Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  He was so industrious that (despite his generosity) even the work of his own friends failed to impress him. "There is a horrid respectability about the most of the best of them," he wrote," -- a little, finite, systematic routine in them, strangely expressive to me of the state of England herself." Yet he was ever the champion of the unchampioned -- as in Mr. Sleary's heartfelt and lisped plea for the circus artists in Hard Times. "Don't be croth with uth poor vagabondth. People must be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a learning, nor yet can they be alwayth a working, they ain't made for it. You mutht have uth, Thquire. Do the withe thing and the kind thing, too, and make the betht of uth; not the wortht!" It is this quality in Dickens that has been blessed by Irving Howe, who writes that "in [his] strongest novels, entertainer and moralist come to seem shadows of one another -- finally two voices out of the same mouth."

  Dickens's gift is how spontaneously he can render a situation both sympathetic and hilarious -- and charged with his fierce indignation, with what Johnson calls his "furious exposure of social evils." Yet Dickens's greatest risk taking, as a writer, has little to do with his social morality. What he is most unafraid of is sentimentality -- of anger, of passion, of emotionally and psychologically revealing himself; he is not self-protective; he is never careful. In the present, postmodernist praise of the craft of writing -- of the subtle, of the exquisite -- we may have refined the very heart out of the novel. Dickens would have had more fun with today's literary elitists and minimalists than he had with Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Jellyby. He was the king of the novel in the same century that produced the models of the form.

  Dickens wrote great comedy -- high and low -- and he wrote great melodrama. At the conclusion of the first stage of Pip's expectations, Dickens writes: "Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts." But we are ashamed of our tears. We live at a time when critical taste tells us that to be softhearted is akin to doltishness; we're so influenced by the junk on television that even in reacting against it we overreact -- we conclude that any attempt to move an audience to laughter or to tears is shameless, is either sitcom or soap opera or both.

  Edgar Johnson is correct in observing that "though much has been said about Victorian restraint, emotionally it is we who are restrained, not they. Large bodies of modern readers, especially those called 'sophisticated,' distrust any uncurbed yielding to emotion. Above all when the emotion is noble, heroic, or tender, they wince in skeptical suspicion or distaste. A heartfelt expression of sentiment seems to them exaggerated, hypocritical, or embarrassing." And Johnson offers a reason for this. "There are explanations, of course, for our peculiar fear of sentiment as sentimental. With the enormous growth of popular fiction, vulgar imitators have cheapened the methods they learned from great writers and coarsened their delineation of emotion. Dickens's very powers marked him out as a model for such emulation."

  To the modern reader, too often when a writer risks being sentimental the writer is already guilty. But as a writer it is cowardly to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. It is typical -- and forgivable-- among student writers to avoid being mush-minded by simply refusing to write about people, or by refusing to subject characters to emotional extremes. Dickens took sentimental risks with abandon. "His weapons were those of caricature and burlesque," Johnson writes, "of melodrama and unrestrained sentiment."

  And here's another wonderful thing about him: his writing is never vain -- I mean that he never sought to be original. He never pretended to be an explorer, discovering neglected evils. Nor was he so vain as to imagine that his love or his use of the language was particularly special; he could write very prettily when he wanted to but he never had so little to say that he thought the object of writing was pretty language; he did not care about being original in that way either. The broadest novelists never cared for that kind of original language -- Dickens, Hardy, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Melville ... their so-called style is every style; they use all styles. To such novelists, originality with language is mere fashion; it will pass. The larger, plainer things -- the things they are preoccupied with, their obsessions -- these will last: the story, the characters, the laughter and the tears.

  Yet writers who are considered masters of style have also marveled at Dickens's technical brilliance, while recognizing it as instinctual -- as nothing anyone ever learned, or could be taught. G. K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens: A Critical Study is both an appreciative and a precise view of Dickens's techniques; Chesterton also offers a marvelous defense of Dickens's characters. "Though his characters often were caricatures, they were not such caricatures as was supposed by those who had never met such characters," Chesterton writes. "And the critics had never met the characters; because the critics did not live the common life of the English people; and Dickens did. England was a much more amusing and horrible place than it appeared to the sort of man who wrote reviews."

  It is worth noting that both Johnson and Chesterton stress Dickens's fondness for the common; Dickens's critics stress his eccentricity. "There can be no question of the importance of Dickens as a human event in history," Chesterton writes, "... a naked flame of mere genius, breaking out in a man without culture, without tradition, without help from historic religions and philosophies or from the great foreign schools; and revealing a light that never was on sea or land, if only the long fantastic shadows that it threw from common things."

  Vladimir Nabokov has pointed out that Dickens didn't write every sentence as if his reputation depended on it. "When Dickens has some information to impart to his reader through conversation or meditation, the imagery is generally not conspicuous," Nabokov writes. Dickens knew how to keep a reader reading; he trusted his descriptive powers -- as much as he trusted his ability to make his readers feel emotionally connected to his characters. Very simply, narrative momentum and emotional interest in the characters are what make a novel more compellingly readable on page 300 than it is on page 30. "The bursts of vivid imagery are spaced" is how Nabokov puts it.

  But didn't he exaggerate everything? his critics ask.

  "When people say that Dickens exaggerates," George Santayana writes, "it seems to me that they have no eyes and no ears. They probably have only notions of what things and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value." And to those who contend that no one was ever so sentimental, or that there was no one ever like Wemmick or Jaggers or Bentley Drummle, Santayana says: "The polite world is lying; there are such people; we are such people ourselves in our true moments." Santayana also defends Dickens's stylistic excesses: "This faculty, which renders him a consummate comedian, is just what alienated him from a later generation in which people of taste were aesthetes and virtuous people were higher snobs; they wanted a mincing art, and he gave them copious improvisation, they wanted analysis and development, and he gave them absolute comedy."

  No wonder that -- both because of and in spite of his popularity -- Dickens was frequently misunderstood, and often mocked. In his first visit to America he was relentless in his attack on America's practice of ignoring international copyright; he also detested slavery, and said so, and he found loathsome and crude the American habit of spitting -- according to Dickens, practically everywhere! For his criticism he was rewarded by our critics, who called him a "flash reporter" and "that famous penny-a-liner"; his mind was described as "coarse, vulgar, impudent, and superficial"; he was called "narrow-minded" and "conceited," and among all visitors, ever, to "this original and remarkable country," he was regarded as "the most flimsy -- the most childish -- the most trashy -- the most contemptible.

  So, of course, Dickens had enemies; they could not touch his splendid instincts, or match his robust life. Before beginning Great Expectations, he said, "I must make the most I can out of the book -- I think a good name?" Good, indeed, and a title many writers wish were free for them to use, a title many wonderful novels could have had: The Great Gatsby, To the
Lighthouse, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Sun Also Rises, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick -- all great expectations, of course.

  2. A Prisoner of Marriage; the "One Happiness I Have Missed in Life ..."

  But what about the plot? his critics ask. Aren't his plots unlikely?

  Oh, boy; are they ever "unlikely"! I wonder how many people who call a plot "unlikely" ever realize that they do not like any plot at all. The nature of plot is unlikely. And if you've been reading a great many contemporary novels, you're probably unused to encountering much in the way of plot there; should you encounter one now, you'd be sure to find it unlikely. Yet when the British sailed off to their little war with Argentina in 1982, they used the luxury liner, the Queen Elizabeth II, as a troop transport. And what became the highest military priority of the Argentinean forces, who were quite overpowered in this war? To sink that luxury liner, the Queen Elizabeth II, of course -- to salvage, at the very least, what people call a "moral victory." Imagine that! But we accept far more unlikely events in the news than we accept in fiction. Fiction is, and has to be, better made than the news; plots, even the most unlikely ones, are better made than real life, too.

  Let us look at Charles Dickens's marriage for a moment; the story of his marriage, were we to encounter it in any novel, would seem highly unlikely to us. When Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, Catherine's younger sister Mary, who was only 16, moved in with them; Mary adored her sister's husband, and she was an ever-cheerful presence in their house -- perhaps seeming all the more good-natured and even-tempered alongside Catherine's periods of sullen withdrawal. How much easier it is to be a visitor than to be a spouse; and to make matters worse, Mary died at 17, thus perfectly enshrining herself in Dickens's memory -- and becoming, in the later years of his marriage to Kate (Catherine was called Kate), an even more impossible idol, against whom poor Kate could never compete. Mary was a vision of perfection as girlish innocence, of course, and she would appear and reappear in Dickens's novels -- she is Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, she is Agnes in David Copperfield, she is Little Dorrit. Surely her goodness finds its way into Biddy in Great Expectations, too, although Biddy's capabilities for criticizing Pip come from stronger stuff than anything Dickens would have had the occasion to encounter in Mary Hogarth.

  In his first visit to America, while Dickens made few references to the strains that Kate felt while traveling (her anxieties for the children back in England, especially), he did observe the profound lack of interest in America that was expressed by Kate's maid. Kate herself, he documented -- in the course of getting on and off boats and coaches and trains -- had fallen 743 times. Although this was surely an exaggeration, Mrs. Dickens did compile an impressive record of clumsiness; Johnson suggests that she suffered from a nervous disorder, for her lack of physical control was remarkable. Dickens once cast her in one of his amateur theatrical company's performances -- it was a small part in which Kate spoke a total of only 30 lines; yet she managed to fall through a trapdoor on stage and so severely sprained her ankle that she had to be replaced. It seems an extreme step to take to gain Dickens's attention; but Kate surely suffered their marriage in her own way as acutely as her husband did in his.

  When Dickens's 23-year-old marriage to Kate was foundering, who would be living with them but another of Kate's younger sisters? Dickens found Georgina "the most admirable and affectionate of girls"; and such was her loyalty to him that after Dickens and Kate separated, Georgina remained with Dickens. She might have been in love with him, and quite more to him than a help with the children (Kate bore Dickens 10 children), but there is nothing to suggest that their relationship was sexual -- although, at the time, they were subject to gossip about that.

  At the time of his separation from Kate, Dickens was probably in love with an 18-year-old actress in his amateur theatrical company -- her name was Ellen Ternan. When Kate discovered a bracelet that Dickens had intended as a present for Ellen (he was in the habit of giving little gifts to his favorite performers), Kate accused him of having already consummated a relationship with Ellen -- a relationship that, in all likelihood, was not consummated until some years after Dickens and Kate had separated. (Dickens's relationship with Ellen Ternan must have been nearly as guilt ridden and unhappy as his marriage.) At the time of the separation, Kate's mother spread the rumor that Dickens had already taken Ellen Ternan as his mistress. Dickens published a statement under the headline "PERSONAL" on the front page of his own, very popular magazine (Household Words) that such "misrepresentations" of his character were "most grossly false." Dickens's self-righteousness in his own defense invited controversy; every detail of his marriage and separation was published in The New York Tribune and in all the English newspapers. Imagine that!

  It was 1858. Within three years, Dickens would change the name of Household Words to All the Year Round and continue his exhausting habit of serializing his novels for his magazine; he would begin the great numbers of fervent public readings that would undermine his health (he would give more than 400 readings before his death in 1870); and he would complete both A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. "I am incapable of rest," he told his best and oldest friend, John Forster. "I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing."

  As for love: he would lament that a true love was the "one happiness I have missed in life, and the one friend and companion I never made." More than a little of that melancholic conviction would haunt Pip's quest of Estella's love (and profoundly influence Dickens's first version of the ending of Great Expectations). And the slowness and the coldness with which the teenaged Ellen Ternan responded to the famous author in his late forties would cause Dickens to know more than a little of what Pip's longing for Estella was.

  His marriage to Kate had, in his view, been a prison; but in taking leave of it, he had encountered a most public scandal and humiliation, and a reluctant mistress -- the relationship with Ellen Ternan would never be joyously celebrated. The lovelessness of his marriage would linger with him -- just as the dust of the debtors' prison would pursue Mr. Dorrit, just as the cold mists of the marshes would follow young Pip to London, just as the "taint" of Newgate would hang over Pip when he so hopefully meets Estella's coach.

  Pip is another of Dickens's orphans, but he is never so pure as Oliver Twist and never so nice as

  David Copperfield. He is not only a young man with unrealistic expectations; he is a young brat who adopts the superior manners of a gentleman (an unearned position) while detesting his lowly origins and feeling ashamed in the company of men of a higher social class than his. Pip is a snob. "It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home," he admits; yet as he sets out to London to enjoy his unknown benefactor's provisions, Pip heaps "a gallon of condescension upon everybody in the village."

  It must have been a time of self-doubt for Dickens -- at least, he suffered some reevaluation of his self-esteem. He had kept his workdays in the blacking warehouse a secret from his own children. Although his origins were not so lowly as young Pip's, Dickens must have thought them low enough. He would never forget how deeply his spirits sank when he was pasting labels on the bottles at Hungerford Stairs.

  And was he feeling guilty, too, and considering some of his own ventures to have only the airs of a gentleman (without real substance) about them? Surely the patrician goals to which young Pip aspires are held in some contempt in Great Expectations: the mysterious and elaborate provisions that enable Pip to "live smooth," to "be above work." At the end -- as often at the end with Dickens -- there is a softening of the heart; the work ethic, that bastion of the middle class, is graciously given some respect. "We were not in a grand way of business," Pip says of his job, "but we had a good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well." This is an example of what Chesterton means: that "Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted." This is an important distinction, especially when regarding Dickens's popularity; the man
did not write for an audience so much as he expressed an audience's hunger -- he made astonishingly vivid what an audience feared, what it dreamed of, what it wanted.

  In our time, it is often necessary to defend a writer's popularity; from time to time, in literary fashion, it is considered bad taste to be popular -- if a writer is popular, how can he be any good? And it is frequently the role of lesser wits to demean the accomplishments of writers with more sizable audiences, and reputations, than their own. Oscar Wilde, for example, was a teenager when Dickens died; regarding Dickens's sentimentality, Wilde remarked that "it would take a heart of steel not to laugh at the death of Little Nell." It was also Wilde who said that Flaubert's conversation was on a level with the conversation of a pork butcher; but Flaubert was not in the conversation business -- which, in time, may prove to be Wilde's most lasting contribution to our literature. Compared to Dickens or Flaubert, Wilde's writing is on a level with pork butchery. Chesterton, who was born four years after Dickens's death and who occupied a literary period wherein popularity (for a writer) was suspect, dismissed the charges against Dickens's popularity very bluntly. History would have to pay attention to Dickens, Chesterton said -- because, quite simply, "the man led a mob."

  Dickens was abundant and magnificent with description, with the atmosphere surrounding everything -- and with the tactile, with every detail that was terrifying or viscerally felt. Those were among his strengths as a writer; and if there were weaknesses, too, they are more easily spotted in his endings than in his beginnings or middles. In the end, like a good Christian, he wants to forgive. Enemies shake hands (or even marry!); every orphan finds a family. Miss Havisham, who is a truly terrible woman, cries out to Pip, whom she has manipulated and deceived, "Who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?" Yet when she begs his forgiveness, he forgives her. Magwitch, regardless of how he "lived rough," is permitted to die with a smile on his lips, secure in the knowledge that his lost daughter is alive. Talk about unlikely! Pip's horrible sister finally dies, thus allowing the dear Joe to marry a truly good woman. And, in the revised ending, Pip's unrequited love is rectified; he sees "no shadow of another parting" from Estella. This is mechanical matchmaking; it is not realistic; it is overly tidy -- as if the neatness of the form of the novel requires that all the characters be brought together. This may seem, to our cynical expectations, unduly hopeful.