A Walk with Jane Austen (19 page)

We can't fully know our own character. I think this is one of our greatest weaknesses—something Jane certainly understood. Like our physical appearances, some of us have no doubt of being handsome when in fact we are plain; some who are beautiful think they are ugly.
I have no luck making myself out. I'm perversely prone to err on both sides—at once to think myself incredibly good and to be plunged into despair for never having a completely unselfish feeling, for not being genuinely loving, to have all my faults overwhelm me at once. We are human; we have blind spots. There are egregious flaws of which we are completely unaware. And mostly our friends and family are loathe to say anything about them. I wonder if we really even want them to. It's possible to live all our lives without understanding who we really are, what we are really like.

I am a strange mixture of incredible inner strength and great insecurity, of a desire to laugh and an intense and often overly serious view of the world, of occasional bravery and great, awkward shyness. As a child I learned to be sweet, which perhaps is good in a child, but it's something that developed into an act. I learned to appear nice, to say and do the right thing. I was too afraid of voicing my own opinion, of being real. I could analyze this in detail; multiple reasons and multiple and complex streams of thought and behavior converge here. But as Jane would say, it was affected behavior. As the apostle Paul would say, I have often been “a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1), worthless without genuine love.

What I am today I would guess is something like my physical appearance—a fat-little-skinny-girl kind of soul that looks more than acceptable in most lights, but doesn't tolerate minute inspection. (And if God were to pull back the covers to show me myself in the stark light of absolute Truth, I'm sure I would be overwhelmed with hopelessness. Praise God he does not let us see ourselves as we truly are, at least not all at once.) I hope that my friends and family—and gentle proddings from God—will move me in the right direction, that I will, in spite of
my hopeless pride, be open to some kind of reproof, that I'll be able to discern which corrections to heed and what of my own self-condemnation is completely unnecessary. I'm tired of being human, with all the necessary imperfections that implies. If nothing else, I've learned to laugh at my own occasional ridiculousness, which gives me hope.

One of my favorite characters in Jane's life is her charming and favorite brother, Henry—tall, good-looking Henry, who loved everything he did and simultaneously always wanted to be doing something else, who spent time in the militia and contemplated importing wine from France and was part owner of a bank until it went bankrupt. He finally ended up, enthusiastic as always, in the church, disappointed that the bishop who ordained him had no desire to read the New Testament text in the original Greek.

You can't tell the story of Henry without talking about Eliza, the Austens’ beautiful, romantic French cousin, whom he eventually married. Eliza was actually born in India, where her mother had successfully gone in search of a husband. But she spent some of her growing-up years in France, married a French army officer who liked to be known as a count—but doesn't seem to have actually been a count
¹⁰
—and visited Versailles, where she adored the “Feathers, ribbon & diamonds” in Marie Antoinette's [May 16, 1780] hair and found her ungloved hands “without exception the whitest
&C
most beautiful I ever beheld.”
¹¹

You can imagine the stories she told when she came back to visit the Austens in their country rectory, speaking French like a native and being generally flirtatious. Unfortunately, the dear count (it's unclear
how much Eliza really loved him) lost his life to the guillotine in the Revolution (February 1794).
¹²
Eliza returned to England, and it took a great deal of persuasion for Henry, ten years her junior, to talk her out of the charms of being single and able to flirt with every man in the room.
¹³
James had been interested as well, but Henry won, and James went on to Mary Lloyd, who could never really love Eliza knowing that James had wanted her once.

Eliza died young of what may have been breast cancer, and Henry, who did not have “a Mind for affliction’
¹⁴
and was not of a disposition to wallow in grief, went back to being the charming man-about-town, even dancing at the royal ball at Burlington House in 1814 celebrating peace with France, where the Prince Regent, the Czar of Russia, and the King of Prussia were in attendance. “Oh! what a Henry,” Jane said.
¹⁵

Henry was the one who couldn't bear for Jane's authorship to remain a secret. It seems that whenever the books were mentioned— and they were popular even then—he couldn't help but mention, against her wishes, that his sister was the author. He handled all of her business negotiations with publishers.

He lived here in Covent Garden for a while (he was always moving), but my hopes for the place have all been dashed. There's too much junk and higher-end chain stores. I sit in a wine bar with my backpack and notebook, drinking bubbly water, thinking one should probably never bring a backpack into a wine bar. A couple guys look my way, and as always, I can't determine if they're meditating on my beauty or my overall strangeness.

Henry reminds me of my own brother. When he walks into a roomful of people he doesn't know, he is sure to win them over. As a child, I thought his gregariousness was strength, my own shyness weakness.
He told me a few years ago that this was just the particular way his own insecurities worked themselves out. But there's something there—an ease and self-assurance—that I've always wanted desperately, at least as soon as I realized they were missing. I'm sure Henry had them as well. I think that is so much of what makes someone good-looking to us—not physical beauty, but a confidence and force of personality that often has nothing to do with looks.

I went to a candlelight concert in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields—Bach and Handel with a chamber orchestra, gorgeous and comforting. Music like that fills me up and holds on to me, reassuring me.

And then I came home to Margaret and the news, which I cannot watch anymore. It is mostly about terrorism, but the last several nights they've been covering the famine in Niger, following one small boy. I don't know how old he is, maybe eighteen months, but he lies on the ground with a head that looks far too big for his tiny body. His stomach is distended; his face is crusty. There are flies. He's dying, and they are there to film it.

I am sick of seeing death and being unable to do anything about it. I can't bear to just send my twenty dollars to some massive aid organization. I want to do something meaningful.

“They took turns in those days, you know,” Dom Nicholas had said. We were having coffee—Anselm, Susan, Nicholas, and I before Susan and I headed out to Chawton. He was talking about how people used to take care of one another in Austen's day, how they made soup for the poor. “Everyone knew when it was their turn, when it was
their week. You see, they understood their responsibility. They took care of each other. And if you were going to skimp, you didn't put meat in the soup, but the Austens always used meat. They took their responsibility seriously.”

I know Jane made shirts for the poor, people she knew who lived in Steventon. I know she bought them things they needed—shifts and stockings and shawls. I feel both isolated from poverty—I do not know what my neighbors need or if they need anything—and surrounded by it because now we know about all the hunger and death in the world, and everyone is my neighbor.

I want to make soup.

Do you know the scene in the old movie
It Happened One Night
where a glamorous Claudette Colbert shows a little leg for the sake of stopping traffic since Clark Gable is having no luck hitchhiking? If you can imagine a situation almost entirely the opposite, you'll have a pretty good idea of my predicament this afternoon. I was standing on the narrow shoulder of an A road in Kent (whoever knew that A roads are the busiest roads in the countryside?), drenched from rain, my hair in strings around my face, any trace of makeup gone, my hiking shoes soaked, my pants wet four inches deep. Only I don't know how to hitchhike the cool way, so I looked like a soaked crazy woman having an incredibly bad hair day sticking out my thumb in the manner of a librarian and occasionally trying to wave cars down. No one stopped.

One of my most frequent prayers of late is that I will just not be an idiot. And I don't mean the socially awkward, always saying the wrong things at the wrong time kind of idiot, though perhaps I should pray for that more as I have some talent in that area. I mean the kind of
proud, ridiculous idiot who thinks highest of herself and as a result whose life adds up to very little in the end. But this was idiocy of a whole other kind. I often question God's direct involvement in my life as a result of prayer, but I begged him with everything in me to please do something to get me off the side of that A road in Kent.

It's been an ugly day, both for me and the weather. I wore my green cropped sweatpants and dark red tank, which would have been okay, except that I had to wear my hiking shoes, which threw the whole outfit off, and then it was so cold that I had to put on my red fleece, which clashed with everything, and it was raining off and on, so I kept putting on and taking off my rain jacket, which clashed with the fleece. I had planned to try Winchester today, but they were doing work on the tracks in that direction this morning. Instead, Margaret drove me to the Bromley station, and I was able to get a train directly to Canterbury.

The town center is small, the streets narrow. The sky was gray and spitting wet. I found my way from the train station to the cathedral, just after the morning service had started. To me it felt oppressive and lifeless—maybe because it was so gray and cold—and the sermon, from the little attention I had for it, seemed to be rubbish, full of weak analogies with little strength and conviction.

By 1:00 I was choking on a dry ham omelet in a great little café above the tourist center, and at 1:25 I caught the train to Chilham from the West train station on the other side of town. The lady at the tourist center had never heard of Godmersham.
Very bad beginning
,I thought. Then when she did look up the bus schedule, she said the buses didn't run on Sunday, so I should take the train to Chilham and get a cab from there, which would be much cheaper.

I sat in the café drinking my watered-down instant decaf, feeling like an ugly, conspicuous, backpack-toting tourist. I felt like I couldn't do anything right and had far too many un-chic accoutrements. I wondered if I should even try to find Godmersham, what kind of challenges I would find, if it would even be worth the effort. So I made a conscious decision to choose adventure. And that is when the fun began.