Willoughby was sincere

If we wish to make something of sincerity as a virtue we must have a way to evaluate it. I won't say "measure it" because that suggests something like science. But there is something to be said for wanting to measure it for we don't just wonder if someone is sincere, we also wonder how sincere they are. The implied claim is that someone could be sincere but not sincere enough; that being sincere is not like pregnancy in that one either is or is not but rather that there are degrees of sincerity just as there are degrees of courage.

Someone might be courageous enough to kill spiders but be at a complete loss when dealing with bats. I'm not suggesting that there is a unit of courage but we all understand that some people might be brave enough for some circumstances but not for others.

Courage can also be learned and trained for: if you practice facing small things bravely, you will prepare yourself for facing the big ones.

It doesn't seem to me that you can discuss sincerity in  those terms. I think to talk about sincerity as being more or less strong is nonsensical. I fact, I'd argue that sincerity has nothing to do with strength at all—you can be the very worst sort of moral weakling and be sincere.

I don't mean to say that sincerity is nothing. I don't think it is terribly useful for building or evaluating character.

Is he or isn't he?

"Is he sincere," seems a natural enough question. Bill says he will love Janice to the end of time and she wonders if he is sincere. But is it really? If Janice really has to ask, then she obviously has little knowledge of his character. If she knew Bill to be a good, caring and responsible person, she wouldn't be asking the question because she would not only know him not to make such a statement carelessly, she would also have some notion of his ability to carry through on his promises.

For someone can make promises, both explicitly and implicitly, and be absolutely sincere in making them and yet fail miserably in keeping them. This is where John Willoughby comes into the picture for his love for Marianne Dashwood is sincere. This is not a matter of interpretation but a plot point. When Willoughby shows up while Marianne is sick late in the novel, the whole point of the conversation he has with Elinor is to bring this fact into clear light; Austen wanted to make it clear to the reader that there was no room whatsoever to doubt Willoughby's sincerity. For Marianne, it is some comfort to learn that her judgment of his sincerity was not wrong. But, having acknowledged that, we are left with another problem for if he was (and is) sincere in his love and yet behaved the way he did, what good is sincerity?

The early American pragmatists were brought face to face with this problem by the civil war when it turned out that some of those who held sincere anti-slavery views were cowards in action while some others who cared little for the plight of the slaves distinguished themselves by fighting very bravely.

Children of alcoholic parents often have the uselessness of sincerity driven home in particularly brutal fashion. Their alcoholic mother or father will make declarations and promises that are absolutely sincere and then fail to come through with heartbreaking regularity.

For Austen, the virtue that really mattered was constancy. Constancy isn't enough by itself: a constant racist is not a virtuous man or woman after all. But constancy, unlike, sincerity, can real work in a moral life.

By the way ...

A fascinating thing about Willoughby as a character in a novel is that he has failed as a man before the story even begins. Nothing he could do could make him a worthy husband for Marianne because he has already poisoned things by having sex with the 15-year-old Eliza. He'd be a better man, if he would accept his Aunt's conditions and do right by Eliza after having gotten her pregnant but he would still be less than a whole man because he no longer loves Eliza after having met Marianne.

I knew a guy who was much like Willoughby in university. Dave was very successful with women. He wasn't a pick-up artist, by which I mean he didn't run up great numbers of conquests. But he was always with a beautiful sexual partner and there were always other women vying for the chance to replace whoever his partner of the moment was.

After graduation, he got a job at the Bamboo Club in Toronto and carried on in his ways. I hadn't known him terribly well at university and had assumed that Dave was a cynical man who cleverly exploited women's emotions to have sex with them. I got to know him in those later days, however, and found that he was anything cynical: he was sincerely loved by the women who fell in with him and he sincerely loved every woman he ever was involved with.

Ultimately, though, the women all gave up on him. They didn't hate him . One of the most trying things for those of us who wished we had a quarter of Dave's attractiveness for women was that they spoke of him admiringly but regretfully even after the break up. They still seemed to wish that their relationships might be rekindled and actually work out the second time. He had everything they wanted for love but not what it took to make a marriage.

Dave, like Willoughby, was immensely attractive as a sincere lover but not much of a man in the final analysis and "constancy;" is a good word to describe what was missing in him. . I recently finished the Sylvie Simmons biography of Leonard Cohen and reached the same conclusion about him.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

Body Heat Pt2: Some thoughts about women in noir and neo noir films
Most criminals are brutally stupid people who do stupidly brutal things. They don't make for good subjects for fiction. That is why there is so little really realistic crime fiction. Realism is always a series of stylistic conventions rather than actually realistic.

Dashiell Hammett's brilliant innovation was to realize that the only way you could make a story about the irrational people who actually commit crimes interesting was to write a story in which normal people end up interacting with them. In Hammett the normal person is usually the detective. Sam Spade was sleeping with his partner's wife and now his partner has been murdered. That is an interesting moral story. The three nuts pursuing the black bird would not be interesting  all by themselves. If you took characters such as Spade and the genuinely human moral tension out of them, most noir fiction would lose all its appeal.

Thus it is Ned Racine and his moral weaknesses that makes Body Heat interesting. But what about Matty Walker, the femme fatale. What is there for women in a character like this? And to ask that question honestly, we need to take seriously the possibility that the answer might be nothing at all. Obviously I am going to make the case that there is something.

An unreal person living a real life?
It seems to me that the first thing to note about Matty Walker is that the rough outline of her life is actually quite plausible. This is not a life that most people live but a depressing number of people do live lives not unlike it. Here it is in outline:

• She is the most beautiful girl in her high school and dreams of "being rich and living in an exotic land".
• Her unrealistic dreams lead her into bad choices including drugs.
• A guy bails her out, no doubt for less than idealistic reasons.
• Cleaned up and attractive again, she finds a better deal and trades up.
• Initially happy to be married to this wealthy guy, she starts to chafe at the restrictions and to tire of having sex with this "small, mean and weak" man.
• She finds another lover and soon begins plotting how to extract herself from this marriage taking the maximum amount of money with her.
• This new guy soon finds that he too is being used.

All of that is believable enough. What is hard to believe is that the woman who would do all these things could be anywhere near as intelligent, interesting and alive as Matty Walker as played by Kathleen Turner. I don't mean just that she looks better the way even bellboys in movies tend to look a lot better than they do in real life. I mean that she is far too human a person to have that biography. People who slide in and out of drugs and then commit murder are hollow vessels.

If you crave realism, this will disappoint you.

de-Baroquing the story
The key to making any sort of morale for real women out of a story like this is to smooth out the Baroque details and see the real life pattern that has been blown up into something fantastic. Make her,

•  A girl who had exotic dreams whose real life didn't match those dreams and is now in a relationship that she entered into for reasons that may have once felt like love but now feel purely pragmatic. She has lost all attraction for the man she is with and now is repulsed by him during sex. 
• She begins an affair with another man, swearing him to absolute secrecy, but slowly begins to wonder if there isn't some way to escape.
• All the time this is going on, it isn't clear whether she is really in love with this new man or just using him.

If you haven't known someone who did just that, then you haven't been paying attention. Most of us, if we are honest, will admit that, even if we haven't done quite that, we would be capable of falling into such a pattern if we just let things slide.

One of the really great things about a movie such as Body Heat is that it rewards repeated watchings. The first time, you can watch his story. The second time, you can watch hers. The merit is not the realism. This is fiction and never pretends to be anything but fiction. But it is fiction in which we can exercise our moral imagination. We can put ourselves inside her just feel like what it would be like.

For example, the sex. Why does she do it? Does she enjoy it? I think yes, but does she enjoy it because it feels good or does she enjoy it for the feeling of erotic power it gives her? Because you can imagine that. You could—if the idea appeals to you—fantasize about it. But what conditions would it take for you to actually enjoy doing something like that?

The answer to these questions are nobody's business but yours of course.

By the way, one of the fascinating things about fiction that doesn't pretend to be anything but fiction is the craft involved. Fans of Jane Austen will appreciate the way the story arc here is structured. The murder takes place in exactly the middle of the movie. There is a perfect story arc just like in an Austen novel. If we started drawing up a list of similarities with an Austen novel, we would find quite a few.


Part 3 is here.

Venus Day

Charlotte Collins, novelist
Here as promised is the story of Charlotte Collins the greatest English language novelist of all time. That name not ringing any bell? Perhaps you know her better under her maiden name of Charlotte Lucas? Well, you've heard of her most famous book. It's called Pride and Prejudice. No, the Pride and Prejudice. It's not like there is more than one of them.

You don't believe she wrote it? Well, try reading it again and compare Charlotte's insights into Elizabeth's character versus Elizabeth's insights into Charlotte. Again and again, Elizabeth underestimates Charlotte or just gets her wrong. Charlotte, however, is unfailingly penetrating in her assessments of Elizabeth.

I know, I know, "But Charlotte commits the greatest sin possible by marrying for pragmatic reasons rather than love." Well, maybe. But is Elizabeth any better? She is just as stuck with Lady Catherine now as Charlotte is. You don't think that Lady Catherine isn't going to get over her humiliation and be back in her usual form do you?

But but, Elizabeth really loves Darcy!

Does she? To really love someone you have to understand them and Elizabeth, by her own admission, doesn't even begin to grasp Darcy. Here is an example, in his second declaration of love, Darcy blames everything on his pride and claims his parents were not to blame. Do you believe that? You do? Then why does Darcy have two last names? Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Nobody who gave their child that name could be anything but a pretentious git of the very worst kind. (Lady Catherine isn't an exception, she is typical of her family.)

And what names they are. "Darcy", with its arrogant assertion of Norman blood—this from a family of great wealth but no distinction whatsoever beyond what they married into—is really something. My mother used to say, "Always wash your hands after handling money, the commonest people have money."

But as bad as "Darcy" may be, "Fitzwilliam" is worse. First of all it's a name that someone in the family married into and nothing they come by legitimately. Second it comes loaded with its own boatload of pretension: it is "Fitzwilliam" from "fils de William". Any time you see "Fitz" in a name like this it means that someone way back when was the bastard son of someone they thought it worth claiming descendance from even at the price of parading their illegitimacy. "Fitzroy" meant the king's bastard son, "fils du Roi". The pretension in "Fitzwilliam"is a million times worse because they aren't claiming descendance from any old king but from William the Conqueror.

And all they are is really rich. That they were so proud of having "Fitzwilliam" in the family by marriage that they were willing to saddle their son with it just to keep up what is most likely a bogus claim is very telling. At best, the William in question might have been the mayor of some little burg who knocked up some particularly trampy chambermaid whose descendants later got rich dishonestly. It almost certainly wasn't William the Conqueror.

I know, millions of women had very meaningful "experiences" while fantasizing about Colin Firth but the only difference between Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy is one of degree. The two marriages are more or less alike.

A mirror image
If you still don't believe me, consider how easily the story could be reversed. You could tell pretty much the same story only have the beautiful girl marry a rich man with a house for pragmatic reasons and have her more sensible best friend marry the poor clergymen dependent on the munificence of others for his living.

Here is the trajectory of Elizabeth's story.

Elizabeth meets a wealthy man named Darcy but finds his personality less than attractive, then she falls under the charm of a handsome rogue named Wickham in whom she puts her trust leading to almost disastrous consequences for her and her family until she is saved by the man she originally put off and now she suddenly "sees" his real virtue and marries for love.

Meanwhile, steady Charlotte waits until all other claims against Mr Collins are cleared up so that she can pursue the man she sees as a good solid bet.

It's not hard to imagine that the other way around, wherein it is Charlotte who really marries for love and Elizabeth is the purely pragmatic one marrying for protection and comfort.

Can't do it? Maybe the names are getting in your way. Let's change the names of our characters so we can see the thing afresh.

A young woman, let's call her Marianne, meets a wealthy man with a nice country seat, let's call him Colonel Brandon, but finds his personality less than attractive, then she falls under the charm of a handsome rogue, let's call him Willoughby just for variety's sake,  in whom she puts her trust leading to almost disastrous consequences for her and her family until she is saved by Brandon, who she originally put off, but now she suddenly "sees" his real virtue and marries for what are probably really pragmatic reasons of wanting someone to protect and keep her.

Meanwhile, another, more steady woman, let's make her a sister for a little more variety and call her Elinor, waits until all other claims against, oh it's so hard just making up names on the fly like this, I'll call him Edward Ferrars for lack of anything better, are cleared up so that she can pursue the man she really loves.

That's not so hard is it. And yes, it is pretty much the same story structure isn't it?

Charlotte Collins does this all the time. There is a character named Eliza in Sense and Sensibility who gets entangled with Willoughby before the action and ends up pregnant. It's not terribly hard to imagine that, but for the grace of God, her namesake in Pride and Prejudice could easily have met the same fate. I know we don't like to discuss this sort of possibility; I mean that Wickham might have nailed Elizabeth. Oh sorry, it sounds so crude when I put it that way. "Nailed" is such an ugly word to describe the act of ... whoops we wouldn't want to call it "'love" would we? . Would "seduced" be any better?

Actually, seduced is a little unfair to Wickham. Yes, he is a liar and cad but Elizabeth rather throws herself at him doesn't she? Seduction is really giving him too much credit. I know, only the horrible Lydia could do something quite that brazen. Well, Lydia is bad, true, but the difference between she and Elizabeth is one of degree not kind.

Okay, if that is too crude and dirty for you, consider instead Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park. She is likable and not a tramp but she doesn't work out so well and the similarities between Mary and Elizabeth are awfully compelling. Actually, that one even pains me. I read Mansfield Park and I can't help but wonder if maybe Charlotte has had second thoughts about Elizabeth.

Here is a hypothesis, what if, in writing Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte based Elizabeth on her best friend forever only to have that BFF disappoint her deeply between the time she finished Pride and Prejudice and before she started writing Mansfield Park?

Actually, it's a pseudonym
I haven't been completely honest here. "Charlotte Collins" was actually  a pseudonym that was assumed by a woman named Jane Austen to write the novel. Later she changed her mind and published under the simpler pseudonym of "a lady" but she kept Charlotte Collins as the name of the character she based on herself.

She did this because there were some touchy privacy issues involved. You see Charlotte/Jane never married. Mr. Collins is actually based on her father and the whole story is her brutally honest (complete with many warts) but loving way of presenting the portrait of a man she loved, he was her father after all, in print. She portrayed the man in several of her novels under different names, Mr Elton, for example. Sometimes, she idealized him a bit, as a loving daughter is wont to do, and so we get the more positive portraits we see in Henry Tilney, Edward Ferrars and Edmund Bertram but the relationships are always with fatherly types whom you can't imagine actually ... I'm sorry I can't bring myself to use the words.

Okay, I'm making all this up but you don't really have any way of knowing that some of it may not be true. This is a continuation of my point from yesterday. A good novelist, and Austen is the best, can create an endless number of characters out of very limited biographical resources. And she can place these characters into a shockingly limited number of basic story structures and still come up with stories that are profoundly different from one another even though her various stories parallel one another to a degree that is really quite astounding.

A while ago, I read a journalist who mocked the Nancy Drew stories by saying they aren't stories about a girl having a bunch of different adventures so much as they are stories of the same girl having the same adventure over and over again. That sounds damning until you read Jane Austen. The difference between her stories and the Nancy Drew stories is not that Austen always tells fresh stories but that she is much better at telling what is more or less the same adventure over and over again.

Towards the end of In Search of Lost Time Proust has his narrator Marcel make the same point to Gilberte while they are having tea. Telling variations on the same simple stories over and over again is, says Proust, what great artists do. It's what Shakespeare did and it's what Sophocles did. (One of the big weaknesses in the Nancy Drew stories is that all the adventures are needlessly complex; a better writer would have written more simply.)

One of the marks of a truly great novelist is that they have a number of basic character types whom they can shuffle and move about in a variety of approaches. Austen did it, so did Henry James, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh.

And the same is true of our lives. We don't judge a woman better than other women because she has new or different adventures from other women but because she plays the same music only more meaningfully. (Yes, I would say the same thing about men and I started to yesterday. Today I'm focusing on women though.)

Final thought, if you've ever sneered at Charlotte Collins you only succeeded in proving something about yourself by doing so. Have I ever sneered at her: yes, back when I was callow youth. I know better now.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post is here. 

Marital assymetry

This is a term that I found in some Austen criticism. It refers to a number of marriages Austen portrays in which one partner is clearly deficient. Mr. Collins is a good example. Another, and the one that this critic I am reading (John Dussinger) singles out is:

[Mrs. Allen] was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. Northanger Abbey

Nowadays, these people tend to be divorced. When I think of the single and divorced people I know and like I have to say I am not terribly surprised that most of them are. Most people I know are married but there are friends and relations who have made it into their late thirties or forties without getting married or, more frequently, without getting remarried.

They're good enough people. I like them all and dearly love some of them. But I don't sit around wondering why they just can't seem to meet someone because it's pretty obvious why they cannot. I keep hoping they will find someone to be happy with but I suspect that no one in their right mind would marry one of them. Nor does anyone other than themselves spend a lot of time wondering why their marriages didn't work out.

The thing about Austen is that she unhesitatingly blames Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Collins for their respective predicaments. She sees all three as having failed as human beings. We might nod politely and change the subject when our divorced friends bemoan their fates but we don't, even to ourselves, hold them morally responsible. We don't think, "If you had spent your time developing a more amiable character you wouldn't be in this fix."

Perhaps we should.

Elinor Dashwood

I think Elinor is the greatest of Austen heroines. Before anyone jumps down my throat, that is different from saying that Sense and Sensibility is the greatest Austen book, it isn't. For me, Elinor towers above all others save Fanny Price (who comes close in greatness). If you want to be a good human being, there probably isn't a better role model in all fiction than Elinor Dashwood.

Wonderful Austen

Colonel Brandon is telling Elinor his history and how his brother's marriage failed:

"My brother had no regard for her; his pleasures were not what they ought to have been, and from the first he treated her unkindly."

My but that is wonderful: "his pleasures were not what they ought to have been". The next time someone tells you that Austen is sexually repressed, read them this sentence and ask them to explain what that might possibly mean. She doesn't dwell on sex nor does she get explicit but she knows exactly what these things are about.

And how unlike the namby-pamby nonsense that passes for ethics today was a morality that assumed it was important to have the right pleasures.