Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  In "the ruined garden" of Satis House, the rank weeds pollute a beauty that might have been; the rotting wedding cake is overrun with spiders and mice. Pip can never rid himself (or Estella, by association) of that prison "taint." The connection with crime that young Pip so inexplicably feels at key times in his courtship of Estella is, of course, foreshadowing the revelation that Pip is more associated with the convict Abel Magwitch than he knows. There is little humor remaining in Pip upon the discovery of his true circumstances. Even as a maltreated child, Pip is capable of exhibiting humor (at least, in remembrance): he recalls he was "regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain." But there is sparse wit in Dickens's language after Pip discovers who his benefactor is. The language itself grows thinner as the plot begins to race.

  Both in the lushness of his language, when Dickens means to be lush, and in how spare he can be when he simply wants you to follow the story, he is ever conscious of his readers. It was relatively late in his life that he began to give public readings, yet his language was consistently written to be read aloud -- the use of repetition, of refrains; the rich, descriptive lists that accompany a newly introduced character or place; the abundance of punctuation. Dickens overpunctuates; he makes long and potentially difficult sentences slower but easier to read -- as if his punctuation is a form of stage direction, when reading aloud; or as if he is aware that many of his readers were reading his novels in serial form and needed nearly constant reminding. He is overly clear. He is a master of that device for making short sentences seem long, and long sentences readable -- the semicolon! Dickens never wants a reader to be lost; but, at the same time, he never wants a reader to skim. It is rather hard going to skim Dickens; you will miss too much to make sense of anything. He made every sentence easy to read because he wanted you to read every sentence.

  Imagine missing this parenthetical aside about marriage: "I may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any living authority with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring passing unsympathetically over the human countenance." Of course, young Pip is referring to having his face scrubbed by his sister, but for the careful reader this is a reference to the general discomfort of marriage. And who cannot imagine that Dickens's own exhaustion and humiliation in the blacking warehouse informed Pip's sensitivity to his dull labors in the blacksmith's shop? "In the little world in which children have their existence ... there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice." For "injustice" was always Dickens's subject -- and his broadest anger toward it is directed at injustice to children. It is both the sensitivity of a child and the vulnerability of an author in late middle age (with the conviction that most of his happiness is behind him, and that most of his loneliness is ahead of him) that enhance young Pip's view of the marshes at night. "I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude."

  Images of such brilliance are as enchanting in Great Expectations as its great characters and its humbling story. Dickens was a witness of a world moving at a great pace toward more powerful and less human institutions; he saw the outcasts of society's greed and hurry. "In a passion of glorious violence," Edgar Johnson writes, "he defended the golden mean." He believed that in order to defend the dignity of man it was necessary to uphold and cherish the individual.

  When Dickens first finished Great Expectations, he was already running out of time; he was already exhausted. He would write only one more novel (Our Mutual Friend, 1864-65); The Mystery of Edwin Drood was never completed. He worked a full day on that last book the clay he was stricken. Here is the final sentence he wrote: "The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering like wings." Later, he tried a few letters; in one of them, Johnson tells us, he quoted Friar Laurence's warning to Romeo: "These violent delights have violent ends." Perhaps this was a premonition; in his novels, he exhibited a great fondness for premonitions.

  Charles Dickens died of a paralytic stroke on a warm June evening in 1870; at his death, his eyes were closed but a tear was observed on his right cheek; he was 58. He lay in an open grave in Westminster Abbey for three days -- there were so many thousands of mourners who came to pay their respects to the former child laborer whose toil had once seemed so menial in the blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs.

  The King of the Novel (1979)

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  Portions of this Introduction to Great Expectations were first published in The New York Times Book Review of November 25, 1979, in an essay titled "In Defense of Sentimentality." That essay was much revised before making its first appearance as an Introduction to the Dickens novel in a Bantam Classic edition (1986); in that edition, both the original and the revised ending of Great Expectations were printed. My Introduction has since been published in several foreign-language translations of Great Expectations; it remains my favorite of what little nonfiction I have written.

  My affection for Dickens is undiminished. I remember that I was outraged upon my first reading of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust to discover that Waugh had condemned Tony Last to the Amazon, where he is saved from death by a crazed illiterate who forces poor Tony to read Dickens aloud to him (we presume, forever). Waugh is making the claim that reading Dickens aloud, forever, would be a fate worse than death. Upon rereading both Dickens and Waugh, it strikes me that a worse fate would be to read Waugh aloud forever.

  My fondness for Dickens extends to an eccentricity I have not duplicated in the case of any other writer I admire -- namely, I have left one Dickens novel unread. I am saving Our Mutual Friend for a rainy day, as they say; it is the last novel Dickens completed, and I have long imagined that it is the last novel I want to read. Of course this is madness: I am thinking of a 19th-century deathbed scene, where I am given proper warning that the end is near, and thus I am permitted to surround myself with friends and family -- and I'll have just enough time remaining to read Our Mutual Friend. Violence and the unforeseen accident are the late 20th-century equivalents of the deathbed scene; even my doctor friends discourage me from thinking that I will necessarily be allowed to pick the time to read Our Mutual Friend. The conventional wisdom says I'd better read it now.

  I am saving it, nevertheless. My friend and editor Harvey Ginsberg has given me the original monthly parts of the first edition of Our Mutual Friend (London: Chapman & Hall, 1864-65), although I doubt that the pages could survive being turned, except carefully -- more carefully, I fear, than I usually turn the pages of a Dickens novel. I have other editions in my library -- just to be prepared, both in my Vermont house and in the Toronto apartment -- and so Our Mutual Friend is waiting for me to read it. In whatever terms, a sufficiently bad day will come -- maybe it won't be as dramatic a bad day as a deathbed scene -- and I will turn to Mr. Dickens, the first writer I read who made me want to be a writer.

  AN INTRODUCTION TO A CHRISTMAS CAROL

  "I wear the chains I forged in life."

  -- MARLEY'S GHOST

  In January of 1990,1 was living with the Great Royal Circus in Junagadh, Gujarat, in the northwest of India. The TV and VCR were almost as common in the troupe tents of the performers and their families as they are where I more frequently live -- in Vermont and Toronto. That January, the popular Hindu epic the Mahabharata was continuing its Sunday-morning journey of 93 televised episodes, each an hour long; at that pace, the story wouldn't end (at the gates of heaven) until the coming summer. A record number of robberies had occurred during the broadcasts because the thieves knew that a great majority of Indians would be glued to their television sets.

  That Sunday, in the troupe tent of the Great Royal's ringmaster and lion tamer, Mr. Pratap Singh, the TV was faithfully encircled; the only members of the circus not wa
tching the Mahabharata were a half-dozen elephants and two dozen lions and tigers, in addition to a dozen horses and as many chimpanzees, and uncounted cockatoos and parrots -- and dozens of dogs. But of the 150 human members of the Great Royal Circus, including almost a dozen dwarfs, everyone was enjoying the epic.

  The rest of the week, the videocassette players in the troupe tents treated the acrobats and wild-animal trainers to various wonders and excesses of the Hindi cinema. Nowadays, the Great Royal rarely travels outside the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat; the movies that are hits in Bombay are similarly successful with the circus performers. But that Sunday, after the conclusion of the weekly episode of the Mahabharata, I wandered away from the television set and into the family kitchen of the ringmaster's troupe tent. Sumi, the lion tamer's wife, made me a cup of tea. From the VCR, I heard a surprisingly familiar burst of dialogue -- in English. I couldn't see the TV screen, but I knew that the speaker was none other than that most literary of ghosts, Jacob Marley -- the dead business partner of the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge. It was that part when Marley's Ghost is rejecting Scrooge's compliment: "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob." Marley's Ghost cries out, "Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" (It's a stirring speech, followed by the rattling of the ghost's chains.)

  I repaired to the television set in the Singh family's troupe tent to watch the video of A Christmas Carol; it was the Alastair Sim version. There -- in Junagadh, at an Indian circus -- the child acrobats were seated on the rugs that covered the tent's dirt floor; they were illiterate Hindu children but they were riveted to the story, which was as fascinating to them as it remains to our children. If the principal point of A Christmas Carol is that Scrooge reforms -- that he learns "how to keep Christmas well" -- these child acrobats had never kept Christmas at all; moreover, they would never keep it. Also, they spoke and understood little English, yet they knew and loved the tale.

  One of them -- a 12-year-old contortionist, a girl named Laxmi who was also skilled as a tightrope walker -- saw me looking at the TV. Since I was the foreigner among them, I suppose Laxmi thought I needed to be told something about A Christmas Carol; she mistook my astonishment at what I was seeing and where I was seeing it -- she assumed I was ignorant of the characters and the narrative.

  "Scrooge," she said, identifying old Ebenezer for me. "A ghost," Laxmi said, indicating the shade of the late Jacob Marley. "More coming," she added.

  "A Christmas Carol" I replied. This didn't impress Laxmi; Christmas wasn't her subject.

  It was then that the ringmaster and lion tamer, who was also the chief trainer of the child performers, spoke to me. Pratap Singh was not a man who kept Christmas either. "The children's favorite ghost story," Pratap explained. I remember thinking that Charles Dickens would have been pleased.

  A Christmas Carol was originally subtitled "Ghost Story of Christmas"; the accent on the ghostly {not the Christmasy) elements of the tale was further emphasized in Dickens's Preface to the 1843 edition. "I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me."

  If that doesn't alert his readers sufficiently, Dickens titles the first stave of his Carol "Marley's Ghost," and the author states no fewer than four times in the first four paragraphs that Marley is dead. "Marley was dead: to begin with" -- the first sentence of the first paragraph. "Old Marley was as dead as a doornail" -- the last sentence of the first paragraph. "You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail" -- the last sentence of the second paragraph. And, finally: "There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate" -- the second and third sentences of the fourth paragraph.

  I think we get the idea. An editor of today's less-is-more school of fiction would doubtless have found this repetitious, but Dickens never suffered a minimalist's sensibilities; in Dickens's prose, the refrain is as common as the semicolon.

  Also common is Dickens's penchant for the juxtaposition of extremes. (In his own words: "It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.") Scrooge's nephew is the old curmudgeon's opposite, a true celebrant of Christmas -- "the only time I know of," the nephew says, "when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

  But Ebenezer Scrooge is from "another race of creatures." From the beginning, Scrooge's cantankerous character is unsparing with his cynicism; his miserliness -- more so, his utter shunning of humanity-- makes him seem a fair match for any ghost. "The cold within him froze his old features," as Dickens describes him. "He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas." Even beggars don't dare to approach him. "Even the blindmen's dogs" give Scrooge a wide berth. "It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance" -- Ebenezer Scrooge is the original Bah-humbug man. "If I could work my will," Scrooge declares, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas,' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart."

  Old Ebenezer may strike us as a mere caricature of anti-Christmas scorn; yet, to Dickens, Scrooge's greed was both realistic and detestable. Dickens hated the political economists of his time -- namely, their rationalizing that ruthlessness was justified for the sake of gain; that wealth and industrial power were the "natural" objectives of 19th-century society; that if Scrooge's poor clerk, Bob Cratchit, is unable to support his large family on his small wages, Bob should have had a smaller family. Today, the discrepancy between Scrooge's tyrannical authority and Bob Cratchit's meekness might be dismissed as Dickensian exaggeration, but Dickens stood squarely on Bob Cratchit's side. Modern critics have been skeptical of Dickens's flagrantly sentimental choice: to emotionally railroad the reader's sympathy for Bob Cratchit, Dickens saddles poor Bob with a crippled child -- Tiny Tim. Dickens's answer to skeptics, like Scrooge, is to terrify them with ghosts.

  Scrooge is such a pillar of skepticism he at first resists believing in Marley's Ghost. ("You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!") Yet Scrooge is converted; beyond the seasonal lessons of Christian charity, A Christmas Carol teaches us that a man -- even a man as hard as Ebenezer Scrooge -- can change. What is heartening about the change in Scrooge is that he learns to love his fellowman; in the politically correct language of our insipid times, Scrooge learns to be more caring. But, typical of Dickens, Scrooge has undergone a deeper transformation: that he is persuaded to believe in ghosts means that Scrooge has been miraculously returned to his childhood, and to a child's powers of imagination and make-believe.

  Dickens's celebration of ghosts, and of Christmas, is but a small part of the author's abiding faith in the innocence and magic of children; Dickens believed that his own imagination -- in fact, his overall well-being -- depended on the contact he kept with his childhood. Furthermore, his popularity with his fellow Victorians, which is reflected by the ongoing interest of young readers today, is rooted in Dickens's remarkable ability for rendering realistically what many adults condescendingly call "fantasy."

  Additionally, it was Dickens's "fullness of heart" that caused Thackeray to praise A Christmas Carol to the skies. "Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this?" Thackeray wrote. "I
t seems to be a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness." Even the dour Thomas Carlyle was so moved by A Christmas Carol that he was (in the words of his wife) "seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality"; apparently, this was quite contrary to the Scots philosopher's nature. Remember: as Chesterton once wrote of Dickens, "The man led a mob." Part of the reason is that relationship which Dickens forces his readers to maintain with children.

  As for the ghosts -- "You will be haunted by Three Spirits," Marley's Ghost warns Scrooge -- they have become emblematic of our Christmases, too. The first of these phantoms is the easiest to bear. "It was a strange figure -- like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions."

  Shortly thereafter, the spirit introduces himself: "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

  "Long past?" Scrooge asks.

  "No. Your past," the ghost answers -- a chilling reply.

  It is from the Ghost of Christmas Present that Scrooge is confronted by his own words; his own in-sensitivity is thrown back at him and leaves him "overcome with penitence and grief." This happens because Scrooge asks the spirit if Tiny Tim will live. "I see a vacant seat in the poor chimney-corner," replies the ghost, in a ghostly fashion, "and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved." When Scrooge protests, the spirit quotes Scrooge verbatim: "If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

  As for the last visitor, that silent but most terrifying phantom, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears before Scrooge "draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him." This ghost is taking no prisoners; this spirit shows Scrooge his own corpse. "He lay in the dark empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think."