Wind, willows and water

Among my favourite novels are two animal tales: Wind in the Willows (1908) and Watership Down (1972). Both involve animals whose lives unfold in the English countryside; animals with powers of speech and reason and even wit. Both are charming books, but only in one does the charm arise from watching animals be animals. In Watership Down, the rabbits are rabbits. In Wind in the Willows the animals are arguably humans.

Rat and Mole, Badger and Toad certainly have animal qualities like heightened sense of smell and the homing instinct, but they are essentially Edwardian gentlefolk living fairly gracious riparian lives. They all wear clothes and walk upright (Toad seems to have hair); they inhabit a carefully stratified social world, and affect the diction of characters from Wodehouse and Waugh. They buy their food from shops; they eat (at tables or in wicker chairs) sumptuous breakfasts washed down with ale and coffee; delicious al fresco luncheons; and suppers accompanied by cheeses and wines. There’s one scene that’s always troubled me: Rat and Mole sit at ease by the fire in Rat’s bijou sitting room; they are apparently alone in the house when ‘dinner is served.’ By whom? This is not the only passage that suggests servants are one of the several luxuries these mild-mannered beasts enjoy. In a wonderful 2009 article Rosemary Hill regards the book as a sigh of nostalgia for the lost world of Edwardian suburbia, when boating and picnicking filled the long days of the leisured classes. The story, too, turns on behaviour more proper to adult humans than rats and toads: dangerous addictions and excesses, fraud, theft, imprisonment, escape, and in the end, violent overthrow of interlopers. Charmed though I always am by this book (Kenneth Grahame’s prose is radiant) it’s certainly not because it offers any real insight into animal life.

The rabbits of Watership, on the other hand, are wild animals whose lives are governed by weather, terrain, predation, and instinct. They speak, but they speak a language called Lapine. They have social structures, but these resemble the structures that abide in real warrens, according to Richard Adams’ careful research. The human world, and even other animals, are utterly strange to them. They are a band of brothers who come to value each other deeply, but they never transcend their animal desire to fight each other in mating season, or their animal pragmatism about defacating and breeding. (One can’t imagine the genteel Rat even excusing himself to use the lavatory, and certainly not courting a lady-rat; he and his friends are indubitably bachelors.) Inhabiting the rabbits’ world, far from evoking nostalgia, makes you feel how alien and menacing humans and ‘man things’ are to wild creatures.

Yet, without disowning this animality, Watership Down is an intensely political novel as well. It’s about freedom; about the treacherous compromise between safety and liberty. In their travels, Hazel and Fiver and their companions come across two other warrens: one is the Brave New World of rabbitry, where the rabbits are sleek sophisticates who engage in a conspiracy of glazed silence about their mortal danger. The other is 1984. A highly militarised warren run by a lapine tyrant, Efrafa is full of pitiful creatures, brutally oppressed in the name of safety. Hazel’s band comes to embody the perils and the promise of true freedom.

The Willows are a world away from such political concerns. The animals’ highest goods and deepest joys come from eating, drinking, communing, and resting. Their freedom is simply the fresh air in which they pursue their simple pleasures. Looked at one way, that makes them just the parasitic aristos for whom they stand in. Looked at another, it makes them creatures in the best, blessed sense. 

On Dickens (Part 2): Heavenly creatures

Reading Dickens at university, I found myself searching, thirsting in the end, for a female character that united strength with charm in something resembling reality. All I could see were grotesques at one extreme, coquettes at the other, and in the middle spineless, simpering, mawkish Agnes Wickfield or Ada Clare - veritable Victorian angels. Though there were many to amuse, I couldn’t find a single female character that inspired admiration. The only one that came close was Mrs Bagnet in Bleak House, but even she was a caricature. 

Miriam Margulyes’ one-woman show places the women in Dickens’ life alongside the women in his books. As an answer to my question about where these women came from, it’s illuminating, and a little bit scary. A writer of comic genius and apparently boundless sympathy, he was a man of strong, strange and often cruel passion towards women. 

It begins with his mother, who famously sent him back to the blacking factory after his father rescued him. He wrote with palpable bitterness, “I never afterwards forgot, I never can forget, I never shall forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.” She is punished for this in the character of Mrs Nickleby, one of the most unwise, unfeeling mothers to be found in his work.

Then there’s his first love, Maria Beadnell, on whom Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield is based. Pretty, silly, shallow and utterly self-absorbed, Dora dies early in their marriage. After a horrifying reunion with Maria years afterward, Dickens resurrected Dora as Little Dorrit’s Flora Finching. Flora is Dora twenty years older, fatter and giddier. A spoiled and artless girl might be enchanting, but to be spoiled and artless in rotund middle age was unforgivable. 

Catherine Hogarth DickensPerhaps most disquieting is Dickens’ ultimate marriage to Catherine Hogarth, who doesn’t seem to have warranted a literary vengeance, though Dickens came to regard his marriage to her as his greatest mistake. Two of Catherine’s sisters lived with the couple, first Mary and then Georgina; Dickens was deeply attached to both these women, but less and less to his wife, from whom he separated after 22 years of marriage. It’s hard to imagine and impossible to guess what estranged them, but it looks as though an original personal incompatibility was compounded by Catherine’s severe depression. 

This seems to have begun after the birth of their first baby, whom Catherine had trouble breast-feeding. Mary wrote, “every time she sees her baby she has a fit of crying.” Not long afterwards, Mary died suddenly, causing Catherine to have the first of several miscarriages, and causing Dickens acute misery from which he never recovered. He wore her ring and carried a lock of her hair, called her a “perfect creature,” and expressed a wish to be buried in her grave. Whatever state of mind this portended in Dickens, it cannot have conduced to Catherine’s mental health. Nine more children followed, including a baby girl that died at nine months. Dickens seemed baffled by the arrival of so many children. Of their last, a son, he said: “on the whole I could have dispensed with him.”  Soon after this they separated, surrounded by rumours of Dickens' infidelity. 

Perhaps the most heart-tearing glimpse into the truth of their marriage comes from a comment Dickens’ friend Henry Morley made after he had met Mrs Dickens. “One sees in five minutes that she loves her husband and her children, and has a warm heart for anybody who won't be satirical.” How was such a temper to be the wife of the greatest satirist of the age? 

It seems she looked in vain, as I did, for something in Dickens that would allow women who were less than angelic to escape satire. 

Pride and prejudice and portraiture

First Impressions was the title Jane Austen originally gave to her best-loved novel, in which the thread of impressions, reflections, and portraiture runs through the narrative in interesting ways. In one of their early encounters at Netherfield, Elizabeth tells Darcy she’s trying to “take his likeness.” He replies gravely, “I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either." 

Disliking Darcy, and falling for Wickham, “whose very countenance may vouch for his being amiable,” Elizabeth is led astray by appearances. When she learns the truth about Wickham, she tells Jane: “One has all the goodness, the other all the appearance of it.” 

Months later, she contemplates the miniatures of Darcy and Wickham at Pemberly. How differently she sees both images, now that her eyes have been opened to the true characters of both men. Seeing them thus side by side she no longer deceives herself about the appearance of either, admitting to the housekeeper that Darcy is indeed very handsome, and nudging her aunt towards the possibility of Wickham's waywardness. When she stands before Darcy’s large portrait in the gallery upstairs, his image and his character come together for the first time. 

“She stood several minutes before the picture, in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery...There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt at the height of their acquaintance."

This is a turning point, and when Darcy appears in the flesh soon afterwards, she beholds him changed; both from within and in her own perception of him. From this moment she begins to think she could be happy with him, but within another day or two, Wickham has intervened to separate them - in part because she has never unfolded his true character to anyone but Jane. 

This game of hide and seek is the engine of the novel. His pride and her prejudice are the masks they both wear, that must fall away before they can come together. Their first impressions must be replaced by the portraiture of genuine understanding, and patient skill. 

This turbulent priest

I’m sad to hear that Rowan Williams is resigning. He’s not been everyone’s cup of tea as Archbishop, but he’s my kind of prelate. Thoughtful, humane, sonorous, and kindly. He could talk about biblical texts as though they had something to say about human experience, and about Dickens or Dostoevsky as though what they say about human experience has deep moral resonance. His contributions to public debates, unlike those of many other religious leaders, have been subtle and ruminative but nonetheless morally resolute. Moreover he has intervened reluctantly on questions of private morality, and unhesitatingly on questions of public morality. He has had far more to say about war, injustice, poverty, and oppression than about sex. Unfortunately, members of his flock have decided that sex is the defining moral issue of our time. So after ten years in a tough job, he’s going to the greener pastures of a Cambridge College. Many will say he’s better off back in his academic box, but I think he’s a great loss to public discourse and to a much wider communion than his own. They’ll say the Anglican communion is more deeply divided now than it was a decade ago, but who do they suppose could unite it? In a time when there seems less room for complexity, less oxygen for nuance and balance, his loss feels like a victory for the one-dimensioned over the many. As the darkness deepens, his going feels like one more light going out. 

On Dickens (Part 1): Art and Life

Considerably before there was dada, surrealism, magic realism, or animation, there was Dickens, who foreshadowed them all. He was born two hundred years ago last month into a world that he would later give his nameDickens' study at Gad's Hill to. His childhood was what can only be described as Dickensian - financially precarious, socially liminal, involving stints in a blacking factory. He grew up, somewhat embittered, to skewer a succession of fat, juicy Victorianisms on the spit of his genius, and roast them to a delicious crispness. He’s praised and censured for how much larger his imaginary world is than life, but it’s this largeness, more than anything else, that makes him great. 

What first grabbed me about Dickens was his sheer energy. His narratives rush at and past you. His prose feels like some winged creature swooping and wheeling, circling upwards then suddenly diving, pecking savagely at the nasty characters, tenderly enfolding the sweet ones in soft feathers. His language is elastic, inventive, rhythmic, even onomatapoeic; jazz is latent in it. There are jokes, or at least barbs, embedded in the very syntax. Perhaps my favourite sentence in all of Dickens (it’s the one Miriam Margulyes ends her show with) is the names of the birds that, in Bleak House, Miss Flite keeps caged: “Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.” This sentence runs the reeling gamut of Dickens’ portraiture. Here, and everywhere, he seems to skitter along the edge of the fantastic, the unbelievable. But this, after all, is his most consistent comment: life is unbelievable. 

In his speech at the official wreath-laying in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, the Archbishop used words like ‘exuberance’ and ‘excess’ to describe the essence of Dickens.   What appeals is the exaggeration and caricature, but more because they reach for something truthful than because they go beyond it: “The truth is extreme, the truth is excessive. The truth about human beings is more grotesque and bizarre than we can imagine. And Dickens' generous embrace of human beings does not arise out of a chilly sense of what is due to them, but out of a celebratory feeling that there is always more to be discovered.”  

This is a thought GK Chesterton took up in his marvellous biography of Dickens, published in 1906. He answers the critics who found Dickens’ works unlike life.  “Dickens is ‘like life’ in the truer sense, in the sense that he is akin to the living principle in us and in the universe; he is like life, at least in this detail, that he is alive. His art is like life, because, like life, it cares for nothing outside itself, and goes on its way rejoicing. Both produce monsters with a kind of carelessness... Art indeed copies life in not copying life, for life copies nothing. Dickens's art is like life because, like life, it is irresponsible, because, like life, it is incredible.”