Reading Note:
Sadly, No
3 March 2015
Six weeks or so ago, I quoted a paragraph that included the following sentence.
I would say that Great Expectations may be the most greatly realized novel in English (though I steer clear of that sort of competitive judgment).
This was Shirley Hazzard, in a Paris Review interview, refusing to name novels that she might like to have written (a silly question indeed). “Rather, I might speak with a joyful envy of passages that I myself would not have conceivably written.” The first book that she speaks of is Great Expectations.
It was too obvious a challenge to resist, but, its obviousness notwithstanding, it also became a very complex challenge. Of course I should have to read Great Expectations (which I hadn’t done before) to see if I could figure out what Hazzard was talking about. What would Great Expectations tell me about Shirley Hazzard’s idea of a “greatly realized” novel?
The complication was that I should have to read Great Expectations as if I were enjoying it. I should be obliged to forbear from interrupting my reading with expostulations upon Dickens’s incompetence, his treacly sentimentality, his half-hearted formulaism, his inability to create fully human characters — and so forth and so on. In addition to sparing Kathleen hours of bloviate denunciation, such as I once regaled her with in connection with The Prince of Tides, almost every one of whose supernumerary words prompted two or three explosive ones from me, I should have to observe a inward, mental quiet, as if my mind were a public library. Or as if, say, Shirley Hazzard were sitting next to me. I should have to try to forget my Dickens in order to read hers.
Now, there is not much to “my Dickens.” What have I read? David Copperfield in school — hated it. A Tale of Two Cities. This I quite liked, but it was the first novel that I ever read, aside from the Hardy Boys mysteries. When I had another go at it a few years, I became so exasperated with Miss Prosser at one point that I put the novel down and never picked it up again. Bleak House — Esther Whatshername gave me boils. I could tell that I’d be rooting for Lady Dedlock, just as I did for Lady Audley. Oh, and The Pickwick Papers, which I also had to read for school, but didn’t. A Christmas Carol of course, which of course I read with a heart of stone.
As is the case with authors who don’t excite a positive enthusiasm, I pretended, for the most part, that Dickens didn’t exist. In casual conversation, I might say, “I loathe Dickens,” and complacently nod if my interlocutor agreed. That was about it. I do not understand the appeal of Dickens. The most constructive thing that I have to say is that, to the extent that Dickens’s delineations of the hell that was mid-Victorian England are righteous and powerful, they sap his work of beauty.
And I say that after reading Great Expectations.
I did not come to understand what Shirley Hazzard was talking about. I remain as mystified as I was when I first read the Paris Review interview. I try in vain to imagine ways in which one might hold Great Expectations to be “greatly realized.” (Not to mention its being the most greatly realized novel in English!) The more I turn the question over, the more Great Expectations strikes me as perfectly un-realized. Dickens goes on and on about irrelevancies while scanting the meat of his tale. It seems more than possible that all I could see of Great Expectations was the negative of Shirley Hazzard’s impression.
But this entry is not about Great Expectations so much as it is about a novel literary experience. If I quickly rose to meet the challenge of Hazzard’s judgment, that is because I had never been able to figure out what Great Expectations is about. I knew about Miss Havisham, the jilted bride who extends the moment of her rejection to the term of her natural life. (Miss Havisham is such a well-known literary curiosity that I tended to place her in The Old Curiosity Shop.) But Pip and Estella were merely names, and Magwitch hardly even that. Herbert Pocket came as a complete surprise — I’d never heard so much as a whisper about him. Nor Wemmick, nor Jaggers. As for Joe Gargery, I might have come across the name, but never a hint that he is the moral touchstone of the book.
I had never picked up, as one does pick things up, the least idea of what Great Expectations is about.
***
Midway through the middle volume, or Book II, I sent myself an Evernote, in which I made three points. Here they are, fleshed out, in slightly different order.
First, I didn’t care about Pip. As best I can make out, Pip fails on two counts. First, he has no idiosyncrasies, no hobbies, no personal color. Second, his voice is implausible — the not-uncommon mishap of first-person narratives. How did a rather oppressed little boy from the marshes of Kent learn to speak so “well”? Because Pip wasn’t real enough to care about, I was never very excited by the drama of his great expectations.
Second, Dickens’s prose, especially where it ought to have been exciting, was, in comparison with Wilkie Collins’s, dead in the water.
Third, I wondered what Trollope would have had to say about Magwitch’s project of making a gentleman out of Pip by showering him with money. This is what I should address at length if I were to study Great Expectations. The greatness of Trollope’s fiction is its preoccupation with the ordeal that young men of limited means go through when they try to do the right thing vis-à-vis the women they love. What does it mean to be a gentleman? It is much more than a matter of spending money and fresh linen. This problem, or challenge, does not, however, interest Dickens at all. Pip’s London life, which apparently involves more than a few pieces of jewelry and a habit of running up debts, is given the most cursory treatment. We have none of the vivid illustrative scenes in which Trollope would have shown us the hero’s conscience wrestling with irresistible metropolitan lures.
Nor — and this seems almost perverse to me, but then I don’t get Dickens — is Estella’s creator very interested in her. Trollope managed to kill my the pleasure that I took in his books with his fetishistic idolatry of innocent young ladies (who could never be allowed to admit that they’d made a mistake, and permitted to find a happier love), but his fiction is liberally seasoned with bad girls. How intriguing it would have been to see the full-length portrait of Estella that Trollope painted of Lizzie Eustace!
And what about Compeyson, that cipher of a villain, who appears only to drown, and whom we never once hear? Compeyson is the sort of thing that I have in mind when I charge Dickens with incompetence. Here is a man who has betrayed both of the novel’s victims, Magwitch and Miss Havisham. Surely we ought to see at least half as much of him as we do of Adolphus Crosbie (in The Small House at Allington). Compeyson, in addition to being very wicked, is the archetypal non-gentleman, the pattern of what Pip, with his great expectations, ought to avoid. (It ought to have been Compeyson, not Orlick, in the limekiln.) But, as I say, he’s hardly there at all. Dickens’s handling of this character, from introduction to finish, seems extraordinarily maladroit.
But I did find out what Great Expectations is about, and in the only proper way: by reading it, quietly and with an open mind. That was the novel literary experience, and I can’t say that it wasn’t a pleasure.