NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, PART 2

I’m still wholeheartedly enjoying Nicholas Nickleby. I’m now more than halfway through (page 484 of 770) and hope to finish by the end of the month. What I love about the book is that it’s basically about the Nicklebys forming a new family after the death of their husband/father, but the new family is an unconventional one, full of assorted pleasant, eccentric people who meet by chance, show each other kindness in the face of adversity, and bond together against the evil people in the world and the alienation of modern life. It’s a very contemporary idea (the “tribe” replacing the nuclear family), and it means Dickens gets to take a break from the grotesque caricatures he’s so deservedly known for and indulge in gentler portraits of a whole bunch of lovable, downright cuddly characters. I’ve grown quite fond of the Kenwigses, the Brothers Cheeryble are so wonderful I want to put them in my pocket and take them home, and John Browdie had me practically cheering aloud in Chapter 39. Here are two particularly adorable bits of description:

• Tim Linkinwater and his old, blind pet blackbird: “Tim would utter a melodious chirrup, and cry ‘Dick’; and Dick, who, for any sign of life he had previously given, might have been a wooden or stuffed representation of a blackbird indifferently executed, would come to the side of the cage in three small jumps, and, thrusting his bill between the bars, turn his sightless head towards his old master—and at that moment, it would be very difficult to determine which of the two was the happier, the bird, or Tim Linkinwater.”

• Miss La Creevey: “Here was one of the advantages of having lived alone so long. the little bustling, active, cheerful creature existed entirely within herself, talked to herself, made a confidant of herself, was as sarcastic as she could be, on people who offended her, by herself; pleased herself, and did no harm. If she indulged in scandal, nobody’s reputation suffered; and if she enjoyed a little bit of revenge, no living soul was one atom the worse. One of the many to whom, from straitened circumstances, a consequent inability to form the associations they would wish, and a disinclination to mix with the society they could obtain, London is as complete a solitude as the plains of Syria, the humble artist had pursued her lonely, but contented way for many years; and, until the peculiar misfortunes of the Nickleby family attracted her attention, had made no friends, though brimful of the friendliest feelings to all mankind. There are many warm hearts in the same solitary guise as poor Miss La Creevey’s.”

All that said, I hate Mrs. Nickleby. I know she’s supposed to be silly comic relief, but she’s even worse than Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice—she prattles on and on like a moron, not only boring but dangerous besides, because she’s completely oblivious to reality and thus useless to help or protect her children. Ugh. Oh, but I must admit totally love the villain, Ralph Nickleby—I can’t help it, maybe it’s because thanks to the movie I envision him as Christopher Plummer, or maybe it’s just because he’s just the kind of villain I always end up falling for, chillingly dastardly in his selfishness but with just a glimmer of humanity that makes him sad and tragic.

A few other choice bits:

• As a euphemism for pregnancy, Dickens says “in an interesting condition.” I love it.

• After the doctor declares the Kenwigs’ baby “The finest boy I ever saw in all my life,” Dickens notes, “It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who content for the gradual degredation of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.” Hee.

• Best line out of context (and pretty funny in context, too): “You know, there is no language of vegetables which converts a cucumber into a declaration of attachment.”

DICKENSMANIA, PART 2

I finished the Dickens biography. Here are the remaining highlights:

• This is why I love the Victorians: “Torment is not uncommon in the lives of novelists and in the lives of nineteenth-century novelists seems to have been the rule rather than the exception. Thackeray’s wife was irredeemably insane; George Eliot lived out of wedlock with G.H. Lewes, whose wife continued to produce children with other men; Charlotte Bronte watched her sisters die of tuberculosis and her brother perish of alcoholism before herself dying in childbirth at forty-one; George Sand, Nikolai Gogol, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy all lived lives that to us seem dramatic, strenuous, and even traffic, beset in some cases by debt, in others by illness, madness, loss, grief, political imprisonment.” Good times!

• Scandal! “In October [1857], as a result of a dispute, Dickens told Catherine’s maid to erect a partition in their bedroom so that he could sleep separately from her.” Although I had heard about Dickens’s affair with actress Ellen Ternan before, somehow it had never occurred to me that he was divorced before that started, and the public messiness of it surprised me—Dickens behaved just plain badly, kicking Catherine out to live with her parents while keeping custody of the children (Catherine’s sister, Georgina, who had lived with the Dickenses and cared for the kids for many years, stayed with Charles and continued in her role), trying to alienate them from their mother, and severing contact with any of his friends who helped Catherine. Wild rumors flew, including one that Dickens had slept with Georgina and she was actually the mother of the Dickens children (Dickens refuted this by having poor Georgina examined by a doctor to prove she was a virgin)! Dickens then began living a double life, carrying on an 11-year affair with Ternan so secretively that modern scholars still have no idea what the exact nature of the relationship was—sexual or no? (There are hints that Ternan miscarried one or two children, and even that Dickens was with her when he died, contradicting the official story that he spoke his last words to Georgina, but no one knows for sure.)

• Charles Dickens, action hero! “On June 9, 1865, when Dickens was returning from France with Ellen and Frances Ternan, the train in which they were riding went off the tracks as it was crossing a bridge…and seven first-class carriages went over the bridge into the river below. Dickens’s carriage dangled over the bridge, held by its coupling to the baggage car behind it. Dickens and the Ternans were thrown into the downward corner of the carriage, buit Dickens managed to climb out the window and then procure a key and get the two women out. At this point he saw the chaos below. He took his brandy flask and his top hat and went down among the dead and injured; he filled his top hat with water from the river and went around, succoring where he could. Some people died as he was helping them; others he helped, only to return and discover that they had died…. He persuaded one young man to get himself out from under the wreckage; he helped another confront the death of his bride…. When it was time to be taken away by an evacuation train, he climbed into the dangling carriage and found his manuscript.”

• I like Smiley’s advice: “Newcomers to Dickens can do no better than to begin with a novel—my suggestion is David Copperfield, to be followed by Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, and Our Mutual Friend, in that order, light, dark, light, dark, light, a wonderful chiaroscuro of Dickens’s most characteristic and accessible work.” Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend had not previously been on my want-to-read list (though I’ll be doing Copperfield next month), but maybe I’ll have to add them.
  

Taking advantage of the holiday weekend, P and I spent all day Sunday watching the 7.5-hour 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House, and holy shit, we totally loved it! We hadn’t planned on watching the whole thing in one sitting, but as soon as we started at 11:30 a.m., we were hopelessly hooked, pausing only to walk to Whole Foods for lunch (nice veggie pizza, insanely expensive and delicious chocolates, and an intriguing gingerbread beer) and then Azeen’s Afghani for dinner with the menfolk. I must say, Bleak House makes Nicholas Nickleby seem tame by comparison—sure, NN has some child abuse, several carriage accidents, leering old men, and eventually a suicidal hanging, but it can hardly compete with what BH has to offer: A secret illegitimate child! (OK, technically NN has that.) Consumption! (Er, NN has that too.) Pneumonia! Opium (addiction and overdose)! Smallpox (with scarring)! A dwarf! A murder mystery (and one of the earliest detective characters in fiction)! A legal battle! Three different men vying for the hand of one woman! A homicidal Frenchwoman! And, of course, spontaneous human combustion! Awesome. It’ll definitely be the next Dickens novel I read (after this year’s Project is over).

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, PART 1

Having chosen Nicholas Nickleby as my February read, I put the Penguin edition on hold at the library, and when I received it I was disappointed to see that it was the movie tie-in edition (always more embarrassing to carry around, plus it warps my vision of the characters, so that Wackford Squeers is always Jim Broadbent and Nicholas is that cute British guy from Undeclared, which I guess is not too much of a problem now that I think about it). Instead of being written by a Dickens scholar, the introduction was by Douglas McGrath, the screenwriter/director of the film. Luckily, McGrath is a smart, nimble writer who charmingly details the agonizing process of distilling such a rich novel into a short screenplay: “Most readers begin a new chapter with the hope that it will have something interesting in it. I often kicked off a new chapter with the hope that it contained something boring I could remove.” In doing so, he sums up the themes of the book more clearly than many literary critics would be capable of.

McGrath says (brilliantly, I think), “Given the astonishing fact that Dickens wrote Pickwick and Twist simultaneously, Nicholas Nickleby is their love child: it merges the wandering, comic qualities of the first with the gothic social vision of the second.” Honestly, I was a little worried about that “wandering” bit. Combined with the description on the back of the book, it made me downright twitchy: “Nicholas Nickleby’s loose, haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque novels of the eighteenth century.” Ack, the P-word! Give me something described as picaresque, and nine times out of ten I’ll hate it. Sure, I found Candide, Don Quixote, and Moll Flanders intermittently amusing, at least conceptually, but in practice they left me cold. And bored. I like a good plot, and it’s the Victorian-melodrama aspect of Dickens that appeals to me.

Luckily, so far I’m liking NN. The only time the P-word sprung to mind was in Chapter 6, when the coach crashes on the way to Yorkshire, and the passengers engage in a little impromptu storytelling session, a la The Canterbury Tales. We are treated to two random stories that are completely irrelevant to the story and drag on for about 15 pages. The endnotes observe that “Dickens seems to have inserted this…as a means of filling out the second number,” or installment, of NN. McGrath more charitably calls them “the literary equivalent of bonus tracks.” I skimmed them. As long as it doesn’t happen again, I’m OK.

NN high points so far:

• Dickens’s famously concise summary in Chapter 1 of how Nicholas’s father was financially ruined by poor investments: “A mania prevailed, a bubble burst, four stockbrokers took villa residences in Florence, four hundred nobodies were ruined.”

• Chapter 2, which hilariously brings to mind the 1990s dot-com boom (new, ludicrously named companies springing up every day, making sweeping claims to lure stockholders and boost share prices until the bubble bursts) and takes full advantage of the comic potential of the word “muffin” while describing the joint-stock meeting of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company:
  
  “The honourable gentleman made a speech which drew tears from the eyes of the ladies, and awakened the liveliest emotions in every individual present. He had visited the homes of the poor in the various districts of London, and had found them destitute of the slightest vestige of a muffin…. He had found that among muffin sellers there existed drunkenness, debauchery, and profligacy…. He had found the same vices among the poorer class of people who ought to be muffin consumers, and this he attributed to the despair engendered by their being placed beyond the reach of that nutritious article, which drove them to seek a false stimulant in intoxicating liquors.”
  
  Then an Irishman gets up “with such a speech as only an Irish member can make, breathing the true soul and spirit of poetry, and poured forth with such fervour, that it made one warm to look at him; in the course whereof he told them how he would demand the extension of that great boon to his native country; how he would claim for her equal rights in the muffin laws as in all other laws; and how he yet hoped to see the day when crumpets should be toasted in her lowly cabins, and muffin bells should ring in her rich green valleys.”

• The delightful description of Squeers in Chapter 4 (even if, as the endnotes tell me, Dickens did crib it from Sheridan): “He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.”

• Dickens’s description of the poor, neglected students of Dotheboys Hall in Chapter 8 is a tour de force: “Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long, meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies . . . there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding there!”
  
  Wow.

DICKENSMANIA!

Month of Chabon is over, and I consider it a great success. I read four great books—three new to me, and one reconfirmed as a favorite. I would have liked to revisit Wonder Boys (or at least rewatch the movie), but now I’ve got bigger fish to fry. 700-page-long fish, to be exact.

A brief history of my relationship with Dickens: My dad loves Dickens. He reads a Dickens novel every year, in order of publication. He’s being doing this as long as I can remember, and he’s restarting the cycle anew with The Pickwick Papers this year, so I figure he’s read each of the 14 novels at least two or three times, if not more. When I was a kid, he read me A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and The Pickwick Papers, and I adored them. (This amazes me a little now, because I picked up Pickwick a couple of years ago and could barely get through the first few chapters. That puppy is loooong and meandering. I figured Dad must have skipped some stuff to keep his 10-year-old audience interested, but he swears he read it to me the whole way through, every single word. I would be curious to know how long it took to read that entire book aloud, in 30-minute nightly increments.) I revisited Oliver Twist and Great Expectations a couple of times for assignments in high school and college, and added Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times to my repertoire during my English-major years, and each time I was reminded how much I enjoy reading Dickens (in contrast to my classmates, some of whom were less than thrilled about it). But I’ve never read Dickens for pleasure, under my own steam, until now.

I thought I’d kick things off by reading a Dickens biography to put things in context. I sought out the definitive bios, only to realize that—duh!—they’re thousands of pages long. Plan B: Jane Smiley’s 200-page Charles Dickens, part of the Penguin Lives series. While it’s got less trivia than I’d like (the only factoid I’ve picked up so far is that Dickens’s recreational daily strolls sometimes clocked in at 20 to 30 miles), it also dispenses with all the grindingly dull detail (I’ve read way too many bios that begin by profiling the subject’s parents, grandparents, or even more distant ancestors for 20 pages or more) and cuts right to what I need: a decent overview of Dickens’s life, organized more thematically than strictly chronologically, with emphasis on analyzing the novels. Smiley is affectionate without being overly reverent—she seems as annoyed as I am with the fact that Dickens seemed to blame his wife for their enormous quantity of children and her subsequent health problems and recurrent postpartum depression. Still, Smiley manages to be fair and insightful to both sides, succinctly summing up the troubled marriage as follows:

Victorians as a group believed in effort and in making one’s way by dint of personal force, especially masculine personal force. But even his fellow Victorians were exhausted by Dickens’s restless productivity. [To Dickens] a good life is a busy one; an idle life is boring and morally suspect. Rest is something ever sought, never found, only occasionally imposed by illness. If every marriage is a belief system, and if one spouse usually dictates the terms of the belief system, then the evidence was growing stronger that Catherine was unable to maintain her part in the Dickens family mythology. The reserves of energy that Charles could call upon at will, even when ill, were not available to Catherine, But it must be said that sustaining ten pregnancies and several miscarriages in sixteen years, along with many house movings, social engagements, and long trips, is a task that few modern women would even consider, much less be able to manage.”

For the novel itself, I’ve chosen Nicholas Nickleby as my assignment for February. About all I knew about the book before I started was that (1) It’s so long and dense that the Royal Shakespeare Company famously adapted it into a stage play lasting nine hours, and (2) I really enjoyed the 130-minute 2003 movie. I picked it because I was curious about all the stuff that must have been cut from the book to make the movie, and also because Smiley describes it as the “first wide-ranging ‘Dickensian’ novel,” “a lively and entertaining reading experience,” “ebullient,” “bright,” and “high-spirited.” Sounds like fun, right? Stay tuned for my thoughts on the first 150 pages later today.

BOOKS TO FILM: THE GOLDEN COMPASS AND MANSFIELD PARK

The Golden Compass finally moved to the cheap theater (now just $3, yay!), so A and I went to see it. Not having read the books, he thought it was OK, but I kept writhing and smacking my forehead so much I think he wanted to smother me with his coat. It wasn’t a total loss—everything looked just as I’d envisioned it while reading, and the casting was brilliant. Nicole Kidman, Sam Elliott, and the girl who played Lyra were especially perfect, and you could play “Spot the famous British actor” throughout—Derek Jacobi! Christopher Lee! The voice of Ian McKellen! I thought Freddie Highmore was too squeaky as Pan’s voice, but at least we got Kathy Bates for Hester. I’m not usually a fan of CGI talking animals, but the daemons and armored bears were very well rendered. The plot, however, was a mess—hamhanded and dumbed down. I’d been prepared for the dilution of the (anti)religious themes, but not for the watering-down of everything else. Small examples: in the movie Iorek Byrnison is exiled from Svalbard for losing a fight with another bear, rather than for killing another bear in a fight. (Why? Were the filmmakers afraid of making him too scary or unsympathetic?) And he doesn’t eat Iofur Raknison’s heart after killing him, although at least they left in the jaw-ripping-off part (ew! and awesome!). One of the things I loved most about the book is that nothing is overly explained; you experience and learn things from Lyra’s point of view over time. In the movie, there was lots of very clumsy exposition, some of it in the form of Old Evil British Guys Talking, which was not only annoyingly non-Lyra-POV, but boring for kids as well. And although I knew going in that the downer ending of the book was going to be saved for the next movie (which I think is perfectly fair—the Lord of the Rings movies did it effectively enough), now that I know there’s not likely to be a sequel (since The Golden Compass wasn’t a hit), I wish they’d just gone for it. The film’s ending was dreadfully bland and toothless, especially if you’ve read the books. Overall, it seemed like the filmmakers were afraid of their material—I think they wanted to adapt the book so they could show a lot of cool computer-generated animals, and then they realized they’d have to wince and duck all the inconvenient story details. (Still, I reread The Subtle Knife the next day, remembered I like it even more than the first book, and found myself totally yearning for a second movie—for one thing, Sam Elliott got totally robbed of Lee Scoresby’s big scene!)

And given my Mansfield Park angst last year, of course I had to watch the new PBS adaptation. Surprisingly, I liked it. It made me appreciate the story more. It was snappy and streamlined (though I was sorry to get the Portsmouth part get cut), and I think the morality-play aspects were easier to watch than to read. Body language and tone of voice goes a long way in conveying why certain people in the book are supposed to be good and others are supposed to be “bad” (but seem way more fun than the goodniks—I’m looking at you, Crawfords). I really enjoyed the portion of the film after Mary and Henry show up and all the young people start flirting and running amuck—I even laughed aloud a couple of times. Also, I loved Pug. However: While I figured they’d have to change Fanny’s personality to make her more likable and less passive, did she have to run all the time? In the book she’s practically an invalid and it’s a big deal when she has to walk a quarter-mile, and in the movie she’s manically racing all over the place, romping with children, dancing, and playing badminton, for pete’s sake. A slight adjustment to her character would be fine—no need to bend over backwards and make her a freakin’ tomboy. Also, I know Mansfield Park isn’t the most romantic of Austen novels, but the adaptation went a bit overboard to rectify that at the end, with about 10 minutes of longing glances over the breakfast table, gooey confessions of love, kissyface, and wedding frolicking. It didn’t work for me…although maybe that’s because A (who tuned in halfway through) was so repulsed: “But…they’re cousins! They were raised as brother and sister!” Yeah, no matter how cute and nice you make Edmund and however much you amp up the romance, that’s a hard detail to overcome.

By the way, is anyone else cranky about the new Masterpiece Theater format? Television Without Pity’s Blogfile nails it in the fittingly titled entry “Goddammit, PBS!”:

Oh, sorry, it’s Masterpiece now, isn't it? What—the second word was too much to handle? We live in such an impatient blog-ridden society that no one can manage to wait around for a two-word title? Wait, I know—it was the use of “Theatre” and not the Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and E.M. Forster that made the series seem too intellectual for all those PBS-watching theatre-phobes. Like Masterpiece alone is so much better. It’s just hanging out there all cold and unfinished. “Masterpiece” what? Society? Barbecue Sauce?