William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

But Dickens, as has been frequently observed, can all too easily make his critics appear clever. This may be a weakness apparent in a certain type of talent or genius — not so long ago Mozart was mocked for his “horrible little tunes”—a type that is generous and lavish, open and unguarded, the very opposite of the costive or over-intellectual artist. Dickens takes great risks (he was, it should always be remembered, writing for a huge popular audience) and he leaves hostages to fortune in every chapter. It is not difficult to deplore a ghastly passage like this, apostrophizing on the attraction between John Westlock and Ruth Pinch:

Merrily the tiny fountain played, and merrily the dimples sparkled on its sunny face. John Westlock hurried after her. Softly the whispering water broke and fell; and roguishly the dimples twinkled as he stole upon her footsteps.

Oh, foolish, panting timid little heart, why did she feign to be unconscious of his coming! Why wish herself so far away, yet be so flutteringly happy there!

Can this be the same man who can write, with the laconic quietism of a Kurt Vonnegut, of a child’s death: “Smart citizens grow rich, and friendless victims smart and die, and are forgotten. That is all”? The answer is “yes” and there is a complexity of reasons required to explain why this can be. Briefly, it is a combination, I would suggest, of autre temps, autres moeurs, and various impulses existing in the Dickens psyche. And there is no doubt that raw sentiment, in serious literature, is today almost wholly discredited and démodé to such an extent that we are embarrassed when we come across it in an artist we admire and revere. It is instructive to compare the contemporary responses to another comic genius — Charlie Chaplin (with whom, in the life and the work, there are many parallels) — who, forty years after Dickens’s death, also won enormous popular acclaim with a similar blend of comedy and unadulterated sentiment. In Chaplin’s case modern audiences feel happier analysing the complex architectonics of a pratfall or elaborate gag than responding to the two-fisted hauling on their heartstrings that many a Chaplin film indulges in. But Dickens is the greater artist (and, of course, his art form infinitely more rich and complex) and his genius, unlike Chaplin’s, more easily survives the excesses of an overloaded heart.

There are two broad reasons for this: one to do with content and one to do with form. Dickens proclaimed that Martin Chuzzlewit was to do with “Self.” But, as with many of the ostensible subjects of his great novels, this formulation is just another way of saying that it is to do with “Money.” Money and the getting of it are the key factors underpinning the narrative and moral strands of Martin Chuzzlewit. Martin wants money, as do Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit and Montague Tigg. Chuzzlewit, like many a Victorian novel, has as its starting point a potential inheritance, and the material changes that inheritance will bestow: who will get what and how will their lives alter thereby? It was a theme, to put it bluntly, very close to Dickens’s heart. But against this need, against this motive force, Dickens sets characters for whom these pecuniary desires hold no attraction. Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley and Ruth Pinch, for example, lead lives in which the getting of money has no part to play beyond essential pragmatic concerns. (Symbolically, Tom sends back Mrs Lupin’s fiver without breaking it.) Their lives are driven instead by principles of simple human decency, and the moral tensions of the novel revolve around these counterposing tendencies. Money versus decency, and the eventual triumph of decency, is a sloganizing redaction of what Martin Chuzzlewit is “about.” It is not resolved in a satisfactory way because the comic form, the serious comic form, fights against this type of cosy sententiousness. This sort of conclusion is one where art is designed to console, but if it is to console in this way then it has to be handled, and the reader manipulated, with cool and masterly skill. A glance at the final paragraphs of Martin Chuzzlewit will illustrate just to what extent Dickens has lost this fingerparing, objective poise.

But it does not matter: the cute verities that Dickens endorses in the novel’s conclusion do not undermine its greatness (and in fact I defy anyone not to be delighted that young Bailey turns out to be alive after all. There is a small place for sentiment, one must grudgingly concede, however hardnosed we like our comedy to be in this day and age) because the triumph of decency, if we may so term it, is not why one values the novel. Because, to contemporary readers, its value must be to do with, in the end, questions of contemporary response. It is right that we should not bend Dickens’s work into some grotesque modern distortion—“The Existential Dickens,” or “Dickens as Marxist” or some such parody. He was an early Victorian, inescapably, with all the emotional and intellectual baggage that is implied in that classification. But at the same time it is vital for each new generation of readers to reassess and re-evaluate the great works of the past, and if we are to read Martin Chuzzlewit today, and derive pleasure from it — and not just as an anthropological curiosity — we must ask ourselves what there is in the novel that defies history, as it were, that makes it always valid.

My own response to this question would be that it lies in the comedy. The unequivocal fun and exuberance are crucial, as I have suggested, but there is a note in Chuzzlewit that is new in Dickens and marks Chuzzlewit as a precursor of the darker, later novels. The high-spirited comedy is mixed here and there with a brand of humour that one might designate “brutal” or “cruel”; moments where Dickens, like all great comic novelists, recognizes the indifference of the universe to mankind’s fate, recognizes that, to quote Evelyn Waugh, “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” One thinks in this context of the tenacious, indestructible fraudulence of Pecksniff, of Merry and Cherry and their respective fates, of Jonas Chuzzlewit’s bleak lechery and near-demonic possession, of the ruthless mockery of Chuffey and Moddle, of Mrs Gamp and her gallows humour, of Montague Tigg and his ebullient conning of trusting investors. Dickens’s comic vision of the world, despite his neat pairing off of happy young lovers, despite, one might say, his best intentions, is too sagacious, too clear-eyed and realistic, to pretend that all’s well that ends well. There is a moment, early in the novel, where Dickens is guying the rebarbative smugness of the Pecksniff family. “What words can paint the Pecksniffs in that trying hour? Oh, none: for words have naughty company among them, and the Pecksniffs were all goodness” (my italics). At the end of the novel “all goodness” seems to have triumphed but the jollity and benignity appear forced and self-deceiving. Tom Pinch may be bedecked with flowers and mellow harmonies may enfold him but we know what the world is really like because Dickens has just shown us, with fierce accuracy and intoxicating humour. It is the naughty company of words that we celebrate and recall: this is what gives Martin Chuzzlewit its edge, its wild glee, its cautious disquiet, and its greatness.

1994

“Madame Bovary c’est moi,” Flaubert famously observed, but was he talking about the book as a whole or its heroine? Titles are important clues as to how a book should be read: Madame Raquin, Miss Emma Woodhouse, or even Emma Bovary carry a different freight than the originals do. And if titles are significant then subtitles represent another covert shove in the right direction. Madame Bovary was originally subtitled Moeurs de Campagne. “Moeurs”—in my Petit Robert — is defined thus: “habitudes (d’une société, d’un individu) relatives á la pratique du bien ou du mal”—a far more nuanced term than the usual English translation of “customs.” “Customs of the countryside” will not do.