AMERICANA

Dickens was received at the White House by President Tyler, who said he was glad he could come by, and hoped he would see him again, sometime. Was this the first observed instance of our ever-shortening attention span? One learns from reading. Living as we did under the banner of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity as discovered by Jefferson, Mrs. Trollope found 'mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms.' A fictitious equality had 'poisoned the American political system.' Men 'attained power and fame by eternally uttering what they know to be untrue.' Which sounds to me a fair enough description of Congress.

For surely no man was ever elected by stating the unpleasant truth that Inequality is what is, and Equality is only what some people think should be. 'When monstrous institutions' do their best to change men's 'nature' they open them up to gratifying their every 'furious and beastly rage', said Dickens. That, too, should be plain. Turn up a little corner of liberty and the whole Magic Carpet flies off with you aboard. Not all our fantasies of what we can be are good, or even sane.

Some of the best things in Dickens lie in his excoriation of journalists. He was one. He knew what he was talking about. I have been one and I think I know what their game is. One part of the trade, as it was, is immortalized in Evelyn Waugh's wonderful Scoop. That little novel, intensely funny, and Black Mischief have to be among the most politically incorrect books still in print. How long before they are banned? At least in Massachusetts. The other part of that drink-sodden profession, its megalomaniacal side, its cant about objectivity and standards, is meat for the P.G. Wodehouse jaws. All I want to know is how is it that we have allowed the 'media' to govern our opinions? When I see Mme. Anampour's 'sincerity' advertising on CNN, I puke: no fact is too obvious for her to posture about her concerns with this and that cause, and that cause is supposed to give us 'grave concern'. Which is nonsense. Journalists don't stand for anything except their expense accounts. Whereas good reporters -- and Dickens and Defoe were marvelous ones when not preaching -- let us hear, let us see, and let us understand what is going on. The moment a journalist thinks he's something more than our eyes and ears and begins to think he is someone whose name we should remember, he's kidding himself and trying to fool us. You need both qualities -- self-deception and persuasiveness -- to become a celebrity. How to avoid that is not taught in schools of journalism. And though a sucker is born every minute, we don't have to join them.

I remember some delicious nights, all starting at 11 p.m., when Mike Wallace started his black-and-white inquisitions on TV. For about three weeks everyone I knew gathered about the box to see Mike, stuffed with facts and evidence, get the bastards. It was riveting, great fun, and one imagines with delectation O.J., Glenn Beck, Jim Baucus et alia being taken apart. Alas! Came the day when one phoney 'celebrity' (I seem to remember he was a glorified hairdresser) appeared on the show. At first he answered politely. But by Minute Ten, he began asking questions back, of Mike. He too had facts and evidence. Mike, with whom I used to play tennis regularly, never really recovered. Now that was journalism.

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON DICKENS

In the construction by Dickens of The Old Curiosity Shop and Barbary Rudge, as in Nicholas Nickelby, the spaciousness of the times made available for details that are today passed over as 'mere description' and skipped over by students eagerly seeking some underlying theory or psychological insight. Those details, in the age of print, were the Reader's senses: his sight, his smell, his absolute peculiarity. Dickens could and did invent characters by the hundreds. They delighted in and of themselves. Contained in a half-dozen sub-plots, they were no driving force to the plot. But when he needed them, there they were, ready to provide a vital refuge, a new twist. Literature was not then fast food. It was an expansive culture and believed firmly in reality. But also in humor and pathos. Dickens' Society for the Improvement of Everything we live in now.

THE LITERARY LIFE 1836 AND 2010

In reading Mr Slater's lugubriously written but carefully informative biography of Charles Dickens and his 'breakout' year, 1836, I am compelled to report the following:

1. That in that year, Dickens published, sketched, contracted for and wrote: at least two novels, some thirty 'sketches' of up to 10,000 words each, innumerable press reports, an operetta or two, while managing also to fit in his own wedding.

2. That in that year, his readership, which was to grow and stay with him throughout his writing life, another thirty-six years, became firmly established. He was of course his own agent -- since that now-parasitical occupation did not then exist -- wrote his own contracts, and was pursued to do more. Much of his production was available in print within days, some within weeks, and only a very small part required that he should wait for a few months.

3. That in that year the sheer exuberant variety of his work, ranging across genres and having as its subject 'ordinary life and ordinary people' was such as to create a real presence for him, not to speak of an income, by the end of that twelvemonth, that enabled him to dispense with his taxing, nocturnal reporting work.


It is small wonder that anyone who writes for his living as I have done for sixty-plus years should be profoundly envious of such encouraged prodigality and Dickens' close relatinship with his readers. I acknowledge, of course, that writers come in all kinds. There is the minging producer of the occasional poem or story and the logomaniac. Occasional writing -- such as Dickens' many sketches -- barely figures in the writer's life today, there being but scant market for it. For Dickens, such writing was his training ground. Newspapers and magazines abounded and consumed such material as soon as it could be worthily created.

Dickens would have been able to portray his Nancy Pelosi (the hairy one, in Italian) and Harry Reid in the kind of writing which dwellt less on what they did as on which sub-species of humanity they belong t0, how they walked, how their lips furled, how they talked. In other words, vividly, as a part of life. Apparently no one does this any more, though the reason may be that no one but I would publish it. But I have failed miserably to persuade writers that this is where art begins.

Serial publication made it possible for Dickens not just to respond to his public but also to change his novels in the course of writing them: that is how the Pickwick Papers began, as sketched by 'Boz'. When, however, Mr. Bellow and I, in ANON, sought to get writers to send in their manuscripts chapter by chapter, free to change them at will thereafter, we received a fair number of replies detailing that what was possible for Dickens (and Dostoievsky, etc.) was impossible for them. We reckoned that they cowered before the Perfection Brigade and that the rough-and-ready was not for such refined artists as themselves.

As for periodical publication of any kind, or the existence of such magazines as TRoL, many took the position, and so stated it with vehemence, that 'all that' literary activity was a waste of our time and talents: a true writer was one with a cabin in the woods producing the undying.

As for seeing one's work in print, what was more or less standard in my youth -- six to nine months -- has now become years. After all, how could Harvard or Yale possibly take a flying leap on a text that hadn't been peer-reviewed by a dozen dullards? And what would the charming editors at publishing houses do with their time if the author claimed sole responsibility for his text? (Granted, in many cases this would have led to some pretty awful and illiterate texts!)

Dickens was writing in a blessed era of literature in which the written, printed word was as valuable as nourishment of the mind as food was for the nourishment of the body. Of the six shillings a week he earned when he was twelve, Dickens spent at least sixpence on periodicals. I make that to be 8.25 percent of his income. The average college graduate, we are told, reading ten years later, manages to get through 1.5 books a year. Assuming modestly that his income (after tax) is 40,000$ per annum, a similiar thirst for the printed word would cost him $3,350 p/a, not a raw thirty bucks. There are clearly not many readers today who share his passion.

I doubt it is for any single reason that writers are now worth nothing more than a single meal without drink per annum. More likely is that reading in general has been abandoned by our educational system,and by teachers who are themselves -- like much of the public -- barely literate. When our esteemed senators were presented with major legislation (stimulus, health care), we are informed that they could not possibly read several hundred pages in the given time. Part of their problem, no doubt, was that the bills were not written in English but in lawyerly legislatise; but another problem, and a more likely one, was that in their busy days of flying about and dining and conferring and plotting, they barely had time to read even a whole newspaper. Or the inclination.

I should of course add that in 1836, Dickens was twenty-four years old and almost totally unknown, and that in the year that followed he began to edit a magazine, one of many in which he had -- by both editing and writing -- a powerful hand.