Diane Setterfield reflects on Transcribing Frank Austen

There you are! Transcribing Frank Austen

When along with over 2000 others I volunteered to transcribe two pages of Admiral Sir Francis Austen’s memoir for the Jane Austen House Museum I did not realise it would be like teaching myself to read all over again. Was this mark an n or a u? Were these ink shapes two words? One? Four? At first I found more mystification than communication in Captain Austen’s loose lines and squiggles and my early attempts to capture what I had understood on paper contained more blanks than words. It was slow work.

That arduous deciphering of handwriting from another century – made harder perhaps because in this digital age I am so rarely required to read even modern handwriting – is only half the story. While I was absorbed in my effort to make sense of the words in the manuscript, I was also trying to get a sense of their author.

It’s curious that even at the outset, when I understood so little, a tone of voice should have been detectable. Capt. A (that is how he talks of himself) was brisk. As I was scrabbling about for a foothold in his slippery, unstable lines I had the distinct impression that he was rushing me on, rattling off his endless list of triumphant exploits. Was it self-satisfaction that I sensed and could not warm to? Well never mind. It was too late now. I was committed.

I soon found myself chatting to Capt. A. It was a lopsided conversation, his unyielding sentences and my cranky responses: ‘A c, Captain? That’s never a c! It is? You cannot be serious!’ When his orthography was at its most impenetrable, I swore at him. But it wasn’t just the difficulty of transcribing that separated me from Frank. We were distanced even more radically by the values of his age and mine. Nothing could transform me into his ideal reader, one ready to be favourably impressed by worldly success. Nothing could force him to reveal a personal self, an ‘inner man’, of the kind I might find more congenial company.

Transcribing requires you to pay close attention, for an abnormally long time, to small hand-produced marks on paper. Do it for long enough and you start to notice things that are not words, and not even letters. Wobbles. Deletions. Uneven spacing. These elements do not convey meaning in any conventional sense, but that is not to say they are meaningless. They might, for instance, tell us something about the human body that performs the physical act of writing: ‘Tired Frank?’ I wondered, when I saw cramped letters pile up on each other. They might indicate a state of mind: ‘Changed your mind? What were you going to say?’

A manuscript is not like printed or digital text. It conveys deliberately intended words, but handwriting is also a record – a fragile one, capable of only the most tentative interpretation – of the moment in which the words were recorded.

There was in my pages a stray pen mark. It hovers between the lines: accidental, as close to being meaningless as it is possible for a speck of ink to be. With unexpected insistence, my imagination conjured from it an image: a man sitting at a desk gazes unseeing into the distance, beyond the walls of the room. He is gazing into his past: remembering, sifting, selecting. He is gazing into the future: what will a reader, unknown to me, make of what I am saying? What will they make of me?  His hand wavers. Fleetingly the nib makes contact with the paper, producing the pen mark that I am so fascinated by, and startling him back to himself. He shakes off whatever thought it was and purposefully returns his pen to the paper to continue his narrative.

It is a fanciful scene. Certainly memoir – for any author, in any age – calls for consideration of just the kind that my fictional scene illustrates, yet no such vividly imagined scene of introspection can reasonably be attributed to a slip of the pen. There was a moment of inattention – that is all we can say, and I, a novelist, given to making things up, made something of it. And there was this, too: after all those hours of effort, trying to decipher a long-dead man so removed from me in time and sensibility, the scene that arose from the ink speck collapsed the distance between us. I saw him, sitting in a room, at a desk, pen hovering uncertainly over the page, staring into the distance. Just like me.

‘Oh, Frank! There you are,’ I said.

And there we were. Two human beings, two pens, one activity: writing. We got on a bit better after that.