Bamboo

by William Boyd

  Not that this unduly matters, I repeat. The poet and critic Craig Raine suggests, quite rightly I believe, that “finally, we read Dickens for his brilliant detail.” Detail like this, for example: “his fingers, clogged with brilliant rings, were as unwieldy as summer flies but newly rescued from a honey pot.” This is masterfully done, not simply in terms of the visual analogue provided—one knows exactly the degree of vulgar flashiness we are dealing with—but also for its undertones, of “flies round a honey pot,” of the element of corruption—there is something candidly disgusting about this image. The fact that the simile is applied to Tigg Montague in his newfound glory makes it all the more apt. And the fact too that this is but one image in a marvellously burnished paragraph devoted to a description of Montague Tigg turned Tigg Montague is further evidence of Dickens’s prodigality.

  A little later, in the extraordinary pages that make up our introduction to the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, we find this: “Look at the green ledgers with red backs, like strong cricket-balls beaten flat …” The strength and sheer originality of this simile almost draw you up short. A cricket-ball beaten flat? Something I doubt anyone has ever seen, but in the forcing jar of Dickens’s imagination it not only is readily visualized but it also provides a vision of these mighty ledgers that is perfectly precise.

  These “brilliant details,” the quality of writing, the very palpability of Dickens’s descriptive prose, are the nuggets we quarry from the great bulk of the novels and Martin Chuzzlewit is richly provisioned with them. But there are moments when Dickens, in full flow, is able to extend this feeling of physicality through entire paragraphs. Here, for example, is part of a description of Mrs Todgers’s boarding house:

  In particular, there was a sensation of cabbage; as if all the greens that had ever been boiled there, were evergreens, and flourished in immortal strength. The parlour was wainscoted, and communicated to strangers a magnetic and instinctive consciousness of rats and mice. The staircase was very gloomy and very broad, with balustrades so thick and heavy that they would have served for a bridge. In a sombre corner of the first landing, stood a gruff old giant of a clock, with a preposterous coronet of three brass balls on his head; whom few had ever seen—none ever looked in the face—and who seemed to continue his heavy tick for no other reason than to warn heedless people from running into him accidentally. It had not been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s, within the memory of man. It was very black, begrimed, and mouldy. And, at the top of the staircase, was an old, disjointed, rickety, ill-favoured skylight, patched and mended in all kinds of ways, which looked distrustfully down at everything that passed below, and covered Todgers’s up as if it were a sort of human cucumber-frame, and only people of a peculiar growth were reared there.

  All the familiar Dickensian tropes are pressed into service here. Comic exaggeration, the swaggering simile (“balustrades …[that] would have served for a bridge”), personification, the conversational aside (“It had not been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s”), the piling on of adjectives and then, finally, the startling transmogrifying image—of Todgers’s as a human cucumber-frame—that leaps from the page and delivers us Todgers’s in a manner so fresh, so audacious, that any sense that this was merely another run-of-the-mill tumbledown dwelling, of the sort that has been described in literature countless times before, is entirely banished from our minds.

  There are also other, more covert, talents at work in passages like this: to do with punctuation and rhythm and sentence cadence. This is hard to analyse, and it may even be an instinctive gift, but Dickens, it seems to me, has a superb sense of timing, of when to throw in a short sentence—“It was very black, begrimed, and mouldy”—amongst longer ones; of when to allow the parenthetical clauses to build and mount; of when to introduce repetition (“The staircase was very gloomy and very broad”); and so on. This ability to orchestrate the pace of these bravura passages in no small manner contributes to their success. The way a paragraph like this is structured acts as a kind of invisible matrix upon which the ideas and images may confidently rest; and Dickens shows himself as deftly accomplished with these more recherché technical gifts, as with the principal ones of story, character and language, allowing them discreetly to distribute and enhance the various forces of the words he employs. One may admire the splendid ambition of the architect but one should never forget the less ostentatious labours of the engineer. Dickens, as we have seen, was a formidable exponent of both professions.

  There are many passages of similar brilliance in Martin Chuzzlewit, as there are in all of Dickens’s novels, but Chuzzlewit, to my mind, is amongst the most amply provided. Furthermore, it is not simply a matter of sparkling and pyrotechnical description. Chuzzlewit, it is worth reiterating, is Dickens’s funniest novel, and it is the ever present, and effervescent, sense of comedy, alongside the virtuoso wordplay and image-mongering, that makes paragraphs like the one quoted above so memorably effective.

  If, in some notional parlour game, I were asked to select the most sustained passage of comic writing in English literature, to choose a tour de force that one could confidently present as an exemplar of the comic form, then I think I would offer up as my choice the penultimate chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, where Salter, the hapless news editor, follows William Boot to Boot Magna, the family home, and tries to persuade him to rejoin the staff of the Daily Beast. Every time I read these pages I laugh again and exult at Waugh’s impeccable comic sense. Comparisons are invidious, and the comic styles are so different in any case, but I now believe that the pre-eminence of the penultimate chapter of Scoop is seriously challenged, if not overthrown, by chapters eight and nine of Martin Chuzzlewit, pages which deal with the Pecksniff family’s trip to London, their arrival at Todgers’s, their visit to Miss Pinch and concluding with the Sunday dinner given in the Pecksniffs’ honour by the gentlemen lodgers. Waugh’s style is all to do with restraint, the humour is implicit, everything is merely presented—shown—and it is the reader who, automatically, fleshes out the context and significance, and supplies the humour and absurdity. Waugh sets the charges, if you like, and the reader detonates them. In Dickens the reverse is true—Dickens tells as well as shows—and it is a remarkable tribute to the potent verve and dynamism of his style (and perhaps to the fact that, at root, senses of humour barely change) that, a century and a half on, these forty pages or so of Martin Chuzzlewit provide such fecund and inventive writing as well as such rich and apparently timeless comedy. They are, in my opinion, unmatched in all his other novels.

  But Dickens, as has been frequently observed, can all too easily make his critics appear clever. This may be a weakness apparent in a certain type of talent or genius—not so long ago Mozart was mocked for his “horrible little tunes”—a type that is generous and lavish, open and unguarded, the very opposite of the costive or over-intellectual artist. Dickens takes great risks (he was, it should always be remembered, writing for a huge popular audience) and he leaves hostages to fortune in every chapter. It is not difficult to deplore a ghastly passage like this, apostrophizing on the attraction between John Westlock and Ruth Pinch:

  Merrily the tiny fountain played, and merrily the dimples sparkled on its sunny face. John Westlock hurried after her. Softly the whispering water broke and fell; and roguishly the dimples twinkled as he stole upon her footsteps.

  Oh, foolish, panting timid little heart, why did she feign to be unconscious of his coming! Why wish herself so far away, yet be so flutteringly happy there!

  Can this be the same man who can write, with the laconic quietism of a Kurt Vonnegut, of a child’s death: “Smart citizens grow rich, and friendless victims smart and die, and are forgotten. That is all”? The answer is “yes” and there is a complexity of reasons required to explain why this can be. Briefly, it is a combination, I would suggest, of autre temps, autres moeurs, and various impulses existing in the Dickens psyche. And there is no doubt that raw sentime
nt, in serious literature, is today almost wholly discredited and démodé to such an extent that we are embarrassed when we come across it in an artist we admire and revere. It is instructive to compare the contemporary responses to another comic genius—Charlie Chaplin (with whom, in the life and the work, there are many parallels)—who, forty years after Dickens’s death, also won enormous popular acclaim with a similar blend of comedy and unadulterated sentiment. In Chaplin’s case modern audiences feel happier analysing the complex architectonics of a pratfall or elaborate gag than responding to the two-fisted hauling on their heartstrings that many a Chaplin film indulges in. But Dickens is the greater artist (and, of course, his art form infinitely more rich and complex) and his genius, unlike Chaplin’s, more easily survives the excesses of an overloaded heart.

  There are two broad reasons for this: one to do with content and one to do with form. Dickens proclaimed that Martin Chuzzlewit was to do with “Self.” But, as with many of the ostensible subjects of his great novels, this formulation is just another way of saying that it is to do with “Money.” Money and the getting of it are the key factors underpinning the narrative and moral strands of Martin Chuzzlewit. Martin wants money, as do Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit and Montague Tigg. Chuzzlewit, like many a Victorian novel, has as its starting point a potential inheritance, and the material changes that inheritance will bestow: who will get what and how will their lives alter thereby? It was a theme, to put it bluntly, very close to Dickens’s heart. But against this need, against this motive force, Dickens sets characters for whom these pecuniary desires hold no attraction. Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley and Ruth Pinch, for example, lead lives in which the getting of money has no part to play beyond essential pragmatic concerns. (Symbolically, Tom sends back Mrs Lupin’s fiver without breaking it.) Their lives are driven instead by principles of simple human decency, and the moral tensions of the novel revolve around these counterposing tendencies. Money versus decency, and the eventual triumph of decency, is a sloganizing redaction of what Martin Chuzzlewit is “about.” It is not resolved in a satisfactory way because the comic form, the serious comic form, fights against this type of cosy sententiousness. This sort of conclusion is one where art is designed to console, but if it is to console in this way then it has to be handled, and the reader manipulated, with cool and masterly skill. A glance at the final paragraphs of Martin Chuzzlewit will illustrate just to what extent Dickens has lost this fingerparing, objective poise.

  But it does not matter: the cute verities that Dickens endorses in the novel’s conclusion do not undermine its greatness (and in fact I defy anyone not to be delighted that young Bailey turns out to be alive after all. There is a small place for sentiment, one must grudgingly concede, however hardnosed we like our comedy to be in this day and age) because the triumph of decency, if we may so term it, is not why one values the novel. Because, to contemporary readers, its value must be to do with, in the end, questions of contemporary response. It is right that we should not bend Dickens’s work into some grotesque modern distortion—“The Existential Dickens,” or “Dickens as Marxist” or some such parody. He was an early Victorian, inescapably, with all the emotional and intellectual baggage that is implied in that classification. But at the same time it is vital for each new generation of readers to reassess and re-evaluate the great works of the past, and if we are to read Martin Chuzzlewit today, and derive pleasure from it—and not just as an anthropological curiosity—we must ask ourselves what there is in the novel that defies history, as it were, that makes it always valid.

  My own response to this question would be that it lies in the comedy. The unequivocal fun and exuberance are crucial, as I have suggested, but there is a note in Chuzzlewit that is new in Dickens and marks Chuzzlewit as a precursor of the darker, later novels. The high-spirited comedy is mixed here and there with a brand of humour that one might designate “brutal” or “cruel”; moments where Dickens, like all great comic novelists, recognizes the indifference of the universe to mankind’s fate, recognizes that, to quote Evelyn Waugh, “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” One thinks in this context of the tenacious, indestructible fraudulence of Pecksniff, of Merry and Cherry and their respective fates, of Jonas Chuzzlewit’s bleak lechery and near-demonic possession, of the ruthless mockery of Chuffey and Moddle, of Mrs Gamp and her gallows humour, of Montague Tigg and his ebullient conning of trusting investors. Dickens’s comic vision of the world, despite his neat pairing off of happy young lovers, despite, one might say, his best intentions, is too sagacious, too clear-eyed and realistic, to pretend that all’s well that ends well. There is a moment, early in the novel, where Dickens is guying the rebarbative smugness of the Pecksniff family. “What words can paint the Pecksniffs in that trying hour? Oh, none: for words have naughty company among them, and the Pecksniffs were all goodness” (my italics). At the end of the novel “all goodness” seems to have triumphed but the jollity and benignity appear forced and self-deceiving. Tom Pinch may be bedecked with flowers and mellow harmonies may enfold him but we know what the world is really like because Dickens has just shown us, with fierce accuracy and intoxicating humour. It is the naughty company of words that we celebrate and recall: this is what gives Martin Chuzzlewit its edge, its wild glee, its cautious disquiet, and its greatness.

  1994

  Gustave Flaubert

  (Review of Madame Bovary)

  “Madame Bovary c’est moi,” Flaubert famously observed, but was he talking about the book as a whole or its heroine? Titles are important clues as to how a book should be read: Madame Raquin, Miss Emma Woodhouse, or even Emma Bovary carry a different freight than the originals do. And if titles are significant then subtitles represent another covert shove in the right direction. Madame Bovary was originally subtitled Moeurs de Campagne. “Moeurs”—in my Petit Robert — is defined thus: “habitudes (d’une société, d’un individu) relatives á la pratique du bien ou du mal”—a far more nuanced term than the usual English translation of “customs.” “Customs of the countryside” will not do.

  Both the title “Madame” and the subtitle speak of decorum, or, more precisely, bourgeois decorum. Madame Bovary is a book about the “bourgeois” of provincial France and their “habitudes relatives á la pratique du bien ou du mal.” And the mal in question here is the adultery of Emma Bovary, the causes and the consequences thereof. Emma Bovary dreams of a different life and her dreams are driven by romantic literature, good and bad. Every choice she makes in her life is vitiated by this corrupting influence: she sees the world through a glass, rosily. Her marriage to the widower Charles Bovary, country doctor, her affairs with Rodolphe, the libertine, and Léon, the clerk, are a series of straw-clutching efforts to escape.

  Flaubert, a bourgeois who lived in the provinces, loathed the bourgeois and the book is a sustained dissection and condemnation of this sensibility and class. When he quoted Voltaire’s dictum that “the history of the human mind is the history of stupidity,” he meant it from the bottom of his heart.

  Everybody in the novel is stupid: Charles Bovary is stupid for loving Emma; Homais, the insufferable chemist, is a smug monster of stupid homilies. Emma’s two lovers are stupid and selfish in equal measure. Nothing escapes Flaubert’s gimlet eye and the precision of his detailing. And God is in the details of this novel, so lovingly reproduced in a perfectly fashioned prose that we forget we are dealing with a dull tale of provincial adultery. If Flaubert’s pen is dipped in bile it is so that he may write all the more clearly—phrases even italicized so they will not escape notice, relish and censure. The effort and art in this procedure were both phenomenal and revolutionary. One detail will have to stand for the mass. Emma’s daughter Berthe is brought into a room to say goodbye: “… la servante amena Berthe, qui secoua au bout d’une ficelle un moulin á vent la tête en bas.” Most novelists might have mentioned a toy, a few might have chosen a wi
ndmill, but only Flaubert would have had it dangling upside down on a string.

  Emma, ruined, poisons herself; Charles dies—of grief—and the impossible Homais triumphs and is awarded the Légion d’Honneur. Flaubert is unremittingly and uncompromisingly bleak in his final vision—no consolation is offered. “I remain glued to the earth,” he wrote to George Sand, “… everything disturbs me, everything lacerates and ravages me, though I make every effort to soar.” It is his rage against the bourgeois spirit that informs his novel and his furiously precise prose but that alone cannot explain the book’s endurance as a classic. We are all, in our own way, bourgeois—like Emma Bovary—and even Flaubert admits he made every effort to soar. For to think that life might be better is no shame—it is, indeed, to be human. In the end, Madame Bovary, c’est nous.

  1999

  Cyril Connolly

  In early 1945 Evelyn Waugh was languishing in Yugoslavia, bored and dispirited, waiting for the war to end. He had recently completed Brideshead Revisited, the most important novel of his career, when Nancy Mitford sent him a copy of The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly. Waugh read and reread Connolly’s book and scribbled his reactions on the margins. The marginalia are extensive, full of insight and full of self-delusion. Waugh used the opportunity both to excoriate and analyse his old acquaintance (“friend” is too loaded a word for their complex relationship) and the comments he made on the book are fascinating, not just for what they say about Connolly but also for the light they throw on Waugh himself.