#5: The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

This is one of the most popular books of all time, as big in its day (1836) as Harry Potter is in ours.

But who would want to read it today? A massive Victorian novel without sex, violence, or vampires. Even among Dickens novels, I don’t think it would be in many “top five” lists. I wasn’t really hankering to read it myself, but I had an old Penguin paperback that I had picked up. I liked the cover illustration, I liked the heft of it, and so I started reading, sort of on a self-dare.

I work harder than most people at deciding what books I should read, what movies I should see, and what music I should listen to. For that very reason, I think it’s good idea every so often to “take a flyer.” Taste can be confining, a groove we wear in what the world has to offer. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to have too much faith in your own taste. Have you heard of “desert island discs”?—this is a genre of music writing where people are asked what five records they would want to have with them if they were stranded on a desert island. (Or rather, they answer without actually being asked.) I realize the real question behind this conceit is merely “What are your favorite records?”, but I can’t help trying to imagine what it would be like if you really were forced to spend the rest of your life under a cocoanut tree with a record player and five records. Maybe one of those wind-up grammaphones with a speaker like a big lily. I suspect that after a few weeks it would not matter what the discs were—or rather, it would matter in ways that we could not imagine in advance. Maybe we’d just want happy music, or singable music, or music that told a story. Would we want Sgt. Peppers or Dark Side of the Moon? I might be just as happy with Celine Dion, Tom Jones, and The Beegees as I would be with the Beatles, Bach, and Charlie Parker. Because taste is an extravagance, a way of coping with surplus. Music is music.

So am I comparing The Pickwick Papers with Celine Dion? Not exactly—but both have sustained and entertained a lot of people. Given the choice, though, I’ll take Pickwick. (Unless I’m in Vegas and I get a good deal on tickets.)

I was somewhat indifferently entertained while reading Pickwick. I didn’t work at it, as I would have if I’d owed somebody a term paper afterwards. There were some good bits of comedy and lots of great period detail about coaches and inns and servants. After finishing the book I went back and read the introduction, and began to understand how to “value” Pickwick. I felt a little guilty for not having recognized all the virtues of the book, all the things that make it remarkable. Pickwick was just a country I was passing through—I dipped a little into what it had to offer, as I would try a few Portuguese dishes if I were staying in Lisbon. Or maybe Dickens is the country, and Pickwick is a small coastal port. In any case, I’m not going to try to be your guide to the Pickwick experience, or to suggest for a moment that this is a trip you should put at the top of your list. Which puts me in mind of those “1000 X’s to See/Do/Hear Before You Die” books—another consumer trope that I am rather inclined to look at too literally. Whenever I see one of those books I am more amazed that some cheap trade paperback has the nerve to remind me of my mortality, than I am interested in the list of items. (OK, yes, I am interested in the list too.) But since I am going to die, and perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the best thing to do might be to dispense with lists and collections altogether. I suspect these books are for twenty-five year olds, who have trouble imagining their own mortality.

Dickens was a hot young journalist when he was offered the Pickwick project. A popular illustrator wanted a pretext for publishing a series of illustrations, and the publisher was looking for someone to supply some narrative to fill in around the pictures. The pictures were to be of a “sporting club,” and they were to be satirical—people in extravagant hunting costumes discharging their pieces ineptly, and so forth. The first few chapters did little to transcend this flimsy concept, but as he wrote, Dickens began to realize that he was, in fact, Charles Dickens. Characters, descriptions and themes began to pour forth. The sporting club gave way to intrigue, adventure, and romance. A star was born. As monthly installments were published, Dickens took note of “what worked,” and promptly supplied more of those commodities. Sam Weller, the shrewd and practical cockney manservant, introduced as a peripheral character in one episode, was brought back and made a key cast member. It wasn’t “reality” novel-writing, but it had that element of audience interaction that keeps shows like American Idol on everyone’s lips.
After the fourth installment, the illustrator shot himself. A new illustrator was found, but the ratio of text to illustrations was increased. Advantage: Dickens. For the modern reader, reading Pickwick is somewhat like watching a sitcom without the laugh track. Or like watching the performers on American Idol without the judges and the audience. You’re seeing only one half of a dialogue between artist and audience.

You’re also lacking the cultural perspective of the early Victorian English audience. The knowledge of current events, the gentle satire regarding master/servant relationships, etc. Humor can either be “of the moment,” full of satire and parodies of people and events in the news, or more what I would call, for lack of a better word, universal. When they rebroadcast ancient Saturday Night Live episodes, I suspect they edit out skits making fun of Edmund Muskie, Billy Carter and the like—the fact that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is “still dead” isn’t nearly as funny as it was 35 years ago, when the audience knew that the Spanish dictator had clung to life for months before finally expiring. Monty Python skits, in contrast, seem mostly free of such cultural specifics, and so have aged better.

Of course the ultimate challenge in this regard is Shakespeare. Consider “Romeo and Juliet”—there are parts of that play that are chock full of cultural references and topical jokes that nobody today can appreciate—unless they read the footnotes carefully. Yet they assign this play to high schoolers. Of course, the play does work on other levels at the same time. It’s interesting when you watch a Shakespeare comedy performed—especially a low-budget production without famous actors. Productions that cannot rely on opulence and acting skill to blow you away. The actors always make sure they give the audience plenty to laugh at. I always wonder—how much of this humor was put there by Shakespeare (and typically missed by me as I read the play and tried to navigate the iambic pentameter), and how much is part of the cultural inheritance of the play—gestures and effects handed down through the centuries as younger performers absorbed the tricks and gambits of their predecessors. Not unlike magicians. There is a third possibility—that actors and directors can invent humorous readings, gestures, and “bits” without any guidance from either the bard or their mentors. I suspect that when you watch a Shakespearean comedy you’re seeing a blend of all three of these potential sources of humor: what Shakespeare put in, theatrical traditions, and new inventions.

In any case, there is no way for us today to recapture the excitement that would have been felt by the original readers of The Pickwick Papers. We can only admire it the way we admire surviving Roman ampitheaters, with only perhaps 60% of the rock still in place.

#4: Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

I found two Isak Dinesen books at a yard sale a couple of months ago for ten cents each—Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa. I read the former first and just finished the latter. The two books are very different—the former is a collection of highly stylized and intricately weird romantic tales, the latter a factual account of the author’s experiences running a sort of plantation in Kenya. But what unites them for me is the strength of the author’s personality, as expressed in her writing. This was a person who wrote confidently and boldly, and I get the definite sense that she would have showed those traits in other aspects of her life as well. I don’t think she was a timid person.

Seven Gothic Tales has a spooky Scandinavian feel, it's an orchestration of effects and sleights and nuances. She chooses the role of artificer, a maker of illusions and effects. Some of the stories are thrilling and exotic, others are a bit vague and dream-like.

In Out of Africa, the sense of power comes from the way the author so capably puts across her personal understanding of her experience managing a large coffee plantation in Kenya. The book is neither modest nor grandiose; the author has a cool, supple, and poised intelligence which can be philosophical, analytical, or sympathetic as the occasion requires. She presents her 17 years in Africa exactly as she wishes us to see them, selecting people and events to give her experience resonance and coherence.

Reading the book in 2011, though, it’s difficult not to wonder about certain things. Dinesen runs a 6000-acre farm, staffed by hundreds or perhaps thousands of Africans, primarily of the Kikuyu tribe. She is friendly with many of her so-called natives and tells us of the lives and tribulations of several of them, but never without a certain paternalistic distance. Indeed, she writes of favorite horses and dogs, as well, and in much the same way—they are noble, they endure, they die. Dinesen’s natives are being run off the land as systematically as the Indians of the American west were—at one point she explains why her people will have to relocate after she sells the farm: “The natives cannot, according to the law, themselves buy any land…” If this fact caused Dinesen any dismay, it is not evident from this book. Perhaps she is just extending her own personal stoicism to those around her.

We read of the blue peaks of the Ngong Hills, of safaris down into the Masai Reserve. We read of the slaughter of several lions, and of a plague of locusts. We read of the ways of the hardworking Kikuyu, of the warlike Masai, and of the Somali, with their fierce Islam religion and their sequestered wives. Somalis served as loyal major domos to the white landowners, aristocrats among the Africans, and you wonder how their homeland could have come to the awful state it is in today. Reading Out of Africa makes me want to visit Kenya, to walk the cool uplands of the west country and to see the stars and the moon and the sky as Dinesen describes them. Of course, today her property is within the suburbs of Nairobi, so I doubt if the walk would be quite as exhilarating as in her day.

I would like to someday read Judith Thurman’s biography of Blixen to learn about everything that she has left out. Even just a few minutes of browsing in wikipedia provides all sorts of surprises—What of the husband who gave her syphilis and whom she divorced in 1921? What of the brother who came out to help her run the plantation for four years? What of her love affair with Denys Finch-Hatton (or is it Hatton-Finch), which is the main substance of the 1985 film made from Out of Africa? It is odd to think that the movie, using the same title, tells of events that are barely hinted at in the book. Dinesen is a ruthless editor of her own life, throwing out whatever doesn’t suit her purpose. I haven’t decided if I think this is quite honest.

Was Kenya in the 30s really so idyllic? Perhaps not. But I do not think it was any the worse for Karen Blixen’s having been there.