Tom’s deep confusion about Aline was exacerbated by his identification of her with the sophisticated New York literary and theater worlds that enraged him and that he clearly also envied: His later work is permeated with tantrums about
the fine horse-manure with which we have allowed ourselves to be bored, maddened, whiff-sniffed, hound-and-hornered, nationed, new-republicked, dialed, spectatored, mercuried, storied, anviled, new-massed, new-yorkered, vogued, vanity-faired, timed, broomed, transitioned, and generally shat upon by the elegant, refined, and snobified Concentrated Blotters of the Arts.… He was none of your little franky-panky, seldesey-weldesey, cowley-wowley,… steiny-weiny, goldy-woldly, sneer-puss fellows.…
But the heart of his anguish about her lies in his conflicted psyche. He is insanely in love, sexually besotted, and in Oedipal terror. She is Helen of Troy, she is Penelope, but she is also, he tells her, “my grey haired wide hipped timeless mother.” In his draft for The Web and the Rock, the Tom character asks the Aline character, “Am I your child?” “Yes,” she answers, “yes.” “Are these my breasts?” “Yes,” she replies. “Have you any milk there for me?” When she tells him no, he snorts, “Hah,… if you really loved me, you would have milk for me.” “My heart is smothering in its love for you,” he writes to her. “You are the most precious thing in my life, but you are imprisoned in a jungle of thorns, and I cannot come near you without bleeding.” Here is vagina dentata tooth and claw—surely a textbook lesson in psychopathology.
David Herbert Donald in his biography comments:
In some ways he always remained an infant—as an adult, a gigantic infant, to be sure—unwilling to give up its mother’s breast. He desired to devour everything in sight, whether it was mountains of food or libraries of books. He had grandiose fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, and endless love. In other ways he was always a small boy—unable to drive a car or to use a typewriter, unwilling to bathe regularly, uninterested in keeping his clothes clean.
Self-absorbed, he took a childish pleasure in the functioning of his own body. Even as a man he felt great satisfaction when he had a bowel movement.… Even as an adult he continued to play with his genitals.…
Feeling unloved by both of his parents, Wolfe grew up with an insatiable need for recognition and praise and with an extraordinary sensitivity to criticism of any kind. At the same time his sense that his mother and his father had failed him produced in Wolfe, as it does in other narcissistic personalities, an urgent “need to reunite with a powerful and nourishing figure” who could take their place.
And so he adopted Max and Aline as alternative parents to his larger-than-life but distant father and his tenacious, grasping mother, only in the long run to reject them, too.
* * *
AFTER DISMISSING MAX and depositing at least a million words with Aswell, Tom started traveling—south to home, west to explore. By the time he was roaming around the Northwest, his health had utterly collapsed: He had pneumonia on top of a dangerous tubercular condition. Brought east by train, he was admitted to Johns Hopkins, where it quickly became clear that he was dying, although in a final (futile) gesture, the doctors trepanned his skull. He died shortly before his thirty-eighth birthday, in September 1938. At the hospital were his mother, two of his siblings, Aswell, his agent Elizabeth Nowell, and Max. Aline had been told that her presence would outrage the family, who loathed her. Afterward, Aswell tried to assuage her grief by reporting that Tom’s last words were of her. His eyes searching the room, he had whispered, “Where’s Aline … I want Aline … I want my Jew.” “I told him you were coming,” Aswell said, “and he smiled, and lay down again.”
Tom’s farewell to Max was in a letter—the last he ever wrote. “No matter what happens or has happened,” he wrote, “I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below. Yours always, Tom.”
This letter was written from a hospital in Seattle some five weeks before he died in Baltimore. The Genius people improve on this scenario: Tom is in a final coma from which he’s not expected to emerge, yet to the astonishment of the nurse attending him, his eyes flutter open and he signals her to bring him paper and pencil. Slowly, laboriously, he strives to scrawl the final loving words …
* * *
WHAT ARE WE LEFT WITH of Thomas Wolfe, other than the vanishing legend and the vanishing books? The sense of a monstrous prodigy, on the one hand possessed of immense energy and kindness (the Perkins girls, for instance, adored him), generous to his family, brilliantly read, but on the other hand tormented by demons, alcoholic, vainglorious, both self-destructive and destructive of others. Everything about him was huge, from his physical frame to his appetites to his emotions, and—yes—to his talent. That was real. There are splendid stories, novellas, stretches of the novels—but only when he escapes from his narcissism and looks outward rather than inward. The portrait of his mother that constitutes the somewhat Joycean novella “The Web of Earth,” the portion of Look Homeward, Angel dealing with the death of Eugene’s brother Ben, the historical sections of the unfinished The Hills Beyond—these justify or at least explain the fuss that was made about him, and the high expectations.
As Wolfe grew older, his writing grew less ornate and rhapsodic, more focused and disciplined. If he had lived, he might, someday, have warranted the praise heaped on him by Sinclair Lewis, who when interviewed on winning the Nobel Prize singled him out as having “a chance to be the greatest American writer,” and indeed, “one of the greatest world writers.”
Even, perhaps, a genius?
The New York Review of Books
DECEMBER 8, 2016
The Sensationalist
WILKIE COLLINS
THERE ARE NOVELS THAT GRIP YOU despite inconsistencies of plot, failures of tone or characterization, lack of depth—you may not even like them, but you have to go on reading: Their sheer force and urgency are irresistible. The Three Musketeers and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are not Middlemarch or Proust, but they’ve thrilled generations of readers. And regardless of its distressing historical attitudes and mundane prose, Gone with the Wind goes on selling in the tens of thousands because Margaret Mitchell just sweeps you along.
One of the most enthralling of all popular novels is Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which began serial publication in 1859—to almost frenzied success—in All the Year Round, the new magazine founded and edited by his close collaborator and friend Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities had been the cornerstone of the opening issues; The Woman in White, which followed it, did even better—“Queues of eager readers formed outside the offices on press days,” Collins’s finest biographer, Catherine Peters, reports in The King of Inventors. It was like the good old days of The Old Curiosity Shop almost twenty years earlier, when the whole world waited desperately to learn whether Dickens would really allow Little Nell to die.
There was a “Woman in White Waltz” and a “Fosco Galop” (named for the spellbinding villain, Count Fosco). There was merchandise—“Woman in White” bonnets, shawls, perfumes. And when the novel was published in book form, new readers were captivated: Gladstone canceled an evening at the theater to keep reading it; Thackeray stayed up all night to finish it. At least one of Collins’s other novels rivaled it in popularity—The Moonstone, written a decade later—but the epitaph he devised for his tombstone reads: “Wilkie Collins—Author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.” He knew.
Collins was thirty-five when he began writing The Woman in White, with four novels, an estimable biography, a great deal of excellent journalism, and two successful collections of short stories behind him; his reputation was rapidly growing. But the new book instantly placed him among the leading novelists of the day.
His first novel
, Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome, was a mishmash—an “impossibly melodramatic and impossibly dull” rip-off of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, as Dorothy Sayers called it.
His next, Basil, was so much better than Antonina—and so different—that it’s hard to believe they’re by the same writer. Basil is markedly personal in tone—the story of an upper-class young man who disastrously falls in love at first sight with a young woman, from a lower class, whom he encounters on a bus, and who deceives him and blights his life. It’s a stab at realism, and it was much admired: Dickens, for instance, foreseeing a major career for its author, praised its “admirable writing” and “delicate discrimination of character.” In Wilkie Collins, Collins’s latest biographer, the prodigious Peter Ackroyd, with his bent for hyperbole, calls it “a novel of fatality and obsession that might almost earn a place beside the great Russian novels of love and madness.” Sorry, Mr. Ackroyd, but not even “almost.” Yet it remains readable both for its realistic surface account of London life, anticipating George Gissing, and for its highly charged melodrama. It’s very, very far from Dostoevsky, but it’s a respectable precursor of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.
* * *
THESE AND COLLINS’S OTHER EARLY VENTURES into fiction reveal a hardworking, highly capable craftsman, but one still in search of his true métier. With the first installment of The Woman in White, his essential style and power broke through. Dickens (himself no slouch in the hyperbole department) hailed it as one of the two most dramatic scenes in literature, the other being the march of the women to Versailles in Carlyle’s The French Revolution.
Walter Hartright, Collins’s hero, is walking alone through London, late at night,
when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me.
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
From here the novel rushes forward, inexorably unspooling its riveting story of mistaken identity, faked death, kidnapping, conspiracy, and lunatic asylums, all revealed in a series of interlocking narratives by the characters themselves, and all convincing because the voices are so natural; so normal. Nothing here of the high Gothic nonsense of Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and “Monk” Lewis, but a patina of domesticity laid over a cruel and vicious story. Henry James gave credit to Collins for “introducing into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors.… Instead of the terrors of Udolpho we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house, or the London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible.”
Collins is generally regarded as the inventor of what came to be known as the “sensation novel”—a contemporary story crammed with lurid incidents and constantly building in suspense. (His principle in writing fiction, he liked to say, was “Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait.”) At its most extreme, the melodrama is out of control, as in one of his later—and worst—novels, The Two Destinies, about which The Saturday Review said: “This is an amazingly silly book.… It records, if we have counted rightly, three attempts at suicide, two plots to murder, one case of bigamy, two bankruptcies, one sanguinary attack by Indians, three visions, numberless dreams, and one shipwreck.”
But his four most considerable works compel belief because they’re anchored in credible characters and consummately crafted plots. And in The Moonstone there is practically no “sensation” at all. Instead, we identify it as the grandfather of all detective novels, featuring, as it does, a baffling crime, a handful of plausible suspects, a startling yet logical solution, and a perfectly conceived venue: an isolated English country house, complete with loyal old family retainer and ex-convict maid. Again, you accept the complicated story because you believe the voices of the narrators, from the mercurial hero to the elderly Gabriel Betteredge (with his conviction that everything worth knowing can be found in the pages of Robinson Crusoe), to the maddening religious crank Miss Clack. Finally, in Sergeant Cuff (with his passion for roses), based on a famous Scotland Yard investigator, Collins created the template for the thorough, unflappable detective who would dominate the genre for decades.
The Moonstone, though less febrile and turbulent than The Woman in White, continues to hold the reader. T. S. Eliot, who twice wrote extensively about Collins, called it “the first and greatest of English detective novels.” And Dorothy Sayers (who should know) called it “probably the very finest detective novel ever written.”
* * *
COLLINS—WHO BEFORE HE STARTED WRITING A NEW BOOK spent months working out, detail by detail, the intricacies of the story—has generally been seen as stronger on plot than on characterization. But what most forcefully grips the reader of The Woman in White are its two central and mesmerizing characters—who also mesmerize each other. Count Fosco, the villain, is corpulent, sensual, a tyrant to his wife, ruthless in pursuit of his goals, grotesquely attached to the pet canaries and white mice who run freely over his body, and with an insinuating feminine charm. The heroine is not the passive, pretty Laura Fairlie, victim of Fosco’s intrigues, but her older half-sister, Marian Halcombe. When Walter Hartright first sees Marian across a room he is “struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude.” When she turns toward him and begins to advance,
the easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body … set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, “The lady is dark.” She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, “The lady is young.” She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), “The lady is ugly!”
But Marian—as Walter, and Fosco, and the reader will discover—is resilient and courageous, with a strong mind and a loving heart. Indeed, Fosco himself is powerfully drawn to her, while Marian is both repelled and fascinated by him. “Something transsexual,” Catherine Peters suggests, “is hinted at” between the “feminine” count and the “masculine” Marian (with her famous trace of a mustache), whose appearance, it has been proposed, was modeled in part on George Eliot’s. Marian Halcombe is Collins’s first commanding female character, but her heroism is essentially reactive, prompted by her concern for her endangered sister.
* * *
THE CENTRAL CHARACTER of No Name, the book that followed The Woman in White, is totally proactive. In the face of disaster, a young and cosseted gentlewoman, Magdalen Vanstone, assumes control of her life, lying, cheating, assuming a false identity—even taking to the stage!—and marrying a man she loathes (who conveniently dies), all in order to regain her situation in society. Her beloved parents, it transpires, had not been able to marry legally until shortly before her father was killed in a train crash and her mother died in childbirth. Whereupon Magdalen and her sister were, under the current laws, labeled illegitimate and brutally thrown upon the world.
Magdalen’s behavior is both heroic and dismaying; we admire her boldness and audacity while nervously acknowledging that her actions border on the criminal, and are certainly far from ladylike. That she prevails—eventually marrying an admirable man who cherishes her strength of mind and purpose—is the first sign we have that Wilkie Collins’s view of morality is radically different from that of his Victorian contemporaries. There is no woman in Dickens remotely like Magdalen Vanstone, and Thackeray’s Becky Sharp is a conniver, not a triumphant woman warrior who can finally gloat: “I am a respectable married woman, accountable to nobody under heaven but my husband. I have got a place in the world, and a name in the world, at last.�
� [My wickedness] has made Nobody’s Child, Somebody’s Wife.”
No Name is not only an unsettling drama centered on a powerful woman, it’s also the first of Collins’s agenda novels, in which he challenges Victorian legal and cultural injustices, almost always from a strongly feminist viewpoint—although he firmly resisted being labeled a feminist. (“He is the most genuinely feminist of all the 19th-century novelists,” wrote Sayers, “because he is the only one capable of seeing women without sexual bias and of respecting them as human individuals in their own right, and not as ‘the ladies, God bless them!’”)
The Law and the Lady features a resolute and brave young woman successfully defying convention—and risking her skin—in her determination to remove the stigma of the deplorable Scottish verdict of “not proven” after her husband’s trial for murdering his first wife (who—spoiler!—had actually committed suicide). Heart and Science is a fierce crusade against vivisection. Man and Wife has two agendas. It’s an attack both on the confusing and unfair marriage laws and on the “muscular Christianity” of Charles Kingsley and his followers: The heroine, at bay, has been betrayed by the handsome young athletic luminary the world worships. (He’s found out. She’s saved.) The Evil Genius takes on divorce and the custody of children. The Black Robe is anti-Jesuit. The New Magdalen and The Fallen Leaves deal with redeemed, or redeemable, prostitutes. It was novels like these that prompted Swinburne’s much-invoked couplet “What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition? / Some demon whispered—‘Wilkie! have a mission.’”
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