English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Dr Pinion sounds a bit uncomfortable with the modern view that Hardy is a greater poet than novelist. He believes that ‘the novel can stir the reader more often and with a cumulative strength quite beyond the range of a short poem’. Well, yes and no. But the real trouble is that Dr Pinion, like many Wessex addicts, does not seem to care that much for the poems at all. He finds Hardy ‘crotchety in his arbitrary use of his words, sometimes to the detriment of his poetry’. True, he does quote Hardy’s famous letter to an unnamed young poet: ‘dissonances and other irregularities can be produced advisedly as art, and worked as to give more charm than strict conformities, to the mind and ear of those trained and steeped in poetry’.

  But I do not think he gives anywhere near full weight to Hardy’s unrelenting efforts to revive the language of verse by trying every conceivable kind of break, skip, dip, slur, dwelling, swelling, new-minting, old-exhuming, dodge, fancy, quirk, irony, meiosis, graveyard-gaiety, summer-gloom, daydream and nightmare that any single human being could ever have thought of. The spectacular reflowering of his poetry after Emma’s death is a unique event in twentieth-century English literature. By comparison, many modern poets who are revered for their innovatory energy can sound a little flat. When all is said and done, is not Eliot sometimes rather prosy, and is not Auden inclined to be a bit glib? Philip Larkin said that he did not ‘wish Hardy’s Collected Poems a single page shorter’. Larkin was not given to gushing.

  CHARLES DICKENS: KINDLY LEAVE THE STAGE

  On a hot Wednesday afternoon in August, walking up Piccadilly on my way back from the London Library with a carrier bag full of Dickensiana, I was musing in a drowsy way (like so many of the books in my bag) on Dickens and realism – all those starvelings and cripples and dwarfs, and that business of Krook and the spontaneous combustion, a bit over the top surely. I suddenly became aware that I was walking behind a man in beige shorts and sandals with a hunchbacked dwarf riding piggyback on his shoulders.

  Outside Fortnum & Mason, the man gently unclasped the dwarf’s hands from round his neck and let him slide to the ground. They stood side by side looking at the rich array of potted meats and crystallized fruit and picnic hampers in the window. The dwarf was unshaven and wearing jeans and a green check shirt. He must have been about thirty. The man was the image of Charles Dickens in his middle years, but about two stone fatter (Dickens was always a sparing eater, although he liked to watch others tuck in): the same Louis Napoleon beard and moustache, the same frizzy wedges of hair, the same bright commanding eye – what Henry James called Dickens’s ‘merciless military eye’.

  After they had gazed their fill, he swung the dwarf up on his shoulders again and strode off in the direction of the Ritz. Coming the other way, Lord Crickhowell, the chairman of the National Rivers Authority, his mind until that moment doubtless running on parched reservoirs and hosepipe bans, could not stop his eyes popping out of his head. We had been transported into one of those fanciful late-Victorian magazine illustrations in which Dickens is depicted surrounded by his characters with Smike and Squeers, Pickwick and Micawber buzzing around his head or perched on his armchair.

  Dickens himself was always quick to notice when life was limping along to catch up with him. When both the landlord of his lodgings in Brighton and the landlord’s daughter were taken away raving to the local asylum, Dickens commented ‘quite worthy of me and quite in keeping with my usual proceedings’. He believed that extraordinary things would keep on happening to him, and that he possessed an unrivalled knack for making use of them. At the age of twenty, when applying for a job as a comic impersonator to the stage manager at Covent Garden (at various times, he toyed with the idea of becoming an actor or a barrister or of emigrating to the West Indies), he was already claiming that, ‘I had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others.’

  In his otherwise damning notice of Our Mutual Friend, Henry James approves of the way that ‘Dickens reconciles us to what is odd’, but this is surely an understatement. Dickens pursues oddity, embraces it, caresses, melodramatizes oddity, transfigures it. Like nobody else since Shakespeare, he somehow goes beyond engaging our sympathies for his twitching, misshapen, gabbling, dropsical or skeletal creatures to give us the irresistible sense of their being made of the same stuff as the rest of us.

  I doubt whether any other biographer of Dickens can have shown as exhaustively as Ackroyd does in this massive four-pounder, nigh-on-1200-pager how unrelentingly Dickens refused to disengage from this pursuit of oddity. His love of melodrama, his dislike of highbrow company, his preference for the louche, japing Punch crowd – ‘he is in a bad set,’ Ruskin said, ‘yet he is I believe a good man’ – on closer inspection look less like symptoms of laziness or intellectual inferiority than a wilful, almost austere determination to stay in touch not merely with his readers but with the gnarled roots of his art.

  Ackroyd never lets us forget that Dickens was always in training. He stretched himself physically to the limit, with 20-mile hikes and gruelling tours, first, of trashy melodramas which he insisted on writing, directing and starring in, then later, of the notorious readings of his own works, which did help to kill him, although Ackroyd tries to minimize the damage. In between, he darted about London, popping into rag-and-bone shops, pubs, police courts, cheap lodging houses, schools (he hurtled up to Yorkshire for a couple of days to ‘do the research’ for Dotheboys Hall), rookeries and morgues.

  He loved a good morgue, especially the Paris Morgue with ‘the ghastly beds, and the swollen saturated clothes hanging up, and the water dripping, dripping all day long, upon that swollen saturated something in the corner, like a heap of crushed overripe figs’.

  To Trollope and the more intellectual writers of the later Victorian period, Dickens was ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’. But in the practice of his craft, he was a hard, not to say hard-boiled sort of character. When Mrs Keeley, playing Smike in a dramatization of Nickleby, said a line about ‘the pretty, harmless robins,’ Dickens told the prompter ‘Damn the robins. Cut them out.’ And he worked up to his grand deathbed scenes with a certain anticipatory relish. ‘Paul I shall slaughter at the end of number five,’ he wrote to his dogged friend and biographer, John Forster, while he was working on the early numbers of Dombey and Son.

  Nor was he unconscious of the springs of his own creativity.

  He says of his childhood ordeals – working in the blacking factory, visiting his improvident father who had been imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea – that ‘all these things have worked together to make me what I am’. The quasi-autobiographical passages in Copperfield reinforce our sense that he understood perfectly well how he had come to be as he was.

  He knew more or less where his appalling, inexpiable restlessness came from: ‘I seem to be always looking at such times for something I have not found in life’ – or, as he puts it in the novel, ‘I felt a vague unhappy loss or want of something overshadowing me like a cloud.’ He told Forster that it was better to go on and fret than to stop and fret, and that, as to repose, for some men there was no such thing in this life.

  But here we knock up against the first problem confronting Dickens biographers (a large and ever-growing band). It is impossible to write a dull life of that unstoppable, unsquashable genius, but it is also hard to improve on the 7000-word autobiographical fragment that Dickens himself wrote for Forster and which Forster included more or less verbatim in the first of his three volumes.

  The fragment breaks off at the moment Dickens leaves Warren’s Blacking Factory at the age of fourteen:

  From that hour until this at which I write (a quarter of a century later), no word of that part of my childhood which I have now gladly brought to a close has passed my lips to any human being. I have no idea how long it lasted; whether for a year, or much more, or less. From that hour until this, my father and my mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion, howeve
r far off and remote, from either of them. I have never, until now I impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God.

  Until old Hungerford-market was pulled down, until old Hungerford-stairs were destroyed, and the very nature of the ground changed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began. I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it. For many years, when I came near to Robert Warren’s in the Strand, I crossed over to the opposite side of the way, to avoid a certain smell of the cement they put upon the blacking-corks, which reminded me of what I once was. It was a very long time before I liked to go up Chandos Street. My old way home by the borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak.

  Ackroyd does describe in its proper place – twenty-five years later – the incident which triggered this extraordinary confession: Forster had told Dickens that his friend Charles Dilke had once visited the blacking factory with Dickens’s father and had given Dickens half-a-crown and had received in return a very low bow. Earlier lives, by Fred Kaplan (1988), for example, throw away this crucial unlocking of memory by tossing it into the narrative of Dickens’s time at the blacking factory. How much more dramatic to spring it upon the apparently invulnerable world-famous novelist. Ackroyd, as a novelist himself, often shows a more telling sense of detail than his predecessors. He tells us of the letter Dickens wrote to Miss Burdett-Coutts about her home for fallen women, on returning from his sister Fanny’s funeral: ‘His hand was unsteady and the letter is filled with blobs.’ Kaplan tells us only that ‘he could not keep the pen steady’. Neither of the two standard modern biographies – by Edgar Johnson and Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie – mentions the detail at all. More telling still would have been to point out that it is Dickens himself who says: ‘I am afraid I write illegibly – but I have been at my Sister’s funeral today, and my hand is not as steady as usual.’

  Here and there, alas, Ackroyd shows distressing early signs of Holroyd’s Syndrome (in its later stages, the disease proves fatal to the work thus afflicted). The underlying cause of this complaint is an overvaluation of the biographer’s trade, and its symptoms are a recurring tendency to go on about his problems and to lucubrate repetitiously and at inordinate length on the psychological complexities of the relationship between the biographer and his subject. Ackroyd says of Dombey and Son that Dickens ‘is almost too much with us; he seems to be doing all the work, determining the reader’s reaction to events, suggesting the nature of the characters.’ The same could sometimes be said of Mr Ackroyd.

  Traditional-minded readers may not care for the little interludes spattered through the book in which Dickens and Ackroyd engage in imaginary conversation, sometimes in company with Ackroyd’s earlier subjects, Eliot, Wilde and Chatterton. I do not mind these – except for the penultimate one, where Ackroyd has a rambling conversation with himself which is both banal and self-indulgent. When a biographer starts telling us that he uses files and card boxes and indexes, we can only say: we do not wish to know that, kindly leave the stage. Mr Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, whose first production this is and otherwise a magnificently produced one too, really might have plucked at his sleeve.

  And should anyone who believes as Ackroyd does that ‘family ties and early childhood are the two most boring elements in anyone’s life’ go in for writing biographies, certainly not a biography of Dickens, who was more obsessed with his own childhood than almost any other human being? Ackroyd seems to regard Dickens’s father and mother as feckless nuisances of little interest and appears as eager to pack them off to Devon as Dickens himself was. Yet John Dickens must have been one of the most splendidly absurd figures ever to have existed, the epitome of every variety of self-deception and self-inflation and thus the source, to a greater or lesser extent, for so many of Dickens’s immortal male comic creations: Micawber and William Dorrit, of course, but also Skimpole, Chadband, Podsnap and many another. Nothing Dickens himself thought up could outdo the begging letters of the real-life Father of the Marshalsea, to Miss Burdett-Coutts, for example: ‘Contemporaneous events of this nature place me in a difficulty from which, without some anticipatory pecuniary effort, I cannot extricate myself . . .’ He wanted twenty-five quid to finance the move back from Devon to London.

  In his zeal to plumb the resonant chambers of a writer’s inner life, Ackroyd is also a bit skimpy in his treatment of Dickens’s circle – that merry band of tipsy hacks, addicted to puns and punch and facetious toasts and post-prandial leapfrog. It will not really do, for example, to write off what Thomas Hood, an occasional member of the circle, called the Traditional Priest as ‘a certain Father Prout, writer of articles and critic’. The Reverend Francis Mahony, that acerbic, alcoholic, unfrocked Jesuit, under the alias of Father Prout, wrote the immortal ‘Bells of Shandon’, which lulled me to sleep as a child; to have described something of his mixture of sentimentality and disenchantment would have given us a fuller feeling of the world of Dickens’s early manhood – a much more rackety, restless place than the mid-Victorian England in which we tend to picture him and in which, as Ackroyd does point out, Dickens seldom sets his novels.

  There is, besides, a law of diminishing returns on efforts to sink ever-deeper shafts into an artist’s mind. The greater the artist and the deeper you go, the less you may find. All you are likely to achieve is a closer view of his awesome powers of absorption and his huge storage capacity; the glimpse thus obtained is little more privileged than a view of the innards of a top-of-the-range vacuum cleaner. Far richer treasures may lie scattered about on or near the surface. Biography is or ought to be more like open-cast mining.

  The more perceptive of Dickens’s contemporaries were strongly conscious that he was a marvellous engine rather than a person. Emerson said to American friends who were marvelling at the great man’s cheerfulness and high spirits: ‘You see him quite wrong, evidently, and would persuade me that he is a genial creature, full of sweetness and amenities and superior to his talents, but I fear he is harnessed to them. He is too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left. He daunts me!’

  Or, as Forster said of his wonderful powers of mimicry: ‘He seemed to be always the more himself for being somebody else, for continually putting off his personality.’

  I cannot help thinking that, in trying so hard to plunge right down to the core rather than explore the infinite richness of the surface, Ackroyd takes a fundamentally wrong turning. He is looking for something which really is not there, or not there in such abundance as to fill 1100 pages. As a consequence, he often seems to be driven to stretch his chosen material, to squeeze out of it something more exotic and profound than it naturally offers.

  This, I fear, is what goes wrong with Ackroyd’s treatment of Dickens’s separation from his wife and his taking up with the teenage actress Ellen Ternan. Ackroyd conceives the intriguing fancy that Dickens’s relations with Ellen were sexless and that the whole romance was a fulfilment of all his visions of innocent child-love. There is no conclusive evidence either way – which is not so surprising considering the lengths that Dickens went to to cover his tracks, in order not to estrange his huge public and so be cut off from the oxygen of adulation on which he was by now hooked.

  All things are possible, nowt so queer as folks and so on, but Dickens was a remarkably energetic man of forty-six. He had had ten children by his wife. After he took up with Ellen Ternan, he never flirted with another woman. He was a person of plain and hearty enthusiasms who detested humbug. He set up Ellen and her mother in a series of homes in Slough and Peckham and at Condette, near Boulogne, usually establishing pieds-à-terre for himself nearby. In his other dealings – business, familial, social – Dickens was ruthless, egotistical and impatient. He was as cold and horrible to his wife Catherine as any deserting husband can ever have been (the beastlier he is to her, the more endearing and heroic she sounds). He told a series of disgusting lies about the unhappines
s of their earlier life together. In many ways, he was a horrible man – racist, selfish, money-grubbing. But even when he was being a marvellous man, which he also was, he always knew what he wanted out of other people and lost no time in getting it. Is it really conceivable that this whole complex edifice of expense, betrayal and deception was a conspiracy for the purpose of a virginal spooning?

  Worse still, now and then, one seems to spot Ackroyd shutting his novelist’s eye in order to underplay both the deception and the obsession. For example, when Dickens was commuting to London from the Ternans’ cottage at Slough, we are told only that ‘he usually caught the train at Windsor Station, perhaps to expose himself less to public comment on the platform’. But according to Kaplan, he used to walk across the back fields from Slough and would date his letters from Eton, explaining casually that he was ‘merely walking in the Park here, but write from this place, in consequence of having omitted to do so in town’ – which conveys a considerably more devious impression.

  After Dickens and Ellen and her mother had been embarrassingly exposed as travelling together by being caught up in the Staplehurst railway accident, Ackroyd tells us that Dickens asked his manservant to deliver a basketful of delicacies to ‘Miss Ellen’. Edgar Johnson quotes the instruction in rather more detail: ‘Take Miss Ellen tomorrow morning a little basket of fresh fruit, a jar of clotted cream from Tuckers, and a chicken, a pair of pigeons, or some nice little bird. Also on Wednesday morning, take her some other things of the same sort – making a little variety each day’ – which sounds not only more solicitous but also somehow fleshier.

  The fact that the relationship was not a very happy one does not mean that it was platonic. Nor was Dickens’s behaviour necessarily any more complex than that of other successful, strongly driven men who see middle age looming.