Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens’ Reformed Scrooge, on ‘Christmas in My Heart’)

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”—Ebenezer Scrooge, realizing the error of his ways, in Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

The image accompanying this post shows Alistair Sim, who played Scrooge in what, to me, is still the definitive adaptation of Dickens’ Christmas classic.

Merry Christmas, my friends!

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, with an Early Version of Scrooge)

"In an old abbey town, a long, long while ago, there officiated as sexton and gravedigger in the churchyard one Gabriel Grub. He was an ill conditioned cross-grained, surly fellow, who consorted with nobody but himself and an old wicker-bottle which fitted into his large, deep waistcoat pocket....

"A little before twilight one Christmas Eve, Gabriel shouldered his spade, lighted his lantern, and betook himself toward the old churchyard, for he had a grave to finish by next morning, and feeling very low, he thought it might raise his spirits, perhaps, if he went on with his work at once....

"He strode along until he turned into the dark lane which led to the churchyard—a nice, gloomy, mournful place into which the towns-people did not care to go except in broad daylight, consequently he was not a little indignant to hear a young urchin roaring out some jolly song about a Merry Christmas. Gabriel waited until the boy came up, then rapped him over the head with his lantern five or six times to teach him to modulate his voice. And as the boy hurried away, with his hand to his head, Gabriel Grubb chuckled to himself and entered the churchyard, locking the gate behind him."--Charles Dickens, "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," from The Pickwick Papers (1836)

December 1836 was usually busy even for the naturally hyperkinetic Charles Dickens. On the 22^nd, his comic operetta The Village Coquettes was performed; earlier in the month, he befriended his eventual biographer, John Forster; and he anxiously awaited the birth of his first child, which would occur a week into the new year.

The last event was no small reason why the 24-year-old journalist-turned-novelist finished writing “Number 10” of The Pickwick Papers on December 23. The installment, which would appear in the December 31 serialization of the novel, was necessary to be whipped out--and fast--to take care of his new, and already growing, family.

The Pickwick Papers, Dickens recalled later, was written largely on the fly. But his many gifts of observation and narrative were already on display in his initial attempt at a novel, and the above quote offers a good opportunity to see these qualities at work. (I myself stumbled upon this story-within-a-novel in the Everyman's Library anthology, Christmas Stories.)

The quote offers something else, too, which I found surprising: The way his imagination reworked characters, even after initial publication.

The other day, listening to a radio performance of A Christmas Carol, I found myself saying many of the lines before the actors did. This was hardly due to my memory, but more likely testified to how much I--how much all of us--have heard the work over a lifetime. After so much exposure, responses to this work become automatic--unthinking, even. Maybe it helps to step back, to think of this thousand-times-told tale (60 film adaptations alone!) afresh.

That, in essence, is what the tale of Gabriel Grub can do. It is, according to theologian Mark D. Roberts, writing for the blog “Patheos,” “like looking at the charcoal sketches of an artist getting ready to paint a masterpiece.”

Both tales involve nasty old men so miserly that they scorn Christmas celebrations. Even their surnames epitomize their psyches: the hard “gs” in “Grub” and “Scrooge” indicate how obdurate they have become with age. Indeed, they are such lost cases that paranormal visitors (dream goblins in the first, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future in the second) are required to effect drastic change in them on Christmas Eve.

But Ebenezer Scrooge has made a far more vivid impression on readers over time than Gabriel Grub. You could argue, I suppose, that Grub’s occupation--gravedigging--already leaves him sharply inclined toward the vision of final things with which he’ll be afflicted this night. But more than this is at work.

First, “The Story of the Goblins” is only an “inset story” in a larger picaresque tale (Pickwick) heavily indebted to Cervantes, Smollett, and other novelists given to shambling stories. By the time of A Christmas Carol, Dickens had become adept at creating his own narrative structures.

Second, the passage of seven years had given him more perspective on this story that, according to a 2007 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, he had first heard about a Danish gravedigger. The ills of the Industrial Revolution were more widespread than even Dickens himself--famously, one of its early victims as a child worker in a shoeblacking factory and warehouse--suspected. The Gabriel Grubs of this world were not merely spiritually dead themselves, he realized, but caused the same condition in others.

Third, an entire novel allowed him to draw out the full psychological implications of the story and give the protagonist a deeper, more understandable background. He could also render in greater detail how obsession with money (a condition with which he had become increasingly familiar with because of the need to provide for his family) could deform lives.

Fourth, the novel allowed Dickens to pile on plot developments so shattering that they could effect an instantaneous change in his protagonist. Grub, fearing his experience with the goblins will make him the laughingstock of the community, disappears for a decade before returning virtually unrecognizable. The change in Scrooge is overnight, enabling a more rapid conclusion--and the possibility of endless theatrical interpretations that would have overjoyed this most theater-loving of novelists.

Quote of the Day (Maeve Brennan, on Christmas “Waifs”)

“It was shameful thing to be a waif, but it was also mysterious. There was no accounting for it or defining it, and over and over again she was drawn back to her original idea—that waifs were simply people who had been squeezed off the train because there was no room for them. They had lost their tickets. Some of them never had owned a ticket. Perhaps their parents had failed to equip them with a ticket. Poor things, they were stranded. During ordinary times of the year, they could hide their plight. But at Christmas, when the train drew up for that hour of recollection and revelation, how the waifs stood out, burning in their solitude. Every Christmas Day (said Isobel to herself, smiling whimsically) was a station on the journey of life….She, Isobel, looked them all over and decided which ones to invite into her own lighted carriage. She liked to think that she occupied a first-class carriage—their red-brick house in Herbert’s Retreat, solid, charming, waxed and polished, well heated, filled with flowers, stocked with glass and silver and clean towels.”—Maeve Brennan, from “The Joker,” in The Rose Garden: Short Stories (2000)

In Isobel’s formulation, waifs simply don’t fit in anywhere. The same might be said for longtime New Yorker contributor Maeve Brennan (1917-1993), who created a slim but choice body of short stories and “Talk of the Town” pieces but died in relative obscurity.

I first came across Brennan in her posthumous short-story collection set in her native Dublin, Springs of Affection (1997). To my knowledge, Brennan—who came to the U.S. when her father was appointed first Irish ambassador to the U.S.—published two Christmas stories. “Christmas Eve,” in Springs of Affection, is written through the eyes of a child and the mother who wants to protect her from life’s sadness. It’s a lovely piece whose nostalgia serves as slim but necessary gauze covering deep, ordinary family unhappiness.

“The Joker,” which appeared in the December 27, 1952 issue of The New Yorker, is different in tone. “Herbert’s Retreat” was inspired by Sneden’s Landing, a Rockland County, N.Y. community that, over the years, has become a kind of arts enclave, with such famous residents as Gerald and Sara Murphy (the Riviera expatriates who served as the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night), Angelina Jolie, and Al Pacino.

Already, by the end of the paragraph quoted above, Brennan telegraphs that Isobel fancies herself a kind of Lady Bountiful. Instead of three magi, it’s three “waifs” who come to her cottage.

In his warm and perceptive appreciation of his colleague prefacing Springs of Affection, New Yorker fiction editor (and short-story writer) William Maxwell finds some of Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories to be “satirical in tone, and…heavy-handed.” Well, “The Joker” is satirical, but I prefer “tough-minded” to “heavy-handed” in describing its impact.

Its sentences, dense with detail, summon a world of gentility—even if, as in this case, it results more from a husband’s high corporate position rather than earlier generations' inherited wealth—and unconscious condescension: “The tablecloth was of stiff, icy white damask, and the centerpiece—of holly and ivy and full-blown blood-red roses—bloomed and flamed and cast a hundred small shadows trembling among the crystal and the silver.”

According to recollections by Brennan’s niece, Yvonne Jerrold, the writer did not conform to the conservative mores expected of women in deValera-era Ireland. Part of her Catholic education, however, must have left a bone-deep impression, for Brennan’s portrait of Isobel shows a modern, female Pharisee, who fulfills the letter but not the spirit of the religious law: “She felt it was only fair that she should help those less fortunate than herself, though there was a point where she drew the line. She never gave money casually on the street, and her maids had strict orders to shut the door to beggars. ‘There are places where these people can apply for help,’ she said.”

These people…places they could apply for help…Isobel would be horrified by the suggestion, but you can hear an echo of Ebenezer Scrooge’s inquiry about whether the workhouses and the Poor Law weren’t still in effect. It turns out that she’s also somewhat like Mrs. Jellyby from Dickens' Bleak House: i.e., someone all for humanity in the abstract, but not in the nearby, smelly, needy flesh.

Of the three “waifs,” Vincent Lace—Irish would-be poet, failed academic, confirmed drunk—is the most finely wrought. You sense from his pretensions (even the surname suggests insubstantiality and “lace-curtain Irish”) that this was a type Brennan knew all too well.

The fact is that Isobel really does not care for the waifs she’s invited. And when a fourth unexpected visitor that she treats as another waif turns out to be “the joker” of the title, Isobel discovers that those she invited return her ill opinion.

It’s bad enough that Isobel’s sense of philanthropy springs from misplaced pride—an instinct to guard against especially in this season. But she also exhibits either little compassion for the forces that brought “the waifs” to their present state, or appreciation for what makes them human beings in the first place.

I’m not sure why this story is not anthologized more. Even the man Brennan eventually wed, in a disastrous misalliance, St. Clair McKelway, had a “Talk of the Town” casual reprinted in Christmas at the New Yorker. Brennan’s tale deserves to be read, and the fine career and warm personality that preceded her own waif-like ending (she died homeless and destitute after a number of years of alcoholism and mental illness) deserve to be remembered.

Quote of the Day (Lisa Toland, on How Scrooge’s World Remains With Us)

“While poor children in developed nations are mostly those living in former industrial centers, worldwide poverty and exploitation have even more faces. These are the modern-day Tiny Tims. Our London is any metropolitan area in the world. Our Bob Cratchits are in the United States and Europe, but also in Nigeria, Thailand, and North Korea. For a great percentage of the world—and especially for children—the current recession is not a new experience of great need; many have lived in poverty for generations, even centuries. Theirs is an unending recession.”—Lisa Toland, “The Darker Side of A Christmas Carol,” Christianity Today, December 2009

So long as somebody, somewhere, justifies indifference to their fellow man by asking if the government doesn’t do enough for them; so long as these individuals, taking it a step further, ever declare, by deeds if not words, that “greed is good”; and so long as the belief that a spark exists in each of us enabling an 11th-hour reprieve of our lives—A Christmas Carol will not go out of date.

And I mean A Christmas Carol in all its variations. It’s a Wonderful Life is, of course, an American version of the tale, with Mr. Potter an unredeemed Ebenezer Scrooge. 

(I was just told today, at lunch, about a Saturday Night Live skit of years past in which the crew comes back to tidy up the major loose end of the latter film. A sample line from this “fabled lost ending”—George Bailey returning to announce, “I want a piece of you, Potter!”—gives an idea of the general tone of this sketch, with Dana Carvey as a terrific George and Jon Lovitz as Potter.)

I’m partial to the 1951 Alistair Sims big-screen version and George C. Scott’s 1984 TV version of Charles Dickens’ tale, but there are fans of the 1970 Albert Finney movie musical, Scrooge (I met one such individual while standing on line at Barnes & Noble this past week). 

There are even, believe it or not, fans of perhaps the lamest comedy of Bill Murray’s career, Scrooged (1988). (As far as I’m concerned, the misuse of the wondrous Karen Allen in the latter is almost as bad as anything the Victorian miser perpetrated on his employees.)

Lisa Toland’s piece, quoted above, is Janus-faced, but in a good way. Much of her discussion concerns why A Christmas Carol struck such a deep chord immediately upon release in 1843. 

(Churches, we learn, copped with the challenges posed by the increasingly mobile urban poor in varying ways: individual parishes, the old sources of charity, were overwhelmed; elements of the established church were so elitist that they felt removed from the plight of the downtrodden; while newer sects, such as the Methodists, helped to fill the breach.)

At the same time, in Toland's telling, contemporary events make Dickens’ depiction of want and greed all too relevant. 

I don’t think many of us this season will be able to forget the juxtaposition of two developments: the big banks’ hurried repayment of government bailout money, the better to escape restrictions on executive pay and bonuses, at the same time that thousands of Americans remain unemployed because of the madness bred by the banks’ greed.

The image above is John Leech's woodcut from the 1843 edition, showing Scrooge extinguishing the Ghost of Christmas Past. That brings to mind a larger leitmotif of Dickens’ fiction, explained below in “The Reanimator,” Adam Thirlwell’s New Republic review of Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens:

“In his novels of reanimation, Dickens went for ghosts, for guilt, for bottled fetuses and effigies: for murder. His necromantic imagination needed corpses. Dead bodies are his constant prop. What else could he do? His subject was how strange the transition was between the live and the dead.”

There isn’t a word in Thirlwell’s excellent analysis of Dickens’ fiction about A Christmas Carol, but it’s impossible to read this paragraph without thinking of the great Victorian novelist’s greatest Christmas tale—and particularly the visits to Scrooge by Marley’s ghost, followed by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. 

It brings to mind an irreducible fact about the holiday: while it springs from the birth of Christ, it takes place in nature’s season of death, when human beings are haunted by old regrets and people from the life to which we can never return.

“It‘s a Wonderful Life”: Two Perspectives on “The American Christmas Carol”

Upteenth viewings (or, for that matter, readings) need not dim our fascination with a classic: In fact, it might add to it. Case in point: It’s a Wonderful Life.

Critically well-regarded at the time of its release in the 1940s, the movie was still not embraced wholeheartedly by TV audiences until the mid-1970s, when an expired copyright thrust it into the public domain—i.e., it could be broadcast repeatedly without the original copyright holder being paid. That’s how I came to watch it, when, urged on by my brother John, I sat down and became more intoxicated than I ever could with the most potent eggnog as I watched the vintage entertainment then playing on Channel 5 (WNEW) in the New York City area.

I’ve just referred to the Frank Capra classic as “The American Christmas Carol.” The most obvious similarities between Dickens’s novel and Capra’s film are that they concern a spiritual regeneration of a lost soul on Christmas Eve and that they prominently feature a conniving miser.

Lionel Barrymore, in fact, had supplied the voice of Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio for years, but had to pass up the opportunity to play him on the big screen because arthritis and a hip injury increasingly confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Yet, eight years later, as greedy banker Mr. Potter, that same disability provided him with an invaluable prop. As George Bailey notes, Mr. Potter “sits there like a spider” plotting stratagems, and Barrymore’s hands tighten on the wheelchair as much as his eye sockets do. Yet, while seemingly immobile, he can, whenever occasion requires it—such as when Uncle Billy’s misplaced money falls into his hands—move the wheelchair—and the plot—rapidly enough.

If you’re like myself, you felt in September a sudden astonished identification with at least one element in the plot: the scene with the run on the bank. I never thought I’d love to see the day when that all-too-common Depression scenario would ever replay in real life.

For readers who might not have come across these, I thought I’d highlight two newspaper pieces with different perspectives on the film.

The first, from USA Today, concerns the town that might have inspired it: Seneca Falls in upstate New York. American history buffs and feminists are likely to know of this village for another reason: it is often considered the birthplace of the American women’s rights movement, the site of an 1848 meeting in which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a group of close friends produced a “Declaration of Sentiments” patterned after the Declaration of Independence.

It would be ironic indeed if tourism to this town increased more for a film not based on real events than for a real-life event of crucial importance to American history. But I’m sure the town fathers wouldn’t mind any boost it could get, particularly in this crushing recession.

The second article, printed in The New York Times within the last week, is a somewhat curmudgeonly piece by Wendell Jamieson on George Bailey’s “Pitiful, Dreadful” life. I say “curmudgeonly,” though, to be sure, Jamieson performs the same kind of useful function that Lionel Trilling did when observing Robert Frost as a “terrifying poet” with more in common with Sophocles than with Longfellow: that is, reclaiming from accusations of empty sentimentality an artist who plunges to the depths of the human heart.

I really must draw the line, however, at Jamieson’s suggestion that Pottersville is a cooler place—and a more economically viable one to boot—than Bedford Falls…