Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  The regular pregnancies imply a certain frequency of intercourse, but Dickens plainly stopped desiring Catherine fairly early in the marriage, complaining that she had grown fat and clumsy and was continually unwell. It seems unlikely that she herself invited or insisted on conjugal sex, since it was the continual childbearing that undermined her health. (There was, of course, no question of using contraception.) One can only suppose that for Dickens it was the equivalent of those twenty- or thirty-mile walks that he was fond of taking, at an average speed of 4.5 miles an hour—a way of releasing and relieving the extraordinary energy and nervous tension pent up in his small, neat body, while the dutiful wife lay back and thought of England (or perhaps The Pickwick Papers). The novels throw no direct light on the subject, because they contain not a single word about physical sexuality. Extreme reticence on this aspect of human behaviour was of course compulsory for all Victorian novelists, but Dickens, unlike many of his peers (Thackeray, for example), does not seem to have chafed under this constraint. His imagination was exceptionally chaste. There is not a risqué joke, or a single scene that would “bring a blush into the cheek of the young person” (Podsnap’s phrase), in his entire oeuvre. For an essentially comic writer, this is a remarkable achievement.

  He seems to have subscribed to the view, widely held (or at least professed) among the Victorian middle classes, that normal women didn’t have sexual appetites, and put up with men’s for the sake of matrimony and motherhood. His heroines are either childlike or saintly, presexual or asexual (Dora and Agnes in David Copperfield are prime examples of each type, and Amy Dorrit combines both). In life Dickens’s most intense emotional relationships were with younger, virginal women, notably Mary Hogarth, Catherine’s younger sister, who lived with them at the beginning of their married life, and died suddenly and tragically in Dickens’s arms, aged only seventeen. He wore one of her rings for the rest of his life, kept a lock of her hair and her clothes, and said it was impossible to exaggerate her influence on him. In due course his sister-in-law Georgina came to occupy a similar place in the household. She was a more intimate companion to Dickens than Catherine, and rumours that she was his mistress were quashed only when she submitted to a medical examination that confirmed she was a virgin. Perhaps with Nelly he finally achieved a relationship that was both emotionally and erotically satisfying. One rather hopes so.

  In the 1850s Dickens was going through what we would call a midlife crisis. Jane Smiley does not attempt to excuse his treatment of Catherine, which was deplorable, but by viewing the episode in the perspective of our own “divorce culture,” and by empathising with the peculiar psychological pressures that Dickens suffered as artist, entrepreneur, and celebrity, she makes his behaviour comprehensible. She follows Edmund Wilson (in his classic essay, “Dickens: the Two Scrooges”) in seeing the novelist’s imagination as essentially dualistic—constantly affirming the necessity of virtue, love, altruism, but constantly attracted to the portrayal of evil, cruelty, and hypocrisy. It is a critical commonplace that his most memorable characters are all morally flawed, if not outright villains. The unregenerate Scrooge is much more entertaining than the reformed one. Wilson traced this deep, dark vein in the novelist’s work back to the traumatic episode in his childhood when his father was imprisoned for debt and the twelve-year-old boy was abruptly ejected from home and school and sent to work sticking labels on bottles in a blacking factory on the bank of the Thames, in the company of rats and a young orphan called Bob Fagin. Dickens kept this episode a secret from family and friends for most of his life. Around 1850 he wrote down the story for his own eyes only, and later showed it to Forster, who published it posthumously in the first biography of the novelist. “The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless,” Dickens wrote, “of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written.” Of course it was written, indirectly, in Dickens’s incomparable rendering of oppressed and helpless children in his fiction, which confirms Wilson’s thesis. But Smiley cautions us against a too reductively Freudian interpretation of Dickens when she points out that novelists do not merely draw on personal experience of conflict in creating their work—they also in a sense discover it in the process of writing. “Art that has a revelatory effect upon the reader had its first revelatory effect upon the writer; the process of working out the plots and relationships in an ambitious novel is always a learning process.”

  Writing fiction, in Jane Smiley’s view, is a way of imposing order upon the chaotic flux of experience, to make it comprehensible and to project a vision of what it should or might be, and she offers the interesting suggestion that Dickens tried to make the real world correspond to his fictionally ordered version of it. She argues that the extraordinary amount of time and energy that he expended on nonliterary activities of a social and philanthropic nature—the good works, the fund-raising, the consciousness-raising, the speeches and dinners and parties and Christmas festivities and amateur theatricals—is best explained as an effort to embody in his own life the vision of the good society implicit in his books. To outward appearances he succeeded to an astonishing degree; but inwardly he was disappointed and unfulfilled in one aspect of his life: the affective and erotic. In Nelly Ternan he saw a last chance to make up for this absence, and seized it, putting the whole edifice of bourgeois respectability that he had laboriously constructed in jeopardy. That is Smiley’s analysis of the affair, and it is persuasive, as is her account of its effect on his professional career.

  In spite of the smokescreen Dickens created around his relationship with Nelly, the rumours and journalistic coverage damaged his reputation as a model Victorian public man. “His ties with the mainstream . . . loosened.” He no longer embodied unproblematically the values and aspirations of the middle-class reading public in his novels, which became darker and less reader-friendly. Younger readers found him eccentrically old-fashioned; older readers regretted the passing of the genial, cheerful, reassuring tone of the early books. In his own life he cultivated “the sort of relationships that are primary in our century—one-to-one intimacies on the one hand, joined with star-to-audience performances on the other.”

  These performances were the public readings which occupied more and more of Dickens’s time and energy in the last decade of his life, and which undoubtedly hastened his death in 1870, at the age of 58. They were by all accounts extraordinary events. Without the aid of artificial amplification, he held huge audiences (2,000 in Birmingham, 3,700 in Bradford) spellbound. Listeners fainted at his rendering of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes. It was a natural extension of his enthusiasm for amateur theatricals, but now Dickens was the complete professional. He revised the extracts from his novels to make them dramatically more effective, rehearsed every nuance of his delivery, and supervised every detail of the staging and lighting. He made a good deal of money from these performances, but that was not the primary motive for undertaking them. He was addicted to the high that comes from thrilling and controlling an audience. Smiley is also surely right to argue that it was a way of maintaining his unique and unprecedented relationship with the public. His readings consisted mostly of “golden oldies” from his early novels—A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit. The appropriate modern analogy is not the more or less competent reading by a more or less nervous novelist in a bookshop or at a literary festival, but the triumphal tour of an aging, still charismatic pop star.

  Although Dickens was the greatest of Victorian novelists, his work did not flow in the same direction as the strongest literary current of the time, which was towards greater and greater realism in the rendering of the social world and individual psychology. In that respect the somewhat younger George Eliot was much more representative, and it is significant that in an article writte
n in 1856, at the threshold of her own literary career, she criticised Dickens’s depiction of human beings because “he failed to give us their psychological character.” Henry James (who as a child hid under a table to listen to his father reading David Copperfield, and was discovered when he was unable to restrain his sobs at the pathos of the story) put the boot into Our Mutual Friend in the same year when he published his own first tale, complaining in a review that it was “wanting in inspiration” and its characters “lifeless, flat, mechanical.” Jane Smiley, on the contrary, regards it as “Dickens’s perfect novel, seamless and true and delightful in every line.”

  The prestige of the Jamesian poetics of fiction in the modern period, reinforced in England by the rather humourless and puritanical school of F. R. Leavis (who famously dismissed Dickens as “a great entertainer” in The Great Tradition [1948], though he offered a more generous estimate later), inhibited critical appreciation of Dickens. Smiley suggests that our postmodernist age is more receptive to his kind of “flat,” larger-than-life, often grotesque characterization:

  Dickens appeals to that part of the reader that recognises that much is left undiscussed by reasonable discourse, that people and institutions often do populate our inner lives not as who they are but as what they mean to us, and that we often do not see them whole and complex, but simple and strange. This view, of course, has an affinity with childhood, as Dickens had an affinity with childhood, but it also has an affinity with many states of consciousness throughout life, including madness or obsession and exalted states of love or spiritual transcendence. That Dickens submerged into his style many good, useful and humane ideas is a testament to the fact that his vision did not prevent him from living and working in the world, but simply intensified his experience of it. As he said to Forster, “Only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is.”

  That desperately intense nature produced an imagined world of extraordinary vividness, variety, and life-enhancing humour—but at a certain human cost, which Jane Smiley’s book helps us to measure: the awesome expenditure of energy, the unremitting demands made upon himself and others, and the eventual abbreviation of life itself. Charles Dickens was indeed “the Inimitable.” Few other writers have possessed his willpower, never mind his genius.

  chapter four

  FORSTER’S FLAWED MASTERPIECE

  EVER SINCE LIONEL Trilling’s seminal E. M. Forster: A Study (1943), which argued persuasively for Forster’s canonical status, and focused special attention on Howards End, that novel has been required reading for serious students of modern English fiction. It has been exhaustively discussed and analysed in innumerable periodical articles and books. The details of its genesis, composition, and reception have been painstakingly recuperated, and the author’s manuscript pored over for evidence of changes of authorial intention. And yet very few of the critics and scholars who have devoted so much time and attention to Howards End have concurred with Trilling’s judgement that it is Forster’s masterpiece. Most would award that accolade to A Passage to India (1924). Many have expressed dissatisfaction with the earlier novel, for a variety of reasons: its design is excessively schematic, its plot relies on improbable coincidences, the behaviour and motivation of the main characters are sometimes implausible, and its verbal style is prone to sudden, and not always happy, shifts of tone.

  How can we explain or resolve the paradox, of a novel apparently so deeply flawed and yet so inexhaustibly fascinating to literary critics? There are, I suggest, two reasons. First, the good things in Howards End are very good indeed. Second, even when it does not fully convince as fiction, it is always intelligently engaged with issues of the deepest interest and concern to the kind of people who teach the humanities in universities, and to the much larger number of people whose values and beliefs have been largely formed by such an education. Howards End fingers with unparalleled precision a sensitive spot in the consciousness, or conscience (in French the word conscience has both meanings), of the liberal literary intelligentsia. In one of the best recent essays on Howards End, Daniel Born has argued persuasively that it provides “the most comprehensive picture of liberal guilt in this century.”1 The issue it addresses, and dramatises in an absorbing human story, is whether culture in the large sense defined by Matthew Arnold, as the pursuit of “a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society,”2 is ultimately dependent on the availability of money; and if so, what stance should those who subscribe to that view of culture adopt towards those who make money and towards those who have little or none.

  Of course, the question does not present itself in quite the same terms at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it did in the first decade of the twentieth. For Margaret Schlegel (and for Forster) the possibility of bad faith arose when people of her type and class refused to recognize that their way of life, with its priorities, attitudes, and values, depended on the possession of private incomes, inherited and invested. “You and I . . . stand upon money as upon islands,” she says to her aunt. “It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence . . . I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same . . . And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders.”3 One reason she respects the Wilcoxes is that they make no hypocritical pretence of despising the money that supports their life-style, and another is that they work hard for it. Today there are fewer intellectuals living on unearned income, but most of us are enmeshed in capitalist economies, uncomfortably aware (or complacently unaware) that the quality of our lives depends ultimately upon economic structures which entail injustice and inequality on a global scale.

  Like all classics, Howards End is both revealing of its own time and yet of more than “period” interest. The manners and morals of middle-class English society in the decade before the Great War are preserved in its pages like a collection of perfect fossils. Some features of this world have gone forever: for example, the existence of a huge pool of cheap labour for domestic service; or the repressive and hypocritical sexual code which made pregnancy outside marriage the ultimate disgrace for a respectable woman. But in other respects, Howards End seems surprisingly relevant to our own contemporary concerns, especially in the debate it stages between the values of the liberal intelligentsia and those of the capitalist bourgeoisie. The Schlegels belong to the Edwardian equivalent of what an inspired anonymous British journalist in the 1980s called “the chattering classes,” while the Wilcoxes are Thatcherites avant la lettre. When Henry Wilcox says to Margaret, “You can take it from me that there is no Social Question—except for a few journalists who try and get a living out of the phrase,” he anticipates Mrs. Thatcher’s notorious assertion (to a journalist) that “there is no such thing as Society.” In her effort to make a connection between these two opposed social groups and their value-systems, Margaret Schlegel anticipates the ideological shift of the “soft left” towards acceptance of market economics following the collapse of Communism.

  Edward Morgan Forster was born in 1879. His father died in the following year, and he was brought up by his mother, assisted by numerous female relatives. He later recalled the ambience of his childhood as “a haze of elderly ladies.”4 Notable among these was his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, whose father had been a leading member of the so-called “Clapham Sect,” an influential group of high-minded Evangelical Anglicans in the first decades of the century. She left Forster £8000 in trust on her death in 1887, enough to assure him of a modestly comfortable private income in adult life. But the most intense and important emotional tie in his childhood, and for long afterwards, was with his widowed mother, who never remarried. In psychoanalytical terms it was a classic scenario for the development of a homosexual temperament.

  The happiest years of Forster’s childhood were those between 1883 and 1893, when he lived with his mother at Rooks-nest, a house in the country near Stevenage in Hertfordshire, about twenty-five mile
s north of London, that was to be the model for “Howards End.” Later they moved to Tonbridge, in Kent, where Forster attended Tonbridge School. In spite of being protected from the full rigours of a British public school by virtue of being a day pupil rather than a boarder, Forster was deeply miserable at this establishment. His gentle, shy, feminized personality was at odds with the aggressively masculine, athletic, and imperialistic ethos of the school (of which the Wilcoxes might have been products).

  In 1897, however, Forster went up to Kings College Cambridge to read classics, and was happy once more. He came under the influence, indirect rather than direct, of the philosopher G. E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) argued that affectionate personal relations and the contemplation of beauty are the supremely good states of mind. This teaching was enthusiastically adopted by some of the cleverest young men in Cambridge, such as Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes, who in due course carried it to London, where, stripped of Moore’s own austere moral code, it became the hedonistic philosophy of the Bloomsbury Group. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of Cambridge on Forster’s personal and intellectual development. As an undergraduate he found there a kind of ideal society—privileged but not ostentatiously affluent, steeped in tradition, and housed in beautiful ancient buildings. It was at that time an almost exclusively male society, in which intense friendships could and did develop. It was at Cambridge that Forster recognized his homosexual orientation, though some years passed before he experienced his first physical relationship.