Vintage Reading

by Robert Kanigel

  These are some of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and all that’s wrong with Lewis Carroll’s inspired dream story is that it ends too soon. Even this fault, though, has a remedy: Seven years after its first appearance came a sequel, Through the Looking Glass, that some feel actually improved on the original.

  The Alice stories have been psychoanalyzed, plumbed for hidden political and religious messages, even probed for roots in their creator’s affinity for mathematics and logic. But no tired theorizing can explain their enduring appeal to generations of children and adults. They are endlessly inventive. Their characters are unforgettable. They are, simply, great fun. As one critic has pointed out, Lewis Carroll “did not send Alice down the rabbit hole on a summer’s afternoon for the benefit of a future generation of Freudians, but rather for the present pleasure of three Victorian children.”

  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a mathematician, author of a number of scholarly treatises. He was a deacon in the Church of England. He was an ardent and accomplished photographer—in one critic’s view, “the best photographer of children in the 19th century.” Yet today we remember him for none of this. For in 1862, he and an adult friend went on a boat trip upriver from Oxford with three children—10-year-old Alice Liddell being one of them—during which he told the story that turned into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Three years later, it was published under a pseudonym, Lewis Carroll.

  Happily, the published version retained much of the spontaneity and madcap inventiveness of the original. It is supremely clever, in the best sense of the word. It’s full of delightful puns, poems scattered midst the prose, and typographical high jinks—as when the text of the Mouse’s tale winds down the page in the form of a tail. And it boasts a cast of outrageous characters, every one of whom is fully developed: It’s not any rabbit Alice meets, but a nervous and silly one, dressed in kid gloves and waistcoat. It’s not any cook that Alice encounters at the Duchess’s, but one with a penchant for throwing frying pans.

  This would-be children’s story is not all sweetness and light: A strain of danger and uncertainty winds through it, as if to subtly raise the emotional stakes. The Queen of Hearts, for example, is a kind of Stalin of children’s literature, forever ordering “Off with his head” at any imagined affront. The blue caterpillar Alice meets lolling atop the mushroom is sarcastic and forbidding. Even the neurotic White Rabbit is nobody you’d want to spend much time with.

  But then there’s Alice herself, an island of calm midst all the madness, ever rational, slow to anger, a model of Victorian girlhood. “Curiouser and curiouser,” Alice may be heard to say. Or, “How queer everything is today.” But for her, Wonderland is no fearful hocus-pocus world of superstition and terror, but merely the place, just a tad out of kilter, in which she happens to find herself.

  The mushroom on which Alice nibbles to fine-tune her size is not “magic,” merely a mushroom. She approaches everything with curiosity and uncommon common sense. Any child, I suspect, would come away from reading her adventures more apt and better able to find wonder in the world than shrink in terror from its dangers.

  So would any adult not irreversibly ground down by “maturity’s” stern demands.

  Justine

  ____________

  By Lawrence Durrell

  First published in 1957

  When it first appeared in the 1950s, Justine could be judged wholly on its face—as a lush, sensuous novel of love steeped in the sights and scents of a corrupt and teeming Egyptian city. Today, it is known, too, as the first panel in that textured tapestry known as The Alexandria Quartet.

  Readers of Justine today, then, are apt to have lost some literary innocence. They likely know that the same cast of remarkable characters will reappear in the subsequent volumes, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, their motivations reinterpreted, their personalities grown richer and more rounded; that many of them lead double and triple lives; that there’s more to Justine’s infidelity to her princely Egyptian husband than is ever revealed here. As one writer has put it, The Alexandria Quartet is a “serial drama that, instead of steadily advancing, continuously folds in on itself.” Only in Clea, the final book, does the action move ahead in time.

  The tetralogy takes its title from the sense-dripping, often suffocating city in which it is set and which—a bit self-consciously to my taste—functions as a central character. In fact, the real terrain for the Quartet is Love, its endless variations, its subtleties of feeling, its refusal to resolve itself into anything simpler than what it is. Alexandria is the test tube for love, brimming over with all the ingredients needed for its study.

  Justine: A writer named Darley, already involved with Melissa, takes up with the haunted Justine, wife of Mesim, a wealthy merchant. Their affair progresses against a backdrop of intrigue and one-of-a-kind characters: the Cabalist Balthazar; “the gentle, lovable, unknowable Clea”; and the one-eyed Scobie, a wrinkled old police functionary.

  Near the end, Nessim holds a duck shoot; a man is killed. Then Justine, the object of at last two men’s ardor, goes to Palestine, settling on a kibbutz. “Watching her now and remembering the touching and tormenting person she had once been for us all,” Clea writes Darley, “I found it hard to comprehend the change into this tubby little peasant with the hard paws... “

  But only gradually does this seeming wisp of a story develop. Durrell has called himself “a poet who stumbled into prose,” and the description is apt: Lyrical evocations of Alexandria and its bizarre denizens find favored treatment in Durrell’s hands, while the story line suffers by comparison. Dialogue is stylized, not to say stilted, and never overly concerned with moving the narrative ahead. Readers inured to a story that hurtles along may be disappointed.

  The places and events Darley records are of his past, forced through the prism of memory. They come out in ill-ordered, self-contained snatches— soft, glowing, emotionally heightened, as if through a cinematographer’s hazy filter: “The whole room belonged to Melissa—the pitiful dressing-table full of empty powder-boxes and photos: the graceful curtain breathing softly in that breathless afternoon air like the sail of a ship. How often had we not lain in one another’s arms watching the slow intake and recoil of that transparent piece of bright linen? Across all this, as across the image of someone dearly loved, held in the magnification of a gigantic tear, moved the brown harsh body of Justine naked.”

  Sometimes, all this good stuff is too much—too many colors, textures, smells—and interest flags. More often, it is gently hypnotic, like a drug. In fact the whole book can be likened to certain hypnotics that heighten sensory sensitivity but then, in time, give way to a sweet narcissus, like that of a lazy noonday nap in summer grass under a warming sun.

  Oliver Twist

  ____________

  By Charles Dickens

  First published in 1838

  It is overwritten, moralistic and hopelessly sentimental, with turns of plot that would make a writer of romance novels blush. But cavil all you like about the literary shortcomings of Oliver Twist, it is inspired by a warmth and appreciation for sheer human goodness not often seen today.

  An infant delivered even as its mother dies, in the rudest and most miserable surroundings, gets the name Oliver Twist—by virtue of the letter T following the S of a child named Swubble. He grows up in the workhouse, unloved and half-starved, is apprenticed to an undertaker, finally runs off to London. There, he falls in with a gang of pickpockets and thieves led by the inimitable Fagin. On a venture with his new friends, of whose criminal activities he is unaware, he’s arrested for a pickpocketing committed by another. Miraculously, he is found innocent; a witness comes forward to substantiate his story, and the victim of the crime sees in young Oliver a sweetness and nobility of character inconsistent with a criminal heart.

  All through the story, similar forces work on Oliver, good and evil competing for his fate. Despite his grimy dress and criminal surroundings, his innocence endears him to respectable fo
lk—a trait Fagin sees as making him ideal for a life of crime; who, after all, would suspect so sweet a boy?

  Oddly, Oliver sometimes seems a minor character in the novel that bears his name. His early years in the workhouse are drawn sympathetically enough. But later, flung back and forth between Fagin and the kindhearted men and women who would rescue him, he’s more object than subject. We know that all are taken with his innocence, that he acknowledges the kindness of his benefactors, that he resists Fagin’s path of cruelty and crime. But we never know how he feels deep down as fortune subjects him to its whims.

  Oliver Twist is a social document, and a troubling one. Keenly aware of social ills, it launches frequent barbs at the treatment of the poor. Yet, a deep conservative streak runs through it, too. Criminals, bumblers and hypocrites seem drawn exclusively from the lower social classes, while Oliver’s benefactors are invariably the soul of upper middle class respectability, people who would today drive Volvos. How much, one wonders, does this split owe to social conditions, how much to innate character? Are Fagin, robber Bill Sikes and the rest of the gang victims of the System—or just plain bad?

  The question torments us today as much as in Dickens’ time. For just as then, we have a great underclass, from which few seem able to extricate themselves, whose poverty, criminal behavior and despair mock middle class values. Is it their own fault, we wonder, or ours? Does the continued existence of an underclass suggest that, reformers to the contrary, nothing much can be done about it? Or else that our society stands indicted of just not caring?

  Dickens’ novel is ambivalent in its answers. On the one hand, Oliver’s strength of character is made to seem the product of the superior stock from which, we learn, he derives; blood, in other words, tells. But what of Nancy, Bill Sikes’ moll? At one point, given a chance to step out from her dissolute life and into a new, more hopeful one, she refuses. Why? Because of the awful hold of the underworld upon her? Or because of her own weakness of character?

  Oliver Twist raises other troubling questions, not the least of which is anti-Semitism. Fagin, the sly, malevolent and miserly leader of the gang, who is happy to see his own henchmen swing from the gallows if it will save his skin, is a Jew. By itself, nothing anti-Semitic in that. But a modern reader’s tolerance wears thin when Fagin is repeatedly referred to not by name but simply as “the Jew.” Fagin never suffers a single taunt about his Jewishness from either the assorted low-lifes who populate the novel, or anyone else. Nor does Dickens ever attribute his vicious nature to it. And yet if Fagin is just an evil man who happens to be Jewish, why that ugly, incessant chorus – the Jew?

  In reading Oliver Twist, one does not reach for the word “great;” the novel is too resolutely middle class to inspire the word. For all its preoccupation with sordid city streets, it glories in the joys of hearth and home. And—as in a minor character’s decision to renounce ambition and opt for a parsonage in the country—it seems to reject anything too high flown, as well.

  Fagin’s defeat, and Oliver’s salvation, represent a victory for ordinary lives lived quietly and well.

  Pride and Prejudice

  ____________

  By Jane Austen

  First published in 1813

  Though afflicted by a title reminiscent of a Horatio Alger story or a Sunday school tract, Pride and Prejudice is a love story. And largely because it leaves you in the extended company of one of the most appealing and intelligent characters in all of fiction, Elizabeth Bennet, it’s a delight to read.

  A young and spirited upper-class women in early 19th-century England, Elizabeth meets the sullen and mysterious Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. She immediately dislikes him for his apparent conceit and disdain for social niceties. But gradually, over the span of the book, her feelings change. This slow reversal is fascinating in itself, if only for the psychologically precise insights it affords into how people come to hold the impressions they do, and how they may come to give them up. Indeed, substance and appearance are as much the twin subject of Jane Austen’s novel as pride and prejudice.

  This is a novel of manners. Nothing much happens. No bloody revolutions upset the world its characters inhabit, no civil strife, no hunger, no physical danger. The characters amiably converse. Or stroll through well-tended gardens. Or attend balls. Politics never intrudes. Neither does the need to make a living. The characters worry only about living up to the mandates of their class—to marry well, live comfortably and speak civilly.

  At first blush, all this might seem wholly irrelevant to all the rest of us who daily strive and struggle. And yet, the serene, ordered backdrop of these characters’ lives means that whatever takes place against it stands out in bold relief. Lines of action are clear, clean and spare, without workaday reality to muddy up matters. Personality traits are highlighted. Emotional intensity gets a chance to irresistibly build; for sheer sexual tension, few novels can match that moment when Elizabeth suddenly encounters Darcy at his family home: “Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush.”

  The story is unusually rich in memorable supporting characters. Like the clergyman Collins, whose bouts of long-winded flattery offer intervals of comic relief (especially when he proposes to Elizabeth). And the highborn Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose brusque imperiousness might well be enough to forment a revolution. And Elizabeth’s older sister Jane, who can say no unkind word of anyone. Or their mother, Mrs. Bennet, a nervous, silly woman whose only wish is to see her five daughters married off—at whatever cost to her own dignity, such as it is.

  Modern readers may at first resist with this world of exaggerated manners and verbal artifice. But for most, it won’t be long before all that recedes into the background and the story itself takes hold. That story’s superficial aspect is pleasant, light and airy. But by contrast, it renders the darker, deeper relationship between such substantial characters as Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet serious indeed, compelling our interest almost two centuries after Jane Austen brought them to life.

  A Passage to India

  ____________

  By E. M. Forster

  First published in 1924

  A Passage to India fictionally portrays the clash of cultures between Indians and their British masters during the twilight years of the Empire. It takes the abstraction that is “colonialism” and reveals it for the darkly brutal force it’s often been.

  In a mysterious, fevered moment deep in the caves of Marabar, young Adela Quested, fresh from England, fancies that her Indian acquaintance, Assiz, has tried to rape her. While just what did happen in the cave is never made clear—an ambiguity that Forster plainly means to stand for the mysteries of the East—it is clear that Assiz is innocent. The English authorities rally ‘round the aggrieved victim of Oriental rapacity and, with evident relish, bring the case to trial. But then, on the witness stand, in a moment of crystalline insight, Adela recants her story.

  The victim of her confusion, Assiz, is a medical doctor, intelligent and capable. But he is also exquisitely temperamental, his Western scientific training but a thin veneer laid down upon a mystical and poetic streak that holds kindness above justice, reason, consistency or truth.

  For Assiz, Forster writes, there was “no harm in deceiving society as long as she does not find you out, because it is only when she finds you out that you have harmed her; she is not like a friend or God, who are injured by the mere existence of unfaithfulness. [And so], he meditated what type of lie he should tell... “

  At least in Forster’s telling, the petty falsehoods of Assiz and the Indians generally are like the lies told the dying cancer patient; they insulate against painful truth, protect fragile feelings. To Indians, “unless a sentence paid a few compliments to Justice and Morality in passing, its grammar wounded their ears and paralysed their minds. What they said and what they felt were (except in the case of affection) seldom the same.”

  To the English, who understand none of this, it is all qui
te simple: The “natives” are duplicitous, unworthy of social contact beyond the merest pleasantries. If the density of prejudice heaped on them here is based even roughly on historical fact, it’s a wonder the Indians didn’t throw off their shackles long before they did. If anything, English women act most callously of all. “Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let them die,” says Mrs. Callendar, wife of the chief medical officer. She’s content so long as the Indians “don’t come near me. They give me the creeps.”

  Almost alone among the English to see the Indians as different rather than inferior is Cyril Fielding, principal of the government college. He and Assiz become friends, though the cultural chasm yawns wide; their relationship is ambivalent, strained, easy prey to misunderstanding. Assiz’s problem with Fielding is that, though more comfortable among Indians than with his English compatriots, Fielding is still an Englishman. Only in tender moments can Assiz forgive him that. “He knew at the bottom of his heart that [the English] could not help being so cold and odd and circulating like an ice stream through his land.”

  Offering another variation-on-an-Englishman-theme is city magistrate Ronn Heaslop, the man whose merits as marriage partner Adele has come to India to weigh. He’s as scornful of the natives as the others, but less blindly. “I am out here to work,” he says, “to hold this wretched country by force. I’m not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental sympathetic literary man. I’m just a servant of the Government.”

  A Passage to India works as both a great tapestry of India and through its small, sharp insights. And it is prophetic, too. In the end, rejecting European ways and European medicine, Assiz retreats from British India. “I am an Indian at last,” he tells himself. “Clear out,” he tells Fielding in what each knows will be their last meeting. “Why are we [Indians] put to so much suffering? We used to blame you, now we blame ourselves, we grow wiser. Until England is in difficulties, we keep silent, but in the next European war—aha, aha! Then is our time.”