Austen×Twain

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on LATE SHOW, Jane Austen and Mark Twain. They take up On the rival they secretly suspected was right all along.
2. 00:10
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Mr. Clemens, I confess I approached this topic with some trepidation. The notion of acknowledging one's rivals borders on the confessional, and I was raised to believe that private misgivings ought to remain precisely that.
3. 00:23
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Well, Miss Austen, where I come from we call that being chicken. But I'll allow it's more dignified in your phrasing.
4. 00:31
   Jane Austenshare moment

   How reassuring. Yet here we are, asked to speak of those whose work we perhaps dismissed too readily, only to find their insights creeping back upon us in our less guarded moments. I wonder if you have such a figure.
5. 00:44
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Oh, I got a whole regiment of 'em. But the one that sticks in my craw is Bret Harte. Now, Bret and I came up together in California, writing for the same papers, and I thought he was writing sentimental slop about miners with hearts of gold and prostitutes who quoted Shakespeare.
6. 01:01
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I take it you have revised this assessment?
7. 01:03
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Not entirely. But the man understood something about the West that I was too busy being clever to see. He knew that people out there were playing at being civilized, putting on the costumes of respectability over their essential wildness. I made fun of it. He saw the tragedy in it.
8. 01:21
   Jane Austenshare moment

   That is a considerable admission, Mr. Clemens. I should not have expected it from you, who seem so certain of your judgments in print.
9. 01:30
   Mark Twainshare moment

   In print I can edit myself. In life I'm just another fool with opinions. Who's your candidate, Miss Austen? Don't tell me it's Mrs. Radcliffe and all those Gothic castles.
10. 01:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Mrs. Radcliffe? Certainly not. I satirized that entire mode in Northanger Abbey and stand by every word. No, my rival is someone rather closer to home. My own contemporary. Maria Edgeworth.
11. 01:55
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Don't believe I know the lady's work.
12. 01:57
    Jane Austenshare moment

    She wrote novels of Irish life, of estate management, of education and moral improvement. Belinda, Castle Rackrent. She was vastly popular, praised by everyone from Sydney Smith to Sir Walter Scott. And I found her insufferably didactic.
13. 02:14
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So far you ain't wrong. Didactic's about the worst thing prose can be, next to dull.
14. 02:20
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yet she understood what I chose to ignore. Miss Edgeworth wrote about money not as a matter of annual income and marriage settlements, but as a force that shapes entire societies. She wrote about the responsibilities of landowners to their tenants, about the corruption that follows from absentee landlords, about the actual management of estates. I wrote about inheritances and entailments as plot devices. She wrote about them as moral questions.
15. 02:48
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Hold on now. You're being too hard on yourself. You showed us how money works in drawing rooms, how it makes people mercenary and calculating. That's worth something.
16. 02:59
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It is worth something, yes. But I confined myself to the marriage market and thought that was sufficient. Miss Edgeworth looked at the entire system. When I considered estates, I thought of whether the heir was agreeable. She thought of whether the crops were rotated properly.
17. 03:17
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You're saying she had a wider lens.
18. 03:19
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I am saying she had a social conscience that extended beyond whether young women married well. And I suspect I avoided it because it would have required me to examine my own family's comfort rather more closely than was pleasant.
19. 03:33
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Now that's interesting. Because what you're describing sounds like what I finally had to admit about Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold better than anything I ever wrote, and I told myself it was because it was simple-minded propaganda for people who wanted to feel righteous.
20. 03:51
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I sense another revision approaching.
21. 03:53
    Mark Twainshare moment

    She was righteous, no question. But she was right. And being right turns out to matter more than being clever, which is a hard thing for a professional humorist to swallow. I wrote Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson wrestling with slavery, trying to show its absurdity and cruelty. But she just showed it, plain and direct, twenty years before I got around to it.
22. 04:18
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Did you know Mrs. Stowe?
23. 04:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Met her a few times. We were neighbors in Hartford for a while. Nice enough lady, but she had that reformer's certainty about her, like she'd been deputized by the Almighty. Made me want to argue just for the sake of it. Which, looking back, tells you more about me than her.
24. 04:38
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I never met Miss Edgeworth, though we had mutual acquaintances. I believe I was rather glad of it. One does not wish to be confronted with one's own limitations in the flesh.
25. 04:49
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Were you aware of her work while you were writing?
26. 04:51
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Oh, acutely. Everyone read Miss Edgeworth. She was the example held up to young writers of what a moral novel ought to be. And I rejected that model entirely, or thought I did. I wanted to write about what I observed, not what I ought to improve.
27. 05:06
    Mark Twainshare moment

    But observation ain't neutral, is it? You observed matchmaking and courtship because that's what was in front of you. She observed estate management for the same reason.
28. 05:17
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You are quite right, and that is precisely what troubles me. I told myself I was simply describing the world as it was. But I was describing a very small corner of it, and calling that corner the whole. Miss Edgeworth at least knew she was working on a larger canvas.
29. 05:34
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I don't know about that. Seems to me your corner was honest. Better to draw one room perfectly than to sketch a whole house badly.
30. 05:42
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How generous of you, Mr. Clemens. But I wrote six novels about women trying to marry well, and not one word about where the money came from. Not the plantations in Antigua that finance Mansfield Park. Not the labor that produces the wealth everyone is angling for. Miss Edgeworth would have addressed such things directly.
31. 06:02
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And you think that makes her work better than yours?
32. 06:04
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I think it makes her work more honest about what a novel can do. I was content to be clever within my limitations. She was willing to be earnest beyond hers.
33. 06:14
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Well, now you're just flagellating yourself, and it's making me uncomfortable. Your limitations were also your discipline. You wrote about what you knew, and you didn't fake the rest. That's honorable.
34. 06:26
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It is honorable to know one's limits. It is less honorable to be secretly pleased by them. And I was pleased, Mr. Clemens. I was pleased to write about drawing rooms because it meant I did not have to think about where the furniture came from or who made it.
35. 06:42
    Mark Twainshare moment

    All right, I'll grant you that. But if we're being ruthlessly honest here, I've got the same problem. I wrote about slavery but I grew up in a slave state. I knew it was wrong, but I didn't say so until it was safe to say so. Mrs. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin when that could still get you killed in half the country.
36. 07:02
    Jane Austenshare moment

    So we are a pair of cowards, then, who discovered our courage only when it was convenient.
37. 07:08
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I wouldn't say cowards. I'd say we were artists instead of reformers. There's a difference.
38. 07:13
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Is there? Or is that merely what we tell ourselves to sleep well?
39. 07:17
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Maybe both. But here's what I've come to think: Mrs. Stowe changed minds with a hammer. I changed minds with a stiletto. Both work. Hers worked faster, I'll give her that.
40. 07:29
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And Miss Edgeworth believed one changed minds through education and example. I believed one changed minds not at all, but merely exposed them as they already were. Perhaps I was the cynical one, after all.
41. 07:42
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Cynical's just disappointed idealism. You can't be disappointed unless you expected better in the first place.
42. 07:49
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How very American of you, to find optimism even in cynicism.
43. 07:53
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And how very English of you to make that sound like an insult. But you still haven't answered my question. Do you actually think Edgeworth was the better writer?
44. 08:03
    Jane Austenshare moment

    No. I think she was the better citizen. Whether those are the same thing is a question I have spent considerable time avoiding.
45. 08:11
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's the rub, ain't it? Being a good writer and being a good person don't always line up. Sometimes you have to choose.
46. 08:19
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And we both chose the writing.
47. 08:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    We did. And I don't know if I'd choose different even now, which probably makes me a moral failure by several lights. But I can at least tip my hat to the people who chose the other way.
48. 08:32
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. One can acknowledge that Bret Harte saw tragedy where you saw comedy, and that Mrs. Stowe saw injustice where you saw material.
49. 08:41
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And that Maria Edgeworth saw responsibility where you saw tedium.
50. 08:45
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Precisely. Though I would still argue that her novels are, in fact, quite tedious.
51. 08:51
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Well, a person can be right and boring both. The world's full of such folks, unfortunately for them and us.
52. 08:59
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Indeed. And a person can be entertaining and shallow both, which is perhaps our shared misfortune.
53. 09:05
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I wouldn't call you shallow, Miss Austen. Limited in scope, maybe, but you dug deep in your little acre.
54. 09:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And I would not call you shallow either, Mr. Clemens, though you worked very hard to appear so. We are both guilty of the same crime, I think: we chose art over duty.
55. 09:21
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And having chosen it, we at least did it well.
56. 09:24
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. Though it would have been better, perhaps, to have been Maria Edgeworth or Harriet Beecher Stowe, and been both useful and good.
57. 09:32
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Maybe. But the world already had them. It didn't have us.
58. 09:35
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is either a justification or a consolation, Mr. Clemens. I am not entirely certain which.
59. 09:42
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Can't it be both?
60. 09:43
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I suppose it must be. We have little choice in the matter now.