A scary ghost story from Thackeray - HE, I promise you, won't stand any nonsense

I almost forgot to do my Halloween reading, but then I remembered, so tonight’s text is “The Notch on the Ax” by William Makepeace Thackeray, published in 1863 the Cornhill Magazine.  In two parts, I guess, since this is in the dead center of the story:

At this moment the clock (after its previous convulsions) sounded TWELVE.  And as the new Editor of the Cornhill Magazine--and HE, I promise you, won't stand any nonsense--will only allow seven pages, I am obliged to leave off at THE VERY MOST INTERESTING POINT OF THE STORY.

Can you imagine the suspense of the original readers?  I have not said anything about the story, so I suppose not.

This story has everything:  ghosts, Freemasons, mesmerism, Bluebeard, table-rapping, Mary Queen of Scots, artificial limbs, silly accents, a guillotine, a woman named Blanche de Bechamel.  On second thought, there is a lot it does not have.  Thackeray meets an ancient man who tells him a ghost story.  That is the action, more or less.  I read the story in a collection archived at Gutenberg.org which had a prefatory note telling me that “the style of each principal sensational novelist of the day is delightfully imitated.”  The sensation novel had been invented only three years earlier by Wilkie Collins, so this sounded like fun, although I wondered if Collins had a strong enough style for me to recognize a parody, much less that of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, much much less that of some voguish bestseller whose name I do not know.

Who is the writer, for example, who always disguises the names of the “real” characters with dashes – “(of course I don't mention family names)”?  As in

'Captain Brown,' I said 'who could see Miss Sm-th without loving her?'

Or

As he said "Ha!" there came three quiet little taps on the table--it is the middle table in the "Gray's-Inn  Coffee House," under the bust of the late Duke of W-ll-ngt-n. 

Even going so far as to disguise the exact relationship between people:

As I live, he here mentioned dear gr-nny's MAIDEN name.  Her maiden name was ----.  Her honored married name was ----.

"She married your great-gr-ndf-th-r the year Poseidon won the Newmarket Plate," Mr. Pinto dryly remarked.

Maybe this is not meant to be anyone in particular and is just a good gag.

Later, as the part of the story related to the title finally got moving (i.e., why does the little guillotine have a notch in its blade, why does the headless ghost seem so upset with the old man), to my surprise I did recognize the parody.  A fugitive is hiding in a convent in Paris – a clue right there – and is forced (by hypnotism) to leave it.  Lists begin to appear, and paragraphs composed of single sentences, short ones.  Some puzzling precision intrudes.

"And he came to No. 29 in the Rue Picpus--a house which then stood  between a court and garden--

"That is, there was a building of one story, with a great coach door.

"Then there was a court, around which were stables, coach-houses, offices.

"Then there was a house--a two-storied house, with a perron in front.

"Behind the house was a garden--a garden of two hundred and fifty French feet in length.

"And as one hundred feet of France equal one hundred and six feet of England, this garden, my friend, equaled exactly two hundred and sixty-five feet of British measure.

"In the center of the garden was a fountain and a statue--or, to speak more correctly, two statues.  One was recumbent,--a man.  Over him, saber in hand, stood a Woman.

"The man was Olofernes.  The woman was Judith.  From the head, from the trunk, the water gushed.  It was the taste of the doctor:--was it not a droll of taste?

I stop here because this is where I finally figured it out – this is V-ct-r H-g-!  Thackeray is having fun with Les Misérables, which had been both published and heroically translated into English only the year before.  I had not thought of Les Misérables as a sensation novel, but in the English context of course it is.  “If the fashion for sensation novels goes on, I tell you I will write one in fifty volumes” Thackeray promises at the end of the story, but sadly he died later that year.

For somewhat scarier public domain stories, see the Little Professor’s Halloween Horde of Horrible Happenings.  She has been blogging as the Little Professor for ten years now, longer than I have been alive.

"And I shall be deservedly hanged," say you, wishing to put an end to this prosing. - clever Thackeray

Perhaps I should mention that, whatever yesterday’s post might have suggested, I’m not so sure that Henry Esmond is William Thackeray’s best book.  For one thing, I’ve only read two of them, and he wrote a heap.  For another, I prefer Vanity Fair.  Henry Esmond is more technically accomplished.  How that translates into better and best, I’ll leave to others.

Perhaps I should not have mentioned any of this.  I leave all sorts of things unmentioned, and jokes unexplained.  Why else did I adopt Lil’ Thackeray as a mascot, as soon as I discovered him, forlorn and alone, at the end of Chapter IX of Vanity Fair.  Or not forlorn – he could be perfectly content.  Without the mask, it is hard to read his expression.

Henry Esmond begins with a mask.  Or almost begins.  This is the beginning of the novel’s second preface:

The actors in the old tragedies, as we read, piped their iambics to a tune, speaking from under a mask, and wearing stilts and a great head-dress.  'Twas thought the dignity of the Tragic Muse required these appurtenances, and that she was not to move except to a measure and cadence.

Esmond invokes Greek tragedy, and John Dryden, before turning to the Muse of History:

She too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to measure.  She too, in our age, busies herself with the affairs only of kings; waiting on them obsequiously and stately, as if she were but a mistress of court ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering of the affairs of the common people.  [A brilliant bit about “little wrinkled” Louis XIV is snipped]  I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be court-ridden?  Shall we see something of France and England besides Versailles and Windsor?

Esmond, writing long after the events of his memoir, sounds like a mid-twentieth century social historian, not that he writes about the common people himself.  Or, rather, he radically denies that the kings and heroes are any better or worse than anyone else.  No man is a hero to his valet, that’s the theme, although, in his own memoir, Henry Esmond is in fact a hero to his valet, which is a fine, fine joke.  Esmond continues: Queen Anne as a “hot, red-faced woman.  Cato, the Stoic Roman, is imagined “fuddling himself at a tavern with a wench on each knee.”  He ends this three page introduction with a vision of his own hanging:

"And I shall be deservedly hanged," say you, wishing to put an end to this prosing.  I don't say No.  I can't but accept the world as I find it, including a rope's end, as long as it is in fashion.

Thackeray’s novel is a sustained attack on the idea of heroism, a swing at Thomas Carlyle and others.  The Great Men are not so great, except perhaps for the unappreciated Henry Esmond, and the reader has some reason for doubt there, too.

The novel actually begins with another preface, by Esmond’s daughter.  She has apparently prepared her father’s memoir for publication in 1778.  Looking back, I’m amazed how much of the novel’s thematic material is packed into these first pages, the two prefaces, how much of even the plot is actually covered.  But the first-time reader has no idea who any of the characters are, or why Esmond is sneering at kings and queens, so it’s all just so much fog. 

We’re given a long paragraph, for example, on the history of Mrs. Thomas Tusher, a character who is never in the novel, not under that name, so even the attentive reader is unlikely to remember that we’ve already been told the end of her story.  This is exactly – exactly – the trick Nabokov uses in the John Ray, Jr. preface to Lolita (1955).  Thackeray, like Nabokov, is a supremely clever novelist.  Others can judge the value of cleverness in novels, the value of looking behind the mask to find the face, itself another mask.

Nobody reads it. - Henry Esmond, Thackeray's best book - a survey of opinion

Kind-hearted commenters have directed me to many other writers who have expressed their high opinion of The History of Henry Esmond.  Virginia Woolf thought it was Thackeray’s best novel, as did Anthony Trollope.

Walter Pater, in Appreciations (1889) calls it “a perfect fiction” (Newman’s Idea of a University is, in the same sentence, “the perfect handling of a theory”, and the Mallomar is “the perfect marshmallow-filled cookie”) – “Thackeray’s Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its interests.”  By its what, now?  Pater often loses me somewhere along the way.

Oscar Wilde declares that “Esmond is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself.”*  That “because” should make a fellow nervous.  I refer readers to the not-so-brief quotation from Henry Esmond I posted yesterday, and would be delighted to read a defense of its “beauty.”  Not what he meant; I know.

What all of these writers, even Trollope, a true follower of Thackeray, have in common is a particular interest in style, in writerly tricks and effects, in difficulty, what John Crowley calls “a skilled and unexpected use of the tools of fiction.”  Other writers, and critics like me, are delighted with the “how” of the book, while the “what” slips into the background.

Henry Esmond is, after all, filled with duels and deathbed confessions and kings in disguise, the usual melodramatic claptrap.  Am I supposed to take all of that seriously?  I do, actually, but that’s because of Thackeray’s writerly skill – all that fuss seems surprisingly natural.

Trollope, again, in Thackeray (1879):

I told Thackeray once that it was not only his best work, but so much the best, that there was none second to it.  “That was what I intended,” he said, “but I have failed.  Nobody reads it. After all, what does it matter?” he went on after awhile.  “If they like anything, one ought to be satisfied.  After all Esmond was a prig.”  Then he laughed and changed the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. (Ch. V, 124)

Gee, poor Thackeray.  Trollope, as I mentioned yesterday, was impressed by the difficulty of Thackeray’s task, his simulation of the language of the early 18th century, of Addison and Steele and Swift, all of whom are actually characters in the novel.  Trollope suspects that the feat was so difficult that it actually damaged Thackeray’s later books – once he had mastered this new hybrid style, he was never able to free himself from it.

I will never know, because I am never going to read those later novels.  Who are we kidding?  I’m just glad I somehow was convinced to read Henry Esmond.  It’s a bit like Melville’s Clarel – it’s hardly an injustice that it is read less, even a lot less, than Vanity Fair.  Esmond is a prig, and his story has no Becky Sharp.  It’s a specialized novel.  Modernists and postmodernists should all read it carefully, even if it damages their sense that they invented everything valuable in literature.

I had sort of planned to move back to Hawthorne tomorrow.  No one will complain is I spend one more day on Henry Esmond, will they?  After all, blog posts are awfully easy to skip.

* "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891) in The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1968, p. 280.

The conceptual purity of Thackeray's Henry Esmond

An idly curious question, to begin, for any English professors who wander by: is William Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852) teachable?  Everything is teachable, so what I really mean is, under what circumstances would you want to teach it?*  The novel is fraught, as they say, with difficulties.

Henry Esmond is absolutely brilliant, dazzling even, but dazzling only from a certain distance.  Page to page, sentence to sentence, it can look like an awkward, disorganized, prosaic mess.  I don’t expect anyone to get very far with this sample, even though it describes a reasonably thrilling heroic feat:

By the besiegers and besieged of Lille, some of the most brilliant feats of valor were performed that ever illustrated any war.  On the French side (whose gallantry was prodigious, the skill and bravery of Marshal Boufflers actually eclipsing those of his conqueror, the Prince of Savoy) may be mentioned that daring action of Messieurs de Luxembourg and Tournefort, who, with a body of horse and dragoons, carried powder into the town, of which the besieged were in extreme want, each soldier bringing a bag with forty pounds of powder behind him; with which perilous provision they engaged our own horse, faced the fire of the foot brought out to meet them: and though half of the men were blown up in the dreadful errand they rode on, a part of them got into the town with the succors of which the garrison was so much in want. (II.15, “General Webb Wins Battle of Wynendael”)

The passage is entirely typical of a part of the novel, at least.  The novel’s subtitle is A Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne, Written by Himself, which is accurate, up to a point.  The book is a novel by Thackeray, but also a memoir by Colonel Esmond, written in Virginia in 1740.  Both books describe Esmond’s peculiar childhood, his military exploits, and, in a gesture towards a novel-like plot, his unrequited love for his beautiful cousin.  The plot is superb, actually, but Thackeray keeps it a secret for about two-thirds of the novel.  It’s a “How far will a man go for a beautiful woman” sort of story.

The memoir, and thus the novel, is written with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the events of the War of Spanish Succession, the rise and fall of the Duke of Marlborough, and the political fortunes of the claimants to the English throne.  Or at least as familiar as the reader of 1740 would be, which means quite a bit more knowledgeable than the read of 1852, or 2010.  I have done my share of reading from the period, and still had to look up this and that.

The Duke of Marlborough, just as an example, is also referred to as His Grace, the Commander-in-Chief, Churchill, and – I’ve forgotten at least one more.  Esmond’s choice is based on the circumstance of the reference, and signifies Esmond’s curiously full range of attitude, from respect to contempt, towards the Duke.  None of this is explained.  Who, in 1740, would think that necessary?

It’s all so pure.**  The language is a simulacrum of that of the age of Queen Anne.  Esmond’s memoir is not written like a novel – there were none, not like we know them.  I wonder if the fictional composition date is a nod to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published the same year, and commonly called the first English novel.  Thackeray’s historical novel is not written like a Walter Scott novel, though, again, I suspect a direct reference, since a good part of Henry Esmond’s plot is about the restoration of the Stuarts.  When Robert Louis Stevenson chose to write historical novels, he picked the same historical thread.

Henry Esmond is an uncompromising conceptual novel of extraordinary facility.  Anthony Trollope, in his little 1879 book, Thackeray, is as amazed as I am: “No one who has not tried it can understand how great is the difficulty of mastering a phase of one’s own language other than that which habit has made familiar” (124-5).  Thackeray is stone-faced, and unforgiving to the reader, yet somehow creates a genuine novel, a masterpiece.

* The Little Professor described a list of “imaginary courses.”  Those Brockport kids should be signing petitions and staging sit-ins to get her to teach them, especially the one on Browning’s The Ring and the Book.  Undergrads never know what’s good for them.

**  The novel was originally published to look like an 18th century book, including an antiquarian typeface!

Nefarious novelists manipulate their readers' demand for sympathetic characters

Really, here's the most important reason to be careful about indulging in the entirely natural impulse to sympathize with the admirable and interesting characters in a novel.  It turns out that certain novelists are aware of this predilection and have learned to manipulate it for their own sinister ends.  One solution is to avoid all such books.  Use this post as a guide.  Another is to be cautious.  Very cautious.  One can't be too safe.

Vladimir Nabokov, for example.  In Lolita (1955), a murderous pedophile writes his confession.  He (Humbert Humbert, and Vladimir Nabokov) uses every trick in the book, and invents a few new ones.  Readers who are not extremely vigilant almost inevitably find themselves relaxing their guard.  HH is so erudite, and there are worse monsters in the world, and - well, there's a lot more like that.  Most importantly, we spend most of the first-person novel with him, and he's not only charming, but dazzling, a self-pitying master of flimflammery.  We slip into the narrator's world.  Isn't that what we're supposed to do in a novel?

Lolita is a useful case because it is actually about readerly sympathy.  Taking the book as a real document, the author is justifying his crimes to someone, asking someone to forgive him, appealing for sympathy.  Taking the book as a novel, the reader often has to struggle to escape the natural pull of sympathy.  Whether or not HH, at the end of the novel, begins to understand the true nature of his own crimes is incidental to the way the device works.

Nabokov continued to explore this idea in the novels that followed Lolita. In Pnin (1957), the hapless Russian immigrant Professor Pnin is genuinely sympathetic, a brilliant, warm creation.  Many readers, indulging in their fellow-feeling for this marvelous character (see the end of Chapter Six, the punch bowl, unbelievable), never quite notice how he's being abused by the narrator, a certain "Vladimir Nabokov."  Poor Pnin, with a burst of creative solution-finding, actually has to flee the novel.  In Lolita, the villain hides behind false sympathy; in Pnin, behind real sympathy.  Pale Fire (1962) twists the idea in yet another direction.  Nabokov sure enjoyed the author-as-puppeteer metaphor.

Ford Madox Ford famously begins The Good Soldier (1915) with "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."  Now here, one thinks, with this story we'll find some first-rate sympathizin'.  "Poor Florence," the narrator calls his dead wife, again and again, and Captain Ashburnham is the model of an English gentleman, and "I loved Leonora always and, to-day, I would very cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it, in her service."  But in fact the characters turn out to be ridiculous, and the narrator himself loses sympathy for them as he tells the story - actually, because he tells the story.  The act of storytelling in this case destroys sympathy. 

And what, I ask you, is behind the inscrutable expression of Little William Thackeray, perched up there at the top of the blog?  He's keeping a careful eye on the readers of Vanity Fair (1847-48), watching them puzzle over exactly which characters are supposed to receive the reader's sympathy.  The most likable character is selfish and immoral; the other candidate is selfish and priggish.  The men are idiots or dishrags.  The narrator keeps telling us that everything's fine, what do we expect, that's just the way things are.

These are some of my all-time favorite books.  You may have noticed that these are all comic writers.  So the savvy sympathetic reader might want to avoid comic writers.  Dickens wanted his readers to like his characters, so he's safe.  I think.

All right, I'm tired of not liking anyone.  Tomorrow, I'm going to sympathize with sympathy.

* I want to recommend, as strongly as possible, Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift (1938), which is neither tricky, nor icy, nor icky, nor whatever other adjectives people use to diminish Nabokov.  It's a perfect Bildungsroman, and I have no idea why it's not more read.  The Chernyshevsky chapter alone is one of the best things Nabokov ever wrote.

My mascot, Little William Thackeray - don't take it all so seriously

Since I have been commending myself for my exemplary humility, I will take the opportunity to explain the internet icon I have been using for a while. This fellow:
That's a self-portrait of William Thackeray, which can be found at the end of Chapter IX of Vanity Fair. I don't look much like Thackeray - only the grinning mask, pointy-toed slippers, and over-sized head are accurate. But the lil' fella seems to capture a good part of the spirit of Wuthering Expectations. Whenever I see him, I remind myself not to take this business so seriously.

Why is he there? Thackeray has just introduced Miss Crawley, the well-to-do maiden aunt, and described how her relatives love her, "for she had a balance at her banker's which would have made her beloved anywhere". Then he switches, for the last paragraph, to the first person plural:

"What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the banker's! How tenderly we look at her faults if she is a relative (and may every reader have a score of such), what a kind good-natured old creature we find her!... How, when she comes to pay us a visit, we generally find an opportunity to let our friends know her station in the world! We say (and with perfect truth) I wish I had Miss MacWhirter's signature to a cheque for five thousand pounds. She wouldn't miss it, says your wife. She is my aunt, say you, in an easy careless way, when your friend asks if Miss MacWhirter is any relative."

Now that's a dirty trick. What happened to "we"? Now it's "you". It's almost as if Thackeray is trying to implicate me, the reader, in this low behavior. Me! "[A]nd with perfect truth"! Now the aunt (not the aunt in the story, but Thackeray's aunt, or possibly my aunt) comes to visit:

"What a good fire there is in her room when she comes to pay you a visit, although your wife laces her stays without one! The house during her stay assumes a festive, neat, warm, jovial, snug appearance not visible at other seasons. You yourself, dear sir, forget to go to sleep after dinner, and find yourself all of a sudden (though you invariably lose) very fond of a rubber. What good dinners you have--game every day, Malmsey-Madeira, and no end of fish from London."

There's that "you" again - "You yourself", even. The end of the chapter:

"Ah, gracious powers! I wish you would send me an old aunt--a maiden aunt--an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage, and a front of light coffee-coloured hair--how my children should work workbags for her, and my Julia and I would make her comfortable! Sweet--sweet vision! Foolish--foolish dream!"

And then we have stony-faced little Thackeray, mask in hand. Why, it seems that the jokey tone was just a mask. He was serious after all. Unless the drawing is also a joke (which it is). The Thackeray portrait, like the name of the blog in a way, helps me tamp down the vanity a bit.

For whatever reason, I never wrote about this book, an outrageous masterpiece about which I had been misled in various ways. I will recommend Mr. Virus's posts at Blogging the Canon on this book, fine reading all, my favorite being the inspirational hands-on research into the exact composition of rack punch.

Are the Christmas books of Charles Dickens Christian? How about Vanity Fair?

What got me thinking about all this was, among other things, Charles Dickens’s second Christmas book, The Chimes (1844), his follow-up to the huge success of A Christmas Carol. I came up with a simple-minded question – are the Christmas books Christian? I mean, I know that’s the background, but how far back? What ethical message do they contain that is not shared by non-Christians, secular or religious? Does Scrooge become a churchgoer? Does it matter?

I’ll just assume that everyone knows how A Christmas Carol goes, and save The Chimes for later. See below on that topic. Anyway, what does Scrooge learn? Be less selfish, more attentive, more charitable, less concerned with money. Who disagrees? Objectivists, please go away.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol right in the middle of the serialization of Martin Chuzzlewit, which is itself a dissertation on and classification of human selfishness. The novel contains a couple of proto-Scrooges. One of the selfless characters likes to play the organ during church, but otherwise the novel seems virtually religion-free.

I don’t know anything about Dickens’s own religious views, and don’t much care to lean more, but the ethics of his books are humanist. That seems pretty clear. Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop, dies in a church. If I remember correctly, it’s an antique Catholic church that's been converted into a dwelling. That may be symbolical of something. This is in a novel that invokes The Pilgrim's Progress, my benchmark for at least one type of truly Christian fiction, by name. The ethics of Charles Dickens, whatever their source, are a long way from those of John Bunyan.

Two of Balzac’s finest stories, neither of which made it into the Big Balzac Blowout, unfortunately, are about the symbolic power of the Catholic Mass. “An Incident in the Reign of Terror” is about persecuted Catholics who secretly perform Mass during the French Revolution; “The Atheist’s Mass” is about just what is says in the title, a dedicated, public atheist who secretly attends mass once a year. Yet in some Balzac novels, there is hardly a reminder that the Catholic Church exists. Balzac seems like a humanist, as well.

I should stick with English or American examples. The Church in France is a tarpit for the outsider. I mean, the basis for Chateaubriand's great post-Revolutionary apology for Christianity is that he likes the sound of the bells. Let me turn to a remarkable letter from William Thackeray to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth. Mrs. C-S has apparently been complaining that one of the characters in Vanity Fair is selfish, which is beyond hilarious, but anyway, here's part of his reply:

"What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase) greedy pompous mean perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior virtue... [The selfish character] has at present a quality above most people whizz: LOVE - by wh she shall be saved. Save me, save me too O my God and Father, cleanse my heart and teach me my duty." (Vanity Fair, Norton Critical Edition, p. 699)

I am wary about taking this letter entirely at its face value; nevertheless it was a great surprise to me. This is what I was getting at yesterday, I think, but I fear I have dived into a deep pool. I may have to spend next week splashing about in it.

Rohan Maitzen is going to host a discussion of The Chimes over at The Valve. When she's involved, the Zizek and Derrida stuff seems to stay away, so it should be a friendly and useful discussion. The Chimes has nothing like the perfection of A Christmas Carol, but it is most interesting. 100 pages, including illustrations, in the edition I read. Please join in. Note that this "Christmas" story is set on New Year's Eve, which I guess does put it somewhere in the Twelve Days of Christmas.