Emma

 Have you ever felt like you were headed down the road in one direction only to see a number of signs luring you a different way?

 I’ve been reading a variety of things lately. As usual, a few of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. I gave up on Cokie Roberts’ Ladies of Liberty as too slow and polemical, but greatly enjoyed The Long Embrace (Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved) by Judith Freeman. (Chandler didn’t know Cissy was 17 years older than him when he married her; the description of Cissy’s life as a bohemian in turn of the century Harlem is fun, as is the depiction of Chandler in Los Angeles in the teens and twenties, and the story of how Chandler delivers the screenplay for The Blue Dahlia is flabbergasting.)

I’ve been reading a lot of Penelope Fitzgerald’s fiction, and very much admire her natural style, which renders extraordinary situations in such a plausible, economical way. So it’s in that milieu that several coincidences occurred.

 In the introduction to the Nero Wolfe trio of mysteries Death Times Three, Stout’s biographer, John McAleer, writes that Stout once told him he felt “men did everything better than women, but that was before I read Jane Austen. I don’t think any man ever wrote better than Jane Austen.” He goes on to say that he asked Stout, a few days before his death, what Wolfe was reading. “Rex confided, ‘He’s rereading Emma.’ Rex ranked Emma as Jane Austen’s masterpiece. In the last weeks of his life he also reread it. That a book could be reread was to him solid proof of its worth.”

 Increasingly intrigued by Penelope Fitzgerald as a writer, beyond her fiction, I also ordered The Afterlife, a series of her essays and book reviews. The very first one is on Jane Austen’s Emma. Fitzgerald also felt Emma was Austen’s best work. She likes the character of the meddling Emma, and comments on the morality behind her backfiring attempts at matchmaking, pointing out Emma’s “sin of thought.”

 After Rex Stout’s death, the publisher tried to keep the Wolfe franchise going via one Robert Goldsborough, who in the 1980s published a Wolfe mystery titled Murder in E Minor. Attempting to drum up interest, they published a few pages of the beginning in the back of a Stout book, and it has the laggardly Wolfe admonishing his dogsbody Archie, “desist using the word ‘retired.’ I prefer to say I have withdrawn from practice.’ And with that he would return to his book, which currently was a re-reading of Emma by Jane Austen.”

The day I read that during my commute I found they had a book sale in the lobby of our building for some worthy cause. I browsed and found an interesting title or two, before finding Emma all by itself. No other Austen. It might have been flanked by a cookbook and a travel guide, for all I can recall.

But it was obvious where this was going. It was simply time for me to buy the freaking thing. Although the college text (with intro by Lionel Trilling) was a heftier paperback than I like to lug up and down Market Street in my backpack, I recognize the cosmic signposts when faced with them—I shelled out a few bucks and bought the book.

This weekend Mrs. O and I went up to Inverness, on Tomales Bay (in part to deliver some firewood after our big blow). I hadn’t been there for a while, and after we had settled in was browsing their shelves again. I had The Afterlife with me (and had just recently read her review of  Emma), and there, on a shelf mostly of sci fi, biographies and popular fiction, was a copy of the book.

Clearly, merely by purchasing Emma I wasn’t heeding the messages enough. Although I’d left my newly purchased copy back at home, obviously I was supposed to begin reading it. Inverness is secluded and ideal for reading—quiet, far beyond the city and sheltered by mountain ridges, with poor cell phone reception and limited radio signals (our hosts do have cable TV—but that’s as limited as TV ever is).

So, in amongst the dogwalks, hauling the poplar firewood from our backyard windfall under their deck, enjoying the view over the bay, and eating whatever we wanted whenever we wanted to, I’ve now begun Emma.

You don’t have to hit me over the head.

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