The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

by Nick Hornby

  3) In The Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P. G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David’s bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop.

  4) I have complained in this column before about how everyone wants to spoil plots of classics for you. OK, I should have read David Copperfield before, and therefore deserve to be punished. But even the snootiest critic/publisher/whatever must presumably accept that we must all, at some point, read a book for the first time. I know that the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even James Wood and Harold Bloom read before they reread? (Maybe not. Maybe they’ve only ever reread, and that’s what separates them from us. Hats off to them.) Anyway, the great David Gates gives away two or three major narrative developments in the very first paragraph of his introduction to my Modern Library edition (and I think I’m entitled to read the first paragraph, just to get a little context or biographical detail); I tried to check out the film versions on Amazon, and an Amazon reviewer pointlessly gave away another in a three-line review. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d been looking for a Grisham adaptation.

  5.) At the end of last year, I was given a first edition David Copperfield as a prize, and I had this fantasy that I was going to sit in an armchair and read a few pages of it, and feel the power of the great man enter me at my fingertips. Well, I tried it, and nothing happened. Also, the print was really small, and I was scared of dropping it in the bath, absentmindedly putting a cigarette out on it, etc. I actually ended up reading four different copies of the book. An old college Penguin edition fell apart in my hands, so I bought a Modern Library edition to replace it. Then I lost the Modern Library copy, temporarily, and bought another cheap Penguin to replace it. It cost £1.50! That’s only about ninety dollars! (That was my attempt at edgy au courant humour. I won’t bother again.)

  There was a moment, about a third of the way through, when I thought that David Copperfield might become my new favourite Dickens novel – which, seeing as I believe that Dickens is the greatest novelist who ever lived, would mean that I might be in the middle of the best book I’d ever read. That superlative way of thinking ceases to become very compelling as you get older, so the realization wasn’t as electrifying as you might think. I could see the logic, in the same way that you can see the logic of those ontological arguments that the old philosophers used to trot out to prove that God exists: Dickens = best writer, DC = his best book, therefore DC = best book ever written – without feeling it. But, in the end, there was too much wrong. The young women, as usual, are weedy. Bodies start to pile up in uncomfortable proximity – there are four deaths, if you count drippy Dora’s bloody dog, which I don’t but Dickens does – between pages 714 and 740. And just when you want the book to wrap up, Dickens inserts a pointless and dull chapter about prison reform, twenty pages from the end. (He’s against solitary confinement. Too good for’em.)

  What puts David Copperfield right up there with Bleak House and Great Expectations, however, is its sweet nature, and its surprising modernity. There’s some metafictional stuff going on, for example: David grows up to be a novelist, and the full title of the book, according to Edgar Johnson’s biography (not that I can find any evidence of this anywhere), is The Personal History, Experience and Observations of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery, which he never meant to be published on any account. And there’s a point to the metafictional stuff, too. The last refuge of the scoundrel-critic is any version of the sentence, ‘Ultimately, this book is about fiction itself/this film is about film itself.’ I have used the sentence myself, back in the days when I reviewed a lot of books, and it’s bullshit: invariably all it means is that the film or novel has drawn attention to its own fictional state, which doesn’t get us very far, and which is why the critic never tells us exactly what the novel has to say about fiction itself. (Next time you see the sentence, which will probably be some time in the next seven days if you read a lot of reviews, write to the critic and ask for elucidation.)

  Anyway, David Copperfield’s profession allows him these piercing little moments of regret and nostalgia; there’s a lot about memory in this book, and in an autobiographical novel, memory and fiction get all tangled up. Dickens uses the tangle to his advantage, and I can’t remember being so moved by one of his novels. The other thing that seems to me different about David Copperfield is the sophistication of a couple of the characters and relationships. Dickens isn’t the most sophisticated of writers, and when he does attain complexity, it’s because subplot is layered upon subplot, and character over character, until he can’t help but get something going. But there’s a startlingly contemporary admission of marital dissatisfaction in Copperfield, for example, an acknowledgement of lack and of an unspecified yearning that you’d associate more with Rabbit Angstrom than with someone who spends half the novel quaffing punch with Mr Micawber. Dickens eventually takes the Victorian way out of the twentieth-century malaise, but even so… Making notes for this column, I find that I wrote ‘He’s from another planet’;‘Was he a Martian?’David Gates asks in the introduction. And to think that some people don’t rate him! To think that some people have described him as ‘the worst writer to plague the English language’! Yeah, well. You can believe them or you can side with Tolstoy, Peter Ackroyd and David Gates. And me. Your choice.

  For the first time since I’ve been writing this column, the completion of a book has left me feeling bereft: I miss them all. Let’s face it: usually you’re just happy as hell to have chalked another one up on the board, but this last month I’ve been living in this hyperreal world, full of memorable, brilliantly eccentric people, and laughs (I hope you know how funny Dickens is), and proper bendy stories you want to follow. I suspect that it’ll be difficult to read a pared-down, stripped-back, skin-and-bones novel for a while.

  A selection from

  DAVID COPPERFIELD

  by CHARLES DICKENS

  Into this shop, which was low and small, and which was darkened rather than lighted by a little window, overhung with clothes, and was descended into by some steps, I went with a palpitating heart; which was not relieved when an ugly old man, with the lower part of his face all covered with a stubbly grey beard, rushed out of a dirty den behind it, and seized me by the hair of my head. He was a dreadful old man to look at, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and smelling terribly of rum. His bedstead, covered with a tumbled and ragged piece of patchwork, was in the den he had come from, where another little window showed a prospect of more stinging nettles, and a lame donkey.

  ‘Oh, what do you want?’ grinned this old man, in a fierce, monotonous whine. ‘Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!’

  I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by the repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of rattle in his throat, that I could make no answer; hereupon the old man, still holding me by the hair, repeated –

  ‘Oh, what do you want? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo!’ – which he screwed out of himself, with an energy that made his eyes start in his head.

  ‘I want to know,’I said, trembling, ‘if you would buy a jacket.’

  ‘Oh, let’s see the jacket!’cried the old man. ‘Oh, my heart on fire, show the jacket to us! Oh, my eyes and limbs, bring the jacket out!’

  With that he took his trembling hands, which were like the claws of a great bird, out of my hair; and put on a pair of spectacles, not at all ornamental to his inflamed eyes.

  ‘Oh, how much for the jacket?’ cried the old man, ‘no! Oh, my eyes, no! Oh, my limbs, no! Eighteenpence. Goroo!’

  Every time he uttered this ejaculation, his eyes seemed in danger of starting out; and every sentence he spoke, he delivered in a sort of tune, always exactly
the same, and more like a gust of wind, which begins low, mounts up high, and falls again, than any other comparison I can find for it.

  ‘Well,’ I said, glad to have closed the bargain, ‘I’ll take eighteen-pence.’

  ‘Oh, my liver!’ cried the old man, throwing the jacket on a shelf.‘Get out of the shop! Oh, my eyes and limbs – goroo! – don’t ask for money; make it an exchange.’

  I was never so frightened in my life, before or since; but I told him humbly that I wanted money, and that nothing else was of any use to me, but that I would wait for it, as he desired, outside, and had no wish to hurry him. So I went outside, and sat down in the shade in a corner. And I sat there so many hours, that the shade became sunlight, and the sunlight became shade again, and still I sat there waiting for the money.

  There was never such another drunken madman in that line of business, I hope. That he was well known in the neighbourhood, and enjoyed the reputation of having sold himself to the devil, I soon understood from the visits he received from the boys, who continually came skirmishing about the shop, shouting that legend, and calling to him to bring out his gold. ‘You ain’t poor, you know, Charley. Rip it open and let’s have some!’ This, and many offers to lend him a knife for the purpose, exasperated him to such a degree, that the whole day was a succession of rushes on his part, and flights on the part of the boys. Sometimes in his rage he would take me for one of them, and come at me, mouthing as if he were going to tear me in pieces; then, remembering me, just in time, would dive into the shop, and lie upon his bed, as I thought from the sound of his voice, yelling in a frantic way, to his own windy tune, the Death of Nelson; with an Oh! before every line, and innumerable Goroos interspersed. As if this were not bad enough for me, the boys, connecting me with the establishment, on account of the patience and perseverance with which I sat outside, half-dressed, pelted me, and used me very ill all day.

  He made many attempts to induce me to consent to an exchange; at one time coming out with a fishing-rod, at another with a fiddle, at another with a cocked hat, at another with a flute. But I resisted him all these overtures, and sat there in desperation; each time asking him, with tears in my eyes, for my money or my jacket. At last he began to pay me in halfpence at a time; and was full two hours getting by easy stages to a shilling.

  ‘Oh, my eyes and limbs!’ he cried, peeping hideously out of the shop, after a long pause, ‘will you go for twopence more?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I shall be starved.’

  ‘Oh, my lungs and liver, will you go for threepence?’

  ‘I would go for nothing, if I could,’ I said, ‘but I want the money badly.’

  ‘Oh, go-roo!’ (it is really impossible to express how he twisted this ejaculation out of himself, as he peeped round the door-post at me, showing nothing but his crafty old head;) ‘will you go for fourpence?’

  I was so faint and weary that I closed with this offer; and taking the money out of his claw, not without trembling, went away more hungry and thirsty than I had ever been, a little before sunset. But at an expense of threepence I soon refreshed myself completely; and, in being in better spirits then, limped seven miles upon my road.

  JUNE 2004

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  Donkey Gospel – Tony Hoagland

  I Never Liked You – Chester Brown

  We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

  BOOKS READ:

  Random Family – Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

  What Narcissism Means to Me – Tony Hoagland

  Bobby Fischer Goes to War – David Edmonds and John Eidinow

  The Polysyllabic Spree – the ninety-nine young and menacingly serene people who run the Believer – recently took their regular columnists out for what they promised would be a riotous and orgiastic night on the town. Now, I have to confess that I’ve never actually seen a copy of this magazine, due to an ongoing dispute with the Spree (I think that as a contributor I should be entitled to a free copy, but they are insisting that I take out a ten-year subscription – does that sound right to you?), so I was completely unaware that there is only one other regular columnist, the Croatian sex lady, and she didn’t show. I suspect that she’d been given a tip-off, probably because she’s a woman (the Spree hold men responsible for the death of Virginia Woolf) and stayed at home. It shouldn’t have made much difference, though, because you can have fun with a hundred people, right?

  Wrong. The Spree’s idea of a good time was to book tickets for a literary event – a reading given by all the nominees for the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards – and sit there for two and a half hours. Actually, that’s not quite true: they didn’t sit there. Such is their unquenchable passion for the written word that they were too excited to sit. They stood, and they wept, and they hugged each other, and occasionally they even danced – to the poetry recitals, and some of the more up-tempo biography nominees. In England we don’t often dance at dances, let alone readings, so I didn’t know where to look. Needless to say, drink, drugs, food and sex played no part in the festivities. But who needs any of that when you’ve got literature?

  I did, however, discover a couple of books as a result of the evening: Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me, which didn’t win the poetry award, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, which didn’t win the non-fiction award. I haven’t read the books that did win, and therefore cannot comment on the judges’ inexplicable decisions, but they must be pretty good, because Hoagland’s poems and LeBlanc’s study of life in the Bronx were exceptional.

  Middle-class people – especially young middle-class people – spend an awful lot of time and energy attempting to familiarize themselves with what’s going down on the street. Random Family is a one-stop shop: it tells you everything you need to know, and may even stop you from hankering after a gun or a crack habit as a quick way out of the graduate-school ghetto. And yes, I know that all reality is mediated, and so on and so forth, but this book does a pretty good job of convincing you that it knows whereof it speaks.

  Random Family is about two women, Coco and Jessica; LeBlanc’s story, which took her ten years to write and research, begins when they’re in their mid-teens, and follows them through the next couple of decades. Despite the simplicity of the setup, it’s not always an easy narrative to follow. If LeBlanc were a novelist, you’d have to observe that she’s screwed up by overpopulating her book, but Coco and Jessica and the Bronx don’t give her an awful lot of choice, because Random Family is partly about overpopulation. Coco and Jessica have so many babies, by so many fathers, and their children have so many half-siblings, that at times it’s impossible to keep the names straight. By the time the two women are in their early thirties, they have given birth to Mercedes, Nikki, Nautica, Pearl, LaMonte, Serena, Brittany, Stephany, Michael and Matthew, by Cesar, Torres, Puma (or maybe Victor), Willy (or maybe Puma), Kodak, Wishman and Frankie. This is a book awash with sperm (Jessica even manages to conceive twins while in prison, after an affair with a guard), and at one stage I was wondering whether it was medically possible for a man to become pregnant through reading it. I think I’m probably too old.

  The combination of LeBlanc’s scrupulous attention to quotidian detail and her absolute refusal to judge is weirdly reminiscent of Peter Guralnick’s approach to Elvis in his monumental two-volume biography. Those of you who read the Elvis books will know that though Presley’s baffling, infuriating last decade gave Guralnick plenty of opportunity to leap in and tell you what he thinks, he never once does so. LeBlanc’s stern neutrality is generous and important: she hectors nobody, and the space she leaves us allows us to think properly, to recognize for ourselves all the millions of complications that shape these lives.

  There are many, many things, a zillion things, that make my experiences different from those of Coco and Jessica. But it was remembering my first pregnancy scare that helped me to fully understand the stupidity and purposelessness of the usual conservative rants about responsibility an
d fecklessness and blah blah blah. It was the summer before I went to college, and my girlfriend’s period was late, and I spent two utterly miserable weeks convinced that my life was over. I’d have to get, like, an office job, and I’d miss out on three years pissing around at university, and my brilliant career as a… as a something or other would be over before it had even begun. We’d used birth control, of course, because failing to do so would cost us everything, including a very great deal of money, but we were still terrified: I would just as soon have gone to prison as started a family. What Random Family explains, movingly and convincingly and at necessary length, is that the future as Coco and Jessica and the fathers of their children see it really isn’t worth the price of a condom, and they’re right. I eventually became a father for the first time around the same age that Jessica became a grandmother.