Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (42 page)

Of course, there are things to learn from Jaggers: the attention he pays to that dull villain Drummle helps to open Pip's eyes to the unjust ways of the world — the world's standard of values is based on money and class, and on the assured success of brute aggressiveness. Through his hatred of Drummle, Pip also learns a little about himself — “our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise,” he observes. We might characterize Pip's progress in the novel as the autobiography of a slow learner. He thinks he has grasped who Pumblechook is right from the start; but the
degree
of Pumblechook's hypocrisy, his fawning, his dishonesty, and his false loyalty — based on one's station in life and revised, instantly, upon one's turn of fortune — is a continuing surprise and an education. Pumblechook is a strong minor character, a good man to hate. Missing — from our contemporary literature — is both the ability to praise as Dickens could praise (without reservation), and to hate as he could hate (completely). Is it our timorousness, or that the sociologist's and psychologist's more complicated view of villainy has removed from our literature not only absolute villains but absolute heroes?

Dickens had a unique affection for his characters, even for most of his villains. “The bores in his books are brighter than the wits in other books,” Chesterton observes. “Two primary dispositions of Dickens, to make the flesh creep and to make the sides ache, were … twins of his spirit,” Chesterton writes. Indeed, it was Dickens's love of the theatrical that made each of his characters — in his view — a
performer.
Because they were all actors, and therefore they were all important, all of Dickens's characters behave dramatically; heroes and villains alike are given memorable qualities.

Magwitch is my hero, and what is most exciting and visceral in the story of
Great Expectations
concerns this convict who risks his life to see how his creation has turned out. How like Dickens that Magwitch is spared the real answer: his creation has not turned out very well. And what a story Magwitch's story is! It is Magwitch who enlivens the book's dramatic beginning: an escaped convict, he frightens a small boy into providing food for his stomach and a file for his leg iron. And by returning to London, a hunted man, Magwitch not only contributes to the book's dramatic conclusion; he as effectively destroys Pip's expectations as he has created them. It is also Magwitch who provides us with the missing link in the story of Miss Havisham's jilting — he is our means for knowing who Estella is.

In “the ruined garden” of Satis House, the rank weeds pollute a beauty that might have been; the rotting wedding cake is overrun with spiders and mice. Pip can never rid himself (or Estella, by association) of that prison “taint.” The connection with crime that young Pip so inexplicably feels at key times in his courtship of Estella is, of course, foreshadowing the revelation that Pip is more associated with the convict Abel Magwitch than he knows. There is little humor remaining in Pip upon the discovery of his true circumstances. Even as a maltreated child, Pip is capable of exhibiting humor (at least, in remembrance): he recalls he was “regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain.” But there is sparse wit in Dickens's language after Pip discovers who his benefactor is. The language itself grows thinner as the plot begins to race.

Both in the lushness of his language, when Dickens means to be lush, and in how spare he can be when he simply wants you to follow the story, he is ever conscious of his readers. It was relatively late in his life that he began to give public readings, yet his language was consistently written to be read aloud — the use of repetition, of refrains; the rich, descriptive lists that accompany a newly introduced character or place; the abundance of punctuation. Dickens overpunctuates; he makes long and potentially difficult sentences slower but easier to read — as if his punctuation is a form of stage direction, when reading aloud; or as if he is aware that many of his readers were reading his novels in serial form and needed nearly constant reminding. He is overly clear. He is a master of that device for making short sentences seem long, and long sentences readable — the semicolon! Dickens never wants a reader to be lost; but, at the same time, he never wants a reader to
skim.
It is rather hard going to skim Dickens; you will miss too much to make sense of anything. He made every sentence easy to read because he wanted you to read every sentence.

Imagine missing this parenthetical aside about marriage: “I may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than any living authority with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring passing unsympathetically over the human countenance.” Of course, young Pip is referring to having his face scrubbed by his sister, but for the careful reader this is a reference to the general discomfort of marriage. And who cannot imagine that Dickens's own exhaustion and humiliation in the blacking warehouse informed Pip's sensitivity to his dull labors in the blacksmith's shop? “In the little world in which children have their existence … there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.” For “injustice” was always Dickens's subject — and his broadest anger toward it is directed at injustice to children. It is both the sensitivity of a child and the vulnerability of an author in late middle age (with the conviction that most of his happiness is behind him, and that most of his loneliness is ahead of him) that enhance young Pip's view of the marshes at night. “I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.”

Images of such brilliance are as enchanting in
Great Expectations
as its great characters and its humbling story. Dickens was a witness of a world moving at a great pace toward more powerful and less human institutions; he saw the outcasts of society's greed and hurry. “In a passion of glorious violence,” Edgar Johnson writes, “he defended the golden mean.” He believed that in order to defend the dignity of man it was necessary to uphold and cherish the individual.

When Dickens first finished
Great Expectations
, he was already running out of time; he was already exhausted. He would write only one more novel
(Our Mutual Friend
, 1864-65);
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
was never completed. He worked a full day on that last book the clay he was stricken. Here is the final sentence he wrote: “The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering like wings.” Later, he tried a few letters; in one of them, Johnson tells us, he quoted Friar Laurence's warning to Romeo: “These violent delights have violent ends.” Perhaps this was a premonition; in his novels, he exhibited a great fondness for premonitions.

Charles Dickens died of a paralytic stroke on a warm June evening in 1870; at his death, his eyes were closed but a tear was observed on his right cheek; he was 58. He lay in an open grave in Westminster Abbey for three days — there were so many thousands of mourners who came to pay their respects to the former child laborer whose toil had once seemed so menial in the blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs.

The King of the Novel (1979)
AUTHOR'S NOTES

Portions of this Introduction to
Great Expectations
were first published in
The New York Times Book Review
of November 25, 1979, in an essay titled “In Defense of Sentimentality.” That essay was much revised before making its first appearance as an Introduction to the Dickens novel in a Bantam Classic edition (1986); in that edition, both the original and the revised ending of
Great Expectations
were printed. My Introduction has since been published in several foreign-language translations of
Great Expectations;
it remains my favorite of what little nonfiction I have written.

My affection for Dickens is undiminished. I remember that I was outraged upon my first reading of Evelyn Waugh's
A Handful of Dust
to discover that Waugh had condemned Tony Last to the Amazon, where he is saved from death by a crazed illiterate who forces poor Tony to read Dickens aloud to him (we presume, forever). Waugh is making the claim that reading Dickens aloud, forever, would be a fate worse than death. Upon rereading both Dickens and Waugh, it strikes me that a
worse
fate would be to read
Waugh
aloud forever.

My fondness for Dickens extends to an eccentricity I have not duplicated in the case of any other writer I admire — namely, I have left one Dickens novel unread. I am saving
Our Mutual Friend
for a rainy day, as they say; it is the last novel Dickens completed, and I have long imagined that it is the last novel I want to read. Of course this is madness: I am thinking of a 19th-century deathbed scene, where I am given proper warning that the end is near, and thus I am permitted to surround myself with friends and family — and I'll have just enough time remaining to read
Our Mutual Friend.
Violence and the unforeseen accident are the late 20th-century equivalents of the deathbed scene; even my doctor friends discourage me from thinking that I will necessarily be allowed to pick the time to read
Our Mutual Friend.
The conventional wisdom says I'd better read it now.

I am saving it, nevertheless. My friend and editor Harvey Ginsberg has given me the original monthly parts of the first edition of
Our Mutual Friend
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1864-65), although I doubt that the pages could survive being turned, except carefully — more carefully, I fear, than I usually turn the pages of a Dickens novel. I have other editions in my library — just to be prepared, both in my Vermont house and in the Toronto apartment — and so
Our Mutual Friend
is waiting for me to read it. In whatever terms, a sufficiently bad day will come — maybe it won't be as dramatic a bad day as a deathbed scene — and I will turn to Mr. Dickens, the first writer I read who made me want to be a writer.

“I wear the chains I forged in life.”

—
M
ARLEY'S
G
HOST

I
n January of 1990,1 was living with the Great Royal Circus in Junagadh, Gujarat, in the northwest of India. The TV and VCR were almost as common in the troupe tents of the performers and their families as they are where I more frequently live — in Vermont and Toronto. That January, the popular Hindu epic the
Mahabharata
was continuing its Sunday-morning journey of 93 televised episodes, each an hour long; at that pace, the story wouldn't end (at the gates of heaven) until the coming summer. A record number of robberies had occurred during the broadcasts because the thieves knew that a great majority of Indians would be glued to their television sets.

That Sunday, in the troupe tent of the Great Royal's ringmaster and lion tamer, Mr. Pratap Singh, the TV was faithfully encircled; the only members of the circus not watching the
Mahabharata
were a half-dozen elephants and two dozen lions and tigers, in addition to a dozen horses and as many chimpanzees, and uncounted cockatoos and parrots — and dozens of dogs. But of the 150
human
members of the Great Royal Circus, including almost a dozen dwarfs, everyone was enjoying the epic.

The rest of the week, the videocassette players in the troupe tents treated the acrobats and wild-animal trainers to various wonders and excesses of the Hindi cinema. Nowadays, the Great Royal rarely travels outside the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat; the movies that are hits in Bombay are similarly successful with the circus performers. But that Sunday, after the conclusion of the weekly episode of the
Mahabharata
, I wandered away from the television set and into the family kitchen of the ringmaster's troupe tent. Sumi, the lion tamer's wife, made me a cup of tea. From the VCR, I heard a surprisingly familiar burst of dialogue — in English. I couldn't see the TV screen, but I knew that the speaker was none other than that most literary of ghosts, Jacob Marley — the dead business partner of the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge. It was that part when Marley's Ghost is rejecting Scrooge's compliment: “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.” Marley's Ghost cries out, “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” (It's a stirring speech, followed by the rattling of the ghost's chains.)

I repaired to the television set in the Singh family's troupe tent to watch the video of
A Christmas Carol;
it was the Alastair Sim version. There — in Junagadh, at an Indian circus — the child acrobats were seated on the rugs that covered the tent's dirt floor; they were illiterate Hindu children but they were riveted to the story, which was as fascinating to them as it remains to our children. If the principal point of
A Christmas Carol
is that Scrooge reforms — that he learns “how to keep Christmas well” — these child acrobats had never kept Christmas at all; moreover, they would never keep it. Also, they spoke and understood little English, yet they knew and loved the tale.