“Charlie & Me”

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

Editor’s Note: this is a previously published piece by Wayne Mergler, none the worse for wear for a bit of time having passed since the writing, and your reading, of it . . . .

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—5/24/10—For the past five weeks, I have spent two hours of my Sunday nights in front of the TV screen, enthralled by the latest BBC/PBS dramatization of another masterpiece of British literature, the kind that, for some reason, only the British seem to know how to do properly.

This one, Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, was so wonderful that I found myself eagerly awaiting Sunday night, usually the most dreaded night of my week. This adaptation, by the brilliant Andrew Davies, who has adapted so many of these BBC productions from literature (Middlemarch, The Way We Live Now, Wives and Daughters, the stunning Bleak House) is really the best that television can produce: a thoughtful, creative, faithful, and wholly captivating version of the classic novel, one which even manages to pass my own rigorous and prejudiced scrutiny of any potential blasphemy towards a favorite book.

I was, every Sunday night for five weeks, transported, transfixed, hooked. And, of course, as any good literary adaptation ought to do, it has sent me immediately back to the original novel. So I am now re-reading Little Dorrit, though it is somewhat “out of season” for me.

Spring is the most un-Dickensian of seasons.
I have written about my obsession with Charles Dickens and his novels many times before (other columns, other newspapers, other venues), so now I will merely say that Charles Dickens has always been my favorite writer and that I have had a passionate and intense love affair with his books for more than half a century. I re-read Dickens every year, usually in the fall and winter, when the weather turns to what I have always called “Dickens weather.”
There comes a day, every year—usually, here in Alaska, in early October—when I suddenly know that it is Dickens weather. It is sometimes hard to define it, but I know it when it comes. There comes a day in the fall when there is a decided difference in the air; it is colder, crisper, yes, but something more than that. A sweater or a light jacket is needed. A cold wind usually begins to blow and you can hear it whistling in the flue of the fireplace.

Days will then grow shorter; mist roll in from the hills. Multicolored leaves, dropping now from trees, swirl around in little whirlpools in the air. The mornings are foggy and, one morning, you will notice that the fog has begun to freeze on porch railings and fence posts and the windshields of cars. There is an energy in the air that wasn’t there in days before. The sky has a strange glow, a mixture of old gold and leaden gray. It is time to light the first fires of the season, and you can smell the smoke in the air: a smell of campfires, hearth fires, bonfires, burning leaves.

I build a fire in the fireplace. I brew a pot of steaming hot tea and place it on the little table by my overstuffed easy chair. I wrap an old crocheted afghan around my lap and legs. And then I am ready. I open a book by Charles Dickens, a large, leather-bound, gilt-edged, lavishly illustrated tome—my gift to myself many years ago was a fabulous set of the complete Dickens from London—and, almost at once, lose myself in its many delights.

If the wind begins to roar outside, if it rattles the panes of my window, if the snow begins to fly, if the howling of a wolf or a stray dog is sometimes confused with the noise of the wind, all the better. I am snug and safe and warm and cozy and lost in the world of Dickens.

With 18 novels from which to choose (counting the three short Christmas novels), there is never a danger of growing weary of the same old stuff. I usually re-read two Dickens books between late October and Christmas, or thereabouts, and only have to repeat a book every few years. But I suppose I have read all of Dickens’ books at least half a dozen times, some—my very favorites—much more often than that. Some of my friends scratch their heads. Don’t I know the stories by now? Of course, I do. But as everyone who re-reads anything knows: it is a different book each time you come to it. And with a genius such as Dickens, the treasures and surprises in each book are more rewarding with each revisit.

No other writer has given me so much pleasure. No other writer makes me laugh quite so hard or cry so unabashedly, often on the same page. I am always amazed and appalled when I meet people who say that they don’t like Dickens. And there are many of them. I have found that those who claim to dislike Dickens have almost never read him. If they have read him, they were usually forced to read him in high school or in a college literature class and then they usually had to read Hard Times or Oliver Twist, which are, in my opinion, Dickens’ least likable books.

Those two are often taught for one reason only: they are relatively short compared to most of Dickens’ books. But, though both Hard Times and Oliver Twist have wonderful moments, they are hardly in the same league with Dickens’ true masterpieces: Bleak House; Little Dorrit; Great Expectations; Our Mutual Friend.

And, with the possible exception of Great Expectations, those brilliant books are today rarely read. Many dismiss Dickens as too wordy, too descriptive, too sentimental, too depressing, too boring. All of these criticisms seem outrageously unfair to me—and patently untrue. Dickens is not really guilty of any of those things, particularly if you compare him to other VIctorian writers. In fact, many of his critics are simply lumping him in with their own misconception of what 19th-century literature is: long and boring. Dickens is not too wordy or too descriptive. His style is light, lively, and entertaining.
“I hate it,” one young man said to me recently, “when they go on and on for pages describing a room.”

Dickens does very little of that; not nearly so much as his contemporaries Thackeray, Trollope, or George Eliot do.

“. . . and when they digress and talk to the reader? I hate that,” the young man added.
Thackeray does that all the time; Trollope does a good bit of it, too. George Eliot certainly feels the need carefully to describe and analyze every motivation of every character, with an analysis of what their motives may ultimately lead to.

Dickens never does that. He leaves a great deal to the reader to figure out. He is descriptive when he needs to be. His descriptions create atmosphere, and atmosphere is of prime importance in any Dickens novel.

As for sentimentality, yes, there is a sentimental streak in Dickens, just as there is in any Victorian writer. It was a sentimental era. Audiences loved melodrama. The early Dickens strayed sometimes into the maudlin, most infamously with the sentimental and mawkish death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (an otherwise terrific book, I might add), but he was very young when he wrote that book and he learned as he mastered his craft.

The deathbed scene of Magwitch in Great Expectations, for example, is a profoundly moving scene, deeply sad without any trace of sentimentality. So, too, is the truly moving death of the sadly-damaged Mr. Dorrit, after years of suffering in prison, just when his life seems to be on the mend.

And to accuse Dickens of being depressing or boring is an outrage to me. Dickens cheers me up whenever I read him. His books are so funny; brimming over with the joys of life; so full of celebration and love and family, so full of good food and drink; so life-affirming. Yes, of course, there is darkness and despair, but that is accompanied by thrills and excitement and danger.

I know many women who read Jane Austen whenever they need comforting in a hectic, contemporary world. I read Dickens in the same way.

There is, quite simply, no other writer like Charles Dickens. He has always defied classification, which has sometimes made him problematic for scholars. I have seen books about Dickens the Realistic Novelist and books about Dickens the Romantic Novelist. I have heard Dickens called a social satirist, a tragic writer, a comic writer. I have always maintained that Dickens was the first urban fantasist. His novels are filled with the fantastic, with fairy-tale elements.

In Dickens there are trolls lurking under staircases, ogres hiding in dark passages, wicked stepmothers, princesses locked away in towers, evil dwarfs who stalk young girls through dark, fog-shrouded, labyrinthine streets. Hans Christian Andersen, the great teller of fairy tales, was inspired by Dickens. Without Dickens, there would be no J.R.R. Tolkien, whose hobbits come right out of Dickens; no T.H. White; no J.K. Rowling, who is the most Dickensian writer working today.

I cannot remember when I first read Charles Dickens or knew of him. I remember, as a very little boy, playing a card game with my grandmother called “Authors.” My grandmother was a schoolteacher and very fond of Dickens. When I would get the Dickens card in the game, I remember that she praised him as a great writer. That must have stuck somewhere deep inside me.

I remember, too, watching A Christmas Carol, in one of its myriad incarnations, on TV during the holiday season as a kid. My favorite was always the old Alastair Sim version, though I do remember being amazed, when I first actually read A Christmas Carol, to discover that it was so much better than any of the rather lame movie or TV efforts. I remember seeing the David Lean films of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist at some point in my childhood. And I remember reading the Classics Illustrated comic book versions of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.

So I knew of Dickens and his books long before I actually read them. But I can’t say that that is what began my obsessive love for the man and his work. It may have been a combination of all those things; it may have been something else entirely that I no longer remember.

I was 13 when I first went to London with my parents, and I remember thinking, even then, that this was a world I wanted to explore, wanted to know better. I wanted to live there. Years later, when I was in graduate school in London, I lived, by sheer coincidence, in Tavistock Square, where Dickens, too, had once lived. His house was no longer there, destroyed by German bombs during the Blitz, but there was a blue plate marking its spot, right across from the window of my room, and I sat every day in the square and thrilled at the thought that he, too, had sat there.

When I was 13, my family moved to Germany. My father was a military officer. We lived on a small post on the outskirts of Stuttgart. There were very few kids on that post. Most of my friends lived at the large Patch Barracks, some miles away. I used to get on my bicycle and peddle off the Post and into the little German village beyond the walls of the military establishment, a thrilling though rather frightening adventure for me.

I spoke very imperfect German, though I was learning, and in my meanderings through the village, I came one day upon a little bookshop. I remember that I propped my bicycle against the wall of the shop, with never a thought that it might not be there when I returned (those paranoid days were far in the future) and stepped inside.

There was (of course, there was) a little tinkling of a bell, and a smiling lady with silver hair piled high on her head came out from a back room. I struggled to speak German to her until she finally realized that I was an American and switched our conversation to English. I asked her, without much hope, if she had any books in English. Books in English were very hard to come by in those days in Germany. I had access to my school library and to the Post library, but that was about it. The PX on Post had a spinner of very uninteresting paperbacks which sold for 25 or 50 cents. But, for some reason, I wanted my own books, my own little library to fill up the shelves built into the headboard of my bed.

The lady smiled at me and nodded and showed me a small display of English-language books, all from publishers in England. Most of the books were by Charles Dickens. I remember that I bought three books from her that day: the Christmas Novels of Dickens, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.

The purchase cost me four marks. They were the first books I ever bought.

I rode home with the precious books, lovingly wrapped by the lady in brown paper, like a present, in the basket on my handlebars. And that, I think, was the beginning of it all.

Nothing had ever enthralled me like those books did. Pip, in Great Expectations, was the first literary character with whom I ever identified. He was a boy from the fens of England, whereas I was a Southern boy from Virginia, but I knew him well.

I knew the shame and guilt of being embarrassed by one’s family, by yearning to be a gentleman when, in truth, you were clearly a redneck; I knew the humiliation Pip endured when the beautiful Estella smirked at his muddied boots; in my case, it had been the red clay stains on the knees and backside of my overalls. And then, of course, there was David Copperfield and his moving adventures through life. And Scrooge and the delightful Peerybingles and Trotty Veck.

I loved them all. I read those books over and over again. In the tenth grade, when we all had to read Great Expectations, I was the only one in the class who had already read it. But I was too shy to admit to that and never answered the questions Mr. Magee asked us about the book to generate discussion, even though I was eager to do so. But I loved Mr. Magee because he claimed that Great Expectations was his all-time favorite book.
My love affair with “Charlie” has never let up. Eventually, over the years, I read all the books. I discovered that my favorite Dickens book tends to be the one I am reading at the moment—whichever one I am reading at the moment. Sometimes I say that Bleak House is my favorite; other times I think, no, it is really Our Mutual Friend.

At the moment, as I am re-reading Little Dorrit, that is my current favorite. But I love them all. I love the delights and joys and silliness of The Pickwick Papers, the hilarity and the tragedy of Nicholas Nickleby, the Fellini-esque Old Curiosity Shop, with its carnival atmosphere, its puppeteers and trained dogs and clowns and waxworks lady and, most remarkable, a character who seems to be the god Vulcan come to earth, forever tending his great fires.

Martin Chuzzlewit is, to my thinking, Dickens’ funniest book; Great Expectations and Little Dorrit, his saddest. This recent production of Little Dorrit, and, now my unseasonal re-reading of it, has struck me with how amazingly relevant the book is for today’s readers.

Little Dorrit is all about money and greed and the economy and the sudden getting and losing of fortunes. Among its characters which seem so timely today, are a terrifying serial killer, a sadistic wife-abuser, a greedy slumlord, bureaucrats laden with red tape and inefficiency, a predatory lesbian, several victims of bankruptcy and foreclosure, a mentally-challenged young woman, an adult woman who looks like a child and a child who looks like an adult woman and, most amazing of all, Mr. and Mrs. Merdle, who are 19th-century dead-ringers for Bernie and Ruth Madoff.

Like all of Dickens’ work, the book is both desperately dark and dazzlingly light, hilariously funny and devastatingly sad; so rich in character and story, so teeming with life.
I was born on February 6; Charles Dickens was born on February 7. I used to think that, given the difference in time between England and Virginia, I could somehow make that come out to being basically the same day. It seemed a connection to me, a bonding with a long-dead friend who never knew me, but whom I have always felt was an intimate.