A hero of my own life

Charles Dickens, the world's greatest novelist (in my highly subjective opinion), was born on this day 150 years ago.

Dickens captured my imagination and my compulsive attention when I was a kid of 12 or so. One summer I lay on the couch day after day, reading his books one after the other.

"There is perhaps no person living who can remember reading David Copperfield for the first time," wrote Virginia Woolf, but I can, vividly. It was the work of Dickens' that I first essayed, and I was a goner after the opening pages, when David talks about the father he never knew, buried in the churchyard close by their house, and "the indefinable compassion I used to feel for (him) lying out alone there in the dark night."

(My own father had died a couple of years before.)

I re-read Dickens through high school, and in college I had a Dickens seminar, during which our professor would expound, noteless, for three hours at a stretch, twice weekly, about the man and his work. It was a thrilling experience -- here was someone even more in love with Dickens than I was. He particularly loved Copperfield , probably because Dickens himself loved the novel above all his others. ("I have my favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield," Dickens wrote.)

What Woolf meant was that reading this particular novel of Dickens is one of those timeless experiences:

"Like Robinson Crusoe and Grimm's Fairy Tales...Pickwick and David Copperfield are not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to those myths and memories of life...

"We remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens...What we remember is the ardour, the excitement, the humour; the oddity of people's characters; the smell and soot and savor of London; the incredible coincidences which hook the most remote lives together; the city, the law courts; this man's limp, that man's nose; some scene under and archway or on the high road; and above all some gigantic and dominating figure...stuffed and swollen with life."

Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, Dickens was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads:

"He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world."

"Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of man in the weak modern way," wrote G. K. Chesterton; "he was the brotherhood of man, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration."

But everybody goes

English novelist Thomas Hardy was born on this day in 1840. In his novel Jude the Obscure, as his hero lay dying alone, Hardy wrote:

"Nobody came, because nobody does."

Aliteracy, fraternite, egalite

The first magazine in the U. S. was published on this day in 1741.

"I see no point in reading." -- Louis XIV of France (1638-1715).

He’d taken to reading early on, as a way of filling up time. But beyond that, a good reader and a good book could create a world unto itself, and shut out the real one. He’d been a good reader, however, only at times. For the most part it had been a mere habit, an unhealthy one at that it seemed to him now. All those ill-read books! He’d gone through thousands of them, most of them no more than a title now, if not utterly forgotten. What did he remember, say, of Moby Dick or Madame Bovary? “The heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” That was Melville, wasn’t it? Or was it Flaubert? The universe was as inhospitable to Emma as it was to Ishmael, equally cruel, capricious and senseless on land or at sea. That was what he’d carried away from books. The inscrutable pointlessness of life. The hostility it had in store for us. A hero or heroine, brimming with hope and good will, sets out in a novel to engage with life, prepared for a skirmish, for its inevitable bumps and bruises, and ends up crushed, demolished.


Life took you where it would, but who needed books to learn that?  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten

He wrote more, but we fell asleep reading it

English novelist Samuel Butler (Erewhon, The Way of All Flesh) was born on this day in 1835. He wrote:

"Life is one long process of getting tired."

He was weary, worn out. His strenuous inner life, his contemplative exertions had taken their toll. Man was a thinking reed, but a reed. Sully’s weariness was profound. It couldn’t be assuaged even by eternal rest.   --  Chapter 45, The Misforgotten.   

We always dreaded reading it

Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) was born today in 1832.

"I know little of women. But I've heard dread tales." -- Harold Pinter.

Billowby went behind the bar, tucked the pumpkin under his arm and carried it into the kitchen. Sully hadn’t given a thought to the essay since the night Billowby had brought it up. He’d been obsessed—possessed was the word—with his story, in particular the character of Boone, and dressing up as a bum had seemed only natural. He’d been running it by Linda, who’d given it the thumbs-up for the most part. She’d thought his portrait of Viveca Dupree was a little one-dimensional, and he’d told her that that was about as deep as his knowledge of women went.  --  Chapter 24, The Misforgotten.

Let us now praise confusion

American writer James Agee was born on this day in 1909. He died in 1955, after a couple of heart attacks.


His most famous book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a work of photographs and prose about sharecroppers in Alabama. The book sold only several hundred copies until being remaindered, but it is now regarded as a 20th-century masterpiece.

He was also an influential film critic -- "Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture - none of it under the right people," he wrote about one film – and he is a credited writer on two great films, The Night of the Hunter and The African Queen.

In 1957 Agee's novel, A Death in the Family, was published posthumously and in 1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Agee struggled with alcohol and other demons his entire life. "The mere attempt to examine my own confusion," he wrote, "would consume volumes."

What about the meaningless absurdity of Sarah Palin?

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist (War and Peace), died on this day in 1910. Near the end of his life he wrote:


"The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."

Today's Perverse Verse:

If you think life's absurd,
You may not have heard
There's another one waiting,
Even more excruciating.
If you long for -- at long last -- death,
Save your breath.

God bless Herman Melville

Moby-Dick was published on this day in 1851. The author, Herman Melville, had a nervous breakdown four years later, in part because of his novel's dismal sales. After unsuccessful lecture tours, Melville found work as a customs inspector on the New York City docks. His oldest son committed suicide in 1867.


Melville's death on September 28, 1891, in New York, was noted with only one obituary notice. Moby-Dick sold only 3,000 copies during his lifetime.

An unfinished work, Billy Budd, Foretopman, was unpublished until 1924. The protagonist of the story, set during the war between England and France, is the innocent and angelic Billy Budd, the favorite of everyone on the crew of the HMS Bellipotent except John Claggart, the sadistic master-at-arms. Claggart falsely accuses Billy of being involved in a mutiny. Billy, unable to answer the charge because of his stammer, accidentally kills Claggart.
The ship's captain, Vere, has seen through Claggart's plot but fears rebellion if Billy isn't punished. He calls a court, which condemns Billy, who goes cheerfully to his fate and is hanged from the yardarm, right after crying out "God bless Captain Vere." When Vere is mortally wounded during an engagement with the French, he murmurs as his last words Billy's name.

"Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried," Melville wrote in Moby-Dick; "it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored..."

By day they churned down the river, Camille at the wheel, he and Cutterback drunk. They blasted music (Themes from the Great Westerns), roaring at the top of their lungs. At night they’d dock and take over a bar. Cutterback arm-wrestled all comers. They ate catfish, mountains and pyramids of it. After Camille had gone to bed they sat up on deck, listening to the water lapping at the hull. Cutterback sang, drawing out the lines he particularly relished. Sully had brought along Moby Dick. He read aloud the passages he’d marked. All men were mesmerized by the deep, Ishmael had said. They saw in it the ungraspable phantom of life.  --  Chapter 42, The Misforgotten.