Jane Austen, Amy Winehouse, Life versus Art

One of my guilty pleasures is award shows. My excuse is that I need to keep up with the current films, music and Broadway plays. Last Sunday the pleasures were guiltier than usual when Grammy Awards had the added soap opera of whether singer, Amy Winehouse, who was nominated for six awards, would be able to attend despite visa problems and substance abuse issues. Ironically one of the songs she won an award for was "Rehab" explaining why she wasn’t going to rehab, while one of obstacles she faced in attending was the fact that she actually is now in rehab.

The Grammy awards, however, were scheduled opposite the PBS airing of the first few hours of Pride and Prejudice, the Colin Firth version, so I missed them. I was still curious enough about Winehouse that I checked her out online
Amy Winehouse

Wow.

She has an amazing voice that is strong enough to hold up against a baritone saxophone and a Phil Specter-style Wall of Sound. The songs on the Back to Black album stand out like dark, twisted jewelry in the glittery "girl group" setting. Layered, ironic, funny, dangerous, magnetic, sensual. Grafting her bad girl persona onto the girl group sound demonstrates a wicked genius. Those songs invariably feature lyrics like: "Nothing you can do can make me untrue to my guy." A major contrast to Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good." I haven’t been so amused since I heard a gay male group sing "He’s So Fine."

What, you may well ask, did this teach me about Jane Austen?

Well, the public buzz about Winehouse is that she’s a bad role model. (Goodness, a popular musician being a bad role model! Most unusual.) Sorry, my point was that she’s taken a whole raft of personal problems and turned them into gorgeous works of art.

Jane Austen, a lifelong impoverished spinster who struggled with living on the crumbs of family charity, didn’t even see all her novels published in her life. Yet she created a world so seductive that many of us go there repeatedly.

PBS aired a biographical film, Miss Austen Regrets, on February 3rd that I did not post here about it just after I saw it because it was so painful for me to watch. The film tried to scrape up some romance in Austen’s not-very-eventful life. They turned excerpts from her letters to her sister and her niece into dialog. I’ve heard others say that they found these exchanges witty, but they really don’t dramatize well. Nothing in her novels suggests that she would be that cruel and bitter in a social setting. The problem is that, unlike the surgically deft dialog in her novels, the scathing wit in Austen’s letters was never meant to be spoken aloud in social setting. It was very private and meant for intimate correspondents she trusted.

In the last scene of Miss Austen Regrets, after she and Jane agonize about their poverty and Jane dies, the surviving sister, Cassandra, burns most of her letters. Really the only thing I took away from that film was a more complete understanding of why this was necessary. People look at Austen’s life and want her to be one of the heroines of her novels, but she is their creator, and that is so much more. It would take a biographical genius to portray Austen's life in a way that showed the magic of what she created in her fiction.

We want artists to be saints, but they have other work to do. Their task is to built dream vessels to transport us into their own worlds, to share their visions, songs and stories. Then like all other humans, the artists have to return to real life to deal with it as best they can can.

I have been through substance abuse problems both as a participant and an observer, and I can see how Amy Winehouse is walking a narrow path at the edge of a cliff. I hope she can come to safer ground soon. In the meantime it’s not fair to try to force her to also carry the burden of being a role model, just as it’s cruel to jam Jane Austen into the role of disappointed spinster--we don't know her well enough to say that and conversely we know her too well to limit her that way.


February 5 to 16, 1978 I read:

Breakdown, N. S. Sotherland
My note: A psychologist’s personal account of manic depression with some gossipy put-down sketches of the founders of the main schools of psychotherapy.

Love, Honor and Dismay, Elizabeth Harrison

By Force of Will, the Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Donaldson
My note: Much better than Hemingway & the Sun Set, which was remarkable only for a picture of Duff

The Professor Game, Richard D. Mandell
My Note: Fairly witty, which is rare, but with that characteristic poverty of joie de vivre one finds among existentialists. So I’ll say witty and gritty.

The Vagabond, Colette
My note: Wow.

Streets, Actions, Alternatives, Raps: A Report on the Decline of the Counterculture, John Stickney
A 1971 view


February 5 to 16, 2008 I read:

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, Carol Karlsen
Interesting book, originally a dissertation about who was singled out as witches n Colonial New England and why. Many insights into fears of women that are still alive and flourishing.
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/salem/scholarship/karlsenrev.html