Reading Dumas Again...

Reading Dumas again, I'm reminded how a great artist -- because that is what Alexandre Dumas, père, was, a great artist -- says what he means to say by whatever means he may choose or take up of necessity or in keeping with the fashion of the times, and in whatever medium, or genre, or material that may be, finds not only the way but the reason to make art. Unlike Hugo or Balzac, for whom I suspect the reason came first, Dumas might almost be said to have become an artist because, being poor and finding he was suited to little else, but being being ambitious, and clever, he took to writing for want of other opportunities. In this, Dumas is more like Dickens than either Hugo or Balzac, for both of whom the writing of fiction was always mixed with the politics of their time, with philosophy, and poetry and the traditional preoccupations of serious young men determined to make, not only art, and a reputation, but their mark, and ultimately to not only influence but change the world around them. For Dumas, like Dickens, writing was first a way to make a living, to make something from nothing, to make a reputation yes, but also a popular success. Both became immensely popular, and both became rich, and the nakedness with which they both pursued this worldly success has been used ever since to indict them both as being inferior artists. It's perfectly true that both popular novelists relished their popularity, and the money it made them, but that doesn't mean that either had nothing very important to say, or that they did not ultimately come to say things that were not necessarily popular. Each man, having found that he might do very well indeed by way of writing novels, found he might also, by the same means, without actually compromising his popularity or his income, or his principles, say exactly what he thought. If Dickens, almost unable to help himself even so early as the second half of his first great success, The Pickwick Papers, could not keep from being angry, and expressing that seriousness that marked him out as more than just a comic writer, and in so doing make his eponymous little retiree not only go to jail, but see it as it was; filthy, corrupt, a tragedy and a shame, and be changed by the experience, so too Dumas, the supreme romancer, was never satisfied that his heroes should win and their enemies lose. Everyone loses in Dumas. If not now, then later, if not life, then love, if not everything, then what matters most. Not even in the greatest revenge ever written, does the Count of Monte Cristo sail away without regrets. At peace? Perhaps, but off he goes, none the less. Do we know why?

That's what makes Alexandre Dumas, père, the greatest romancer, greater even than his master, Walter Scott. There are questions in Dumas for which he has no answer.

Dumas wrote romances for a number of reasons, not all of them noble I suppose, and he used a whole factory of hacks and researchers to produce his books. A recent film biography produced in France created controversy, not only by casting the great Gérard Depardieu rather than a black actor to play the novelist, who was a direct descendant of a Caribbean slave, but by showing something of the shabby way Dumas sometimes treated his collaborators. I haven't seen the film, which I don't think has ever been released here, so I can't speak to the accuracy of the portrait, or Depardieu's performance, or the controversies that the film created. What I've read of Dumas' biography does suggest that he was subject to a certain and persistent racism, used by his critics as just one more way to attack him, and that while the writer was extremely proud of the memory of his father, a Napoleonic general and son of an aristocratic Frenchman and an Afro-Caribbean Creole of mixed French and African ancestry, Dumas seems seldom, at least in his novels, and the memoirs I've read, to concern himself much with race; either his own or as a topic to explore. He did write one short novel, Georges, with a protagonist of mixed race, but the subject didn't seem to interest him much, if at all, even that one book aside. Dumas was a Romantic and well as as the supreme romanticist, and as such it was always the individual, as hero and antagonist, in love, war, intrigue, and most supremely in dialogue, that speaks to him and for whom he speaks most eloquently. Gascon or Parisian, king or commoner, black or white, even, somewhat surprisingly for a man and a writer of his time, man or woman, for Dumas, any human being, every human being, is a story, a history, heroic and cowardly, weak and strong, but never simply one of many, and never banal. I don't think, for all his patriotism, all his pride, that Dumas really believed much in nations, or even peoples. Dumas believed in Dumas. Recognizing his own moral complexity, his own character, he invested nearly every character he wrote, historical or invented, with something of the same contradictions he found in himself. He relished his own, rather ruinous humanity, and saw no reason to deny even his villains something of his own humor and generosity, just as he always invests even his greatest heroes something of his own weakness and pride and lack of sobriety.

I've just read Dumas' portrait of Henri of Navarre at his court, well after he escaped the Valois, and before he claimed France as his kingdom. It is an astonishingly good likeness, as I understand it, but it is more than just a portrait of a king in a small kingdom who would go on to become the great king who restored France. For Dumas, there is greatness in Henri, but we do not see it in him, as indeed did not most of his contemporaries, until it can be proved. Indeed, even Chicot, Dumas' brilliant portrait of an exceptionally perceptive and able man, hobbled by loyalty to an inferior prince, Henri's brother-in-law, Henri III of France, fails to fully appreciate the King of Navarre until he is bested by him, and comes in fact to love him. It is an amazingly deft and believable transformation that Dumas makes, of both men, and dangerous, not only in the exciting context of the story, and history, but as a bit of narrative. The reader presumably knows more than either man what will happen next, and yet Dumas still surprises. Chicot, one of Dumas' supremely clever men, is outfoxed and kept from escaping the hospitality of provincial Navarre, not by force, but by ruthless good manners. The king, thought to be something less than a soldier, and even rumored to be a coward, does not cease to be a coward in battle, when he undertakes to make war. He shakes with fear. Chicot sees this just as we do. Like Chicot, the reader may well be astonished to see Henri of Navarre, rather than deny his terror, admit it, even shame himself with it, and not so much overcome it as use it to force himself to continue, and to triumph. Chicot, the great friend of the Valois king, as great a cynic as he is loyal, while he will not betray his master, admits freely that he has met a better man in Henri of Navarre, and pledges his friendship, should he ever be free from his obligation to the house that has never brought him anything but disappointment and grief, but which he will not abandon.

Dumas' genius is in not only his adventurous story-telling, or the plots he took from history and the hands of his collaborators, but in his dialogue, which is unmatched for it's telling character, it's wit and it's magical facility for being both very like what what may or must have been said by the people in the time of which he writes, and better, probably, than anything a witness to these scenes would actually have heard. Dumas was first a playwright, and so he was at his best as a novelist, taking the highly theatrical settings of French history, and the conventions of romance, and elevating both by giving voice not only to the character of his characters, so to say, but to all the complexities with which conversation at its best might be made by exceptional men, moving in and making history.

Dumas does something we now longer accept in our history; he makes great men say great things, not in speeches, but between themselves. The advances in technology and the disappearance of privacy for even the leaders of nations has sadly proved how unlikely it is that princes and generals and politicians ever spoke this well. And yet, the magic of romance, and what Dumas, like Shakespeare, understood perfectly, is that we want men and women not only to do great things, but to be greater than just their deeds. Again like Shakespeare, Dumas knew that it is not always the winners who are the most eloquent witnesses of events, that it is not always good that wins, or the best who survive. But Dumas believes even in his fools and his failures, in his murderers and his assassins as much as his heroes, and believes they all deserve a hearing, and at their best. So reading Dumas, must we. It is glorious to be in such a world, if only in a book!

As for Dumas putting his name to other writers work, he may well have done. The Two Dianas, set in the reign of Henri II, and so set just before the Valois novels I'm finishing now with The Forty-Five, is now widely assumed to be almost wholly the work of another. What I have read is that even Dumas most regular, and possibly most misused collaborators were nevertheless quick to point out that whatever they did, it was Dumas who took it and made it into literature, by whatever means or magic. (One has only to read some of the unauthorized sequels to his Musketeers, like The Son of Porthos, to which Dumas contributed nothing, to appreciate how necessary his genius was to elevate the material to something more than sentimental melodrama.)

What Dumas gave his books was not just life, as great novelists do, but joy, as only the greatest artists understand. It isn't just the adventure, the victories or the defeats, it isn't just the romance of love and politics and honor and war, it is the joy of it all, and in spite of it all, of living, that one knows best perhaps in Dumas. Say what you will of Alexandre Dumas, he had as much or more to say about that than almost anyone else I can name in literature, or life.