Wilkie Collins meets a reader

Peter Ackroyd's brief life of Wilkie Collins, while disappointingly thin on gossipy speculations about Collins's seedier aspect--his two households, his opium addiction--does offer plenty of anecdotal nuggets to enjoy, of which the following is easily my favorite. Soon after the publication of his novel of a reformed prostitute, The New Magdalen, Collins took a trip on a train and shared a car with a clergyman and his two daughters. Ackroyd writes,

When the clergyman fell asleep one of the young ladies quietly took out a book from her bag; she dropped it and, when Collins retrieved it for her he saw that it was The New Magdalen. She blushed as she realised that her secret reading was discovered. "It's perfectly dreadful," she told her sister. But soon enough she was thoroughly absorbed in it. On signs that her father was about to wake, she quickly returned the book to her bag. When Collins looked at her, she blushed again.

It's a charming little story, almost too perfect to believe, like the story (for which I can't this morning find a reference) that Dickens overheard a reader in a shop asking for the next number of his current book and from that realized just how far behind he'd allowed himself to fall--at which point he raced home and set to work.

But it's more fun to believe it, so let's. And let's also be grateful that Collins wasn't traveling in Japan, where people wrap their books in brown covers, or in the future, where all e-readers present the same anonymous face.

Wilkie Collins loves America

Just after finishing Wednesday's post, I came across a bit that seems worth sharing as an addendum and counter to all the British anti-Americanism I included in that post. Peter Ackroyd, in his brief life of Wilkie Collins, writes of Collins's 1873 tour of America,

[H]e was generally beguiled and charmed by the Americans whom he met. They were frank, cheerful, and free; they did not obey the conventions of Victorian England that Collins himself cordially detested. They lacked the hypocrisy and frigid good manners of the English middle class. They had minor failings, however; they did not hum or whistle; they did not keep dogs; and they never walked anywhere.

Good to know that the American aversion to non-mall walking has been around for more than a century. Collins would surely be pleased by the spread of dog ownership, however, though I don't know that we whistle or hum any more now than we did then.

Collins's approbation stands in contradistinction to what his friend Dickens found in America. Upset by, among other things, the Americans' refusal to legislate and enforce copyrights--and what he saw as their disregard for his losses therefrom--he turned his American Notes for General Circulation into a savage indictment of the whole people. Much of the book's criticism is marred by spleen, and thus rendered not wholly convincing, but the following passage, at least, from the conclusion, describes an American trait that's certainly still with us:

The merits of a broken speculation, or a bankruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel, are not gauged by its or his observance of the golden rule, "Do as you would be done by," but are considered with reference to their smartness. I recollect on both occasions of our passing that ill fated Cairo on the Mississippi, remarking on the bad effects such gross deceits must have when they exploded, in generating a want of confidence abroad, and discouraging foreign investment: but I was given to understand that this was a very smart scheme by which a deal of money had been made: and that its smartest feature was that they forgot these things abroad, in a very short time, and speculated again, as freely as ever.

However, since we're but little removed from Independence Day--as evidenced by periodic explosions outside--I'll let Collins's appreciation be the last word on the subject today. Ackroyd writes,

[H]e had thoroughly enjoyed the experience; he had made new friends and had enjoyed the unaffected admiration of his audiences. "The enthusiasm and kindness are really and truly beyond description," he wrote. "I should be the most ungrateful man living if I had any other than the highest opinion of the American people."

And now to go whistle "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in Collins's honor.

Dickens the disbeliever

In honor of Claire Tomalin's new biography of Dickens, which hits stores this week, our October travels turn to Boz on this blustery autumnal night. Casting my memory back through the biographies of Dickens that I've read, I don't recall any incidents of Dickens encountering any ghost more substantial than the memory of the blacking factory, but as Scrooge is always there to remind us, the idea of spirits was one that interested him. In The Victorian Supernatural, Louise Henson notes that John Forster, in his 1874 biography of Dickens,

recalled that Dickens "had something of a hankering" after ghosts, and "such was his interest generally in things supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the follies of Spiritualism." Forster, however, also recognised that "no man was readier to apply sharp tests to a ghost story or a haunted house though there was just as much tendency to believe in any 'well-authenticated' [sic] as made perfect his manner of telling one."

For all his creativity and imaginative sympathy, the sense one gets of Dickens from biographical writing is that he was so consistently busy and engaged with the things of this world--and, to put it bluntly, so self-involved and self-distracting--that the world of ghosts would hold little allure for him. His world is our world, absolutely bursting with physicality and--even in its most far-fetched coincidences--ultimately comprehensible almost solely as a manifestation, not of the spirit, but of the ever-growing and bustling new industrial city. Henson quotes what seems reasonable to think of as Dickens's basic position on the question from an 1848 review for the Examiner of a collection of ghost stories, Catherine Crowe's The Night-Side of Nature:

Dickens protested against this common fault of "seeking to prove too much," when the independent existence of ghosts rested on "independent grounds of proof [and] in vast numbers of cases [spectres] are known to be delusions superinduced by a well-understood, and by no means uncommon, disease. . . . [I]n a multitude of others, they are often asserted to be seen, even on Mrs. Crowe's own showing, in that imperfect state between sleeping and waking, than which there is hardly any less reliable incident to our nature."

His position on the ghost as it shades into fiction, meanwhile, Henson locates in his rejection of a set of ghost stories submitted by Francis Elliot to All the Year Round in 1867:

He recognized among them "an old one, perfectly well known as a story. You cannot tell it on the first hand testimony of an eye-witness." Dickens explained that were he to print them with her claims to authenticity, "I would deservedly be pounced upon. If I were to put them in without your claim, I would be merely republishing a stereotyped set of tales."

Originality above all, in other words. So for all his inventiveness in the genre, we can't count on Dickens for a personal ghost story. But his friend Wilkie Collins . . . well, the stories of Collins's belief that he was stalked by a doppelganger are numerous, but William M. Clarke's account in The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins is the most satisfyingly garish:

[H]e spoke openly to his friends of ghosts standing behind him, and of a green woman with teeth like tusks who appeared on the stairs, along with other ghosts "trying to push him down." He also spoke of "another Wilkie Collins" appearing before him if and when he worked into the night. As the story goes, "the second Wilkie Collins sat at the same table with him and tried to monopolise the writing pad. Then there was a struggle, and the inkstand was upset; anyhow, when the true Wilkie awoke, the inkstand had been upset and the ink was running over the writing table. After that Wilkie gave up writing of nights."

You can always count on an opium addict for a nicely blood-curdling story of apparitions.

Don't say the Louvin Brothers didn't warn you!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Now, if I know my Bible, it's the day of the Lord that so cometh like a thief in the night, and we should watch therefore for we know not the hour of his arrival . . . but this week it's been not the Lord, but Satan who's been sneak-sneak-sneaking into my reading!

His first appearance of the week was courtesy of the satirical pen of Wilkie Collins, who turns one portion of the narration of The Moonstone (1868) over to the wonderfully entertaining, pious, and hypocritical Miss Clack. In hopes of saving her dying aunt's immortal soul (and, if it should just happen that way, securing a small monetary legacy for herself), Miss Clack comes loaded for bear--heathen bear, that is:

Here was a golden opportunity! I seized it on the spot. In other words, I instantly opened my bag, and took out the top publication. It proved to be an early edition--only the twenty-fifth of the famous anonymous work (believed to be by precious Miss Bellows), entitled The Serpent at Home. The design of the book--with which the worldly reader may not be acquainted--is to show how the Evil One lies in wait for us in all the most apparently innocent actions of our daily lives. The chapters best adapted to female perusal are "Satan in the Hair Brush"; "Satan behind the Looking Glass"; "Satan under the Tea Table"; "Satan out of the Window"--and many others.

"Give your attention, dear aunt, to this precious book--and you will give me all I ask." With these words, I handed it to her open, at a marked passage--one continuous burst of burning eloquence! Subject: Satan among the Sofa Cushions.

Sadly, like that of Onan, Miss Clack's seed falls on fallow ground: her aunt is not saved, her legacy remains but notional. The Invisible Library, however, is not so hard-hearted: we'll be cataloging this veritable gazetteer of Satanic hideouts as soon as our next shift clocks in!

For his next appearance, Satan chose Uzbekistan. Elif Batuman, in her hilarious new book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, tells about a summer she spent in Samarkand, a city whose glory has faded a smidge since Tamerlane's day. There to study Old Uzbek language and literature, she lived with her boyfriend, Eric, who was pretending to be her husband, in the house of a woman whose actual husband, she was told, was in California studying to be a yogi--a story that was given the lie by his arrival on the scene:

Shiny-headed, with muscular shoulders and a paunch, Sharif indeed projected the impression of someone who had never lived in California, which he thought shared a border with New York.

He may not be a yogi, but Sharif, it turns out, is interested in Satan:

Another statement Sharif liked to repeat was that Satan wasn't outside us, in the world, but within us. "You think Satan is out there" (pointing in the bushes); "but Satan is everywhere--above all, inside us!" (pointing at his stomach).

"What's wrong with his stomach?" Eric asked.

"He thinks Satan lives there," I told him.

"Tell him!" Sharif urged me. "Tell your husband! Satan is everywhere!"

"He wants me to tell you that Satan is everywhere, including his stomach."

Eric narrowed his eyes, assessing Sharif's stomach.

All of which sent me back to Zachary Schomburg's strange and impressive new book of poems, Scary, No Scary, which I reviewed for the Quarterly Conversation earlier in the week--and to its handy index, which led me to the dreamlike prose poem "The Darkness and the Light," where I once again found the conniver lurking. After a few lines describing a house that is nothing but light inside and nothing but darkness outside, around which a parade marches noisily, Schomburg's speaker reveals:

There is only one thing that can be seen: Satan. Satan is floating endlessly, tirelessly, a few feet above the ground along the parade route outside of my house, arms crossed across his fiery chest. He looks like he's made of glowing rock, cracking with the pressure of hot gaseous lava. Lava is spilling out of his hollowed eye sockets. His hair is wind-swept wild-fire. The heat that radiates from his body keeps my house very warm. Like a clock, he slowly floats past the front window of my house at noon and midnight. It is how I keep time. It is Satan's job to keep time. It is Satan's job to be the only light in the darkness. Some people think it is Satan's job to make what is wrong with this world, but those people are wrong. It is Satan's job to make us choose between the only two things that are right with it.

And should we choose wrong, well, as Elif Batuman tells us, Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying.