Thackeray Aloud

Stratford on Avon wasn't all that much, you know, until David Garrick. It was the great actor and friend of Johnson and Goldsmith, etc., who put that place on the map. Scandalized by the failure of the town to much mark the two hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, and seeing an opportunity, in 1769 Garrick organized a "jubilee" that officially inaugurated, by most scholarly estimates, the birth of the Stratford cult. There was already local a gent selling keepsakes carved from what was purported to be a mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare, but otherwise, there wasn't yet much of a market in" Bardolatry" in the old boy's hometown. Garrick, the foremost Shakespearean of his day, himself an eager collector of Shakespeareana, and not one to let an opportunity pass to link his own name with that of his idol, went all out with his late birthday party. It was and it wasn't a success. Garrick himself described the event as "gigantically comic fiasco." Plagued by bad weather, lack of accommodations, some seriously poor planning, and what now seems an incredible oversight in not offering a single actual performance of a Shakespeare play, the festival nevertheless proved a memorable occasion. Garrick performed his own Ode upon dedicating a building and, erecting a statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford-upon-Avon, which went over very well. Otherwise, it sounds rather a mess. Whatever the detractions of the jubilee, it gave Stratford on Avon, forgiving the pun, the cottage industry upon which its fame and fortune still depends.

Come next February, a similar occasion will doubtlessly be marked in England by a much more professionally managed series of public events, lectures, readings, news stories and new publications when the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens rolls around. (In my own modest way, I hope to do my part with at least one reading at the bookstore. I sincerely hope that that will not prove to be the only such celebration locally. Shame on us if it is.) Obviously, I am all for this kind of thing. Celebrity book club selections, movie adaptations -- good and bad, though mostly bad -- house-museums, musicals... generally I only draw the line at sequels, or "reinterpretations" written by other hands. That's almost invariably a bad idea; see the wretched Dan Simmon's vulgar Drood, for example, or any of the Darcy romances of recent days, or Oscar Wilde as a vampire hunter. Shiver. Otherwise? Almost any excuse, I feel. Anything that draws the attention of the public to great books and to those that made 'em, is all to the good. Snobbery be damned. I love that there is a theme park called Dickens World -- though I haven't any urge to go. (I do dream of seeing Gad's Hill someday.)

The centrality of literature to modern culture is increasingly questioned in the popular media. This is nonsense. Forget for a moment that this is primarily an exercise in writers writing about writing for readers reading about reading. Even if the human thumb is in some kind of evolutionary transition thanks to portable electronics, there is as yet no evidence that any human brain organizes itself by any method other than language, or ever will, or that any language, including mathematics, code and music, has surpassed our own for efficiency as a method of communication. All those other languages have their beauties and their unique capacities, but none, I predict, will ever improve on "I love you" as the quickest and best means to the happiest of ends. So long as this is true, there must be a literature to elaborate. The best literature, like the best music, transcends the limitations of time and place, and the fad and fashion dictated by commercial distraction, academic and political preoccupations, and survives even popular neglect.

Do not however mistake my confidence in the survival of literature for complacency. No good comes from any assumption made about the durability of "classics" without an active commitment on the part of everyone with an interest in seeing to it that what is best is bought, taught, heard and seen. What we now would call "classical" music survives not simply because it is better than the folk songs and popular ditties of its day, or even because those materials inspired genius, but because a whole community of musicians, composers, conductors, teachers, students and fans have kept the tradition alive. (The idea that grand opera was ever the popular music of the eighteenth, let alone the nineteenth century has always made me smile. I understand the impulse to have it so, but popularity must be rather elastically defined if I am to accept that my great grandma ever heard a tune by Verdi or even Mendelssohn, as she surely did, and recognized it as such.)

That last in mind, the great nineteenth century novel has proven to endure, but by no means can we assume that it will unaided, just because it should. We must all do what we can, those of us who believe in the best books, to remind ourselves, and everyone else, why. We must, by whatever means we comfortably may, be evangelists for the books we love. Whatever it takes, I say. The disdain expressed by snobs for the "Austen industry" of criticism, clubs and tours, and even less respectable, for quaint little gift editions of excerpts, for Jane T shirts, and Austen tea-services, is understandable in so far as the production of such stuff exploits the memory of the novelist to no better end than to keep the Chinese sweatshops that keep us in knickknacks going, but it says something for us, and our Jane, surely, that those poor souls are not just painting "Hello Kitty" cups, doesn't it? The need of such ancillary trash, while not evident of itself, bespeaks at least a sustained interest in the lady if not always in really reading the books, a need for community and a pride in expressing, however vulgar the means, a preference for superior intellectual achievement. There's little enough likelihood, two hundred years hence, that anyone will be wearing a picture of Stephenie Meyer on a T shirt, or making pilgrimage to Tom Clancy's compound. Exceptional intelligence and talent are however no guarantee of popular remembrance, anymore that the lack of these has ever been a bar to popular success.

A case then very much in point: William Makepeace Thackeray. July 18th, 2011 will mark his two hundredth birthday. I can find little or nothing in the way of planned commemorations of the date, here or in Great Britain. I hope I'm wrong. If the author of the greatest comic novel in the language rates not so much as a cake...

I want to do a reading of Thackeray, for his birthday. A reading of what, I don't know. Might do the Duchess of Richmond's ball from Vanity Fair, if that proves manageable, or just selections from his Yellowplush Papers, something. The point being that here is exactly the excuse required.

Not so easy as Dickens. Everybody knows Dickens still, even people who may never have read a word of him. Not so Thackeray. Vanity Fair, that greatest of novels to which I referred already, is still widely read and respected, but it's author is now too little known, despite still being ranked as a great writer. Thackeray's reputation in his own day was, in some circles, even superior to Dickens; Thackeray being thought the more refined sensibility, the greater satirist, the better gentleman. Doesn't mean a thing now, whatever his reputation once was, nor should it. The rivals, for such they were, are both dust, as are the critics who would set them up as such. All of Dickens survives. All of Thackeray does not, nor did some of it necessarily deserve to, though again, that hardly matters. What does matter is that there is more in Thackeray than most people now know; more comedy, more feeling, more finely accomplished art than anyone who may have read only Vanity Fair would know.

The chief complaint against Thackeray -- made even so recently as the last major biography of him a couple of decades ago -- was that unlike Dickens, Thackeray was somehow insincere. The accepted line is that having achieved greatness with his first novel, he declined thereafter, writing more for money than for art, a victim of his own success and snobbery, unwilling to offend, now he'd arrived, the very people he had once so ruthlessly satirized. The possibility that the novelist, no longer young, simply ceased to see society as being so irredeemable once he was in it, while admitted to be possible, sounds less dramatic. That Thackeray was both a cynic and a snob, a ruthless critic and a kind soul, a realist nevertheless capable of what we would now consider gross sentimentality, does not, to my mind, disqualify him from being a great novelist, anymore than Dickens perhaps being a bit of a hypocrite in matters domestic makes his fantasies of the happy hearth fraudulent. Both were men. Both were flawed. Both had genius. If Dickens had the larger share, as even Thackeray in an honest mood was prepared to admit, in what way does that condemn Thackeray to comparative obscurity?

Reading further in Thackeray has been one of the sustained pleasures in my leisure hours now for a decade. If nearly all of his later essays for "Punch" and long stretches of The Virginians, for example, have dated beyond the point of pleasure, well, I would only mention Trollope's hunting scenes, or George Eliot's sermons, or the excruciating shyness of Austen's Fanny Price, etc. Not every book must be a masterpiece, nor every piece an undiluted pleasure to be read with satisfaction.

Henry Esmond, and even more, The Newcomes, are brilliant novels, every bit as worthy of readers and study as anything written by any of the novelist's great contemporaries, including Dickens. So why aren't they read more?

One answer would be that Thackeray's conservatism, for so it would seem to us now, lacks the satisfaction of the more righteous indignation of Dickens, or Mrs. Gaskell's social-problem-novels. But do we really read great novels, and great novelists, for their politics? Thackeray's sympathies were as wide as any man of his day. If his political engagement with the issues looks to us to have come from the wrong side in most matters, what of it? Was Trollope a proper liberal by our standards? Was Eliot not occasionally insufferably smug? It's nonsense to talk this way about great novelists, no better than judging Tolstoy by his latter religious manias. Great novels are great, often as not, despite the limitations of their politics. It is in the humanity expressed, the humor and sophistication of the observer, and the gift for invention and expression that great fiction writers lay their claims on the reader, not their opinion of the Corn Laws or any other such forgotten reforms.

I think the real reason for Thackeray's failure to come down to us in tact has less to do with his failures, or his failings, than it is to do with our attention simply being elsewhere. When I was giving copies away of Mrs. Gaskell's charming little Cranford, the lady had yet to make her debut on Masterpiece theater. Now she's everywhere. I claim no part in her popularity. I don't know that any of the copies I gave as gifts were ever read. Despite an appalling recent screen adaptation of Vanity Fair, or perhaps at least in part because of it, readers have not been flocking to even that one masterpiece of Thackeray. All it would take, I'm convinced, is a few mentions in the popular press, perhaps a new television film of Henry Esmond, and Thackeray could make a similar comeback. Maybe I'm wrong, but surely the novelist's 200th birthday provides at least some excuse for making a fuss?

I've no illusions about how many a reading of mine might bring to his standard, but that's all for the moment I can think to do, so why not? Why not give it a go, say something of his out loud, to mark the passage of two hundred years since he came into the world, and do something rather than nothing to see that he isn't further forgotten? It'll be fun.

What's the worst than can happen? A few loyal friends may listen to me read a little something, well or badly, and then maybe have a drink in memory of one of the great English novelists. There are worse ways to celebrate a birthday.

He disliked public speaking, though he did it, and he didn't much care for reading his work aloud, unlike Charles Dickens who made a second career of it, but he did that too. He did however like a drink, and a party, as much as the next fellow. So, a modest party, and a large drink at least, come the day. Mark your calendars.

To, then, William Makepeace Thackeray!