Camp Austen_My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

by Ted Scheinman

  A Regency cotillion is well worth observing if you ever get the chance. The floor should be rectangular or square, with plenty of room for at least two dozen couples to stand in two rows, facing each other over a distance of five or so paces. The action is graceful, even when performed by amateurs: as with line dancing, it’s a collective effort, and best viewed from a balcony. Seen from above, partners separate and recombine in new configurations (now a spinning quartet, jigging in a circle; now an octet, followed by a sudden return to your original partner), as the dancers describe curlicues, and the whole affair becomes a series of larger themes and smaller grace notes—a kaleidoscope wherein humans are the crystals. Over the course of a Janeite ball, the company invariably becomes familiar with each of the antiquated group dances, helped in no small measure by the liberating effects of wine-punch, and by the presence of Jack Maus at the head of the room, calling out the steps and exhorting the revelers “not to be shy.”

  * * *

  As the last note of the third number redounded and died, our little trio entered the great hall. I removed my hat and Ashley lowered her fan, both of us appraising the company with as much disdain as we could muster in the giddy spirit of the moment. Muttering began among the Meryton gentry. Jack Maus, maître de la danse, handed me a microphone.

  “It is, I must say, a … singular pleasure to be among you this evening. Your facility at the cotillion is rather good. For the provinces.”

  Adam took the mic and began calling every person and inanimate object “charming,” including as many superlatives and uses of “I say” as the Queen’s English allowed. Maus then requested that Caroline Bingley and Mr. Darcy lead the following dance. We assented. As Maus prepared the string quintet, Inger’s youngest daughter, Clara, tiny and dressed in lovely Regency white with a pink sash, asked whether she might dance with Mr. Darcy. Her face was a beautiful crimson. I took a knee to explain that my second dance was spoken for, but would she do me the honor of saving the third? She nodded her bonny blonde head in agreement, and would of course keep me to my word. Ashley labored to preserve her deportment of condescension even as we “led” the next two dances and linked arms happily with various delightful people on whom Darcy and Miss Bingley, drunk on their own excellence in the first volume of Pride & Prejudice, expend so much disdain.

  There is a pleasant geometry to these Regency cotillions: a refreshing alternation between the basic circle and the basic oblong or square. So, for instance, if Caroline Bingley and I are the lead couple at the head of the dance line, we will perform various curlicues: spinning one another, lacing ourselves between and then around the “B” couple, just below us, and of course doing the “back-to-back,” which is the rural English equivalent of the rural American “do-si-do.” We then proceed, in linear fashion, down the line of two dozen–ish couples, until the “head” couple finds itself at the bottom. Not unlike the end of Mansfield Park, really.

  Our twenty-first-century difficulty with the steps put us very much at odds with the Austens, their circle, and their contemporaries around England, for whom these dances, though they depend on a rich geometry, were essentially second nature—one of Austen’s biographers suggests that the family could have done all the jumping, setting, circling, and promenading with their eyes closed.

  Despite Ashley’s enthusiastic fainting at the instruction earlier that day, she had been paying close attention, and had achieved a graceful command of her moves that allowed me to “follow” without disgracing myself. There are moments at a cotillion when even the fleetest of foot will find him- or herself mimicking Wile E. Coyote, racing in blushingly belated manner through old steps in a doomed effort to catch up with the micro-orchestra. In one moment of particular shame, Ashley watched with patience as I twirled myself in a half-assed way to make up for not having twirled her.

  “I think we’re doing all right, Darcy,” she said with a smile. “See how the natives positively teem with admiration.”

  I smiled in response and said nothing, lest I fall further behind. I comforted myself with this thought: whatever I lacked in precision and training, I might recoup via twirls of the foot, the occasional soft-shoe, and easy manners.

  Clara proved an equally forbearing partner. Her blushes dissipated as the hornpipe began; before long, she was issuing gentle correctives in my direction:

  “No, this way”; “Now you must take my hand”; or, more often, “This way, Mr. Darcy!”

  Clara is in some respects an anomaly among American primary-schoolers, the early beneficiary, much like Georgiana Darcy, of a family devoted in equal measure to fine books and fine hospitality. But her language here is so curious that it bears brief comment. We have spoken before about dress and company, and how these two can adjust character and behavior. The anachronistic directive “Now you must take my hand” is a lovely example; however bookish and well-mannered, Clara was speaking through inherited, unrehearsed formal patterns of speech, likely culled from early exposure to Austen adaptations on-screen, recalled by the circumstances of the ball, and energized by the period outfit.

  We enjoyed two such dances together, my tiny tutor and I, and photographs of the proceedings will comfort me in my golden years. Several hours and many minuets later, I would see the young lady fast asleep across the chest of her smiling father. Dozy adults were weary from booze; this little sylph was merely exhausted from having kept me in line for so long.

  Having acquitted myself through several rounds of dance without face-planting, I saw no objection to repairing to the viewing gallery for idle gossip and decorous flirtation. Whist had been on the evening’s docket, but dancing monopolized the collective attention, along with bowl after bowl of Shrub, a vinous punch concocted in the classic style by Gary Crunkleton, a local bar owner and “mixology historian.” I abstained, but the ladies in my company assured me the concoction was divine. It became curiously clear, in this moment, how very easy it might be to find oneself smitten on such a night, two-hundred-some years ago.

  A few hours later, in the kitchen of an unfamiliar house, I quietly separated my 1813 clothes from my 2013 clothes and slipped the latter onto my weary limbs. My suit pants felt as billowy as a sundress, and this sensation lingered as I whispered parting words and then tiptoed home to prepare for the closing ceremonies, which would begin shortly after the imminent sunrise. (The words would resonate, and the house would not long remain unfamiliar.) Seeing my “costumes” side by side, a happy thought entered my still-twirling head. We do not dress to escape ourselves; we dress to clarify ourselves through the crystal patterns of a half-recovered world where seeking goodness in others creates goodness in turn—where finally, beneath the starch and the silly outfits, we find some long-forgotten piece of our true, our best selves.

  * * *

  The Carolina dancing prepared me insufficiently for my first JASNA meeting in Minneapolis, where I went following my partial conversion to Janeism at the summer camp. Once more, I was an unworthy surrogate for my mother—my tasks in Minneapolis included delivering one of my mother’s papers while she lay on a couch in upstate New York with her legs elevated—but I was also on assignment, still writing about, and trying to understand, the Janeites, this intoxicating secret society that was beginning to feel like an unexpected birthright.

  My dancing in Minneapolis showed certain improvements. Though still clumsy and inattentive to choreography, I was at least not a total amateur the second time around. Nevertheless, the size alone of the annual JASNA meeting meant the ball would be far more populous, collisions would be more frequent, and no one was safe from a camera. As the ball was set to begin, the writer Deborah Yaffe dragged over a friend, the two of them insisting that “Jane Bennet” (a gorgeous historical novelist with bouncy blonde ringlets) had been eyeing me.

  “Go over there!” Yaffe told me. “Tell her she’s the very image of Jane Bennet. That’s your line.”

  I thanked Deborah and turned to locate the woman in question, who had just materia
lized on my right arm.

  “They’re taking photographs of us,” she whispered into my ear as she steered me toward a phalanx of camera-phones. “I hope you don’t mind.” Her poise before the cameras, and the commanding way in which she had taken my arm, felt absurd, like a moment of stage management on a red carpet outside the Oscars. There were camera flashes all around us, and I didn’t even get to use Deborah’s line before the lady had reserved two dances with me. Things were looking up.

  At dinner, while scribbling observations in my steno pad, I noticed Inger and Emma Brodey seated two tables away in the banquet room. After the chicken course, Inger spotted me, smiled, rose, and approached.

  “Ted, at the risk of meddling, I should like to say that the two ladies on either side of me would both be tickled if you reserved the first four dances for them.”

  Craning, I spotted them: Prashansa, a young Indian scholar in a crimson sari, and Maria, a young Coloradoan with doe eyes and lashes the length of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Maria wore a beautiful white gown with a red sash.

  “Of course, Inger. Depend upon me. Shall I pretend we never had this conversation?”

  Inger almost giggled. “Yes, I think we’d better.”

  Staff began clearing tables to make room for dancing, and I approached the women in question.

  “Excuse me—I wondered whether you ladies would do me the honor of reserving the first portion of your dance cards for me.”

  They smiled—Maria actually curtseyed—and agreed, with a sly glance at Inger.

  We were novices, and there were one or two moments when our costumes came between us (the breech-clasps below my knees kept coming undone, while Prashansa’s sari did its best to trip her graceful feet), but no one trod on anyone else’s toes, and we acquitted ourselves well. Conversation during the “Duke of Kent’s Waltz” was quite literally by the book.

  “And now it is your turn to talk,” Prashansa told me, as we spun down the dance line. I lost only a moment in finding my bearings—Pride & Prejudice, Volume I. She’s Elizabeth. You’re Darcy. Get on it.

  “Perhaps something about the number of couples?”

  “Yes!” Prashansa cried. “Or the size of the room!”

  Maria’s dress was far better behaved, an arrangement that left her free to bat her eyes at a rate that would turn any warm-blooded man epileptic.

  “You’re very good, you know,” I told her.

  “Don’t tell anyone I didn’t attend the instructional sessions,” she stage-whispered. We interlaced with other couples, parted, reunited at the center of the dance line.

  “It’s so crowded!”

  “I would have twirled you, but there wasn’t sufficient real estate.”

  “Oh, we can twirl next time; just don’t let Glasses over there step on your toes.”

  Deborah Yaffe and her partner appeared next to us, in one of the kaleidoscopic reconfigurings that form the ritual intricacy of the Regency assembly-dance.

  “I see you’re doing well for yourself,” Deborah said.

  “You as well,” I said.

  “But what happened to Miss Bennet?”

  “Miss Bennet, sad to say, is married.” (This was true.) “But I really must thank you for your matchmaking efforts.”

  Deborah pulled me aside for a moment. “Well, at least we know,” she said in a tone of delectable conspiracy.

  As a break in the proceedings, the staff refreshed us with meats, cheeses, and white soup, the latter a favorite with Charles Bingley. (“As soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough I shall send round my cards,” he promises Lydia before the Netherfield ball.) Making my way toward a table, I came upon a group of women discussing their conquests at previous years’ balls. “I’ve tried to explain to my cousin,” said one lady. “Nobody comes here for the sex. But we’re warm-blooded people—”

  “I like to watch a man struggle with a corset.”

  “It’s like you get the best of then and now! You can dress like Emma but still go to bed with Frank Churchill.”

  “Assuming his fiancée isn’t around.”

  The women agreed that a JASNA ball was a bit like visiting a resort in Austen’s day, when, as a tourist in Bath or Southampton, a man or woman of means could behave much more freely than at home, especially given that most people would be strangers.

  “Do you think Austen would have considered Minneapolis a resort city?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re here, and we’re thoroughly disguised.”

  “Imagine just putting your hand down Willoughby’s pants. What a power move that would be.”

  “I think one’s allowed a bit of fun after being so studious all day.”

  “I should think Jane would be happy to see modern ladies getting to enjoy themselves, though I’m not sure she’d be impressed with the selection of men…”

  I sat myself with Maria and Prashansa and several older ladies. The lady to my right, in a green bonnet, offered us a gracious smile as we installed ourselves.

  “Oh, I know you—I attended your mother’s talk,” said Miss Green Bonnet. “She seems to have the proper idea about Austen and sex.”

  “Your mother had many thoughts on this score,” Prashansa said with a smile.

  “My mother,” I explained to Maria, “disagrees with Ruth Perry, who argues that film adaptations have blinded us to Mr. Collins’s status as an eligible bachelor.” Maria laughed.

  “Yes, that is going too far. But the films always make us read the books differently, don’t they?” The table issued nods and slurps. “For instance: Do you like the Olivier/Garson version?” Maria was referring to the 1940 version, directed by Robert Z. Leonard with a script by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin. (The one with the “hottentot” line.)

  “I do, very much,” I said with a generous wave of my soup glass. “Despite its famous liberties!”

  Maria nodded. “Which include a thorough rewrite of Lady Catherine.”

  “A public rehabilitation in the third act?”

  “Indeed. And of course that’s all a wartime thing—the American P&P leaves us with warm feelings toward this crusty exponent of the traditional gentry virtues.”

  “Right. Because we’d never send troops to help Mrs. Norris,” someone added.

  The evening’s wines were beginning to take effect; this remark was met with titters around the table. I told the ladies about the man whom I had met in the elevators that morning. There were two conferences happening concurrently at the Minneapolis Hilton: JASNA, and a separate, much smaller weekend seminar called “Financial Planning for Lutherans.” In general, it was not difficult to tell which hotel guests were attending which of the two conferences. The gentleman in question (who struck me as the very model of a fiscally prudent Lutheran) had cast a smiling eye over the dresses and petticoats in the lobby of the hotel before joining me in the elevator to observe that “everyone seems to be dressed very nice.”

  I laughed, uncertain as to what he meant, whether he was joking. “What do you think of the bonnets?”

  “Well, I guess I didn’t realize they were back in fashion!”

  He wasn’t joking.

  “You realize it’s the big annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society?”

  His smile widened but he remained blithe, unfazed. “Oh! How funny. I had no idea. I thought perhaps there was a wedding or baptism.”

  When I returned to North Carolina, I was telling colleagues in the English Department all about my first JASNA meeting, making sure to include the vignette of this God-fearing man and his blissful lack of astonishment at the finery of the Janeites. “Perhaps that’s how we’ll know the Janeites have won,” one professor offered. “When you can walk down a city street dressed like Lizzy Bennet and nobody even thinks to give you a second look.”

  * * *

  My second and final JASNA was the one in Montréal the following year, where I had agreed to play Henry Crawford and where, fitted with bionic knees, my mother joined me at last—no lon
ger was I a surrogate, but merely (and much more happily) a companion. After her conspicuous absence at the summer camp and at the JASNA meeting in Minneapolis, it seemed only fitting that we should attend at least one big Austen shindig together. I was eager to observe my mom being fêted by past students and old collaborators, to count her admirers, and to bask in her reflected glory. I was also beginning to suffer from a case of Janeite fatigue, the sense that I had become little more than a fancy eavesdropper, and, far from blaming me for this lack of proper spirit, my mother seemed to understand. At the Montréal conference, we were a little Janeite universe of two, mixing freely and volubly with those Janeites who were not linked to us by blood, but largely keeping to ourselves, in what was a temporary breach of the local etiquette. After our dinner and the annual “toast to Jane” (during which the gathering feels much like a séance), I asked Mom whether she felt up to dancing. She gave me a wonderful frank look.

  “If you’re asking whether I can physically stand it,” she responded, “then the answer is yes.”

  “But?” I suspected we were both harboring the same shameful secret.

  She leaned over to whisper in my ear so that our tablemates wouldn’t hear us.

  “I am so exhausted, and I do not need to dance ‘Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot’ right now.”

  Deeply relieved, I told her that I felt the same. I looked around the room, spotted Julia Matson (founder of Bingley’s Teas, proprietrix of that “loose woman” poster), and knew that she would castigate me if I fled dancing-duties. Julia and I had walked through the old city earlier that day, and I had basically sworn up and down that I would participate, with enthusiasm, in the ball. Prashansa and Maria had not repeated their appearance from the previous year, but there were other people in the room to whom I had suggested, if not promised, that I would take a spin with them. But I was tired, and in love to distraction with someone who wasn’t on the continent, and I had precisely zero patience for flirtation of any sort. I was being a horrible Janeite, doubly so because I represented an endangered species, and by absenting myself would further exacerbate the shortage of men. These considerations did little to cool my conscience, but it was my mother’s judgment that most concerned me, and since she had approved my plan to flee, I was resolved.