Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #28

Daily Dose

From Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, Volume Two, by Edgar Johnson

STROLLING BACK

"Strolling back from Huntly Burn, Adolphus and Scott paused to admire some feathery saplings lining the roadway just below them.  'I like,' Scott remarked, 'that way of giving an eyelash to the road.'  Adolphus refered to the Burn as a brook; 'hardly that,' said Scott, 'it is just a runnel.'  On its tiny cascade he liked to quote Lord Holland: 'Cascade! asking the ladies pardon, I could produce a more respectable waterfall from my own person!'"

From Chapter 6, Like a Recusant Turnspit, (1827)

Daily Dose

From Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, Volume Two, by Edgar Johnson

JOURNAL

"I shall tire of my Journal if it is to contain nothing but biles and piles and plaisters and unguents."

From Chapter 5, The Rod of Prospero (1826 - 1827)

Breakfast at the Bookstore #15

Quick Review

The Great Charles Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Slater is perhaps the greatest living Dickens scholar.  That isn't to say he's Dickens' best biographer -- a title I would still give to the late Edgar Johnson, if anyone -- or even that I much liked his magisterial life of Dickens from a few years back.  It was a factual wonder: summarizing and condensing all the best Dickens research of the past fifty years, indisputably accurate in every detail, no doubt, and as true a record of the great man's life as we are likely to ever see, two centuries out from his birth.  If it was not a very diverting or stimulating book, and if critically it lacked the sharp edges and enthusiasm of earlier lives, such as Johnson's, Pope-Hennessy, Steven Leacock or the more recent and readable biography by Claire Tomalin, Slater's book was also free of many, even most of the critical eccentricities and or speculative inventions of the rest.  The best biographies, particularly critical biographies of great artists, at least for the common reader, are not quite so dryly reportorial, so determinedly objective as was Slater's.  Specially when reading the life of a man of such profound and influential emotions as Dickens, one wants some clear sympathy, some humor, some joy.  Even John Forster's classic biography, for all Forster's supposed Victorian reserve, was suffused with what can only be described as love for biographer's great subject and friend.  Likewise, later, Chesterton's brilliant little book, and even to a lesser extent, Leacock's life, or the recent short life by the actor, author and Dickens reader, Simon Callow.  For a man who has devoted a good span of his professional life to reading and writing about Dickens, Professor Slater would seem to allow himself precious few pleasures in the task, at least precious few he's felt fit to share.  (There were many familiar and not a few fresh and wonderfully new anecdotes of Dickens' fun in the biography, quoted presumably with Slater's full intent to amuse, but rather as an unfunny man might relay the story of a party at which he abstained from the punch.)

Curiously, the very deficits in Slater's full-length biography; the cool, not to say cold detachment, the dry reliance on accumulated evidence, no matter the reader's willingness to accept such authority as might have been already sited, the over-fastideous refusal to comment directly on anything but in deadpan, can prove real virtues when, as here, the literary historian's task is to sort, sift and present rather than revivify the past.  Slater hasn't any interest in reviving past controversies, or in disputing the dead or the living.  What he does do, and do extremely well in a brief span, is tell a somewhat sorry story straight.

I could not imagine why he should want to tell this story at all until I'd read his book.  Claire Tomalin, in her biography of Ellen "Nelly" Ternan, The Invisible Woman, and again, if with less emphasis in her biography of Dickens, rather conclusively and quite brilliantly made the case not just for Dickens' last "scandalous" love for a much younger actress, but also definitively restored Ternan to her full dignity as an interesting and sympathetic person and personality in her own right.  So why then should the great scholar, Michael Slater choose to follow up his weighty biography with this considerably more sleight review of the whole history of the scandal?  Why rake over yet again Dickens' disastrous end to his long and fruitful marriage, his not so secret fascination with Ternan and their life together and apart to the time of his untimely death?

What Slater does here, and does so well, is painstakingly trace the evolution and detection of that well known and yet little recorded story.  His interest is strictly and quite cleverly confined, again, to the facts, and most interestingly, how they were concealed, revealed, suppressed and finally brought most fully to light.  The book is more the story of the many Dickensians -- amateur detectives and enthusiasts mostly, with a few professional hacks and hatchet-men among them --who down the years made it their business to winkle out the many small details; an address here, the name on a lease there, a letter, a confession, an otherwise lost conversation and or half-forgotten encounter, from which one of the few truly private episodes in Charles Dickens' very public life might be reconstructed.   Slater's command of not only the facts but the personalities involved is masterful.   Even with the end now a forgone conclusion for most readers, the good professor manages to make this teapot tempest genuinely exciting, even suspenseful in part because of the scholar's dry, distance survey.  Slater looks into it all from a very great height and surprisingly, with very little disdain for any but the very worst characters involved, nay, with even what I feel safe in characterizing as amusement and affection.

Imagine.  Such a surprise for the reader of his earlier biography.  (Though that's not altogether fair.  Slater's entry for Dickens in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, later reproduced as a very short book, was a wise and almost witty thing, smart as paint, and his even earlier critical volume, Dickens and Women was a very clever analysis, free from all the more usual psychological and political cant to be expected from an academic on such a subject, replete as it would seem to be with opportunities for scoring points for and against current theories of sexual and literary politics.)

This book then would seem to have been exactly the sort of exercise the great scholar was meant to take, so late in his labors; an almost brutally clear-eyed review of some the last messy materials left over from more than a century of gossip, rumor and pedestal-rocking.  The reader would be hard-pressed to think how anyone coming after might still make much more of the business.

(This also answers some of the more naggingly lazy references to the scandal, and the rather shabby uses to which it is still put in even quite recent books, like Robert Gottlieb's otherwise entertaining and informative book, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, where that author too easily reproduces one or two of the least attractive opinions of Dickens' behavior to both Nelly Ternan, his wife and daughters without properly tracing the origins, as Slater does so definitively here, of those judgements against Dickens' character and affections.)

If finally my own interest in both the relationship between Dickens and Nelly Ternan and the resulting scandal remains next to nothing, even after this book and the rest, That, I happily confess is because my awe of and delight in Dickens achievement as a writer, and my admiration of him as a man, remains all but undimmed by the unhappy end of his marriage and or his personal failings as either a husband or father.  I am myself then a Dickensian, I suppose, and proud to so say.  Perhaps it is just my own thoroughly modern disinterest in saints, sin and personal scandal as a determining factor in appreciating great literature.  Perhaps it is my ever deepening appreciation in this, Dickens' bicentennial year, of his unparalleled artistry as the greatest comic novelist in English that makes me, if always curious as to the details of his life, unwilling to judge him by any other standard.  Perhaps it is as simple as saying that I love him, as best as I am able to say, as he was, that makes this book of such keen if passing interest.  Whatever I think of this book then, and I think it quite good, it is still Dickens I believe to have been great.

Of that, I am more sure with every word by, rather than about him that I read.


View all my reviews

Daily Dose

From Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, a Biography, Volume Two, by Edgar Johnson

AMONG HIS IMAGINARY BOOKS

"... The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, of which the successive volumes were labeled: 'I. Ignorance. II. Superstition. III. The Block. IV. The Stake. V. The Rack. VI. Dirt. VII. Disease.' Along side this bulky work was The Virtues of our Ancestors, a single volume so narrow the title had to be printed sideways."

From Part Eight: The Darkening Scene, 1851 - 1858, Chapter One: Fog Over England

Daily Dose

From Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, by Edgar Johnson

ON LITTLE NELL

"Rather than our being entirely right and Dickens' contemporaries entirely wrong, the fact is that we live in a different emotional climate from theirs."

From Chapter Four, The Neglected and Misused

Debts

In January, 1842, a young English novelist, sailed for America. He and his wife were to have their first vacation. They would be in the United states for six months; visiting up and down the eastern seaboard, from Boston to the deep south. It was to be, typically of the man, a working vacation. Having begun his professional life as a journalist, he intended to write a record of his impressions, and eventually a book. He did just that. The book was to be a celebration of American democracy and egalitarianism, of a nation and a society, unlike his own, if not wholly free, at least, in principle, not crippled by the dead weight of custom, aristocracy, patronage and industrial exploitation. The novelist was something of a radical, certainly a reformer, and he was convinced that America was everything Great Britain was not.

This was not just a novelist though. At the age of only thirty, this was the most successful novelist in the English speaking world. In fact, he was, and still is, the greatest novelist in the English language. Charles Dickens came to America convinced that he would love America, and from the moment he arrived, he was made to understand that the feeling was mutual.

Dickens wrote that Americans were "friendly, hospitable, kind, frank... warm-hearted, fervent, and enthusiastic." It was natural that he should find us so. We adored him. It is difficult now to fully appreciate the extraordinary position in which the young writer found himself, even then, after only half a dozen books. There had never been, nor would there be, until perhaps Chaplin, a celebrity like him. (In her brief biography of him, novelist Jane Smiley makes an excellent case for the argument that Dickens rather invented the modern celebrity.) From the moment he arrived in Boston, Dickens was feted, feasted, introduced to every notable of the day. His likeness was everywhere: in every newspaper and magazine, from soap to cigar-boxes. He could not leave his hotel without being recognized, shaken by the hand, made much of by every passing stranger on the street, it seemed. It must have been both overwhelming and annoying, but it was also, I don't doubt, deeply gratifying, in a very unEnglish way.

The novelist and his wife made it as far as Hartford before the glow began to flicker. Dickens made some remarks on a subject very much on his mind, copyright, and the well-established custom of American piracy of English authors. The press, as a body, turned. Suddenly, the newspapers were full of indignation and acrimony. Dickens, it was said, was "no gentleman." Dickens was stung, but he did not back down. He was adamant: copyright was a necessity for the artist, a duty in a civilized nation, and, in the absence of copyright, publishers were no better than thieves. He was denounced as a scoundrel. Worse was to come.

In the end, Dickens saw more of America than he, or his hosts, had intended. He saw, and heard, much that he did not like. He saw poverty, gross politics, capitalism at it's cruelest, and a crudeness he had not anticipated. Worst, he saw slavery, and condemned it for the eradicable stain that it was. The book he wrote when he got home, American Notes, was by no means the book he had intended, nor did America much like it. The novel he wrote next, Martin Chuzzlewit, with it's scathing satire of American society and manners, America liked even less. It was a long time before Charles Dickens came back for another visit, and it was a long time before he would have been welcome.

By the time he did return, on his first great reading tour in America, Dickens was not so much forgiven, as irresistible. By his last visit, the most famous novelist in the world, the most famous novelist in history, already prematurely old, and ill from his labors, Charles Dickens was... unassailable.*

Much might be and has been made of Dickens complicated affection for this country, and ours for him. I touch on it here only to provide a context for the question that concerns me just at the moment. What was it that Charles Dickens felt obliged first to say and then to defend that so outraged us? Why did what we would now call the media, turn so fiercely on the young novelist it had, but a breath before, been praising so extravagantly? Why did so seemingly a pedestrian area of the law as copyright cause such a furor in the first place?

Plagiarism is a word that has lately gained a weird, new and unexpected opprobrium; not the act, you understand, but the accusation. Much is being made in artistic and critical circles just now of the "good old days" of literary license, supposedly before the arrival of lawyers, and guilds, fact-checkers and copyright. Plagiarism, it is argued, is a journalistic invention, an affectation of the newspaperman, the petty bureaucrats of academia, and, like copyright itself, it is but a tool of the publishers, the lawyers, and the capitalists, used to control and dictate to the artist, to the protect property rights of all those who seek to exploit art for their own gain, at the expense of creative freedom, innovation and the development of a more technologically and artistically democratic literature. To be accused of plagiarism nowadays is to be proved an innovator. Collage, it seems, is king. To defend copyright is to sound hopelessly compromised. Another word has likewise recently been turned on its head, and now to "appropriate" is not to take that which does not belong to you, but to simply put something otherwise inert and useless to a new and better use. In a culture of such uncontrollable energy, fractious interdependence and diversity as ours, the only honest artistic response, it seems, is to abandon the very idea of authorship in favor of what is, after all, it is being argued, an older, less rigidly western, less culturally elitist paradigm of... what exactly? Anonymous and communal craftsmanship? Swashbuckling? What?

Nostalgia is the falsification of the past in order to support and justify an intentional misinterpretation of present circumstances. Nostalgia is, in every age, and in every argument, the favorite tool of the demagogue. Now we learn that literature, our literature, was once a perfect paradise of unattributed quotation, paraphrase and "appropriation," that, once, in days most regrettably long gone by, in the blissful absence of veracity, and contracts, artists flourished in blissful ignorance of petty restriction. From the ancients to Montaigne, at least, and down perhaps to even so late a date as Dickens, writers were owed nothing and owed nothing. Writers once, it seems, lived on air. Words fell from the sky like manna in the desert: whole sentences and paragraphs might be gathered by the armload, to nourish the chosen. In the lost democracy of this earlier innocence, apparently, authors gave away their labour for the love of literature and gleefully tore the pages from their books that they might be shared with anyone who might have need of them, or who might -- might -- put them to some new and better use.

Samuel Johnson wrote a most scathing letter to a would-be patron of his great dictionary who, having neglected to provide the slightest actual support when Johnson worked for years in a garret to produce that mighty volume, claimed after and in company to be numbered among Johnson's earliest and greatest benefactors. Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield is a model of restraint, considering what he might have said, or done, had he met his Lordship in the street. But it would behoove the reader to remember what Johnson, dependent all his life on subscription, patronage, and fees, could not say, or do beyond the letter he wrote. The writer, if not an aristocrat or otherwise "of independent means," in Johnson's day, risked everything, even in writing just as Johnson did.

Patronage nowadays is a rare thing. To the extent it may still be counted among the means by which a writer might live while writing largely as he or she pleases, it exists perhaps only in the institution of academic tenure. It seems to me unsurprising then that the vast majority of those who now most loudly cry down copyright as an antiquated curb on their creativity, and even simple attribution and or acknowledgement as tedious and inauthentic, should shout from the sanctuary of academic cinctures.

Charles Dickens undid his hosts when, very politely mind you, he suggested that, friendly as they were, "hospitable, kind," etc. as he found us, we were none the less taking money from his pockets and bread from his table. In calling to task the capitalists, publishers, pirates, jobbers and "gentlemen" who felt themselves entitled to steal from their workers and betters, Dickens spoke not just for himself, but for the dignity of the artist, and the individual, as well as the integrity of his work. Even being robbed in America, Dickens was already well on his way, at thirty, to being rich. Even without America, for a time, he became perhaps the most rewarded writer in history. Yet if he stood to gain little at the time by his insistence, he never the less still had a great deal to lose. Already the much beloved "Boz," remember, he was not yet the financially secure Grand Old Man of Letters. (That really only came when he began to work himself to death, writing novels, editing magazines, and giving public readings.) If nothing else, his 1842 visit to America, proved to be a longer six months than he'd bargained for.

But Dickens was an idealist. His disappointments were not simply personal. He felt obliged to stand for something in which he fervently believed, just as, elsewhere in his journey, he felt obliged to decry what he found to be shoddy, false, inhuman and evil.

There is an irony so obvious here that I hesitate to elaborate it further. Forgive me then for going on so, but it frankly astonishes me to see bright and brave young writers, all dependent on day jobs, eagerly endorsing their own economic and ethical undoing in their eagerness to embrace not just the wonderful freedom of this new technology -- the very thing that allows me to natter on this way day after day without curb or caution -- but also the nitwitted theorizing of the literary leisured class that would have writers do without the security provided not by the salaried platform of our public academics, but by the again unpopular conviction of writers like Charles Dickens, that the writer is owed a living from his labor, if he can make it honestly, and the respect he shows. So to disrespect not only the the achievements and sanctity of the past, and the history of art, but the sweated labor of Daniel Defoe, the poverty of Herman Melville, the sad and wretched anonymity of Edgar Allen Poe, to no better purpose than faddish, theoretical, cultural currency, is not just pissing on headstones, it is dancing into an open grave.

The day I see a professor giving away free copies of his new book on the Ave. is the day I will take such gaseous theories seriously, and the very day I will accept the sincerity of all such manifestos.

*For the story of Dickens in America, I owe acknowledgement to, and most heartily recommend the greatest of Dickens' 20th Century biographers, Edgar Johnson.

Avarice Unchecked, Rechecked, Checked Off

So. The first of our two Employee Shopping Days, as I may have mentioned, is nigh. Our discount goes up by ten percent, just for the day. There is much hoarding of books in the days and weeks before this. Many a used book that has been hunted and lost will turn out to have been squirrelled away, who knows how long ago, on the employees' hold shelves, only to re-emerge on our sales report's com Saturday morning. Others, particularly expensive sets and rare editions, will be thought better of at the last moment and come drifting back onto the sales floor, just in time to be counted in our inventory. This can be annoying, of course, but a blind eye must be turned. I myself am in no position to judge. Like both my work-spouses, I have my own cache of ill-considered treasures to review for purchase come Friday.

For instance, the greatest of Dickens' many biographers, was, evidently, something of an expert on satire, and made a wonderful anthology: A Treasury of Satire: Including the world's greatest satirists, comic and tragic, from antiquity to the present time. Selected and edited, with critical and historical backgrounds, and an introduction on the nature and value of satire, by Edgar Johnson. I include the whole subtitle as shown on the cover, by way of explanation. For me, having had Johnson's great two volume biography of Dickens recommended to me when I was doing research for the public readings of Dickens I did last year, and having read same with pleasure and respect, seeing his name on another book, whatever the subject, has sold me. The book was published in 1945, when George Bernard Shaw was still very much alive, and cranky, and Johnson's essay on just why Shaw belonged in the anthology, and why Shaw would not allow any of his work to be included, is reason enough for me to own the book. Into the yes pile then with Edgar Johnson.

We get beautiful unread hardcover books from local reviewers -- called, in the trade, "full copy" as opposed to advanced reading copies printed cheaply in paper covers -- and these are specially difficult to resist at any time of the year, but never more so than when one is already anticipating an even deeper discount and a lower price. Among the books that I am determined to buy this time, there are at least three or four novels of just this provenance. None are books I might not just as easily read by way of borrowing, and yet I want, inexplicably, to own them outright. That I will, in all probability, end up selling all these books on later, doesn't mean I won't want to buy them Friday. They are so shiny new, you see, so very much of the moment, subject to wide and flattering review, that I can't help but think, at least while I read them, that having my own copy will be the best. This is idiotic. Adding books like Elinor Lipman's The Family Man to my stack adds considerably to the expense of the day without adding much to my library, where it is unlikely to stay. But I want it. I can buy it. I will.

Other books are already being discarded as unnecessary. These, sadly, are for the most part remainders and discounted books I could more easily afford, even were my discount to be as it usually is. Somehow, it is easier to part with these than with new books I need only wait a year or less to see reduced to the same condition, on the bargain tables, when, their moment gone, they are returned to their publishers en masse by the chain stores and discounters, and sold to us as remainders, same as these others. Such is the fate of nearly all hardcover fiction and history nowadays, and one need no longer even be all that patient to wait. But those black marks on the bottom edges of remainders do make books less valuable, less desirable, and while these disfigurations are only meant to prevent the return of these books to their publishers at full value, in fact, they make books less attractive, even on a day of special discounts. Putting ten remainders out of my pile and back into stock allows me to feel, I suppose, like a judicious buyer, even as the price of my total purchase continues to climb. I can't help but think that I've built myself a straw man to just this purpose by piling so many remainders up behind the desk for Friday. I need hardly say that I will probably buy them all thereafter anyway.

Some stray little books, most of them used and already cheap enough and far from necessary, books like Elizabeth's Eccentrics: Brief Lives of English Eccentrics, Exploiters, Rogues & Failures, 1580 - 1660, by Arthur Freeman, will go to the cash register with me come Friday as much from my embarrassment at having held on to them so long rather than having sent them to the floor as I ought to have done. I will read these, or at least read in them, once I get them home, not so much because I still feel the same curiosity I did when they first came across the buying desk, but because I feel I ought to justify even so small an expense by finding something in them as good or better than the fist taste I took when I took each with me on a break or to lunch, no matter how long ago that might have been or how little I remember now of the little I read then.

I know how mad this all must sound to anyone not afflicted with bibliophilia. That I should end my week hauling home books I may not even remember my reasons for wanting does seem an irrational admission, now I come to make it here. But however irrational the impulse to buy, buy, buy, I do not think, when compared to almost any other indulgence available to the likes of me, that this extravagance rates even so much disapprobation as I might indulge here. The books I buy do not get eaten, or smoked, or lost, they continue life in or out of my possession. My books will survive me.

I even know, sorta, where some of them will probably go. Friday I will buy the four latest Library of America volumes. These, along with every other volume in the series purchased to date, are in my will. I'll have little enough otherwise to leave behind me. No bad inheritance, that; the whole long history of literature in America, preserved, collected and bequeathed. Will anyone really want my old car? my clothes? my ashes? My books though, I'm confident, will find readers after me.

There are worse vices than buying books, no?

Daily Dose

From A Treasury of Satire, by Edgar Johnson

DOUBTLESS

"The sly remark leaving delayed poison of meaning behind it was doubtless as favored by the ladies of Nineveh as by ladies who dwell in apartment hotels and metropolitan suburbs."

From What Satire Is