Quote of the Day (Nancy Mitford, on an ‘Orgy of Merrieness at Yule’)

“But although each season of the year had its own merrie little rite it was at Christmas time that Lady Bobbin and her disciples in the neighbourhood really came into their own, the activities which she promoted during the rest of the year merely paving the way for an orgy of merrieness at Yule....

[E]very year at Compton Bobbin the German and Sussex customs were made to play their appointed parts. Thus the Christmas Tree, Christmas stockings and other activities of Santa Claus, and the exchange through the post of endless cards and calendars (German); the mistletoe and holly decorations, the turkeys, the boar's head, and the succession of carol singers and mummers (Sussex Roman Catholic); and the unlimited opportunity to over-eat on every sort of unwholesome food washed down with honest beer, which forms the groundwork for both schools of thought, combined to provide the ingredients of Lady Bobbin's Christmas Pudding.”— Christmas Pudding, by Nancy Mitford (1932)

This Day in Literary History (Trollope, Astonishingly Prolific Victorian Novelist, Dies)

December 6, 1882—One month after suffering a stroke that paralyzed the hand that wrote 47 massive novels, Anthony Trollope died in a London nursing home at age 67. In productivity, he exceeded his Victorian contemporary, Charles Dickens, and in popularity he did not lag behind him.

These days, Trollope’s place in the Victorian fiction canon is more equivocal. In the British Victorian Literature course I took 30 years ago, Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Emily Bronte represented fiction, and I daresay you’d see something like the same thing across the country now (albeit with Charlotte Bronte subbing for her younger sister). That position reflects the decades of neglect experienced by Trollope until the 1960s, as well as, perhaps, some academic distaste for his Tory sympathies.

That’s part of it, but I don’t think it’s all. From youth to early middle age, Dickens, with the simultaneous need to feed his growing family and to maintain his high style of living, had put out his work, but he had the showman’s sense not to let his audience see how he performed his magic. For Trollope, a longtime civil servant in the British Post Office, writing was work, not entertainment, and he didn’t care who knew how he went about his business.

And so, in his Autobiography, published a year after his death, Trollope related that he wrote quickly—very quickly. It wasn’t only that he maximized his time while traveling by sea or train; no, his self-discipline seemed almost—well, a fetish:

“When I have commenced a new book, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied. According to the circumstances of the time,–whether my other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which I was writing was or was not wanted with speed,–I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went. In the bargains I have made with publishers I have,–not, of course, with their knowledge, but in my own mind,–undertaken always to supply them with so many words, and I have never put a book out of hand short of the number by a single word. I may also say that the excess has been very small. I have prided myself on completing my work exactly within the proposed dimensions. But I have prided myself especially in completing it within the proposed time,–and I have always done so. There has ever been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”

This didn’t even go over with proper, bourgeois British Victorians, and you can imagine the reaction by Americans of the 20^th century, who liked their writers to slave over words till they got them just right, the kind of mania for style claimed by Truman Capote, who noted how he and others of his ilk could become “notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.” That, of course, would take years to produce.

It would take years before Trollope would recover from that self-inflicted blow. In the 1960s, a Trollope revival began to occur. Today, an active Trollope Society (including an American branch) exists, and interest in his work has also been helped by the occasional PBS miniseries such as Barchester Towers. 

Trollope depicted Dickens as “Mr. Popular Sentiment,” author of a bestseller called The Almhouse, in his book The Warden, but he shared with the target of his satire an almost boundless energy that manifested itself in herculean productivity. Dickens churned out 15 baggy novels, assorted shorter tales, journalistic pieces, A Child’s History of England, American Notes, not to mention amateur theatricals in collaboration with friend Willkie Collins. Trollope turned out three times as many novels, along with his autobiography.

As for short fiction: Well, even that represented a doorstopper, I’ve just found out. A volume containing his Complete Shorter Fiction, edited by Julian Thompson, contains 42 stories, coming in at nearly 960 pages. This being Christmas, I searched for –and found—a few yuletide tales in the bunch. To my blessed relief, I found one, “Not If I Know It,” that not only was a mere six pages, but that, from a biographical point of view, was really interesting, as it was his last completed work of fiction.

If you want to know how the poor, the downtrodden—the common man and woman—of the 19^th century lived, Dickens is your man. But if you want to know about the world of the professionals and the powerful—clergymen, newspaper editors, the aristocracy, financiers—then you’ll want to look at Trollope. I read his 1873 masterpiece, The Way We Live Now, about a decade ago, around the time that the Enron scandal broke. Four years after virtually the entire American financial system almost came down, it’s even more pertinent.

(Among his other literary motifs: politics and Ireland. Trollope was persuaded to run for Parliament, and though he lost the election and his interest in other office, his fascination with the process remained. His work in the Post Office frequently took him to Ireland. A few months before he died, he made another trip there, in preparation for what would have been another novel. Unintentionally, he was closing a circle in his life that had started with publication of his first novel, The Macdermotts of Ballycloran, which was set in the Emerald Isle.)

At his most exasperated, Trollope could be unintentionally funny (despite fairly wide acquaintance with Americans, he wrote a friend that he refused to believe “that in these days there should be a living village called Minneapolis by living men”). But—again like Dickens—his anger and concern for honesty linger. 

Abby Wolf, speculating how the cantankerous Victorian might have treated Rupert Murdoch’s wiretapping imbroglio, got it right in a post for the Daily Beast blog, when she wrote: “Trollope, like Dickens and [George] Eliot…despised duplicity, backstabbing, and ugly dishonor, and one imagines that no one, save the young girl to whose family the Murdochs have repeatedly issued an un-Murdochian apology, would emerge unscathed were Trollope to set pen to paper today.”

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.

This Day in Literary History (Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” Published)

December 17, 1843—Experiencing an unexpected sales down with his prior novel, Charles Dickens rebounded with perhaps the most beloved book of his wildly popular career, A Christmas Carol, in Prose.

Within eight days, this Yuletide ghost story of greed and generosity sold 6,000 copies, and by the following May it had gone through seven editions. And the author couldn’t complain this time, as he had in the past (and would again in the future), about the publisher: he’d financed the whole enterprise himself, including the gilt edging and hand-colored illustrations.

Believe it or not, the 31-year-old novelist, with four children already and a fifth coming in the following year, still didn’t make as much money as he wanted. A pet peeve of Dickens’ when he was visiting America in 1842—the lack of a copyright law—became an issue in this case even on his home turf, as a pirate edition came only a month after publication.

Even a successful lawsuit produced only limited results. Dickens put the offending firm out of business, but he was never able to collect from them. He ended up paying court costs of 700 pounds, leaving him with a profit by the end of the year between only 130 and 230 pounds.

This did not make the novelist happy. You’d have to look Charlie Chaplin and Irving Berlin to find two other wildly popular artists whose adult lives were so malformed by childhood poverty. He’d have to get busy again, which he promptly did: Another Christmas tale, The Cricket on the Hearth, was published almost one year to the day after A Christmas Carol.

You can trace the darkness gradually descending on Dickens in how he depicted Christmas over the years. A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth were two of five Christmas novels he wrote from 1843 through 1848. But the season is mentioned in four other novels, including his first, the sunny The Pickwick Papers, and the last, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, when a murder occurs in the season.

In the wider sense, the comparatively disappointing lack of profits coming Dickens’ way after A Christmas Carol didn’t matter. The important thing was that Dickens—a novelist whose newest novels had been as eagerly anticipated as J.K. Rowling has been in our time—had reestablished himself as a publishing phenomenon, only months after his latest work, Martin Chuzzlewit, had annoyed American readers who resented the satire of their country.

By October 1843, monthly installments of Martin Chuzzlewit gave Dickens an idea of the changed public attitude toward him. It’s hard to know what precisely triggered the burst of creative energy that produced A Christmas Carol, but for six weeks Dickens wrote like a man possessed, during which he wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition.”

Earlier this week, in a post on Louisa May Alcott, I alluded to Dickens’ theatrical propensities. Nowhere is that more prevalent than in A Christmas Carol. You can see how readily this work lends itself to theatrical or cinematic adaptation.

In a New York Times article last year, Anita Gates pointed out that the first and most famous of Dickens’ Christmas novels has been made into some three dozen feature films and television movies—and that’s not counting the times the plot’s been openly borrowed and transformed (A Diva’s Christmas Carol, starring Vanessa Williams) or parodied (a “WKRP in Cincinnati” episode, “Bah, Humbug!”)

I imagine that Dickens, an admirer-turned-critic of America, would snort at the notion that adaptations of his novel make it the most frequently performed play on U.S. stages. Twelve years ago, while in San Antonio for the holidays, I caught one of these productions, and I daresay that I could have gone to any major metropolis and seen it there, too.

Earlier in this post, I indicated that, though A Christmas Carol didn’t make Dickens as much money as he wanted, it wasn’t a total loss. Fifteen years after its publication, he had discovered how remunerative his own public readings of his world could be. 

A seven-week series in London, followed by an even longer “Provincial Tour,” became such sensations that he would perform 500 of these between 1858 and his death in 1870. A Christmas Carol served as the centerpiece of this all-stops-out series that lined his wallet even as it taxed his strength.

Appreciations: Christmas Books

What's with that headline – especially today, what with the mall crowds vanished and the last of the eggnog and champagne drained?

Well, in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, today is the Feast of the Epiphany – or, as we Irish like to call it, "Little Christmas." Why not plan ahead for next season's readings with your helpful book guide (i.e., me) at the ready?

Internal editor: "Didn't you only get around to buying these books well into this past season? Is that why you didn't write this earlier?" MT (absentmindedly leafing through papers scattered around his room, talking to himself): "Where did I leave my copy of Mark McGwire's testimony to Congress on steroids in baseball? Oh yeah, here it is." (Clearing his throat and speaking to Internal Editor): "I’m not here to talk about the past….My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family and myself."

So, here are my suggestions for readings for next Christmas. Get started now looking for the best price for the title(s) that interest you. Then, plan to start reading them just before the start of the season, so that you'll have already made headway into this as the Consumer Madness begins.

1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson. I was inspired to read this by the documentary about this German theologian and Nazi victim that came out several years ago, as well as by friend Peter Quinn's novel The Hour of the Cat,The in which Bonhoeffer makes a cameo appearance. (No more details, lest it spoil your surprise in reading Peter's marvelous historical mystery.)

Bonhoeffer's social consciousness is certainly evident in these sermons, running from 1928 to 1945. But so is his passion for preaching, and the way he draws out vivid conclusions from seemingly time-worn tales. For instance, in the first sermon from 1928, using as his thesis "I stand at the door and knock"(Revelation 3: 20), he notes that the season means learning how to wait – "an art which our impatient age has forgotten."

A few paragraphs later, in words that continue to speak to an anxious age and anxious hearts: "The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come."

Though I am not an aficionado of the social gospel or liberation theology, nor of contemporary misreadings of the past (e.g., Al Gore stating that the Holy Family were "homeless"), Bonhoeffer's social activism did not distort his reading of Biblical texts. His interpretation of Mary's "Magnificat," for instance, which he sees as coming from a "passionate, powerful, proud, enthusiastic" young mother-to-be, seems amply justified by the text ("He has brought down the rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble").

What surprised me the most in this slim, 185-page book was Bonhoeffer's wiliness in defying the Nazis. Editor Robertson recounts how, while seated in a café in June 1940, the theologian heard the news of the fall of Paris blaring through a loudspeaker. Frantically urging his companion to raise his arm, Bonhoeffer whispered frantically, "We shall have to run risks for very different things now, but not for that salute!"

His reaction reminds me of an earlier political martyr, St. Thomas More, who, in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, attempts to find the exact wording of the oath that citizens are being forced to take to Henry VIII. “God made the angels to show him splendor -as he made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man he made to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind! If he suffers us to fall to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and yes, Will, then we may clamor like champions . . . if we have the spittle for it. And no doubt it delights God to see splendor where He only looked for complexity. But it's God's part, not our own, to bring ourselves to that extremity! Our natural business lies in escaping.”

Arrested in August 1943 for his role in the German underground resistance, Bonhoeffer lasted nearly another two years in prison before being executed.

His warning to listeners on the impermanence of tyranny, even as the Nazis sought to extend their evil dominion over Europe and beyond, is as relevant now in our terror-anxious age as it was at the end of what W.H. Auden called a "low, dishonest decade”: "Jesus will not establish his government of peace by force, but only when people submit to him freely, and allow him to rule over them. Then he gives to them his wonderful peace. When, today, once again, Christian people are torn apart by war and hate, yes, when even Christian churches cannot come together, that is not the fault of Jesus Christ, but the fault of people who will not allow Jesus to rule over them."

2) The Long Christmas Dinner, by Thornton Wilder, in his Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. (Library of America edition). I’ve read Wilder’s “Big Three” plays – Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker (the basis for the musical Hello, Dolly, which provided him with healthy residuals, after a lifetime of labor at his craft, in the last decade of his life), along with the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (which I read in elementary school – which might account for why I didn’t appreciate it at the time).

But I hadn’t read this gently ironic, deeply affecting one-act play, which was written in 1931, seven years before Our Town. The two are twin slices of Americana (in The Long Christmas Dinner, Mother Bayard says she can “remember when we had to cross the Mississippi on a new-made raft,” and “when St. Louis and Kansas City were full of Indians.”) Covering 40 years in the Bayard household, it might be thought of as “Our Family,” a microcosm of “Our Town.”

Women – Mother Bayard, her daughter-in-law Lucia, and the latter’s daughter-in-law, Leonora – are depicted as the keepers of family tradition through oral tradition and memory, while men – preoccupied with their business affairs and the immediate task at hand, the cutting of the turkey – are slightly condescending, if not submissive, of the whole affairs. From generation to generation, they repeat the following, or a variation on it: “It’s all down in a book somewhere upstairs. We have it all. All that kind of thing is very interesting…”

Mortality is even more heavily present here than in Our Town for being so concentrated; the passage of characters toward death is indicated by their walk toward the back of the stage, through “the dark portal.” The constant departures and the repetition of statements by different characters over the years starkly remind the audience that we are less individual than we might think and that one life, no matter how lengthy, is terribly short in the larger scheme of things.

For anyone experiencing the passage of time, this play leaves one chuckling one minute when not stifling a sob the next.

3) Christmas at the New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art, edited by the editors of The New Yorker, with a foreword by John Updike. I bought this book, whose pieces span the founding of the magazine in 1925 up to 2002, because I spotted a John O’Hara story that I hadn’t read yet: “Christmas Poem,” from 1964.

How had I overlooked this small gem? Probably because O’Hara’s output is more vast and varied than nearly any other 20th-century short story master you can name. It springs from the same region as his Gibbsville stories – eastern Pennsylvania – and its young protagonist is a wiseguy counterpart to his fictional alter ego, James Malloy. But the young man, Billy Warden, receives an unexpected lesson about the value of enduring love, even amid the hurly-burly of social rounds that seem so important at this age.

Two pieces from the magazine’s golden era under editor Harold Ross, James Thurber’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas” and S.J. Perelman’s “Waiting for Santy: A Christmas Playlet,” imagine, respectively, to hilarious effect, how Ernest Hemingway and Clifford Odets might have related one of America’s best-loved holiday tales.

At the same time, you can’t read many of the later pieces without being struck by the passage to a harder, more secular time. Hardly heartwarming, Richard Ford’s “Creche” follows a fractious American family on vacation. What spiritual consolation exists, as hinted by the title, is tentative, as this small group journeys to northern Michigan to ski, chiefly because “No one wants to spend Christmas alone.” Many will find this piece dreary, but I found it a moving evocation of the loneliness that so many feel at a time of year expected to be merry.

Though I was grateful for so many pieces from the magazine’s golden age, I wish that the editors had not followed the old New Yorker practice of not providing biographical details about contributors. Three pieces, for instance, come from Sally Benson, whose other work, today’s readers may not realize, were adapted into one of cinema’s true holiday chestnuts, Meet Me in St. Louis.

This anthology is so rich that I was only able to read some of the pieces. But the pages, filled with so many examples of the magazine’s cover art and cartoons, as well as boxed “Talk of the Town” pieces, are so inviting that I look forward to finishing it next year.

4) Christmas Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell (Everyman’s Library edition). Over the last year, I’ve increasingly sought out Everyman Library titles – they tend to be cheaper than Library of America titles, and contain the world’s literature rather than simply this country’s. This volume did not disappoint, and I was willing to purchase it even though four pieces – including Richard Ford’s “Creche” – overlapped with the New Yorker anthology.

This anthology ranges even more widely in time than the other anthology, going back to the Victorians – who, especially Dickens, should share the lion’s share of credit for virtually inventing the modern celebration of the holiday. And yes, Dickens is here, along with his contemporary, Anthony Trollope, as well as leading lights of Russian literature – Gogol, Chekhov and Tolstoy. (The title of the latter’s contribution – “Where Love Is, God Is” – sums up my attitude toward the holiday.)