Why Read the Classics? (22 page)

The openings of Dickens’ novels are often memorable, but none is better than the first chapter of
Our Mutual Friend
, the second last novel he wrote, and the last one he completed. Carried along on the corpse-fisher’s boat, we seem to enter the dark side of the world.

In the second chapter everything changes. We are now surrounded by characters out of a comedy of manners, attending a dinner-party at the house of parvenus where everyone pretends to be old friends but in fact they barely know each other. However, before the chapter ends the guests’ conversation suddenly turns to the mystery of a man who drowned just as he was about to inherit a vast fortune, and this takes us back to the suspense of the opening chapter.

The huge inheritance is that of the late king of rubbish, an extremely greedy old man whose house still stands in the London suburbs next to a field dotted with huge piles of rubbish. We continue to move in that sinister world of detritus to which the opening chapter had introduced us by way of the river. All the other scenes in the novel, tables set out sparkling with silver, sleeked ambitions, tangles of interest and speculation, are nothing but thin screens covering the desolate substance of this apocalyptic world.

The custodian of the Golden Dustman’s fortune is his former labourer, Boffin, one of Dickens’ great comic characters, particularly for the pompous air with which he preens himself, whereas the only experience he has ever had has been one of abject poverty and limitless ignorance. (He is a likeable character, all the same: he and his wife possess both human warmth and kind intentions. Subsequently, in the course of the novel, he becomes greedy and selfish, but in the end he is once more shown to have a heart of gold.) Suddenly finding himself rich, the illiterate Boffin can give free rein to his repressed enthusiasm for culture, buying the eight volumes of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(a title which he can barely make out, so that instead of
Roman
he reads
Rooshan
and thinks it is about the Russian Empire). Accordingly he employs a beggar with a wooden leg, Silas Wegg, as his ‘man of letters’, to read to him in the evening. After Gibbon, Boffin, who is now obsessed by the fear of losing his riches, searches the bookshops for lives of famous misers, and has these read to him by his trusted ‘man of letters’.

The irrepressible Boffin and the shady Silas Wegg form an extraordinary twosome, and they are joined by Mr. Venus, by trade an embalmer and someone who makes human skeletons using bones which he has found lying around: Wegg asks him to make him a leg out of real bones to replace his wooden one. In this wasteland milieu, inhabited by clown-like and ghostly characters, Dickens’ world becomes before our eyes the world of Samuel Beckett: in the black humour of Dickens’ late works we can discern a definite foretaste of Beckett.

Of course the darkness in Dickens always contrasts with the light, even though nowadays it is the ‘darker’ aspects that stand out more in our reading of him. The light usually radiates from young girls who are all the more virtuous and kind-hearted the more steeped they are in a kind of black hell. This emphasis on virtue is the hardest thing to take for modern readers of Dickens. Of course, Dickens as a man had no more direct access
to virtue than we have, but the Victorian mentality found in his novels not only the faithful exemplification of its ideals but almost the founding images of its own mythology. And even though we maintain that for us the real Dickens is to be found only in his personifications of evil and in his grotesque caricatures, it would still be impossible to ignore his angelic victims and consoling presences: without the one kind of character the other would not exist. We have to regard both as structural elements which relate to each other, like supporting walls and beams of the same solid building.

Even amongst the ‘goodies’ Dickens can create unusual, unconventional figures, like the bizarre trio in this novel comprising a dwarf girl, full of sarcasm and wisdom, Lizzie who is angelic both in her face and in her heart, and a Jew with his beard and gaberdine. Wise little Jenny Wren, who makes dolls’ clothes, who can only move on crutches, and who transforms all the negative elements in her life into flights of fancy which are never cloying, is one of Dickens’ most captivating and humorous characters. And Riah the Jew, employed by a sordid racketeer, Lammle (who terrorises and insults him and at the same time uses his name to act as money-lender, while continuing to pretend to be a respectable and fairminded person), tries to counteract the evil which he is forced to carry out by secretly lavishing his gifts on one and all, like the charitable spirit he is. This provides a perfect illustration of anti-Semitism, the mechanism through which a hypocritical society feels the need to create an image of the Jew on which to offload its own vices. This Riah is such a mild-mannered man that he could almost be thought a coward except that when he is at the nadir of his misfortunes he manages to create a space in which he can be free and seek revenge, along with the other two outcasts, especially following the active advice of the dolls’ dressmaker (she too is angelic, but capable of inflicting on the odious Lammle a diabolical punishment).

This space for good is represented in physical terms by a terrace on the roof of a seedy pawnshop, in the middle of the squalor of the City, where Riah provides the two girls with material for dolls’ dresses, beads, books, flowers and fruit, whilst ‘the encompassing wilderness of dowager old chimneys twirled their cowls and fluttered their smoke, rather as if they were bridling, and fanning themselves, and looking on in a state of airy surprise’.

In
Our Mutual Friend
there is room for an urban romance and a comedy of manners, but also for complex and even tragic characters such as Bradley
Headstone, a former labourer who as soon as he becomes a schoolmaster is overtaken by an obsession for social climbing and status which becomes a form of diabolical possession. We follow him first as he falls in love with Lizzie, then as his jealousy becomes a fanatical obsession, and we watch his meticulous planning and execution of a crime, before subsequently seeing him condemned to go over all its details in his mind, even when he is teaching his pupils: ‘As he paused with his piece of chalk at the blackboard before writing on it, he was thinking of the spot, and whether the water was not deeper and the fall straighter, a little higher up, or a little lower down. He had half a mind to draw a line or two upon the board, and show himself what he meant.’

Our Mutual Friend
was written in 1864-65,
Crime and Punishment
in 1865-66. Dostoevsky was an admirer of Dickens, but could not have read this novel. Pietro Citati says, in his excellent essay on Dickens (in his
Il Migliore dei Mondi Impossibili
, Rizzoli): ‘The strange providence which governs literature decreed that in the very years when Dostoevsky was writing
Crime and Punishment
, Dickens was unconsciously trying to rival his distant pupil, in writing the episode of Bradley Headstone’s crime…. If Dostoevsky had read this part, he would surely have found sublime this last passage about the drawing on the blackboard.’

Citati’s title
The Best of All Impossible Worlds
was taken from the twentieth-century writer who most admired Dickens, G. K. Chesterton. He wrote a whole book on Dickens as well as the introductions to many of his novels for the ‘Everyman’s Library’ series. In the introduction to
Our Mutual Friend
Chesterton starts by quibbling about the tide: ‘Our common friend’ means something in English (as does ‘il nostro comune amico’ in Italian); but ‘our mutual friend’, ‘our reciprocal friend’, what on earth can that mean? One could answer Chesterton by pointing out that the expression appears for the first time in the mouth of Boffin, whose English is always faulty, and that, even though the tide’s connection with the substance of the novel is not very obvious, nevertheless the theme of friendship, true or false, vaunted or concealed, twisted or tried and tested, is there on every page. But after condemning the tide’s linguistic impropriety, Chesterton announces that he likes the title precisely because of it. Dickens had never had a regular education and had never been a sophisticated man of letters; but it is for this very reason that Chesterton likes him, or rather likes him when he is himself, not when he tries to be something different. Chesterton’s predilection for
Our Mutual Friend
is also for a Dickens who
has returned to his origins, after various efforts to improve himself and to display his aristocratic tastes.

Although Chesterton has been the strongest champion of Dickens’ literary stature in the twentieth century, I feel that his essay on
Our Mutual Friend
betrays an element of condescension, as the refined writer looks down on the popular novelist.

As far as I am concerned,
Our Mutual Friend
is an unqualified masterpiece, both in its plot and in the way it is written. As examples of writing, I will mention not only the rapid similes which crisply define a character or situation (‘with an immense obtuse drab oblong face, like a face in a tablespoon’), but also the descriptive cityscapes which are worthy of a place in any anthology of urban landscapes: ‘A grey, dusty, withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sundial on a church wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of having failed in its business enterprise, and stopped payment for ever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porters sweep melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell.’

These last quotations [in Calvino’s original Italian essay] were taken from the Italian translation in Einaudi’s ‘Struzzi’ series, but my first quote above, about the chimneys, came from the version by Filippo Donini in Garzanti’s ‘I Grandi Libri’ series. Donini’s translation seems to reflect the book’s spirit more accurately in some of the more subtle passages, even though it is more old-fashioned in other respects, such as the Italianisation of first names. In that quotation it was a question of rendering the gap between the humble pleasures of the terrace and the chimneys of the City, which were seen as haughty ‘nobili dame’ (dowagers): in Dickens no descriptive detail is ever otiose, rather it is always an integral part of the dynamics of the story.

One other reason why this novel is considered a masterpiece is its highly complex portrait of society and of its class conflict. On this point there is agreement between the two introductions to the Italian translations: both in Piergiorgio Bellocchio’s perceptive and intelligent preface to the Garzanti edition, and in Arnold Kettle’s introduction to the Einaudi version, which
concentrates entirely on this class aspect. Kettle’s polemic is directed against George Orwell who in a famous ‘class’ analysis of Dickens’ novels proved that for Dickens the target was not so much the evils of society as the evils of human nature.

[1982]

Trois Contes
is entitled
Tre racconti
in Italian, and we could not call them anything else, but the term
conte
(as opposed to
récit
or
nouvelle)
underlines the link with oral narrative, with the marvellous and naive, in short with the folktale. This connotation applies to all three tales: not just to
The Legend of St Julien the Hospitaller
which is one of the first examples of a modern writer adopting the ‘primitive’ taste of medieval and popular art, and to
Hérodias
, which is a historical reconstruction that is erudite, visionary and aesthetically appealing, but also to
Un Coeur Simple (A Simple Heart)
, where contemporary daily reality is experienced by a poor serving woman of simple spirit.

The three stories of
Trois Contes
are almost a distillation of all of Flaubert, and since they can be read in an evening I strongly recommend them to all those who want to pay homage, swift though it may be, to the sage of Croisset on the occasion of his centenary. (For the centenary Einaudi is reissuing them in the excellent translation by Lalla Romano.) In fact, those with even less time can omit
Hérodias
(its presence in the volume has always seemed to me rather dispersive and redundant) and concentrate all their attention on
A Simple Heart
and
The Legend of St Julien
, starting out from their fundamentally visual quality.

There is a history of visibility in the novel — of the novel as the art of making persons and things
visible
— which coincides with some of the phases of the history of the novel itself, though not with all of them. From Madame de Lafayette to Benjamin Constant the novel explores the human mind with prodigious accuracy, but these pages are like closed shutters which prevent anything else from being seen. Visibility in the novel begins
with Stendhal and Balzac, and reaches in Flaubert the ideal rapport between word and image (supreme economy with maximum effect). The crisis of visibility in the novel will begin about half a century later, coinciding with the advent of the cinema.

A Simple Heart
is a tale all about things that are seen, consisting of simple, light sentences in which something always happens: the moon on the Normandy meadows shining on the recumbent cattle, two women and two children passing by, a bull emerging from the mist charging head down, Félicité throwing earth in his eyes to allow the others to escape over a hedge; or the port at Honfleur with the derricks lifting the horses before lowering them into the boats, her nephew the cabin-boy whom Félicité manages to see for a second before he is immediately hidden again by a sail; and above all Félicité’s little bedroom, crammed with objects, souvenirs of her own life and of that of her masters, where a holy water font in coconut wood stands alongside a block of blue soap, and over everything dominates the famous stuffed parrot, which is almost emblematic of what life has not given to the poor serving woman. We see all these things through Félicité’s own eyes: the transparency of the sentences is the only possible medium to represent her purity and natural nobility in accepting both the good and the bad things in life.