John Glassco, Gertrude Stein, and others
The following passage comes from a book, written in the 1960s many years after the facts it purports to recall, about the experiences of a nineteen-year-old expatriate Canadian writer living in Paris during the late 1920s, John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse, intro. Leon Edel (1970; rpt. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973).
. . . just then Narwhal [Glassco's pseudonym for Man Ray] came up and began talking so amusingly that I could not drag myself away [from the party that the memoirist, Glassco, reports himself and his roommate Graeme as attending].
'I have been reading the works of Jane Austen for the first time,' he said in his quiet nasal voice, 'and I'm looking for someone to share my enthusiasm. Now these are very good novels in my opinion. You wouldn't believe it but here--among all these writers, people who are presumably literary ahtists--I can't find anyone who has read her books with any real attention. In fact most of them don't seem to like her work at all. But I find this dislike is founded on a false impression that she was a respectable woman.'
'Jane Austen?'
'I don't mean to say she was loose in her behaviour, or not a veuhjin. I'm sure she was a veuhjin. I mean she was aristocratic, not bourgeoise, she was no creep, she really didn't give a darn about all those conventions of chaystity and decorum.'
'Well, her heroines did.'
Oh sure, they seem to, they've got to, or else there'd be no story. But Austen didn't herself. Who is the heroine, the Ur-heroine of Sense and Sensibility? It's Marianne, not Elinor. Of Pride and Prejudice? It's the girl that runs off with the military man. What's wrong with Emma? Emma.'
'You mean Willoughby and Wickham are her real heroes?'
'No, they're just stooges, see? But they represent the dark life-principle of action and virility that Austen really admired, like Marianne and Lydia stand for the life force of female letting-go. And when Ann Elliott falls for Captain Wentworth--you'll notice he's the third W of the lot--it's the same thing, only this time he's tamed. It's a new conception of Austen's talent which I formed yesterday, and which was suggested to me by the fact that Prince Lucifer is the real hero of Paradise Lost, as all the savants declare.'
This idea of Jane Austen as a kind of early D. H. Lawrence was new. Never had the value of her books been so confirmed as [95-96] by this extraordinary interpretation of them: it was a real tribute.
'Do you happen to know if there were any portraits of Austen made?' he asked.
'A water colour by a cousin, I think.'
'Good! I guess it's lousy then,' he said with satisfaction. 'Because I've been thinking of doing an imaginary portrait of her too. I see her in a wood, in a long white dress. She's looking at a mushroom. But all around her are these thick young trees growing straight up--some are black with little white collars and stand for ministers of the church and some are blue and stand for officers of the Royal English Navy. I'm also thinking of putting some miniature people, kind of elves dressed like witches and so forth, in the background--but I'm not sure.'
'It sounds good.'
'The focus of the whole thing will be the mushroom,' he said. 'It represents the almost overnight flowering of her genius--also its circumscribed quality, its suggestion of being both sheltered and a shelter--see?--and its e-conomy of structure.'
'An edible mushroom?'
'You've got it. That will be the whole mystery of the portrait. The viewer won't know and she won't know either. We will all partake of Jane Austen's doubt, faced with the appalling mystery of sex.'
We must have been talking with an animation unusual for one of Gertrude Stein's parties, for several of the guests had already gathered around us.
'You are talking of Jane Austen and sex, gentlemen?' said a tweedy Englishman with a long ginger moustache. 'The subjects are mutually exclusive. That dried-up lady snob lived behind lace curtains all her life. She's of no more importance than a chromo. Isn't that so, Gertrude?'
I was suddenly aware that our hostess had advanced and was looking at me with her piercing eyes.
'Do I know you?' she said. 'No. I suppose you are just one of those silly young men who admire Jane Austen.'[96-97]
Narwhal had quietly disappeared and I was faced by Miss Stein, the tweedy man and Miss Toklas. Already uncomfortable at being an uninvited guest, I found the calculated insolence of her tone intolerable and lost my temper.
'Yes, I am,' I said. 'And I suppose you are just one of those silly old women who don't.'
The fat Buddha-like face did not move. Miss Stein merely turned, like a gun revolving on its turret, and moved imperturbably away.
The tweedy man did not follow her. Leaning towards me, his moustache bristling, he said quietly, 'If you don't leave here this moment, I will take great pleasure in throwing you out, bodily.'
'If you really want,' I said, 'I'll wait outside in the street for three minutes, when I'll be glad to pull your nose.'
I then made my exit, and after standing for exactly three minutes on the sidewalk (by which time I was delighted to find he did not appear), I took my way back to the Dôme. Graeme joined me there fifteen minutes later.
'That's the last party we go to without being invited,' he said.