Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  “What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him!”

  Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.

  It may be that the White Whale is not so much Job’s Leviathan, or Yahweh’s, as it is the Gnostic Demiurge incarnate. From Moby-Dick’s perspective, the Pequod is Satan, source of all his persecutions. I wish William Blake had lived to read Moby-Dick. He would have told us even more forcefully that this history has been adopted by both parties:

  From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooners aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.

  “The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat; “its wood could only be American!”

  Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.

  “I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”

  The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

  The Pequod goes down but to what purposeless purpose?

  But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

  Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

  Tashtego takes the hawk as an emblem of the freedom of the air down into the great shroud of the sea. I am a little unnerved by the manifestation of Milton’s Satan, yet I think we must read hell and heaven here from a Blakean and Shelleyan perspective. The Gnostic Melville always strikes through the mask. We return to Noah’s flood but with an ark consisting only of Queequeg’s coffin, with an isolated Ishmael surviving to tell his story. What remains is the superb epilogue:

  EPILOGUE

  “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

  Job.

  The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck.

  It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its greatest buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

  FINIS

  The epic’s final epigraph is the culmination of Job 1:19, where four individuals express the same dreadful report, the destruction of Job’s children, servants, flocks. I once wondered whether Ishmael now would be Rachel’s son Joseph the Redeemer or her younger son, Benjamin, whom the grieving Jacob kept always by his side. Insofar as Ishmael is a persistent interpreter, he might seem to be Joseph, skilled in the art of clarifying dreams. Yet Ishmael, though very likable, is unreliable, and so has not the eminence of a Joseph. He is a Benjamin, another lost child.

  CHAPTER 15

  Bleak House (1853)

  CHARLES DICKENS

  THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY AGO, my favorite Dickens was The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), his first novel. I was thirteen and enchanted by it. Five years after, I became obsessed with Bleak House, a choice that lasted until I had read all of Dickens and was drawn in by the dank and frightening Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, left a bit more than half done when he died on June 9, 1870, is even darker, but we will never know how it was to end. Dickens died at fifty-eight, worn out by his incessant and exhausting public reading of his works to large and enthusiastic audiences. Had he not become one of the greatest novelists, he could have had a remarkable career on the stage. Five years before the stroke that killed him, he and his young actress protégée Ellen Ternan had been in a train wreck that killed ten passengers and injured many, including Dickens, who did
his heroic best to attend to the other victims. He had separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858, after twenty-two years of a rather difficult marriage in which she had endured ten pregnancies.

  The liveliest biography of Dickens is by Peter Ackroyd (1991). I have learned a great deal from a study by Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (1971). Anyone who reads Dickens frequently and deeply will be impressed by the personal quality of his attachment to the figure of Jesus. For Dickens, Christianity was Jesus and consisted in compassion, sincerity, charity on an individual basis. Dickens felt contempt for all who professed to be Christian but loathed, exploited, or ignored the sufferings of the poor, the homeless, child laborers, outcast women, all the injured and insulted of London and the world.

  The Dickens of Our Mutual Friend (1865) has affinities with the Victor Hugo of Les Misérables (1862). Both titans defend the wretched of the earth, and both descend into the underbelly of their cities and rivers. Death and resurrection alike come out of the muck, dust piles, and human waste of the Thames and the Seine. And money in all its corruption is identified by both with feces. Hugo is more optimistic ultimately than Dickens, because Victor Hugo confused himself with God. Dickens, to his sorrow, knew better.

  Bleak House, which appeared as installments from 1852 to 1853, was judged by the irascible yet brilliant curmudgeon G. K. Chesterton to be Dickens’s best novel, though not necessarily his best book. As a formal judgment, this seems right to me. With enormous skill Dickens juggles a remarkably diverse cast of characters and resolves an intricate plot by making precisely appropriate employment of them all.

  The most important is Esther Summerson, who, if I remember properly, is the only woman to narrate a substantial part of a Dickens novel. When I was very young, I so loved Esther that I wept when she wept. I have ceased from that but am very moved by her to this day. Raised by a Miss Barbary (her undisclosed aunt), poor Esther was made to feel by that dreadful lady that she was somehow guilty for her birth as the bastard of supposedly unknown parents. In consequence, the sweet-natured Esther has no expectations of joy, lacks all self-esteem, and is heartbreakingly cheered by any good fortune or incident. I sometimes feel Dickens rather piles it on when Esther catches smallpox from a stricken child she is nursing, and loses much of her beauty.

  Later in the novel we learn that Lady Honoria Dedlock was Esther’s mother and that one Nemo (“nobody” in Latin) was her father in a love affair that could not endure. Nemo was actually Captain James Hawdon, once an army officer and the commander of the admirable trooper Mr. George. Hawdon has been reduced to a scrivener copying law documents for the good-natured Mr. Snagsby, who befriends the street urchin Jo, a pathetic sweeper, as does Nemo until he dies of an opium overdose. Inspector Bucket, who otherwise is very likable indeed, in his one bad act accepts payment from the malign lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn to harry Jo so as to force him out of London. Tulkinghorn is Sir Leicester Dedlock’s attorney and fears needlessly that Nemo might have told Jo the secret of Esther’s birth. There are other savage lawyers in Dickens, but I particularly loathe Tulkinghorn and am delighted when he is murdered by Hortense, the French maid to Lady Dedlock, who vies with Madame Thérèse Defarge of The Tale of Two Cities as one of Dickens’s sexiest avengers.

  Esther’s guardian is John Jarndyce, a generous and amiable man who is an unwilling principal in the endless Chancery lawsuit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. He is benignly in love with Esther and in a fatherly way wishes to marry her but readily gives her up when she falls in love with Allan Woodcourt, a young surgeon in every way estimable. After her customary struggle with her sense of personal unworthiness, Esther accepts Woodcourt.

  Dickens ingeniously fashions Bleak House by intermingling two narratives, Esther’s and a voice describing things as they occur. That narrator occupies thirty-four chapters, whereas Esther has thirty-three, but the impression I receive is that the novel is essentially Esther’s story. Whose else could it be? There are the vivid characters who carry much of the life of Bleak House: Mr. George the trooper, Harold Skimpole the sponger (Leigh Hunt), Lawrence Boythorn (Walter Savage Landor), and Honoria, Lady Dedlock, Esther’s mother. Leigh Hunt, a minor poet and radical journalist, is remembered now as the close friend of both Keats and Shelley, while Landor, a very good poet and the author also of the engaging Imaginary Conversations (1824–29), was famously irascible, endlessly involved in lawsuits, and quarreling with almost everyone. Dickens skewers Skimpole-Hunt and enjoys Boythorn-Landor as much as we do. Mr. George is a pillar of honor, but the unfortunate Honoria dies a suicidal death, unaware that her bereaved husband forgives her everything.

  Yet it remains Esther’s book. Flaubert said that he was Madame Bovary. Esther Summerson is neither David Copperfield nor Pip. They are Dickens. Still, I wonder if she also is not the abandoned child in Dickens himself, cast off by his parents into a blacking factory when his father went to prison for debt. Charles Dickens all his life was haunted by that humiliation at the age of just twelve. I find it astonishing that he was kept at the factory by his callous mother. Long after his release from that bondage, he continued to resent his mother. Presumably, his conviction that women should stay home as wives and mothers emerged from this experience.

  I love Dickens most fiercely when he is totally outrageous, which is why I now set Our Mutual Friend over even Bleak House. My favorite character in Bleak House could also adorn Our Mutual Friend. This is Krook, who lives entirely on gin and runs a shop overflowing with papers, rags, and bottles. The dwellers in his house include Nemo, who dies there, and the mad Miss Flite, an aged crone who is another victim of Chancery and who keeps a horde of little birds, which she says will be released only at the Last Judgment. Krook ignites in spontaneous combustion, a splendid event in whose probability Dickens actually believed.

  Richard Carstone, the ultimate victim of Chancery, has secretly married Ada Clare, another ward of Chancery. When the case is resolved and there is no money left, as everything has gone to the lawyers, Carstone collapses and dies rather virtuously, forgiving himself everything and urging his wife to do the same:

  ‘I have done you many wrongs, my own. I have fallen like a poor stray shadow on your way, I have married you to poverty and trouble, I have scattered your means to the winds. You will forgive me all this, my Ada, before I begin the world?’

  A smile irradiated his face, as she bent to kiss him. He slowly laid his face down upon her bosom, drew his arms closer round her neck, and with one parting sob began the world. Not this world, O not this! The world that sets this right.

  When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me she had given her birds their liberty.

  This ending of Bleak House, whatever one thinks of it, is as close to an apocalypse as Dickens gets until he writes Our Mutual Friend and the final fragment, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I think that the last sentence partly redeems the conclusion.

  CHAPTER 16

  Our Mutual Friend (1865)

  CHARLES DICKENS

  THE BEST REMARKS I have seen on Our Mutual Friend are made by Adrian Poole in his introduction to the Penguin Classics volume (1997):

  Our Mutual Friend boasts less confidence than earlier works in its own last judgements. It finds a truer sense of its deepest attention in the moments of suspense. As if the writer and his readers were poised, like a doctor and his attendants, over the body of a world, the soul of which seems to hover and flicker, between renewal and extinction. The doctor who seeks to revive the dank corpse is only one of the writer’s possible guises. There is another doctor who gently eases the passage of a dying child out of this world. And there is plenty of other work to be done over corpses, for coroners and pathologists, for ministers of religion and articulators of bones.

  In Poole’s view, the title could be read: Death Is Our Mutual Friend. A palpable hit. And yet, to quote Robert Browning, “A common greyness silvers eve
rything.” Poole once amiably disputed my notion that, except for Macbeth and his Lady, Shakespeare subdued the tragedy’s characters to a common grayness. With appropriate amiability, I might venture that death and resurrection fuse in Our Mutual Friend in a cosmos so fetid and so fecund that all demarcations are rendered ghostlier even as the sounds of Dickens’s diction achieve a new keenness.

  Our Mutual Friend is a vast eight-hundred-page prose poem unlike anything else that I have ever read. I can think only of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables as a rough analogue. In his postscript, Dickens concluded with a terrible memory of the railway accident of June 9, 1865, in which he was injured but heroically labored to help and comfort the maimed and the dying. He survived to finish Our Mutual Friend and ended the postscript with a poignant sentence:

  I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book:—The END.

  September 2nd, 1865.

  Five years to the day after the train wreck, Charles Dickens died, on June 9, 1870, at the age of fifty-eight. There is a gap between Great Expectations (1860–61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). It was unlike Dickens to lie fallow for almost three years. Trauma may be a part of the explanation. The separation from his wife, Catherine, in 1858 took place a year after he fell in love with the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. Peter Ackroyd persuasively argues that the relationship with Ternan, which lasted the rest of Dickens’s life, was never sexually consummated. Six years after the novelist’s death, she married, then had two children, and died at seventy-five in 1914. Most biographers disagree with Ackroyd’s judgment. It seems sound to me, because Dickens at forty-five started to yield again to his childhood traumas and found in Ellen Ternan an idealized object.