Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  Not only did Collins’s novels grow less convincing as they grew more missionary, but their melodrama grew coarser as he more and more frequently conceived them in relation to potential stage adaptations—his passion for the theater was lifelong. But he could be unconvincing even without an agenda on his mind, or a dramatization in view. Poor Miss Finch, written soon after The Moonstone, has a crackpot plot involving a rich blind girl who despite her blindness has an unconquerable aversion to the color blue; her doting suitor, Oscar, who turns blue from a medical procedure; and his identical-twin brother, Nugent, who also falls in love with Miss Finch. (He intrigues to marry her in place of his blue brother but—defeated and remorseful—dies on a polar expedition, “found dead,” as Ruskin put it, “with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.”)

  I can confirm that The Woman in White and The Moonstone remain irresistible, and that the other two Collins novels that can still be read with considerable pleasure are those that came between them: No Name and Armadale, his longest and most extravagantly plotted book. (T. S. Eliot wrote that Armadale “has no merit beyond melodrama, and it has every merit that melodrama can have.”)

  Peter Ackroyd, however, repudiates the idea that the great majority of Collins’s novels are without real value. “All of his work remains powerful and ingenious, striking and persuasive,” he sums up. “It is true that his later novels are no longer widely read, but modern taste is not impeccable.” Can he and I have read the same thirty novels? This is Ackroyd at his most provocative and least plausible, comparable to the near-fanatic insistence—which mars his magisterial biography of Dickens—that, despite both the evidence and common sense, Dickens never consummated his years-long liaison with Ellen Ternan.

  The hard truth is that if Collins had not written his four major novels, no one today, with or without impeccable taste, would have heard of him. His minor books are far inferior not only to the Big Four but to a number of other sensation novels of the day: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s wildly successful Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, for instance; even Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne. Whereas within the ten-year span of his finest work, he was a major force in British fiction, remaining highly popular until the end of his life. That is enough to justify a biographer of Ackroyd’s stature devoting a book to him.

  * * *

  WRITING ABOUT COLLINS in the late 1920s, Eliot complained that there was no “adequate biography” of him. Since then, as The Moonstone and The Woman in White have stubbornly refused to go away, the literature on him has swelled, and today there are at least a dozen substantial books, apart from Peters’s and Ackroyd’s, ranging from general biographies (The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins; Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation) to specialist academic literature (Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety; Wilkie Collins’s American Tour). But it’s not only Collins’s achievement that has fascinated so many writers. It’s also the complicated, almost brazenly unconventional life he chose to lead—and that he got away with.

  His father, William Collins, through heroic diligence rather than extraordinary talent, became one of England’s most successful painters. He was a benign and loving parent, though somewhat strict and relentlessly narrow-minded in religious matters. (He “would not shake hands with a Unitarian”!) And he adored his wife, Harriet, a clever, fun-loving, sociable woman of relatively good birth who had once worked as a governess. After her husband’s death she remained the central figure in the lives of her two sons, who made their official home with her well into their adulthood.

  But Wilkie was also out on the town. After a desultory dip into the legal profession—disappointing his father, who had hoped he would go into the church—he flirted with painting but soon realized that what he wanted to do was write. Soon enough, when he was only twenty-four, he published a very well received two-volume biography of his father that launched him into the London literary world. At the same time, he was launching himself into the life of a young voluptuary, having (he boasted to Dickens) enjoyed his first sexual adventure with a much older woman when he was thirteen or so while the family was living temporarily in Italy. Was it true?

  Certainly Wilkie admired women, pursued women, and succeeded with women, despite the fact that he was physically unprepossessing—quite short and (writes Catherine Peters) “oddly disproportioned, with a bulging forehead, head too large for his body, short arms and legs and ‘pretty little hands and feet, very like a woman’s.’” It was his charm and vivacity that attracted women to him, plus their appreciation of how much he appreciated them.

  His unembarrassed sexual activity—to one correspondent he wrote, “I have had between 40 and 50 years Experience of women of all sorts and sizes”—was one of the many things about him that appealed to Dickens, who was not only twelve years older than he was but, publicly, far more straitlaced. The aggressively domestic Dickens relished adventuring with Wilkie both on their long nighttime traipses through the slums of London and on their stays together in Paris, where lads could be lads, even though Dickens was a lad with ten children. The relationship between the two men was crucial for Wilkie—Dickens would become mentor, intimate friend, collaborator (they wrote plays and fiction together), boss (when Wilkie worked as well as wrote for All the Year Round), and publisher. They also became related by marriage, when Wilkie’s artist brother, Charley, whom he loved deeply, married Kate Dickens, her father’s favorite child.

  The marriage was a disaster: Charley was physically fragile and sexually ambivalent, if not asexual, and Dickens came to despise him. This did not help the Dickens–Collins friendship—Wilkie, always fiercely protective of his younger brother, began distancing himself from The Inimitable, and when Dickens died suddenly in 1870, at the age of fifty-eight, Wilkie took the death coolly. (He was certainly cool in his description of the unfinished Edwin Drood as “Dickens’s last laboured effort, the melancholy work of a worn-out brain.”)

  The death he had not taken coolly was that of his mother, which had occurred two years earlier while he was struggling to finish The Moonstone and suffering agonies from the rheumatic gout that tormented him throughout his adult life. He was in his mid-forties when Harriet died, and again and again through the following years he would refer to her death as “the greatest sorrow” of his life. She had moved out of London sometime before dying, but by this time he had a home of his own—two homes, in fact, and two “wives.”

  * * *

  ALMOST ALL THE MAJOR VICTORIAN NOVELISTS had irregular private lives. (Trollope was the great exception: He lived, apparently happily, with his wife until he died, and we know almost nothing about her.) Bulwer-Lytton so hated his wife that he once had her confined to a lunatic asylum. Thackeray’s wife, depressed and suicidal, spent most of her life in an institution. George Eliot lived in solemn sin with the married George Henry Lewes, whom, due to the complicated divorce laws, she couldn’t marry. About Dickens’s double life and wreck of a marriage we now know a great deal.

  But Wilkie Collins was violently opposed to marriage, so that his double life was both more and less scandalous than the others. He simply practiced what amounted to legal bigamy, setting up two women in separate establishments, each knowing about the other and knowing about (and known to) his friends. To his male friends, that is: Neither Caroline Graves, who lived with him on and off for more than thirty years, nor Martha Rudd, who came along later and bore him three children, could be acknowledged by the ladies of his acquaintance, beginning with his mother. Harriet Collins had simply refused to acknowledge the existence of Caroline, a respectable and intelligent lower-class woman who acted as Wilkie’s hostess, dined out and traveled with him, and was a recognized and constant part of his life—more a common-law wife than a disreputable mistress, as Catherine Peters puts it.

  When they met, Caroline was a widow with a young child whom Wilkie raised, educated, and loved. In later years, this girl, Carrie, functioned as his secretary—he even dictated parts of his later novels to her—and
he gave her in marriage to a young attorney whom he then (disastrously) employed. Wilkie spoke of Carrie as his adopted daughter, and she and her children remained central to his life.

  The most dramatic story told about Wilkie has to do with his first encounter with Caroline Graves. Supposedly, he, Charley, and their great friend the artist John Everett Millais were walking through the streets late one night when a woman—dressed, of course, in white—darted out of a house in terror and fled into the dark. Wilkie, consumed with curiosity, followed her and claimed her.

  This story, so conveniently reflecting the opening of The Woman in White, seems to have no basis in fact—it was spun by Millais’s son years after all the players in the drama were dead. More prosaically, it appears that when she and Wilkie met, Caroline was running a small marine shop near where the Collins family lived.

  The origins of Martha Rudd are equally obscure. The daughter of a shepherd, she came from a small fishing village in Norfolk where Wilkie often spent time sailing, and where he discovered her and attached her to himself, again for life. (It’s also been suggested that he came upon her when she was working as a housemaid in his mother’s home—to me, a more plausible story.) Martha was an attractive young woman, modest, capable, and practical, who seems not to have minded her irregular situation—no doubt she saw it as a big step up in the world: a good man, a famous man, security, affection. Certainly Wilkie treated her generously, lived with her—often under an assumed name—when he wasn’t living with Caroline, and loved their children.

  Although the two “wives” probably never met, Martha’s children mingled happily with Caroline and with Carrie’s children, and they were all treated equally and fairly in Wilkie’s will. After Wilkie died, Ackroyd tells us, Caroline “took care of the grave at Kensal Green until her own death in 1895 placed her in the same earth. Martha Rudd then tended the grave until her death in 1919.” So who are we to bridle at these unusual arrangements?

  * * *

  WILKIE’S OPENLY UNORTHODOX DOMESTIC LIFE, his peculiar appearance (“flamboyant … eccentric rather than dandyish”), and his championship of unpopular causes in his novels all went to sustain what Peters calls his “more or less conscious decision to be not quite a gentleman.” But none of this had a negative effect on those who knew him. He had to an abundant degree the gift of being loved—by colleagues and friends, by men and women, by young and old. Nina Lehmann, a first-rate pianist and for decades with her husband at the center of London artistic life, said of him and the twenty years of what she called their “steady friendship”: “always the same, always kind, always earnest, always interested, always true, always loving and faithful … I value my Wilkie and I love him dearly.” Her son, Rudy, reminisced about “our dear old Wilkie Collins, the kindest and best friend that boy or man ever had.” Even George Eliot was conquered, remarking on “a sturdy uprightness about him that makes all opinion and all occupation respectable.”

  When Wilkie died, in 1889, at the age of sixty-five, his health had entirely given way from the combination of his agonizing arthritic gout and the immense amount of laudanum (a liquid tincture of opium) that he had taken through the years to combat the pain. He was unable to finish his final novel (his friend Walter Besant did it for him), and one feels he was surprised that he had survived as long as he had. He had no reason, however, to regret his life: He had successfully flouted convention, was fulfilled sexually and emotionally, and had enjoyed an immensely successful and well-rewarded career from start to finish.

  Of course we recognize the limits of his accomplishment—Dickens, wrote T. S. Eliot, is “separated from Collins by the difference between pure unaccountable genius and pure consummate talent.” But to be mentioned in the same breath with Dickens is a remarkable tribute. As Dorothy Sayers put it, “When we have said that he cannot equal the giants of his age, the fact remains that it is with giants that we compare him.”

  The New York Review of Books

  JUNE 8, 2017

  A Russian Classic Revisited

  ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of getting old—and, believe it or not, there are others—is that you get to reread (and sometimes re-reread) books that you first knew sixty or more years earlier. Some writers are always with us—Jane Austen, for instance, for people like me; some books we may go back to every decade or two: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Idiot—an admired new translation may spur us on; Middlemarch, Moby-Dick, Proust. But other remarkable works drop out of sight, if not out of mind.

  Very recently, after playing with the idea for half a dozen years, I went back to one of the most famous of all Russian novels, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, a book that all too many Western readers, if they know about it at all, think of as the novel about a man who never gets out of bed. They’re right in one sense: It’s the central figure of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov who for more than one hundred fifty years has supplied Russia with a word for an apparently fundamental quality of the Russian identity: oblomovshchina. Which is the state of being like Oblomov—a man, a member of the landed gentry, who is so without strength of will or purpose that he simply does nothing.

  Though he does get out of bed—sort of. His serf-servant Zakhar, one of the major comic characters of literature, helps him put on his stockings and boots and attends to his basic needs, but he’s as lazy as his master. Yet Zakhar is shrewd in his peasant way, whereas Oblomov is the opposite of shrewd: He’s a sublime innocent, completely without guile and without protection from the predatory people who surround him. He’s far from stupid, he’s educated, his looks are appealing, his estate (which he never visits) provides him with enough to live on, although he’s being robbed blind. He just lacks all energy, and his placid good nature protects him from suspicions, resentments, or ambitions. In other words, he’s a hopeless case—and a beautiful soul.

  His great friend Stolz is his exact opposite—dynamic, tireless, indefatigable. (Well, of course: He’s half German.) While Oblomov hardly ever strays from his bed, his sofa, and his dressing gown, Stolz is rushing around the country, around Europe, in a whirlwind of productive activity, every once in a while coming home to St. Petersburg to prod and poke his friend into doing … something. Anything. Go to your estate and fix it up; come to Europe with me; get back into society. Oblomov would obey if he only could, but he can’t: Yes, of course you’re right, Stolz—but not now. And then, through his friend, he encounters a woman who rouses his ardor: the beautiful, intelligent, soulful Olga. Can she really love him back? Can it be true that she will marry him? It is true, and he is incandescent with happiness. Except that he ponders, hesitates, procrastinates, postpones. And Olga is a young woman in love with life, with a passion for seeing, doing, seeking. Before it’s too late she steps back, anguished but clear-minded, and eventually finds in Stolz himself the man she can spend her life with. Though even in her happiness with him she is questioning her purpose, almost abandoning herself to an insidious (Russian?) melancholy, from which he determinedly succeeds in rescuing her.

  Whereas the nineteenth-century European novel is almost dominated by women toying with, or surrendering to, adultery, Olga is a woman toying with despair. What is life about? What is it for? How to live it? She isn’t political—she isn’t going to become a bomb-throwing anarchist. She isn’t driven intellectually or artistically—a George Sand, say. She’s the opposite of socially ambitious. She may be the first woman in fiction to find herself in the grip of what we would call an existential crisis. The second major strand of Oblomov is the desperate, painful evolution she forces herself to experience, in contrast to the hero’s resistance to all evolution—indeed, to all action.

  In their marital happiness, Stolz and Olga go about their busy, productive life together, almost forgetting their great friend. Stolz has rescued Oblomov from the predatory crooks who have been robbing him, but years go by with no contact between them—Stolz is so busy, Oblomov is so lazy. But eventually husband and wife go to St. Petersburg to bring Oblomov back into their lives. And find
him exactly where they left him, comfortably established in his old apartment, and more or less married to the loving and worshipful landlady whose sexy bare elbows and exquisite cooking provide him with all he wants and needs in life. He has rediscovered the secure and undemanding world of his childhood, in which he takes for granted everything that is unstintingly done for him; he’s re-created the world of oblomovshchina. At least, though, he’s managed to father a little boy, named for Stolz, whom Stolz carries away to be raised by him and Olga and presumably infused with their own life-force. Yet much as they deplore Oblomov’s failure of vitality and stamina, the Stolzes never cease honoring his “pure, pure heart.” His, says Stolz, “is a transparent, incorruptible soul.” A Russian soul.

  I must be Russian. There’s a side of me that could happily never get out of bed, given a stack of books and a good reading lamp: I’m Oblomov. But then there’s the side that can’t bear to be without a job to do, without something to accomplish: I’m Stolz. How did Goncharov, back in 1859, know me so well?

  From the start, Oblomov was recognized as a masterpiece. “Goncharov is ten heads above me in talent,” said Chekhov. “I am in rapture over Oblomov and keep rereading it,” said Tolstoy. And Dostoevsky came to rank it with Dead Souls and War and Peace. Who are we to disagree?

  Departures

  SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

  Just for the Fun of It

  FIFTY BOOKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  WHAT A PECULIAR LITTLE BOOK! John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford and lead book critic of the Sunday Times of London, picks the fifty books of the twentieth century that have given him the greatest reading pleasure. These are definitely not, he reassures us, books reflecting anything so pretentious as “literary ‘greatness,’ the testimony they bear to the human spirit or anything of that kind.” No, pleasure is the only guiding principle.