But, does that mean it is OK to recommend reading Persuasion?

Why the angst? Persuasion the novel is about Persuasion the act. Before the story starts, our heroine Anne Elliot wanted to marry the dashing Captain Frederick Wentworth, but was persuaded to avoid this romantic entanglement by the well-meaning Lady Russell. Fast forward nearly a decade, the novel begins and Anne, still single, meets Wentworth, also, mirabile dictu, single. You know how it ends. It’s Austen.

A novel with a plot that hinges on the idea that persuading people to do things is a really bad idea. Should I persuade you to read it?

Is persuasion itself an ethical act? The act of persuading is an assertion that the persuader knows something the persuadee does not. The persuader has decided that the persuadee should act in a certain manner. There is no escaping the fact: if I try to persuade you to do something, then I am fundamentally asserting that I know better than you what will be best for you.

This raises a pair of deep problems. If you are trying to persuade me of something, how do I know that your motives are pure? After all, you are trying to change my behavior by asserting that your advice is in my interest, but you might equally well be trying to persuade me to do something because it is actually in your interest, not mine. This is exactly what you and everyone else does when playing games—admit it, you have tried to convince your opponent to do something because you thought it would help you win. Do you do that in life too?

Second, if you are genuinely trying to improve my lot by persuading me that a certain course of action is best, how do I know that you actually understand what is best for me? Why should I trust that your advice is good? And, now flip the matter around. If you are trying to persuade someone of something, how do you know that your advice is good? How do you know that you are right in what you are trying to persuade someone to do? Do you really know the other person and the situation that well?

It’s a tricky problem. You have a friend who is dating a person who is fundamentally unsuitable for your friend. But, your friend is in love, blind to the massively obviously failings of the beloved. Is it your right to try to persuade your friend that this relationship is manifestly not good? Is it your obligation to do so? Or do you stand by and watch your friend go down a path which you know will only end in misery?

That question is probably unsolvable. Persuasion is just a fact of life. Obviously, if I think you should do something, I will try to persuade you to do it. It’s hard to be a college professor and not think that I should, at a minimum, try to persuade students that learning is fun.

So, should you read Persuasion? Depends. If you have not read Pride and Prejudice and Emma, then you should most definitely read those two novels before you pick up this one. Having read those two, if you want more Austen, then this is a fine book.

Fine, not truly great, though. The prose is marvelously Austenish and the world is fun, so that redeems the book. But the novel itself is woefully undercooked. Other than Anne Elliot there is not a filled-out character in the book. Anne’s father, Sir Walter Elliott, is impeccably sketched. Nobody else in the novel rises to the level of three-dimensional or even interestingly two-dimensional.

The plot reads more like the outline of a plot than a plot itself. By two-thirds of the way through the novel, Anne has three suitors. You know which one she will end up with, so it isn’t like sitting on pins and needles. But, these two other suitors show up out the blue, begin something akin to courting Anne, and then abruptly vanish. There is also a whole coterie of other relatives and acquaintances, all of whom are interrelated and none of whom are terribly distinguishable from each other. In other words, the world of Persuasion is nowhere near as complete as the world of Austen at her best.

In fairness, it is worth noting that this novel was not published in her lifetime. Maybe she was planning to add another 100 pages and fill out the world. Indeed, even the title was not her own; the manuscript was entitled The Elliots, which would have been a much better title.

Other than the meditation on the nature of Persuasion, is there anything else to discover herein? Yep. And, it is one of the tragedies of the College Shutdown that I have missed the opportunity to have what would have been an incredibly merry discussion. I had assigned this book in one of my reading groups for the semester. We were slated to discuss it right after Spring Break.

Toward the end of the novel, there is a lengthy discussion on the difference between the affections of men and women. Which one is more constant? If a man and a woman love one another and then are torn asunder for a time, who is more likely to retain affection the longest? It’s a lively debate in the novel. I would have loved to have raised that question in a room full of Mount Holyoke students. It would have been an incredible conversation about love, gender roles, and innate sexual differences. To say the conversation would have been lively is an understatement. Curse you, coronavirus! (Insert raised shaking fist.)