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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!
I am richly enjoying Our Mutual Friend. Since it’s Halloween, I’ll just take note of how Dickens has the knack for sentimental uncanniness:
Thus, Fascination Fledgeby went his way, exulting in the artful cleverness with which he had turned his thumb down on a Jew, and the old man went his different way up-stairs. As he mounted, the call or song began to sound in his ears again, and, looking above, he saw the face of the little creature looking down out of a Glory of her long bright radiant hair, and musically repeating to him, like a vision:
‘Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!’
Dickens likes these little scenes in which characters are invited to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of life, for life. My favorite lines from A Tale of Two Cities:
“You know that you are recalled to life?”
“They tell me so.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I can’t say."
In other uncanny news, I’m reading vol. 2. of B.P.R.D. [Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense]: The Soul of Venice and Other Stories. I’m rather disappointed so far. I devoutly hope I like a good Lobster Johnson yarn as much as the next fellow. And a ghost story as much as the next fellow. But a story about Lobster Johnson as a ghost seems like gilding the lily. Even on Halloween. (I know, I know, he’s also a ghost in some other Hellboy story I haven’t read, The Conqueror Worm, which is supposed to be good. Well, I haven’t read it.)
Comments
Not entirely unrelated is Little Dorrit vol 2, ch. 24; Merdle, the financier, having crashed and on the verge of being discovered as a fraud, is on his way to the public baths to commit suicide. He stops off at his son and daughter-in-law’s.
When the candles were brought in, Mr Merdle was discovered standing behind the door, picking his lips. ‘I thought I’d give you a call,’ he said. ‘I am rather particularly occupied just now; and, as I happened to be out for a stroll, I thought I’d give you a call.’
As he was in dinner dress, Fanny asked him where he had been dining?
‘Well,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I haven’t been dining anywhere, particularly.’
‘Of course you have dined?’ said Fanny.
‘Why—no, I haven’t exactly dined,’ said Mr Merdle.
He had passed his hand over his yellow forehead and considered, as if he were not sure about it. Something to eat was proposed. ‘No, thank you,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I don’t feel inclined for it.’ ...
Said Fanny: ‘having so much to do, Mr Merdle, loss of appetite is a serious thing with you, and you must have it seen to. You must not be ill.’ ‘Oh! I am very well,’ replied Mr Merdle, after deliberating about it. ‘I am as well as I usually am. I am well enough. I am as well as I want to be.’
I find those last three sentences just superb. It’s like something Samuel Beckett would write. Also good is when Merdle borrows a pen-knife, to sharpen his pen as Fanny thinks, but actually (we discover later) to cut his own jugular vein.
‘Edmund,’ said Mrs Sparkler, ‘open (now, very carefully, I beg and beseech, for you are so very awkward) the mother of pearl box on my little table there, and give Mr Merdle the mother of pearl penknife.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘but if you have got one with a darker handle, I think I should prefer one with a darker handle.’
‘Tortoise–shell?’
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes. I think I should prefer tortoise–shell.’
And the final paragraph of the chapter, from spoilt Fanny’s p.o.v.:
Thoroughly convinced, as he went out of the room, that it was the longest day that ever did come to an end at last, and that there never was a woman, not wholly devoid of personal attractions, so worn out by idiotic and lumpish people, Fanny passed into the balcony for a breath of air. Waters of vexation filled her eyes; and they had the effect of making the famous Mr Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap, and waltz, and gyrate, as if he were possessed of several Devils.
Conqueror Worm is awesome.