FICTION REVIEWS: 'D'

Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year -- I believe that I have read that Defoe is the most widely-published author in history. He was certainly prolific. This particular book I have read only once and have otherwise read nothing about it. It is a piece of fiction cleverly designed as a factual account. The author's sense of verisimilitude is so good that he even furnishes a footnote to the narrative to identify a certain quarter where the narrator is supposedly buried. Nice touch. 

  Charles Dickens, David Copperfield -- When a novelist writes in the first person he deliberately deprives himself of telling the plot in conventional ways. But he makes this choice because the subjectivity is the essence of the plot and he loves his narrator. Excellent novels as widely varied as The Heart of Darkness and The Good Soldier would be flat or unimaginable if written in the third person. (An otherwise successful novel which suffers badly from this choice, however, is Treasure Island which I mention because it nevertheless requires the intensity of a first person adventure as seen from the perspective of a youth.) This first person technique is essential to certain Dickens novels, the most important of which to me (and Dickens I believe) is David Copperfield. It is considerably long and most of it is an exploration of the hero’s growing maturity. But to me David Copperfield will always foremost be the story of young David. Critics have said, as though it were somehow a fault on his part, that Dickens was too obsessed with the insecurities and vulnerabilities of young children. I am unable to criticize him on that basis. Dickens was not simply the advocate for children, because in his writing he became the child again, transporting himself and his readers back to a childhood which he recalled with a clarity that can make a reader’s teeth ache. Part of his talent, indeed, was his recollection of how resilient children are, a dimension which the critics often overlook. Consider the evening when David, about six years old, returns home to find his very young and widowed mother newly married to the austere and forbidding Mr. Murdstone. Too confused to cry, he is presently consigned to an unfamiliar bedroom where “I thought of the oddest things – of the shape of the room, of the cracks in the ceiling, of the paper on the wall, of the flaws in the window-glass making ripples and dimples on the prospect, of the washing-stand being rickety on it three legs, and having a discontented something about it . . . .” Children, of course, remember details with a clarity greater than they have to understand the bigger picture. Many literary artists share this perception. Like children, they build their bigger picture on just such random items, invested with the emotions of the moment. Dickens’s ability to remember and portray this is possibly his greatest genius. Some years ago, I read the account of Mr. Murdstone's later beating of young David to my six-year-old. There was absolute stillness, not a twitch. This "story" was absolutely real to him -- and with a satisfying retaliation by David at the end. To give him fuller credit, Dickens also regularly portrays the immature sagacity of children. Early in the novel, David is essentially cheated of a meal by a wily waiter who eats the boy’s food himself on various pretexts which require David to sympathize with him. In thinking back on it, the adult David (and Dickens) ruminates, “but I am inclined to believe that with the simple confidence of a child, and the natural reliance of a child upon superior years (qualities I am very sorry any children should prematurely change for worldly wisdom), I had no serious mistrust of him on the whole . . . .” Dickens’s children are badly treated for the purposes of the plot, but like all of us they also periodically encounter adults and peers who are sympathetic and helpful, a technique that must also count in the novelist’s favor. It counts in David’s favor, too, because his creator has a definite autobiographical view of him. David always remains, as he describes himself, “romantic and dreamy” and ultimately happy to be the center of attention. He says he is“[a] child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally.” Perhaps I should also mention that David Copperfield differs from virtually every other Dickens novel by its plot being propelled by something other than a mystery. (There is the deferred introduction of Aunt Betsey’s deadbeat former husband, but this is not central to the plot.) In this way, I see it as a more mature production than even such great Dickens efforts as Bleak House and Great Expectations. David Copperfield survives quite well with foreshadowings, which are the hallmark of a novelist who knows where he is going. Dickens also makes his share of jokes along the way, often in a style dry enough to set the pattern for Mark Twain. Describing his Great-Aunt Betsey’s servant girl, for example, David says that “she was one of a series of protegees whom my aunt had taken into her service expressly to educate in a renouncement of mankind, and who had generally completed their abjuration by marrying the baker.” When David’s mother dies, Mr. Murdstone takes him out of the grim boarding school where he had sent him and puts him to work in his counting house in the city where he briefly boards (and bonds) with the impecunious Micawber family, before running away to Dover to find his formidable Aunt Betsey. The well-known story unfolds from there, but I find myself, after several readings of this novel beginning in my teenage years, now feeling the need to deal with Steerforth, the generous and noble older student to whom young David attaches himself at Mr. Creakle’s school in the early part of the book. In my later years, I am now more sympathetic to this bold character than in my earlier life, when his treachery in seducing David’s childhood companion Em’ly became the only dominating thing about him. (I must say too that Em’ly’s own wilfulness only came through to me in later readings.) Steerforth is exactly as I (and his mother in the novel) describe him: noble and generous. He plays somewhat with the younger David and essentially goes slumming at Yarmouth, but this does not mitigate his perspicacity in understanding young David’s intelligence and merit or the genuineness of the Peggoty family. Steerforth never ceases to be likable in a Pontius Pilate way: burdened by his strengths, aware of his defects, world -weary and resigned to an afterlife in hell. Early in the story, the irritating character, Miss Dardle – who incessantly asks if everything is “really so?” – sounds a warning note about him, but it is no more than the author and David himself sense, and ultimately she herself emerges as less likable and crueller than the object of her caution. If anything, Steerforth is tragic and unburdened with a conscience, but not evil. Indeed, the two villains of the piece are Miss Dardle and Uriah Heep, each of whom is given an aria of wickedness in the course of the plot. (I exempt the Murdstones from this category only because their premeditation is self-righteous and necessarily exaggerated as having been seen through the eyes of a child.) There are conspicuous features of David Copperfield which would be considered awkward in modern fiction. I include not only the colorful characters, but also the periodic coincidences the propel the plot. Micawber comes across David while passing Wickham’s house in Canterbury and again later as Traddles’s “landlord,” David encounters Steerforth by accident on his way to Yarmouth, Miss Murdstone re-appears as chaperone to Dora, etc. Drawing upon his own biography, Dickens made numerous opportunities to comment on England’s judicial system in the mid-Victorian era. The most elaborate observations are to be found in Bleak House, of course, but here is a piquant aside that the youthful David makes when he is apprenticed to a firm of solicitors and makes his first visit to court: “The languid stillness of the place was only broken by the chirping of [a] fire and by the voice of one of the Doctors, who was wandering slowly through a perfect library of evidence, and stopping to put up, from time to time, at little roadside inns of argument on the journey. Altogether, I have never, on any occasion, made one at such a cozy, dozy, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little family-party in all my life; and I felt it would be quite a soothing opiate to belong to it in any character – except perhaps as a suitor.” Apart from his mastery of the dry aside, Dickens is equally a commander of dialogue written so well that the “stage direction” is unnecessary. Here is Steerforth appearing unannounced one late night in David’s chambers and proclaiming among other things, that he has been asked to deliver a letter: “From whom?” “Why, from your old nurse,” he returned, taking some papers out of his breast pocket. “‘J. Steerforth, Esquire, debtor to The Willing Mind’; that’s not it. Patience and we’ll find it presently. Old what’s-his-name’s in a bad way, and it’s about that I believe.” “Barkis, do you mean?” “Yes!” still feeling in his pockets, and looking over their contents; “it’s all over with poor Barkis, I am afraid. . . . Put your hand into the breast-pocket of my greatcoat on the chair yonder, and I think you’ll find the letter. Is it there?” ‘Here it is!” said I. “That’s right.” As David Copperfield is the history of this boy’s journey into adulthood, the second half of the novel must take a pivot. The orphaned boy, with much Victorian pluck, having walked alone and hungry several days to Aunt Betsey’s home, she – to no surprise to any reader of Dickens – embraces the young stranger (astringently) and arranges for his further education. When she places him in school in Canterbury, to live in the home of Mr. Wickham, a decent lawyer and estate administrator, he becomes the trusted friend and confidante of Mr. Wickham’s daughter, Agnes. Although Mr. Wickham is slowly falling under the influence not only of the bottle but also of his insidious clerk, Uriah Heep (who also has designs on Agnes), David finishes his education and moves on. He takes his first real job in London, articled to a firm of lawyers. Here he meets and falls in love with Dora – a loveable but silly goose, actually – daughter of the senior partner, all the while subject to the continuing pull of the Peggoty family in East Anglia and alarmed by the abduction of Emily. The final third of David Copperfield has always struck me as little more than an extended epilogue. It tells us what eventually happens between David and Dora (they marry and she dies[1]), to Steerforth (he goes down bravely with a ship in a storm), to Miss Betsey, David’s friend Traddles, and the uxorious Micawber (after exposing Uriah Heep he then moves with this family to Australia with Mr. Peggoty and Emily). Much of it is so mawkishly Victorian that it disturbs the pain and veracity of the first act[2]. But Dickens, after all, was a Victorian, indeed the one to whom we might first make reference if called upon to identify those who created the age. And so when I say that if there is an overriding theme in David Copperfield beyond the sturdy maturation of a boy into a decent man, that theme would be the wisdom of attaining a Victorian marriage. The book, of course, is not homilitc. But it repeatedly illustrates the perils of making a bad choice over a good one. The mis-match of David’s mother with Mr. Murdstone is catastrophic, for example, as is Emily’s wilful elopement with Steerforth, rejecting the reliable sailor-boy who had been her fiancé. The lower classes living on love alone seem to do well – Barkis and Peggoty, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber – but without foresight, love alone will not be enough, as David comes to learn in his marriage with Dora. From a modern standpoint, the least plausible moment occurs when Annie, the child bride of the aging scholar Dr. Strong (one of David’s early teachers), after some years of marriage must tearfully and semi-publicly protest her love and respect for the old man notwithstanding the unwelcome attentions she has received from her younger cousin. Dr. Strong is no Petruchio and Annie is no Kate. The scene is the purest Victorianism and only escapes treacle by a hairsbreadth[3]. (It also anticipates Emily’s reconciliation with Mr. Peggoty, which is at least only described in the past tense.) But it does touch on such things as intellectual and age disparity that Dickens obviously finds problematic in achieving a successful marriage. And yet it is marriage and a fulfilling family life that the author sets up as the reward for the virtuous life. Today, it would be unimaginable for a first-rate novelist to end his tale with a happy marriage. And today even among Victorian novels – which are now hardly read at all – I suspect that David Copperfield is read far less frequently than darker tales (Hardy, Elliot) which bring with them an ambiguity more congenial to our modern world. If this is so, I don’t complain. The saccharine ending is a shame, but I have loved David Copperfield from a young age, and continue to do so. Endnotes 1. Her earlier miscarriage is such a model of 19th Century euphemism that it took me a moment to figure out what the author was talking about: “The spirit fluttered for a moment on the threshold of its little prison, and, unconscious of captivity, took wing. ” 2. And yet, without the fallen woman – or the possibility of one – there would be no Victorian novel. 3. Robert Graves, incidentally, had the arrogance to write what he called The Real David Copperfield, which is his notion of a streamlined version omitting all those irritating "dear reader" asides. Wouldn't want the art to get in the way of a good story. 

  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations -- To read the opening chapter of Great Expectations is to be taken back to your own life as a six- or seven-year old. What child would not be transfixed and terrified upon encountering a strange man in a cemetery at twilight who grabbed him, held him upside down, and threatened to kill him if he did not bring him a file from his brother’s forge? The events of our childhood are randomly as vivid as any we experience in our whole lives, as Dickens knew. To me, therefore, novels like David Copperfield and the opening section of Great Expectations and are virtually autobiographical, avenues back to my childhood, the most vivid time of my life. And Dickens, no matter what has been said about his alleged mawkishness, as an advocate for children, was an advocate for all of us. “In this little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may only be small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big boned Irish hunter.” On the other hand, Great Expectations, a great Victorian novel, contains little of Dickens’s efforts at urgent reform as in Oliver Twist, or psychology as in Bleak House, or obvious Christianity as in A Tale of Two Cities or A Christmas Carol. Its message – though by using the word “message” I do not intend to burden the book with any distasteful qualities – is fairly straightforward, along the lines of the dangers of wealth in comparison to True Friendship and the eternal virtues of generosity. It is a wonderful novel which, on the other hand, I suppose is read with impatience by modern readers. But I want to dwell a moment on Dickens’s technique. His novels, written a century and a half ago, were meant to be read aloud in the family circle. This is one of the reasons why he is a great novelist; he helps his reader as much as a director helps an actor by giving stage direction when it is necessary. And he tells us what we already know. Consider this exhausted evening when Pip lies awake unable to sleep: “When I had lain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices with which silence teems, began to make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.” If there is a reader to whom this is not familiar, let him read “beach” books and leave great novels to the rest of us. Pip is the leading character and narrator of Great Expectations, an orphan who is raised (“by hand”) by his disagreeable sister and her blacksmith husband, Joe Gargery. Joe, whose own miserable childhood is also sketched by the author in a few words, must be one of literature's most decent and lovable characters and it is truly painful to see Pip, as he grows older, become embarrassed by this simple and good-hearted man. And yet, because he is not nearly so nice as David Copperfield, Pip is a much more realistic character and the novel is the more interesting. Among other things, because the novel is told in the first person (as is David Copperfield), Dickens is able to portray Pip’s more unattractive features through the character’s own voice, including the retrospective regret that comes with it. As a matter of writing technique, this is a small thing, but it contributes a poignant and ineffable verisimilitude to a novel whose story line otherwise demands a “willing suspension of disbelief.” And in a larger sense, it is the theme of the novel. As Joe’s rude fidelity and industry and amiability embarrassed Pip, he says in retrospect, “I know right well that any good that inter-mixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restless aspiring discontented me.” Pip would probably have been discontented anyway, but the catalyst of the novel’s sub-plot is his odd meeting with Estella and her protector, Miss Havisham. The latter is a rich recluse living on the margins of the town in a boarded up mansion – Satis House – with Estella, a haughty girl of about Pip’s age. For entirely selfish reasons, Miss Havisham arranges to have Pip attend Estella at regular intervals so that he might be tormented for her love, which he surely is. This is the part of the novel which we all remember. But Dickens had a compulsion to relate what George Orwell, I believe, called the “iron-bound plot.” What follows is more or less my re-telling of the Great Expectations plot, chiefly for the purposes of stoking my own memory. As a plot, it’s not bad. Indeed, it’s a good plot. But the telling of it took Dickens many chapters and my summary may seem a bit frenzied. The counterpoint to Estella is Biddy, a plain good-hearted girl of about the same age, who is also wise to Pip’s ambition. After Pip’s sister is one day assaulted and left an invalid while alone in their cottage, Biddy is obliged to come and care for her as Pip continues his apprenticeship with Joe. But that is not to last, for about a quarter-way into the novel, Pip is informed by the formidable Mr. Jaggers, a London attorney, that he has been bestowed with “Great Expectations” – something like a trust for his education – from an unknown patron whom he believes to be Miss Havisham, not illogically since Miss Havisham herself appears to have engaged Jaggers. Pip thus moves to London to be educated as a gentleman under Jaggers’s distant observation. His assigned teacher is a Mr. Pocket (a relative of Miss Havisham’s), whose son, the amiable Herbert Pocket, Pip is startled to recognize as a boy whom years before he had bested in a fight at Miss Havisham’s. Herbert had been Miss Havisham’s initial choice as prey for Estella, but evidently hadn’t worked out to her satisfaction. His history, however, has put him in the position to relate to Pip that it had been Miss Havisham’s ne’er-do-well half-brother who had contrived with her fiancé to leave her bereft on her wedding day 25 years before. When Pip is obliged to return to his home for a visit, he reflects on the power the memory of Estella has over him as “the clue by which I am to be followed into my poor labyrinth.” “The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all: I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” (If this passage is not exactly the theme of the novel, it is nevertheless a bitter truth – and an odd personal comfort.) Sure enough presently Estella coolly informs Pip that she has no heart. And Pip cannot let time and absence heal things for it is not long before Miss Havisham sends Estella to live in a suburb of London where her indifferent proximity continues to distress him. This entire set-up of the plot (and more) would have led to entirely different results in French hands. As it is, for Dickens it has consumed more than half of the book but led to far different purposes which only then begin to come into focus. On a dark night of loud storms he is frighteningly confronted alone in his rooms by the old convict, Magwitch who, revealing that it is he who has been the source of Pip’s expectations, begins to make himself at home, a fugitive from the law. The first time I read this novel, I was appalled at Pip’s horror and rude rejection of this man who had done everything for him. But it is so much easier now to understand that none of us would be prepared for a rough man to intrude himself into our home and expect a warm welcome on no notice. “The wretched man, after loading me with his wretched gold and silver chain for years, had risked his life to come to me, and I held it there in my keeping! If I had loved him instead of abhorring him; if I had been attracted to him by the strongest admiration and affection, instead of shrinking from him with the strongest repugnance, it could have been no worse.” But this is not entirely to Pip’s discredit, for now Dickens reverts to the tale of man redeemed. Magwitch had been one more of Dickens’s orphans, of the lowest sort, who as a young man had fallen in with an accomplished cold-hearted grifter, Miss Havisham’s false lover who had later become Magwitch’s mortal enemy (and fellow convict). Pip now bitterly confronts his rejection of Joe and realizes that the deluded Miss Havisham had never intended Estella for him. Indeed, the girl has married an obnoxious dandy. Only now does the repentant recluse give him an endowment with her abject expression of guilt: “That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown dis-eased, as all minds do and must and will reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well.” Before leaving, Pip takes a turn around the blighted garden but, on a premonition, returns to Miss Havisham’s room. In his absence the ancient wedding gown, which she has always worn has caught fire on the antique candelabrum and he is obliged to throw her to the floor in an insane embrace to put out the hellish flames. (She dies later anyway.) And Estella? She is Magwitch’s child by a servant whom Pip had seen periodically in Jaggers’s office. This woman had possibly murdered a rival and had told Jaggers that in revenge for his infidelity she would also destroy their child (whom Jaggers, her lawyer, actually delivered to Miss Havisham). And of course we now learn that Jaggers too has a conscience, as in the third person he hypothetically “puts his case” to Pip for rescuing Estella: “[T]hat he lived in and atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction . . . . that he often saw children solemnly tired at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; . . . that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged.” Meantime, Magwitch’s return from Australian exile has been discovered, which would require a hanging if he is captured. The police being hot on Magwitch‘s heels, Pip contrives to spirit him back out of the country. As morning arrives, he spirits Magwitch into a small boat to intercept a steamer beyond Gravesend downriver from London where there will be little observation. A descriptive paragraph of the beginning of this trip reminded me of Virginia Wolff’s description of the cacophony of London’s docks somewhat more than a half century later: “Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty chain-cables, frayed hempen hawsers, in and out, bobbing buoys sinking for the moment floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal, in and out, under the figure-head of John of Sunderland making a speech to the winds . . . and the Betsy of Yarmouth with a firm formality of bosom and her nobby eyes starting two inches out of her head; in and out, hammers going in ship-builders’ yards, saws going at a timber, clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps going in leaky ships, capstans going, ships going out to sea, and unintelligible sea-creatures roaring curses over the bulwarks at respondent lightermen . . . .” But the plan miscarries as Custom House officers intercept the boat and Magwitch is mortally injured. Pip is left the pauper he was as the novel began. His great expectations all come to nothing and he is destined to live without either Estella – who though a humiliated widow is wise enough not to make a match with Pip – or Biddy who herself wisely marries Joe. 

  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities -- The opening chapter of this famous historical novel is so well written that it alone should be reviewed by students to see how well an excellent author can set the tone of a book in just a few paragraphs. And then I came to the second chapter and found that it was so vivid – a rainy late night encounter of a messenger with a coach in fear of highwaymen – that I recalled it from having read it 20 years before. A Tale of Two Cities is not religious art, but it is strongly informed by Christianity and Christian images. There is a recurring theme of men being “recalled to life,” the guillotine versus the cross, and of course the concluding sacrifice of Sydney Carton that moved Dostoyevsky to call Dickens "that great Christian." The “two cities,” it eventually becomes clear, are not London and Paris, but the City of Man and the City of God. I believe that it was while reading this novel that I first realized that Dickens, among his other colossal talents, was also a cameraman, by which I mean that he describes some scenes in the present tense as though viewed through a camera. It's a very effective technique and done so smoothly that you really don't notice it at first. I also recall a vivid scene in Our Mutual Friend that uses the same feature. As an older reader, I am less willing to suspend disbelief about Dickens’s coincidences. But on the other hand, his plots are always so convoluted, that the coincidences are sometimes just another detail in the mid-Victorian embroidery. This is how I found myself regarding the fact that well into the book we learn that an English spy in the French prison system is the brother of Miss Pross, the governess to Charles and Lucie Darnay, and also that Mme. DeFarge is the sister of the peasant woman raped by the twin Evremonde brothers who had engaged (why?) the young Dr. Manette to treat her before she died. There are also other features of this novel which make it arresting. Here is an interesting observation, made decades before Freud’s “death wish”: “ . . . . a species or fervor of intoxication known, without doubt, to have led some persons to brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease – a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.” And as to Mme DeFarge, this description of her shows that Dickens was quite observant of revolutionaries: “Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those qualities, the troubled time would have heaved her up under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. . . . [¶] . . . If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe tomorrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent her there.” It is a description of Lenin, is it not? 

  Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist -- In early 19th Century England, through the insistence of his father, young Mr. Liefert is married to an inappropriately older woman of fine family but low character. The marriage produces a son, Edward, but the two parents, unable to live together, eventually break apart, the wife moving to the pleasures of Paris in company with young Edward, whom she teaches to despise his father. Liefert, meantime, finds his unhappy life slowly lightened by an association with an older widower and his two daughters, one of them the lovely Agnes, a girl of 19. Divorce being impossible, Liefert and Agnes bank their fires for a time, but eventually she becomes pregnant. Unaware of his daughter’s disgrace, her father has in the Magwitch vein bestowed on her and her betrothed (as he thought) his fortune. But by now the young man is dying in Rome and obtaining his unexpected fortune (which Agnes, who dies in childbirth would otherwise share) is the motive for the ensuing history, the life of their illegitimate child, Oliver Twist. This is the elaborate prehistory to this popular novel and I recite it not only because figuring it out almost overwhelms the pleasures of the story but because knowing it is essential to understanding the story. It simply must be done. Other Dickens novels (Barnaby Rudge, Great Expectations) also require such an exercise. In some novels this is a magnificent “extra” amounting almost to a novel within a novel (see, e.g., Absalom, Absalom) and generally the process is richly rewarding in Dickens’s hands. (Not all share this evaluation, however; George Orwell’s essay on Dickens refers in frustration to his “iron bound” plots.) Nevertheless, I must say that my re-reading of this novel was not the treat I had hoped for. Oliver, while admittedly a child, is not a distinct personality like Pip or David Copperfield (each of whom had the advantage, of course, of becoming mature adults during the course of their books). Instead, Oliver is more an icon of innocence, sweetness, and righteousness and the catalyst for the elaborate plot to come. Furthermore, poor Oliver seems to be at risk every time he ventures out of a house; he is kidnaped, waylaid, stumbled over, or unexpectedly encountered more than any comic hero in a Fielding novel. And for some reason the conversations between various characters -- e.g. a love scene between the orphan Rose and Harry Maylie -- seem uncharacteristically stuffy and Victorian for Dickens’s normally puckish style. The style, however, is irrepressible. Irony, for example, in unskilled hands, can easily degenerate into sarcasm and bitterness, particularly if its object, as it is here, is as somber as poverty and the treatment of orphans. But for Dickens, irony is one of a score of tools in his shop, and he uses it as deftly as a feather, chiefly because of his sense of humor. Mrs. Mann, he says, has made an impression on Oliver’s mind chiefly because she has previously made impressions on his body. He makes it look easy.

  Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby -- Although I've read this novel a couple of times, both David Copperfield and Great Expectations always eclipse it in my memory. It hardly seems fair to judge a novel by those standards, but there it is. One amusing Dickensian touch is the neighboring madman who flirts with Nicholas's mother by launching vegetables over the back wall -- and the fact that she is demurely tolerant of the nonsense when her children are naturally scandalized.

  Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers -- Without having done any outside reading on the question, the following seems likely to me. Dickens began this early work with something in mind different from what the final product turned out to be, viz. that he would produce a series of comical, sober, or terrifying stories and "papers" loosely tied together by the perambulations of the Pickwick Society. My theory is that Dickens discovered about a quarter of the way through that nature intended him to be a novelist and that he realized that he had the rudiments of a pretty good novel already underway. Some people, after all, can't help themselves. (See Moby Dick.) I suppose that Mr. Pickwick himself must be considered the great creation of this book, but my own sympathy vote goes to Sam Weller. 

  Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend -- I've only read this novel once and don't remember much of it now. But I do remember this one wicked touch. Two peripheral characters, a man and a woman, are both adventurers, circulating in the world of wealthy London society, hoping to make a match. They do: by accident, they marry each other. 

  Charles Dickens, Bleak House -- Before Conrad there was Dickens. Although it may not be sensible to compare the two in any way other than their membership in a small fraternity of born writers, nevertheless Bleak House reminds me how plastic the medium can be in the best hands. Conrad’s unsurpassed suppleness in forming a novel may be his most signal feature, but Bleak House illustrates that Dickens had some tricks of his own. I have remarked elsewhere on Dickens’s idiosyncratic camera technique and use of the present tense. All of that is present here, of course (the description of the death of Mr. Tulkinghorn is a splendid example), but I was also struck by the author’s innovative decision to alternate this peculiarly Dickensian narrative point of view with a first person narrative provided by the central character, Esther Summerson. Planning his novel in this way, Dickens has given himself complete latitude to keep his mystery alive subjectively while advancing the story along both subjective and objective lines. Bleak House also offers a model of mid-Victorian sensibilities, both genuine and artificial. Dickens always knew the difference and as usual parodies those super-refined aristocrats (and others) who have lost touch with their humanity. His snide remarks about Lords Boodle, Doodle, and Foodle, etc. are tiresome, but on the other hand, he gives a wonderfully wry picture of Tulkinghorn’s funeral at which the carriage of every important man in London is in stately attendance -- while the owners themselves have remained at home. Another arresting feature is the Bucket character, a detective who toward the end of the book is given what might be the archetype of the drawing room scene in which the great man reveals all, including the unexpected perpetrator of the crime. Bucket also provides the prototype for the “Quick, Watson, the game’s afoot” scene. This was years before Sherlock Holmes. Most of the foregoing details occurred to me in the second reading of the book, always a worthwhile activity.

 

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit -- Like about half of Shakespeare's plays, there are a good number of Dickens novels that have to be called second best -- but only by the standards of the genius. Thackeray would have been proud to have written this novel which, truth be told, is superior to his best efforts on virtually every front (even wit). It is no criticism of Dickens to report that the incidents and his cast of characters in Little Dorrit are somewhat familiar: an imperious housebound woman, the debtors prison, a "best of times/worst of times" atmosphere, an everyman leading man (less engaging, I admit, than Pip or David Copperfield), and of course the mystery. The mystery is given its theme by using the idea of dreams, shadows, and pairs of characters and other twin-like things (including a genuine two-part novel). It seems to me, incidentally, that the reason Arthur Clennem is not so interesting as his antecedents Oliver, et al. is that his forbidding childhood is omitted from the tale instead of portrayed. Little Dorrit also has its incidents of Dickensian sentimentality which is really no more than mawkish Victorianism. (This was the occasion for Oscar Wilde’s snide remarks about Dickens.) And this is not the only Dickens novel where such expressions of true love, true devotion, etc. appear -- the ending of David Copperfield has always put me off. I am not inclined to see them as the epiphany that was evidently intended.

  Charles Dickens, Hard Times -- By Dickensian standards, this is more novella than novel. Like Barnaby Rudge and some other less successful Dickens novels, it lacks an everyman narrator or protagonist and so it also lacks much of a personal touch to involve the reader. (In no way is this mandatory, however.) In a way I suppose that this was intentional, since the chief point seems to be to satirize the Benthamites and their bloodless view of the world. On the other hand, the book contains many of the familiar Dickens elements: an abandoned child, several strange old ladies, a one-dimensional comic villain, a minor mystery, and some humorously sarcastic social commentary. The plot surrounds the fortunes of Luisa Gradgrind, clever daughter of the Bentham of the piece, whose childhood has been rendered so lifeless by her father's insistence on fact over fancy, that she makes a most uninspired marriage to her father's pompous up-by-the-bootstraps friend, Bounderby. Virtually the whole of the novel is set in the industrial coal country, not London. 

  Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge -- Never mind Turgenev, it is this novel that should have been called "Fathers and Sons." Young Barnaby Rudge, often called an "idiot" by some of the other characters, was the third victim -- his father appears to have been the second -- of a double murder which occurred before the opening of the story (the prehistory is a favorite Dickens device). With his accustomed self-control, Dickens makes this clear at his own speed as he deliberately reveals what and who was involved. At the center of the first half of the novel is John Chester, a truly remarkable Dickens creation, himself a gentleman of perfect control and cordiality who is not a gentleman after all. He is one of Dickens's best villains, something like an early Moriarity. And he too is a father -- of the chief romantic character, Edward, who is in love with the daughter of the first murder victim. And then there is parallel love among the yeomen, Dolly Varden and Joseph Willett, the latter of whose own father is as insensitive in his way as Edward's. The parallel love affairs and family conflicts are a recurring theme of the book which, incidentally, is an historical novel set during the time of the American Revolution, though that is barely adverted to. Instead, the historical event which is so vividly recalled is the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London in 1780. Although Dickens furnished a compelling recollection of the French Revolution in his other historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, the portraits which he draws of the Gordon rioters is much more reminiscent of Hitler's thugs in the late 1920s and early 1930s -- including a vainglorious and intense little man who never understands how ridiculous he appears. My chief complaint about this novel, however, is what I found was the undertelling of the prehistory. It was never clear to me why John Chester was motivated against Mr. Haredale, what brought Barnaby's father to the murder scene, etc., etc.

  John DosPassos, USA Trilogy, including Forty Second Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money — This “trilogy” is a largely uninvolving pastiche of incidents in the lives of eight or ten different American characters who go through life in the first quarter of the 20th Century. Between chapters are certain innovative breaks called “Newsreels” and “The Camera Eye” in which the author repeats some apparently genuine headlines of the day or some supposedly personal reminiscences from his own life in the same time frame. (One biographical anecdote involved a suicide he appears to have come across in France and it is genuinely chilling.)

But the characters are not terribly interesting -- sometimes they are virtually interchangeable -- and the incidents attributed to their particular stories often sound like anecdotes that the author may have heard from others and kept on a note card for future use. (Manhattan Transfer leaves this same impression.)

It may be that the reason for the work’s popularity is the author’s determination to see his “USA” subject matter from the angle of the proletariat. Thus we have mini-stories on the Wobblies, slices of the life of merchant seamen during World War I, doughboys in love, the pluck and upward thrust of yeomen tainted by their success, etc., etc. In the third volume, this culminates with an overwritten elegy on Sacco and Vanzetti.

Every now and then, DosPassos drops in a thumbnail biography of a genuine historical figure, Thomas Edison, Woodrow Wilson, Thorstein Veblen (“a congenital inability to say ‘yes’”), and such. At their best, they resemble short encyclopedia entries, but often as not, as in the case of Theodore Roosevelt, they are tinctured by irony and snideness. From time to time I encountered a authentically good sentence or a thoughtful or innovative phrase. At the end of the day, however, this is just a second rate piece of work published early enough to be interesting for its novelty.

The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky

     I almost never stop reading a book before finishing it, and I did not do so with The Possessed. In fact,actually went back and read the first quarter of it again, hoping to place the characters and become involved in the plot. 

     But it didn’t help at all. This was very surprising to me. I have read and re-read several other novels by Dostoevsky and I was prepared to like this one as well. All I had heard of it in advance was that it was supposed to be the ne plus ultra of novels about underground intrigue and secret cabals. That was definitely present and although I was certainly not expecting John Le Carre, I was also not expecting to be bored for lengthy stretches and virtually indifferent for most of the time.  

    There were some moments of humor, particularly in one or two of the characters who in contemporary language might be called “drama queens.” Now and then there would be a vivid scene which promised portentousness. Inevitably there is the Dostoevskyian reflections on God and religion in the Russian style, but overloading the entire production (it is a very long novel) there were far too many endless conversations between people feeling each other out or revealing themselves. In a work of this length, foreshadowing and subtle clues must not be so distant from the point that the reader will have forgotten the significance. I cannot imagine reading it again.

Feodor Dostoevski, House of the Dead –

This is an odd little book which begins routinely enough as a novel but ends abruptly when it fails to finish the circle. That is to say, it commences as a story within a story, but never resurfaces. We start in a Siberian village in which the narrator presently reveals to us an odd resident, a pedagogue, who shuns contact with all adults. For reasons unimportant to the story, we come across the stranger’s diary and learn that he is Alexander Petrovich, a former convict. Thenceforth our original narrator utterly disappears but for a parenthetical note of verisimilitude about two-thirds of the way through, and we read Alexander Petrovich’s first-hand account of his life in a Siberian penal colony. (He is there for having killed his wife, though that hardly matters to the story.)

Dostoevsky having spent some time of his own in a Russian prison, the narrative seems at all times authentic, though peculiarly Russian. I must say it also seems quaint compared to just the few hours I spent inspecting San Quentin a few years ago; if all criminal prisoners are alike, still they must have evolved a crueler and more terrifying strain in recent generations in America. These Russian prisoners, who most certainly include child murderers, nevertheless are by and large middle-aged rural peasants and neither the drug-addled sociopaths that Tom Wolfe is so good at describing nor the angry, profane, buffed-out 20-year-olds who I saw at San Quentin.

In any event, Alexander Petrovich’s story has little plot progression to it. What the novel consists of are mini-character sketches of various other inmates, disquisitions on the incidents of prison life, and occasional incidents which the narrator observed or participated in. In this, the book is a precursor of Solzhenitzin’s Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a much better (and more bitter) recounting of how cruel Russians can be to each other. Now that I have put it down, I cannot picture myself feeling the need to visit it again, but this is not because of its vividness (the way I feel about Jude the Obscure), but simply the fact that its best feature is the troubling title.

Feodor Dostoevski, The Idiot –

After I had finished reading The Idiot, I went to the neighboring library to read a short essay on the book. (As I have said elsewhere, I need all the help I can get.) What I learned was that Dosteovski himself had ventured no fewer than eight versions (!) of the novel before he was satisfied with the result. Possibly this explains why by the end of the novel I had become wearied by the plot and almost indifferent to the significance of what I had read. In fact, I cannot say that I found much of significance at all. The whole ordeal struck me as much like a “study” that a painter might make. Here is the way this person would look in joy, in anguish, in love, etc. etc. There was something earnest but artificial in the whole project.

This is not to say that The Idiot is not infinitely better than most mortals could accomplish. If it illustrates anything to me, it is how truly difficult it is to write a good novel. The first third of the story occurs entirely within a single day, beginning in the morning on a railway car from Warsaw and ending late at night in Petersberg. To me, it seems very un-Dostoevskian, indeed farcical. The segment follows the young, penurious Prince Lyov Nikolaievich Myshkin’s re-entry into Russia from his extended stay in Switzerland where he has been sent for treatment as an “idiot” for being an epileptic. He is unknown in his native land with no family and nothing to fall back on. But in fact, he is portrayed as a sweet and simple Candide to whom all who encounter him are attracted. (He is not a Christ symbol, but certainly a conscious imitation of Christ.) This is seen at the very outset in Myshkin’s interaction with his two accidental companions in the rail car, Parfyon Semyonevich Rogozhin, a wastrel who has just come into a huge fortune, and Lebedev, a formal, obsequious civil servant. And it continues through both Myshkin’s unscheduled visit later in the day at the comfortable home of General Yepanchin whose imperious but somewhat silly wife, Lizaveda Prokovyevna, is Myshkin’s distant relative (she has never heard of him but is intrigued to learn of her connection with a prince), and his later lodging with the general’s gauche subaltern Gavril (Ganya) Adonyvich Ivolgin and his colorful and operatic family.

By the time Part I of the novel has ended, we have met, in the Russian fashion, too many characters with far too many names and titles (the Russian love affair in that period with elaborate names eludes me), all of them declaiming their own self-importance in their respective, insane self-dramatizing manner. If there is a key to keeping things manageable, it is always to recall that most of the characters – but not the central ones – come from the circles maintained by three families, the Yepanchins, the Ledbedyevs, and the Ivolgins. But one such non-family character is Nastasia Filipovna, an uncommon beauty and increasingly-mad kept woman who must be married if her original seducer, a character named Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, is to prosper. She is pursued by everyone, particularly Rogozhin, and the question of what is to become of her is the engine which sporadically moves the novel forward. Thus she bewitches Myshkin, and for his part, his innocence fascinates her.

Part II opens with a dramatic change of tone. It begins several months later when Myshkin, having come into a modest inheritance, returns to Petersberg from Moscow. The farce has ended momentarily and he is aware of being observed in several venues by “demon eyes” in a crowd. There follows one of those fevered Dostoevskian episodes, an internal monologue in which Myshkin sees with second sight the meaning (possibly) of things. He is then attacked by the jealous Rogozhin – with whom he had previously “exchanged crosses” – and escapes because the attack coincides with the first fit he has had in years. (Eventually, we begin to see that Rogozhin is a deliberately diabolic figure, the counterpoint to Myshkin’s ingenuousness.) Then we commence again, three weeks later, in the suburbs of Pavlovsk where everyone it seems has a dacha. A new character, Yevgeny Pavlovich Radonsky, is introduced, and Myshkin is in a flirtation with Mme Yepanchin’s lovely youngest daughter, Aglaya. But Myshkin, we learn, has also actually formed a liaison with Nastasia Filipovna. The novel rumbles forward, punctuated with attempted suicides, thefts, drunken apologies, another fit, a death, and eventually the murder of Nastsaya Fillipovna. Over this period, Myshkin is framed and ridiculed, admired and confided in. For the purposes of the plot, all of this is necessary, but for all of the length of the novel, neither he nor anyone else in the book seems particularly real. It is this lack of reality that would distress Dostoevksi. As far as I can tell, he was desperate that the plot be realistic to readers like me so as to illustrate his theme of the “perfect man” in an imperfect world. I wish it had happened, and possibly it is simply the Russian attitude that is too foreign to me to succeed. But, it must also be said that the author was familiar with and respectful of both Shakespeare and Dickens (both Othello and The Pickwick Papers can be detected in The Idiot – and it may be that the very notion of the central character being an “idiot” was borrowed from Barnaby Rudge) and so he certainly knew about literature’s ability to transcend the cultural divide. And since I conclude as I began, dilating on the difficulty for an author to get his plot, theme, and characters plausible, I will give this author the last word, quoting his reflection late in the novel about the mixture of his players:

“In their novels and stories writers mostly try to pick out certain social types and represent them imaginatively and artistically – types one rarely comes across in real life in the way they are represented in fiction and which nevertheless are more real than life. . . . [I]n real life the typical characteristics of people seem to be watered down . . . . We have, however, still not answered the question what a novelist is to do with quite ‘ordinary,’ commonplace people and how he is to present them to his readers so as to make them at all interesting. . . . In our opinion, a writer ought to try to find interesting and instructive traits of character even among commonplace people. . . . To this category or ‘ordinary’ or ‘commonplace’ people belong certain persons of our story . . . .”

This is a personal touch that Dostoevsky employed in other of his novels, as well. It may be ingenuous, but the passage I have just quoted I also see as a confession of failure.

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie —

In the right hands, this novel possibly could have been as good as The House of Mirth, an American meditation on the press of social change on people not quite well-enough equipped to handle it. But Dreiser was not half the talent of Edith Wharton.

Young Carrie, probably 18 or so, moves from the country to Chicago, lives briefly with her unimaginative sister and brother-in-law, and in a financial pinch moves in with a traveling salesman without benefit of marriage. Presently she decamps to New York with an older and ostensibly more suitable man who (unknown to her) has stolen a considerable fund from his employers to finance the move. Carrie ultimately thrives on the stage (what else?), while Hurstwood, her bigamous husband, finally takes his life in pitiful circumstances. (This culminating event of the novel follows a modestly-detailed Dickensian account of being down and out in New York in the 1880s.)

Dreiser’s writing moves steadily forward at the same tempo to the end, much like Main Street and similar second-rate American novels. Events unfold, and the reader soon enough foresees the outcome (particularly if he has seen A Star Is Born). But as Dreiser is neither censorious nor enamored of his characters, he is not at pains to furnish genuine foreshadowings of doom. Hence this novel is not the male analog of Anna Karenina; Dreiser is incapable of taking the story to that level. Given the date of its publication (1900) and America’s prevailing moral climate, the novel may have been scandalous (no doubt because it lacks much of a point of view), but that precise lack of passion prevents it from transcending the plot. Instead of being included in the syllabus with Madam Bovary and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, therefore, to my mind Sister Carrie is more an historical artifact than a literary effort.

Daphne duMaurier, Rebecca --

As a model of how to play your cards in writing a mystery novel, this book is almost perfect. No plot development or background fact is revealed before its time. About midway through I found myself saying to my wife that "It's an excellent mystery and I don't even know what the mystery is."

Well, there is a mystery, packed up nicely in the end, but rather like the Dickensian mysteries whose chief purpose is to hold the reader's interest by means of some unresolved conflict rather than to be the central subject of the novel. I don't quarrel with that, except insofar as Dickens's efforts would be worthwhile without the guessing games. In Rebecca, all we have without the mystery is one of those rather foolish women's novels about love and getting the man. It's not quite Gothic, but almost. Compare Vanity Fair.

Lawrence Durrell, Alexandria Quartet --

Including Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. Although these books were written and published over a period of years as separate novels, they are, in fact, "a four card trick in the form of a novel," to quote one of the characters. In each, Durrell deals with the same place, events, and people, but at all times everyone is "like those figures on revolving turntables in jewelers' shops, . . . turn[ing] new facets of ourselves toward each other."

Ostensibly the theme is love ("the austere mindless primitive face of Aphrodite") as exhibited in Alexandria (the city "which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain"), but in a larger sense it is Durrell's meditation on art and artists, whom he expressly contrasts with priests. Art has no intention, no theology; it is a "manuring of the psyche." Thus there is not much of an actual "story" in the Alexandria Quartet, just a series of perceptions, some of them false, all of them valid. Like Conrad, Joyce, and Nabokov, Durrell is always in touch with the "other things" that are happening simultaneously with his story and, perhaps more than they do, always permitting his readers to sense these things. There are several points at which he confides his outlook to his readers. In Mountolive, the character Pursewarden writes a letter in which he says,

"For the artist, I think, as for the public, no such thing as art exists; it only exists for the critics and those who live in the forebrain. Artist and public simply register, like a seismograph, an electromagnetic charge which can't be rationalized. One only knows that a transmission of sorts goes on, true or false, successful or unsuccessful, according to chance. But to try to break down the elements and nose them over -- one gets nowhere. (I suspect this approach to art is common to all those who cannot surrender themselves to it!)"

Elsewhere, Durrell writes, "A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn." This viewpoint hardly does justice to Jane Austen, et al., but artists are never really very kind to each other.

Otherwise, criticisms seem to me to be beside the point in evaluating this work, which surely deserves the name "novel," pace Ulysses. I will permit myself this one, however: except for Scobie (who appears to greatest comic effect in Balthazar) and maybe a few other minor characters, the main players all seem to talk alike and are little differentiated except for their playing different parts assigned to them by the author. The dominant image in these books, particularly in Justine, is that of mirrors. It is on virtually every page and indescribably hypnotic. Justine meets her first husband in a mirror; that husband writes a book ("Moeurs") quoted extensively within this book; Justine's diary (but is it her diary?) is read in part by Darly who must put her ink blotter to the mirror to do so; etc. But there are also masks, glass eyes, false teeth, blindness, and distorted faces in general. One character has no nose.

By the way, while "Moeurs," is the critical book within a book in Justine, in Balthazar we learn that Pursewarden, an author who appeared to be a minor character in the earlier book, was really (according to Balthazar) the central person in Justine's life. And Pursewarden's unfinished book, "God Is a Humorist," becomes more important as the novel's own version of The Alexandria Quartet. (The quotations from each, however, are more or less aphoristic, and do not give the sense of a real underlying book.)

We must come to Mountolive and its third person narrative style (Justine, Balthazar, and Clea are written in Darly's voice) to begin to make sense of the plot. But this time the plot is far more conventional, viz. international intrigue, than anything that had been suggested before. In Mountolive things become objectively intelligible as opposed to the highly subjective delivery given to us by Darly. But no matter who the narrator is, Durrell is particularly good at sketching a scene. Several incidents with Narouz, the savage brother of Justine's second husband, are as vivid as anything Faulkner wrote. And a scene almost worthy of Melville unfolds at the end of Clea: an underwater burial site of six or eight Greek sailors killed in the war, wrapped in oil skin by the survivors, weighted down at the feet, and sent to the bottom where they stand silently in a group like an audience, witnesses to Darly and Clea when they accidently swim into their circle.

A word about time: Durrell gives Clea a remark at the end of Balthazar that seems to reveal his own attitude:

"For us, the living, the problem is . . . how to harness time in cultivation of a style of heart -- something like that? . . . . Not to force time, as the weak do, for that spells self-injury and dismay, but to harness its rhythms and put them to our own use."

This is what Durrell has done. The entire production is a tour de force.