Finally I took down the beautiful leather-bound copy of Bleak House that Dickens had inscribed and given to me two years after we had met.
I chose Bleak House without actively thinking about it because, I now believe, I both admired and hated that book as much as any writing in the dead man’s ouevre.
I had been inhibited from telling any but a very few confidants of how absurd I found Dickens’s much-lauded writing to be in that book. His occasional first-person narration by “Esther Summerson” was the height of this absurdity.
I mean, Dear Reader (if the unworthy book has survived until your time, which I very much doubt—although I truly believe that The Moonstone will and has), just look at Dickens’s chosen primary metaphor that opens the book—that fog! It appears, it becomes the central metaphor, and it creeps off, never to be used as such again.
What amateur writing! What a failure of theme and intention!
And just look, Dear Reader—as I was madly doing that night of Dickens’s funeral, flipping through the pages with the intensity of a lawyer seeking a precedent by which to save (or, in this case, condemn) his client—at how ridiculous the totally unbelievable coincidences are in that book… and how unbelievably cruel the character of the always-a-child Harold Skimpole was, since we all knew at the time that he had based Skimpole on our common acquaintance Leigh Hunt or… there is the abject failure of his late-in-the-book mystery element, so inferior in every way to that in The Moonstone or… the shifting and contradictory impressions of Esther’s looks after she has suffered the smallpox (I mean, was she disfigured or not!? Now yes! Now not at all! What a conspiracy of auctorial incompetence wrestling with narrative dishonesty) and then… but look here first!.. look, if you will, at that entire narration by Esther Summerson! What do you say to that? What can you—or any honest reader sitting in judgement—say to that!
Esther begins her narration with the poorly educated and naive child’s view we might expect for a poorly educated and unworldly child—she speaks in near-infant’s sentences such as (I riffled and tore at the pages to find this)—“My dear old doll! I was such a shy thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never dared open my heart, to anybody else.… O you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!”
You are pardoned, Dear Reader, if you suddenly were required—as I was— to rush to the water closet to vomit at that line.
But Dickens forgot that Esther thinks and speaks in such a manner! Before long, “Esther” is describing simple scenes with pure Dickensian alliteration and effortless assonance—“the clock ticked, the fire clicked”—and not long after that the poorly educated girl is narrating entire pages, complete chapters, with the devastating incantatory eloquence of Charles Dickens and Charles Dickens alone. What a failure! What a sheer travesty!
And then, on that night of Dickens’s funeral—or most likely it was the next day now, for had I not heard, unnoticed hours earlier, the ticking clock toll midnight above the clicking fire? — I was paging madly through the now-torn book to find more ammunition in my skirmish (if not war) to convince you, Dear Reader, (and perhaps my exhausted self) of the newly dead man’s long-overlooked mediocrity, when I came upon the following passage. No, not a passage, actually, more of a fragment… no, a mere sliver of a fragment of a passage, the kind of thing that Dickens constantly dashed out without later revision or any serious conscious effort at the time.
Esther has travelled, you see, to the inn at the town near the harbour of Deal to see Richard, her dearest female friend’s future husband and a young man with Fate and Unhappiness and Obsession and self-inflicted Tragedy expectantly hanging about him like a flock of crows (or what the Americans call buzzards) on the branches in a leafless November tree—expectantly hanging about him, waiting for their inexorable time to come, as surely as they always have and continue to do about me.
Over Esther’s shoulder, Dickens allows us to catch a glimpse of the harbour. There are many boats there and more appear, as if by magic, as the fog begins to rise. Like Homer in the Iliad, Dickens briefly catalogues the ships becoming visible, including a great and noble Indiaman just back from India. And the author sees this—and makes us see this—just “when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea.”
Silvery pools in the dark sea.
Pools in the sea.
My one exercise and indulgence, Dear Reader, is hiring a crew to do the work and taking a yacht up along the coast. It was on just such an outing that I met Martha R—. I have seen the sunlight on the sea thousands of times and have described it in my books and stories scores of times—perhaps hundreds of times. I have used words such as “azure” and “blue” and “sparkling” and “dancing” and “grey” and “white-topped” and “ominous” and “threatening” and even “ultramarine.”
And I had seen that phenomenon of the sun “making silvery pools in the dark sea” scores or hundreds of times but had never thought to record it in my fiction, with or without that swift and certain and slightly blurred sound of the sibilants Dickens had chosen for its description.
Then, without pausing even for a breath (and possibly not even to dip his pen), Dickens had gone on having the fog in the harbour lift over Esther’s shoulder by writing, “these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed…,” and I knew in that instant, with my agitated, scarab-driven eyes merely passing over these few words in these short sentences, that I would never—not ever, should I live to be a hundred years of age and retain my faculties until the last moment of that life and career—that I would never be able to think and write like that.
The book was the style and the style was the man. And the man was—had been—Charles Dickens.
I threw the expensive, personally inscribed, moroccan-leather-bound and gold-leaf-edged copy of Bleak House into the ticking and clicking and crackling and cackling and f— ing fire.
Then I went upstairs to my room and tore my clothes off. They were sodden with sweat and I swear to this day that I could smell not just the overpoweringly sweet stench of the graveside flowers on them all, down to my clinging under-linens, but also the sweeter stink of the grave soil heaped nearby to make the hole—the final void—for the waiting (waiting for all of us) oak box.
Naked, laughing, and shouting loudly (although I forget what I shouted or why I laughed), I fumbled out the key and then fumbled open the requisite locks to get to Hatchery’s pistol.
The metal thing was heavier than usual. The cartridges were, as I have endlessly described to you, still there in their nest.
I thumbed back the happy hammer and set the round ring of muzzle to my sweaty temple. Then I remembered. The palate. The softest way to the brain.
I started to put the long steel phallus in my mouth, but then could not. Without even lowering the hammer, I threw the useless thing into my linen drawer. It did not discharge.
Then, before bathing or getting into my pyjamas and robe, I sat down at the small secretary in my bedroom (near where the Other Wilkie usually sits when he takes dictation on the Gods of the Black Lands) and wrote a brief but very clear and concise letter. Setting it aside for personal delivery—not for posting—the next day, I finally went in for my bath and then to bed and then to sleep, skittering scarab or no scarab.