Two Lives Of Dickens

Charles Dickens

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. EL DOCTOROW

Two biographies have been published recently anticipating the bicentenary of Charles Dickens's birth next February: Becoming Dickens: The Invention Of A Novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life.

Both books mention the meeting Dickens reputedly had with Dostoyevsky in 1862. In a subsequent letter mentioning this momentous encounter, the great Russian novelist recalls his great British counterpart telling him that All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him ... one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Whereupon Dostoyevsky was supposed to have asked: Only two people? 

Whether or not the meeting actually occurred, and whether or not the letter is authentic (it has never been traced, and there is no extant copy), no matter. What's interesting is the Jekyll and Hyde (though Stevenson's novel The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde did not come out until sixteen years after Dickens's death!) 'split personality' Dickens admits to here. Of course, Dostoyevsky himself was fascinated by multifaceted personalities (one of his stories is called The Double) and the dilemmas caused by opposing moralities struggling for ascendance in the same human soul (just look at Raskolnikov in Crime And Punishment).

Dickens, after twenty one years of faithful (so far as we know) marriage to his wife Catherine, began a liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan in 1857 - which continued until his death in 1870. Divorce was barely thinkable for a man in his position at the time, so he separated from Catherine in 1858 but remained married to her. Perhaps guilt about this was at the back of his mind when he made his startling revelation to Dostoyevsky, perhaps not. Who knows?

However, from a personal point of view, the longer I live, and the more I experience life, the more convinced I am that we all have, to a greater or lesser extent, split or multiple personalities. We all have some of the saint and the sinner, the hero and the villain, the good and the bad within us - in varying proportions. And it's only when we get beyond such manifest polarities of our fragile and fearful ego that we can start to experience the unquenchable joy, peace and love which characterises our true Being and Consciousness - as Eckhart Tolle* might say.

* I'll have more to say at a later date about Eckhart Tolle's book The Power Of Now.   

So Various

I'll end this 9-post riff on Hardy with some quotations I jotted down while reading Claire Tomalin's terrific biography Thomas Hardy:The Time-Torn Man.

The wounds inflicted by life never quite healed in Hardy. Humiliation, rejection, condescension, failure and loss of love remained so close to the skin that the scars bled again at the slightest occasion. This is why many of his poems return to the griefs of the past. It is also why the rage that appears in his last novel, Jude The Obscure, was fuelled in the 1890s by the anger he felt in the 1860s.

The shifting feelings in a marriage, and in a family, are as complex and unpredictable as cloud formations.

Looking at the expensively dressed ladies at an evening party, he [Hardy] famously asked himself, 'If put into rough wrappers in a turnip-field, where would their beauty be?'

Hardy took some of his pessimism from Schopenhauer, who saw the world as malignant, God and immortality as illusions, and the extinction of the human race through chastity as an end to be sought: best of all not to be born. Yet he [Hardy] was always too imaginative to follow any one philosopher.

Here she [Tess] is reviving after disaster: 'some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpended youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.'

He [Hardy] was exact when he said a novel is not an argument but an impression, and this novel [Tess Of The D'Urbervilles] lives through its impressions of Tess and the landscapes through which she moves.

No one has ever claimed that the book [Tess Of The D'Urbervilles] is perfectly written or constructed, or without clumsiness, but it glows with the intensity of his [Hardy's] imagination; and Tess's capacity to arouse visceral distaste in some and profound affection and admiration in others is a measure of the sexual power he built into his heroine.

Leonard and Virginia Woolf paid a visit to Hardy in July 1926. Leonard Woolf wrote about the encounter: He is one of the few people who have left upon me the personal impression of greatness... He was a human being, not 'the great man'.

[The poem] So Various describes a man made up of contradictions, highly strung but also stiff and cold; a faithful lover but fickle too; pleased with his own cleverness but easily put down; always sad but cheerful company; cool to friends yet eager to please - all of course versions of himself.

(These posts have been a kind of blogging experiment in which I've tried to approach Hardy from all sorts of different perspectives - novels, poems, biography, philosophy, religion, romanticism, realism, nature, walking. No post was particularly preplanned. Each post just seemed to evolve spontaneously from the previous one - in the typical way of blogs. I hope something of my enthusiasm for Hardy has communicated; and if I've encouraged anyone to read or reread Hardy, that's great.)

(During my recent reading about Hardy I also jotted down all the adjectives I could find which were used to describe him by his family, friends and acquaintances. These are some of them: shy, introverted, kind, elusive, sphinx-like, ill-at-ease, depressive, private, lively, grey, self-possessed, unassuming, snobbish, mean, generous, unfathomable, quiet-mannered, curious, charming, unaffected, observant.)

Walking: Creation And Revelation

The road became a theatre for action in his imagination... CLAIRE TOMALIN on THOMAS HARDY

I've finished The Return Of The Native (Hardy's own personal favourite of his novels) and I'm now immersed in Claire Tomalin's excellent and very readable biography Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Viking, 2006). The blurb of this book presents Hardy as a paradoxical figure: one of the great Victorian novelists - and also one of the great twentieth-century poets ... a believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; a driven man who who ended his days in simplicity and serenity. Simplicity and serenity. Not a bad way in which to end one's days.

Every day the boy Hardy walked the 3 miles from his family cottage in Higher Bockhampton to school in Dorchester and back. Later he did the same trip in his 1st job as an architect's apprentice. A keen observer of nature and of people, he took in everything he saw during these daily walks - and these details impressed themselves on his mind and found their way into many of his writings.

As Tomalin says early in her biography: Walking the roads, meeting others on the road, exchanging news with travellers, being overtaken by riders, carts and carriers, or offered lifts, were all part of his daily experience throughout his boyhood, so that it is not surprising that the road became a theatre for action in his imagination and walking a central activity in his writing, used dramatically and to establish or underline character. Most of his charcters are prodigious walkers. Tess and Jude both walk themselves through the crises in their lives, and Jude effectively kills himself by walking in the rain. Gabriel Oak walks to find work, and Fanny Robin walks through the snow to plead with her lover, and then drags herself along the road to the workhouse, leaning on an obliging dog, to die. Elfride in A Pair Of Blue Eyes runs 'through the pelting rain like a hare; or more like pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to fly, but does not.' The newly-wed lovers in Two On A Tower walk nine miles across country to a railway station to avoid being noticed. The Hand Of Ethelberta opens with Ethelberta, a young widow, taking a solitary walk on a heath, where she sees a wild duck being pursued by a hawk, runs after the birds to see what will happen and loses her way. At the beginning of The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Henchard is shown on the road, his character to be read not in his words but his walk: 'his measured springless walk was the walk of the skilled country man as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference, personal to himself.' And at the end of the book he leaves Casterbridge on foot, a diminishing figure going into the distance, and observed in fine detail: 'the yellow straw basket at his back moving up and down with each tread, and the creases behind his knees coming and going alternately.' In The Return Of The Native, Mrs Yeobright recognizes a distant, anonymous furze-cutter simply by his walk: 'a gait she had seen somewhere before; and the gait revelaed the man to her... "His walk is exactly as my husband's used to be," she said; and then the thought burst upon her that the furze-cutter was her son.'

(Claire Tomalin has also written acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Dickens, Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys. She is married to the playwright, novelist and translator Michael Frayn.)