If your bookshelf speaks to you, it’s likely to be uttering reproaches. Or so my experience runs. All those unread books!—the must-reads of last year, or the year before, hot débuts of young novelists, frosty farewells from the aging and once hot, books whose catchy titles beguiled you into buying them, books that will (so their blurbs promise, or threaten) change your life forever. They address us in the voices of aggrieved friends, saying, Why don’t you call me? Or, Why don’t you ever pay me a visit? Or, ultimately, Why are you neglecting me?
But the bookshelf offers other voices of reproach—deeper and more solemn voices. These speak less like friends than like grandparents, whose stern, measured cadences will not be stilled by any jocular protests of good intentions. They ask you, When will you get serious? They ask, When will you grow up? These are the voices issuing from the weightiest projects in your library. Maybe the gravest reprimand comes from a broad-backed “Don Quixote,” forever to be embarked on in the summer—next summer. Or from a yellowing “War and Peace,” a gift from a college adviser who clearly placed more faith in your stamina than you’ve ever merited. Or Burton’s labyrinthine “Arabian Nights.” Or a “Riverside Chaucer,” buoyantly purchased after receiving a flat “A” in a sophomore survey course, the Genesis of English Literature.
For me, the firmest rebukes these days come from a beautiful eight-volume Folio Society edition of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” I realized the other day that in the half-dozen years since purchase I’ve not only failed to take it off the shelf but haven’t read even the contents stamped on the spine (“Volume V, Justinian and the Roman Law,” and, remoter still, “Volume VII, The Normans in Italy and the Crusades”).
Still, every now and then some daunting, exhausting project actually reaches fruition. One summer, painstakingly, I made my way aloud through both Pope’s “Iliad” and Dryden’s “Aeneid.” Other years, I’ve hiked through the four volumes of Conrad’s complete short fiction, the five-volume “Complete Sagas of Icelanders,” the six volumes of Trollope’s Palliser novels, the seven volumes of Proust’s masterwork. Distinctive as each project was, they alike created a final heady ambivalence: pride in completing an admirable mission; a touch of claustrophobia; and a bittersweet sadness in the recognition that even the most stupendous efforts at literary monumentality must dwindle in time to the negligible dot of a terminating period.
My most recent big literary undertaking has been, in terms of sheer pages, the most sizable of all: Dickens’s complete fiction. It comes to something like nine thousand pages, and I’m nearly finished; only “The Old Curiosity Shop” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” remain. I don’t know what to think on discovering that my favorite Dickens is mostly the world’s favorite Dickens. It feels appropriate, anyway, that this writer who so stoked and revelled in his international popularity should be fairly, representatively epitomized by his most popular books.
Three of these books seem to me all but flawless in their chosen genres. “A Christmas Carol” must be English literature’s finest story of redemptively benign ghosts (just as its dark twin, Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw,” is the greatest display of damning malignant spirits). And “A Tale of Two Cities” is the most satisfying thriller I’ve ever read. If we’ve mostly accepted the notion that the thriller belongs to Hollywood, this is our loss. The artistry in “A Tale of Two Cities” (the deft transitions, the quick and sure portraiture, the mob scenes, the terse but telling accesses of intimacy) is peerless. And what about that mainstay of the thriller—the chase scene? Has any film of squealing cars or screaming fighter planes surpassed the excitement of the pursuit in which, past “solitary farms, ruinous buildings, dye-works, tanneries,” the Manette family race across the northern face of blood-mad France toward sane, cozy England?
Finally, there’s “David Copperfield.” It was Dickens’s own favorite among his novels and remains for me an achievement beyond the rest. Surely no other novel, ever, has offered a richer cast. Had “Copperfield” introduced no memorable character besides Mr. Micawber, it would still be a book of lasting worth. But in addition we have the oozily unctuous Uriah Heep; the flighty yet staunch-souled Aunt Betsey; the doomed, callow, beautiful Dora, who, before her premature death, comes piercingly to understand her callowness; the justice-obsessed and yet unbearably vicious stepfather, Edward Murdstone…. The list goes on and on.
Many of the book’s admirers detect an artistic falling off as David passes from childhood into manhood. And while I don’t myself see any slackening of brilliance up through the final page, David’s harrowing early years are unforgettably vivid. Everywhere the boy turns, he meets singular souls. Dickens rivals Shakespeare in his fascination with nature’s sheer prodigality in creating so heterogeneous a troupe under the heading Homo sapiens. A passion for human peculiarity fortifies most of Dickens’s fiction, but it shows special potency when filtered through the eyes of the boy David, who is such a scrupulous, fervent interpreter of the world. He has to be. For him, a grasping of diverse personal motivations isn’t merely a satisfying of curiosity. It’s a necessity. David’s future, his deliverance from the forces determined to annihilate him, depends on his ability to construe character. As a stand-in for Dickens, David is potentially a great artist—though of course the beleaguered boy cannot articulate this. Yanked out of school when he is only ten and thrust into a job in a London bottling factory, he knows only that his life is being strangled.
The critic Randall Jarrell once defined a great novel as one that “does a single thing better than any other book has ever done it.” I don’t know of any other novel that so penetratingly explores this overwhelming reality that each of us confronts as children: the gradual, horrifying recognition that the world that determines our future is composed of creatures—those willful, wayward beings called grownups—whose deepest motivations are inscrutable. A child like David can have no inkling of the travails of romantic love, the alibis and white lies disguising the enactments of sexual desire. About six years old when his stepfather arrives, he has no way to see that Murdstone is symbolically crushing a sexual rival when he bullies and beats him—subjugating the son of the deceased father who may still impose lingering claims on David’s mother’s affections. Nor can David understand that Murdstone must likewise crush her spirit, since if the woman possesses a spirit she may yet be capable of preferring her late husband.
David’s mother dies early in her second marriage, heartbroken, and David is effectively incarcerated in the bottling factory. He eventually resolves to flee both job and London, throwing himself on the mercy of his Aunt Betsey in Dover. David is pertinacious, and when his meager bankroll is stolen, he vows to walk the entire distance. What makes his pilgrimage so touching is that he has never met Aunt Betsy, or received from her the flimsiest encouragement. The orphan boy invests his fate in an ancestral memory, his mother’s, who during her lying-in was paid a visit from Aunt Betsey. David notes that “it might have been altogether my mother’s fancy,” but it seems that Aunt Betsey, this “dread and awful personage,” possibly touched “her pretty hair with no ungentle hand.” What more artful symbol could we possess for the frailty and invincibility of love, of earthly rescue, than the way in which David’s deliverance springs from something as tenuous as the memory of a memory of a possible caress?
So David tramps from London to Dover. I was surprised recently to discover that the journey takes only ten pages. For it’s a momentous literary pilgrimage—allied in spirit with Odysseus’s hapless shuttling round the Mediterranean, or Huck and Jim’s plunge upriver, or Ishmael’s voyage across “the watery part of the world,” or the peregrinations of the elderly, penniless, nameless old woman in Laxness’s “Iceland’s Bell” who seeks a pardon for her condemned son. David’s search marks a turning point: though he will still have much to learn and overcome in life after finding his aunt, he will never again feel utterly abandoned.
Dickens was so fond of chronicling moments of wonder and befuddlement that he often overdid them. But the meeting of David and his aunt is beautifully understated. Spotting a dirty, unfamiliar boy outside her house as she steps out to garden, Aunt Betsey orders him away: “Go along! No boys here!” But David won’t be put off, and in the moral progression he makes from ma’am to aunt he fixes an emotional claim upon her that is everlasting:
Poor Aunt Betsey has come in one moment to intuit that David, too, is digging at roots.
Those foot-soldier readers who successfully march through all of Dickens’s fiction may wind up feeling like David at his journey’s end, with shoes in a woeful condition (“the upper leathers had broken and burst until the very shape and form of shoes had departed from them”) and skin powdered “white with chalk and dust, as if I had come out of a limekiln.” Reading projects of this old-fashioned sort are the equivalent of a long pilgrimage on foot. The pace and the proddings of modern life, forever segmenting one’s existence into smaller and busier intervals, counsel against them. On the other hand, those patient, reproachful, grandpaternal voices continue to mutter on your bookshelf. And they say, Start walking.
Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” will appear next February.
Illustration of Mr. Micawber and David Copperfield courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty.
