Dan Simmons: Drood

I thought that last metaphor very garbled and grotesque indeed.

Chapman even swore that he would never let the slightest whisper of my offer to him slip out (and warned me never to tell anyone) for fear that “You shall then inevitably and irretrievably become the most hated and assuredly assumed and presumed presumptuous man in all of England and the Empire and the World.”

How even a publisher and editor could write and express himself that poorly, in a sentence that spavined, I have no idea to this day.

But rumours and whispers against me did begin about that time and that is—as I say—when the active dislike of me by the public seems to have begun in earnest.

AS DICKENS HAD BEFORE ME, I did a reading tour of the United States and Canada. Mine was in 1873 and 1874, and it could objectively be categorised as a total disaster. The travel by ship and by train and by coach exhausted me even before the tour was really under way. The American audiences seemed to agree with the English audiences that my readings lacked energy, even audibility. I was never well during the entire tour and reached a point where not even massive ministrations of my laudanum—which I found oddly hard to find and purchase in the States—could bring back any energy or pleasure. The American audiences were idiots. The entire nation was composed of prudes and bluestockings and boors. While the French had never had the least problem with Caroline travelling with me, the Americans would have been scandalised at the very idea of a woman not my wife in my entourage—so I had to suffer my travels and illnesses and nightly humiliations on stage without her help for those long months in America.

And I had no Dolby to organise my reading-tour life. The one manager I hired to oversee the production of one of my plays in New York and Boston—one of several theatrical premieres I had arranged for my tour there—tried to rob me blind.

In February of 1874, in Boston and in other urban pimples on that blank white canvas of a map they call New England, I spent time with the leading lights of American literature and intellectual life—Longfellow, Mark Twain, Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—and I have to say that if these men were the “leading lights,” then the glow of literature and intellectual life in the United States was very dim indeed. (Although I did enjoy a verse tribute that Holmes wrote and performed in public for me.)

I realised then and still believe now that the majority of Americans in those crowds who jostled to see me or who paid to hear me read, did so just because I had been a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens. Dickens was the ghost that I could not leave behind. Dickens was the Marley-face on the knocker who greeted me every time I approached a new door.

I saw Dickens’s old friend James T. Fields and his wife in Boston—they took me out for a fine dinner and then to the opera—but I could tell that Annie Fields thought little of me, and I was not surprised when, sometime later, I read the following report she had made of me in private but which quickly found its way to public print—

A small man with an odd figure and forehead and shoulders much too large for the rest of him. His talk was rapid and pleasant but not at all inspiring.… A man who has been fêted and petted in London society, who has overeaten and overdrunk, has been ill, is gouty, and in short is no very wonderful specimen of a human being.

All in all, the only truly companionable and relaxed time I had during all those months in America was when I went down to stay with my old friend the French-English actor Fechter, he of Dickens’s Christmas-gift Swiss chalet, at Fechter’s farm near Quakertown, in the province of Pennsylvania.

Fechter had become a drunk and a raving paranoid. The once distinctive (if not overly handsome, since he specialised in villains) actor was now—all agreed—gross and bloated in both appearance and manner. Before leaving London forever, Fechter had quarrelled with his theatrical partners there—he owed them all money, of course—and then had quarrelled with and publicly insulted his leading lady, Carlotta Leclercq. When he went off to Pennsylvania in America to marry a girl named Lizzie Price—another actress but one with no discernible talent—no one even thought it pertinent to mention to Miss Price that Fechter already had a wife and two children in Europe.

Fechter died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1879 in a condition—one London obituary reported—of being “universally despised and isolated.” His passing was a special blow to me, since even during my last visit to him in Quakertown six years before his death, he had once again borrowed money from me and never paid it back.

Last year as I write this (with blobs), or perhaps it was the year before—1887—at any rate, sometime shortly after I had moved from Number 90 Gloucester Place to where I currently am living (and dying) at 82 Wimpole Street (Agnes was beginning to scream, you understand, and I do not believe that I was the only one who could hear her, since Mrs Webb and the other servants avoided being near the boarded-up staircase at all costs) and…

Where was I?

Oh, yes, last year or the year before, I was introduced to Hall Caine (I can only trust, Dear Reader, that you know who he is—was—as well as Rossetti, who introduced us), and Caine looked at me a long time and his impressions of me later found print:

His eyes were large and protuberant, and had the vague and dreamy look sometimes seen in the eyes of the blind, or those of a man to whom chloroform has just been administered.

But I was not so blind then that I did not notice his horrified appraisal. I said to Caine that day, “I see that you can’t keep your eyes off my eyes, and I ought to say that I’ve got gout in them, and that it is doing its best to blind me.”

Only by then, of course, and for many years before that, I used the word “gout” to mean “beetle”—to mean “scarab”—to mean “Drood’s insect burrowed into my brain behind my aching eyes.” And it was doing its best to blind me. It always had been.

ALL RIGHT… Reader. I know that you could not care less for my history or pains or even the fact that I am dying as I labour to write this for you. All you want to hear about is Dickens and Drood, Drood and Dickens.

I have been wise to you from the start… Reader. You never cared about my part of this memoir. It was always Dickens and Drood, or Drood and Dickens, which kept you reading.

I started this memoir years ago with the hopeful dream that you knew me and—much more importantly—that you knew my work, had read my books, had seen my plays. But no, Reader there in the indifferent future, I know now that you have never read The Woman in White or even The Moonstone, much less my Man and Wife or Poor Miss Finch or The New Magdalen or The Law and the Lady or The Two Destinies or The Haunted Hotel or A Rogue’s Life or The Fallen Leaves or Jezebel’s Daughter or The Black Robe or Heart and Science or “I Say No” or The Evil Genius or The Legacy of Cain —or the book I am working so hard on now, when I can write at all, and which is being serialised in the Illustrated London News, my Blind Love.

You know none of these, do you… Reader?

And in your arrogant future, as you glide to the bookstore in your horseless carriage and come back to your underground home illuminated by garish electric lights, or perhaps even read in your carriage that may have electric lights in it (anything is possible) or glide to the theatre in the evening—I trust you still have theatre—I hardly think that you have read my novels or seen stage productions of my The Frozen Deep (it was never Dickens’s, which was performed first in Manchester) or Black and White (which opened at the Adelphi) or The Woman in White (which opened at the Olympic) or Man and Wife (which opened at the Prince of Wales) or The New Magdalen (which opened at the Olympic and also premiered in New York while I was there) or Miss Gwilt (which opened at the Globe) or The Dead Secret (which opened at the Lyceum Theatre) or—at long last— The Moonstone (which opened at the Olympic) or…