More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  Cuttle then lives “a very close and retired life; seldom stirring abroad until after dark; venturing even then only into the obscurest streets…and both within and without the walls of his retreat, avoiding bonnets, as if they were worn by raging lions.”

  So, see the proud and alienated Dombey as some sort of arctic falcon. I know there’s no such thing as an arctic falcon, yet Dombey’s relentlessly characterized as frozen, frigid, and remote, and yet he’s too high-strung and vulnerable to be a polar bear, and far too preening and fierce to be a penguin. The great ice-creature’s chill and hauteur are the fundamental problem to be solved in this book, while around him, seeking or awaiting a solution, a host of other beasts gibber and beseech and pine and scheme, every one of them in their way more accepting of his or her animal nature, and animal destiny, than Dombey himself. Dombey’s error is that, seeing the world in mercantile terms, he denies familial truth; he sees his offspring principally as methods of extending his Dealings and his Firm. He’s wearing the wrong spectacles: they filter out the natural truths all around him. They filter out his daughter. Dickens wants us to feel this as a blindness, one as poignant as it is infuriating. When Dombey orders a tombstone prepared for his deceased son and heir, he asks that it read: “beloved and only child.” It takes the stonecarver to point out the mistake:

  “It should be ‘son’, I think, Sir?”

  “You are right. Of course. Make the correction.”

  But every approach to Dickens, apart from “Read him, damn it!,” seems patronizing and reductive, doesn’t it? Fur-covering his characters is only an absurd example. How can it be that this most generous and diverse and intricate and inventive of novelists, in whose pages nearly every subsequent narrative mode seems—whether as a result of conscious experiment or exuberant, instinctive doodling—to have been anticipated, is nearly always introduced by critics or followers (and any writer of fiction is a follower of Dickens, I insist on this, whether like Gissing and Kafka and Dostoevsky and Christina Stead and Peter Carey a conscious follower, or like me, until my shameful awakening five years ago, a blind and unconscious one) who say, one after the other, in so many words: “Dickens only half-knew what he was doing” or “Dickens was often great despite himself”?

  The trick of Dickens is that it is only easy to say what he wasn’t. Basically, he wasn’t George Eliot. He wasn’t the inventor of the interior, psychological mode in English fiction, the mode which can be legibly traced from Richardson and Austen through Modernism to the preponderance of contemporary fictional styles. Having excluded this, and having muttered a few apologies for his broad or theatrical or popular or sentimental tendencies, commentators are often at a loss to say what Dickens was. This is because he was everything, and to be everything is to be paradoxical and overwhelming, and leave your reader grappling for a handhold. It’s not that Dickens isn’t what he’s said to be, and what a thousand paraphrases into movies and Classic Comics and all sorts of other mediums have suggested: theatrical and sentimental, absolutely. The man’s the all-time beguiler, flatterer, and manipulator of readers, to great comic and bathetic effect in virtually every chapter. The trick is that he deals in proto-Modernist ambiguity and disjunction too. For everything Dickens is plainly wishing you to understand and feel, he also provides a fistful of arrows pointing elsewhere, to uneasy, vagrant thoughts and feelings, “signifiers” which a reader tends to feel Dickens is ignorant of, or resistant to, himself, but which he endlessly shares anyway.

  His genius, then, is at one with the genius of the form of the novel itself: Dickens willed into existence the most capacious and elastic and versatile kind of novel that could be, one big enough for his vast sentimental yearnings and for every hunger and fear and hesitation in him that cut against those yearnings too. Never parsimonious and frequently contradictory, he always gives us everything he can, everything he’s planned to give, and then more. This from one of the most energetic souls to ever walk the planet, or specifically the streets of London, which he famously did, in daily marathons of ten miles or more, where one presumes he generated material in the collision of his fevered imagination with the varieties of life he encountered in the streets, and with the life of the streets themselves, the buildings and railroads of an increasingly industrial century.

  Take for instance the famous “theatricality,” which might seem one of the least arguable assertions about Dickens. He adored the theater, yes. And his characters do present themselves to the reader and to one another in declamatory, presentational modes which seem specifically derived from Victorian melodrama. Yet it’s worth pointing out that Dickens shows an aggressive impatience with the most basic and inherent limitation of theatrical presentation: the stage. He’s forever sliding from the main action to focus on peculiar side-issues, on reaction shots of minor characters, or simply to vent the camera-eye of his prose to the rooftops, to the sky. He’s constantly panning the crowd, in what can begin to seem a kind of claustrophobic avoidance of whatever main stage he’s set. Take for instance Dombey’s wedding. It begins with a wide shot: “Dawn with its passionless blank face, steals shivering to the church…” We’re given pages of steeple-clock, spire, a super-anthropomorphized “dawn,” the church’s mice, the beadle, and Mrs. Miff, the pewopener, none of them previously introduced, nor relevant to the book’s design. The chapter ranges over the reactions of the pastry-cook and others on the serving-staff, winding up with nameless partygoing throngs and with those mice again. Or, consider Little Paul’s death, which is presented as a recurring shot of waves ceaselessly pounding the shore, as if to reinforce the fateful universality of the event, and distract us from its meaning in terms of the central theatrical unit—the Dombey family.

  Dickens works to keep us aware of the variety he’s met in the street, and of the possibility that, if his eye happened to settle elsewhere, in place of the story underway we’d find another story going on. These methods anticipate film: the distended ensembles of Robert Altman’s Nashville or A Wedding, the rhythmic cityscapes Yasujiro Ozu employs to widen the context of his family dramas in Late Autumn or Tokyo Story. This isn’t to say Dickens would have hightailed it to Hollywood if he’d lived in our century. One only has to measure his torrential, visceral engagement with language to know this is as silly as speculating that Beethoven could have been tempted from music, or De Kooning from paint. Still, the most famous page in Dombey is a fantastic wish for the ultimate wide shot. It echoes the utopian intent of a filmmaker like Godard, who used a cutaway set to anatomize social reality in Tout Va Bien:

  Oh, for a good spirit who would take the house tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demons in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes…For only one night’s view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate together…Not the less bright and blest would that day be for rousing some who never have looked out upon the world of human life around them, to a knowledge of their own relation to it…

  In Dombey, Dickens brings in the outside world in his portraits of the (then-new) London suburbs, and of the railway as it crushes its way through the heart of London. These are usually taken as proof that Dickens was beginning to anchor his drama in the larger socio-economic world. Dombey and Son (its full title: Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation) is the first book in which he places an institution at the center of his story, a move he’d expand and deepen in Bleak House and Hard Times.

  That’s just one of the ways in which Dombey is a watershed for Dickens. If four or five of his novels are more cherished by contemporary readers, all roads somehow lead to Dombey: welcome, here, to the heart of the heart of Dickens. As I said at the top, this book contains his first conscious use of autobiographical sources. It’s also the first in which Dickens drew a clear blueprint beforehand, rather than relying on improvisation to get him through his plo
t—and because he was impressed by his own new capacity to make plans, he documented them carefully in his letters to his friend (and eventual biographer) John Forster. So we know, for instance, of Dickens’s enthusiastic effort to shift sympathy quickly from Paul to Florence, after the boy’s death, and of his vetoed scheme to have Carker and Edith Dombey consummate their self-loathing tryst.

  What’s more, it was after the occasion of a reading of the second installment of Dombey to a group of close friends that Dickens wrote to Forster:

  “I was thinking the other day that…a great deal of money might possibly be made…by one’s having Readings of one’s own books. It would be an odd thing. I think it would take immensely. What do you say?”

  This is not just to blame Dombey for the whole modern-day rigmarole of book touring, or to say that it was here Dickens learned the trick that, taken to grueling extremes on American and British stages, likely killed him. It changed his writing, too. Mark Lambert, in Dickens and the Suspended Quotation, suggests that the public readings siphoned off a significant portion of Dickens’s craving for the flattering approval of a human audience. By venting the grossly comedic and sentimental aspects of his temperament live on stage, Dickens may have freed himself to be the more remote, obscure and generally less people-pleasing author of subsequent books. Perhaps this confluence—autobiography, social criticism, increased planning, and the readings, all attributable to Dombey—is what created the “late” style.

  “Dombey and Son makes the impression of a leafless tree illuminated fitfully by twinkling lights…(which) reveal to us the whole person and house of Dombey in all their aridity and arrogance.” That description comes from Una Pope-Hennessy’s (largely supplanted) 1945 biography. Another way of putting it is that the character at the center of this book is a cold fish, whom Dickens exposes by the warmth of the menagerie around him, and by the steady loving gaze of his daughter, Florence. Critics have often taken Dickens to task for his “perfect girls,” of which Florence is a classic example. Gaitskill defends the function of Esther in Bleak House, another of those angels, this way: “When Dickens looks at certain wicked or complex characters through her ingenuous eyes, he can perceive their gross faults with naïve clarity while pretending…not to know what’s wrong with them.” Florence, similarly, serves as a simple but powerful lens roaming through these pages, amplifying, by her proximity, any tender emotion. Her patience, at her father’s chilly threshold, stands for Dickens’s ultimate faith that in a world of rigid grotesques we are nevertheless required, in the sphere of our intimate experience, to embrace the possibility of growth and change. Dickens’s innocent girls aren’t more persuasive as characters because he doesn’t need them to be. What he needs them for is to cut against the grain of his “beastly” world. Rather than their being relics of the earlier, more sentimental style, it is with Dombey that he begins to require those girls more urgently, in order to contradict the monolithic, even punishing design of the later books.

  Dombey’s house, and his novel, becomes a kind of deprivation chamber: how much warmth and charm can Dickens banish from this space and still have a tale to tell? One after another, Toodles, Walter, Paul, Edith, Florence, Susan Nipper, all the abiding hearts, are pushed away to heighten the eerieness of Dombey’s stand in his room, alone. This is a book partly about solitude, and Dombey is mirrored not only by Cuttle in his shop-burrow but by Carker smugly plotting in his living room, and by Toots spacing out in his attic—all, perhaps, oblique self-portraits of a writer alone in his workshop, images that range from the self-lampooning to the self-outraged.

  Dickens declared this book an indictment of the excesses of capital-p Pride. I’d say it’s also his Anatomy of Sycophancy. The book catalogues a host of divergent postures in respect to Dombey’s power. Dickens, fresh from a buffeting by extremes of adulation and rejection by American crowds, had a lot to tell us on this subject. Major Bagstock is, of course, the most delirious flatterer, always ready to cover himself in any butter he’s spreading:

  “Dombey,” said the Major, “I’m glad to see you. I’m proud to see you. There are not many men in Europe to whom J. Bagstock would say that—for Josh is blunt. Sir: it’s his nature—but Joey B. is proud to see you, Dombey.”

  “Major,” returned Mr. Dombey, “you are very obliging.”

  “No, sir,” said the Major, “Devil a bit! That’s not my character. If that had been Joe’s character, Joe might have been, by this time, Lieutenant-General Sir Joseph Bagstock, K.C.B., and might have received you in very different quarters. You don’t know old Joe yet, I find. But this occasion, being special, is a source of pride to me. By the Lord, Sir,” said the Major resolutely, “it’s an honour to me!”

  Bagstock’s sycophancy, and Mrs. Skewton’s, provide the book an engine of misunderstanding, whisking Dombey into his disastrous marriage. Dickens shows how other misguided postures of homage have their own grievous results: it is Captain Cuttle’s cultivation of Dombey that dooms Walter Gay to his exile on the high seas. Rob the Grinder’s wheedling at the feet of Carker and Mrs. Brown is portrayed with outright disgust.

  Seeing sycophancy overthrown provides one of the novel’s chief satisfactions. Take Susan Nipper’s confrontation with Dombey: it’s silly but quite wonderful that we can still have our breath taken away to see a maidservant shuck off her deference. And one of the book’s great comic set-pieces is Cuttle’s buddy and confidant Bunsby unexpectedly switching allegiance to the husband-hunting MacStinger. Bunsby-Cuttle-MacStinger, though, are only a comic echo of the book’s key triangle: Carker-Dombey-Edith. In each case the ultimate insult in an affair of the heart is in learning that someone else, someone unexpectedly nearby, may want what one has cast off.

  The relationship between Carker the Manager and Edith Dombey is Dickens’s darkest and shrewdest presentation of the evils of sycophancy. In an analysis of “slave mentality” worthy of Nietszche, Dickens details the baroque self-loathing of proud souls brought to heel by Dombey’s wealth, and by his oblivious arrogance. Carker and Edith, in their hypocrisy and nihilism, are unmistakable to one another, though Carker fatally mistakes the compulsion between them for a sexual To Do list. That Dickens censored his original plan to give the pair a night or two to exorcise their lust, and to make Dombey an official cuckold, is hardly important—Edith’s hatred would surely have outstripped her carnality before long. Dickens is a pretty sexaverse writer—note how he has to banish Florence and Walter to a remote offstage land to consummate even the happiest union. But this revision is a good one, underlining the morbid psychology instead, in one the most modern sequences in all of Dickens. In the words of David Gates, “the man knew a thing or two about sadism and shame.”

  For all this, Dombey’s pride is the novel’s ultimate subject—and because Dickens felt a paradoxical identification with Dombey, it remains the novel’s ultimate mystery. Old Dombey’s humbling last-minute capitulation at the novel’s end only comes, after all, due to his infirmity and bankruptcy. Dickens himself couldn’t afford to wait that long to confront his own severity, and snobbery, or his resistance to the images of home and hearth he’d become a celebrity for endorsing. The novel’s most tormenting moment, for me, comes after Little Paul’s death, as Dombey boards the train on his way to the resort where he will meet Edith. On the platform he runs into the stoker, Toodle, whose wife had been Paul’s wet-nurse. Dombey, characteristically, offers charity—munificence being one of the simplest ways to inscribe the distance between classes. But Toodle doesn’t want money. He wants to discuss their two sons, Rob the Grinder and Little Paul. Dombey can’t handle this. Turning away, he notices a bit of crape on the stoker’s cap: Toodle is publicly mourning Paul. At this, Dombey becomes enraged:

  To think of this presumptuous raker among coals and ashes going on before there, with his sign of mourning! To think that he dared to enter, even by a common show like that, into the trial and disappointment of a proud gentleman’s secret heart! To think that this lost chi
ld, who was to have divided with him his riches, and his projects, and his power, and allied with whom he was to have shut out all the world as with a double door of gold, should have let in such a herd to insult him with their knowledge of his defeated hopes, and their boasts of claiming community of feeling with himself, so far removed: if not of having crept into the place wherein he would have lorded it, alone!

  This reminds me of Alfred Lambert, the St. Louis paterfamilias in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Franzen’s is a definitive contemporary portrayal of this typically middle-class rage for quarantines—quarantines not only between classes, but between realms of life. Dombey is the nineteenth century antecedent. Each man believes the beastly, shitty, unworthy, overwhelming world can be held at bay, be banished from his house. Each writers sympathizes with, and puzzles over, this adamant, hopeless belief. In Dombey, Dickens was in part asking himself: How, if I am the great hero of domesticity, can I want to spend so much time alone in my room, or racing through the London streets? Why do I act as if my children have disappointed me? What was their crime? And: I’m the great lover and champion of the poor, sure, but do I hold them at arm’s length with my charity? It is Dickens’s genius that even while he impersonates Dombey, he is also with us in the form of Florence, waiting at Dombey’s door, wondering how to get inside, and framing for us in her despair the unanswerable question: What would actually happen if he came out?

  —Introduction to Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, 2003.

  Reprinted that same year in The Believer

  The Counter-Roth