Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

Works on Charles Dickens are sprouting up like weeds lately, no doubt at least in part because of the upcoming bicentennial of his birth on Feb. 2, 2012. Claire Tomalin and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst have both just published new biographies, and these follow several recent ones: Peter Ackroyd's 1991 Dickens and Michael Slater's 2009 Charles Dickens. I read the Ackroyd, which was strange in places, but valuable and evocative of the man's complexities.

I've just read Tomalin's 2011 Charles Dickens: A Life, and the first most obvious question is, why a new biography at all? This book cries out for an author's introduction explaining what's new about her outlook, her evidence, her sources, or whatever. But none is given. (Luckily for readers, the New York Times reviewer David Gates nicely summarizes the Dickens biography situation in his review "Being Charles Dickens."

What I found most valuable was Tomalin's attention towards Catherine Dickens and Ellan Ternan. The biographies I've read before don't give much sense of poor Catherine, calling her "shadowy" or "passive" and having done with it. Tomalin shows how hard it was to stand up to Dickens, and shows Catherine's good nature--her kind, pleasant nature, her love of puns, her fortitude in all the difficult Victorian travel they did.

Tomalin has written before about Ellen Ternan in Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. She provides a good deal of strong evidence to show how deeply they were involved, even (perhaps; Tomalin makes it seem likely) having a baby who died in infancy. This relationship is something other biographies tend to skim over, and Ackroyd even maintains that Dickens and Ternan probably never consummated their relationship. Anyone weighing the evidence will want to read Tomalin's account.

Tomalin's scholarship, while admirable, can become tiresome. Dickens traveled frequently, and Tomalin seemingly records every train trip, every ferry crossing. Details of the publishing process, copyright law, and so on were less than riveting.

Tomalin obviously loves Dickens's writing, and she also provides useful, thoughtful summaries of his works. While she never looks away from his considerable faults, she understands what makes him irresistible to readers. "He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens." And perhaps that helps explain why all the biographies, 142 years after his death.

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey (2009)

 The first punk-noir novel I can think of, Sandman Slim imagines a world where some people have magical abilities, and James Stark’s have been honed by 11 years fighting off demons in Hell. Now escaped, Stark has some serious scores to settle with the ex-friends who put him there. The story plays out in a traditional noir setting, Los Angeles, but here it’s a magician gang fight being battled out among L.A.’s gritty alleyways and expensive private clubs.

Lots of this novel is great fun and I want to read the next one. But I had a lot of trouble with the hero (we never learn why his other name is Sandman Slim). He’s as much of a haughty snob  as are the rich fucks he despises; it’s just a different set of sensibilities, punk-approved. Chuck Taylors instead of Ferragamos. Motocross jackets instead of London tailoring. Girls with green hair and tattoos instead of being body-sculpted and waxed.

But Stark occasionally shows some insight, and I had to remind myself that he’s stuck emotionally at age 19, when he entered Hell and then spent 11 years being abused by demons: not a great developer of character. And he has a moral compass in his lost girlfriend Alice, reminding himself that Alice wouldn’t like it if he did this or that. Also, it’s again traditionally noir for the hero to be compromised in some way. He does seem somewhat changed at the end, more aware of his own faults and ready to be less angry at the world.

Infelicities in the book include lots and lots of typos, such as three or four instances of “bought” for “brought.” Three references to the Beverly Hillbillies to indicate lameness—really? Nothing more up to date than a show that’s been off the air since 1971? Also, I felt the gladiatorial arena in Hell perhaps owed something to Kage Baker’s similar theme in her 2008 novel The House of the Stag, where the hero similarly fights almost impossible battles with hellish opponents to please his owner.

In all: Fun, not perfect, and I’ll read the next one.

Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything by Lynda Barry

Drawn + Quarterly Press has been publishing Lynda Barry, my favorite cartoonist, for some years. Now they're putting out collections of her early work, some of it long out of print, in Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything, comics from 1978-81.

I used to have all Barry's books beginning with Girls and Boys, but sold most of book collection when I was out of money in the early 90s. Getting these back again, plus a lot of her weekly strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, is a real treat.

Also a treat is Barry's illustrated introduction where she talks about how her drawing style developed. I especially liked her distinction between "sweet" (like Peter Max) and "bitter" (like Robert Crumb) and how she needed to reach a bittersweet style for better expressing what was true to her.

You can see her line changing drastically through the book, yet always retaining something that's Lynda Barry. Her characters also change quite a bit: early on, a lot more grownups and adult romantic difficulties than her current work, which is almost entirely from a childhood point of view. Re-reading these strips made me wish she'd explore more grownup themes in her work.

Not all of her early work is especially strong, and I was baffled by such repeated themes as the six-inch-tall person on the breakfast table. Some of it is just "Huh?" If you're a devoted Barry reader, like me, the book will be most valuable for how it shows the development of a great artist.

A quibble: The publishers chose a rectangular format that fits with the recent Barry books on writing and drawing, but since her comics are square, this means a lot of wasted space and squeezed-in panels with tiny writing.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R. Saks

For anyone, Elyn Saks’s accomplishments would be impressive: multiple degrees from distinguished schools including Vanderbilt, Oxford University, and Yale Law School, plus a PhD in psychoanalysis; four books published and many articles; and important awards, including the MacArthur “genius grant.” Saks did all this while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Her story is nothing short of astonishing.

Saks’s descriptions of her delusions and crazy behavior are fascinating and sad. She alarms people by asking “Have you ever killed anyone?” or saying “You are the devil. You are trying to kill me. I am evil. I’ve killed you three times today. I can do it again.” At times she is floridly psychotic, even forcibly committed and put in restraints. (This leaves such an impression that she’s devoted a good part of her professional life to examining issues of consent with mental patients.)

As Saks explains it, the fundamental characteristic of schizophrenia is confusion between what’s real and what’s not, like the feeling when you wake up from a nightmare and aren’t sure yet if it’s over. As crazy as her delusions sound, it takes many years for Saks to accept that they are delusions, not the same things everyone else thinks but doesn’t say. She figures they just have better self-control than she does.

In fact, Saks is amazingly self-controlled, strong, and self-disciplined. She can maintain order and sanity in her life, and being immersed in the work she loves helps keep her sane. Ironically, though—and to me this is one of the most interesting themes in the book—her refusal to surrender keeps her sicker longer. Even when she can be persuaded to take antipsychotic drugs at all, for years she lowers the dose at the first opportunity, despite many, many experiences of getting better at higher doses. After much she work, she can finally accept that yes, she is schizophrenic, and yes, she needs meds.

Slowly, and with the help of talk therapy, Saks does find balance in her life, even meeting someone to love who loves her back. She’s married now, and has good friends too, and that made me want to stand up and cheer. She’s never going to be not schizophrenic, but she has a way to live with it now, and I’m so glad for her.

Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan (2011)

I was 10, in the summer of 1974, when I first read Sybil, utterly fascinated and horrified. (My mother told me to skip the abuse sections, but of course I didn’t.) I re-read it many times over in years to come, and anything else I could find about multiple-personality disorder. As nearly everyone did, I accepted uncritically Flora Rheta Schreiber’s account of Sybil’s illness and recovery under Dr. Cornelia Wilbur. The story made beautifully dramatic sense: A severely abused child who is also intelligent, sensitive, and creative could unconsciously save herself from being destroyed by trauma. She could split herself into separate personalities with separate memories and life experiences, each personality having a role in remembering certain events, expressing forbidden feelings, and otherwise protecting the core self. Through emotional confrontations with the repressed past, and with the help of a caring therapist, the patient could integrate into one whole, healthy person.

Except that’s not what happened, as journalist Debbie Nathan explains in Sybil Exposed. The exposé here is not really of Sybil herself (real name: Shirley Mason), but of  “Sybil” the created product. (There was even talk, after the book’s success, of a Sybil board game, T-shirt, dolls.) Nathan lays bare how, in their different ways, Wilbur, Schreiber, and Mason each needed and contributed to the MPD narrative. Both Wilbur and Schreiber had reputations to make. Wilbur had been wanting an MPD patient; it was a rare diagnosis, a fascinating one, and she felt she could help. Schreiber was tired of writing fluff pieces for women’s magazines and needed a juicy yet serious subject. Mason desperately wanted love and attention, and her diagnosis guaranteed lots of that. Especially when Wilbur started shooting her up with truth serum in hours-long sessions several times a week, demanding to know who had hurt Shirley.

Besides the Pentothal, other drugs Wilbur prescribed include Seconal, Demerol, Dexamyl, Miltown, Edrisal, and Thorazine. She also made house calls, sometimes to inject Pentothal, sometimes with a portable electroshock box:

Connie would carry her apparatus to Shirley’s apartment and climb in bed with her. She would clamp the paddles to Shirley’s temples, twirl the dials, press the buttons. Shirley’s body would arch and crash with convulsions . . . . Connie was relentless, administering Pentothal round the clock.

Of course, we know now that “truth serum” is more likely to produce rambling flights of fancy, but Wilbur was convinced that every word was gospel. When Mason finally wrote a long letter to her doctor saying she had been lying because she’d been distraught and didn’t even know how she came up with these terrible accusations about her mother, Wilbur called it a defensive maneuver. Wilbur cued her intelligent, suggestible, and needy young patient until she got what she wanted, and rewarded her with hugs, gifts, and money, sometimes paying her rent, getting her jobs, sometimes living with her, going on vacations with her, and other shocking boundary violations that would never be accepted today.

Nathan makes depressingly clear that poor Shirley Mason was made far worse by Wilbur’s treatment. She did need help. Since childhood, she’d been troubled, unhappy, and anxious. Artistically gifted, she was burdened by her parents’ extremely strict Seventh-Day Adventist beliefs, which forbade imaginative play, fictional stories, and art done in non-realistic colors. A lonely only child, she invented imaginary playmates; this too was a sin, but she couldn’t stop herself from escaping into pretend adventures with Vicky and Sam. Sometimes she became so involved she couldn’t remember what was real and what was fantasy. By the time she started seeing Wilbur regularly, Mason had had a lifetime of dreaming up other selves and imagining heroic adventures.

Schreiber never mentions this in the book. Nor does she mention that no one in Mason’s tiny hometown, where everyone knows everyone, could corroborate the savage abuse described in Sybil. Yes, Mattie (“Hattie” in the book) was a bit nervous and strange, and when depressed would ignore her daughter. But no one had a story about her wandering around the neighborhood defecating on people’s lawns. Not a single rumor about the teenage lesbian orgy in the woods Sybil supposedly witnessed. Dodge Center doesn’t even have woods. Although the TV movie claims that doctor’s records validate scars from sexual abuse, no such records were found.

Near the end of the book, we learn that Wilbur mentions in passing that one reason Mason was always so tired is that she had pernicious anemia. The symptoms? Exactly those Mason went into treatment for, including depression, anxiety, headaches, mood swings, hallucinations, and confusion about identity. If she’d just taken some vitamin B12, instead of having MPD iatrogenically produced through powerful, addictive drugs and a dangerously enmeshed psychiatrist, she could most likely have lived a much happier, healthier, more independent life. Schreiber and Wilbur made their careers on her. Mason died nearly penniless. If she’d been willing to sell her paintings as Sybil, she’d have had plenty to live on. But she refused.

As for why, besides inherent fascination, Sybil became a huge bestseller and introduced a new psychiatric diagnosis, Nathan says it’s about female identity after the sexual revolution and how the book was published during a time in history when women were experiencing fragmented selves, needing to integrate their roles as wife, mother, professional, and so on. Maybe; Mason wouldn't be the first woman to be wrongly diagnosed because a woman's symptoms must indicate hysteria. I don’t think you have to look that far, though. The idea that the one who is supposed to love you best is actually a frightening monster out to get you has its own inherent fascination—one that doesn’t need a push from historical currents. After all, I had no role confusion at age 10, and I was agog. It’s ironic that the story of monster disguised as helper winds up being true after all, although the monster is named Doctor, not Mother.

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong became a nun in 1962, when she was 17, and left the convent seven years later. She'd already written a memoir--since revised--about that experience, called Through the Narrow Gate. I read the unrevised (I think) edition years and years ago, so it was very interesting to read her reflections now on the nunnery and what happened when she left.

Her life wasn't easy afterward, particularly when it came to her epilepsy, which unbelievably enough went undiagnosed for years. She was told she was repressed, hysterical, oversensitive--and this, with a disease that's been described and known since antiquity. All those years of fearing she was going crazy, would wind up in a locked ward, for an illness she now manages well with medication! (Her previous doctors were just lucky that Britain isn't as malpractice-suit-happy as America.)

The spiral staircase image is from Eliot's poem "Ash-Wednesday," the first long poem he wrote after converting to Anglicism. The staircase, where it seems one is always returning to the same place and making no progress, but actually slowly ascending, signifies for Armstrong the pattern of her spiritual and emotional life.

Though she couldn't pray after leaving the convent, and couldn't feel any closeness or belief in God, religion was always her subject. After her failed attempt (in highly unfair circumstances) to get an Oxford doctorate--her topic was Tennyson--she wrote books and presented TV programs on subjects like Jerusalem, St. Paul, the Crusades, mystic poets, and one book titled The History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

But does she believe in God now, or what? Her answer is that these words are too small and limited for anything but a small and limited concept of God. She rejects the litmus test of "belief" and says of faith, paraphrasing theologian Cantwell Smith:

Quote:

Faith was really the cultivation of a conviction that life had some ultimate meaning and value, despite the tragic evidence to the contrary--an attitude also evoked by great art.

That doesn't mean you can believe anything you like. There is a test:

Quote:

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion.

What largely led Armstrong to this point of view was writing The History of God. First, she found, she needed to write about Muhammed and Islam first, to understand it and to present a counternarrative to the hatred swirling around after Ayatollah Khomeini and the Salman Rushdie fatwa. No accessible life of the Prophet that Westerners could understand existed. So Armstrong wrote it.

To do so, she had to edit out her ego, she says, a practice that became, without her intent, spiritual, as she worked "to penetrate another culture and develop a wholly different way of looking at the world. It required a constant concentration of mind and heart that was in fact a type of meditation." And in writing her History of God, she finds this concentration to be central to all religions at their best and when unsullied by fear or politics.

The spiral staircase does seem an apt metaphor for Armstrong's life. As much as she longed to break free from the nunnery, everything about her life seems nun-like except for the obedience to authority.

Quote:

I tried to break away from the convent but I still live alone, spend my days in silence, and am almost wholly occupied in writing, thinking, and speaking about God and spirituality.

Indeed, a problem in the book is that Armstrong can seem bloodless even when she's suffering and lonely, as if she's someone without any strong carnal desires. (She dismisses her meager love life in a few paragraphs, and herself as a non-starter.) But then, she seldom gives herself sufficient credit for her powerful achievements.

Armstrong writes with great clarity about spiritual and human loneliness. Her account of a mind opening, an intellect finding its subject, and a spirit breaking free from oppression, is moving and thoughtful. Her understanding of faith and hope is blessedly free from pink-cloud sentiment. I'm really glad I read this.

The Notting Hill Mystery, Compiled by C. Felix, From the Papers of the Late R.H. Esq.

Published as part of the British Library's historical collection; originally published in Once a Week, 1865.

This is a thriller detective novel in the form of letters, statements, a crime scene map, and journal extracts. They've been compiled by an insurance investigator to examine claims made by Baron R** following the mysterious death of his wife, Madame R**—a death closely linked to two others.

Madame R** drank poison while sleepwalking—but Baron R** is a well-known mesmerist. So did she die of her own will or of his? The narrator refuses to decide, so has laid out all the evidence for his readers to make a final judgment.

When, by page 29, I had already encountered mesmerism, sleepwalking, and a child stolen by gypsies, I figured I was in for a thumping good read in the manner of Wilkie Collins's thrillers. The Notting Hill Mystery actually predates 1868's The Moonstone, also an epistolary novel, and both books have been called "the first detective novel" in English. However, while I enjoyed the novel, it's clear why Collins is remembered and Felix is not.

With Collins, you have believable, varied characters with psychological complexity and a mystery that unravels as the novel goes on. Felix's characters are thin, just coat hangers for the few attributes to keep the story moving, like "jealous of family pride" or "weak constitution." Also, and worse, the heart of the mystery is laid out so early there's no real suspense. Every fresh document just adds weight to what we already have been told must be the solution--if you can accept the reality of mesmeric control. Otherwise you must accept some amazing coincidences. Either way, it's unsatisfying.

"Charles Felix" is a pseudonym, some think for Charles Warren Adams. He was a lawyer whose firm published another book by "Charles Felix" called Velvet Lawn.