Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  My idol was Judy Wilson, a tall big-boned blonde with a pixie haircut. Judy was not just a rider but one of the best riders in the school. Those of us who had signed up for this expensive activity rode at a nearby stable run by a florid-faced man named Teddy. Despite the correctness of my Saks Fifth Avenue riding togs, I never quite got the hang of East Coast equestrian style; I was used to Western saddles and trail rides in the hills above Malibu. Without a saddle horn, the Eastern saddle seemed alarmingly bare; its stirrups were too high, and you weren’t supposed to neck-rein the horses. Judy Wilson, in contrast, had a wall in her room lined with blue ribbons from jumping com-petitions, and her popularity was such that she was elected head boarder marshal her senior year. She moved through the corridors of Rosemary Hall, often in her riding boots, with a calm assurance I considered the epitome of grace. My attention quickened as she approached; I cherished every stray word and smile she granted me.

  I’m still sometimes asked how I liked my boarding school, and the question always stirs a little regret in me. When two years after I started at Rosemary Hall, my brother began at the Putney School in Brattleboro, Vermont, a coed progressive school where the students excelled in the arts, worked on a collective farm, and called teachers by their first names, it seemed to me he’d gotten a much better deal. We hadn’t known about Putney when I was deciding on Rosemary Hall. Or perhaps just hadn’t looked for it. My mother had been fixed for me on the model provided by Scottie.

  Dickens’s near contemporary Matthew Arnold considered the portrait of Salem House and its cane-wielding Mr. Creakle in David Copperfield a brilliant depiction of the sort of puritanical English miseducation that, as he writes in Irish Essays, serves to form the “hard, stern, and narrow” nature of a Mr. Murdstone. David Copperfield’s nature, though, is the opposite of hard, stern, and narrow, and despite its severities, Salem House, oddly, does not hurt him. In part he is saved by the threadbare master Mr. Mell, who sees David’s worth and seeks to protect him. Also David takes a first step towards becoming a novelist through his role as Scheherazade—regaling Steerforth with the plots of Perigrine Pickle and other eighteenth-century novels. Later, forced into degrading work at the London warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, he looks back to Salem House as a time of opportunity; Steerforth and Traddles are achingly remembered as the associates of his “happier childhood”; the time at the school represents his crushed “hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man.”

  Rosemary Hall was narrow as well. It wasn’t a cruel place, but it was unimaginative in its conventional snobbery and anti-Semitism. The education it offered was decent, but its limiting and limited assumption was that its graduates would go on to lead genteel upper middle-class lives. Yet I, too, like David Copperfield, found boarding school a setting in which to begin coming into my own. I had a few excellent teachers—perhaps that’s all one really needs—who saw my potential and encouraged me. I won prizes (when my daughter enrolled in the coeducational and more diverse Choate-Rosemary Hall thirty years later, my name was among those she read on the plaques). I loved learning and was a great reader. By then, though, I had left Dickens behind me, at least for a stretch of years. I plunged more fully into the Russians, especially Dostoevsky, who showed me new possibilities of passion and also of humility. In a notebook of my “reflections,” I exhorted myself to follow the example of Father Z. in The Brothers Karamazov to “condemn no man.” Then I discovered Thomas Mann and saw myself in his figure of the outsider artist in “Tonio Kröger,” who idealizes unthinking, healthy normal beauty just as I had idealized Judy Wilson.

  If I had been asked as a high school senior to name my favorite novel, I might have said David Copperfield, but I can’t be sure of that. What I know for a certainty is that I cherished the character of David—Davy, still to me—planning to give a son this name, though that ended up not happening in the real world. Yet his figure lived potently inside me. I didn’t need to reread the book; I never wrote a paper about it nor talked to anyone about my special sense of it. I never, in my French class, proclaimed, “David Copperfield, c’est moi.” But the sense of loving and being David Copperfield persisted—and has persisted to this present moment in which I write, early in a new century, nearing the end of a long teaching career, knowing I am in many ways ordinary yet still striving to count myself heroic.

  ii

  DICKENS DECLARED DAVID COPPERFIELD his “favorite child,” and much has been written about the novel’s striking autobiographical components: the parallel between David’s enforced sojourn at Murdstone and Grinby’s, whose trade is in wine and spirits bottles, and the author’s own terrible time at Warren’s Blacking in the Strand, the shoe polish factory where the young Dickens, visible to passersby through the shop window, felt searing shame at having to work in public view fixing labels to bottles of blacking; the reversal of initials through which his own C.D. becomes D.C.; the links between the improvident Mr. Micawber and Dickens’s father, who was also incarcerated in debtor’s prison; Dickens’s admission in his letters to Maria Beadnell Winter that his memories of being infatuated with her had animated his depiction of David’s courtship of Dora Spenlow; and, more generally, the fact that David Copperfield is ultimately a bildungsroman, the story of the novelist as a young man. It sets out to show how a sensitive child with the faculty of keen observation grows up to be a successful author.

  David Copperfield is, I’ve learned, many readers’ “favorite child.” Since the early days of my reading life in which I adopted the novel as my own, I have discovered how many people, spanning generations and genders, classes and continents, have loved and embraced it.

  First for me is my mother, the person who took the book from our den’s library shelves to hand to a child asking for something new to read. Even before Scott Fitzgerald discovered her struggling to get through the first volume of Proust and set out to complete her education, my mother had read Dickens in her orphanage and been quick to understand that “Norwood,” as it familiarly was called, was a Dickensian institution. As she recounts in her memoir College of One, looking back to her earlier reading:

  Books were the breath of my existence. David Copperfield was my favorite—the first part. His childhood was worse than mine. My Mr. Murdstone was the headmaster, but he was a remote dragon, except for the terrifying time when I happened to pass him and he would for no apparent reason give me a whack across the back to speed me on my way.

  I am tempted to argue with my mother, or at least with her ghost, that the headmaster in her orphanage was more aptly her Mr. Creakle than her Mr. Murdstone. But to do so would be a cavil, for Mr. Murdstone is the one truly terrifying villain in the novel, the figure who enters the sanctity of David’s childhood home and destroys it, the villain who in no way can be called or seen as comic. The other “bad” characters all have some comic tic—the vicious Creakle splutters and applies his “Tickler”; fulsome Uriah Heep is “umble” and wrings his hands; even Miss Murdstone snaps shut her steel-clasped reticule and proclaims against boys. Mr. Murdstone has no such verbal or physical idiosyncrasy. He is simply a killer of joy, a purveyor of misery.

  My mother’s childhood “home,” for better or worse, was the orphanage, its frightening headmaster her Mr. Murdstone just as my intruding stepfather seemed mine. I see the irony that young Lily Shiel, reading the novel in her orphanage, consoled herself at seeming better off than David, whereas I in my comfortable Beverly Hills home lived his hardships in my imagination as if they were my own. Perhaps David’s childhood seemed worse to my mother than her own because from her earliest memories she had—and needed to have—a bedrock sense of self-reliance. She couldn’t afford to feel as vulnerable as David Copperfield. I could.

  A few years after my mother was reading Dickens in the Norwood orphanage, the man I would later learn was my father, the British logical positivist A. J. Ayer, was reading him, also at a young age, in his own far more privileged upper-middle-class family home in London and then as
a public school boy at Eton. Freddie Ayer would continue to read Dickens to the end of his life. As Ayer’s biographer Ben Rogers speculates:

  Ayer never wrote about Dickens in any detail, but he returned to him again and again, and the novels are often a source of incidental reference in his philosophical writings. Dickens’s stories abound with vulnerable, receptive and enterprising orphans—children “of excellent abilities with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally,” more or less obliged to make their way in an unfeeling world. There was certainly much to which Ayer might have related in these creations. He was physically small, perceptive, and determined; at once bookish and resourceful, sad and enthusiastic, gifted but emotionally perhaps a bit neglected.

  Rogers’s quotation, it so happens, is from David Copperfield. The description begins the chapter in which David is sent to London to Murdstone and Grinby’s. David as narrator expresses his surprise, “even now,” that a child of such abilities could have been “thrown away” at such a young age. I wonder how many of us have memories of a similar childhood self: gifted, delicate, sensitive, forced to go forth into a world that so often fails to value us as we value ourselves, yet persisting despite our delicacy. I do, for one. As for Freddie, he seemed without self-pity and was not drawn to David Copperfield in particular. He once told me his favorites were the later, darker Dickens novels—Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend. Yet it makes sense to me that his biographer sees him as David—observant, delicate, and tough—and I know he was bullied at Eton.

  Because David Copperfield so often casts himself as passive—an observer of others, someone acted upon—it’s all the more striking when he isn’t, when he lashes out against a tormentor and shows he can defend himself. For one friend and colleague, among those whom I started questioning about the novel, seeking to fathom its captivating power, this was her point of attachment. She told me of her early fascination with Mr. Murdstone’s hand, the hand David bites as Mr. Murdstone thrashes him.

  “Mr. Murdstone’s hand?” I echoed. Of course, I remembered David’s biting Mr. Murdstone, but I’d never given much thought to the tooth-marked hand.

  “It obsessed me,” my friend confided, as we sat at our table at Arte Café, our favorite Upper West Side Italian restaurant, two gray-haired ladies savoring our early-bird special. “I could feel the hand throbbing.”

  When I returned home from dinner, I looked up the passage. David fails in the recitation of his lesson, and Mr. Murdstone coldly determines to flog him:

  He walked me up to my room slowly and gravely—I am certain he had a delight in that formal parade of executing justice–and when we got there, suddenly twisted my head under his arm.

  “Mr. Murdstone, Sir,” I cried to him. “Don’t! Pray don’t beat me. I have tried to learn sir, but I can’t while you and Miss Murdstone are by. I can’t indeed!”

  “Can’t you indeed, David?” He said. “We’ll try that.”

  He had my head as in a vice, but I twined round him somehow, entreating him not to beat me. It was only for a moment that I stopped him, for he cut me heavily an instant afterwards, and in the same instant I caught the hand with which he held me in my mouth, between my teeth, and bit through it. It sets my teeth on edge to think of it.

  Mr. Murdstone proceeds to beat David after this “as if he would have beaten him to death.” David is locked in his room, feels wicked, and crawls up to the mirror to look at his red and swollen face. After a five-day incarceration, he is packed off to Salem House where he must initially wear the placard, “Take care of him—he bites.” He doesn’t again encounter Mr. Murdstone until his half-year holidays. When they meet, David apologizes. The hand Mr. Murdstone extends to him, David recounts, “is the hand I had bitten. I could not restrain my eye for resting for an instant on a red spot upon it; but it was not so red, as I turned when I met that sinister expression in his face.”

  As a child, I remember being thrilled but frightened at David’s biting Mr. Murdstone’s hand. Thrilled to see him fight back. Frightened because I could anticipate the consequences of this instinctual act of self-defense. I thought of it as self-defense, not aggression, just as my fantasy that if Bow Wow ever returned, I would thrust a knife into his protruding stomach was my imagined defense of our home, not an act of premeditated murder.

  For years, well into adulthood, I harbored my fantasy. The stabbing would occur on the sidewalk of our quiet tree-lined Beverly Hills street. A sentinel but always a child, I would be outside on our manicured front lawn, alert to the immanence of harm. Bow Wow would come walking up the sidewalk, heading towards our house, slowly but inexorably—an odd aspect of the daydream since almost no one walks in Beverly Hills. Pedestrians are stopped by the police, suspect simply by virtue of not being in a car. Somehow I would have a kitchen knife in my hand. Concealing it as I calmly approached him, I would stare at him hard, raise my hand in one swift motion, and before he could detect my purpose, plunge the knife into his beefy middle.

  After our mother died, when my brother and I were both in our forties, I confessed my evil thoughts to him. “And what do you think you would do if you ever saw Bow Wow again?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Robert, “I guess I’d invite him out for a beer and ask him what he’d been doing all these years.”

  Robert’s answer startled me. I found it hard to think of Bow Wow as someone one could talk to, yet my brother’s pacific inclinations put into stark relief the violence of my metonymies.

  Mr. Murdstone’s hand is echoed in the novel in the long, skinny, grasping hands of Uriah Heep. Later David uses his own hand to strike Uriah on the cheek, Uriah who wants only what David wants and gets: to be a gentleman and claim Agnes Wickfield as his own angel in the house. Although I hadn’t until recently focused on Mr. Murdstone’s bitten hand, I have long been fascinated by imagery of hands—hands as touching, hands as grasping, hands as greedy. “Keep your hands to yourself,” my grandson, who tends to get into trouble, was warned over and over in his elementary school. At least unlike his younger cousin, who lives in France, he didn’t bite other children in his class. Another friend I teach with—and another devotee of David Copperfield—confessed to a persistent dream that she’s biting everyone in sight and then hurling them over a banister. This particular friend happens to be the best-loved professor in our department, renowned for her kindness to her students. Neither she nor I has lost touch with the passions or the wounds of our childhoods. But we feel we’re making progress, doing our best to contain our bitings and our stabbings to our nightmares, waking and sleeping. I no longer even see myself stabbing Bow Wow. I don’t know, though, that I could go so far as to ask him out for a beer.

  iii

  I BELIEVE I’M MOVING towards a better understanding of the role of David Copperfield in my life as well as in the lives of so many other readers, the cohort of people who loved the novel as children and continue to love it into adulthood. I’ve spoken of myself, my mother and father, my colleague fixated on the bitten hand, and the one throwing her enemies over the banister. To add just one further testimonial, I recently mentioned my link with the character of David to yet another of my colleagues, a specialist in Shakespeare. She’s my age and we, in fact, attended the same college though we hardly knew one another back then. She has always seemed very tactful and self-controlled. “I was David Copperfield,” I told her. “So was I!” she said. “At a very young age. I just loved that book, especially the early part.”

  A tantalizing synchronicity emerges: one girl reading in Park Slope, Brooklyn, another in Beverly Hills, each lost in the same book. Suddenly we seemed like sisters. My colleague went on to say that, although the nineteenth century wasn’t her period, she had taught the book recently and been deeply moved by it. Now living in another Brooklyn neighborhood, she would come down from the upper floor of her brownstone, her eyes all swollen.

  “Oh you’ve been reading David Copperfield a
gain,” her husband and daughters would say almost accusingly. “There’s such an emotional richness to it,” said my friend.

  That’s it, of course—the emotional richness. I’ve begun thinking about that, about the ways David Copperfield manages to touch us and also invite such identification. For one thing, why become David rather than Pip or Oliver or Little Nell or any of Dickens’s many other orphan children? Perhaps a clue lies in David’s mix of qualities. He’s not unbelievably pure like Oliver or Little Nell—surely neither of them would have bitten Mr. Murdstone. Nor is he unrelievedly miserable like Pip, suffering from earliest memory as either wronged or in the wrong. David is between these extremes—a bright, promising child who feels hurt and embarrassment but who also shows himself to be resilient.

  He’s also at once flexible and constant. Other characters in the novel keep renaming him. His aunt Betsy, whom he reaches in Dover after many misadventures of the road on his flight from London, gives him a bath and renames him Trotwood. To Steerforth he is always Daisy. His young “child wife” as she’s called, Dora, calls him Doady. He bears the names others give him but remains himself, moving ever further from any threat of nullity and failure—at its most alarming when he is at the mercy of Mr. Murdstone—to become at last, securely, the hero of his own life. The novel has an aspect of the picaresque; as readers we are excited to follow David on his adventures. We ask what will happen to him next, how he will manage. The odds might seem against this small frail boy. But he comes out on the safe side of harm.

  This is the pattern of fairy tale, in which you don’t need to start out heroic to survive heroically and triumph, and it’s reassuring. As a young reader of David Copperfield, I, too, felt vulnerable but persistent, sorrowful but optimistic, variable in the ways I was perceived by others—classmates, teachers, family friends, my brother, my mother—but nonetheless constant to myself. In my case that self was female, in David’s male. But this was not a difference that concerned me. The way that each of us is and was a child “of excellent abilities and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally” seemed a state of being in which gender played very little part.