Two ways of entering a room

I happened to be entertained on consecutive days by two different descriptions of characters crossing the thresholds of rooms in two wildly different novels, so, since they amused me, I'll share them and hope they do the same for you.

The first comes from A Tale of Two Cities and is one of the only passages in which the prose carries some of the usual Dickensian playfulness and life. Dickens is describing a room in an inn along the mail route:

The Concord bedchamber being always assigned to a passenger by the mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it, all kinds and types of men came out of it.

We have been living in deep winter for so long here that the concept is familiar: the L train takes in nothing but identical passengers, but once we get to our offices, we as suddenly our own individual selves again, if a bit the worse for wear.

The second passage comes from The Acceptance World, the third volume of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. This volume finds Nick Jenkins in his mid-twenties, properly embarked on life, if still working out how to unknot the lines that tether him to the dock in love. Early in the novel, his college acquaintance J. G. Quiggin, a forcefully left-wing writer and critic, arrives unexpectedly in the restaurant of the Ritz:

However, my attention was at that moment distracted by the sudden appearance in the palm court of a short, decidedly unconventional figure who now came haltingly up the steps. This person wore a black leather overcoat. His arrival in the Ritz--in those days--was a remarkable event.

Pausing, with a slight gesture of exhaustion that seemed to imply arduous travel over many miles of arid desert or snowy waste (according to whether the climate within or without the hotel was accepted as prevailing), he looked about the room; gazing as if in amazement at the fountain, the nymph, the palms in their pots of Chinese design: then turning his eyes to the chandeliers and the glass of the roof. His bearing was at once furtive, resentful, sagacious, and full of a kind of confidence in his own powers. He seemed to be surveying the tables as if searching for someone, at the same time unable to believe his eyes, while he did so, at the luxuriance of the oasis in which he found himself. He carried no hat, but retained the belted leather overcoat upon which a few drops of moisture could b seen glistening as he advanced into the room, an indication that snow or sleet had begun to fall outside. This black leather garment gave a somewhat official air to his appearance, obscurely suggesting a Wellsian man of the future, hierarchic in rank. Signs of damp could also be seen in patches on his sparse fair hair, a thatch failing to roof in completely the dry, yellowish skin of his scalp.

I enjoy the whole description, especially the way that it pauses the action to not only take in, but reflect on, all of Quiggin. It's one of the things Powell is best at: reminding us that our minds are always working, even in company, and letting his narrative slow for their deliberate operations and flights of association. And how effective is that run of adjectives midway through: "furtive, resentful, sagacious, and full of a kind of confidence in his own powers." Can't you just see Quiggin's face at that moment? Finally, there's the opening description that spools out from the hint of exhaustion--so entertaining. It makes me think we should all commit to adding a bit of over-the-top comic description to our daily lives.

A Tale of Two Dickenses

An upcoming staging of a stage production of A Tale of Two Cities here in Chicago made me realize that I've not read it since high school, so, before I finally embark on The Old Curiosity Shop, my last unread Dickens, I'm turning to the Tale.

A Tale of Two Cities occupies an odd place in Dickens's oeuvre, at least in America. Huge numbers of students read it as a middle school or high school assignment, with only Great Expectations coming even close to it in popularity on syllabi. Presumably for most of those people, it's the only Dickens novel they'll ever read. Its choice as a textbook is understandable: it has a tie to important and (relatively) familiar and easily explained historical events, it offers easily (too easily) explored moral lessons, and its plot features moments of high drama.

For a Dickens fan, however, what's more important is what's missing. It's the only Dickens novel--even counting the books like Martin Chuzzlewit and Barnaby Rudge, that border on being failures--that doesn't offer any truly memorable characters, and it is also the only one that is utterly devoid of humor. Dickens himself described it as a sort of experiment in a letter to John Forster in 1859:

I set myself the little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express, more than that they should express themselves, by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the odious stuff that is written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their own interest out of them. If you could have read the story all at once, I hope you wouldn't have stopped halfway.

It's hard not to admire Dickens for trying something new that late in his career, but the problem is that by going away from dialogue and self-expressing characters, he was going away from his strengths. The critical reception reflected that: in Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage, Philip Collins calls the roll:

It "pleased nobody," according to the Eclectic Review (October 1861); for Adolphus Ward (1870) it was "one of the very few of Mr Dickens's works which require an effort in the perusal."

The only people, it seems who liked it initially were Forster, Thomas Carlyle, whose history of the French Revolution formed its ground and who deemed it "wonderful," and Wilkie Collins, who called it "Dickens's most perfect work of constructive art."

Reading it in high school was my first encounter with Dickens, and I loved it. I was utterly caught up in the drama, and in Sydney Carton's overcoming of his own bad nature. Even a terrible teacher and a classroom technique that consisted almost solely of having the students read aloud at their desks, one sentence per person, consecutively, couldn't dull the excitement it offered. Rereading it, however, I find myself less satisfied. I miss the fire of Dickens's prose at its most inventive, and I very much miss the twinkling eyes of his humor. Ultimately, I find I come down near where Claire Tomalin does:

It is true that the plot is too long drawn out and elaborate; . . and that the depiction of the ancien regime is somewhat mechanical in its horrors, the characters like emblematic puppets representing good and evil--virtuous doctor, perfect daughter and wife, wicked marquis, vengeful woman of the people.

And that not to mention that the "perfect daughter and wife" is yet another of Dickens's insipid, unbelievable, flawlessly dull female characters.

Yet Tomalin is right in how she concludes:

The climax of the action is preposterous and deeply sentimental, but the tension is so built up that Carton's famous last words before the guillotine--"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done . . ."--make their effects on all but the most determinedly stony hearts. This is Dickens the showman, amusing his people and drawing their tears.

What's perhaps most interesting about A Tale of Two Cities--drawn, as noted above, with as clear lines of black and white, good and evil, as ever he would use--is that within a little more than a year Dickens would publish Great Expectations, his most morally complicated and interesting novel, the one book of his that fully acknowledges ambiguity. And after that, of course, we would have Our Mutual Friend, as brooding a book as he ever wrote, and the stump of Drood, whose shadows seem likely to have matched it. For all the violence and horror of the Tale, its moral certainties make it essentially an untroubling book, and give no hint of the complexity to come.

Openings

Elif Batuman wrote an entertaining blog post over the weekend about Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele inadvertently mixing up his Tolstoy and his Dickens: after citing War and Peace as his favorite book, apparently he started in on, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Batuman points out, sympathetically, that War and Peace doesn't really open memorably; its first words are in French, for one thing, and they're dialogue, for another. Rather than announce that The Book is Beginning, Tolstoy merely draws back the curtain and invites the reader inside.

That got me thinking about opening lines. Unlike War and Peace, Anna Karenina does open memorably, with the famous aphorism:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Unforgettable, certainly . . . but tell me, does it ring true to you? It's so familiar that I've always taken it as a commonplace, but the more I actually attend to it, the more I doubt. It strikes me as more a flourish than a thought, an overly writerly phrase rather than a genuine observation about human character. It's the sort of phrase that a writer lays down in the fervid inspiration that accompanies the beginning of work on a novel . . . and then should be sure to go back and cut.

It simply doesn't fit, either with what immediately follows or with the long rest of the novel. If Tolstoy hadn't already had such a strong epigraph--"Vengeance is mine. I shall repay."--he would have been better off relegating his opening to that status and beginning the book with the second paragraph instead:

All was confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with their former French governess, and had announced to the husband that she could not live in the same house with him. This situation had continued for three days now, and was painfully felt by the couple themselves, as well as by all the members of the family and household.

Wouldn't it be better to be plunged directly into that irony and bustle, rather than being given Tolstoy's solemn pronouncement first? Isn't that paragraph far more true to the feeling of Tolstoy's world, in all its particularity?

Not that Tolstoy's alone in falling for his own beauties. Take L. P. Hartley, whose similarly well-known lines that open The Go-Between I adapted for the title to Monday's post:

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

Those lines work better than Tolstoy's with what's to come: in the immediate moment, the discovery by an adult of a journal he kept as a boy; in the course of the novel, his realization that his youthful self was missing, or misunderstanding, key elements of a drama in which he had played an unwitting part. But even so, those lines stand out as too chiseled, too separate; they'd do much better as an epigraph--that's the proper place for such an overarching, guiding observation.

And what about Dickens, and his (apparently Tolstoyan, per Michael Steele) "best of times, worst of times"? Those lines, bombastic as they may be, at least are tied to the book's theme of duality (overplayed though it may be in this weakest of Dickens novels)--and, because the passage is rarely quoted in full, it's easy to forget that Dickens intentionally deflates the tone by the end, a reminder that his true genius lay in his eye for the comic and self-important:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Steele, it's only fair to say, is far from the first politician to fail to read far enough into a quotation to reach the sting in its tail. Methinks Dickens would have put him solidly into that category of "noisiest authorities."

For my money, however, Dickens's best opening lines come from the book of his that has been most effaced, as a piece of writing, by its many adaptations--A Christmas Carol:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Is there a better way to open a story that's to begin with the visit of a ghost?

In fact, as far as setting a tone and giving the reader a sense of what's to come, I can only think of one line that beats it:

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

That's from Richard Stark's Firebreak. What more do you need to know, other than how much time you've got left for reading before you have to drag yourself away to bed?