In Austen-L, Elaine Pigeon responded this morning to Diane Reynolds and myself: "Fascinating
thread on Austen, Shakespeare, and Girard."
And you just made it even more so, Elaine! :)
Elaine: "I thought I'd point out that Jane Bowles (the wife of Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky) was also a writer and penned a novel entitled Two Serious Ladies, described in Wikipedia as following "two upper-class women, Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, as they descend into debauchery." "
Wow!!
Elaine:
“So Isherwood's fictional character Sally Bowles is thinly disguised. Isherwood
"first met Paul Bowles in Berlin in the early 1930s and later visited Paul
and Jane Bowles in Tangier in 1955." (PaulBowles.org) Isherwood's
allusion is quite transparent, so I assume he wanted his readers to recognize
Sally, which is not always the case. Anyway, just a tidbit I thought would be
of interest, esp from the perspective of biographical readings.”
That is
so interesting on multiple levels! What it suggests to me first, is that when
Fosse and his collaborators created Cabaret in the Sixties, they really did
their homework, and they were well aware of both (1) Isherwood’s Sally Bowles
in Goodbye Berlin (1939) as a nod to
Jane Bowles, and (2) Jane Bowles’s later
(1943) novel, which I suspect may have been a nod back by Jane Bowles to the
fluid sexuality in Isherwood, acknowledging her “starring role” in his earlier
novel. And so that number “Two Ladies” in Cabaret,
explicitly pointing to the bisexual triad of the Count, Brian and Sally, was
their way of pretty explicitly winking at that entire ball of allusion!
As to
my passing question about whether Isherwood had any interest in Austen, I dug
the following up from my files in Christopher
Isherwood as a novelist by Ranjita Coondoo Anupam (1978) at p. 132,
regarding Isherwood’s 1954 novel, The
World in the Evening: “War seems to
be so important to Isherwood that Stephen has to present an excuse to Gerda for
Elizabeth's omission of any direct reference to war in her novels. While
portraying the character of Elizabeth, Isherwood had Jane Austen as his model.
Just like Stephen defending Elizabeth, Robert Liddell defends Jane Austen by
saying that she did well in remembering her own range as a novelist: Jane
Austen voluntarily rejected the Napoleonic Wars as unworthy to enter into her
picture of contemporary life. She has often, and very foolishly, been
condemned for this.”
When I
found that last year, I did not pursue it, but this time I did, spurred by your
wonderful reaction. First, I noted that Anupam (who I can’t locate via the Internet)
must’ve had some pretty good reason to make this assertion that JA was a model
for the character Elizabeth Rydal in The
World in the Evening, beyond the parallel she notes in Isherwood and Austen
not directly bringing the larger war picture into their stories. But what? I quickly located the text of
Isherwood’s novel online, searched “Austen” and was led to the following very
interesting passage, when Elizabeth Rydal invites one of her snooty, phony
friends over, who has previously made Stephen feel gauche and uncomfortable:
“So
Strines was invited to the flat, to tea. He arrived with flowers, a wedding
present, and an obviously prepared speech….The wedding present was a china
inkwell, ‘almost certainly used by Jane Austen while she was living at
Chawton.’ I felt sure Strines had hastily selected it as being one of the least
wanted items in his own collection. The speech began with a quotation from
Doctor Johnson: ‘You remember what he once said to a Newly-Married Lady?’ I
forget what Doctor Johnson said, but it was something unpleasant and dogmatic,
which Strines then proceeded to twist into a long-winded compliment. There was
no warmth anywhere in the whole proceedings. And I felt that Strines regarded
our marriage as a sophisticated kind of joke, of which Elizabeth would soon get
tired. ‘My dear Rydal,’ he told her,
‘you’ve always been so full of surprises.’ Then, looking at me with his joyless
smile, he added, ‘I hope I have your permission to continue to call your wife
by the name she has made illustrious? It’s a mark of respect, really, for your
private rights in her, on which we wouldn’t dream of infringing. Elizabeth Monk
is entirely yours. Rydal belongs to all of us.’ ‘Really, Strines,’ Elizabeth
interrupted, laughing but a little nervous, I could see, that I might take
offense at his tone, ‘you talk about me as if I were Hyde Park! Do I look as if
the public had trampled me flat?’ Strines didn’t succeed in making me angry: I
could afford to tolerate him now, though I still didn’t like him…”
I’d
call that a pretty good start at a reason! Although Austen is only mentioned in
one line of dialogue, it reveals to a knowledgeable Janeite that Isherwood was
aware of both small and large details in Jane Austen’s biography, and, after
browsing some more through the novel, I formed the hypothesis that the marriage
of the protagonist Stephen Monk to Elizabeth Rydal was a metaphorical
representation of how Isherwood responded and related to Austen’s fiction and
biography. I sense that he saw JA as a key influence and guide, both
artistically as a writer, and also in terms of his coming to terms with his
being gay, which I gather from what I’ve read about him was a lifelong process.
That fits so perfectly with my own sense of JA as being attracted to women (and
probably men as well) – Isherwood must’ve gotten that. And so, getting back to
my speculation about Cabaret’s “Two
Ladies” as having some of its roots in the ambiguous sexualities of Mansfield Park, in particular the scene
with Fanny and William Diane first drew our attention to, I believe it did,
albeit via a series of artistic transmissions.
I also tried
to dig the quote from Samuel Johnson which Strines alluded to, and found it was
not Samuel Johnson who wrote “Advice to the Newly-Married Lady”, but Samuel K.
Jennings, Methodist preacher, doctor, educator and contemporary of Jane Austen …
https://www.commonlit.org/texts/advice-to-the-newly-married-lady …who gave extremely sexist advice to the new
wife –basically, to do what will please her husband, and consider how lucky she
is not to be alone!
But Samuel
Johnson did give advice to men as to
the choice of a wife, which has a strong resonance to Jennings’s advice, when
Johnson warns of the fate of the gigolo (which is what Stephen believes is how
Strines and that crowd all see him vis a vis Elizabeth):
“But of
the various states and conditions of humanity, [Johnson] despised none more
than the man who marries for a maintenance: and of a friend who made his
alliance on no higher principles, he said once, "Now has that fellow (it
was a nobleman of whom they were speaking) at length obtained a certainty of three
meals a day,
and for that certainty, like his brother dog in the fable, he will get his neck
galled for life with a collar."…”
For
those who want more detail about the marriage of Stephen and Elizabeth (i.e.,
the supposed JA stand-in), I also mined excerpts from a synopsis of World in the Evening in the Christopher Isherwood Encyclopedia by
David Garrett Izzo, at ppg. 176-7: “…begins in 1941 at a Hollywood party.
Stephen Monk is 37 and rich. At the party, he discovers the infidelity of his
second wife, Jane. This motivates Stephen to leave the false glitter of
Hollywood. He retreats to the Monk family estate in Pennsylvania and to his
Aunt Sarah, who raised him from childhood after he lost his parents. She is a
Quaker who raised Stephen to be one although he has long lapsed…. Monk..
reconsiders his life, the catalyst being the reading of his first wife’s
letters. 34-year old Elizabeth Rydal was a novelist and 12 years older than
Stephen when they met. She was fragile physically from a weak heart. While he
reads the letters, Stephen is nursed [he was injured in a car accident] by
Gerda Mannheim, a young German refugee. Gerda is another ‘manageress’
dispensing wisdom. She suggests to Stephen that he should be more sensitive to
the inner awareness that is latent within him. …Elizabeth’s letters prompt
Monk’s retrospective evaluation of his past. He recalls his wife’s miscarriage,
her failing health, his brief tryst with a homosexual friend who loved Stephen
one-sidedly, an affair with Jane during Elizabeth’s last illness, Elizabeth’s
death, and his second marriage.
In the
last section…Monk comes to terms with himself, his past, and Elizabeth’s
memory… Monk’s internal journey is Isherwood’s. Monk represents Isherwood
himself in different stages of the author’s life…. Stephen…has a vision of
Elizabeth: ‘Elizabeth, tell me I was crazy to come here? What I am getting
into?’ She answers: ‘Don’t worry, Darling. Just be patient. You’ll find out.’
And he will—slowly ---as a Vedantic unfolding of inner truth. When Monk tells
Elizabeth he is unhappy, she responds: ‘You needn’t be…Nobody need be.’…
…He
begins to read Elizabeth’s letters that were written to him and to others, particularly
Mary Scriven. Stephen says to Elizabeth’s aura, ‘now you’ve got me…I’ll listen
to you now. I’ll try and face up to whatever you want me to know. Just tell me
what I am to do next.’ Monk, through Elizabeth’s letters (and Isherwood’s
diaries) reconstructs his life for examination.
Stephen
recalls how he had been insecure around Elizabeth’s intellectual friends…He
imagined slights and finally blew up over one. Elizabeth patiently comforted
him. After this, Elizabeth and Stephen realized they were in love, and this
temporarily assuaged his insecurity.
…For
Stephen the vision of Elizabeth is the center of his life around which his
circular path is connected continuously and contiguously….Even when Gerda and
Sarah are present, Stephen feels that when he is in this morning mood of total
awareness, Elizabeth is also present as his ‘manageress’, directing his
re-education.
…During
Elizabeth’s last illness, Stephen secretly began his affair with Jane. The
guilt of his betrayal while Elizabeth was dying would follow him to the
present. In the past, Elizabeth had told him that even though she was sometimes
afraid, fear is unnecessary for those who live in the moment… On the same
night, just after saying this, Elizabeth died. Stephen was not ready to understand
her last message to him at the time she said it. Now, he is….” END QUOTE FROM
IZZO
And finally,
Isherwood also wrote A Single Man in
1964, as to which Colin Firth earned awards and nominations in the 2009 film
version. As I first noted when I first heard that title and learned that it was
based on an Isherwood novel, I suspected strongly that Isherwood chose that
title as a deliberate wink at that most famous of opening lines: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that
a single man….”. After now learning what I have about Isherwood’s other
fiction, I now believe more than before that Isherwood by that title was showing,
subtly, that he recognized that Darcy was meant by JA to be interpretable as a bisexual
man in need of a beard!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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