Dickens and "utterly unreasonable compassion"

Having of late and very gladly taken my turn as a missionary for the exalted name of Charles Dickens, I was pleased back in February to attend the wreath-laying at Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, that marked the bicentennial of the great man’s birth. 

I went along not expecting the ceremony to be a huge deal, rather more interested in the prospect of seeing the Abbey in full formal regalia, and also the outside prospect of some top-quality people-watching. (Simon Callow had made it plain that all true believers should shun the Abbey and make their way to Portsmouth for the day; but then Simon Callow was not someone I’d been hoping to snag a glimpse of.)

I had a slight wardrobe malfunction at the door to the Abbey, an impeccable usher leaning to my ear to murmur, ‘May I remind you, sir, of the formality in respect of hats...?’ For I was in fact wearing one, and it had simply hadn't occurred to me that a man must go bare-headed into church... Anyhow, once inside, I was allotted a nice seat right on top of Gladstone's grave. After the solemn entrance of HRH the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, and a lovely airing from Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony, we were treated to a consummate and notably upbeat assessment of Dickens and his legacy by Claire Tomalin, and a very controlled and intense reading of the death of Jo from Bleak House by Ralph Fiennes. 

But to my surprise my favourite address was that given by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams is obviously a smart man, though in the past that hasn’t stopped him from saying a lot of fatuous things – fatuous even by the low standards of what clever Anglicans are forced to say just on account of the collars round their necks. But literary appreciation is evidently a strength of his. I have quite never been able to bear the thought of his book on Dostoyevsky, but quite possibly this has been my loss. His best observations on Dickens were in respect of the ticklish issue of caricature, melodrama, excessive emotion and what have you. Very accurately he praised Dickens’ gift for depicting characters who are in advanced states of inner torment – ‘in hell’, as was the forgivable gloss – and pointed out that what is often their salvation in Dickens is an “utterly unreasonable compassion" that shakes the dungeon and “because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.” It is the very same excess that leaves many of us in bits over Dostoyevsky, and Williams was, I daresay, promoting the connection quite deftly. 

On the star-gazing front, by the way, I feel I need only report that I made my way out of the Abbey side by side with Ron Moody - The People’s Fagin, no question. A cherishable moment.

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest: News/Reviews/Events Round-Up

How've I been keeping? Busy, thank you very much. Here's the current report card on me and my Doctor Forrest:
- A couple of pleasing reviews, from Louise Welsh in the Financial Times ("Richard T Kelly has put his own original stamp on the gothic horror genre") and Ben Felsenberg in Metro ("Richard T Kelly's new novel is a rattlingly good yarn that wears a bloody Gothic heart on its sleeve")
- Last weekend I had the pleasure of writing about The Brothers Karamazov for The Independent's 'Book of a Lifetime' and on Yukio Mishima's The Sea of Fertility for The Guardian's 'Re-Readings'.
- I am interviewed here by Professor Glennis Byron at the University of Stirling's excellent Gothic Imagination website.
- An extract from the opening of the novel is online here at Writers' Hub.
- And I am in conversation tonight with David Peace on matters of the gothic and occult and Northern, at the first 'Faber Social' event in central London. Come ye all, ye be welcome...

Bookhugger column #8: What Our Kids 'Should' Read

My October Bookhugger column went up last week, so this is a belated nod, but in a sense I was distracted somewhat by it having elicited one or two comments, which are, after all, what we live for... The nub of the piece is: how do we get 14-year-olds to sit still and read Great Expectations, since this would be so damn good for them? (And I don't mean the version by Kathy Acker, laudable as that was in its own way.) My answer, I suppose, is 'Teach Dickens together with Dostoyevsky...' But then thankfully when I go to work tomorrow it won't be in order to stand up before a sullen group of 14-year-olds and ask them what they think the author really meant... In any case, this question must come from within, not without.

Vote Labour, all ye penitent sinners...

Gordon Brown’s determination to behave as though he were a character invented by Dostoyevsky – rather than forged at the foot of a stern Scots kirk, the personal back-story Brown prefers – is the big news again. Yesterday’s carnival of reaction had me thinking back to the moment 20-odd years ago when I discovered Dostoyevsky as my ‘favourite writer’, a status he’s more or less retained. One of the scholars whose writings were helpful to my discovery of his work was Professor John Jones of Oxford, who also introduced me to Kafka’s defence of the typical Dostoyevsky hero as a man not utterly deranged but merely ‘incidentally mad’ – in the same manner as the rest of us. Jones was certainly with Kafka on this point, arguing that we all mutter to ourselves when we think we’re alone, cursing under our breath, ‘F**k me!’ or ‘I’ve got him!’ or suchlike. ‘We all do it!’, Jones insisted.
Well, ‘I’ve got him!’ would certainly sum up the current, gleeful view of the Tory commentariat in respect of Gordon Brown, following his inadvertently 'on-mic' dismissal of the woman he met in Rochdale. It’s schadenfreude, of course, but, even if we do indeed ‘all do it’, it’s fair to say that only three of us are currently running for the office of Prime Minister. We are back in ‘psychologically flawed’ land again.
This PM is an unlucky general, for sure. But we do make our own luck in life to a large extent, and Gordon Brown has been stumbling through a veritable thicket of bad karma for years now. His apology was pulpit language – ‘a penitent sinner’, indeed – but the forced grin on his face as he pronounced himself ‘mortified’ was indeed worthy of one of Dostoevsky’s internally divided anti-heroes. Or, to summon another literary spirit – ‘I went on sinning every hour, and all the while most strenuously warring against sin...’ Thus Robert Wringhim, he of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the classic text of Gothic Scottish Calvinism.
All I would say to Brown’s happy detractors is: beware that karmic redress, for it is certainly coming down the pipe at us all. We all say hard words when we think no-one’s listening - sometimes even for the amusement of other ears, if we're sure the company is entirely congenial. Had I the misfortune (say, on election night…) to step into some room populated wholly by the Tory commentariat – say, the likes of Benedict Brogan, Fraser Nelson, the guy who calls himself Guido Fawkes, etc, etc – I do suspect the air in the room could probably be condensed down into a draught fit to turn the noble Dr Jekyll into the gloating Mr Hyde.
In any event, this blog is voting Labour on May 6. It will be a ‘lost vote’ in my case, as Hornsey and Wood Green – captured by the Lib Dems in 2005 in a wave of protest against the ousting of Saddam – is not looking remotely likely to change its mind this time. (This likelihood, though, has not converted me to electoral reform…)
I can’t say I’m hungry for 5 more years of Gordon Brown in Number 10: I have for some time wanted Alan Johnson or David Miliband in that job. I do, however - and for my sins - prefer Mr Brown to the other contenders. More pointedly, in the short-term, I want Alastair Darling to stay Chancellor, Miliband to stay Foreign Secretary, Johnson to stay at the Home Office. Anyone who wants Osborne, Hague and Grayling in those jobs has my very best wishes for a swift recovery. (I couldn’t actually tell you whom the Lib Dems would put up for those positions, but I don’t feel a great loss.)

RTK online column at Bookhugger.co.uk

As of next week I'll be writing a monthly column for the excellent Bookhugger online literary magazine, this to address various matters literary, writers and their books, the publishing business and all what have you. Bookhugger is a splendid platform for book fans, and I'm looking forward to being part of it and having this outlet for expression. In advance of the first column going up I've filled in the site's regular writer's questionnaire, which they call 'The Book That...', a little listing of tomes (Dostoyevsky, Mailer, Mishima et al) that have meant something to me in years gone by, and indeed still do. My responses are here.

‘I’m all for the donkey, in spite of everything.’

Brecht is said to have kept a small stuffed-toy donkey on his work-desk; around its neck a hand-lettered sign saying, ‘I, too, must understand.’ Quite often, I feel like I am that donkey.

‘I’m all for the donkey, in spite of everything.’ Thus Prince Myshkin enthuses to the giggly Yepanchin girls in The Idiot. Such is the Prince’s idea of sitting-room small-talk with young ladies. Kafka had to persuade Max Brod that Dostoyevsky's characters were not all lunatics but merely ‘incidentally mad’; and Myshkin is perhaps the maddest, if only because of his purity. I imagine readers like myself who love Myshkin and The Idiot do so in much the same way as the Prince was ‘awfully fond’ of the ‘good-natured and useful’ donkey.

Robert Bresson, too, was very good on the ‘exquisite sensitivity’ of certain animals, and so was very taken with The Idiot, in particular the profound communication that Myshkin claims to hear in a donkey’s braying. ‘Absolutely admirable’, Bresson declared, ‘to have an idiot informed by an animal, to have him see life through an animal, who passes for an idiot but is of an intelligence.’ He went on to take the novel as his template for Au Hasard Balthazar.

My daughter spent much of last week puzzling over Disney’s Pinocchio, a fine bit of work, if a tad perplexing (also a tad unsettling) for a 3-year-old, in respect of its complicated fantasy-morality: one of the high points of which is the forced metamorphosis of a pack of juvenile delinquents into a herd of pack-mules, carted off to a life of hard labour for their sins. Yes, a donkey’s lot can be a source of great pathos. One would like to think that at least some of Pinocchio’s mates ended up on sandy beaches wearing straw hats and giving pleasure rides to little kids.

Dreaming is Free, mercifully, as I'm not sure I'd pay for it

'All that we see or seem', wrote Poe, 'Is but a dream within a dream.' Nope, you were wrong there, Edgar. Go easy on that laudanum. The hard-edged contours of our daily life may occasionally get a little blurry before our waking eyes, but rarely ever so warped as the stuff we see and seem while we're asleep. (Funnily enough Poe's poem was turned into a pop song by Propaganda, a band I liked a great deal back in 1985. And while tuning into the first couple reels of John Carpenter's The Fog on ITV4 the other night - something I must have done a million times - I realised I'd forgotten that Carpenter took the line cited above as his film's fancy epigraph.)

While I'm being scholastic, may we then contend that 'A dream is a wish your heart makes / When you're fast asleep?' I ask only because this Hal David tune is strongly featured in Disney's Cinderella, which I must have sat and watched with my daughter about a million times in the last week alone. But no, I have to be a blasted pedant and observe that when Cinders sings about 'a dream' she is referring in fact to what Dr Freud called a 'phantasy': a neurotic daydreaming or, if we are more generous, the imaginative activity that underlies all waking thought and feeling.

All this occurs to me because earlier this week I woke, rather troubled, from a dream in which I met someone I hadn't seen for maybe 15 years, the setting being a place much like that in which we last met, the person physically unchanged by the passage of those 15 years - and yet I in this dream was much the same person I am today, fully aged and weathered by said interim. It certainly wasn't the sort of encounter I would have bothered to daydream about, nor did it much resemble those that I have on a daily basis. Therefore I would venture that however one would best define it, pace Poe and Cinderella, would be the definition of what a dream is.

Thinking about the great enemies of Freud in our time puts me in mind of Vladimir Nabokov, whose writing I used to love. Apparently he explained his disdain to one interviewer like so: 'I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me... I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books.'

There's a bit in Transparent Things which, I think, suggests that Nabokov thought himself much too good for the sort of dreams Freud discussed... That said, I don't think I have 'those' dreams either. And yet, still, I feel 'the Viennese Quack' was onto something.
(That Nabokov's other great professed hate was Dostoyevsky is the decisive reason why I finally stopped reading VN's stuff. Because what could one think but 'Get over yourself, man'?)

Norman Mailer's Spooky Art

Today, owing to an unfortunate necessity, I had to forsake my desk at home and go work in the local library, only 5 minutes' walk away, but a drag nonetheless. Waiting for some dogged daily newspaper scanner to give up one of the few writing tables with a plug-point adjacent, I wandered around the stacks awhile and was pleased to happen on a copy of Mailer's collection of thoughts on the writing process, The Spooky Art (2003). Browsing through it at least made the waste of time feel a good deal less vexing, even medicinal.

For a while I read from the index back and found Mailer very good on the affinities and disparities of the Russian masters: basically, that Dostoyevsky went down to depths that Tolstoy couldn't penetrate, but lacked Tolstoy’s panoptic sense of perspective and so tended toward hysteria; consequently from Dostoyevsky we come away with memorable individuals, and from Tolstoy entire societies.

Elsewhere: he's generally thoughtful about bad reviews, albeit occasionally desirous of knocking some picky little toerag's roof in.

He's bracingly self-critical about most of the books, as well as his much-advertised personal failings.

He sounds friendly enough about old Gore Vidal, to whom he is undoubtedly superior IMHO.

You get that sense that he wasn't ever as mad about The Executioner's Song as the book's ardent fans, for all that it's so alive to something fundamental in the big centre of American life, just because it was less his invention.

He makes a useful critique of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as a self-consciously big and well-upholstered novel that doesn't feel large or truly lived.
He expresses a touching love for the novel on the ground that it is 'the form best suited for developing our moral sensitivity - which is to say our depth of understanding rather than our rush to judgment.'
I nodded grimly in reading another version of his view that writers must discipline themselves 'to do a good day's work on a bad day.'

More grim nods when he volunteered that 'working on a book where the plot is already fully developed is like spending the rest of your life filling holes in rotten teeth when you have no skill as a dentist.'

Then there is the rub: ‘I remember saying in 1958, “I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” And I certainly failed, didn't I? At the time, I thought I had books in me that no one else did, and so soon as I was able to write them, society would be altered. Kind of grandiose…’

Still, searching around some reviews tonight I was satisfied that a fair few writers are properly sympathetic to Mailer's readiness to dare and risk failure.

Thomas E. Kennedy: ‘Perhaps the greatest works are inevitably flawed for they reach toward the unreachable in comparison to small works satisfied with small accomplishment.’

Richard Poirier: ‘At his best [Mailer] seeks contamination. He does so by adopting the roles, the styles, the sounds that will give him a measure of what it’s like to be alive in this country.’

Wilfrid Sheed: ‘Mailer follows the Chestertonian principle of exploring the psychosis proper to the group, the identifying madness, and letting it enter him, like an exorcist opening himself to the devil.’

Quite. Like the demon of his last wondrous production The Castle in the Forest, Mailer gave himself the right to inhabit men's minds. Spooky indeed.

Nice review of Crusaders in the Irish Tribune by Tom Widger

I'm pleased to have featured in the Tribune's paperbacks round-up of last Sunday 24th, possibly the first mention the book's really had over in Eire. Tom Widger describes Crusaders as 'a state-of-the-nation's-soul novel, Russian in tone, certainly nodding in the direction of Dostoyevsky, and Russian in bulk, 10 years in the making and highly rewarding.' Grand so, say I. On paper I could maybe be mistaken for a Russophile, perhaps, but then I've never been there, and these days I find myself deferring that long-promised trip to St Petersburg onto a very far-distant To Do list...
Then again, I suppose if someone made me an offer...

Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Debate Continues.

Say what you like about Vanity Fair magazine - that, for instance, it's Hello for people with degrees, or that its left-leaning political coverage might pack more clout if it wasn't swaddled in dime-a-dozen glossy worship of the Rich & Famous - but I have to say that Jim Windolf's blogging piece on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and translations of both plain can't be beat for covering all the key issues in a sharp and serious and amusing manner. Windolf seems to be as interested as I am in Nabokov's famously high-nosed dismissal of Dostoyevsky and all his works.
This was not just a matter of public pronouncement for Nabokov but a stubborn refusal to teach so much as a word of the author of The Brothers Karamazov to his Russian Literature undergraduate students at Cornell University back in the mid-1950s (i.e. when Nabokov was still teaching for his pennies, rather than reclining at ease on royalties from Lolita.) Hard to argue with Nabokov, of course - but, really, this was muleish of him.
The recurrent debate on whether having a favourite between the two Russian masters implies a personality type (or disorder...) feels like mere dinner-party sport to me - certainly not a serious question once one's undergraduate years are past. It seems to me the older you get the more you're bloody grateful to have the pair of them around, if only in spirit on the shelves...