Disappointment and Hope

Rarely have I found the first part of a book so good only to be deeply disappointed by the rest. I was looking forward to Owen Wister’s The Virginian, having heard that it was the first western (i.e. cowboy) novel; I was ready to find Wister an unjustly forgotten American author like Kenneth Roberts. And my first couple of says with the book confirmed my prognosis. Wister offers poetic descriptions of the West and keen observations of the characters: for instance, it’s a surprise to the first-person narrator that one cowboy can call another a son of a — (Wister uses the dash!) and have it received as a term of endearment. He also establishes a classic cowboy trope in 1902 when an enemy calls the Virginian an SoB. The Virginian pulls out his pistol, lays it on the table, and says, “Smile when you call me that.” The saloon gets quiet for a couple of seconds until everyone sees that no violence will ensue. Then the mingled noise of music, cards, and revelry returns. How many times have we seen that scene in movies and on television!

But things turned sour on the third day. First, Wister says that Equality means an equal chance for everyone to show how unequal he is. And then, of course, he has to try to redefine Christianity: “As soon as you treat men as your brothers, they are ready to acknowledge you – if you deserve it – as their superior. That’s the whole bottom of Christianity.” And there’s a very distasteful scene in which the manly Virginian humiliates a missionary by seeming to go along with his program, wrestling with his sin nature all of one night, only to laugh at him in the morning and go about his way, displaying true Christianity by showing how superior he is. That’s Wister’s disgusting idea of a hero. From then on the book just gets boring, with the cowboy getting moony about a girl, and continued trouble with the predictable villain. Oh, and there’s an attack from Indians who are called “peaceful” (with the quotation marks).

But now, just today, the day before I finish this novel, I was starting to think that maybe I had let some moments I disagreed with spoil a book I could have been enjoying if I hadn’t read in protest. (As to why I read books I don’t like “in protest,” that’s the topic for another post, I suppose.) But then the Virginian gave his girlfriend a lesson in civics, as if she hadn’t learned in school that the power of government by courts comes from the people. But, of course, women can’t be expected to retain, let alone, understand such things. That’s why we don’t let them vote! Then the narrator gave the reader, in a condescending tone, a lesson that one might do evil in order to achieve good, giving the example that one might correctly trespass in order to stop a murder, as if we readers don’t know that. And this was in defense of cowboys lynching cattle thieves, supposedly because the corrupt courts give them no other choice: as if killing a man to prevent thieving is just like trespassing to prevent killing a man. Then the final showdown with villain is set up, and Wister pulls back his flimsy curtain with one sentence: “It is only the great mediocrity that goes to law in these personal matters.” So much for Christianity boiling down to treating men as brothers. So much for respecting the authority of any court. We’re back to democracy meaning an arena where the best can win over the lesser. And apparently men always prove superior to women, and white men always prove superior to Indians. Seems to me I’ve read about some lies the white man told the Indian. But never mind that. It’s the Indians who lie so much they are only described as quote-peaceful-endquote. And remember: all this superiority is true Christianity. Wow! The Virginian just fell deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling pit today.

But I’ll be done with it tomorrow. And I know I have some much better reading coming up. Soon I’ll be starting to reread Orlando Furioso, the book that started my whole reading project. There’s also some Anthony Trollope coming up later this year and, in November or December, one of my very favorite books: Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions. (The novel is so much better than the title!) I also have high hopes for Grimm’s Tales and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Consequently, you can hope for some happier posts in the next few months.

Seeds of a Comedic Masterpiece

I had originally intended the last post to refer to both tragedy and comedy in its title and to cover two related observations concerning The Pickwick Papers. But when I got to four good paragraphs on the tragic topic, I decided to split things up and look behind the comedic mask in a second post. Here is that second post; I can’t imagine that it will run as many as four paragraphs.

I begin my second paragraph by saying that several aspects of The Pickwick Papers seem to have found their way later into A Christmas Carol. You can’t read Dickens’s first novel – or even read much about it – without realizing that the embedded story of Gabriel Grub, a misanthropic sexton who has a change of heart one Christmas Eve when he is abducted by goblins, is the odd little tune that six years later served as cantus firmus for the gloriously polyphonic and much, much, much better Christmas Carol. But other things in Pickwick remind me of A Christmas Carol, too. There’s the Christmas dinner at Mr. Wardle’s with the games and the kissing under the mistletoe, which sounds quite reminiscent of nephew Fred’s party at which the rapidly reforming Scrooge played at Twenty Questions and Topper and the plump sister in the lace tucker “were so very confidential together behind the curtains.” And there are certain turns of phrase here and there that crop up again in the Christmas novella, too, especially in the first few paragraphs of Scrooge’s tale. A fellow in debtor’s prison asks Mr. Pickwick, “Why didn’t you say at first that you was willing to come down handsome?” I suppose the last phrase (meaning to be generous, especially in buying a round of drinks) was common in Dickens’s time, but it jumped out at me as I remembered that snow and sleet “often ‘came down’ handsomely, and Scrooge never did.” The teller of one of the stories-within-the-story in Pickwick says early on, “There is nothing at all extraordinary in this story, unless you distinctly understand at the beginning, that he [the story’s central character] was not by any means of a marvelous or romantic turn.” No person having read A Christmas Carol a dozen times (in other words, a mere beginner) can read those words and not think of these: “There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

Hmm. That paragraph got a little bloated. I’d better finish quickly. And I will do so by offering a theory. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol after his first relative failure, Martin Chuzzlewit. He was in a funk and needed a new project, something wonderful and irresistible, to get both his readers and his mojo back. I believe he went back to Pickwick to think about the work that made him so popular to begin with (if offices had had water coolers in 1837, everyone would have stood around them talking about the adventures of Mr. Pickwick), realized that the story of Gabriel Grub would really shine after a good makeover, and in his rereading of that first novel caught a few choice constructions that could bear reusing. Remember, those phrases are all on the first page of A Christmas Carol, as if he were then still working to infuse inspiration into the new work. And now I have to wrap it all up or else I’ll find myself in a fourth paragraph. So I’ll bid adieu today with a recommendation of the movie The Man Who Invented Christmas. Everything in this dramatization of Dickens’s composing A Christmas Carol (other than the obviously fantastical scenes) is historically accurate. Except for the idea that he didn’t know, as he was writing, how Scrooge’s story would end. That bit of poetic license works fine in the movie, but we know that the real Dickens knew exactly where Scrooge was going from the very beginning: Gabriel Grub, after all, ended up a renewed man.

Tragic Relief

The first time I read The Pickwick Papers, I was surprised by all the inserted short stories. They annoyed me, too; I wanted to know more about the antics of the Pickwick Club, but every few chapters, some character would offer to tell a legend, and I kept having to work my way through dreary stories about ghosts and criminals. I’m pretty sure the copy I read included an introduction that told me the stories were dreary and annoying, and I let myself be impressionable. The second time I read the book, the tangential stories weren’t surprising anymore, but I think they still annoyed me.

But I just finished reading Pickwick for the third time, and I’m happy to say not only that I enjoyed the embedded stories – ghosts and criminals are good subjects for short stories, after all! – but that I found them almost necessary. I think that introduction that I read forty years ago said the book wasn’t really a novel but rather a hodgepodge or scrapbook of disconnected stories and comic vignettes. In other words, that Pickwick wasn’t cohesive or unified. Well, it certainly is a novel, with or without the stories, but now that I see their purpose, they seem part of a cohesive structure, as well.

We all know about comic relief. The clowns in Shakespeare’s tragedies provide familiar examples. Well, I think these stories of murderers and hopeless characters provide tragic relief to the ridiculous adventures of Pickwick and his companions. The Food Network’s Duff Goldman is always telling contestants on baking championships to use acid or even umami in desserts to balance the sweetness. Maybe 700 pages of unrelieved comedy would get cloying for the reader. Or maybe even a hundred pages of it did for the author. Maybe Dickens tasted his Pickwickian batter and decided his cake needed some acid to balance the sugar, whipped egg whites, and sprinkles that the humor of Pickwick served up.

Besides contributing to an alternating structure of dark and light, several of the stories have themes that work their way into the outer plot, too. Someone tells a Christmas ghost story, for instance, and then Mr. Pickwick and his friends attend a Christmas dinner. Another inserted story tells the tragic tale of a man who goes to debtor’s prison, sees the family he can’t provide for perish one by one, and then is released and wreaks awful vengeance on the creditor who had shown him no mercy. Several chapters later, Mr. Pickwick himself goes to debtor’s prison. Both presentations show the horrors of debtor’s prison and helped abolish the institution in Britain. But the episode of Mr. Pickwick’s sojourn behind the hopeless walls includes some silliness from himself, Sam Weller, Mrs. Bardell, and others, so the story within the story and its unrelentingly lurid tale of despair and revenge provides a necessary part of the message by working on different emotions.

I wish I hadn’t read that introduction all those years ago. But I’m glad I read The Pickwick Papers for a third time and finally got the bitter taste out of my dessert experience.