Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  The hopefulness that makes everyone love A Christmas Carol draws fire when Dickens employs it in Great Expectations; when Christmas is over, Dickens's hopefulness strikes many as mere wishful thinking. Dickens's original ending to Great Expectations, that Pip and his impossible love, Estella, should stay apart, is thought by most modern critics to be the proper (and certainly the modern) conclusion-- from which Dickens eventually shied away; for such a change of heart and mind he is accused of selling out. After an early manhood of shallow goals, Pip is meant finally to see the falseness of his values -- and of Estella -- and he emerges a sadder though a wiser fellow. Many readers have expressed the belief that Dickens stretches credulity too far when he leads us to suppose, in his revised ending, that Estella and Pip could be happy ever after; or that anyone can. Of his new ending -- where Pip and Estella are reconciled -- Dickens himself remarked to a friend: "I have put in a very pretty piece of writing, and I have no doubt that the story will be more acceptable through the alteration." That Estella would make Pip -- or anyone -- a rotten wife is not the point. "Don't be afraid of my being a blessing to him," she slyly tells Pip, who is bemoaning her choice of a first husband. The point is, Estella and Pip are linked; fatalistically, they belong to each other -- happily or unhappily.

  Although the suggestion that Dickens revise the original ending came from his friend Bulwer-Lytton, who wished the book to close on a happier note, Edgar Johnson wisely points out that "the changed ending reflected a desperate hope that Dickens could not banish from within his own heart." That hope is not a last-minute alteration, tacked on, but simply the culmination of a hope that abides throughout the novel: that Estella might change. After all, Pip changes (he is the first major character in a Dickens novel who changes realistically, albeit slowly). The book isn't called Great Expectations for nothing. It is not, I think, meant to be an entirely bitter title -- although I can undermine my own argument by reminding myself that we first hear that Pip is "a young fellow of great expectations" from the ominous and cynical Mr. Jaggers, that veteran hard-liner who will, quite rightfully, warn Pip to "take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule." But that was never Dickens's rule. Mr. Grad-grind, from Hard Times, believed in nothing and possessed nothing but the facts; yet it is Mr. Sleary's advice that Dickens heeds, to "do the withe thing and the kind thing too." It is both the kind and the "withe" thing that Pip and Estella end up together.

  In fact, it is the first ending that is out of character --- for Dickens and for the novel. Pip, upon meeting Estella (after two years of hearing only rumors of her), remarks with a pinched heart: "I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview, for in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be." Although that tone -- superior and self-pitying -- is more modern than Dickens's romantic revision, I fail to see how we or our literature would be better off for it. There is a contemporary detachment in it, even a smugness. Remember this about Charles Dickens: he was active and exuberant when he was happy; he was twice as busy when he was unhappy. In the first ending, Pip is moping; Dickens never moped.

  The revised ending reads: "I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her." A very pretty piece of writing, as Dickens noted, and eternally open -- still ambiguous (Pip's hopes have been dashed before) but far more the mirror of the quality of trust in the novel as a whole. It is that hopeful ending that sings with all the rich contradiction we should love Dickens for; it both underlines and undermines everything before it. Pip is basically good, basically gullible; he starts out being human, he learns by error -- and by becoming ashamed of himself--and he keeps on being human. That touching illogic seems not only generous but true.

  "I loved her simply because I found her irresistible," Pip says miserably; and of falling in love in general, he observes, "How could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?" And what does Miss Havisham have to tell us about love? "I'll tell you what real love is," she says. "It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter -- as I did!"

  In her jilted fury, Miss Havisham wears her wedding dress the rest of her life and, by her own admission, replaces Estella's heart with ice -- to make Estella all the more capable of destroying the men in her life as savagely as Miss Havisham was destroyed. Miss Havisham is one of the greatest witches in the history of fairy tales, because she actually is what she first seems. She appears more wicked and cruel to Pip when he meets her than that runaway convict who has accosted Pip as a child on the marshes; later, she greedily enjoys Pip's misunderstanding (that she is not the witch he first thought her to be, but an eccentric fairy godmother). She knows he is mistaken, yet she encourages him; her evil is complicitous. In the end, of course, she turns out to be the witch she always was. This is real magic, real fairy-tale stuff, but the eccentricity of Miss Havisham, to many of Dickens's critics, makes her one of his least believable characters.

  It might surprise his critics to know that Miss Havisham did not spring wholly from his imagination. In his youth, he would often see a madwoman on Oxford Street, about whom he wrote an essay for his magazine, Household Words. He called the essay "Where We Stopped Growing," in which he described "the White Woman ... dressed entirely in white.... With white boots, we know she picks her way through the winter dirt. She is a conceited old creature, cold and formal in manner, and evidently went simpering mad on personal grounds alone -- no doubt because a wealthy Quaker wouldn't marry her. This is her bridal dress. She is always ... on her way to church to marry the false Quaker. We observe in her mincing step and fishy eye that she intends to lead him a sharp life. We stopped growing when we got at the conclusion that the Quaker had had a happy escape of the White Woman." This was written several years before Great Expectations. Three years before that he had published in a monthly supplement to Household Words (called Household Narrative) a true-life account of a woman who sets herself on fire with a lit Christmas tree; she is saved from death, but severely burned, when a young man throws her to the floor and wraps her up in a rug -- Miss Havisham's burning, and Pip's rescue of her, almost exactly.

  Dickens was not so much a fanciful and whimsical inventor of unlikely characters and situations as he was a relentlessly keen witness of the real-life victims of his time. He sought out the sufferers, the people seemingly singled out by Fate or rendered helpless by their society -- not those people complacently escaping the disasters of their time but the people who stood in the face of or on the edge of those disasters. The accusations against him that he was a sensationalist are the accusations of conventionally secure and smug people--- certain that the mainstream of life is both safe and right, and therefore the only life that's true.

  "The key of the great characters of Dickens," Chesterton writes, "is that they are all great fools. There is the same difference between a great fool and a small fool as there is between a great poet and a small poet. The great fool is a being who is above wisdom and not below it." A chief and riveting characteristic of "the great fool" is, of course, his capacity for destruction -- for self-destruction, too, but for all kinds of havoc making. Look at Shakespeare: think of Lear, Hamlet, Othello -- they were all "great fools," of course.

  And there is one course that the great fools of literature often seem to follow without hesitation; they are trapped by their own lies, and/or by their vulnerability to the lies of others. In a story with a great fool in it, there's almost inevitably a great lie. Of course, the most important dishonesty in Great Expectations is Miss
Havisham's; hers is a lie of omission. And Pip lies to his sister and Joe about his first visit to Miss Havisham's; he tells them that Miss Havisham keeps "a black velvet coach" in her house, and that they all pretended to ride on this stationary coach while four "immense" dogs "fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver basket." Little can Pip know that his lie is less extraordinary than what will prove to be the truth of Miss Havisham's life in Satis House, and the connections with her life that Pip will encounter in the so-called outside world.

  The convict Magwitch, who threatens young Pip's life in the book's opening pages, will turn out to have a more noble heart than our young hero has. "A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled" -- a man whom Pip sees disappearing on the marshes in the vicinity of "a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate ... as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and [was] going back to hook himself up again" -- that this same man will later be a model of honor is part of the great mischief, the pure fun, of the plot of Great Expectations. Plot is entertainment to Dickens, it is pure pleasure giving to an audience-- enhanced by the fact that most of his novels were serialized; great and surprising coincidences were among the gifts he gave to his serial readers. A critic who scoffs at the chance meetings and other highly circumstantial developments in a Dickens narrative must have a most underdeveloped sense of enjoyment.

  Unashamedly, Dickens wrote to his readers. He chides them, he seduces them, he shocks them; he gives them slapstick and sermons. It was his aim, Johnson says, "not to turn the stomach but to move the heart." But it is my strong suspicion that in a contemporary world, where hearts are far more hardened, Dickens would have been motivated to turn the stomach, too -- as the one means remaining for reaching those hardened hearts. He was shameless in that aim; he cajoled his audiences; he gave them great pleasure so that they would also keep their eyes open and not look away from his visions of the grotesque, from his nearly constant moral outrage.

  In Great Expectations, maybe he felt he had given Pip and Estella -- and his readers -- enough pain. Why not give Pip and Estella to each other at the end? Charles Dickens would never find that "one happiness I have missed in life, and the one friend and companion I never made." But to Pip he would give that pleasure; he would give Pip his Estella.

  3. "No Help or Pity in All the Glittering Multitude"; in "the Ruined Garden"

  But what about the plot? his critics keep asking. How can you believe it?

  Very simply: just accept as a fact that everyone of any emotional importance to you is related to everyone else of any emotional importance to you; these relationships need not extend to blood, of course, but the people who change your life emotionally -- all those people, from different places, from different times, spanning many wholly unrelated coincidences-- are nonetheless "related." We associate people with each other for emotional not for factual reasons -- people who've never met each other, who don't know each other exist; people, even, who have forgotten us. In a novel by Charles Dickens, such people really are related -- sometimes, even, by blood; almost always by circumstances, by coincidences; and most of all by plot. Look at what a force Miss Havisham is: anyone of any importance to Pip turns out to have (or have had) some kind of relationship with her!

  Miss Havisham is so willfully deceptive, so deliberately evil. She is far worse than a vicious old woman made nasty and peculiar by her own hysterical egotism (although she is that, too); she is actively engaged in seducing Pip -- she consciously intends for Estella to torment him. If you are so unimaginative that you believe such people don't exist, you must at least acknowledge that we (most of us) are as capable as Pip of allowing ourselves to be seduced. Pip is warned; Estella herself warns him. The story is not so much about Miss Havisham's absolute evil as it is about Pip's expectations overriding his common sense. Pip wants to be a gentleman; he wants Estella -- and his ambitions guide him more forcefully than his perceptions. Isn't this a failing we can recognize within ourselves?

  Do not quarrel with Dickens for his excesses. The weaknesses in Great Expectations are few, and they are weaknesses of underdoing -- not overdoing. The rather quickly assumed friendship, almost instant, between Pip and Herbert is never really developed or very strongly felt; we are supposed to take Herbert's absolute goodness for granted (it is never very engagingly demonstrated) -- and that Herbert's nickname for Pip is "Handel" drives me crazy! I find Herbert's goodness much harder to take than Miss Havisham's evil. And Dickens's love for amateur theatrical performers overreaches his ability to make Mr. Wopsle and that poor fool's ambitions interesting. Chapters 30 and 31 are boring; perhaps they were hastily written, or else they represent a lapse in Dickens's own interest. For whatever reason, they are surely not examples of his notorious overwriting; everything that he overdid he at least did with boundless energy.

  Johnson writes that "Dickens liked and disliked people; he was never merely indifferent. He loved and laughed and derided and despised and hated; he never patronized or sniffed." Witness Orlick: he is as dangerous as a mistreated dog; there is little sympathy for the social circumstances underlying Orlick's villainy; he's a bad one, plain and simple -- he means to kill. Witness Joe: proud, honest, hardworking, uncomplaining, and manifesting endless goodwill despite the clamorous lack of appreciation surrounding him; he's a good one, plain and simple -- he means no one any harm. Despite his strong sense of social responsibility and his perceptions of society's conditioning, Dickens also believed in good and evil -- he believed there were truly good people, and truly bad ones. He loved every genuine virtue, and every kindness; he detested the many forms of cruelty, and he heaped every imaginable scorn upon hypocrisy and selfishness. He was incapable of indifference.

  He prefers Wemmick to Jaggers; but toward Jaggers he shows less loathing than fear. Jaggers is too dangerous to despise. When I was a teenager, I thought that Jaggers was always washing his hands and digging with his penknife under his fingernails because of how morally reprehensible (how morally filthy-dirty) his clients were; it was a case of the lawyer trying to rid his body of the contamination contracted by his proximity to the criminal element. I think now that this is only partially why Jaggers can never be entirely clean; I am far more certain that the filth Jaggers accumulates in his work is dirt from the work of the law itself -- it is his own profession's crud that clings to him. This is why Wemmick is more human than Jaggers; it strikes Pip that Wemmick walks "among the prisoners much as a gardener might walk among his plants" -- yet Wemmick is capable of having his "Walworth sentiments"; when he's at home with his "aged parent," Wemmick is a sweetheart. The contamination is more permanently with Jaggers; his home is nearly as businesslike as his office, and the presence of his housekeeper, Molly -- who is surely a murderess, spared the gallows not because she was innocent but because Jaggers got her off -- casts the prison aura of Newgate over Jaggers's dinner table.

  Of course, there are things to learn from Jaggers: the attention he pays to that dull villain Drummle helps to open Pip's eyes to the unjust ways of the world -- the world's standard of values is based on money and class, and on the assured success of brute aggressiveness. Through his hatred of Drummle, Pip also learns a little about himself -- "our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise," he observes. We might characterize Pip's progress in the novel as the autobiography of a slow learner. He thinks he has grasped who Pumblechook is right from the start; but the degree of Pumblechook's hypocrisy, his fawning, his dishonesty, and his false loyalty -- based on one's station in life and revised, instantly, upon one's turn of fortune -- is a continuing surprise and an education. Pumblechook is a strong minor character, a good man to hate. Missing -- from our contemporary literature -- is both the ability to praise as Dickens could praise (without reservation), and to hate as he could hate (completely). Is it o
ur timorousness, or that the sociologist's and psychologist's more complicated view of villainy has removed from our literature not only absolute villains but absolute heroes?

  Dickens had a unique affection for his characters, even for most of his villains. "The bores in his books are brighter than the wits in other books," Chesterton observes. "Two primary dispositions of Dickens, to make the flesh creep and to make the sides ache, were ... twins of his spirit," Chesterton writes. Indeed, it was Dickens's love of the theatrical that made each of his characters -- in his view -- a performer. Because they were all actors, and therefore they were all important, all of Dickens's characters behave dramatically; heroes and villains alike are given memorable qualities.

  Magwitch is my hero, and what is most exciting and visceral in the story of Great Expectations concerns this convict who risks his life to see how his creation has turned out. How like Dickens that Magwitch is spared the real answer: his creation has not turned out very well. And what a story Magwitch's story is! It is Magwitch who enlivens the book's dramatic beginning: an escaped convict, he frightens a small boy into providing food for his stomach and a file for his leg iron. And by returning to London, a hunted man, Magwitch not only contributes to the book's dramatic conclusion; he as effectively destroys Pip's expectations as he has created them. It is also Magwitch who provides us with the missing link in the story of Miss Havisham's jilting -- he is our means for knowing who Estella is.