Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (13 page)

I much look forward to Pamela’s infiltration of the Booker panels and word festivals. This is a great and democratizing moment.

She hired a ghostwriter for her book (its title is
Star
), which is another piece of welcome transgressiveness. Biographies, we know, have ghostwriters. The memoirs of ex-politicians, for example, are almost always ventriloquial. But in what sense can a novelist, you may well be asking—in this case, Ms. Anderson—“write” a novel using a ghostwriter? Does she hire some buzzing brain and tell him to sit in a corner until he makes something up she likes, which then becomes merely by the force of her approval … hers? I certainly hope so. There’s precedent from other trades. Nobody builds their own houses anymore, but you don’t see the carpenter’s name next to anyone’s doorbell.

Besides, Pamela Anderson is a celebrity—and, as Homer (Simpson) once said of rock stars, is there nothing that celebrities can’t do? It’s her book because her name is on the cover. And if its story bears an uncanny, almost Siamese, resemblance to her own life, this does not mean it still isn’t a novel. Was it not Oscar Wilde, another literary poseur, who first made the claim that all real art imitates life?

Nor should it be left unnoticed that what Ms. Anderson has actually done here is to have brought the novel, the
form, home. The more austere guides to English fiction usually credit Samuel Richardson as being the father of the novel. You were nobody in the eighteenth century if you weren’t a Richardson fan. If Oprah had been around in the 1740s—and we can only fervently wish that she had been—Richardson would have been her literary Dr. Phil.

Richardson’s first book, and the progenitor of the English novel, was a steamy, lubricious potboiler about a young servant girl’s attempts to resist the endless assaults upon her “virtue” by her master. The plot was built upon “the principle of procrastinated rape” that V.S. Pritchett said was the motor of most romance works. Richardson, Anderson, the principle lives on: sex sells.

And what was that novel’s name?
Pamela
. The subtitle was
Virtue Rewarded
, which I suppose is the only point where this parallel may be seen to fail. Virtue, certainly in no sense in which the word could be understood in the eighteenth century, or most centuries before or after, has not been a persistent intruder in the life of the present-day heroine.

But if
Pamela
begat the novel, may not Pamela take it back?

Now, there will be some who, on learning that a novel by Pamela Anderson is about to crowd Joyce Carol Oates out of the Indigo shops—and if there is any justice in this indifferent universe, give a nudge to the stacks of Bill Clinton’s
My Life
—will whiningly ask whether it’s actually worth reading.

I have culled a sample of its prose from the news reports, and you will agree the answer is, ever so buoyantly, yes.

Star
tells of the heroine’s unsettling reaction to the changes of puberty. Her mother reassures her: “You’re not dying, you’re just growing up. Looks like you’re finally going to get some boobs. You’re becoming a woman, honey. You’re blooming!” And bloom she does. Then comes a sentence that would make Flaubert weep: “Her breasts came on suddenly and tenaciously, as if trying to make up for lost time.” And weep again—perhaps, if possible, even more copiously—over one that follows: “The hard bump turned out to be one of a pair of unruly and self-willed nipples.”

It’s the “self-willed” that does it. That’s genius.

Would there have been a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
TV series without Bram Stoker? No. However far from his
Dracula
the campy reruns may be, the persistence of the vampire story, and the fable’s elemental features—blood-parched undead, fearful only of sunlight, garlic and the crucifix (vampires, not political consultants)—owe everything to Stoker’s renewal of the legend.

Stoker took the ancient myth and folk tale of the vampire and packaged it as a literary entertainment. The latter
half of the nineteenth century is somewhat remarkable in the history of English fiction for the number of authors who wrote stories or created characters that tapped the properties of myth: Robert Louis Stevenson with
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, Mary Shelley with
Frankenstein
, Arthur Conan Doyle with his immortals, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

To the fertility and imagination of the ordinary novelist, these writers, and others, added the gift of encapsulating an archetype, of drawing in strong and vivid colours, figures who became enduring and emblematic. Most especially, they had the gift of creating characters who escape the stories they inhabit, who seem either to live on, independent of the fictions in which they were created (Sherlock Holmes), or stand for the perfect individual representation of an already-present myth or legend (Count Dracula).

Most of the writers I’ve named claim their standing among the immortals of fiction on the basis of a single work or character. But there is a writer of the same period who stands in creative pre-eminence to them all.

Charles Dickens is the king of English novelists. Dickens could stamp life on a character with a catchphrase or with a single paragraph of description. The Dickensian world is a thickly populated assembly of unforgettable individualities, from Mrs. (Sairy) Gamp to Fagin and Pip. Dickens’s characters have an extra-fictional reality. Dickens was also the greatest of namers, the very Adam of English fiction.

The naming of “Sherlock Holmes” was not a lucky hit. Doyle worried mightily over what to call his rationalist sleuth, and only after much trial, and many unhappy attempts, settled upon his hero’s now-seemingly-inevitable moniker. Doyle had a few other fine hits—Moriarty was a great find for a fiend—but his capacity was a talent, not genius.

Dickens, by contrast, was inexhaustibly clever and sure when it came to parcelling out names.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
. The name is the novel: morbid, gloomy, eerie and grim.

Nowhere in all of Dickens are these marvellous faculties of his, building characters and finding their perfect names, more beguilingly deployed than in
A Christmas Carol
. Here, in contrast with the voluminous novels, he works in such a small space.
A Christmas Carol
is, in the Dickensian canon, a riff, a mere firecracker of a book next to the great infernos of
Bleak House
or
A Tale of Two Cities
. But the trim tale is a feast of naming. Ebenezer Scrooge, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, Marley’s ghost—this is the character list of the Christmas season, the only figures outside the foundational gospel account of the Bethlehem story itself that designate Christmas wherever in the world it is celebrated.

Dickens linked the two stories, his and the Scriptures,’ with the character of Tiny Tim, whom we might call the Other Christmas Child. And it is from Tiny Tim that we receive the signature phrase of
A Christmas Carol
, when at that story’s end he wishes, “God bless us, every one!”

Evidently, that benign and concordant felicitation was too much for a school in Kirkland, Washington, which banned a production of
A Christmas Carol
, partly because “God bless us, every one!” was too overtly religious.

There is something apocalyptically demented in anyone, anywhere, taking offence at
A Christmas Carol
during Christmas. Must the innocent enjoyment of thousands fall victim to the hyperactive sensibilities of one or two seasonal grinches? Why must the “injured” sensibility always trump the majority enjoyment? I’ll bet schools could stage
Last Exit to Brooklyn
, or some version of
Naked Lunch
, and pass whatever is the current litmus test, but in the current mood of reflexive cringing toward designated sensibilities,
A Christmas Carol
has to go.

This is an annual insanity. From corporate bulletins to municipal parades, during each successive Christmas, every vulgarity known to man goes out under the rubric of season’s greetings, but the merest echoes of the real thing, from the gospels or Charles Dickens, are filtered and discarded as being “insensitive.” It is the great dumb, blind and cowardly prudery of that protracted and repressive lunacy we know as political correctness.

We will look back on these times and blush that we did not blush at how feeble and sheepish we were during its Scrooge-like and savagely petty dominion.

Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
is inexhaustible. It’s an epic recasting of the most ancient of themes, the struggle between goodness and evil, darkness and light. It is a work that has found vast welcome over time.

That most endearing ubiquity, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” has made it both bestseller and classic. Despite its length, despite Tolkien’s occasional lapses into tedious exposition and overtelling detail, despite the initially indigestible mix of odd names and exotic geography and a plot that ramifies with more complexities than the sponsorship hearings, readers everywhere and of all ages have taken to the great sweep of the story and its heroic melodrama.

Harry Potter is but a clatter on the cobblestones to the great harmonies of
Lord of the Rings
. Tolkien’s work is in every way deeper, broader and richer. There is an animated version, of which I’ve only caught fragments, but not surprisingly, it works, too. The great proof of the power of the Tolkien magic lies, of course, in the movie trilogy. It is a triumph, not of the movie’s stars, but of its director.

Peter Jackson, who not a little resembles Gimli, the dwarf of the fellowship, in both temperament and facial ornament, managed the major miracle of taking the vast and complicated story from the page to the screen. Mr. Jackson took on a story that millions of readers had already imprinted on their own imaginations and dared recast it, cinematically, in his.

We will always give precedence to the original inventor. The imagination that gave birth to this fable is undoubtedly the superior one; the author has our reverence. But considering the spoilage Hollywood has worked on other great tales, the wreckage it has wrought on various classics over the years, Peter Jackson must be acknowledged as a considerable fabulist in his own right.

Over the years, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Henry James have had their works passed through the Hollywood chop shop;
Clueless
, we are told, owes something to Jane Austen, though fortunately Jane sleeps too deeply to acknowledge the debt.
Shakespeare in Love
, with Gwyneth Paltrow flitting by in a gauzy nightgown igniting the Bard’s muse, seemed to me to invite the curse that tradition tells us Shakespeare wrote for his grave: “Good friend, for Jesu’s sake forbear/ To dig the dust enclosed here;/ Blest be the man who spares these stones,/ And curst be he that moves my bones.” Shakespeare’s bones are his words. But not to worry. He’ll survive. Hollywood is ephemeral, Shakespeare immortal. He has survived the obscurantism and sectarian zealotry that have reigned in the most fashionable quarters of Shakespeare studies for the past quarter century. The childish rages against dead white European males and all their works, the ludicrous declarations of the Death of the Author, the more zany “transgressive” approaches to the corpus of English literary masterpieces: all have had their weary, jargon-jewelled day. They are gone, or fading. Willie lives. Poststructuralism, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?

Peter Jackson’s triumph is the more impressive for being the exception to Hollywood’s mostly vacuous, sometimes grotesque rereadings of classic works and classic writers. Just as a side note, when I saw some years ago what Jane Fonda did to the life of America’s one genius misanthrope, Ambrose Bierce, in the hideously sentimentalized
The Old Gringo
—if I may borrow a phrase, tears were not enough. I hope he (bitter Bierce) gets her, in the afterlife he didn’t believe in.

Now Tolkien’s work is about to face the supreme threat.
Lord of the Rings
is scheduled to open
as a musical
, in Toronto, next February. I think of the musical as literature’s own Mount Doom. Is it possible that the melancholy, heroic, extravagantly fantastic and pseudo-mythical
Lord
can survive the costumery, camp and brittleness that are endemic to the musical? Will Gandalf rap? Will the hobbits wear tights? And will there be the almost inevitable overlay of treacly melodies, freight-train-volume arias for the star diva (“Don’t Cry for Me, Mordor” doesn’t leap off the larynx, thank God) and all the other awful signatures of the Rice-Webber world?

We can but hope. If anything can survive this transition, it’s the Tolkien story and the Tolkien world. And remember, too, that by February of next year we’ll have come out of the Gomery Commission. So a story of prancing orcs, menacing outriders, dark forces summoned by a hidden lord, and a truly mystifying quest about truth and power, will already be familiar to most Canadians. As well as the idea that all this is just a song and dance to begin with.

To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.

Many will immediately recognize that citation, such has been the enduring popularity and fame of the work these words begin. They constitute the first sentence of the text of James Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson
which, while it was not the first biography of Johnson (other intimates and acquaintances stole the lead) has been considered by all but eccentrics the best and most engaging, and considered by an almost equal number to be among the very best of all biographies, literary or otherwise, ever written.

Boswell’s words, placed very plainly at the start of his biography (as we should say “upfront”) describe a quite real dilemma. The dilemma, by a curious irony, as I hope to show later, was greatly compounded for all others who followed Boswell, by Boswell’s own work.