Dan Simmons - Drood

I leaned so close that I could smell the pomade on the author’s side curls as we both watched through the chink. Suddenly the lights went up dramatically and some two thousand faces were illuminated in reflected light as an “Aaahhhhh…” of expectation rose from the audience.

“You’d best take your seat, my friend,” whispered Dickens. “I wait another minute or so to whet their anticipation, then we shall begin.”

I had started to leave when he waved me back. Putting his mouth close to my ear, he whispered, “Keep your eye out for Drood. He might be anywhere.”

I could not tell if he was serious, so I nodded and moved away in the dark and then out, finding my way to the side stairs, then up against the flow of late arrivers to the rear of the hall, and then down towards the stage again to my reserved seat along the aisle about two-thirds of the way back. I had asked Wills to set aside this seat for me so that I might slip out to join Dickens in the dressing room more easily at the break about ninety minutes into the two-hour reading. The maroon carpet on the stage, simple table, and even the carafe of water—illuminated as they were by the bright lights—seemed pregnant with potential in that last minute before Dickens appeared.

Suddenly there erupted an explosion of applause as Dickens’s slim figure walked to his reading desk. The applause rose and continued at a deafening level, but Dickens ignored it completely, pouring some water for himself from the carafe and waiting silently for the ovation to abate much as one might wait for carriages to pass before crossing a street. Then, when silence finally descended, Dickens… did nothing. He merely stood there looking out at the audience, occasionally turning his head slightly so as to see everyone. It was as if he were meeting the gaze of every single man and woman there that night… and there now must have been more than two thousand of us crowded into the hall.

A few stragglers were finding their seats near the rear of the theatre and Dickens waited with that total and somehow unsettling calm until they did so. Then he seemed to fix them for a few seconds with his cool, serious, intense, yet mildly questioning gaze.

Then he began.

Several years after this night in Birmingham, Dolby was to say to me—“Watching the Chief read during those last years was not like attending a performance; it was more like being part of a spectacle . It was not at all a matter of being entertained; it was a case of being haunted .”

Haunted. Yes, perhaps. Or possessed, as the spirit rappers so in vogue in my day, Dear Reader, were supposedly possessed by their spirit guides to the Other Side. But it was not only Charles Dickens who seemed possessed during these readings; the entire audience joined him. As you will see, it was hard not to join him.

It saddens me, Dear Reader, that no one in your future generation will have heard or seen Charles Dickens read. There are experiments in my time as I write this with recording voices on various cylinders almost as photographers capture images of a person on film plates. But all this has come after Charles Dickens’s death. No one in your day will ever hear his thin, slightly lisping voice or—since to my knowledge none of his talks were ever captured on daguerreotype or other photographic devices (and since such forms of photography available in Dickens’s day were too slow to record any person in even the slightest motion anyway, and Dickens was always in motion)—see the strange change that came over the Inimitable and his audiences during these performances. His readings were unique in our day and—I would venture the opinion—will never be equalled or adequately imitated in yours (if authors still write books at all in this future you inhabit).

Even in the glare of those brilliant gaslights, a strange, iridescent cloud seemed to hover around Charles Dickens as he read from his most recent Christmas tale. That cloud, I believe, was the ectoplasmic manifestation of the many characters whom Dickens had created and whom he now summoned—one at a time—to speak and act before us.

As these ghosts entered him, Dickens’s posture would change. He would jerk alert or slump in despondency or laziness as the character’s spirit dictated. The author’s face would change immediately and totally—some facial muscles used so frequently by Charles Dickens going lax, others coming into play. Smiles, leers, frowns, and conspiratorial glances never used by the man who lived at Gad’s Hill flitted across the face of this spirit-possessed receptacle in front of us. His voice changed from second to second, and even in rapid-fire exchanges of dialogue Dickens seemed to be inhabited by two or more possessing demons at once.

In other readings, I had heard his tone shift instantly from the hoarse, rasping, lisping, urgent, whispered croak of Fagin—“Aha! I like that thellow’th lookth. He’d be of use to uth; he knows how to train the girl already. Don’t make ath much noise as a mouthe, my dear, and let me hear ’em talk—let me hear ’em”—to the sombre tenor of Mr Dombey to the silly, mincing tones of Miss Squeers, and then to a Cockney so perfect that no actor then on the English stage could rival his accent.

But it was more than voice and language that drew us all in that night. Everything about Dickens would change in the instant when he slipped from one character to the next (or in that instant when one character departed his body and another entered). When he became the Jew Fagin, Dickens’s eternally upright, almost martial posture would melt into the rounded, hunched-shouldered stoop of that evil man. The author’s brow seemed to rise and elongate, his eyebrows grew bushier, as his eyes receded into two dark wells and seemed to gleam of their own accord in the bright gaslight. Dickens’s hands, so composed and assured when he was reading descriptive passages, would quiver, clutch one another, rub themselves fitfully, twitch with money hunger, and try to hide themselves in sleeves when they belonged to Fagin. While reading, Dickens would pace several steps to this side of his customised desk, then several steps the other way, and though the motion was smooth and confident when it was Dickens standing there, it became lithe, shifty, and almost snakelike when he was possessed by the spirit of Fagin.

“These characters and changes are as real for me as they are for the audience,” Dickens had told me before this particular reading tour began. “So real are my fictions to myself that I do not recall them but see them done again before my very eyes, for it all happens before me. And the audience sees this reality.”

I certainly did that night. Whether it was because of the consumption of oxygen by the gas flames or because of the literally mesmeric quality of Dickens’s face and hands illuminated so starkly against the dark maroon background due to the unique lighting, I constantly felt the author’s eyes on me—even when those eyes belonged to one of his characters—and, with that audience, I entered into a kind of trance.

When he was Dickens again, reading narration and description rather than character-inhabited dialogue, I could hear the unfaltering certainty in his voice, sense the enjoyment revealed in the gleam of his eye, and perceive a real hint of aggression—masked as confidence to the majority of the crowd, I was sure—coming from his own knowledge that he could mesmerise so many for so long.

Then the Christmas tale and bit of Oliver Twist were finished, the longer, ninety-minute segment of the evening finished, the interval in the evening’s performance arrived at, and Dickens turned and left the platform, as seemingly oblivious of the crowd’s wild applause as he had been when first coming on stage.