Hiking in Rock Creek Park – The pleasure of seeing old friends again – Mansfield Park – Dawn Wells – Evening statistics
I was able to see AD and EB today, after not having met them for at least ten months. I hiked with AD in Rock Creek Park, a loop starting from the Nature Center, and taking the Valley Trail to Boundary Bridge and the Western Ridge Trail back to the Center. This park extends 12 miles from the border with Maryland to the Cleveland Park area and – considering that it occupies the middle of the city – offers a variety of hike routes, a few of them having a level of difficulty that is slightly surprising. I have done loops in the park that attain well over 2000 feet of elevation gain. Today’s hike was less strenuous but it was still over 6 miles and probably about 1000 feet of elevation gain in all. The ascents are fairly short for the most part but they are numerous and they add up after a certain distance. It was another beautiful day, clear and dry; temperatures were in the low-to-mid 40s, very comfortable for hiking.
Afterwards I went to my friends’ house in downtown DC and we ate lunch on their terrace outside. I have known them for several years, and I have missed their company greatly, so I was very glad to see them again. We talked together about many topics, of course, including the virus. AD and EB are both retired from the medical profession, so they are much more knowledgeable about it than I am. They have participated in a vaccine test program, but they will not find out until mid-to-late February whether they received an actual vaccine or a placebo. It is more important than ever, as EB observed, to be cautious in matters such as mask-wearing and social distancing. If we as a nation can get through the next two months without undue mishaps, the vaccines will eventually be able to bring the COVID virus within containable limits.
We touched upon other matters as well, including the works of Jane Austen. EB had recently finished re-reading Mansfield Park and was curious about my opinion of it.
Mansfield Park is the work that divides the opinions of Austen’s admirers the most – understandably, since it contains some of her best writing and also some of her worst (although even the worst of Jane Austen is far superior to the writings of many other authors). The defects of the work are, to my mind:
- The attempts to make Fanny sympathetic via her supposed appreciation of Nature are not successful. Her comments about evergreens, for example: “When one thinks of it, the astonishing variety of nature! – in some countries we know the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety, but that does not make it less amazing, that the same soil and the same sun should nurture plants differing in the first rule and law of their existence” – it simply doesn’t work; no nature-lover talks like that. For a convincing description of how the contemplation of Nature affects people, one must go to Wordsworth.
- The private theatricals are burdened with a symbolic weight that they are too frail to support. Austen certainly does a brilliant job at describing the various little squabbles and undercurrents of ill-feeling that emerge from the efforts of the Bertram family to perform a play, but it is impossible to agree with either Edmund and Fanny that acting in private is of itself inherently objectionable . The most balanced reaction to the project comes from Sir Thomas. When he arrives back home from Antigua and learns that his children have been attempting to do some amateur acting in his absence, he is not particularly concerned. It’s only when he discovers that they’ve trashed one of the rooms in his house to set up a stage that he shows his displeasure.
- When Edmund, disappointed in the collapse of his engagement to Mary Crawford, turns to Fanny instead, I can’t believe it, and I don’t think that Austen does either. Throughout the novel Edmund has been treating Fanny with that mixture of affection and condescension that an elder brother normally shows to a younger sister, and he has been doing so with such consistency that it is difficult to believe that she is transformed to his love interest at the end. Austen herself seems to have similar doubts: “I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and become as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.” It’s a pretty flat and perfunctory description, especially in contrast with extended conversations in penultimate chapters of the other novels in which the hero and heroine come to an understanding.
On the other hand, the novel has so many excellences that it is impossible to enumerate them all. Some of them are justly famous: for instance, the portrayal of Mrs. Norris, one of the most convincingly odious women in fiction, the coruscating wit and vivacity of the two Crawford siblings, the descriptions of the chaotic household of the Prices in Portsmouth. The chapters centered around the visit to Sotherton, with so many plot threads artfully woven together, have a Mozartean combination of grace and depth. I find, also, that Fanny grows upon me the more often I re-read the novel. At times, I admit, she is infuriatingly passive, but a careful reading shows that she is not at all weak-willed. It is not merely that she resists the pressure put upon her to marry Crawford but that she displays a decided strength of character in her consistent rejection of the role of guardian angel. Edmund and Mary make no secret of their belief that she is ideally suited for the task, and Henry at one point tries to flatter her on this point by saying “When you give me your opinion, I always know what is right. Your judgment is my rule of right.” But she will have none of it: “Oh, no! – do not say so. We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
Edmund, again, is a splendid study of a young man of almost painful forthrightness. In the early stages of their acquaintance Mary Crawford accuses him of being influenced in choosing the church as his profession by the fact that there is a living available for him once he is ordained. Fanny immediately leaps to his defense – “that I am sure it has not,” she cries; but Edmund himself is resolutely honest about his motives. He does not pretend to have an overwhelming vocation for a religious life but is quite businesslike about the matter. There is “no natural disinclination to overcome” and the fact that he knows in advance that he will earn enough to live on by becoming a clergyman has exercised its due influence; just as, say, a college student today might choose to major in engineering because he knows that the company for which he has been an intern will offer him a job once he gets his degree. Who can say that Edmund is not in the right and that he will not fulfill the responsibilities of his position just as well as the most fervent of devotees? In the discussion that follows he defends his profession against Mary’s disparagement calmly and reasonably, never making any show of outraged morality, and it cannot be said that she has the better of the argument.
Edmund has the misfortune to become infatuated with a woman who cannot in the least understand his efforts to do something worthwhile. For a long time he tries to shut his eyes to Mary’s contempt for the clergy but in the dialog between Edmund and Fanny that occurs just before the ball in Fanny’s honor he breaks out during one of the most emotionally intense scenes in Austen’s oeuvre. He has been upset by Mary’s continued ridicule of his line of work and he seizes upon Fanny as his confidante: “Let me talk to you a little. You are a kind, kind listener.” And immediately after this plea for a sympathetic hearing comes the heartbreaking cry, “I have been pained by her manner this morning, and cannot get the better of it.” It has sometimes been said as a criticism of Jane Austen that her male characters are observed only from the outside – which is true; but they are very minutely observed.
And then there is the characterization of Sir Thomas, possibly one of the most subversive portrayals of a family patriarch ever written: a genuinely kind-hearted and benevolent man, always attentive to his wife’s comforts, earnestly solicitous about the welfare of his sons and daughters, providing for his wife’s poor relations to the greatest extent in his power, who nonetheless by his rigid morality, his reserved manner that “repressed all the flow of their spirits,” and his “most untoward gravity of deportment” – almost the first aspect of him that Fanny notices when she is brought into the family – he alienates his children and winds up doing them a great deal of harm, contrary to his intentions. Adaptations of the novel invariably go wrong by reducing him to an ill-tempered tyrant or a lecherous hypocrite. Targets such as these are easy enough to hit. When Jane Austen goes hunting, she is out for bigger game.
As can be seen, we delved into the matter a good deal; it was very enjoyable indeed to discuss such matters after many months of social interaction that has, on account of the virus, become increasingly limited and sporadic. But our discussion was not entirely literary. We spoke about AD’s recent additions to his collection of Turkish and Persian carpets (he is something of an expert of the subject and has given lectures at the Textile Museum) and various episodes in European history and AD’s and EB’s impressions of life on the kibbutzim during a visit to Israel. Our conversation was diverted, at one point, by the appearance of a red-bellied woodpecker at one of the bird-feeders in their neighbor’s yard.
Two hours flew by in this fashion and then I returned home, where I learned, upon scanning the headlines, more sad stories have come about as a result of the pandemic, of which a handful have already been noted in this journal. One in particular caught my attention: Sarah Simental, of Tinley Park, IL, contracted the COVID virus on December 23th. Her condition worsened rapidly and she was airlifted to the University of Chicago hospital, but to no avail: she died three days later. She was only 18 years old and, until she fell ill with the virus, was the picture of health. The virus chiefly affects the elderly but other age groups are by no means immune.
Another victim of the virus today was Dawn Wells, familiar to members of my generation as Mary Ann of Gilligan’s Island. She was 82 years old and thus cannot be said to have had her life cut short, but her passing is saddening nonetheless. I met her once at a Nostalgia Convention, and she proved to be every bit as pleasant and approachable as the character she portrayed in the series. I remarked to her that in the “Mary Ann vs. Ginger” debate that occurred among the men of my generation during its adolescence I was a firm partisan of the Mary Ann camp – which pleased her, as I believe. Her last years were not easy. She took a fall in 2018 and she had difficulty paying for the subsequent two months of hospital rehabilitation. Eventually various fans raised money for her via a GoFundMe page to help her out. “I don’t know how this happened,” she said afterwards in an interview. “I thought I was taking all the proper steps to ensure my golden years. Now, here I am, no family, no husband, no kids and no money.”
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 83,030,872; # of deaths worldwide: 1,810,610; # of cases U.S.: 20,202,545; # of deaths; U.S.: 350,429. The past two or three days were seeing a downward trend, but that has been overturned today with a vengeance. The number of new infections was over 220,000 and the death toll was over 3,500.