Okay, everybody. The election is over. Even the shouting is over. It's time to turn our attention back to the things in life that are truly important.
Old books that nobody reads any more. Yeah!
What follows is actually two entries from my offline journal, both of which date from the fall of 2003. Their subject: getting in touch with Charles Dickens. I kid you not.
If books mean nothing to you, don't bother with this. On the other hand, if you're as passionate about them as I am, there might be food here for lively debate between you and me, whoever you might be...
From Kelley's Journal, November, 2003:
I
Sometimes a confluence of events comes along and pokes me. It has happened now and then throughout my life. They don’t have to be big events, like the loss of a job followed by the failure to find another, followed by a car trip across America. They can be small events, like the reading of an essay following upon the heels of a conversation, followed by the rediscovery of an old, familiar volume. That, in fact, is what just happened, and as a result I feel that my life as a reader has been, in some small way, kick-started. In any case I am reading again, in a tentative way, but throwing tentativeness to the breeze, have undertaken a formidable project in that area: Little Dorrit.
Little Dorrit? Yeah. For most of my adult life, indeed, for most of my life as a reader, I have had an allergy to the Victorians. All that windiness, all that length, all that prudery, hypocrisy, imperial smugness. Who needed it? Twenty-some years ago, Ray Araiza used to tease me about my proud claim that “I don’t read the Victorians.” Hemingway and his generation had fought the good fight to liberate American literature from the stranglehold of Britannia. I was their heir, or so I thought. What did I need with Dickens, Thackeray and company?
Well, the journey to Little Dorrit actually had its earliest beginning in September, 2001. Tatiana Floyd and I were driving from Baltimore to Boston for the Labor Day weekend. We took along with us some books on tape to listen to in the car, one of which was a collection of short pieces by Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up. One of the essays on that tape concerned the brouhaha which followed the publication in 1998 of Wolfe’s novel A Man In Full. Specifically, the fuss that three famous, and jealous, fellow-writers kicked up over its success. Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving all went on television at different times to trash A Man In Full, Mailer claiming that it was “journalism” and not fiction, (he ought to know about that!) and Updike stuffily asserting that it wasn’t a product of “our” literary culture. But John Irving outdid his two fellow sniffers: in an appearance on Canadian TV, the jealous author so lost control of himself on the subject of A Man In Full that he was liberally using the “F” word. And here’s the rub in the case of Irving’s on-the-air tantrum: Wolfe mentioned that some reviewers of A Man In Full had compared it with Dickens, and that was what really got Irving’s goat: Irving, it seems, is a great admirer of Dickens, who would like to be compared with Dickens himself. To see Wolfe compared with Dickens drove John Irving into “F-word” convulsions in a TV interview.
This intrigued me. What possible attraction, I wondered, could Dickens have for the author of The World According To Garp and The Cider-House Rules? I would think that two more dissimilar writers couldn’t be imagined. The idea was tucked away in my memory under “curiosities from the world of book-chat.”
Then, maybe three weeks ago, I was picking through Something To Remember Me By, a volume of short fiction by Saul Bellow. Bellow wrote an introduction to this tryptich of novellas, its theme being precisely this fact, that they were novellas as opposed to novels. He discussed our general failure in recent years to make as much time for reading as people used to, hence a general trend to make fiction shorter than it used to be. I don’t remember the exact context, but as an illustration of the sort of long novel to which people no longer want to bother making a commitment of time and effort, Bellow specifically cited Little Dorrit.
Item filed, note with question attached: why Little Dorrit? Dickens wrote plenty of long novels. Why didn’t Bellow cite Bleak House or The Pickwick Papers? It seems to me that they are both generally better known.
Next came my conversation at Marie Callender’s last Wednesday night with Jan Barnett. Jan told me over soup and buffalo wings that she was endeavoring to stake out some time in her life these days for the things she considers important, not the least of which is reading. When she mentioned that she was reading some of the short stories of Colette, it was like someone had tossed a glass of cold water in my lap. I suddenly found myself thinking back to my college days, or at least to Jan’s, when we were all, each in our own way, so interested in literature that we were reading like fiends. In my case the drive was especially strong because I wanted to be a writer, wanted it worse than anything, and of course as my erstwhile teacher Don Baird had said to me when I was 18, “As for writing yourself, keep reading. Sure, all writers are readers.”
From my teens until I was about forty, it seems I was always reading something, usually something from the “western canon,” e.g. something from the entire pantheon of serious western literature, running the gamut from Homer to Tolstoy, from Thomas Mann to Saul Bellow. (For the most part steering clear of the Victorians, except for Oscar Wilde, who flouted their conventions.) But as my forties progressed and the realization that I was not, after all, going to be a Hemingway or a Henry Miller or even a W.H. Auden began to coalesce in real time like a photograph in the darkroom becoming ever-sharper, my interest in reading great literature gradually began to fade, to extend the simile, like an old Polaroid. Now here’s Jan, who by the way has earned my admiration for the graceful way in which she has accepted her own version of my experience: when she was in college, Jan dreamed of becoming a great artist. She knows now that she probably isn’t going to be the next Georgia O’Keeffe, but she has accepted the fact with equanimity, still enjoys drawing, and by the way, is trying to block out time these days for such things as reading the short stories of Colette. Noted and filed.
Next, just yesterday morning in fact, I was reading an essay by critic Sven Birkerts in a book of his that Lucia gave me, Readings. The essay, Against The Current, concerned itself with Birkert’s experience—and, by extension, our experience generally—of “losing touch” with the world of close reading and the sparks it can cause to fly, thanks mostly to the way our postmodern perceptions have been totally taken over and reshaped, even redefined, by the all-pervading ocean of electronic media in which we spend every moment of our waking lives these days. Using as a starting point his self-described inability to read and appreciate poetry as he once did, Birkerts moves on to a detailed discussion, first of how our—his—altered modes of perception have endangered the attentiveness needed for reading, and then to details of some of the small steps he has taken to try and recover some of that, chiefly by making the sacrifice of doing some things in a deliberately slower, less “efficient” manner than they are usually done these days. For example, writing letters with a pen rather than a computer, and then taking the time to walk to the mailbox to mail them, noticing things around him on the way.
Slowing down, in other words, and tuning in while at the same time tuning out.
All of these little experiences brought me to a decision: I was going to read Little Dorrit. Yesterday afternoon I got in the car and drove over to the Chula Vista Public Library to see if it was on the shelf. I knew that it probably would be; after all, who reads Little Dorrit any more?
And then, as I was entering the library on this mission of reading, another tiny fillip of experience occured, a sort of closing-the-circle gesture on the part of the book gods, which, come to think of it, could not have been more perfect had it been scripted for the occasion.
The library’s little used bookstore, tucked away in one corner of the main library, is open on Saturday afternoons. I seldom go in there because they seldom have anything that catches my interest and anyway, in my current living circumstances I don’t have much room for storing books.
But as I wandered into the little shop yesterday, and browsed around the cramped shelves, I spotted an old friend: Literature: Structure Sound and Sense, by Laurence Perrine. (Harcourt, Brace & World, © 1956, 1959, 1963, 1966, 1969, 1970.) This was the very textbook that we used in Donald S. Baird’s English 6 class, “Composition and Literature,” Southwestern College, Fall Semester, 1973. (MWF 8:00-8:50 a.m.—Imagine discussing T.S. Eliot at eight O’clock in the morning! Still, we did.)
I was 18, it was my first semester of college, and this textbook, along with Baird’s own curmudgeonly pontificatings, was a key factor in the shaping of my own tastes in poetry and fiction during the years that followed. (Baird’s greatest gift to me was Yeats. He could be a little prick, but he did me that favor.)
Donald S. Baird is probably dead by now. And there was that book. Did I say “the gods?” More likely, Baird’s own curmudgeonly little ghost patting my butt as I entered the library in search of Dickens, giving his seal of approval to the quest. As I recall, the cost of this textbook in 1973 was $10. I got it back yesterday for 75¢. It, and Lake Woebegon Days by Garrison Keillor, and yes, The Mill On The Floss by George Eliot, eminent Victorian. Total for all three: $1.75.
The library’s two copies of Little Dorrit were both in—surprise!—in fact I had my choice between the one in old blue library binding and the one in old red library binding. Both are slightly yellowed and just a shade tattered. I chose the red one: New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. 1951.
As of this morning I have read up to Chapter Seven. It’s going to be a long journey, as Saul Bellow promised it would be; I’m on page 64 of a book that runs 788 pages. And so thoroughly has the world changed between Dickens’ time and our own that I am already having occasional trouble “taking his sense,” not so much with regard to the language as to the sensibilities of his characters. The Victorians’ shared system of values and beliefs, not to mention their customs, bore little resemblance to whatever shared system of beliefs we have left in the age of the Internet. But no matter, it is giving me a warm feeling in the gut to begin this long journey, and I am determined to see what lies at the other end.
II
Two weeks ago I announced in these pages that I had decided to read Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. I’m just about halfway through it now, a few pages short of finishing Part One. What are my impressions of the book so far? Well, right off, I can see why some reviewers compared Wolfe’s A Man In Full with Dickens. An argument could indeed be made that Dickens was the Tom Wolfe of his day, or Tom Wolfe the Dickens of ours. Michael Burgess and I were discussing Dickens and my decision to read Little Dorrit the other day. “Dickens was a journalist,” Michael remarked. Indeed he was, in the same sense that Balzac and Zola were journalists. The landscape of London at the beginning of the industrial revolution was what Dickens painted, and he was always exposing the social ills of his era; Little Dorrit’s target was the institution of debtor’s prison. In the custom of that time, his novels were serialized in magazines before they appeared between covers, so he was indeed writing for a popular audience. Novels don’t get serialized in magazines any more, but Wolfe was a magazine journalist before he began writing books. The parallels are easy to draw, which makes me wonder about John Irving’s hissy-fit on Canadian TV.
An American reader in the early twenty-first century can’t help but find Dickens a little verbose. It isn’t just because we don’t read long books any more, either. Both journalism and prose fiction have become noticeably less long-winded in the past 100 years. As a journalist who has studied the history of journalism as well as of literature, I can testify that as you progress from 1900 to 2000 in reading newspaper articles, you’ll find them progressively less and less “wordy” until you reach today’s journalism, which is so terse by comparison with earlier eras as to seem like shorthand. When I pick up a newspaper article written at the time of World War I, I’m aware that I’m reading prose. Ornate sentences, carefully crafted. Curlicues of simile and metaphor. It’s obvious that some of these guys were writing with pen and paper, not typewriters. In fact it wasn’t until the 1960s that this kind of thing finally disappeared. As the newspaper market shrank, newspaper writing became less and less distinguishable. Journalism isn’t crafted at all any more, unless you’re talking about the opinion columnists. Journalism today is churned out as product. Pick up the front page of any major newspaper and the reporting of any two journalists will read pretty much like the reporting of any other two. Formulaic, brief and to the point.
Of course Dickens wasn’t writing newspaper stories, he was writing fiction. But he was writing in a leisurely, mannered style which was the norm of his day and not of ours, whether you’re talking about journalism or fiction. Leisurely, mannered prose fiction was precisely what people like Hemingway, Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler were trying to get away from. They, and their contemporaries, laid the ground rules for the kind of fiction we’re used to reading now: pithy, from the hip. DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, in fact, have taken this postmodern stuff so far that their prose resembles Marlon Brando’s mumbling. It’s not a uniform rule, of course. Some contemporary authors have gone out of their way to be unaccommodating to our short attention spans: I think of Pynchon, Barth, Vikram Seth, whose A Suitable Boy was so massive as to draw comparisons with Tolstoy from the British critics in 1991, (but which sank like a rock), and even Garcia Marquez, who dispensed with paragraphs in his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. But these are acts of intentional obtuseness: guys like Dickens and Henry James were long-winded because that was what their audience expected, not the opposite. They weren’t flying in the face of anything. And, come to think of it, Pynchon, Barth and Garcia Marquez actually belong to an earlier generation. I still think of them as modern, but their heyday was the 1960s and ‘70s. Garcia Marquez published 100 Years of Solitude in 1967. That’s a hop, skip and a jump back for me, but I’m pushing 50. To anyone under 35 that must seem like the olden days. And some to think of it, this is the 30th anniversary year of Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon is no spring chicken either. Barth must be in his seventies: he was hip to the hippies when they weren’t too stoned to read.
And then there is the question of what used to be called “sensibility.” The 19th century was (I should say, is) infamous for its “sentimentality.” (I’ll have to get out the OED and research the history of this word; I’m not sure it even existed in Dickens’ time.) From the time of Rousseau until the massive global disllusionment that followed World War I, public taste tended toward bathos and tears. “Feeling is all,” Goethe said in Faust, and he may have meant it ironically, but he wasn’t kidding. For a century, novelists, poets and playwrights laid it on with a trowel, which is why we find so many of them unreadable now. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was credited by no less than Abraham Lincoln with being the spark that started the American Civil War; today one can’t read it without laughing. I’m not comparing Harriet Beecher Stowe with Dickens, but I am saying that the “sensibility” of the mid-19th century tended to favor scenes and characterizations which today we would consider mawkish. I remember my 10th grade English teacher, Mrs. Terry, (who was very much a child of the “hip” ‘60s) mercilessly ridiculing Longfellow’s poem The Wreck of the Hesperus for its gooey sentiment.
Again, I’m using an extreme example: Longfellow is a second-rate poet. But my point is that you do find in Dickens, or I do anyway, some undeniable traces of this pandering to the “sensibilities” of his time which can make some of his characters seem a little unbelievable to modern readers. Little Dorrit, so christlike in her self-sacrificing, so relentlessly sweet, humble and devoted to her father, looks to me like Mary Pickford hamming it up in a silent film. Arthur Clenham is a painfully nice guy who, in the manner of his time, goes around acting like he has no dick. Even when he falls in love with Pet, he tries to persuade himself that he hasn’t. God forbid that any Victorian should admit having a dick. (Curious, or perhaps not quite so curious after all, is the existence, of which we are now fully aware, of a very active and fecund pornographic sub-culture in Victorian England, of which My Secret Life and The Pearl are two famous examples.)
But having said all that, there is a great deal about Little Dorrit that has a contemporary ring. England no longer has debtor’s prison, but reading about it reminds me of how thoroughly our American attitudes toward fortune and misfortune have been influenced by those of our sister-culture on the other side of the pond. Last week I was recounting for our publisher, Linda Rosas, my interview and subsequent e-mail communication with “the grief lady,” Pam Ramsey, whose life has so totally careened out of control in the past few years that she is now a desolate case, crying for help to the local newspaper. “We all choose our path in life,” Linda said breezily, and as far as she was concerned, the subject was closed. I couldn’t help thinking of the scene in Roman Polanski’s Tess, which was of course based on Tess of the d’Urbervilles by eminent Victorian Thomas Hardy, in which some casual passerby remarks of Tess’ misfortunes, “It’s yer own fault.”
There you go. W.H. Auden pointed out in one of his essays that it’s no accident Catholic countries gave us almshouses, while Protestant countries gave us debtor’s prison. Catholic culture is (or was, anyway) untouched by the influence of John Calvin, whose doctrine of predestination added up, in the countries where Protestantism triumphed, to a prevailing idea that you could be as selfish and self-centered as you pleased, while continuing to think that God was smiling on you. Since everyone was predestined, before the Creation, to be either damned or saved, it is therefore a sign of God’s grace if you’re well-off and prosperous in this world, and a sign of His disfavor if you’re poor or down-and-out.
It’s a short leap from there to the idea that there is something shameful about being poor. There are countries in the world where begging is an honorable profession. But that’s not the case in England and it is certainly not the case here. In our Anglo-American culture, even to be unemployed is a kind of blot on your character. I know, I’ve been there. The sight of the Dorrit family languishing in the Marshalsea, with Dorrit’s elder daughter, Fanny, forced to work as a dancer and at the same time hissing and spitting at anyone whom she perceives as casting aspersions on her “genteel” family, is a sharp reminder of where all of this came from. Admittedly, I cannot relate to Fanny’s, or her father’s, anxiety over word getting out that any member of their family has been actually forced to work for a living, she as a dancer and Little Dorrit as a seamstress. We don’t have quite that level of class snobbery here: America does have its rich class, as most countries do, but it doesn’t have an idle rich class, as England once did, a landed gentry that considered it shameful to soil its hands with any kind of labor. But pride and hubris are themes that cut to the bone in American fiction just as they do in Dickens, both fictions growing from societies in which money success (America) or preserving one’s “position in society” (England) are the terms that delineate the good life.
Small wonder Wolfe made the critics think of Dickens when he created Charlie Croker and company. We might not sing songs like Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie or Don’t You Remember Sweet Alice any more, but Dickens and Wolfe were definitely mining the same vein.
So. Is great journalism great literature? Tom Wolfe actually created that question himself in the 1960s when he and his ilk created the so-called “new journalism,” which in short order had Norman Mailer riffing on himself (and winning the Pulitzer) for The Armies of the Night, an exercise in narcissism disguised as journalism, which makes it only that much more ironic that he should have dismissed A Man In Full as “journalism” five years ago. Family feuds. I know something about those. I also know that Dickens is probably smiling from his grave.
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