Life with the stars
Francis King
The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume Three Edited by Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson. (Oxford University Press. £13.00).
THE bulk of these seven hundred and seventy two letters and the most interesting of them deal with the visit that Dickens paid to America in 1842 and its often contentious and embittered aftermath. There is an interesting parallel here with a visit paid by another world-famous novelist to another seeming Land of Promise almost a century later. Gide set out for the Soviet Union, as Dickens set out for America, in a mood of anticipatory euphoria; and he might have used Dickens's own words to describe his subsequent disillusion: "This is not the Republic I came to see. This is not the Republic of my imagination."
But for the first four weeks of his stay Dickens and America enjoyed a triumphant love-affair. Repeatedly he details to his correspondents the extraordinary "enthoosymoosy" with which he and Catherine have been received. Like Victtoria and Albert, the two of them hold their levees. To his solicitor he writes: "There never was a King or Emperor upon the Earth, so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained in Public at splendid balls and dinners, and waited on by public bodies and deputations of all kinds ... If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surround it and escort me home. If I go to the Theatre, the whole house ... rises as one man, and the timbers ring again." When he landed from a steam-boat in New York, people in the crowd began to pluck tufts out of his fur-coat as souvenirs. It is impossible to imagine the Americans today giving such a reception to a foreigner not a film-star, po_p-singer or space-traveller.
Dickens was at first flattered and delighted who would not be? But then all this overflowing homage and adoration created a mood of "bore-ation." He was perpetually being badgered with invitations, requests for money, requests for information or advice, demands for interviews, questions. A naturally edgy and tactless man, he eventually gave vent to a long-nursed grievance when making a speech at a public banquet in his honour. Like the USSR at the time of Gide's visit, America at the time of Dickens's took the view that a foreign writer should be contented to be read and should not also expect to be paid. Dickens's scathing comments on the absence of a copyright convention brought on him a whole series of newspaper attacks, of which he wrote to Jonathan Chapman, the Whig Mayor of Boston: "I vow to Heaven that the scorn and indignation I have felt under this unmanly and ungenerous treatment has been to me an amount of agony such as I never experienced since my birth."
From that moment the visit began to go sour on both guest and hosts. But there was still much that Dickens could find to like and admire, even at his moments of profoundest disillusion or acutest tetchiness. Then as now, the American men showed far more politeness and consideration to their womenfolk than their English counterparts. The standard of women's looks something that always interested him was high, even if they faded early. People were, in general, kindly, hospitable and responsive. In addition there were the contacts that he was able to make with many of the leading American writers and intellectuals
of the time. Any close rapport between him and Poe was as unlikely as one between Lord Snow and William Burroughs; but with Emerson, Longfellow, the two Danas and William Cullen Bryant he at once established friendships. To Washington Irving, whose Sketch-books are so similar to those of Boz, he was able to write. "What pleasure 1 have had in seeing and talking with you I will not attempt to say. I shall not forget it as long as I live." But increasingly he found aspects of American life, both momentous and trivial, at which to lash out. Among the major annoyances were a democracy that, like the Ancient Greek, was based on the horror (as Dickens fervently saw It) of slavery; a penal system that was even more savage and repressive than in England at that period; and the appalling violence and corruption of American political life _ "the stabbings, and shootings, and coarse and brutal threatenings exchanged between Senators under the very Senate roof the intrusion of the most pitiful, mean, malicious creeping, crawling, sneaking party spirit, into all transactions of life even into the appointments of physicians to pauper madhouses the silly, drivelling, slanderous, wicked, monstrous Party Press." Chief among the minor annoyances were stoves and spittoons. The presence of "the eternal, accursed, suffocating, red-hot demon of Stove, whose breath could blight the purest air under Heaven" was the source of headaches, lassitude and nausea. The spittoons were everywhere beside the judge at the bench, in the most elegant of hotels, in the richest of houses; but despite their ubiquity, carpets, stairways and even Dickens's own coat got covered with spittle. Just as the high civilisation of Versailles was drenched in urine, so the nascent civilisation of America vvas smeared with what looked, in Dickens's own graphic phrase, like "open oysters." Dickens's revenge for the annoyances and boredom of his American tour was, of course, the unflattering picture of the country and its way of life painted first in American Notes and then in Martin Chuzzlewit. Every novelist runs
the danger of seeing only what, subconsciousiy, he wishes to see to feed his imagination; and
one wonders if, in America, Dickens may not:. unknown to himself, have practised this kind nt selectivity. The comedy and the satire of his novels so often spring from grotesque exaggeration; and when compared with the America of other English travellers of this period, his is a country of far quirkier eccentricities, of far more monstrous injustices, of far greater extremes of splendour and squalor. America's own revenge came much later and we shall have to wait some time before we read the letters that record it. In 1867, twenty-five years after his first visit, all animosities forgotten or forgiven, he returned to the country. Already ailing, he subjected himself to a punishing series of 'performances' those dramatic readings from his works with which he could hold enormous audiences spellbound., He kept himself going on sedatives and stimulants and his formidable will-power. It is now generally thought that the strain of this tour hastened his death two years later.
But in his letters under review what impresses one most is the inexhaustible vitality of the man, penning page after page of vivid description and biting comment to his friends while at the same time performing as "a raree-show." The best of the letters are those to John Forster, since they were written with the express purpose of providing a basis for American Notes. But there are many others, hitherto unpublished, that beam revealing sidelights on to an astonishing man and an astonishing country.
As in the case of Rupert Hart-Davis's edition of the Letters of Oscar Wilde, the notes on a page are often even more interesting than the text above it. There could be no higher praise of the editing of Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson.
Francis King's latest novel, A Game Of Patience, is published this week by Hutchinson.
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