Death and Mr. Pickwick (110 page)

*   *   *

I last saw my father's grave in the late 1880s, when I had a couple of days to fill before I started a new job as a clerk. The stone bore only my father's name, even though he was followed in the plot by others from our family. We were too poor to afford a stonemason's fees.

By the 1880s, the grave was overgrown. I wasn't surprised at that, but to my dismay, there were even dungheaps nearby. I said a few poetic lines as I stood before the stone. I do not claim they were very original. Something about ‘Life's unfinished road' and something about ‘Render back thy being's heavy load' – I do not remember the rest. I do remember thinking, as I walked away, that no one from our family would ever see the stone again. Oddly enough, the other day I was looking at a graveyard scene my father illustrated in a work called
The Reciter's Album
,
The Actor's Utility Book
. On one of the tombstones he had drawn the inscription: ‘R. Seymour, Pentonville'. It left me with a peculiar feeling, and I could barely sleep that night.

My father's sins may have been more than suicide. In the note he left, he called my mother the ‘best of wives'. I have sometimes thought of that. Of how my father's problems could not be solved by such a woman. Which is to say, no woman in the world could help him.

There isn't much in his work to shed light on his feelings about women. There is a drawing, called
Pre-face
, which appears in a collected edition of the
Comic Magazine
. I open the volume now. You pass a title page,
Funny Bones
, of a skeleton laughing, hands on ribs, skull tilted in good humour, and then there is an extraordinary image of a man with a monstrous nose – a truncheon of flesh, about two feet long, veiny, hairs sticking out, and the gnarled head is a darker shade. The nose pokes through the doorway before the rest of a man's face enters. It is obviously a phallus. To complete the picture, a woman looks on, and she sees only the nose, or the penis as it would appear to her, entering through the doorway, and she is horrified.

What am I to conclude from this picture? Most likely, that my father was prone to taking risks – among the polite puns of the
Comic Magazine
, he chanced this obscene drawing. Yet I have heard rumours, whispers, of the sordid life my father led. Well, if Mr Pickwick had Sam Weller, then perhaps my father yearned for something of that sort. They are not my sins. I am a bachelor because I have never succeeded in finding a wife. After a time, I gave up, and accepted what I am.

*   *   *

I have also looked at my father's works for clues to his mind prior to the moment when he raised the fowling piece to his heart.

There is his picture,
Better Luck Next Time
, of a man attempting to hang himself from the bough of a tree, saved by a broken rope. It would be easy to say: Father was thinking of suicide long before he committed the act. I see here something different from the actual event in the garden. The attempted hanging in this drawing is an impulsive act – the man has been rejected by a woman, and puts a rope around his neck. My father, though, planned his suicide. He left a note. He had made previous threats to kill himself. He made certain no one would disturb him, in the early morning. He chose a method for which there was no possibility of survival. The rope wouldn't break for him. I cannot help feeling that the man in the picture is attempting suicide almost in a moment of whimsy. This is completely different from my father walking into the garden with the fowling piece, determined to carry out the act. If the picture
Better Luck Next Time
represented the feelings of my father a couple of years earlier, then, very well, he had long-standing thoughts about suicide, but if the picture reflected his state of mind, the strength of desire to do it then was not strong. Something happened prior to the morning he walked into the garden, something which made his desire to die increase and strengthen, and become a firm resolution. The one obvious candidate for that something was the meeting with Dickens, to take grog, a few days before. That my father burnt his
Pickwick
correspondence and papers immediately after that meeting surely shows his extreme distress after seeing Dickens.

There is also a drawing, from my father's
New Readings of Old Authors.
It shows an officer of the law taking away a large round basket of fruit from a poverty-stricken woman. She is obviously a street vendor. The arms of the woman and those of her thin, ragged children are outstretched, pleading with the officer to relent, but he walks away. Underneath is a quotation from
The Merchant of Venice
: ‘You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.'

I conceive of my father in a moment of despair, thinking of how Dickens had all but torn the picture of the dying clown to shreds, finding only the sticks of furniture in the clown's hovel worthy of any praise. I think my father came to believe that à Beckett had told the truth – in a disturbed state of mind, Father believed he had little talent as an artist, for here was another young man, another editor, telling my father his abundant flaws. My father magnified these alleged flaws, and disregarded all the evidence of his career to the contrary. I can imagine him doing that, in a black mood. If Dickens made my father feel that he could not continue as a successful artist then Dickens took away the means whereby my father lived.

There remains the question of why father did not blame Dickens in the suicide note. But there is a simple answer. If he had blamed Dickens, or anyone at all, the suicide could be viewed as an escape from life's problems; the inquest might well have reached a
felo de se
verdict. Father was a religious man, and knew what
felo de se
meant – denial of a Christian burial. He would have known too that
felo de se
would strip my mother of all rights to inherit. By ascribing his suicide to his own weakness and infirmity, and not to any external circumstances, he helped the inquest to reach a verdict of insanity.

Though even in the word ‘weakness', I sometimes hear echoes of my father's struggle against Dickens. It is as though a fallen boxer were to cry out: ‘It is not my opponent's strength, but my own pathetic
weakness
that brings me down.' There was no exoneration of Dickens. There was still an opponent, a strong man, who landed the blows, without mercy.

The great author may not have pulled the trigger. My father did that himself. But I will always see Dickens as the cause of our family's tragedy.

*   *   *

I do remember my father acting out a Christmas drawing of a plum pudding coming alive, for my sister and me, plunging a knife and fork into its sides for arms, balancing a wine glass on top for a head, and two more glasses were legs. I can remember my sister laughing, and that was a happy moment.

I remember, as well, that a couple of years after my father's death, a few unused pictures of his appeared in the
Town and Country Magazine
. There was one called
Baked Taturs
, showing the fate of a baked-potato seller, Hot Bob, attacked by a runaway bull at a bull-baiting event. The bull gored Hot Bob in the bosom. I remember clutching the picture when I was a boy. It was as though my father had come back to me, briefly. I came across the picture again a few days ago. What is the point of keeping it? I have no one to pass it to. I threw it on the fire in the general turnout of my possessions I am conducting.

*   *   *

They would call my father's caricatures ‘cartoons' these days. I do not care for the modern word. Whatever the word one uses for the creator of such pictures, sometimes I think my father didn't really want to be a caricaturist at all. I suspect he always wanted to be a distinguished painter, like Joshua Reynolds. It was a case of ‘I ended up as this' – as is so with most of us.

If I see a second-hand bookshop, I am invariably drawn in to see whether there is anything by my father on the shelves. It is usually a reprint of his
Sketches by Seymour
. I pick up the volume and put it down again. Like my mother, the publishers reprinted many times, until the plates were worn out and they were little more than smudges. Every new edition served only to diminish my father's posthumous reputation.

*   *   *

Sometimes I walk down to the River Stour. If the day is bright, it lifts my mood. In the summer, I might observe boys after catfish, eels, and other small fish. I usually take a bag of bread to feed mallards: one quacks, and others start quacking – as though sharing a joke, it always seems to me. And the burnt-toast smell of the nearby malthouse comes down to the river, upon the wind. There is also the bell from the church of St Stephen's, which chimes clearer since being recast.

But I do not go to church, and I avoid public houses.

*   *   *

I do a little sketching of landscapes. I think that, if I draw quickly, my style is similar to my father's. I have occasionally drawn Mr Pickwick, not because I want to, but because people who have traced me have sometimes asked for a souvenir, and, though I am reluctant, I have made a few shillings by this means. In truth, anyone could draw a crude Mr Pickwick – he is all circles. Round bald head, fat round body, round spectacles, round magnifying glass hanging in front of his waistcoat. The whole of
The Pickwick Papers
itself seems full of circles – more fat men, the spinning wheels of coaches, hats that are blown off and roll along the ground. Also, next to the circles, like a school geometry textbook,
Pickwick
has straight lines – including men thin as sticks. It seems to me that as long as geometry endures, Mr Pickwick will too. In that sense, he is timeless, he is immortal – Mr Pickwick existed before Euclid wrote his
Elements
. But it took my father to bring him to life.

*   *   *

The other day, though it was cold, I sat on the bank of the river and sketched, but my work disappointed me. I crumpled it into a ball and tossed it in the water, and watched it float until it became sodden and sank to the duck-shit carpet on the riverbed. The river, I might remark, is one of the few places where I am unlikely to see an image from
The Pickwick Papers
. Although, even there, I am reminded of the fishing theme on the wrapper.

*   *   *

I have heard various attempts to explain the wrapper, with its sporting pictures, and yet its title and subtitle which are not sporting. Some have said that my father was being deliberately wilful; others, that author and artist were not communicating; and yet others that a new title was stuck on an old picture. All these are unconvincing. The wrapper would be a dog's dinner. Would any commercial publisher really allow it to be published in that state? There is a crucial indication that the wrapper was exactly as my father wanted, with sporting pictures, but the title unashamedly non-sporting,
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
. The sign is this: the wrapper corresponds to my father's first plate,
Mr Pickwick Addresses the Club
, where there are sporting pictures displayed in the clubroom and sporting equipment in the foreground, but up on the wall, right in the centre, is a portrait of Mr Pickwick. My father did not have to draw that portrait, it is not mentioned in the letterpress. He did it because he wanted to. And you would only display the portrait if the club were called the Pickwick Club, and Mr Pickwick its founder.

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There is a trunk I have, and I sell from it what I can sell, though there is little left of my father's. Much has gone over the years. There are books that almost certainly contain his illustrations, but are unsigned and have no proof they are his. One such book is
A Descriptive History of Steam Engines
, from 1824, and in its endpapers there is an advertisement for another work,
Rational Recreations
, which looks remarkably like the frame for the wrapper of
Pickwick
. There is no point in keeping the book. There is a man I have in mind I shall sell it to. I shall say nothing about its personal significance.

Tonight, a bottle of ale from off-licence premises is my company again. Wonderful institution, is the off-licence – sending men back to rented rooms, bottle in bag, so they can get drunk alone. Perfect for those of us who have never sought the cheerless cheer and cold warmth of inns and taverns.

But back to my trunk. Over twenty years ago, I saw the first part of a novel in serial numbers on a bookseller's counter. It was called
Sunrise
. I have just come across it again in the trunk. When purchased, such works were, by then, rare, and this could well have been the last serial novel in numbers. I have seen none since. The wrapper shows a rising sun over the sea, with childish depictions of seagulls. There are no pictures inside. But by then people had lost the taste for pictures in books. It lay on the table beside my bedside for a long time, unread, and I did not buy the second number. But even if there are no serial novels now, there are still serialised stories in magazines; that is the true legacy of my father's work. There may have been serialisations in magazines before
Pickwick
, but, as I remember my mother telling me, there were many more after
Pickwick
appeared, as though our minds had become attuned to reading in instalments, because of my father.

As for
Pickwick
itself, I have not opened it for a long time. I come across it –
of course
. There is scarcely a week when I do not see the image of Mr Pickwick in some advertisement, or observe his words quoted in the newspaper. I have heard politicians on hustings, and taproom philosophers, denounce the Dismal Jemmies of our times – and only
I
am reminded of the character whose appearance killed a father.