When the phone rang and I learned I’d been called on to interview Charles Dickens, the first noise in my mind was the callow exclamation I imagine would have passed through anyone’s mind: But I didn’t know he was still alive! Was this unreasonable? Dickens had always evoked, for me, a world that seemed thoroughly severed from my own, and yet I could think of other cases where people who’d inhabited similarly removed worlds–Paul McCartney, say, or Mikhail Gorbachev–had appeared on TV, in my own time, and I’d not felt nonplussed at all. Finally, I deadened my doubts by thinking of Chuck Berry, a figure whose world had seemed perfectly sealed off from mine, while still, with little difficulty, I could conceive of him as a man who’d been extant in the twenty first century.
As a rule, imagination, when faced with any temporal concept, makes do with spatial symbols, so, considering my place relative to Dickens on a measure as abstract as “human history,” my internal screen mustered a simple line graph (as did yours… no?) which, sometimes, segued into a road (ditto?), the start of which stretched behind me then blurred into a conveniently painted “heat-haze”. Which isn’t to say my “road” was a failure–upon it I could see Dickens crammed up against Berry, then both of them pushed against the backs of my feet in this, possibly brief, technological, industrial epoch, which is really only the most recent outlier of history: the white rim of the toenail from which the giant’s leg and long body stretches backwards over hundreds of clouded millennia while, here, among the beast’s toes, Dickens, my near coeval, avails himself of railways and sewage systems; men no longer wear powdered wigs; nobody is publicly hung, drawn and quartered; and slavery has been abolished, more or less.
I came to accept, then, that I had no reason to be put out if the phone rang in the small hours and an old man’s rasp demanded I visit Dickens, or (this I thought as I crawled in search of a violet, diamond patterned shirt) seeing Dickens interviewed on Youtube, or Dickens as a talking head on TV, answering softball questions about himself.
I worried that, being so long out of public life, and not having published anything for so long, he must have become a gloomy, misanthropic old patriarch. Journalistically, a tough assignment. As with many figures who’d only been at the periphery of my interests, I was surprised by how much I didn’t know: that he’d founded and patronized an institution for “fallen” women; that for more than half a century he’d lived in a suburb of New York… I was surprised to learn he’d chosen NY because, to my knowledge, he’d always been ambivalent about America. That’s the impression I got from what I knew of American Notes. He’d originally emigrated, predictably I guess, to evade the Nazis and, not having been interested enough in his reputation by that time to have published anything in more than a half century, he probably didn’t care if people back home threw the “T” or “C” words at him. To be honest, I think the Nazis might have been gentle with Dickens: he did create, in Fagin, the world’s second-best-loved anti-Semitic archetype after Shylock (although a later trawl through Wikipedia revealed he’d tried to make amends for it towards the end of his published career, writing some honorable Jews into Our Mutual Friend–perhaps they got to him?).
I hadn’t actually read Our Mutual Friend before my abrupt call-up (which ended several months of neglect and inadmissible suffering) and that was another cause for anxiety: I wasn’t exactly the most boned-up interviewer ever regarding the Dickens oeuvre. I’d read Oliver Twist (which, actually, I didn’t like), Great Expectations (better), about a fifth of David Copperfield and, of course, I was familiar with A Christmas Carol (which I mainly hated). Otherwise I’d let Dickens sermonize, or satirize, or simper, or whatever he did, somewhere out of my ken until now, un-forewarned, I was called on to do this interview, I needed a comprehensive and conversational knowledge of the works, and lacked the time to imbibe. I’d been granted a miserly one day before my flight, most of which I spent looking for corners in my flat to conceal contraband… Praises to Wikipedia for its comprehensive overview of characters and plotlines, all of which I printed out and stapled into four portly wads with the intention of studying and memorizing on the plane.
Pausing from these notes, on the train to Heathrow, I tried to picture Dickens as he’d look now: an extremely old man, perhaps bed-ridden and speechless, not having conversed with anyone throughout such a long solitude. I worried that he might just lie there, or stare at the ceiling, which would kill dead all my journalistic aspirations. I jotted potential questions:
- Who, in literature or film, do you regard as your successor?
- Did you see, Oliver!? Reactions?
- Have you read Orwell’s or Chesterton’s essays on you?
…it had also occurred to me that Dickens would view allowing me into his home as an extreme concession to outside pressures and therefore I should cover my imposture, and my ignorance, with a goodwill gift. I figured it would be a nice gesture if I gave him a contemporary book that could act as an emissary to him from my own time and so, after dismissing a mental shelf of more recent titles, I settled on Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon… OK, it’s maybe forty years old, but I think it still somehow captures the tint and timbre of our world, as I see it, and those who built upon its vision later were never really able to throw their borders wide enough to get outside the borders laid down in that book, back then, in the 1970’s. To be honest, I found it hard-going, but I assumed Dickens was a man of superlative intellectual gifts and would have far less trouble than I had getting the juice out of it.
I’d arrived early in London and detoured into the center. There are plenty of bookshops in central London, all of which would have offered what I wanted, but I chose to hit the Waterstones near Piccadilly Circus, not wanting to trample on the livelihoods of independent booksellers. Upstairs I found Pynchon’s little section easily. The Vintage version of Gravity’s Rainbow had the most attractive cover, I thought, consisting of small, intricate cartoons, like a kind of sinister and philosophically literate Where’s Wally? and I could pretty much see, at this point, the author himself, standing close behind, just out of my peripheral vision; not really seeing, just kind of knowing he was there, nodding in an avuncular way, twirling his Dali moustache, saying something like: “Go for it, my boy!”
How couldn’t I?
I didn’t want to risk hidden cameras catching me as I deposited the item into my backpack and so–as you would have done–I opted to behave in a confident, bland-seeming way and just walk out of the shop, object in hand, and because the book was not for my own pleasure, because, ultimately, it wasn’t even a book I liked, I didn’t have to go through the self-questioning and doubt of common filching and this would make me appear strikingly, almost obnoxiously, innocent. You see: I was lacking funds and wasn’t to be paid until after the interview (the American magazine that commissioned the piece had arranged my flight but that was where it ended)… and this may strike you as a pointlessly reckless way to proceed considering all I had at stake (my happiness, my health, I could go on) but I could no longer imagine this interview taking place without this offering, and I could vividly picture myself standing on an old, cold road pleading with an adamantine gate.
All the way down the stairs, past the checkout, my method panned out pretty well–the checkout was manned by a woman with dyed black hair, but it–the method–failed me, and just on the cusp of the sliding door; then a “Hey!” and a palm clamped on my book-wielding shoulder. Out from my shoulder there’d developed a tall security guard–one of the tallest men I’ve ever seen! He wore a bored expression and said in a monotone, slightly Second Language voice, “Please come with me, sir.”
At the back of the shop, a short, fattish, red-faced man was called. Unlike the security guard, he seemed genuinely angry: “OK, scumbag. Let’s see what you got.” He took a swivel chair on the other side of a table that hemmed me against a wall. I showed him the book. He looked down at it then up at me.
“This is a big, difficult book. Can you actually read this?”
He opened to about a third of the way.
“OK [finger sliding down page] Culverts. Do you know what culverts means?”
“No.”
“I bet.”
I wanted to say, “It’s not for me. It’s for Charles Dickens,” but I had a picture in my mind of the ridicule and cruelty that would follow, so I kept my peace. After a few seconds, he moved his lips, as if he were going ask another question, but instead he swiveled towards the security guard, muttered, “Sod this,” and, after opining some derogatory things about me, waddled out of the room to phone the police. The security guard looked down at me and smiled the most subtly polyhedral smile possible.
My arresting officers, one tall with a carbuncle on his glabella, and one stocky, escorted me into the police station. My notes were typed; my property confiscated. They asked if I wanted to make a call but I couldn’t name anyone to receive it. They took my photograph and fingerprints. Then I was questioned by a mustachioed officer whose smile just told me that he was into things like fisting and eating shit and stuff he was when off-duty.
The cell wasn’t too bad in itself, but its blandness was upset, painfully, by the thought of my receding interview, that my flight to New York (and, with it, in fact, my last chance of satisfaction in life) would leave in under three hours. I tried to remember the names and personalities of Dickens’s characters from my notes, which novel each featured in, what happened in those novels, but the books turned out not to be water-tight and I found that, all the time I’d been in London, the characters and events had been sloshing freely from one book to another: Mr Sleary is taking Tiny Tim out to pick pockets. Who’s this old man? Tough luck–today’s quarry has been Grandfather Smallweed and he’s seen you hobbling away, Tim. “Oh, you’ll regret this!”–he shakes a bird-like fist at you. Now both the wallet and Mr Sleary are nowhere to be seen. Poor Tim diminishes into a dismal dream, but–Beware!–old Smallweed has pulled back a crimson curtain and clinked open a cage door and Mr. Magwitch emerges into the light. He’s walking on all fours with his nose to the road. He’s inspecting every door with burning, azure, mindless eyes. His canines are longer than your tibias, Tim–Oh! You’ll be sorry…
A half hour later, maybe, the door opened and an officer entered. He was a bald man who didn’t blink and the corners of his mouth seemed stretched, too far, into an immobile mask of euphoria. Otherwise, his shape and hairlessness made him resemble a huge baby. He sat opposite me and directed a trembling right hand toward his jacket’s inside pocket. Locating something in there, he said, “hur-hur,” then bore from his pocket a–no… yes–a sausage of about twenty centimeters; cold, unwrapped, and richly dappled with pocket lint. His eyes were orbicular and webbed with red veins. “Mind if I…[gesture]?”–and with impressive zest he put the top end of the victual in his mouth. From where I sat I could see a big ball of fuzz, about the size of a macadamia nut, suckling the viand’s lower end. He did his best to take his time, making noises between chomps like, “mmmm… mmmm,” hosannas to gustatory joy, while I sat rigid. I heard footfalls quicken in the corridor then disappear. When the whole of the sausage had been consumed the officer leaned back, unblinking, and said in a slightly too loud voice: “Mmm, fucking marvelous!… Why are you here?”
He leaned forward: “…………………………..?”
He cleared his throat: “Why are you here, young man?”
“I shoplifted a book to give to Charles Dickens.”
“Hmm…” The officer made a face my father had often made, one that corresponded well with the statement, “I have just bought a vacuum cleaner and found that there are no instructions in the box.” He blinked and seemed to forget me, falling back into an awake doze, mumbling things like, “mmm-mmm. Fucking delectable, indeed” and other such botched genteelisms that I started to wonder what kind of life he’d had.
He resumed talking, maybe to himself, and grew animated again. He spoke with increasing speed, sometimes laughed, and when he laughed, and threw up his hands, his pupils bobbed to the back of his head like a pair of compasses–
“So, normally a normal criminal isn’t about to just grab some bag off a chair, grab some shopping bag in public because it could be a, anything–a hairdryer or– one of the Greeks said something about it, look it up–but now he’s fucking, so messed up that– you know it’s like a fucking, it’s like it’s a challenge, so he–he purloins this bag and tears onto the street and these three guys following him, and he gets into this alley and there’s this huge, fucking, huge bodybuilder walking this–this little toy poodle on this–it’s like a ribbon–it’s not a dog, it’s a weasel inbred with a fucking sheep, so he’s swerving this way and this little weasel is swerving–like this–and they go BHWOOOGH–and the bag goes spinning–spinning fucking through the air, into the fucking bodybuilder’s fucking–his phallus–and would you like to guess what’s in the bag? A fucking bag of buttons and a kid’s toy frog!…”
And he laughed, reliving the moment’s absurdity. And we both fell quiet.
His eyes had turned watery and pink like the glistening ends of a pair of frankfurters–an unhappy role-reversal there. I looked at the clock and saw I had less than half an hour before my flight. I groaned and told the officer that, while I was sitting in this cell with him I wasn’t doing nothing: I was actually missing a flight to New York, and with that flight, I was missing the name-making opportunity to be the first person to interview Charles Dickens this century.
“How the fuck does one get to do that?”
I told him I was trying to make my name as a writer. I’d published a few of my pieces on the internet. That’s probably where they’d found me out and decided I’d be the guy for the job. The officer told me he was also a writer, in his own fashion: He’d written a long manifesto about culture, history, and politics and sent it out to various newspapers and magazines. It turned out, though, that the whole of the mainstream media had pretty much closed ranks against him so, finally, he’d published his piece on a blog called The Unforgiveable Truth and he recommended I check it out once I got the fuck out of this shithole.
Then he told me about the things he’d discovered and uncovered while he was researching for his manifesto: that the outcomes of the first and second world wars could be found all mapped out and possibly even planned in a book written way back in the eighteen hundreds; that the Third Reich, despite all its outward projections, was actually a Zionist regime; that there was a five mile train filled with these fucking shackles and chains and whips and yokes that would one day be used to transport the entire population of London, and surrounding areas, down into a vast underground synagogue. Right now he was only a PCSO (Police Community Skilled Officer) but he predicted soon he’d be a full constable, and later a sergeant, and then he’d be even deeper in the bowels of this terrifying machine. It was while he was telling me about this blinking, purple light he saw from time to time, usually assuming a diamond shape, that I began to feel my mind overtaken by the following revelation: that while I’d, by now, almost certainly lost Mr. Dickens (whom, an hour past, I’d thought of as my last and only lifeline), I’d nevertheless found myself in the orbit of an important sage…
Now I listened, fidgeting, trying not to let my foot stamp excitedly as the worldly revelations issued forth, filling the space of the cell, guided on by those unblinking sausage-y eyeballs. The man was like a tumbler filled with knowledge and all you had to do was tilt him this way or that and dazzling perceptions and explanations would flow forth. Just occasionally I needed to prod him awake with questions when his flow became muddied with sleep and his round face began to nod forward. (Here’s another thing: both of us suffered from an identical dread that, if we failed to play our cards right, we’d slide onto another plane of reality and never be able to crawl back again.)
As so often happens, Bad Luck (my co-pilot) intervened after what seemed like only a half hour delivering to my door the same stocky officer who’d escorted me into the station. Now to tell me to get lost. When he saw the PCSO in the cell his back straightened as if an electrical current had been switched on:
“What the shit are you doing here?”
The officer who’d eaten the sausage raised his hands as if fearing a slap. Then he stood up, back bent into a kind of bow and shuffled past the officer and out of the cell. The other officer followed him to the end of the corridor with his eyeball until the footfalls became inaudible. Just as you would have done, I pleaded to be allowed to stay in the cell and to let the PCSO stay in with me, but that, said the officer, was absolutely out of the question, as well being a singularly weird thing to request… to begin with… dickwad.
Outside, in London’s stale grey light I realized I hadn’t asked the PCSO’s email or phone number (how adroitly I defeat myself!). Yet, with his words gripped tight in my memory, like a ribbon around my finger, or leprechaun in my hand, I was optimistic; perhaps more optimistic than I’d ever been about anything before in my life. And can anyone really ask for more than that? From life. You see, a second thought, like a suddenly released scent, had become manifest in my mind while I’d been in the cell: I could record the sage’s insights and discoveries, memorize and annotate them, then present them to my American editors, and ultimately the whole reading world, and beyond, as the reflections and revelations of the elderly Charles Dickens, no?
Let’s skip to the following day: back in my home city and with a court appearance set for about a month hence. That morning I’d gone to a bookstore and swiped two Dickens novels so that I could get a more solid sense of the writer’s style and thereby raise the overall authenticity effect in my interview write-up. At random I picked Bleak House and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The latter is the famously unfinished “last” novel and, as I thumbed it for the first time, it became clear just why Dickens had been unable to reach a conclusion… but here I must digress:
There’s a theory sometimes palpated around the edges of academia that great writers create holistic visual pictures in their works which go way beyond the physical text of the book, and that sometimes a really skilled, really artistic reader can experience these visions in toto. I think this is what Roberto Bolaño was getting at when he proposed a remake of (the film I’ll call) Mesozoic Safari (for purely pedantic accuracy reasons) wherein no dinosaurs appear. Living dinosaurs are not even alluded to. All the viewer will see is Dr. Grant waking up, somewhere in Utah, brewing coffee then bringing the pot to where fellow paleontologist Dr. Sattler is sitting, who’s fretting about a nice boy in their area who’s been spotted hanging out with a rich old drug addict she thinks will be a bad influence on him. Dr. Grant shrugs away her misgivings, saying something like, “He’s not a kid anymore,” and Sattler sighs into her coffee and says something like, “I know. Life’s what you make of it.” The film continues like this for three or four hours, then the credits roll, and yet, in the midst of it all, the audience is made to become anxiously aware, without knowing how or why, that there are rapacious dinosaurs somewhere, perhaps not in Dr. Grant’s vicinity, perhaps not even within a two hundred mile radius of Dr. Grant (who is, meanwhile, filmed doing things like negotiating with his university about funding for an excavation project on the border between Garfield and Wayne counties) but the dinosaurs are somehow still crushingly there, inexplicably, and causing terror and death already in some undisclosed cinematic hinterland.
This is the only way I can think of to explain exactly how I was able to understand why Dickens had been unable to finish Edwin Drood. The first pages were straightforward enough: squalid, sad London; John Jasper leaving an opium den. A little further along, however, I noticed that Dickens, in amongst these surface evocations, was leaving these sorts of cracks and fissures in the paragraphs which expanded as I read on, wide enough to let the teeth and fingers of unvoiced meanings slide up into my own air. Early on, I noticed Dickens offering tacit support for Virginia Woolf. Surprisingly, I also detected an approving nod for Albert Camus. In the next chapter I made out a ditch full of men, some living, some dead, the living and dead intermingling, the living struggling outward through the sea of dying. A few pages later I saw enormous posters along miles of walls showing a mustachioed man in uniform licking his lips, his fingers clenched into a fist. As I skimmed past the book’s half-way point I picked up hints of conniptions in Africa (The Congo? Rwanda perhaps?), the invention of the World Wide Web (with the usual anxieties concerning its effect on human brains), then I reached a very nineteenth-century, very orientalist, kind of panorama showing a group of Arabs, some of whom held severed heads by the hair and were swinging them around like students with lunchboxes (a reference to Islamic jihad, one would have to assume). After that, things became abstract and incomprehensible for me. Thin lines ran parallel for meters or miles (“lanes of light,” Dickens says) all positioned in some, no doubt, meaningful pattern, but not one I could decode–although I picked up on a few split-second intimations: strange methods of violence, crimson water flowing through under-road pipes, people who didn’t look like people, then the book’s abrupt, horrified, cessation.
I ignored the grumbling hunger in my intestines and moved to Bleak House. (I couldn’t recall the last time I’d eaten; certainly not since my meeting with the sage. A month earlier I’d been so skeletal people would turn to each other as they walked past me, and whisper, or they’d look away as if my existence embarrassed them; I reminded them that suffering is as imminent, always, as nakedness.)
This book was a quieter work: The descriptions of smoggy London streets seemed familiarly, one could say predictably, “Dickensian.” I read through about thirty pages and began to wonder if, perhaps, this one would disclose no particular message for me. Yet, on the edge of putting the book aside, I became sensible of a deceptively subtle incongruity I’d been too impatient to process until the first few chapters had shifted from my right hand to my left. London’s streets appeared, in Bleak House, to be falsely straight and uniform, in some places fully giving way to a grid system. This, then, was the grand entrance: London, in Dickens’s vision, had been subtly supplanted by New York, my New York, and having noticed this, the streets filled with cars and yellow taxis and a plane flew overhead. With this it also occurred to me that, all through the book so far–like a child’s hidden word-search solution that suddenly breaks the surface, like (for I lack time to un-mix metaphors), like a whale–I’d been encountering, in every scene, almost every page, the exact same old man. I knew he couldn’t have been manifest in the book’s physical sentences because he wore a polo shirt and a blue tracksuit. He never spoke. He lay on a big, almost luxurious bed… One doesn’t have to be a genius to see that this was the writer’s “cameo,” even though the iconic beard was gone (he was now completely hairless). He lay, tiny and skeletal, inside a white room, the whiteness of the walls interrupted by a few paintings, mostly landscapes, no portraits, and behind him to the right, a grandfather clock with no hands and its face in the form of an eye.
Occasionally his nurses, Persephone Rosehip (who often speaks of her hallucinations) and Cinnamon Fang (whose knitted frog stares from her bag with sad, glazed, button eyes), enter his room to help him with exercises or to administer his medicines. That Dickens should have ended up in America now made perfect sense: If the world’s imperial and economic fountainhead had been set in London in the nineteenth century it had long since been transplanted to New York, where it remains, and Dickens had simply followed it there. Perhaps he felt spiritually depleted except when close to the power source, or perhaps the power source had wanted to keep Dickens close to itself.
It seemed he’d brought together a small team of almost excessively dedicated helpers (henchmen, disciples) who helped maintain his rich seclusion in the US. Dickens loathes and is sickened by any kind of loud noise and so, when he requires something, he turns a handle by his bed and a diamond-shaped light pulsates in the relevant team member’s cabin. This may seem an ineffectual way of calling for attention–if the team member should be asleep, for example–but, apparently, everyone has trained him or herself to jump up, wide-eyed, whenever a purple diamond appears, blinking in his or her dreams. Sometimes he rants and raves. The nurses say he has disturbed fantasies. Sometimes he resembles, for them, nothing more than a shrieking skull…
I was sitting in bed, gazing into a grey-shadowed fold in my sheet and, as I became self-conscious, this vision I’ve tried to describe drained of all clarity. Something had clicked off in the universe and my room had turned languid and dull. I reflected that Dickens would have been waiting for me, anticipating me, and this thought pinched unpleasantly: the first throb of regret since I took on this project. Dickens had made that effort for me (no matter how accurately or inaccurately I’d envisioned his appearance and circumstances). He’d hobbled from his bed to greet me, then he would have realized I was not coming, that I, not he, was the one who’d reneged, and probably he’d been glad to have been spared this intrusion into his solitude and had chortled or cackled to himself, confirmed in his view of human venality, as he turned from his doorway and staggered, slowly, slowly, back to his silent, capacious room. When the door shut behind him all the colors seeped into one and dissolved in front of my eyes and I nodded towards a frustrated sleep.
Into this void came another disruption: an incessant, arrhythmic thumping on my door. I listened in a daze for a few moments, believing that if I could find a pattern I would become lucid. Why does he hit so hard? Howloudhowloudhowloud. Then I felt cheerful: this meant he’d come for me. Perhaps he’d forgiven me! I was fully dressed, and so I had no reason to keep the man waiting–out of my way, door!–and I greeted the gentleman who stood there.
As I’ve said, in my vision the bearded man of the iconic nineteenth-century photographs had been succeeded by the hairless, skeletal wraith I’d come to think of as “Dickens.” Now, as in a fright, that ghost had packed up and hurried off to make room for a new, brawnier figure. A shadow from the hall initially divided his face into two discrete segments and, as he came forward, the receding shade presented two pale eyes, like blue cataracts, that implied no thoughts. He had a missing pinkie-finger and a third blue eye, identical in size and color, was vividly tattooed on his hairless left wrist. His expression was almost an idiot’s but, at the same time, avid and, even, predatory.
“Come in, Mr. Dickens! Can I get you a drink? What do you think?… make yourself at home. You phoned? Take a look at anything you like around here. The toilet is on the right, over there. Here’s a chair. Are you hungry? I’m afraid there’s almost nothing in the cupboards…
Come in!”