Disappointed in Daniel Deronda

{This may be the final post in the back-and-forth that Maggie Bandur and I have been conducting on Daniel Deronda, though it’s possible that my assessment here will prompt Maggie to respond. Regardless, thanks for sticking with us through this (unexpectedly slow-paced) reading.}

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Daniel Deronda, Terence Cave sums up contemporary responses from English readers and critics. My paraphrase: It would be great if it weren’t for all that stuff about Jews. Cave notes, however, that even as English critics praised the Gwendolen Harleth sections and dismissed the Jewish characters and themes, Jewish publications were doing the opposite. It’s easy, therefore, to write off the English establishment’s response as anti-Semitism, or, at a minimum, discomfort with the different social strata and lives represented by Eliot’s Jewish characters.

The problem is that they’re right. They’re not right about the Jewish characters and themes themselves being a problem, of course--that’s where the social discomfort in the response is hard to deny--but their criticisms point to the way that the failure of those aspects of the novel to be integrated with the novel’s other concerns ultimately dooms Daniel Deronda. Think back to where the book begins: We watch a striking young woman throwing caution, and propriety, to the winds at the gaming table. We meet the young man, of mysterious past, who is watching her--and who quickly, anonymously, intervenes to help her clear a debt. We know their stories will be intertwined, and that these next many hundred pages will reveal some sort of approach, combat, and resolution of their independent wills and fates.

That Eliot doesn’t deliver what we expect is not a flaw. Her decision to instead show a mismatch, a truly unrequited love, is impressive, and it makes for some moving scenes, as Gwendolen realizes that Deronda is not the safe harbor she’d been counting on. And her desire to bring in larger themes, and paint a portrait of a mostly neglected, often despised people is also admirable. Cave defends her decisions in the introduction,

The evidence might, it is true, seem to confirm the view that the novel falls into two separate parts, each appealing to different tastes and different cultural norms; but that would be to accept the least demanding reading (on both sides), whereas patently the point of the novel is to make unusual demands on the reader.

He is right that Eliot is trying to do something new, and it’s our job as readers to attempt to meet her on her ground. The problem, however, isn’t with her plan, but with her execution: She wants us to see Deronda driven by a quest for identity and purpose, a quest that can’t be fulfilled through a typical social life and novel-ending marriage. Yet Deronda’s questing always feels light, of limited depth and complexity. I compared him once before to Tolstoy’s Pierre, and I think the comparison remains instructive: Pierre is flighty and irresponsible, but we never question the fact that he’s driven by his inchoate desire to belong to something larger. By contrast, Deronda’s similar desire never ripens for the reader.

That failure can be laid squarely at the feet of Eliot’s two most important Jewish characters, Mirah and Ezra. Her secondary Jewish characters are wonderfully drawn: we believe in, and appreciate, all the Cohens from the minute they appear on stage. But Mirah and Ezra suffer greatly from a flaw that in literature is all but insurmountable, even after we discount for contemporary distrust of sentimentalism: perfection. I wrote before about Mirah’s gauziness, the insipidity that makes her as formless and uninteresting as a love interest in Dickens, but Ezra is just as bad. What do we know of him? He’s ill, he’s obsessed with Jewish history and philosophy, and he’s unfailingly kind and polite. But when we attend his discussion group with Deronda, we hear nothing from him that captivates, see nothing of the fervor or eloquence that could make us understand Deronda’s fascination. Like Mirah, he exists only as a perfection, an instrument for opening Deronda’s mind, and thus we have a hard time caring about just what Deronda’s mind is being opened to.

The same problem plagues the revelation of Deronda’s Jewish heritage. His mother--who at least is memorable in her self-absorption and caustic speech--turns out to be someone we’ve never encountered before, and the big secret of Deronda’s Jewish ancestry is exactly the one we’ve assumed we’d learn. The revelation fazes us barely more than it fazes Deronda (though perhaps we benefit unfairly from the passage of time in that case; it’s conceivable that seeing the very picture of an English gentleman revealed as a Jew could have provided a salutary shock to Eliot’s readers in her day)--it merely opens the door for him to definitively break with Gwendolen’s fantasies.

Gwendolen Harleth is a character worth reading 900 pages for, even if the novel disappoints. And nothing by Eliot could ever be devoid of interest, given her piercing intelligence and facility with epigrammatic observations. But oh, how I wish that Daniel Deronda were the novel it appears to be in its opening, full of fire and dash, mixing self-dealing subterfuges by Lush and clever machinations by Gwendolen, honorable doubt from Deronda and long-held secrets from Sir Hugo. What I wish for, I realize, is a much more traditional novel--and perhaps not a George Eliot novel at all. But sometimes it’s worth remembering the value of form, and this book brought it to mind: to watch such a compelling set-up dissolve into so much inchoate blandness can’t help but frustrate.

Yes, but how long is the apprenticeship?, or, Impatience then and now

{My friend Maggie Bandur and I are nearing the end of our wander through Daniel Deronda, and, in realization of that, in today's post Maggie backtracks a bit, taking us to an earlier scene that caught her eye. If you're just joining us and want to follow the whole thread, just scroll down to earlier entries and work your way back up; the first post is here.}

I appear to be the hold-up here, and while Levi travels for work and family, edits a book, hold down a prestigious job and runs six miles a day, I have no such excuses. I have spent much of the last month literally staring at the wall. This is the hiring time for television writers, when most of the shows staff up, and if you don't get one of the lucrative chairs when the music stops, you may not work again for a while. And although TV staff jobs will give you a mouth like a sailor, you develop no other transferable, marketable skills.

I would like to think it's not just my fretting that has held me back. The fact is I have actually (Shhh!) finished the book. I do think I am still trying to process how I ultimately feel about Daniel and Gwendolen and Mirah and their fates. (They all die. Shhh.) So, if I am permitted to backtrack a little--and Levi never responded to my e-mail to tell me I couldn't--there is a conversation in Daniel Deronda that has really stuck with me, especially in my current mental state. I was so tickled to discover, in the midst of this nineteenth-century novel, a conversation I have had many times: the one where someone asks how to break into the entertainment industry and--more importantly--how long before they can expect to be famous?

Her family having lost their money, Gwendolen decides she is going to take to the stage as an actress and singer. After all, she's always been a hit at parties. She goes to Klesmer, the composer for advice, and the results are eerily familiar. Gwendolen presents her plan with "the conviction that now she made this serious appeal the truth would be favourable." Klesmer takes a looong time answering and then begins ominously: "The gods have a curse for him who willingly tells another the wrong road."

Klesmer suspects Gwendolen does not understand the realities of what is involved:

Well, then with that preparation, you wish to try the life of the artist; you wish to try a life of arduous, unceasing work, and--uncertain praise. Your praise would have to be earned, like your bread; and both would come slowly, scantily--what do I say?--they might hardly come at all.

Gwendolen assures him she is ready--while betraying that she isn't:

I am quite prepared to bear hardships at first. Of course no one can become celebrated all at once.

And when Klesmer lays out the discipline and sacrifice involved, Gwendolen tries the classic defense of, "But I've seen so much crap; it can't be that hard":

"I will be obliged to you if you will explain how it is that such poor actresses get engaged. I have been to the theatre several times, and I am sure there were actresses who seemed to me to act not well and who were quite plain."

"Ah, my dear Miss Harleth, that is the easy criticism of the buyer. We who buy slippers toss away this pair and the other as clumsy; but there was an apprenticeship to the making of them. Excuse me: you could not at present teach one of those actresses; but there is certainly much she could teach you."

First of all, let me be clear I don't ever begrudge having this conversation. It is where everyone starts, there is a special place in hell for people who shit on others for having their same dream, and when it gets down to it, we're all in the same boat: If you look at the facts, making a living doing something creative is more or less statistically impossible and please don't make me look down to where the roadrunner has lured me out over the cliff. But there is something surprising and comforting in the le plus ça change . . . of this passage. I haven't been so delighted since Anna Karenina, shut out of society, decided to write a children's book. Apparently, frustrated, creative people with nothing better to do have been writing children's books for at least two hundred years! (Now, that I think about it, I could write a pretty good children's book.)

But when Klesmer discourages Gwendolen, I found myself ashamed that I do not take enough time to think about the honor and privilege that comes with a life in the arts:

I am not decrying the life of a true artist. I am exalting it. I say, it is out of the reach of any but choice organisations--natures framed to love perfection and to labour for it; ready like all true lovers, to endure, to wait, to say I am not yet worthy.

I do long to be such a worthy, choice organisation. But I am also sure Klesmer would not consider what I do to be art. And it is hard for me to tell the world that all I want to do is express my innermost soul--so now, won't you just give me tens of millions of dollars and a crew of two hundred to do it?

Judging Deronda

{Back at Daniel Deronda, responding today to Maggie Bandur's post from Wednesday. Despite all the other distractions, readng and non-reading alike, we've finally both made it well past the 500-page mark!}

I was pleased to see Maggie raise the question of why Deronda is so uncomfortable with the idea that the Cohens--whose company he clearly enjoys--might be Mirah's relatives. All the possible reasons she adduces seem likely to play at least some part, but the crucial one is eventually identified by Deronda himself the night that Mordecai invites him to the Philosophers' club:

Deronda thought, "I shall never know anything decisive about these people until I ask Cohen point-blank whether he lost a sister named Mirah when she was six years old." The decisive moment did not yet seem easy for him to face. Still his first sense of repulsion at the commonness of these people was beginning to be tempered with kindlier feeling. However unrefined their airs and speech might be, he was forced to admit some moral refinement in their treatment of the consumptive workman [Mordecai].

It's their "commonness," which in this case seems to be a combination of their actual class and their lack of any refinement that might lift them out of it.

What's hardest to process, looking back from our era, is the sense of class as essentially catching, transmittable. If we're honest, we'll all admit that we've been unpleasantly surprised at some point by the uncouth relatives or connections of a friend or loved one, but we root that critique not in their class, but in their behavior--and even then we question our reaction, remembering the role of opportunity and unearned advantage in making us who we are. We may judge, but we do so uncomfortably. Still less do we allow that judgment to affect our sense of the friend we already know. Economic class in America may be far more heritable than we would like to tell ourselves, but we are nonetheless beyond the point of thinking it marks a person and his descendants for life. Yet that seems to be exactly the source of Deronda's fear.

I was also pleased to see Mark Marowitz, in the comments, not only come out as a Grandcourt partisan (!), but suggest that perhaps Deronda actually isn't a nice person. It's a thought that had been nagging at me, too: Is Deronda perhaps just a privileged prig? We have seen him take two generous actions: reclaiming Gwendolen's jewels and saving Mirah from drowning. Both acts involved beautiful women, and the former--the only one that required thought more than instinct--was in aid of a woman of his own class, and required only money. Other than that, what have we seen of Deronda? A friendliness with the Meyricks that seems wholly good. A friendship with Grandcourt that seems to be much more about watching a mirror of the bad self he might become than it is about enjoying Grandcourt's company. And we have his friendship with the Cohens, in which he evinces kindness, but his motives are at least partially instrumental.

Then there's his spiritual questing, in which he is beginning to remind me of Pierre in War and Peace, a character who spends most of the novel so wrapped up in himself that he barely even notices the Napoleonic war. Can someone this preoccupied with himself be nice? Sure, he's incredibly solicitous of Mordecai, but that seems rooted substantially in a desire to see himself as serving a larger purpose.

No, I think the only powerful article for the defense comes in the context of Gwendolen. When Deronda realizes the depth of her despair at her ill-chosen marriage, he forces a conversation, and the urgency of his advice rings true, and utterly selfless:

"[T]here are many thoughts and habits that may help us to bear inevitable sorrow. Multitudes have to bear it." . . .

"Then tell me what better I can do," said Gwendolen, insistently.

"Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action--something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot."

In that scene, Deronda is fierce and focused; we are able to see both his magnetism and the power he could bring to a friendship if he so chose. Will we see that Deronda again?

Mirah and Deronda and Gwendolen, living in different worlds

{I apologize for the slow pace into which my friend Maggie Bandur and I have fallen recently in our back-and-forth stroll through Daniel Deronda; beset by the usual plagues of the blogger--work and travel foremost among them--we have fallen off the pace, but we're back at it. Today, it's Maggie, taking off from my post last week about Deronda's Jewish themes and their place in Victorian literature.}

I, too, am fascinated with Eliot's depiction of Jewish culture in the Victorian era, although I have trouble not seeing it through today's lenses. It makes me terribly uncomfortable when Mirah keeps apologizing for being Jewish because "I know many Jews are bad." I wonder if her perfect, wan saintliness was necessary to get the nineteenth-century reader on board with the story. This only-slightly different Victorian doll lures one into a deeper examination of Jewish life and culture in England -- a culture Eliot obviously cared about and studied -- just as the fans of Tom Sawyer's antics looking for a sequel find themselves reading a subtle examination of race in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

As the book explores the merchants and working class philosophers of the Jewish community, we see a portrait of the Cohen family, with its pawnbroker father and delightfully precocious children. After young Jacob shows off his own pocketknife:

"Have you got a knife?" says Jacob, coming closer. His small voice was hoarse in its glibness, as if it belonged to an aged commercial soul, fatigued with bargaining through many generations.

"Yes. Do you want to see it?" said Deronda, taking a small penknife from his waistcoat-pocket.

Jacob seized it immediately and retreated a little, holding the two knives in his palms and bending over them in meditative comparison. By this time the other clients were gone, and the whole family gathered to the spot, centering their attention on the marvellous Jacob: the father, mother, and grandmother behind the counter, with baby held staggering thereon, and the little girl in front leaning at her brother's elbow to assist him in looking at the knives.

"Mine's the best," said Jacob, at last, returning Deronda's knife, as if he had been entertaining the idea of exchange and had rejected it.

The little girl wants to show Deronda her Sabbath dress, the adults show their commitment to assimilation by talking about going to see the Emperor and Empress of France at the Crystal Palace, and the family generally proves itself to be friendly and generous. So I do not understand with my modern mind why, with Deronda obviously liking them, he is upset by the notion they might be Mirah's relatives. Because of the father's occupation? Because they talk about money? Because they are tradespeople, and she is such a special flower? Is it a matter of anti-Semitism or merely class or just an English dislike of commercial ambition? I am not sure I understand the implications exactly -- but I am relatively sure I wouldn't like them.

I also wondered if the introduction of the uncanny and mystical Mordecai was the other side of the stereotype coin: the fetishized, spiritual version of "the other," a sort of Victorian precursor to Madonna studying Kabbalah. Mordecai yearns for a like-minded friend to whom he can pass on his revelations and scholarship, before consumption takes him. (Although Eliot does state his illness makes his age difficult to determine, I assumed he was as old as Methuselah -- which we learn later cannot be the case.) But I am being unjust. Eliot does show many facets of this world, and, indeed, Deronda's outlook is constantly evolving and expanding -- as presumably the reader's is, too.

As a reminder that these topics remain, after so many hundreds of years, fraught, it was interesting to me to hear Mordecai calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Although I suppose I knew that Zionism had existed -- well, since the destruction of the second temple -- it is something I tend to associate with post-World War II. He dreams of a "new Judea, poised between East and West -- a covenant of reconciliation." I wish he could see his desires to come to fruition -- yet would he grieve to see how precariously it is still poised?

But all of this also makes me worry about poor Gwendolen. (Yes, she is poor Gwendolen now.) Gwendolen, having been placed in a terrible situation, believes Deronda may have the knowledge of how she might endure it. But Gwendolen, "with all the sense of inferiority that had been forced upon her, it was inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his thoughts than she actually possessed." My heart breaks as I recognize that situation of being so affected by another human being and their words, when they do not reciprocate -- or even suspect -- that level of need for their good opinion:

[I]t was as far from Gwendolen's conception that Deronda's life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that he could rise in the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her horizon in the form of a twinkling star.

Indeed, Gwendolen's world of manners and mores seems very far from the one in which Mirah and Mordecai live, surrounded by echoes of ancient history and national destiny. As I read on, I wonder how the novel will resolve these differing threads. Or is this a book about how we all inhabit different worlds which others may never fully understand? Or is there, perhaps, a problem in the writing that Mirah and Gwendolen seem to be in different novels?

Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Jewish characters

If readers know only one thing about Daniel Deronda, it's that it takes up the question of the Jewish experience, and the place of Jewish citizens, within British society. Yet that theme is barely present in the first half of the book: aside from a throwaway reference by Gwendolen to those "unscrupulous" "Jew dealers" in the opening pages, there's no reference to Judaism until the appearance of Mirah Lapidoth, nearly 200 pages in:

"I am English-born. But I am a Jewess."

Deonrda was silent, inwardly wondering that he had not said this to himself before, though any one who had seen delicate-faced Spanish girls might simply have guessed her to be Spanish.

"Do you despise me for it?" she said presently in low tones, which had a sadness that pierced like a cry from a small dumb creature in fear.

"Why should I?" said Deronda. "I am not so foolish."

"I know many Jews are bad."

"So are many Christians. But I should not think it fair for you to despise me because of that."

It's particularly interesting to read this--even knowing that it comes from the mouth of a character who has already been established as upright and sensitive--having earlier this winter read Oliver Twist (1838) and Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1876).

While acknowledging the fact that drawing inferences about social change from the skewed data points represented by a small group of novels is risky, it's hard not to in this case. Oliver Twist is infamous for Dickens's antisemitic portrayal of Fagin. Even when you know going in that it's going to be bad--so bad that Dickens himself later regretted his portrayal of Fagin, and reportedly tried to balance the scales a bit by making Riah in Our Mutual Friend an irreproachable human being--it's startling to encounter. Dickens refers to Fagin simply as "the Jew" 100 times. He makes off-hand reference to the size of Fagin's nose. And he depicts him as wholly without redeeming qualities, an utter villain driven by inhuman greed. As Stephen Gill writes in his introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition,

Fagin is the real agent of darkness in this novel. . . .What determines the presentation of Fagin is a kind of concentrated ferocity, but it is almost certainly without conscious anti-Semitic intent. . . . Fagin's Jewishness is part and parcel of his wickedness, for this is the age-old stereotype, the Jew as scapegoat.

It is the very unthinkingness of Dickens's antisemitism that is so suggestive of a social valence: casting about for a villain, he simply made him a Jew. And, to the extent that Philip Collins's Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage can serve as our guide, the portrayal seems to have gone all but unnoticed by contemporary reviewers--if they were horrified, it was by Dickens's choice to depict with some realism the squalor of London poverty and low life.

That's what makes the depictions of Jewish Britons by Trollope and Eliot not quite forty years later so interesting. Trollope's concern, as always, is with depicting society as it is, and thereby showing us both its foibles and its progress. And what he reveals in The Way We Live Now, published while Disraeli was Prime Ministe, is a society in which antisemitic prejudice, while still present, has receded to a place where it is merely one of a number of prejudices--against trade and new money, for example. Jewishness, like a lack of a title, is an obstacle to be overcome before one can be accorded full membership in society, but some sort of acceptance--if not full--is at least conceivable, provided there's enough money involved. This exchange, between Georgiana, desperate to escape her home life and thus looking to get married at almost any cost, and a old friend who married well is indicative of the improved, if still equivocal, place of Jews in the novel:

She had plucked up so much courage as had enabled her to declare her fate to her old friend,--remembering as she did so how in days long past she and her friend Julia Triplex had scattered their scorn upon some poor girl who had married a man with a Jewish name,--whose grandfather had possibly been a Jew. "Dear me," said Lady Monogram. "Todd, Brehgert, and Goldsheiner! Mr. Todd is--one of us, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Georgina boldly. "And Mr. Brehgert is a Jew. His name is Ezekial Brehgert, and he is a Jew. You can say what you like about it."

"I don't say anything about it, my dear."

"And you can think anything you like. Things are changed since you and I were younger."

"Very much changed, it appears," said Lady Monogram.

That seems, roughly, to be the same position that Eliot's characters find themselves in. The fact that Mirah Lapidoth is Jewish conveys nothing like the horror occasioned by Fagin, certainly, but at the same time the essentially kindly Meyricks seem utterly perplexed by it. The daughters attend synagogue with Mirah, which seems quite ecumenical of them, but they find it largely uncongenial. Their only reference point is Sir Walter Scott's Rebecca, and they find Mirah's Jewishness "less reconcilable with their wishes" than Rebecca's malleable faith was with Scott's plot. "Perhaps," wonders Amy,

it would gradually melt away from her, and she would pass into Christianity like the rest of the world, if she got to love us very much, and never found her mother. It is so strange to be of the Jewish religion now.

That "like the rest of the world" tells you almost everything you need to know about the British mind of the 1870s, doesn't it?

So what, in the second half of the novel, will Eliot do with the theme of Judaism? Unlike Trollope, her concerns are more intellectual than social, so I expect that the Jewish faith and the Jewish race will surely be wrestled with as ideas at least as much as social qualities--but who will do the wrestling? Will Deronda's infatuation with Mirah hold, and draw him away from his upbringing? Ah, the fun of watching a novel unfold, not knowing what is to come!

Back to Eliot, at least briefly

Last week's cross-temporal hunt for emoticons and the many pages I need to read as a judge for the fiction category of the Daphnes has put me behind both my reading and my blogging schedule for Daniel Deronda. Rather than leave you (and my co-Derondan, Maggie Bandur) in the lurch entirely, I'll stall a day or two by offering a brief bit from George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections, a volume edited by K. K. Collins that gathers contemporary reports of encounters with George Eliot. It's not as rich or quotable as the comparable book about Henry James, The Legend of the Master, but it's well worth having alongside when reading or thinking about Eliot.

Tonight I'll just share two anecdotes. First, a short, secondhand impression, via James T. Fields, published in his Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches in 1881:

[Dickens gave] an excellent description of Mr. and Mrs. Lewes. The latter he finds most interesting "with her shy manner of saying brilliant things."

And then this one, also secondhand, published in James Adderley's In Slums and Society: Reminiscences of Old Friends in 1916:

I have been told that George Eliot was in a railway-carriage once with a friend, and there was a "muscular Christian" sort of parson conversing with them about all the topics of the day. The reverend gentleman got out at a certain station, and the friend remarked enthusiastically:--

"Ah! That's the sort of parson I like. No nonsense about him!"

"Is he the sort of parson you would like to have at your deathbed?" said George Eliot.

"Oh no!" said the lady.

The only proper way to close the post after that, I think, is to turn things over to Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon:

Emoticon, or emoticon? (Sorry. Couldn't resist.)

I promise we'll get back to Daniel Deronda by the weekend. But first, a quick update on the Robert Herrick 1648 emoticon front. My post from Sunday about it was fanned into one of those small Internet brushfires throughout Monday and Tuesday. Here's a quick roundup, with apologies to any of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook and are already tired of hearing about this:

--Alexis Madrigal wrote about it on his Atlantic blog, and provided a helpful image.

--That triggered posts from iO9, Engadget, Gizmodo, the Huffington Post, Business Insider, and many others.

--John Overholt, curator of early modern books and manuscripts at Harvard's Houghton Library, was kind enough to offer to check the original 1648 publication of Herrick's Hesperides, and the photo he posted to his Twitter account made the smiley face even harder to ignore.

--Then, to the great amusement of our departmental assistant, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's As It Happens program came looking for me, and I taped a brief interview that aired yesterday. If you're interested in hearing me read Herrick's poem and hedge enthusiastically, I come on about 44 minutes into the program.

--Finally, Slate's Ben Zimmer closed out the day by closing the door: bringing actual research to bear, he made the case against the emoticon. In an essay about James Thurber that will appear in The Getaway Car, Donald Westlake off-handedly describes the New Yorker as "our primary viewer with alarm"; Slate, mostly to its credit, I think of as our pourer of cold water on Internet fun.

Not bad for a couple of days of silliness. Is it an emoticon? Oh, probably not. But barring the discovery of a letter from Herrick saying, "Hey, guess what I did/didn't do?" we can't be entirely certain. And one thing's for sure regardless: I'll never not see it that way now, and it's given me a fun excuse to get people talking about one of my favorite long-dead poets.

The first emoticon?

We interrupt our blogging of Daniel Deronda to share breaking news: In reading some of Robert Herrick's poetry last night, I discovered what looks to be the first emoticon!

It appears at the end of the second line of "To Fortune," which was published in Hesperides in 1648:

Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)
Tear me to tatters, yet I'll be
Patient in my necessity.
Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun
Me, as a fear'd infection;
Yet, scare-crow-like, I'll walk as one
Neglecting thy derision.

Lest it be an aberration in the edition I own, I checked it against the new, authoritative two-volume edition of Herrick's work edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly and published by Oxford University Press last year. The emoticon is there.

Herrick's poetry is rich in wit, so it's not entirely out of the bounds of possibility that this is something more than a punctuational oddity. If so, it would predate by more than two centuries the 1862 emoticon discovered in a New York Times transcript of one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches in 2009.

In honor of the discovery of Herrick's invention, we'll close by letting him raise a toast:

"The Coblers Catch"

Come sit we by the fires side;
And roundly drinke we here;
Till that we see our cheeks Ale-dy'd
And noses tann'd with Beere.

Eliot on adults not seeing what children see nor realizing what they feel

{Editorial note: Today's post from Maggie Bandur continues our back-and-forth through Eliot's Daniel Deronda. You can scroll down for earlier posts from the past couple of weeks.}

As someone who was not a terribly happy child--and as you can see in my post on Tom Brown's School Days--I am fascinated by the fact adults do not always see, and, more importantly, can't believe, that children can be deeply unhappy. Even if everyone else has had pleasant childhoods, this still involves a mass amnesia as to the intensity of one's own childhood passions and fears, and how often something said by an adult was taken to heart in a way the adults never suspected.

So, I was excited to see George Eliot's deep understanding of youthful psyches, as she describes Daniel Deronda's discovery, based on an unrelated and offhanded comment by an adult, that something about his own birth is irregular. When a tutor explains the Popes' many "nephews" were their illegitimate children, we see the alertness of youth as Daniel fixates on that fact, and the propensity of children to make imaginative leaps, as he assumes (it turns out, correctly) that his birth is illegitimate because he is also being raised by an "uncle":

Having read Shakespeare as well as a great deal of history, he could have talked with the wisdom of a bookish child about men who were born out of wedlock and were held unfortunate in consequence

--but he had never thought it applied to him until that one sudden flash of insight:

The ardour which he had given to the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed towards his own history and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown.

(It is also it is interesting how Eliot characterizes this kind of understanding: "He had not lived with other boys, and his mind showed the same blending of child's ignorance with surprising knowledge which is oftener seen in bright girls.")

Eliot understands the effect these sudden revelations can have on a child:

Who cannot imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in this object of complete love was not quite right? Children demand that their heroes should be feckless, and easily believe them to be so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is hardly a less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in mature life.

And even more perceptively, why children may never say anything about them:

Those who have had an impassioned childhood will understand the dread of utterance about any shame connected with their parents. The impetuous advent of new images took possession of him with the force of fact for the first time told, and left him no immediate power for the reflection that he might be trembling at a fiction of his own. The terrible sense of collision between a strong rush of feeling and the dread of its betrayal, found relief at length in big slow tears, which fell without restraint until the voice of Mr. Fraser was heard saying--

"Daniel, do you see that you are sitting on the bent pages of your book?"

In spite of the turmoil going on inside--the upending of his whole world--Daniel doesn't betray his emotions beyond sitting on his book and one petulant outburst when Sir Hugo asks playfully if he would like to be a famous singer, which Daniel takes to mean he won't be raising him as a gentleman. Although Sir Hugo has a mild awareness that his ward is unhappy about something, he is completely wrong about what it is, and here Eliot captures the blindness adults have towards the feelings of children:

Let Sir Hugo be partly excused until the grounds of his action can be more fully known. The mistakes in his behavior to Deronda were due to that dulness towards what may be going on in other minds, especially the minds of children, which is among the commonest deficiencies even in good-natured men like him, when life has been generally easy to themselves, and their energies have been quietly spent in feeling gratified.

Sir Hugo feels no shame--feels pride even--in everyone assuming Daniel is his illegitimate son. And since he isn't bothered by the whole thing, it does not occur to him that Deronda might be. With a child's capacity for silent misery and an adult's inability to notice, Deronda reaches adulthood with Sir Hugo never telling him the story of his parentage--and Deronda never having the heart to ask!

And the outcome of this silent hurt is not all bad. Deronda certainly takes his early slights with more grace than I did:

The sense of an entailed disadvantage--the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender. Deronda's early-awakened susceptibility, charged at first with ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised in him a premature reflection on certain questions of life; it had given a bias to his conscience, a sympathy with certain ills, and a tension of resolve in certain directions, which marked him off from other youths much more than any talents he possessed.

Deronda's childhood disappointment forms him into a deeply sympathetic adult. The detailed, insightful description of his childhood mind only makes the insipid Mirah, whose own bad childhood unrealistically only intensified her inborn saintliness and didn't teach her a single practical skill for dealing with the world, stick out all the more. She has not reappeared for a while; she must get better.

Mirah Lapidoth appears, bearing tears and treacle

{Editorial note: this is the fifth in the series of posts that my friend Maggie Bandur and I are trading back and forth as we wander through George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.. Scroll back for earlier posts if you want to get up to speed.}

I'll start by following up on Maggie's post about Gwendolen Harleth's specific brand of awfulness--for which she makes a solid case--by noting that her skeptical eye led me to read a later exchange between Gwendolen and her mother differently than I would have. Their fortune lost, the family is in scrimp-and-save mode, which does not sit well with Gwendolen, who, reluctantly, is about to go out as a governess while the rest of the family takes residence in a small, remote cottage. "How shall you endure it, mamma?" asks Gwendolen. After she expands on the incipient horrors a bit, her mother replies,

"It will be some comfort that you have not to bear it too, dear."

It would be, wouldn't it? At risk of doubting a mother's sincerity, I find myself reading that as less about her daughter's tender sensibilities and more about the fact that a crowded house is more tolerable the fewer self-entitled whiners you fill it with.

Distrust of intentions and sincerity is actually a good way into the point of today's post, which addresses a new character whom Maggie mentioned at the end of her post: Mirah Lapidoth, "the very Dickens-like, beautiful, but oh-so-sad eighteen-year-old" who is prevented by Deronda from acting on her intention of throwing herself in the Thames.

What Deronda didn't realize is that the Thames might have puked her right back up. She's awful. Throughout this discussion, Maggie and I have in different ways given Eliot credit for her complicated, nuanced portrayals of women . . . and then suddenly she drops on us a character dripping with all the worst sentimental Victorian ideas about the innocence and purity of young women. Deronda is clearly love-struck at first sight by those very qualities, allied as they are to a helpless frailty that is equally intolerable to a contemporary reader, and decides to take her under his wing. Even Eliot seems to sense that perhaps she's taken things a bit too far, for she opens the next book with an account of his hitherto unsuspected romantic side:

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life. . . . To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything that befell Orestes or Rinaldo.

Now, I suppose it's entirely possible that Eliot has brought Mirah into the book primarily to complicate and advance the plot. As those who've suffered through the unlikely machinations of Raffles in Middlemarch can attest, Eliot is at her weakest when she is trying to make her novels conform to Victorian expectations for mystery and surprise; it makes you wish she could have read some late Henry James and realized that it is possible to write a great novel in which almost nothing happens.

Even if that's the case, it doesn't quite excuse the load of sentimental bosh that is Mirah's life story. After Deronda takes her to the home of his friends, the Meyricks, she relates her entire history. At length: it takes up more than 13 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. We get page after page of her sinister father and his sinister companions, her pure heart only slowly awakening to danger, the desperate measures she took to escape, her childlike faith in the goodness of people that is only slowly eroded. Of her life on stage, she says,

I missed the love and the trust I had been born into. I made a life in my own thoughts quite different from everything about me: I chose what seemed to me beautiful out of the plays and everything, and made my world out of it; and it was like a sharp knife always grazing me that we had two sorts of life which jarred so with each other--women looking good and gentle on the stage, and saying good things as if they felt them, and directly after I saw them with coarse, ugly manners.

It's all not only bloatedly insipid, and thus dull, it's also hard to believe. And that's the part I keep getting hung up on. Here, for example, is Mirah's disjointed first explanation to the Meyricks and Deronda of how she came to this pass:

My name is Mirah Lapidoth. I am come a long way from Prague by myself. I made my escape. I ran away from dreadful things. I came to find my mother and brother in London. I had been taken from my mother when I was little, but I thought I could find her again. I had trouble--the houses were all gone--I could not find her. It has been a long while, and I had not much money. That is why I am in distress.

Now, if a stranger came up to you on the street and told you that story, would you instinctively believe them, and want to know more? Or would you slowly back away? And what if they followed it with one of those life stories in which every man's hand is against them, every piece of luck is bad, and everyone is always doing them wrong?

Yet Deronda--and the Meyricks as well, who don't even have love as an excuse--seem to harbor no doubts at all. They are wholly sympathetic, positively brimming with belief. I realize there's always a substantial risk in trying to extrapolate about real people in the past from what we're given in fiction, but could people possibly have been that much more credulous then? Are we that much more thoroughly cauterized by cynicism?

As a modest, unscientific test, I decided to turn to Dickens's Little Nell, whose untimely death in The Ol Curiosity Shop is held up as powerful evidence of Victorian love of Dickens's treacly heroines. But was she really received that heartily? Were there no dissenting voices at the time?

If so, Philip Collins didn't turn any up when he assembled Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage. "Little Nell," he writes,

made her mark immediately: [Dickens's friend and biographer John] Forster was able to predict for her "as long a life as any member of the great family of English fiction can hope to enjoy." Comparisons with Cordelia and Imogen were frequent. At a less literary, more personal, level, she could be imagined "cling[ing] with a never-ending fondness around our necks, inseparable for ever." (Ainsworth's Magazine, January 1844). . . . Nor was the international furore about her restricted to simple unsophisticated readers and arguably ga-ga old men like Landor and Jeffrey. For the austerely intellectual Westminster Review, for instance, she was "the happiest and most perfect of Dickens's sketches . . . a tragedy of the true sort."

The "fierce reaction" against her, Collins notes didn't begin until much later.

Which suggests that, yes, Deronda and the Meyricks may not be atypical in their susceptibility to Mirah's sentimental innocence, and that perhaps Eliot herself thought she was creating a character as believable, and fully fleshed-out, as any of her others. At this point in the novel, I think that's the only way we can read the situation; even so, it's hard for me to reconcile with Eliot's perceptiveness and intellectual acuity, or with the flaying, modern wit she allows Gwendolen to wield.

Gwendolen Harleth as seen from the distaff side

{Editorial note: this post from my friend Maggie Bandur continues our back-and-forth series as we make our way through George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Scroll back through the blog and you'll see the first three posts.}

When I saw Levi’s post about women in Victorian literature, I assumed the topic had been covered, but then I found myself mildly annoyed with the warmth and admiration with which he described Gwendolen Harleth. I mean, she’s so clearly a--well, one of those women who sigh disingenuously and say, “I don’t know what it is, but I have no women friends,” with a subtle implication that other women are mean or jealous, when it is so often she who is, at best, uninterested in anyone of her own sex. Reading back over his post, however, Levi clearly says she has a tendency towards the toxic00and my reaction perhaps reveals more about me than anything else. But still . . .

I had just finished Can You Forgive Her? before embarking on Daniel Deronda, and Trollope does describe the mental states of very different men and especially women so beautifully. (Although, when you get down to it, you could argue, Alice and Glencora are saved from their real doubts and turmoil, by steadfast, serious men who are (mostly) confident this phase will pass.) Eliot is even better. And perhaps because she is a woman, she gives us a character we don’t often see: the woman about whom all the other women say, “Why don’t any of the guys notice that she is horrible?”

And Gwendolen is a little horrible.

She shirks participating in her half-sisters’ education. “’It bores me to death, [Alice] is so slow. She has no ear for music, or language, or anything else. It would be much better for her to be ignorant, mamma: It is her rôle, she would do it well.’” Her mother exhorts her to be kind to her friendly cousin:

"You know, you can’t expect her to be equal to you." "I don’t want to be equal," said Gwendolen, with a toss of her head and a smile, and the discussion ended there.

She even participates in behavior that today’s psychologists would consider sociopathic:

Though never even as a child thoughtlessly cruel, nay, delighting to rescue drowning insects and watch their recovery, there was a disagreeable silent remembrance of her having strangled her sister’s canary-bird in a final fit of exasperation at its shrill singing which had again and again jarringly interrupted her own. She had taken pains to buy a white mouse for her sister in retribution, and though inwardly excusing herself on the ground of a peculiar sensitiveness which was a mark of her general superiority, the thought of that infelonious murder had always made her wince.

White mouse aside, I wish that Isabel had left the cabinet with the creepy portrait open on purpose to ruin her vain charades. And even more damning to me:

In the ladies’ dining-room it was evident that Gwendolen was not a general favourite with her own sex; there were no beginnings of intimacy between her and other girls, and in conversation they rather noticed what she said than spoke to her in free exchange. Perhaps it was that she was not much interested in them, and when left alone in their company had a sense of empty benches. Mrs. Vulcany once remarked that Miss Harleth was too fond of the gentlemen; but we know that she was not in the least fond of them--she was only fond of their homage--and women did not give her homage.

Yes, Gwendolen is constrained by convention: the segregated dinners exist because “the amiable Lord Brackenshaw, who was something of a gourmet, mentioned Byron’s opinion that a woman should never be seen eating...” (!) But Gwendolen isn’t thwarted in her ambition to make art or enter politics, and not for a moment do I believe she really wants to be an adventuress. She wants only to make an effect. She needs admiration--and since women don’t exist to her, it is the admiration of men. This need--all that society can really offer her-does not make Gwendolen unworthy of sympathy; quite the opposite:

She rejoiced to feel herself exceptional; but her horizon was that of the genteel romance where the heroine’s soul poured out in her journal is full of vague power, originality and general rebellion, while her life moves strictly in the sphere of fashion; and if she wanders into a swamp, the pathos lies partly, so to speak, in her having on satin shoes. Here is a restraint which nature and society have provided on the pursuit of striking adventure; so that a soul burning with a sense of what the universal is not, and ready to take all existence as fuel, is nevertheless held captive by the ordinary wirework of social forms and does nothing in particular.

There is something poignant in how Gwendolen knows she wants something, but doesn’t know what. But she clearly knows she doesn’t want anyone else to have it. Still, much as Gwendolen might not like it, I was also touched by Eliot’s evocation of a vulnerability that ties her to all women:

Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?...

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea and Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections.

It does probably help my sympathy (or schadenfreude) that things are stacking up against Gwendolen that could make her very unhappy, indeed. But I imagine she will take it with more spirit, than the very Dickens-like, beautiful, but oh-so-sad eighteen year old, who just appeared so Deronda can want to protect her. (Speaking of Dickens’s women, I reject the apocryphal stories of people running down to New York harbor to ask the arriving ships if Little Nell had died, because no one is described as asking hopefully.) I trust that there will be more to this new character--already she has been identified as a Jewess, which I’m sure was shocking at the time--but I can’t imagine her being equal to Gwendolen. And I don’t know that I want her to be.

(I have not answered Levi’s questions, but I did have some thoughts about hunting for later.)

Gwendolen Harleth, spoiled child, and the place of women in Eliot's Victorian England

In Friday's Daniel Deronda post, Maggie raised the question of gender, and Eliot's presentation of women. It's a topic that's inescapable--how could the author of "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" not be constantly presenting us with reasons to think about women, their education, work, and rights, in her writing?

Unsurprisingly, Eliot's portrayals of women are among the most interesting and nuanced in Victorian literature. I've lately been admiring Trollope on that front, and his novels share a crucial characteristic with Eliot's: they are often about the women found in their pages, at least as much as they are about the men. The women aren't adjuncts to their men, or plot points or prizes for their men to fight over, but active agents in their own lives. Simply presenting them as rational, individual creatures would represent a step up from Dickens's fatuous, treacly angels, but Trollope and Eliot do more: they show us the choices women in general have, and then they help us understand how individual women approach them.

What is of particular interest on that front in the early pages of Daniel Deronda is how Eliot both succinctly describes the limitations women face and uses those limitations to help us understand the spoiled child character that she gives Gwendolen Harleth in the early going. Here, for example, is Gwendolen's answer to a question from Grandcourt, a presumed suitor, about her future plans:

"I don't know. We women can't go in search of adventures--to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants: they are often bored, and that is the reason why some of them have got poisonous. What do you think?" Gwendolen had run on rather nervously, lightly whipping the rhododendron bush in front of her.

Gwendolen is being flirtatious, certainly--and what better calls to mind the familiar nervous energy of flirtation than her "whipping the rhododendron bush"? But she is also being honest, and the honesty, examined closely, is chilling: women, she says, must live where they are or stay where they're taken, with essentially no choice in the matter. Their only recourse? To become toxic.

It is that refusal to deny reality that helps to explain Gwendolen early on. She knows that she is essentially a commodity, and that her job is to fetch the best price she can. Of Grandcourt, just before meeting him--and ensuring that she looks her best, so that he will feel "admiration unmixed with criticism"--she thinks, "She did not expect to admire him, but that was not necessary to her peace of mind." Elsewhere, reminded that if she intends to hunt, she must marry a man who can keep horses, she replies, "I don't know why I should do anything so horrible as to marry without that prospect, at least." Told that Grandcourt is a "delightful young man":

"Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, with a high note of careless admission, taking off her best hat and turning it round on her hand contemplatively. "I wonder what sort of behaviour a delightful young man would have?" Then, with a merry change of face, "I know he would have hunters and racers, and a London house and two country-houses,--one with battlements and another with a veranda. And I feel sure that with a little murdering he might get a title."

Her hearers are shocked, but to readers Gwendolen's wit feels clever, daring, individual, and pleasantly modern. It helps us to believe that even as she is capricious and demanding, she also is magnetic and interesting. Unlike, say, the dissolute young Sir Felix Carbury in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, Gwendolen is that rare spoiled child whose vivacity and appeal we comprehend. We see why people want to be around her, and why they're willing to put up with her less admirable qualities to do so.

Her humor is also her form of rebellion, and--along with her physical impulsiveness (whipping the rhododendrons, twirling her hat, jumping with her horse)--at the same time a reminder of the stifling limitations of her life. She is too smart and engaged for the society, and the choices, she's confronted with, and the friction generated by the difference between her human potential and her social value must be burnt off in that nervous energy. But her understanding of that disjunction also puts her at risk: she knows that she intuitively understands more than her family and friends, but she fails to realize that that understanding nonetheless has limits--limits whose effects are exacerbated by the differing social place of men and women. We see that in her first in-depth thoughts about Grandcourt:

Certainly, with all her perspicacity, and all the reading which seemed to her mamma dangerously instructive, her judgment was consciously a little at fault before Grandcourt. He was adorably quiet and free from absurdities--he would be a husband to suit with the best appearance a woman could make. But what else was he? He had been everywhere, and seen everything. That was desirable, and especially gratifying as a preamble to his supreme preference for Gwendolen Harleth. He did not appear to enjoy anything much. That was not necessary: and the less he had of certain tastes or desires, the more freedom his wife was likely to have in following hers. Gwendolen conceived that after marriage she would most probably be able to manage him thoroughly.

How was it that he caused her unusual constraint now?--that she was less daring and playful in her talk with him than with any other admirer she had known? That absence of demonstrativeness which she was glad of, acted as a charm in more senses than one and was slightly benumbing. Grandcourt after all was formidable--a handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind. But Gwendolen knew hardly anything about lizards, and ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities. This splendid specimen was probably gentle, suitable as a boudoir pet: what may not a lizard be, if you know nothing to the contrary?

It's unclear whether Gwendolen is the one thinking of Grandcourt as a lizard, or Eliot's narrator is, but the image is striking, and Gwendolen's ignorance telling. This, we are made to understand, will not go well.

{PS Questions for Maggie, to be addressed in her post later this week, if she's interested: Mr. Lush. Is he, as it seems early on, a straight Iago figure? Even if so, does he offer us a counterbalancing vision of a male being hemmed in by society and social position? Is this role as Grandcourt's consigliere all he could hope for, or do we have a sense that it's more what he's made himself suitable for? Alternative questions: How much do we as contemporary readers understand about hunting culture from reading Eliot (and even more so, Trollope)? I know that on my first encounter with the Victorians, I was entirely ignorant--now I certainly know more, but do I really understand what it would be like to be out with a hunt?}

Network notes on Daniel Deronda?

{Editorial note: today's post is a contribution from my longtime friend Maggie Bandur, TV writer and book reader. As I explained earlier in the week, we're reading Daniel Deronda together and trading off posts. Enjoy!}

I was very excited and intimidated when Levi asked me to work on this project. I have always been a big reader, but not in a very organized or academically supervised way. I have taken it upon myself to read several Very Important Books of the Canon every year and lately have despaired of the opportunity to use any of this knowledge. Although I work with well-educated people, many of whom are devouring whatever this year’s equivalent of Gone Girl is, I am surprised how many times I get teased for my reading of musty, old books. But I live by my pen! And as a television writer, I am one of the few who still can. Perhaps sitcoms don’t require a deep knowledge of art and literature--but if one is going to spend a lot of time repurposing well-trodden stories, shouldn’t one steal from the best?

Delighted to finally dive into pure intellectual discourse, I was a little disappointed to find myself comparing Daniel Deronda to television and movies--something I don’t normally do. And this before I had read Levi’s introduction. Comparing current television to novels is blecchy. Yes, a television series--one which succeeds--does have the opportunity to show its characters evolve in rich, beautiful, literary ways. But for a show to succeed these days, it seems they must be shocking, at least when first out of the gate. There has been an escalation in violence and sadism and sexy medieval incest, in order to hook people long enough to one day, maybe, explore subtler character moments. This is not, of course, new. The sublimely talky The West Wing pulled a bait and switch by starting the series with Rob Lowe in bed with a call girl, and do you remember that the pilot for The X-Files had Agent Scully in a bra. Can you imagine?! But that deeply humanistic eye for behavior and personality and the mundane which make novels special --well, it must be slipped in between meth deals gone wrong and zombie attacks. George Eliot’s “profusion of aphoristic insights” would not be likely to survive in this golden age of television. Save that for Twitter.

But perhaps I was put in mind of television because I found the opening chapter not at all surprising. It was, in fact, a format with which I was very well acquainted. A famously common and cliched network note is “Start the story sooner.” One easy way to answer this demand is the common trick of opening a show with an extreme situation--dramatic or comic--and then flashing back to how did we get here. Why is Bryan Cranston in his underwear in the desert? Why are foreigners torturing Jennifer Garner? Eliot is telling us who the main players will be, and we learn a bit of Deronda’s character before he disappears for quite some time.

This choice of opening did make me wonder if Eliot had had to deal with editors who complained, “You can’t have a book called Daniel Deronda and not introduce him for 200 pages!” Was this her method of starting the story sooner? Perhaps the chapter’s epigraph is a subtle criticism:

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. . . . His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought sets off in medias res.

But Levi raises a good point. Do other books begin this way? Although I can’t immediately find an example, I have a sense I have read thrillers or YA books that begin similarly--stories that are perhaps more influenced by (or hope to one day be) movies. But are there any contemporary examples? Did Eliot hit on this method herself? In which case, has television perhaps been, all along, stealing from the best?

While reading, I was also put in mind of another entertainment cliche. The screenwriting book du jour, Save the Cat, claims that to sympathize with a character, particularly an anti-hero, we have to know that they are, at heart, a redeemable person, and nothing shows goodness like being kind to an animal. The opening chapter manages to show us that Gwendolen is a rare and remarkable creature, proud and perhaps not wholly good. By so quickly ruining her, isn’t Eliot ensuring her our sympathy, even as she is about to expose Gwendolen in some detail as “The Spoiled Child?” And not to skip too far ahead, but Eliot seems to have discovered the link between likability and animals, as I suspect we are to know an upcoming suitor is not to be trusted because he cruelly teases a loyal dog who wants his affection.

I believe I am supposed to pose questions. If I might broach another potentially blechhy subject, I will probably want to look at Eliot’s portrayal of women. Perhaps in comparison to Dickens and Trollope?

(On a side note, I believe Levi and I read Middlemarch at the same time for a freshman Intro to Fiction class taught by Iris Murdoch scholar Elizabeth Dipple. After not liking the book at first (perhaps because I didn’t know where it was going?), I fell in love about 200 pages in. Although I rarely set a book aside, one of the lasting legacies of Middlemarch is that I have given many books a much longer, fuller shot than they may have deserved. (Including, controversially, Don Quixote.) That class had an unexpectedly large impact for me: It was the first time I realized Dickens was funny after previously having Great Expectations beaten to death in high school English; I was introduced to Murdoch with A Fairly Honourable Defeat and had its deeper themes explicated in a way I might not have caught on my own, suggesting that college existed for a reason; and I had Jane Eyre somewhat ruined by Professor Dipple pointing out that Mr. Rochester’s teasing, coming from a man in such a superior position, was cruel. (Having recently re-read Jane Eyre, however, she was wrong: Jane is a badass; she can take care of herself.) )

(Oh, and P.S., all happy families are alike.)

In which we meet Daniel Deronda, and watch him watch a fascinatrix

{Editorial note: as I explained in Monday's post, today marks the start of a back-and-forth, intended to be a bit conversational, between me and my friend Maggie Bandur as we make our way through Daniel Deronda.}

Like Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda opens on the topic of its female protagonist's beauty. Middlemarch's opening line, though not as familiar as "Happy families are all alike," is reasonably well known, and is generally, I think, considered to be a strong one:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

I would actually class it with "Happy families" in another way, however: as a line that's more memorable than effective, more showy than good. It strikes me as a line an author comes up with very early on, admires, then retains even as the subsequent paragraphs and pages develop along different lines. Oh, I'm exaggerating a bit: Eliot does at least go on to explain herself, which Tolstoy doesn't really do--but wouldn't the chapter work better opening with this line, instead, from the middle of that paragraph:

She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.

Whereas before all you had was a bit of information about appearance, couched in a line seemingly designed to make you think about the sentence itself as much as about its content, now you have a bit of insight into character, and the first hints of a relationship. And opening with "she" puts the whole thing at a further remove, adding a tiny bit of mystery and putting us into the perspective of the outside world looking on and assessing.

Which is closer to what we get in the opening of Daniel Deronda:

Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?

Nicely handled, no? I'm being a bit unfair, of course: I gave Middlemarch a single sentence, whereas Deronda gets a whole paragraph. But it reads that way: the blunt question that begins the book leads you to the next, and the next; instantly, we feel part of a pattern of thought.

With the second paragraph, we learn who is doing the thinking:

She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda's mind was occupied in gambling.

The "she," we'll soon learn, is the book's heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, and right away she's being paired for us with the title character. The rest of the chapter lives up to its opening: Eliot puts us in the fashionable French casino where Gwendolen is gambling with a cool recklessness that fascinates the crowd around her. We shift from Deronda's perspective to the narrator's, and then are turned over to a chorus of the moneyed and fashionable, who trade comments and questions about Gwendolen ("For my part I think her odious. . . . It is wonderful what unpleasant girls get into vogue."), smoothly delivering some early exposition along the way. By the end of the chapter, which runs a mere eight pages, Eliot has introduced her two main characters, made her first steps toward placing them in society, and shown us their mutual, if unacknowledged, awareness of a potent force between them.

That makes Eliot's next move all the more interesting: the second chapter brings a letter recalling Gwendolen home, her family's fortune lost, her hopes for a glittering social life dashed. Without seeing Deronda again, she hurries home, not telling anyone of her troubles . . . after which Eliot carries us back a year. One hundred and fifty pages will pass before we see Deronda again, and more than that before he and Gwendolen are brought back into proximity.

It's a structure that only a supremely confident author would attempt, and I'm not entirely sure that it works. Eliot's decision to essentially set the problem for us at the outset is brilliant, but is the power of that opening scene dissipated too much by the number of pages it takes to get us back to that moment in its characters' parallel lives?

And with that, I'll turn it over to Maggie, who, if all goes well, will appear here on Friday. She may take up that question about the early structure, or she may go off in a completely new direction. Either way, I hope you'll join us!

Diving into Daniel Deronda

If I may speak for you--presuming, I hope not overmuch, upon our eight-year online acquaintance--we'll start this post by stipulating that there are few topics more tiresome than "In this current golden age of television, have TV shows become what novels used to be?" As they used to say in Mad magazine, "Blecccch."

And yet . . . (You knew there was an "and yet" coming, didn't you?) I did have that thought a tiny bit when I was reading Rebecca Mead's thoughtful new book My Life in Middlemarch and came upon this passage:

"We all grumble at 'Middlemarch,'" a reviewer for the Spectator said. "But we all read it, and all feel that there is nothing to compare with it appearing at the present moment int he way of English literature, and not a few of us calculate whether we shall get the August number before we go for our autumn holiday, or whether we shall have to wait for it until we return."

Though I tend to watch TV deeply in arrears, this does jibe uncannily with the feeling of watching a popular show these days: being part of a group, a contentious, easily irritated group that starts at every sign and waits, breathless, to see whether its conjecture will be borne out. That's the characteristic I love best about the current upper-middlebrow TV-watching culture: the way it returns us to a long tradition of serial narrative, of, if not exactly reading for the plot, at least of truly not knowing what will come next, and finding ourselves unable not to wonder. {Side note: this is one of the reasons that I love sports.}

Mead's aside reminds us that that used to be the case with these novels, too--and, for most of us, that was in some sense our own experience the first time through. The first time I read Middlemarch, I marveled at Eliot's profusion of aphoristic insights, but I also wondered, page by page and chapter by chapter, just where Dorothea would end up. It's one of the qualities I most admire in Trollope lately: he offers his characters a range of wholly plausible choices, and we truly don't know which they'll choose until they do.

In contemporary television fandom, this uncertainty, this demonstration of the potency of the installment, is made most clearly manifest in the many online TV clubs and episode recaps, the most prominent of them being Slate's. Certainly, these episode-by-episode back-and-forths can at times be of modest interest, offering recaps and little else. But at their best, they can serve as an interesting record of how we responded in real time, of what it was like to watch plots unfold and characters develop, of how a narrative took advantage of and worked with and subverted our ingrained expectations about how plots turn and people behave.

All of which is by way of a long preamble to an announcement. Having been prompted by the incomparable Patrick Kurp to read Daniel Deronda--which, despite my love (and re-reading) of Middlemarch, I've never taken up--I've dragooned my good friend Maggie Bandur, TV writer by trade, book reader by inclination, into reading it with me and trading posts and questions and ideas. If you've been an IBRL reader for a long time, Maggie's name may be familiar: she's written here before on Tom Brown's Schooldays and Clarissa, and I have no doubt she'll be good, and smart, company.

If all goes well with the other bits of life, I'll start things off on Wednesday with a brief post about the book's opening, and Eliot's quick, yet incredibly effective introduction of Gwendolen Harleth. If you're interested in reading along with us, we'd be glad of the company: there's no set schedule, but I would imagine we'll progress reasonably slowly, say, 150-200 pages a week? Come along--as usual when you read Eliot, you have nothing to lose but your confidence in received opinion!

Did I mention that I'm editing a Donald E. Westlake collection? Oh, I did? How recently?

In the [insert value = "small amount of time"] since I last mentioned The Getaway Car, the collection of Donald Westlake's nonfiction I'm editing for the University of Chicago Press, a lot more of the details of what's in and on the book have been released on the Press's webpage for the book. So, with your patience (and, I hope (?) your interest), herewith:

1 The cover design and illustration will be by the wonderful Darwyn Cooke. Cooke has been my favorite comics artist since his brilliant New Frontier series reimagined DC's Silver Age in its actual context of Cold War America. I first wrote about Cooke back in 2007, praising The New Frontier at the end of this post, and I followed it up with excitement when it was announced that he would be creating four graphic novels of Parker books. So you can imagine how over the moon I am about his involvement with The Getaway Car. I've seen early drafts of the cover, and it's fantastic. I should be able to share it soon.

2 The descriptive copy that my colleague Carrie Adams (who is stuck in the, let's be honest, unenviable position of being her boss's publicist) and I came up with for the book has been released:

Over the course of a fifty-year career, Donald Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including not one but two long-running series, starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. In the six years since his death, Westlake’s reputation has only grown, with fans continuing to marvel at his tightly constructed plots, no-nonsense prose, and keen, even unsettling, insights into human behavior.

With The Getaway Car, we get our first glimpse at another side of Westlake the writer: what he did when he wasn’t busy making stuff up. And it’s fascinating. Setting previously published pieces, many little-seen, alongside never-before-published material found in Westlake’s working files, the book offers a clear picture of the man behind the books—including his background, experience, and thoughts on his own work and that of his peers, mentors, and influences. The book opens with revealing (and funny) fragments from an unpublished autobiography, then goes on to offer an extended history of private eye fiction, a conversation among Westlake’s numerous pen names, letters to friends and colleagues, interviews, appreciations of fellow writers, and much, much more. There’s even a recipe for Sloth a la Dortmunder. Really.

Rounded out with a foreword by Westlake’s longtime friend Lawrence Block, The Getaway Car is a fitting capstone to a storied career and a wonderful opportunity to revel anew in the voice and sensibility of a master craftsman.

I think it does a good job of hitting the highlights in a brief space--and of making one of the points that I think is key, from reader's, critic's, or publicist's points of view: This book is a bit different from the other (very good) posthumous Westlake books. Those are novels, whereas this book, by its nature, invites us to take a moment, nearly six years after his death, to reflect on his life and work, assess his place in the crime-writing pantheon, and be grateful for what he gave us.

3 We've landed a nice blurb from Charles Ardai, novelist and founder of Hard Case Crime--and the man who introduced me to Westlake, through Lemons Never Lie--and one drawn from Lawrence Block's foreword:

“Westlake was a treasure and a delight to read—the man was incapable of writing a paragraph without being witty and memorable and wise—and Westlake on Westlake is enjoyable in the extreme.”--Charles Ardai

“Stahl has done a superb job of . . . separating the best of the wheat from the rest of the wheat—Don didn’t do chaff—and organizing and notating the result.”--Lawrence Block

I can't wait until you folks get to read Block's introduction. It's everything you'd want it to be: heartfelt, funny, and personal.

4 Finally, for those who want even more details, the whole table of contents is now up on the Chicago site:

Foreword by Lawrence Block

Editor’s Introduction

1 My Second Life: Fragments from an Autobiography

2 Donald E. Westlake, a.k.a. . . .
Hearing Voices in My Head: Tucker Coe, Timothy J. Culver, Richard Stark and Donald E. Westlake
Living with a Mystery Writer, by Abby Adams
Writers on Writing: A Pseudonym Returns From an Alter-Ego Trip, With New Tales to Tell

3 So Tell Me about This Job We’re Gonna Pull: On Genre
The Hardboiled Dicks
Introduction to Murderous Schemes
Introduction to The Best American Mystery Stories, 2000
Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

4 Ten Most Wanted: Ten Favorite Mystery Books

5 Returning to the Scene of the Crime: On His Own Work
Introduction to Levine
Tangled Webs for Sale: Best Offer
Introduction to Kahawa
Light
Hooked
Letter to Howard B. Gotlieb, Boston University Libraries

6 Lunch Break: May’s Famous Tuna Casserole

7 The Other Guys in the String: Peers, Favorites, and Influences
Lawrence Block: First Sighting
On Peter Rabe
Playing Politics with a Master of Dialogue: On George V. Higgins
On Rex Stout
Introduction to Jack Ritchie’s A New Leaf and Other Stories
Foreword to Thurber on Crime
Introduction to Charles Willeford’s The Way We Die Now
On Stephen Frears
John D. MacDonald: A Remembrance

8 Coffee Break: Letter to Ray Broekel

9 Anything You Say May Be Used against You: Interviews
An Inside Look at Donald Westlake, by Albert Nussbaum, 81332-132
The Worst Happens: From an Interview by Patrick McGilligan

10 Midnight Snack: Gustatory Notes from All Over

11 Side Jobs: Prison Breaks, Movie Mobsters, and Radio Comedy
Break-Out
Love Stuff, Cops-and-Robbers Style
Send In the Goons

12 Signed Confessions: Letters
To Judy ?
To Peter Gruber
To James Hale
To Stephen and Tabitha King
To Brian Garfield
To David Ramus
To Pam Vesey
To Gary Salt
To Henry Morrison
To Jon L. Breen

13 Jobs Never Pulled: Title Ideas
Crime Titles
Comic Crime Titles

14 Death Row (Or, The Happily Ever Afterlife): Letter to Ralph L. Woods

Acknowledgments
Credits
Name Index

That name index, by the way? Yeah, I should probably create that soon.

Books should be here right after Labor Day. Tell your friends! Tell your bookstore! Tell your bookstore friends!

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.

The root of the disagreement between Johnson and Swift?

Samuel Johnson's dislike of Jonathan Swift's work is famous. Jackson Bate offers the reasonable explanation that what Johnson saw in Swift was a dark reflection of himself--the self he could have been had he let his satiric bite run free rather than constantly attempting to check it and temper it with religious belief. Bate writes,

The Life of Swift strikes the modern reader as the only hopelessly biased Life. Here we can only try to remember Johnson's lifelong fear, especially after the breakdown in his fifties, of the powerful satiric bitterness of his own nature, and his dread--a dread with which he was constantly living--of falling into the anger and the sense of emptiness about life that he associated with Swift.

I suspect Evelyn Waugh may have played a similar role--a sort of "there but by the grace of god"-style role model--for satirically inclined interwar writers.

Bate's position is convincing, and it conforms to what we know of Johnson and of Swift (even as it does nothing to lessen the wish that their lives could have overlapped, giving them an opportunity to meet). But perhaps the explanation is simpler? Perhaps, it's rooted in a simple disagreement about the proper way to approach a hill?

As we saw on Friday, Johnson is documented as a hill-roller: in his fifties, while on the trip to Scotland with Boswell, he took a wistful roll down one, to the amusement (and, presumably, brief worry) of all around. Swift, on the other hand--well, let's let Leo Damrosch, author of last year's excellent biography, tell it:

Swift . . . became convinced that exercise was beneficial, in an era when medical theory discouraged it, and most people avoided it. At Moor Park, as he told Deane Swift long afterward, he would work for two hours and then take a break by running up to the top of a nearby hill and down again. "This exercise he performed in about six minutes; backwards and forwards it was about half a mile."

Oh, I'll admit it seems silly: Could two such great minds as these truly be set at odds by such a silly difference? Could a preference for rolling rather than running down a hill really be enough to cause Johnson to cast Swift beyond of the pale of his appreciation?

Perhaps not--but then, perhaps we should remember what Swift's friend Gulliver learned about the origins of the ongoing conflict between Lilliput and Blefuscu:

It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

Suddenly that hill is looking more like a mountain, isn't it?

Samuel Johnson gets silly

At the end of a too-long, too-busy work week, what better than to share too instances of Samuel Johnson being utterly silly? In case you haven't realized it from my Twitter feed, I've been immersed in Johnson the past ten days or so, going from Boswell to W. Jackson Bate's 1975 biography, and both are a reminder that Johnson is always more varied, more multifarious, than whatever impression is most recent in your mind.

And one of the ways he surprises is by being silly--physically silly. To wit, a moment at the top of a hill during his tour of the Hebrides with Boswell, as related by Bate, via the years-later memories of Johnson's companion that day, Bennet Langton:

Johnson, delighted by its steepness, said he wanted to "take a roll down." They tried to stop him. But he said he "had not had a roll for a long time," and taking out of his pockets his keys, a pencil, a purse, and other objects, lay down parallel at the edge of the hill, and rolled down its full length, "turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom."

Johnson was fifty-five at the time.

This one is even better. At conversation with the Reverend Alexander Grant, Johnson mentioned that Joseph Banks had recently sent back reports of a strange animal called a kangaroo. Then,

In order to render his description more vivid, Johnson rose from his chair and [in the words of Grant], "volunteered an imitation of the animal. The company stared . . . nothing could be more ludicrous than the appearance of a tall, heavy, grave-looking man, like Dr. Johnson, standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.

May your weekend be suitably bouncy.