Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

REBELLIOUS ESTABLISHMENT

I am bemused by the way the terms “rebel” (and “rebellious”) and “establishment” have worked their way into popular parlance over the last half-century.

If a rebel is somebody who confronts, opposes and perhaps wishes to overturn a society as it is, then very few of the people who are labelled rebels are anything of the sort. If the “establishment” means those who are in entrenched positions of wealth, power and influence, then the word is often used as a term of abuse by people who themselves could be more accurately described as the establishment.

What I believe has taken place here is a confusion of manufactured image with social, cultural and economic reality. And I trace this confusion largely to the entertainment industry.

Take “rebel” first of all.

Way back in the 1950s, rock music (then called rock’n’roll) first grew out of black rhythm-and-blues and began to be marketed to newly-affluent white American teenagers. Rock stars like Elvis and Carl Perkins and Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis were billed and promoted as “rebellious”. After all, they produced the type of music that irritated the teenagers’ parents, so this was real rebellion, right? Sometimes they would appear in movies in which they were on the wrong side of the law, or placed in opposition to authority figures. More rebellion.

And ever since then, even as music fashions have changed, the expected image of a pop or rock star is of somebody surly, confrontational, giving the fingers to authority and showing he or she sides with us kids (even kids in their twenties or thirties) as opposed to those boring adults. How often does one see such terms as “edgy”, “controversial” and “rebellious” applied to rising rock stars?

At which point, there has to be some cold calculation. Has there ever been a rock or pop star who has really confronted or wished to overturn the bases of his or her society? Sure, some might attach themselves to fashionable causes, which is always good for publicity among the target audience. But the music industry, which produces rock stars, works entirely on the profit motive. Its business is to return huge profits – not to change the world – and rock stars who really make it are paid fabulous sums.

Are these rebels against society? Of course not. To buy the image of the rebellious star is to conform to what the publicity machine would have you believe. It is the opposite of rebellion, just as pop and rock music is the most conformist sort of music there is. Culturally, in the current climate, you are far more of a rebel if you listen to classical music or jazz – after all, you’re going against the current cultural norm.

Regrettably, this image of the rebel as one who just has to snarl and look surly (while playing a commercial game) has corrupted the whole concept of rebellion and rendered it superficial. To be a rebel, all you have to do is buy the t-shirt (maybe with Che Guevara on it), turn your loudspeakers up, or maybe walk through commuters with your i-pod to your ears.

And what about the term “establishment”?

I would define any “establishment” as something well-established which is able to command great wealth and wield great power and influence over people who do not possess these things.

Which brings me to two television interviews with Hollywood directors, which I saw when they were screened in New Zealand some years back.

In 1991, ahead of the release of his meretricious and largely fictitious fantasy film JFK, purportedly telling the “true” story of the assassination of President Kennedy, Oliver Stone said that he was challenging “establishment historians” with his interpretation of events. In 1997, ahead of the release of his romanticised and historically-inaccurate film Titanic, James Cameron said that “establishment” films had presented the passenger-liner disaster in quite inaccurate ways.

So what was the term “establishment” intended to convey in these two instances? It was intended to suggest that the speaker was on the side of the plain folks who were listening, the mass audience for the movies, as opposed to those elitist academic historians.

At which point I rebel. Surely a Hollywood director, who can command a multi-million dollar budget to make a movie, is far more of an “establishment” figure (in any real sense) than an academic historian is. In influencing people, commanding power and having much money, the film industry far outranks academe.

In the cases of both pop music and movies, the concocted image bears little relationship to economic or cultural reality. Media “rebels” and movie directors claiming to oppose the “establishment” are inducers of conformity and distractions from, or opponents of, any real scrutiny of society regarding its power structures. After all, such scrutiny might lead to real rebellion.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

 

“HOW BIZARRE” by Simon Grigg (Awa Press, $NZ38)

Do you like watching car crashes?

Perhaps you like watching car crashes in slow motion?

If so, then How Bizarre, subtitled “Pauly Fuemana and the Song that Stormed the World” is the book for you. Its woeful tale is one long, slow car crash.

Somebody asked me if I was “going out of my comfort zone” is reading this book. Nearly all books are within my “comfort zone” (horrible, cliché phrase!), and there was very little in this book that made me feel uncomfortable. But it certainly is outside my general range of interest, as I am no follower of pop music (or hip-hop or rap or rock or what-have-you). I certainly have little knowledge of, or interest in, the New Zealand recording industry.

On the other hand, the tiny amount I knew about Pauly Fuemana’s one-hit wonder “How Bizarre” piqued my interest. It came out of South Auckland’s Polynesian and Maori culture, with Pauly (of mixed Nuiean and Maori descent) having originally been part of his brother Philip’s combo, ironically named the Otara Millionaire’s Club (OMC). “How Bizarre” managed to gain a big following. Between 1995 and 1997 the single was successively No. 1 in New Zealand’s pop charts, No. 1 in Oz and finally, and most lucratively, No.1 in the USA.  No New Zealand recording replicated this feat until Lorde’s Royals seventeen years later.

I’m not under the illusion that popularity means quality and (pardon me) my own repeated listening to “How Bizarre” revealed nothing but a harmless pop with a simple rhythm and a mildly ironical lyric and a reedy and slightly off-key voice out front. (The thin, reedy, wobbly voice was even worse in the follow-up “Land of Plenty”, even if it had a better lyric.)  On the other hand, massive sales say something about public taste – even if that taste is ephemeral – so into Simon Grigg’s book I plunged.

Simon Grigg is an industry insider who ran youth-oriented nightclubs and dance-clubs in Auckland and owned some recording labels. He had a hand in developing the career of the excellent jazzman Nathan Haines. At various times he was Pauly Fuemana’s promoter, mentor and adviser; and though he was never formally Fuemana’s manager, he sometimes took on that role too.

Grigg lays out his attitude to Fuemana’s story from the start, remarking in his introduction: “Pauly, born Paul Lawrence Fuemana, had in 1995 found himself at the beginning of a tumultuous rollercoaster ride for which he was neither mentally nor emotionally equipped, and in which his worst enemy was often himself.” (p.4)  

We know at once that this is going to end in tears.

Perhaps we should also be warned that we are not going to get the whole story, either, even if Grigg is an insider. There is virtually nothing in this book about Fuemana’s childhood and adolescence, which are covered in two pages. Hints that Fuemana might have been involved in youthful crime are kept vague and general. In fact there isn’t a great deal about Fuemana’s family. There are only a few snippets about the singer’s relationship with his older brother Philip; and very occasional mentions of his wife Kirstine who was, eventually, the mother of his six children. One has to assume that a number of people chose not to speak to Grigg.

Grigg’s focus is on the making of the single “How Bizarre”, how it affected the local music industry and how it affected Pauly. His take is that the record’s success was as much the work of its producer Alan Jansson and his recording techniques as it was of anything Fuemana contributed. Often writing like a promoter, Grigg talks up the importance and cultural impact of the (pop) music industry and has the alarming habit of referring to every second musician he names as “legendary”. Sometimes Pauly gets completely lost in this narrative, as when Grigg devotes all of Chapter 8 to the music publishing and recording companies in Australia whom he hustled.

There is much detail on attempting to secure lucrative contracts for Pauly with major international recording companies. There is much detail on how the eponymous song was recorded, re-recorded, refined, improved, targeted to its audience and finally released. This involves the following interesting observation:

“A great single, a killer pop record – which is what a musician and producer are invariably trying to create, even if they position it as underground and alternative – almost always needs to be carefully nurtured and slowly matured, over a long period.” (pp.34-35)

There might be (and there are) great claims for “How Bizarre” as representing an underdog Polynesian culture, but in the end there is the admission that the real aim was always to produce a big-selling pop song.

I admit to finding some of the tale both fascinating and tatty. As Simon Grigg earnestly discusses how he hustled up appearance for Pauly on Australian TV’s “Hey, Hey It’s Saturday” show, or on Britain’s “Top of the Pops”, I realise at once how important this was for the promotion and sales of the record, but also how tawdry such (mimed) appearances always were.

I also, of course, take a bitchy pleasure in the unflattering thumb sketches Grigg sometimes gives of NZ showbiz people who cross his and Pauly’s path, as in the following, wherein Grigg adopts a give-with-one-hand, take-away-with-the-other approach:

“ Standing on our left was the Maori entertainer Howard Morrison. Notorious for his crankiness and slightly unpleasant attitude towards those he regarded as lesser beings, the ageing and recently knighted Morrison was still indisputably one of the greatest entertainers New Zealand had ever produced.” (p.183). After which, Grigg tells us that Morrison snubbed their proffered handshakes and insisted they call him “Sir Howard”.

Two things are painfully clear to me from this book, and they both contribute to my judgment that we are watching a prolonged car crash.

First, Pauly Fuemana simply could not handle his sudden (and brief) fame. The book comes close to saying that he was mentally unbalanced. He had a very short fuse and was prone to outbursts of anger. More than once he is reported as threatening people with physical violence should they cross him in even the most minor ways. While Grigg regards “Stole My Car”, the cheeky parody of “How Bizarre”, as amusing and as something which ultimately promoted the sales of “How Bizarre”, Pauly Fuemana flies into a rage, seeing the parody as an affront to his dignity. (p.99)

Pauly was also a fantasist who had the imagination of a boastful little boy. He frequently made up extravagant and silly stories about himself to impress gullible journalists. At one point he claimed to have been a hitman for the mafia, the better to build up his image as a hard man. To an Aussie journo, he said that when he toured the South Island, the Third Reich and the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses outside his motel (p.33). Obviously the fantasy here was that he was some sort of pioneering bearer of Pasifika culture. He had barely established a recording career when he was demanding huge sums of money, as he clearly thought he should now be earning it like Elvis. At his first signing with a major label, he demanded money up front and a BMW (p.62). He also had the habit of making big plans for a touring career that he wasn’t able to sustain. We see him talking big with unimpressed studio musicians – who had been hired simply to mime to one of his TV appearances – about how he is going to offer them a huge salary to become his regular backing group. Inevitably the sums Pauly did earn were quickly burnt up in big-ticket items the singer couldn’t really afford.

Then there was the matter of sex and drugs. Grigg is very, very discreet in how he reports these things, but he does retail an anecdote of Pauly being impressed by the prostitutes’ business cards that are pasted in London telephone boxes, and ordering up a bedraggled old hooker to his hotel room, because he thought she would look like the glamorous studio photo on the card (pp.147-148). As for drugs, Grigg presents himself as the forbearing and wise person who steered Pauly away from the stuff. He tells a story of trying to prevent Pauly from snorting cocaine on a launch cruise which affluent recording industry trash took on the Waitemata (pp.83-85). When eventually Pauly dies in 2010 (in his fortieth year), Grigg refutes rumours that drugs had anything to do with it and ascribes Pauly’s death to a complicated auto-immune disorder.

There are also tales of Pauly, after making a scene or indulging a fantasy, crawling back to Grigg or to other industry people and tearfully asking forgiveness for his bad behaviour. But this simply reinforces the impression of an immature kid out of his depth, and the car crash proceeds to take its course.

Second, when all is said and done, this book comes as close as the author dares to saying that Pauly Fuemana had a pitifully small talent in the first place, even as pop singers go. This may sound an extravagant claim on my part, but I beg you to read the following passages in which Grigg talks about how the recordings were produced:

“Sina Saipaia, who appeared in the revised lyrics as Sister Sina, sang the backing vocals and was a dominant voice in the chorus’s duet. This had proved necessary. Pauly had a brilliant and distinctive, almost nasal rapping style, and he could talk-sing in an infectious and quite charming way, but his singing voice was not strong enough to stand on its own. In truth he was never able to sing a lyric in tune. His vocals needed to be carefully placed in the mix to hide their weakness: they were flat unless almost spoken or mixed in with another, stronger voice. This would remain a serious and vexing problem, which Alan [Janssen, the producer] had to repeatedly battle and overcome in the recording and mixing process. For some songs on the album he quietly brought in a session vocalist, whose vocals were mixed into Pauly’s to bring them back into pitch. Pauly didn’t know and the vocalist was uncredited and sworn to secrecy.” (pp.44-45)

Pauly’s delusion that he was also a skilled drummer produced only “a formless bundle of random drum sounds …. Pauly could not play a drum kit, keep a rhythm or produce a passable beat. Despite this he looked pleased with himself and seemed to think he’d done well. This was an illusion he would suffer from often. He was simply unable to see something he’d created for what it was, convincing himself of its artistic and commercial worth even if it had little or none.” (p.75)

Pauly claimed credit for a dance-mix version of “How Bizarre”, in the production of which he was not even involved. Pauly, in other words, believed that the image of himself, created by studio wizardry, really was himself.

Grigg notes briefly that after Pauly and Alan Janssen finally parted “Pauly would never again replicate, or come close to replicating, the success of his first hit song. Without Alan he was unable to write or produce a record that would enter the charts or gain radio play anywhere in the world.” (p.211)

Grigg does note a couple of occasions when Pauly produced passable performances in front of live audiences. But running through the book is the promoter’s FEAR that Pauly will get too many chances to perform live and inevitably disappoint listeners, because he was, on his own and outside the recording studio, clearly a woefully inadequate performer.

I emphasize that in noting all this, I am not being a grumpy old anti-pop-music sod, but am recording faithfully the things that Grigg says and the tone in which he says them.

Probably a book like How Bizarre could have been written about any number of pop performers who are really sold on their synthetic image, and whose real singing abilities are merely incidental to the hype. One still pities Pauly Fuemana for his delusions.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

 “OUR MUTUAL FRIEND” by Charles Dickens (first published as a serial 1864-65 and then in book form 1865)

            Three years ago I gave a public lecture to mark the 200^th birthday of Charles Dickens, and in preparing it I looked up statistics on how popular each of his novels was, in terms of sales and printings. To my surprise, I found that his biggest seller, calculating from all the copies printed since it was first published, was A Tale of Two Cities, which has never exactly been my favourite. I also found out which of his novels has been most frequently filmed or televised (A Christmas Carol, often presented with the title Scrooge) and which has been least often filmed (Barnaby Rudge, of which no film has been made since the days of silent cinema).  Given that Great Expectations and Bleak House are, for the literati, Dickens’ greatest novels; and given that David Copperfield and Oliver Twist are probably the ones most often discussed by the “common reader”, all this surprised me.

One fact does not surprise me, however. Our Mutual Friend (four times turned into television serials, but never filmed for the cinema) has never really caught on with the general reader. This was Dickens’ last completed novel, written after his masterpiece Great Expectations, and before Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1870.

Looking again at this long and rambling novel, I remain amazed that Dickens could write so well and forcefully, and yet produce something that doesn’t reach his own highest standards. For me Our Mutual Friend, even with all its incidental good things, is almost a case study of how even a great writer can go wrong.

Its unsatisfactory story has three interlocking major plots, which go thus:

The wealthy John Harmon has drowned in the Thames, and his fortune has gone to the “golden dustman” Mr “Noddy” Boffin and his wife, who are simple, altruistic and generous people. Mr Boffin employs villainous, one-legged Silas Wegg (“the evil genius of the House of Boffin”) to read to him and otherwise amuse him. But sudden wealth goes to Mr Boffin’s head. He becomes selfish, morose and miserly. Unknown to him, the villainous Wegg discovers an alternative will of the late John Harmon, which would disinherit and ruin Boffin if it were made public. With a certain Mr Venus, Wegg plans to blackmail Boffin with this alternative will.

BUT, in the second strand of plot, and as we discover definitively about halfway through the novel (it has been broadly hinted at before this), John Harmon is not really dead. He chose to be thought so when a man of similar appearance drowned in the Thames. Under the assumed name “John Rokesmith”, Harmon has taken employment as a secretary to Mr Boffin (who has not seen him since he was a child and who therefore doesn’t recognise his benefactor). “Rokesmith’s” intention is to test the feelings of Boffin’s ward, the beautiful Bella Wilfer – whom his father insisted he marry as a condition of his will – to see if she will really love him, apparently a lowly employee, for his own sake rather than as a man of considerable wealth. At first Bella Wilfer is disdainful of him. The climactic moment comes when Boffin, urged on by Wegg, denounces “Rokesmith” as a fortune hunter, seeking only the wealth that will one day be Bella’s. At this point Bella is morally “saved” when she realizes she really does love “Rokesmith” for himself. She renounces wealth and chooses, for love’s sake, to live in straitened circumstances by eloping with “Rokesmith” and marrying him.

These two strands of plot do connect, but the third strand of plot is really a separable story. It concerns Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of the raffish and semi-criminal “Gaffer” Hexam, who makes his living by salvaging things from the river. It was Gaffer who found “Harmon’s” body in the Thames. Two men have their amorous eyes on Lizzie Hexam. One is the lawyer Eugene Wrayburn. The other is the jealous schoolmaster Bradley Headstone. After various complications (I’ll skip them, if you don’t mind), Bradley Headstone tries – unsuccessfully – to murder Eugene Wrayburn in such a way that it will look as if the criminal Rogue Riderhood was responsible. When this plan misfires, Riderhood turns on Headstone, and the two villainous men die, locked in each other’s arms, as they sink to the bottom of the canal where one has attempted to drown the other. (Drowning occurs in more than one novel by Dickens – Quilp dies thus in The Old Curiosity Shop, as do Compeyson and [more-or-less] Magwitch in Great Expectations and Steerforth in David Copperfield.)

So to the resolution of all three strands of the plot. Wegg at last makes his move against Boffin, but it is a damp squib. By this stage “Rokesmith” (Harmon) is fully satisfied with Bella’s virtue as a wife and the mother of their small baby. It turns out that the Boffins knew all along who “Rokesmith” was and they merely pretended to be mean, miserly and scornful to further test Bella’s moral virtue against the temptations of money. Wegg’s plots fall through when his alternative will proves useless. SO – Wegg retires cursing. John Harmon and Bella are now happily married and have a fortune, as do the nice Boffins. The lawyer Eugene Wrayburn marries Lizzie Hexam. And Rogue Riderhood, Bradley Headstone and Gaffer Hexam are all conveniently dead.

And looking at this summary, accurate though it is, I realize that I have done what one often does when attempting to précis long, serially-written Victorian novels (like, for example, Thackeray’s The Newcomes). I have left out some of the novel’s most interesting characters because they are not necessary to the central plots. In Our Mutual Friend there is in effect a fourth plotline, poorly integrated with the rest, concerning the extortionate money-lender “Fascination” Fledgeby, ruining high society figures. It is through Fledgeby that we are introduced to the Veneerings, whom Dickens satirises something rotten as the type of snobbish, social-climbing parvenus; and to the self-satisfied, narrow-minded, middle-class Mr Podsnap, who makes snap judgments about everything. The only conscientious and sympathetic person we encounter in the more affluent classes is Mr Tremlow. The Fledgeby plot also introduces us to Riah, a gentle and generous Jewish money-lender (whom, after complaints from Jewish friends about the villainous Fagin in Oliver Twist, Dickens deliberately created to be a sympathetic Jewish character.) There is also the pathetic “Jenny Wren” who looks after her drunken father as if he were a dependent naughty child.

            Plot summaries – even ones as extensive as you have just read – are of course no way to judge the worth of a novel. Nearly all Dickens’ novels have a large cast, complex plots and subplots, and characters who are introduced elaborately only to vanish without advancing the story in any way. All of these things are found in Our Mutual Friend, and because they are of themselves part of the Dickens phenomenon, they are not the reason I call this almost a case study in how a great writer can go wrong.

            What does strike me in this novel is how there are so many false starts – so many interesting paths that are not pursued. Many scholars have strained to show that Dickens did plan his novels in advance, and did not merely improvise his plots as he went along, from serial-number to serial-number. Even if this is true, however, there is far too much evidence of things introduced into Our Mutual Friend merely for momentary sentimental effect. I think of the gratuitous introduction of “Little John”, whom the generous Boffins adopt. Within three chapters of entering the novel, he dies pathetically, which seems to be his sole purpose for being in the novel in the first place. He is merely a device to produce a pleasant maudlin feeling in susceptible readers.  Or I think of the character of Betty Higden, similarly introduced for a quickly-ensuing death, so that Dickens has a platform from which to denounce the Poor Laws. (Betty Higden, incidentally, is the mother of “Sloppy” who “does the police in different voices” – the phrase that so interested T.S.Eliot).

All the time I was re-reading Our Mutual Friend, I was mentally comparing it with the great – and far more tightly-structured – novel which preceded it in the Dickens canon, Great Expectations. Clearly Dickens’ interests and thematic concerns in Our Mutual Friend are similar to those in the greater novel. There is again the presence of the river. There is again a mysterious and unrevealed benefactor working by stealth (Harmon to the Boffins here; Magwitch to Pip there). There is again Dickens’ rejecting the notion of class distinctions as determinants of moral character. Late in Our Mutual Friend, high society sneers at the middle-class lawyer Eugene Wrayburn’s marrying the low-born Lizzie Hexam. The sympathetic Tremlow steps in to defend the idea of a gentleman as one who does what is morally right rather than as one possessing wealth – which is very much the lesson Pip learns in Great Expectations. Bella Wilfer (the ward of the wealthy Boffins) is very much like a more benign version of Estella (the ward of the wealthy Miss Havisham), but with a touch of patient Griselda thrown in. She has been brought into high society but, unlike Estella, she is not corrupted by it. (Biographers now all note that Estella and Bella, with their similar names, are both in some sense portraits of Ellen Ternan, the young actress who was Dickens’ mistress at this time.)

So comparisons can be drawn between a very great novel and this one, but there is still a major problem that places Our Mutual Friend in a lower rank. It is the screeching illogic of its development. Coincidences (the fortuitous linking of the destinies of otherwise unconnected characters…) are one thing. They work handsomely enough in Great Expectations (Pip just happens to be sent to play with the little girl who just happens to be the daughter of the convict he helped….). But then Great Expectations is told in the first person, and its surprise revelations are credible in that they are filtered through the limited consciousness of Pip. In Our Mutual Friend, by contrast, Dickens’ omniscient third-person narration seems merely to be withholding things from us wilfully.

He cheats blatantly.

Cheerful, altruistic Mr Boffin’s sudden transformation into a nasty and carping miser is too abrupt for belief. But then, it is much later explained, he was only playing at this role in order to test Bella and others; and he already knew the truth about Wegg and Harmon. Not very satisfactory dramatically, but at least it has some sort of logic. Unfortunately, it also makes complete nonsense of the scenes in which we have been led to believe that he was quaking in fear at the hold Wegg supposedly had over him. In retrospect, they are a cheap conjuring trick – neither believable nor dramatic as psychological development. (Apparently G.K.Chesterton argued that Dickens originally intended Boffin to be genuinely corrupted by his inherited wealth and to find redemption slowly; but the pressures of serial writing forced Dickens to improvise the existing plot. Alas! We have to judge the book that was actually written – not the one that might have been projected.)

In addition, the revelation of “Rokesmith’s” identity about halfway through the novel deprives Wegg’s schemes of any real suspense. We know in advance that they will be defeated.

It was sometime in the mid-twentieth century that literary critics began to interpret Dickens as a great imaginative “poet”, whose works had to be read in terms of dominant symbolism. So Bleak House was read in terms of its great opening image of fog, symbolic of the obfuscations and delay of the law about which the plot turns. And Little Dorrit was read in terms of its central image of the debtors’ prison, paradigm of an imprisoning society. Similarly, Our Mutual Friend could be read symbolically in terms of its opening scene set on the river. It is a great opening scene, one of the best Dickens wrote, with Lizzie Hexam and her father Gaffer rowing on a darkening evening between Southwark Bridge and London Bridge. It is tempting to see this as some sort of image of the river of life and the strange (or unsavoury) things that it throws up. This image is so potent that I have noticed a twilit or moonlit river scene often features on the cover of recent paperback editions of the novel.

Now there certainly are symbolic images in this novel – Boffin’s “dust”-heaps (“dust” being a Victorian euphemism for rubbish, mud and filth of all sorts), connecting wealth with sordor; the “Harmony Jail” of John Harmon’s father, suggesting the imprisoning nature of wealth; and the river. But the actual experience of reading the novel is quite different from a matter of pursuing poetic images, whatever their intention may be. We are caught up in the plot-spinning of an absurd plot. We are presented with characters who are stand-alone shafts of acute social satire for the few pages they inhabit (the Veneerings; Podsnap; Lizzie’s brother Charley Hexam), but who are not fully integrated into the story.  And we are faced with psychological untruths – the absurd transformations of Boffin and the sickly image of Bella Wilfer’s married bliss.

In the end, Our Mutual Friend seems to me a novel that lacks the gusto of the early Dickens and the psychological truth

s of the mature Dickens who wrote Great Expectations, even if it does still indict feelingly class distinctions. I read it as I read Joyce’s Ulysses – as a book which has flashes of brilliance and insight within an overlong and wearisomely-developed narrative. There is that arresting opening. There is Podsnap and the Veneerings. There is the grotesquery of Wegg reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Mr Boffin. (I wonder if this gave Evelyn Waugh his idea, in A Handful of Dust, for a man being forced to read the works of Dickens to his captor?) But this big book still seems to me the work of a man who was tired and who had to force himself to write it.

Now, gentle reader, you may be wondering why I have been so hard on this novel, which is esteemed highly in some quarters. The answer is  - disappointment. Of all the women characters whom Dickens created, Lizzie Hexam seems to me the most attractive – a strong-willed young woman who is able to defy her criminal father over the way he makes a living, and who clearly makes her own plans. Dickens finally gives her wedding bells as a reward, which might offend some modern women readers; but at least he shows a middle-class character fully allying himself with this working-class woman. I am aware that this character has been criticised as being improbable and superficially-drawn. We never get to hear Lizzie Hexam’s thoughts. She is seen from the outside only. She speaks in standard English rather than the demotic tongue she might be expected to speak after growing up in the lower depths. She develops at the whim of the plot. But when all this is said, she is still a hardy young woman with a will and a brain and admirable physical strength.

It therefore disappoints me that this fine and spirited character does not inhabit a better novel. Draw a rough comparison – it’s like the delightful Beatrice and Benedick inhabiting one of Shakespeare’s less accomplished comedies.

Our Mutual Friend is not worthy of Lizzie Hexam.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

LIZZIE HEXAM AMONG DICKENS’ WOMEN

When Charles Dickens creates women and girls who are caricatures, harpies or grotesques, his women are as convincing and entertaining as his male caricatures, villains and grotesques.

Mrs Leo Hunter is as jolly a piece of foolery in The Pickwick Papers as Jingle, Tupman and the rest. Man-woman Sally Brass is as nasty and vicious as her whining brother in The Old Curiosity Shop. Madame Defarge and her clicking needles are the epitome of Dickens’ fear of revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. Sarah Gamp is a gruesomely awful drunken nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, and in the same novel Mr Pecksniff’s daughters Mercy and Charity are as horrible as their hypocritical father. On the credit side, Betsey Trotwood, both peremptory and charitable, is every little boy’s daydream of the ideal mother in David Copperfield, Nancy is (eventually) a pitiable wretch in Oliver Twist and Miss Flite an engaging eccentric (carrying a huge burden of symbolism in the names of her birds) in Bleak House. These characters (and so many others) are the imaginative equals of Bumble, Quilp, Captain Cuttle, Harold Skimpole, Jo Gargery and the whole gallery of male caricatures in Dickens.

But it’s when we come to women in the foreground of a Dickens novel that we strike problems.

Away from the grotesques, caricatures and harpies, too many of Dickens’ leading women are vacuous puppets, dolls, idealisations and simply too good to be true.

I would like to believe in David Copperfield’s marital problems, but Dora Spenlow is a silly girl, inane in thought and movement. She is there for our amusement (and the pathos in her dying). And David’s second wife Agnes Wickfield is so much the compliant, wise angel-in-the-house that she smells of roses.

Yes, there are some leading women in Dickens who rise to complexity. Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, tortured by the past that might catch up with her. Estella in Great Expectations, haughty and corrupted, but at least (in the novel’s original ending – not the sugar-plum one) as much chastened by her experience as Pip is. And Edith Dombey (in one of my favourite Dickens novels, Dombey and Son) bored, bored, bored with her marriage and running away from it – but Dickens has to spoil it by having her at the last moment denounce her potential lover.

Now there’s the rub. Even in his halfway-believable leading women, Dickens has to sweeten them, tame them, domesticate them. They become either pitiable “betrayed” women – like Lady Dedlock – whose duty is to preserve our sense of morality by dying. Or they become those “legless angels” about whom wits in the Freudianised 1920s used to snicker when Dickens’ posthumous reputation was at its lowest ebb.

Which brings me to Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend.

She is not one of Dickens’ caricatures. She is one of his leading women. Certainly Dickens ends up domesticating her, by having her marry Eugene Wrayburn (nursing him and being another angel-in-the-house after his brush with death). Certainly she, a working-class girl with a criminal for a father, talks the same sort of Received English dialogue that is most improbably talked by workhouse boy Oliver Twist (we can’t alienate our middle-class readers’ sympathy….). And certainly we do not see the working of her mind.

But Lizzie is a girl with initiative – trying (hopelessly) to reform her father; trying to drag her foolish brother away from impending criminality and a life of waste. And she is physically strong. The image that opens the novel has her strongly rowing on the Thames as her father searches for valuable flotsam.

Critics have tried, without success, to convince me that Bella Wilfer, the novel’s official leading woman, is a complex character, with her emotional integrity drawing her away from corruption by money. I can’t see it. Bella is a doll in Dickens’ romantic plot. Lizzie has more real intellectual will than she has.

Anyway, you can see I like this woman – probably my favourite woman in the whole Dickens canon.

Here’s a poem I wrote about her, which appeared in Landfall 227 (Autumn 2014). It says what it says.

LIZZIE HEXAM

(Our Mutual Friend)

Strong-armed and sunburnt on a soup-green river,

I’d love you more than the poppet

set up to trap rich men with simpered chat,

Lizzie, hauling bloated corpses, knowing

your life is more than this river.

I’d take you at your word, Lizzie,

catechizing a thankless brother, trying to tame

a mercenary thieving father, scavenging

life in scraps, away from the currents,

the sewered, sucking tide.

I’d haul you in my arms, Lizzie,

nesting you in my top-coat,

polishing, booking, wording you, fitting you

for table-company, sipping river-green soup

from fine tureens, forking veal from bone china.

And I’d betray you, Lizzie, capsize your boat

swamping those very things that make you you,

unpolished, unbooked,  your steady arms

pulling oars across the tide, you bride only

to sun and rain -  sister, daughter, strange mother.

The flow is hard against these piles,

your long hair whips the wind, your voice

is calm,  your keen eyes are a compass,

you row in steady strokes, un-fussed.

I’d love you best by leaving you.