Dan Simmons - Drood

I went alone to the hotel and drank another cup of laudanum while waiting for the Inimitable and his entourage to arrive. My heart was pounding wildly. I was ravenous and shaken and would have welcomed a large meal sent up to the privacy of my own room, but although Dickens would eat nothing more this evening, he invited Wills, Dolby, and me to dine in his suite as he unwound. There he paced back and forth and talked about the next few days of the tour and about the offer he had received for another tour beginning about Christmastime.

I ordered pheasant, fish, caviar, pâté, asparagus, eggs, and dry champagne, but just before the waiter came in bringing this and Wills’s tiny meal and Dolby’s beef and mutton, Dickens turned from the fireplace where he had been standing and said, “My dear Wilkie! What on earth is that on your collar?”

“What?” I confess that I blushed. I had hurriedly carried out my ablutions before drinking my laudanum and coming up to Dickens’s suite. “What?” My hands rose beneath my bearded chin and touched something thick and crusted above the silk of my cravat.

“Here now, move your hands,” said Wills. He held the lamp closer.

“Good God,” said Dolby.

“Good heavens, Wilkie,” said Dickens in a voice that sounded more amused than alarmed. “There is dried blood all over your collar and neck. You look like Nancy after Bill Sikes has done with her.”

The summer of 1866 was tiring.

My novel Armadale was released on schedule in June and the reviews were much as I expected from the usual hide-bound and tiresome critics. In the Athenaeum, their ancient music-critic and reviewer H. F. Chorley opined— “It is not pleasant to speak as we must of this powerful story; but in the interest of everything that is to be cherished in life, in poetry, in art, it is impossible to be over-explicit in the expression of judgement.”

His judgement was that the book was immoral.

The reviewer of The Spectator came to the same conclusion in terms that bypassed the mere strident in favour of the near-hysterical:

The fact that there are such characters as he has drawn, and actions such as he has described, does not warrant his over-stepping the limits of decency, and revolting every human sentiment. This is what Armadale does. It gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of 35 , and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty.… This is frankly told in a diary which, but for its unreality, would be simply loathesome, and which needs all the veneer of Mr Wilkie Collins’s easy style and allusive sparkle to disguise its actual meaning.

This kind of critical attack meant nothing to me. I knew that the book would sell well. And perhaps I have told you, Dear Reader, that the publisher had paid me five thousand pounds—a record at the time and for many years after that—and paid it before a single word of the story had been written. I had serialised it in America in their magazine called Harper’s Monthly and not only had Armadale been wildly popular there, but the editor had written me that my tale had single-handedly saved their magazine from extinction. Its serialisation in England through The Cornhill Magazine had also been wildly popular, certainly causing some of the jealousy we had heard from Dickens the previous Christmas. I was certain that I could adapt Armadale to the stage and that this might well be a greater source of income than the book itself.

It is true that the great sum paid in advance by George Smith at Smith, Elder & Company had all but bankrupted the publisher despite the brisk sales of the two volumes, but that was little concern of mine. It did frustrate me somewhat, however, in the sense that for my next novel—whatever its contents—I would almost certainly have to return to Dickens’s magazine, All the Year Round, just as the author-editor had predicted during our Christmas dinner. The frustration was not merely because the monies in advance of publication would be less—Dickens, John Forster, and Wills were miserly when it came to paying writers other than Dickens—but rather the fact that Dickens would again be my editor.

Yet I remained serenely confident that the hostile reviews of the day meant nothing. Critics and bourgeois reviewers simply were not ready for the heroine of Armadale, my femme fatale Lydia Gwilt. Not only did Lydia dominate the book in a way that no female literary protagonist in my era had done, but she stood out from the pages in a way that no woman in all of Dickens’s fiction ever had or ever would. The full, three-dimensional portrait of this woman, as scheming and vicious as Lydia Gwilt may have seemed to the careless reader or clueless reviewer, was a tour de force.

And yes, speaking of occasionally vicious women, Caroline G— chose this hot summer to upbraid me on a wide front of issues.

“Why will you not consider marriage, Wilkie? You present me as a wife—almost—to your friends who visit here. I am your hostess and proofreader and housekeeper and lover. Everyone who knows you knows that we live as man and wife. It is past time that we make that perception reality.”

I said, “If you know anything about me at all, my dear Caroline, you must know that I do not care a fig for perceptions or other people’s opinions.”

“But I do, ” cried the woman with whom I’d spent the past ten years. “And Harriet is now fifteen. She needs a father.”

“She had a father,” I replied placidly. “He died.”

“When she was one year old!” cried Caroline. She appeared to be teetering on that thin ledge between anger and tears, reason and hysteria, upon which women so frequently find themselves. Or deliberately find themselves. “She is becoming a young woman. She will enter into society soon. She needs your name.”

“Nonsense,” I chuckled. “She has a perfectly good name and a perfectly good home. She shall always have my support and our love. What more could any intelligent young woman wish to have?”

“You promised that we would buy or lease the nicer home on Gloucester Place by this year or next,” whined Caroline. I hate and despise it when women whine. All men, Dear Reader, hate and despise it when women whine. It has always been thus. The only difference in men’s reactions to whining is that a very few, like me, refuse to give in to this auditory and emotional blackmail.

I looked over the top of my glasses at her. “I said that we should have the place sooner or later, my pet. And so we shall.”

“How?” demanded Caroline. “I spoke to Mrs Shernwold while you were having fun with Dickens in Birmingham. She says that she would consider leasing or selling ninety Gloucester to us except for the fact that her unmarried son is returning from Africa in a year or so and she has promised it to him.”

“Trust me on this, Caroline my dear,” I said. “I have promised you this home someday and you and Harriet shall have it. Have I ever failed you, my sausage?”

She glared at me. Caroline G— was a handsome woman—some would say beautiful—despite her advancing years (although she would never tell me her age, Inspector Field had told me that in all likelihood Caroline had been born thirty-six years earlier, in 1830)—but she was neither handsome nor beautiful when she glared. Despite the tons of romantic literary twaddle to the contrary, trust me, Dear Reader, when I assure you that no woman can be attractive when she whines and glares.

“You fail me by not marrying me and giving Harriet a proper father,” she all but shrieked at me. “Do not think that I am not capable of finding and marrying another man, Wilkie Collins. Do not think that for a second!”