A Handsome Ivanhoe

Back in the day, when novels were being published serially in popular magazines and illustrators made a living, the best that even the most popular novelists could do was to pick or approve the artist, suggest and correct what they could, and live with the results. It was the convention of the time, illustration, and helped to sell magazines, which in turn helped to sell the finished books thereafter. Some, like Dickens, who wrote his first book, and the first of Pickwick to the illustrations provided by an editor, eventually became powerful enough to dictate, but that was a rare thing. Dickens himself becoming a hugely successful magazine editor, at least in part, to excise more complete control over his own work, down to the hiring, firing and management of the pictures published with it. Thackeray tried his hand as an illustrator and cartoonist before his first novel was even written. In fact, he auditioned to illustrate for Dickens. He was not hired. Eventually, he did the illustrations for his books himself, and did them well, but this too was an exception. There were, even then, writers who did not much care to have their characters depicted but with the words that made them up, but that was not a fight really won until the illustrated magazines were done. Most writers simply had to accept the pictures they got.

Modern authors, disdainful of, when not in open rebellion against, this, as well as most Victorian conventions, eventually escaped the illustrators and decorators completely, save for the "wrappers" or dustjackets, as we would call them, though even now there are doubtless fights still being had about what's now called "cover art," with or without pictures. (Authors still lose this fight, usually without a word being said.)

Another issue in Dickens' day was piracy. Copyright was a battle he fought all his career, and not only against the gross plagiarism of hacks and publishers, but also the often simultaneous, if not preemptive, stage adaptations of his successes that sprang up like weeds, everywhere. He was prepared to be amused by some of these, sought to shut down many, and was even known to offer advice and collaboration, here and there, in an attempt to at least control the better representations of his work. (But being a devoted amateur actor and playwright himself, he sympathized with the actors and theater technicians in these bowdlerized productions, even when he sued.)

Living writers lucky enough to sell a novel or story to the movies or television, still tend to have no more say in what happens to their books when adapted than did Dickens. A writer of mystery novels I once knew fairly well, when three of his funny crime novels in a row were "optioned," and none of them made into anything much but incomplete or unproduced scripts, told me he'd cashed the checks, and then tried never to think about the subject again. This had been the advice he'd received from an older, more experienced novelist and it proved good. I've never met one novelist whose work has been adapted to the screen, large or small, who was wholly happy with the result, though they were all of them glad of the checks.

A friend at work not so long ago purchased one of the grand boxed-sets of BBC literary adaptations and this weekend lent me the 1997 BBC/A&E coproduction of Ivanhoe, I'd never seen it before. It was rather wonderful: handsomely, if not lavishly produced, with a large and attractive cast and, at a running time of five hours, quite surprisingly faithful to the book. A certain psychological sophistication, unknown, perhaps unnecessary and possibly even shocking to Scott, had he been alive to see the show, was folded in, but this did the story no harm, and frankly did the female characters some good. If there is anything unlikely to appeal to modern audiences so far as Scott is concerned, it is probably the undeniably stiff virtue of his ingenues. Here both of Scott's central women, the good Saxon maid, and the noble Jewess, unwittingly made her rival and otherwise much abused in the story, benefited from being given more to play than bravery, chastity and charity, and from being given more to do than lament, suffer and sacrifice. Even Ivanhoe himself was here allowed a deeper gloom than usual, with a rather cynical reading of a noble line, here and there, and many a baleful glance, and was all the better for it.

But what I like best in these extended TV adaptations is always the room provided for the supporting characters, so that here Prince John is allowed something more than his usual cretinous pout and has a full share as co-conspirator. Robin Hood, Tuck and the rest of the merry band were not the usual cameos, The nasty Normans all had a go at something more than the usual snarling, and the most endearing supporting characters from the novel, the unsurprisingly wise fool, Womba, and his friend, the swineherd/squire, Gurth, both followed their stories out to their ends. This was at least as delightful to me as all the history bits, the daring doings, and the romance. Scott created wonderful minor characters. It was good to see them accounted for.

Scott on the page nearly always seems to me eminently suited to being put up on his feet and before the cameras. His is an imagination made for real horses, the clank of prop swords, the playing of death scenes, fires, fights, castles, intrigues and rescues. The expense of recreating medieval England, or Jacobean Scotland is probably prohibitive, and it is by now doubtless less so to reproduce the more familiar London of the middle and late Victorians, as much of it survives in places other than London. But Scott's voice is gentler than Dickens, or the Brontes, and more easily translated into television or film situations, his characters easier to watch, in a way, for their greater simplicity. His plots multiply like rabbits and leap about, but none is so involved as to require explanation outside the narrative. His use of histories now unfamiliar to television audiences should, I think be more an advantage than not, as there is always something fresh there for a modern audience, and because he never introduces history but through situation, character and action, dramatizing, in other words, anything that might otherwise seem daunting or confusing in a summery of one of the novels -- which is presumably the most one might expect a television or film producer to read. I wish more Scott made it onscreen. (If for no other reason than to spare us the twenty sixth British or American television adaptation of Jane Eyre in as many months, or so it can sometimes seem.)

As for what Scott might have made of this recreation of his Ivanhoe, I should think he would have been pleased. I don't doubt he would have been glad of the check.