Tomorrow comes the event. I am, in some ways, well prepared, in others not. I have rehearsed, many times here in my office at home, but only once with my fellow readers. Our schedules at the bookstore being such as they are these days, and being short-staffed all last week at the buying counter, etc., there simply wasn't time. (I can only hope the other participants found some time on their own.) I have now done a third and a fourth edit of our text to be read, "A Little Dinner at the Timmins's", and I think I have now reduced the whole to a manageable size, and without I also hope, losing the flavor of the piece. Honestly, that is always the hardest work when preparing a reading for the bookstore. I've picked a poem, should there be time, as an encore.
I have certainly read and or reread enough by and about William Makepeace Thackeray by now to be confident that I know my subject better than I might ever have otherwise. When the idea of a reading for Thackeray's birthday first came to me, I went browsing through Vanity Fair, looking for a scene with Becky that we might read for the event. While this proved impossible, I can't say that I was made at all unhappy by the effort. It is a thoroughly great book. Next, I went through essays and journalism, though I was sure we would want an actual story, and I read my way through all the verse, some of which ended up as short readings here. Likewise, entirely satisfying. I reread Barry Lyndon -- and I happened on the brilliant Kubrick film, right there to be rented under the heading "Historical", as an "On Demand" selection from the cable tv company. Imagine that. The film is an astonishing visual achievement; capturing better than any I've ever seen what it may very well have looked like to wander an English meadow in the days of the Georges, or to play cards by candle-light, or face a duel on a cold morning. The movie, quite simply, is beautiful, though very different from the book of course. I read nearly all of Henry Esmond too, and will finish it yet. It is my favorite of Thackeray's novels after VF.
As for books about, I did consult D. J. Taylor's again, as it still seems to me the best of the modern biographies, and I read long patches of Trollope's little book on Thackeray as well. Still seems to a most remarkable thing, that Morley should have got one of the greatest Victorian novelist to write a brief life of another. I had them reprint for me on the bookstore's EBM machine, our beloved Homer, Dr. John Brown's little book, Thackeray: the Literary Career. Brown was a friend, after a fashion, to the novelist, as well as an enthusiast, and his short book is full of true and interesting things. I also had printed at least two short anthologies of quotations and selections, including the book we would eventually reprint for the bookstore's event. As I've already discussed here, doing that subsidiary project has been one of the best experiences of the whole business. I think the book admirable.
Knowing what we were to eventually read, and not planning on any lengthy introduction the night of, both for reasons of time and because I am wary of getting too preachy before reading a funny little story, and so ruining the mood, I really did not need to read another word about Thackeray just now. But honestly? I undertake these events not only from a sincere desire to do the great man some small good, but to give myself some excuse to get lost in the preparations, frankly. I hardly need an excuse to reread Henry Esmond or to explore The Yellowplush Papers, but having one does seem to excuse whatever I might do by way of research and in so doing, I can allow myself the kind of wallow I do not much do anymore. There was a time, in my youth, when I read individual writers in just this way; starting pretty much at one end and reading, back and forth and side to side, my way all through. That isn't the sort of thing one can recreate very often after forty. Reading a great novelist for the first time is wonderful both for the sense of personal discovery, but also because there is usually so much more, particularly with the Victorians, and all of the rest new as well. Rereading such writers, curiously enough, I have found, is actually an even richer experience. True, neither the books nor the life is any longer new, but in some ways, I am. A great part of my life has gone by since I first read Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond. The way I now read is slower, naturally, and what I now read for; humanity, humor, style, I like to think is nearer to what the novelist might have hoped for in a mature reader. The books then couldn't be bettered, but clearly I could.
As for reading around an author, I don't generally do nearly so much of that as I once did, but my patience with the supplemental reading I now dow has considerably increased. What I wanted most from a biography when I was young was, I should think, exactly what I wanted from the novels: I wanted to know. Now I do, at least as much as I am ever likely to, and what I want know is more a matter of emotion and contemplation, if that last doesn't sound too grand for comic novels and the books about the writers of such. I don't personally believe much in the kind of writing usually designed to that purpose. I enjoy a good sermon, honestly, but I prefer the opportunity now to meditate with the weary, the funny, the storyteller, rather than the mystic or the monk. I like the company better. As for biographers and critics, I've developed an impatience with most contemporary literary analysis and that, matched with a healthy horror of most modern psychology, has led me back to the generation of the writers themselves and their immediate heirs. Turns out, what I like best about reading Fielding, for just one example, I also like in Johnson. The thing I like best about the Thackeranians that survived into the Twentieth Century was not only the similarity in language and style to their subject, but also their feverish, admittedly sometimes maddening habit of collecting. It may look like the scholarly complete-ism that came to dominate and nearly wreck literary biography from about the middle of the last century forward; resulting in those thick, unreadable, official biographies of writers as different as Sinclair Lewis and Graham Greene, but the Victorian and Edwardian, even Georgian mania for collecting, rather than resulting in big books detailing every breakfast a novelist ever ate, turn out to be big, wonderful grab-bags instead; full of otherwise lost letters, sketches, contemporary reviews,selections from the memoirs of otherwise forgotten friends, anything and everything that could be gathered in, pell mell, in those far off days before American research libraries and collections, before the Internet, or even newspaper archives. The resulting volumes tend to be badly organized and not always logically arranged, it's true, but they also tend to be full of the most delightful surprises, even with the most familiar subjects.
I couldn't resist then having just one more title reprinted for me. The book in the picture above is monstrous thing, of some five or six hundred closely printed pages, and the EBM reprint proved to be so fat as to almost not make it through the binding. While it's true that I didn't need such a book, where else would I have learned that dear Arthur Hugh Clough, then a very young man, came over on the boat when Thackeray first came to lecture in America, and that the two of them should meet again and again during Thackeray's stay here? Where else might I have read the full text of the article reviewing Thackeray's first American effort, as written anonymously by Thackeray about himself? Great, good fun. (As are all the wonderful sketches, by Thackeray and by various American observers.:
If nothing else, I am glad to now have this book to browse in. What does it matter that I hardly needed it or the reading we are to do? I might never have known of the book's existence, but for having so good an excuse to search Google Books for whatever the name Thackeray might suggest. I am also pleased to note that nothing I've had to read or do to actually prepare seems to have discouraged either my affection for or my interest in William Makepeace Thackeray. That says more for the novelist than it does for me, obviously.
I plan to retire tonight, not with my script which I should be reviewing again, but instead with this latest unnecessary purchase. Why not? It's all Thackeray and all therefore to the good, no? That's what I think, anyway.
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