Come Thursday night, we will be having a little reading at the bookstore, in celebration of the 200th birthday of William Makepeace Thackeray. This all started, you know, when I could find nothing online to mark the occasion, anywhere, save one display mounted in a Midwestern, American, Mormon university library! Imagine that! I searched for something, not just in the US, but the UK, and even in India, the place of the novelist's birth. Nothing else did I find. Since then, I found a Kensington gallery and frame shop, prepared to offer a toast on the occasion, to the novelist in his old neighborhood, in fact, on Thackeray Street, and right around the corner from Thackeray's house in London (now the Israeli Embassy, of all things, and hence described as now being "among the most secure locations in the city." How that might have made the man smile.) One American library. One English frame shop. One Seattle bookstore.
Not to say I wouldn't have wanted to mark the occasion anyway, but seeing little evidence that anyone else much was going to, I became all the more determined that something ought to be done. Securing the available date nearest, July 14th, to the great man's actual anniversary, July 18th, I set about finding something appropriate, and light to read, finally settling on a short story, "A Little Dinner at the Timmins's", and recruited two coworkers to read it with me. I requested a small poster from the good people of the bookstore's Promotions Department, and set up a facebook "event" for the reading, by means of which I might invite friends, far and wide, to attend or at least show their support for the enterprise. Here, and on the bookstore's blog, as well as on Youtube.com and on the facebook page, I've now posted a series of fourteen videos, all brief readings from Thackeray's novels and poems. The last recorded among these consisted of some unintentionally amusing bits of our only rehearsal for the actual reading in the bookstore. All of these preparations and attempts to promote the celebration were undertaken with the one thought in mind that I might draw some attention not just to our small, in-store event, but to the great writer. Anything in service of that seemed, and seems to me worth doing.
Another idea did occur to me, something new. I'd made a pencil sketch to post here, a caricature actually taken, rather ghoulishly, from a study of Thackeray's death-mask. Why not recycle my sketch and put it to further use? And so the subsidiary enterprise of reprinting something of Thackeray's on our own dear Homer, the bookstore's Espresso Book Machine, came to be. We had, a year ago, reprinted a number of books from Helene Hanff's library -- all out-of-print, all now available for reprinting thanks to Google Books -- and made these available the night of our reading for the 40th Anniversary of the publication of 84 Charing Cross Road. That proved one of the great satisfactions of that evening. We subsequently sold all, or nearly all the books we had reprinted, some we have now reprinted more than once! (A few are even now on the shelves at the bookstore.) Rather than just do the same for Thack, we thought we might this time design a new cover, using my sketch, and make proper note of the occasion on the cover. Thanks to the tireless enthusiasm, skill and good taste of the bookstore's own Anna, the present publisher and operator of the EBM, you may see the result above. (This being my copy, a gift from the dear woman.) Copies will be on display and available at the bookstore the night of, and hopefully thereafter.
My original idea had been to reprint two or three of Thackeray's now sadly neglected other novels. Vanity Fair, his first and most lasting masterpiece, requires no help from us to find readers. Sadly, it would seem to be the only one of Thackeray's books to survive in popularity down to our day. This is a terrible injustice to a great writer and one of the supreme novelists, not only of the great Victorian age of the English novel, but in our language. The problem with reprinting even Henry Esmond, or Barry Lyndon though, was that the available formats of each, as scanned by Google Books, were part of larger sets of Thackeray's collected works, and as such it was not always clear what we would actually be getting as reprinted books. Didn't want to confuse anyone new to Thackeray by having the second part of something else crowded in with the whole of something else. That sort of thing. One book I did find, and had reprinted for myself, ended up the title we chose to make over for sale in the bookstore. A collection of quotations and short excerpts from all or nearly all of Thackeray's work, the little book called The Sense and Sentiment of Thackeray, serves our purpose perfectly, I think, as it may introduce readers unfamiliar with the writer, or who may only know Vanity Fair, to more, with some taste of Thackeray's rich and remarkably large production. The emphasis in this collection is not so much on Thackeray's great wit, though that is certainly represented, but more on his philosophy of life and literature; a subject sorely neglected by academia and not much considered even by fairly recent biographers. (No new biography published to mark his bicentennial either, please note. Disgraceful.)
That Thackeray isn't better read nowadays may be blamed, I think, on a fundamental misunderstanding of just this aspect of his writing, his style, and the man himself. For the moderns at the beginning of the last century, Thackeray, much more so than Dickens, or Trollope, or even George Eliot, who was at least a woman, came to represent everything they disliked about the Victorian novelist and the traditional English novel. Dickens at least was angry, and his genius was of such a strange and wonderful kind; full of endless invention, wildly funny and sometimes brutal language, bizarre and brilliant characters, that he was, quite simply, impossible to ignore or dismiss entirely. Trollope talked honestly about money and power. That had a certain realism that continued to appeal to Twentieth Century readers and writers. Despite the fact that Eliot was easily the most pious of that great generation, she was also the most intellectually complex, and the writer of the greatest philosophic sophistication. Thackeray was worshiped by his contemporaries, including Charlotte Bronte, and the critics of his day and just after, for the clean, and elegant style of his prose, widely accepted as a perfect model of how English might best be written. That would not hold with the revolutionaries who came in the century next after his. Moreover, Thackeray came to represent everything that was conventional in English morality, and in English prose, the very things the moderns set out to smash and remake. I need hardly point out that in the hundred years since, much of what the moderns had to say about literature, in turn, has became received opinion, going largely unchallenged by subsequent critics and academics, and so some, though by no means all of the great writers and books that the moderns liked least, continue to be neglected or ignored simply because it is assumed that they must be irrelevant still.
I would argue, however, that among the great Victorian novelists, there is none so near to our present way of seeing the world as William Makepeace Thackeray. If Dickens insistence on love as the necessary force to change the world now seems, as indeed it still is, a radical proposal, and somewhat quaint for that, Thackeray's less bombastic hope for simple kindness, and his sadness at finding so little of it in humanity, strikes me as being very much nearer the familiar liberal sentiment of our own day. Thackeray was accused, even in his own time of being a cynic. Not true. He did not despair of humanity so much as find in it every day evidence of not only endless folly, cruelty and stupidity, but also of kindness, forgiveness and humor. If Dickens was indeed a great man, Thackeray was a good one, and much closer to even the best of most of us for that. Yes, he believed in very Victorian ideas such as honor and the English Gentleman, but he was also wise enough, and so good a writer, as to never just put such things on the page without close scrutiny, and he never wrote a thing he didn't think true, or as near to being so as he might make it.
As for elegance, that is a value now much derided in writing, as in nearly everything. Elegance requires an appreciation of the correctness of a thing, and judging things exclusively in their kind, and these are both phrases suggestive of a fundamentally undemocratic and elitist aesthetic that would have the value of a hat, or a novel, decided by considering hats, and or novels, seriously, worthy of themselves of study, but not ultimately much interested in what a hat, or a novel might mean, or how a hat or a novel might speak to the production of grain in the Ukraine, or the sexuality of the adolescent, or the semiotics of anything. Thackeray may well be now so critically neglected because he would, it's true, have found such modern and postmodern discussions of hats and novels both incomprehensible and hilarious, as well as completely beside the point.
It is, I'm sure, the finding of life both funny and sad that should, in justice, bring more readers to Thackeray. At the bookstore, we're doing everything we can to see that happen. Wish us luck.
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