Poor Wal'r! Drownded, an't he? - more complaints about boring Dickens characters, and a hypothesized solution

The continuing Dickens problem, for the first decade of his career as a novelist: the young, pure heroes and heroines are boring. In Dombey and Son, Dickens made a good attempt at a fix, but couldn't quite make it stick.

Florence Dombey, Mr. Dombey's neglected daughter, and plucky Walter, one of Dombey's office boys, are perfectly serviceable characters when introduced, as children, more or less. An improvement, I thought. But as time passes and the plot moves along, Florence fades a bit and poor Walter is sent on a sea voyage and actually vanishes for 400 pages. That's one solution, I guess. It works! But when he returns, the book is firmly in plot wrap up mode, and Walter seems to have lost his personality somewhere in the South Pacific. Or maybe Captain Cuttle (see title) was right after all, and Wal'r really was drownded, and the fellow who returned was a cardboard cutout.

The rest of the book, meanwhile, presents a dozen top drawer Dickens characters: Captain Cuttle, the fertile Toodles family and their underachieving son Rob, sadsack Mr. Toots and his pal the Game Chicken (a boxer, not a bird), Dombey's prissy sister, Mrs. Chick and her perpetually humming husband.

The great puzzler is how characters as unimportant as Mrs. Miff, "a wheezy little pew-opener," who is really not much more than part of the decor at a church that is a setting for a few scenes, has so much more life than some of the central characters. "A vinegary face has Mrs Miff, and a mortified bonnet, and eke a thirsty soul for sixpences and shillings." A mortified bonnet! And there's plenty more.

A friendly commenter (this commenter) argues that Edith Dombey, Florence's stepmother, is Dickens' best realized female character. She is good, although I'll have to vote for Bleak House's Esther Summerson.

Which leads me to my hypothesis. Dombey and Son is novel number seven. David Copperfield, which I have not read, is next. That's the first Dickens novel in the first person (Chapter I: I Am Born). My theory is that Dickens finally attempted a first person novel as a way to ensure that his central character really exists, to give him some interior life, to force him to be interesting.

New problems arise - how can the narrator be everywhere the writer wants him to be, for example? Bleak House solves that problem brilliantly, with its split structure, half omniscient and half Esther telling her own story. I'm very fond of Esther, but if we only got the external view, she would likely be as colorless as Florence at her worst.

Then it's back to third person, right, in Hard Times (1854), with Great Expectations (1860) as the only other first person novel? Anyway, it's a theory. I'll read David Copperfield and see what I think.

Tomorrow, another problem, a new one.

Hooroar! Hooroar! I finished Dombey and Son

Hey, waddaya know, I finished Dombey and Son (1846-8). This was Dickens's seventh novel, and his best yet.

Months ago, a friendly commenter mentioned that her mother claimed that it is better than Bleak House. Not to me, but I can see how one could think that. This is the first time that the big arc of the whole book really makes sense. A businessman of narrow soul gives all of his affection to his son, and none to his daughter. We know that, by the end of the novel, Mr. Dombey will have been either humbled, and reformed, or destroyed. Some of the steps to that end are what one might expect, while others are quite original.

The previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4), contains the first plot that Dickens planned in advance and stuck with (aside from the short The Christmas Carol, written in the midst of the Martin Chuzzlewit serialization). But it's a pretty simple plot, and a simple structure - there's a selfish man who learns his lesson, and another who does not. The end is typical "wrap it all up" stuff.

Martin Chuzzlewit has its delights, but Dombey and Son is richer, the best characters are more complex, and the structure is innovative, even surprising. The first quarter or so really builds to a moving and significant climax. I can see why someone might single this part out as a great favorite. Then there are seven hundred more pages. Long book, ain't it? The long part two builds to a satisfying end as well, although Dickens seems to need more plotty nonsense to get there.

Reading Dickens in something like chronological order has been so interesting. Some gifts - the comic characters, imitations of speech - he had from the beginning and never lost. Other skills, like plotting and story structure, he had to work on. Despite his early success, he never stopped experimenting. He didn't stop with Dombey and Son, either - it's not half as ingenious as Bleak House, two novels later.

I think that tomorrow I'll write about one old problem Dickens still hadn't solved - his boring virtuous heroes and heroines - and a new one, potentially worse, that cropped up. Each novel is like a serial issue in the story of the artistic development of Charles Dickens. They have cliffhanger endings - what will Dickens do next?

Oh, right. "Hooroar," that's what Captain Cuttle says. "'Hooroar, my lad!' exclaimed the Captain, in a burst of uncontrollable satisfaction. 'Hooroar! hooroar! hooroar!'" And so on.

An eight year old recommended this academic history of China

Just a bit on the actual book, first. So feel free to skip ahead to the eight year old if uninterested in the history of classical China.

The book is The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (2007, Harvard University Press) by Mark Edward Lewis, a distinguished Stanford professor. The book is excellent for its purpose, which is to cram one with knowledge. Since I started from little, the Return on Investment has been very high. Just as an example, I can now place Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, buried with his terra cotta warriors, in some real context. He's not just a very old Chinese emperor now. Please, do not test me on this in five years. Or months.

It is not a narrative history, not a book of personalities or dramatic events. Chapters are titled "Kinship," "Rural Society," "Religion." Sounds a little snoozy, looked at that way. But I'm used to, and can even enjoy, this sort of thing, and, look, the eight year old kid liked it fine.

Maybe he was nine, I don't know. I never met him. See this piece at Anecdotal Evidence, in which Patrick Kurp encounters the Mark Edward Lewis book in the hands of a schoolkid who is also a master wizard. Or something. Anyway, I'm not going to be outread by a dang third grader.

I am actually reading this book because of this kid, and Kurp. Since my surprise trip to Japan last summer convinced me that classic Japanese literature was far more accessible than I had thought, I have been trying to read a little bit of Asian literature, mostly old poems. Japanese poetry led to Chinese poetry. Chinese poetry led to a desire to fill in some substantial gaps in my knowledge of Chinese history. And then somehow I remembered Kurp's post, and that eight year old.

The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han is the "first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China." I'll bet that kid is already way ahead of me. But I'm gonna catch up.

Golem! sings about The Railroad Stories

I feel so bad. I forgot, last week, when writing about Sholem Aleichem's The Railroad Stories, to mention the song "Train Across Ukraine," which is actually about The Railroad Stories. This is a new song, from earlier this year, found on the album Citizen Boris by the neo-klezmer band Golem!

The lyrics are little more than a summary of the premise of the stories - the traveler, third-class, tells us that he rides the train. He introduces himself as both Sholem Aleichem and as Hello, How Are You. Come to think of it, that's not correct, since The Railroad Stories are not narrated by Sholem Aleichem. Well, it's creative license, compression. Some of the lyrics are in Yiddish, but I'll bet they just repeat the English.

The link to Sholem Aleichem is in part a memorial and cultural celebration. But it's also an excuse to play a klezmer train song, with whistles and hoots and steam-engine like drumming. Great song. I wish I could link to it, but all I could find was a Youtube video with terrible sound that's not worth anyone's time.

You can go to Golem!'s Myspace page (warning:PLAYS LOUD MUSIC), though, and hear another of their best songs from the same record, "Citizen Boris," the lyrics of which are nothing but the citizenship oath and questions and answers from the citizenship test ("What is the 4th of July? Independence Day"). The song captures both the absurdity and the patriotic wonder of asking a Ukranian grandmother to swear an oath to die for her new country if called to service.

Perhaps I should have mentioned Golem! during Golem Week, but to my knowledge they have never recorded a song about the golem, although there is a golem-like fellow on the cover of their 2006 album Fresh Off Boat (left), which I think is marginally superior to Citizen Boris. If you know where to listen to such things, try the "Golem Hora," or the brilliant "Warsaw Is Khelm." The fools of Khelm, the most stupid people on earth, that's a whole 'nother set of Yiddish folk tales and jokes that I don't believe I've ever mentioned.

Oh look, Golem! gives away "Warsaw Is Khelm." So download it, and see a fragment of the cute video.

Now I feel that I have done my duty to Golem!

Talking is far better, because you never know what may come of it - what make a railroad story a Railroad Story?

I thought I was going to pin down a couple of my favorites among Sholem Aleichem's Railroad Stories, but I'm having trouble doing that, and not because they're all my favorites. I mean, there's some of this, and there's some of that. But I can't stop looking at the frames of the stories.*

Sholem Aleichem could have published all but a few of these stories as pure monologues, like the examples collected in the superb Nineteen to the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things. The monologues in that books are pure - they are uninterrupted, and the reader has to infer the identity of the auditor. In The Railroad Stories, the narrator, the commercial traveler, is always present, but so, potentially, are a train car full of other people.

So in "Baranovich Station," it's important that the teller of the fascinating but unfinished story is in a full car with dozens of listeners. The pain of never hearing the end is that much greater than if there were an audience of just one, and the reader can share his own pain with the fictional crowd. Although, presumably, the reader also has some distance and can appreciate the joke in a way that the audience cannot.

"A Game of Sixty-Six," by contrast, has to be one on one (with the reader looking over the traveler's shoulder). A man relates to the narrator, confidentially, and at length, being cleaned out by card sharks, before suggesting a little game of their own. Our traveler may not be the sharpest card in the deck himself, but:

"I watched him cut the deck; he did it a little too skillfully, a little too fast. And his hands were a little too white. Too white and too soft. Suddenly I had a most unpleasant thought..."

The con man's story wouldn't work in public. The creepy gangster's story in "The Man from Buenos Aires" works the same way. It requires intimacy.

But sometimes, as in two stories told about an unimportant branch line called the Slowpoke Express, the railroad car provides a stage, even for an audience of one:

"And since we were on the Slowpoke Express, which I described in the last chapter - where, being the only passengers in our car, we had all the time and space in the world - he sprawled out as comfortably as if he were in his own living room and gave his narrative talents free rein, turning each polished phrase carefully and grinning with pleasure at his own story while stroking his ample belly with one hand." ("The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah")

The plots of the two Slowpoke Express stories depend on the actual characteristics of locomotives (an engine running out of coal, for instance), which is not generally the case. What makes a story a Railroad Story? It's the train car as a public space, where strangers can impart their stories to each other. From the narrator's farewell, "Third Class":

"When you travel third class, on the other hand, you feel right at home. In fact, if you happen to be in a car whose passengers are exclusively Jews, you may feel a bit too much at home... At night you can save yourself the bother of having to fall asleep, because there's always someone to talk to - and if you're not in the mood to talk, someone else will be glad to do it for you. Who expects to sleep on a train ride anyway? Talking is far better, because you never know what may come of it."

Translation by Hillel Halkin.

* Prompted by D.G. Myers, a bit, perhaps.

What's a writer after all? Anyone can be one - Sholem Aleichem's Railroad Stories

"My goodness, the things one sees traveling! It's a pity I'm not a writer. And yet come to think of it, what makes me say I'm not? What's a writer, after all? Anyone can be one, and especially in a hodgepodge like our Yiddish. What's the big fuss about? You pick up a pen and you write!"

That's the commercial traveler, third class, who narrates Sholem Aleichem's The Railroad Stories (1902-10, 1911). The traveler mostly just gives us other people's stories, in their own words, with a bit of framing. So most of The Railroad Stories are monologues, Sholem Aleichem's perfect form. Not everyone is a writer, but everyone traveling in a third class Ukrainian train car has a story to tell.

Some of the stories are jokes with punchlines, some are character sketches or social observations or commentary. "A Game of Sixty-Six" is a good con man story. A number are, almost inevitably, stories about story-telling. In "Baranovich Station," a passenger promises a great story. A village bands together to prevent a fellow-citizen's flogging. The story gets more and more complicated and compelling, but then the storyteller reaches his station and disembarks, before the end. "What end? It's barely begun. Let go of me!"

I don't want to say that every one of these stories is more consequential than those in Inside Kasrilevke, but the range of stories is important. There's more varied life here than in any other Sholem Aleichem book I've read. And the comedy is tinged with - sometimes about - some darker matter. Prostitution, suicide, pogroms, discrimination.

I'll pick out one or two of my favorites for tomorrow.

"Come to think of it again, though, writing is not for everyone. We should all stick to what we work at for a living, that's my opinion, because each of us has to make one. And if you don't work at anything, that's work too."

Oh, you want some socks? - The Rough Guide to Sholem Aleichem

Lamed Shapiro was probably a pretty darkly hued fellow to begin with, but he was also rejecting some of what he saw as the sentimentality or lack of seriousness of older writers like Sholem Aleichem.

For example, the odd little volume of Sholem Aleichem published in 1948 as Inside Kasrilevke, which contains two longish stories, "The Poor and the Rich" and "A Guide to Kasrilevke."* Both are comic tales of life in Sholem Aleichem's fictional representative shtetl. They're comic, light-hearted, but with, just barely, touches of seriousness.

The "Guide to Kasrilevke" is mostly shtick. Each chapter has a travel guide title ("Hotels," "Restaurants," "Theater," "Bandits"), but it's really the story of Sholem Aleichem's own visit to Kasrilevke, the town where nothing functions. He just works through some good comic pieces - the tram that won't move; the restaurant that says you can have anything you want, but then doesn't seem to have any specific dish; the thieves who are disgusted by their victim's poverty. The scene that made me laugh the most was where the author, having barely set foot in his hotel room, is assailed by a string of sock vendors:

"Another individual stepped in; this one had a cap on.

'Buy my socks, mister, good and cheap!'

'I don't need any socks,' I told him. 'Thank you.'

'What do you mean, you don't need any?' he protested. 'Didn't you just buy half a dozen socks from the other fellow?'"

That's what we call logic. After a few more sock sellers:

"'Who's 'me'?' I asked. I was afraid to open the door for fear someone might be offering me more socks.

'Dovid,' came the reply.

'Dovid who?'

'Dovid Shpan.'

'Who's Dovid Shpan?'

'Dovid Shpan the agent.'

'What have you got?' I asked. 'Maybe more socks?'

'Oh, you want some socks?' he replied. 'Just wait a minute. I'll run out to the stores and bring you some!'"

Simple Chico Marx stuff, I guess, but I liked it. The other story is a little different - a delegation of Kasrilevke elders travel to the big city to raise money to fix up their burned out town - but the shtick isn't that different. A good running gag, for example: the dignified rabbi always replies to questions with a parable, a very wise and beautiful one, which the narrator always somehow avoids relating: "But since I am telling you a story, I'd rather not interrupt it with another one."

Minor Sholem Aleichem, I suppose. But after the horrors of Lamed Shapiro, a great relief.

* First published when? She don't say. "This book contains the stories Dos Naye Kasrilevke, Kasrilevke Nisrofim, Kasrilevke Moshav Z'kenim, translated from the Yiddish by Isidore Goldstick." That's it. I know; looks like three stories, not two. The third is attached to the second as an epilogue. Both stories mention airplanes, so publication must be after 1908. From their tiny chapters, I would guess that both were originally serialized in Yiddish newspapers.

The less violent Lamed Shapiro - And now let me think.

A couple of examples of Lamed Shapiro's mostly unhappy world that aren't so directly about violence. Indirectly, yes.

In "Before the Storm" (1906), the narrator hires a boat to row him across a river harbor. We read about the sky, the ships, the boat owner and his son. The owner asks the narrator a surprising question, about his belief in immortality, which is an opening for his own story, about his oldest son. He did everything he could for his son, educated him, and the result was that the boy became a revolutionary. Here's there last meeting; the father has just rowed his son across the same river:

"'I no longer knew what I was saying. The tears poured out of me. He only smiled at my words and embraced me in such a way that, honestly, I felt as if he were the father and I the son... Then he kissed his brother and left.'

The old man suddenly fell silent. After while he said, 'Two months later I got his things and a letter from a little town in Lithuania. The letter said that my son was dead.'"

So the story is about the father's endless love for his son, and his complete failure to understand him. But then the narrator disembarks, just as the son did, but "just in time," since "the far-off, angry sounds of a storm were heard." Is the narrator, about whom we know nothing, moving toward the same fate as the son?

The long "Eating Days" (1926-7) works entirely differently. The narrator is a student at a down-on-its-luck yeshiva, a teenager worn to a frazzle by his sexual desires and, maybe the same thing, a new sense of the wonders of life. He's restless and intense, he feels everything to much.

This narrator uses metaphorical language far more than either of the narrators in "Before the Storm": shop owners look out of their shops "like mice out of their holes," and another has "small round hen's eyes" that never shut, like a corpse. A strudel "crackled softly and faintly, as though someone were breaking matchsticks." The voices in the winter market "rang in the ears, like the roar of water in one's head after a dive in the river."

The student's restlessness finally drives him out of school, out of the town, in pursuit of a woman, possibly, or simply of more life. I love the ending ("hosts" refers to the families who fed the yeshiva students on a rotating basis):

"The sun was behind us and the clear dark shadow of the pier played on the water. Further on, the water was as yellow as oil, and over the entire length of the river the fat, thick waters, like huge and endless hosts, stretched on and on, from one end of the world to another.

And now let me think."

The violent stories of Lamed Shapiro

Now here's a tricky writer to recommend. Lamed Shapiro wrote some of the most graphically violent stories I have ever encountered. A lot of terrible things happen in his stories, and he wants to make sure you see them, up close, in sufficient detail. Don't look away, he says, not yet.

The anti-Jewish violence of the Russian pogroms was his great subject. They seem to have left him a little cracked, even. Word War I was, as I found in S. Ansky's non-fictional The Destruction of Galicia, even worse. Shapiro wrote about the war's violence, too.

The Shapiro collection I read was an older one, The Jewish Government and Other Stories (1971), translated by Curt Leviant, who also translated several volumes of Sholem Aleichem stories. There's now a new collection from Yale University Press, The Cross and Other Jewish Stories (2007), which has a lot of overlap with Leviant. The title story, "The Cross" (1909) is easily Shapiro's most famous, a terrifying pogrom tale that asks, what limits are there on the evil a decent person can do, and answers, none.

Fortunately, for this reader's peace of mind, at least, not every story in this collection is a tale of horror and bloodshed. Some are more ordinary pictures of Jewish life in the Pale. Shapiro's world is never too happy, but it is, at times, at least normal. In "A Guest" (1904) for example, a woman's son, a young doctor, returns home to the village for the first time, and deeply hurts his mother by not having lunch with her. That's the story. Or how about "Smoke" (1916), the life story of a good-humored smoker, whose last words are a sort of secret message to his wife about their good life together.

But then there's "The Jewish Government" (1918), a forty page epic of wartime destruction and murder, and "White Challa" (1918), where we get the Russian soldier's point of view, which is just a nightmare, and "The Kiss" (1909), which I don't even want to describe. Don't trust that title. "Ironic" is not the right word for the title - "cruel mockery of all that's decent," maybe.

The violence infected my reading of the stories. The short "Tiger" (1904) is a ten pager about a boy and a dog. Two pages in, I thought, oh no, what horrible thing is going to happen to this dog. After five pages, I was relieved - with such a light tone, this can't possibly be one of the brutal stories. On page eight, though, here it comes, cover your eyes. But no, it could be a lot worse. What a relief to watch the dog run off, never to return. Obviously, if I had read this story first, my expectations would have been entirely different.

Shapiro's violence is perhaps no more graphic than that of his contemporary Isaac Babel - see Red Cavalry, for instance - although Babel's style is more distant, for example filtered through a journalist who witnesses terrible acts. Shapiro sometimes seems to be after something more direct, more visceral (at times, I'm afraid, literally). I've only read one Cormac McCarthy novel, the 1974 Child of God, which may be unrepresentative, but Shapiro's violence reminded me, again and again, of McCarthy. And the worlds of both writers are worlds with absent gods.

So, come to think of it, maybe I should recommend Lamed Shapiro to everyone, without reservation. Look how popular McCarthy is now. People love that stuff.

Tomorrow I'll try to look past the blood and write a little about the art of Lamed Shapiro. Because he was a real writer, cracked or not.

At the end of sixteen years every line in the worn face was present to him when he told the full story of this night - time in Silas Marner

Nineteenth century fiction can be monotonously linear. Chronologically, I mean. The narrative might split up in other ways - we follow Esther Summerson for a couple of chapters of Bleak House, and then see what Detective Bucket is up to. But the reader always remains in the "present" of the novel. When past events affect the plot, they're told to us by someone in the present.

There are brilliant, freakish exceptions like the 18th century Tristram Shandy or Melmoth the Wanderer, and framed stories are common enough. But look at Wuthering Heights, where the frame at first seems fairly complex, but rapidly simplifies to Nellie Dean telling the story in the usual chronological fashion. To the reader used to Modernism, raised on Mrs. Dalloway and The Good Soldier, where the order of events is psychological, and often quite independent from real time, it can sometimes seem like a color is missing. Not a primary or secondary color. Mauve, maybe. Lots of nice things a painter can do with mauve; shame not to have it. Lots of nice things a writer can do with scrambled narratives.

I bring this up because of a single sentence in Silas Marner:

"Mr. Kimble went on, and Godfrey turned back to the cottage. He cast only one glance at the dead face on the pillow, which Dolly had smoothed with decent care; but he remembered that last look at his unhappy hated wife so well, that at the end of sixteen years every line in the worn face was present to him when he told the full story of this night." (Ch. XIII)

Eliot jolts me out of the present, for just a moment. The feckless Godfrey not only becomes a bit deeper at this moment, but we're shown the consequences. Eliot could have preserved more suspense ("when the full story came out," say), but she wants us to know, now, sixty pages in advance, that it's Godfrey himself who will tell someone (who - still some suspense there) about the last time he saw his first wife.

I believe it's the only such line in the novel. Elsewhere, near the end, she slips a couple of short conversations back in time, just slightly (Nancy and Godfrey discussing adoption, for instance), and at the very beginning, she tells us about how Silas Marner lives in the village of Raveloe "now" before jumping back a bit to tell us how he got there.

Even these conventional narrative usages do not seem to have been so common in Eliot's time. I suspect the compression of Silas Marner, only a third as long as Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss, led the author to employ some new tools, although I should be careful. The Mill on the Floss has a couple of "outside of time" interruptions by the narrator, and there's a continual strain of water imagery that lets the attentive reader know how the novel will end.

And Adam Bede has one similar moment, when the narrator suddenly enters the story and tells us about her conversations with Adam Bede, hale and hearty, sixty years after the events of the novel, which tells us, at least, that in the remaining 500 pages Adam is probably not killed or transported to Australia or crippled in a terrible sledding accident. I mentioned this at The Valve last summer and was scolded for my anachronistic modernism - "Eliot is not Borges." Mm hmm. When I observe something particularly sophisticated in a George Eliot novel, I'm going to go ahead and give her credit.

A holiday note: For some reason, I don't write anything when I have a day off, and tomorrow is a firm holiday. Anecdotal Kurp posts every day, even when he's on vacation. I don't know why I let them boss me around, but I won't post anything new until Monday. Have a nice holiday, weekend, etc.