Source ofenergyEdward Blishen

The Letters of CharlesDickens, vol. 5 : 1847-49.edited by Graham Storeyand K. J . F i e l d i n g(Oxford , £40).

D a v i d Copperfield , byCharles Dickens, editedby Nina Burgi s (Oxford,£40).

I KNOW at least half adozen writers who dip intoDickens when working onbooks in order, hy a processmuch more boisterous thanosmosis, to acquire energy.These 1,248 letters, survivorsof a mere three years of cor-respondence, amount , I sup-pose, to not much more thanone of the suburbs of thatenergy.

They are what Dickensfound time for while complet-ing Dombey and Son, writinghis last Christmas book, TheHaunted Man, beginningDavid Copperfield, launchingand keeping much more thanan accountant's eye on acheap edition of his works,fathering two sons, establish-ing and intimately supervis-ing a home for fallen women,instigating and directingseveral tours by amateuractors — he'd be playing fourparts himself, writing thebills, running the box office— planning and preparing tolaunch Household Words, ham-mering out the ground rulesof an insurance scheme forwriters, artists and scientists,campaigning against publicexecutions — and being"mortal lazy."

I am mortal lazy," hewrote to Stone, one of hisillustrators, " and if you wereto come round, I might betempted out to play." Heplayed enormously. He wasalways at the theatre, reada great deal , walked withwhat can only be describedas a kind of avidity.

He was gentle and sensi-tive and often heartbrokenwhen concerned with hisfallen women, the IsabellaGordons and Rachel Bradleysof Urania Cottage.

Compare the letters withthe books, and you have an

interesting demonstration ofthe difference in intensitybetween i writer using hisskills for hasty everyday pur-poses. ?.» i a writer positivelycreating (" working at it veryslowly, and with infinitepains — rejecting things, dayafter day, as they come intomy thoughts, and whippingthe cream off them ").

But there are lovelymoments that might come outof any of the novels: as whenhe looks up from a letter andsees a spider "with twenty-two very decided knees ": orwhen he describes his firstmeeting with Victor Hugo("His wife is a handsomewoman with flashing blackeyes, who looks as if shemight poison his breakfastany morning when thehumour seized her ").

He is, of course, the Inimi-table — and one's remindedthat the self-conferred nick-name amoun ts partly to aform of self-defence undersuch an assault of mimicryas few public figures canever have endured: wryly hecomments that he can't takeup a magazine withoutencountering an echo "coupled , very likely, with•some disparagement by thesame hand ".

Very simply, the emotionalrange of the man is sug-gested: from the most ravish-ing lightness of heart ("Inever heard or saw suchlaughing in a theatre. Thepeople were drooping overthe fronts of boxes likefruit") to the deepest andmost desolate gravity ('havingcome from his sister'sdeathbed, he wrote: " Godknows how small the worldlooks to me who come outof such a sick room on abright summer day — andhow witheringly exact is thatword 'small!'").

I think the letters offerenergy to any reader, writeror not. Reflect, for example,on what's implied when hewrites : " Is it not alwaystrue, in comedy and in tra-gedy, that the more real theman the more genuine theactor ? " The letters, like thenovels, provide us with thespectacle of a great humanbeing engaged in the heroicattempt to link imaginationand reality.

Well, in September 1849,John Leech, on holiday withDickens in Bonchurch, wasstruck while swimming by aviolent wave and concussed.Sitting by his bedside,Dickens observed that " hewas like a ship in distress,in a sea of bedclothes. " Sixmonths later, mildly adapted,the image had found its wayinto Chapter 35 of David Cop-perfield: the new Clarendonedition of which has had aloving completeness bestowedupon it by Nina Burgis. Acurious dplight to read, infootnotes, the passages, some-times indispensable, thatDickens dispensed withbecause they overweightedthe monthly parts.

Both these volumes aremarvels of tireless editine.But oh , the prices ! Woulda modern Dickens be workingon a scheme for insuring pur-chasers of his books ?

Children of their timeHilary Bailey reviews new fiction

"THE children of midnightwere also the children of thet ime: fathered, you under-stand, by history. It canhappen . Especially in acountry which is itself a sortof a dream." Salman Rush-die's hero is born in 1946,on the stroke of India's inde-pen dence, one of. a group ofchildren, all born at the sametime and all with strangepowers — one is a werewolf ,one can walk through polishedsurfaces, one is a time tra-veller. The hero of Childrenof Midnight can see intohearts and minds. SaleemSinai is not of his time. Heactually is his time. He isIndia , growing, struggling,finally mutilated by a figurecalled the Widow, or Indira ,or Shiva .

The book is a politicalfable , but much more. It isfull of scenes and incidents,full of an Indian family, eachmember leading his or hervainglorious life , uninhibitedby psychiatrist , social workeror policeman. It is full oflife, colour and poetry andthe love, and dread , ofcountry. It inhabits a worldwhere reality can be seennaturally as myth or mythas reality, -without eitherlosing any force — thatworld where the actual , themythic and the symbolic are

Midnight's Children, by Morris W e s t (Hoddcr,Salman Rushdie (Cape, £6.95).£6.95). Eve's Ransom, by George

A Bonfire, by P a m e l a Gissing (Dover, £1.75).Hansford Johnson (Mac- ©reams of the Kalahari, bymillan, £5.95). Carolyn S l a u g h t e r

The Hill Station, by J. G. (Granada , £6.95).F a r re 11 (Weidenfeld, Brainchild, by Eve Croft£6-oO). (Only W o m e n Press,

The Clowns of God, by £7.50).

all equally true and which,in occidental society, is nor-mally only found in childrenbefore they are trained outof it in case they grow upmad, or too sane for theirown good. Rushdie brazenlysees life as we ju st some-times perceive it. Eventssometimes mean more thanthe sum of. their parts. Wemake our times and our timesmake us.

Few, if any, British (in theNational Front sense of theword) seem able to achievethis idea of our own times.Nostalgia we have in plenty,as we eternally like

characters in a time-warp,relive the pasts of ourparents and grandparents.But the complete sense ofwhere we are and what ishappening is not there. TheBritish writer's watch evi-dently stopped at the timeof the crime — ten to three— but the puzzle is: Whatwas the crime ?

That said , Pamela Hans-ford Johnson's A Bonfire,which began in 1924, isnevertheless a strong andworthy hook. Her heroine,Emma, grows up and enduresthe death of a dearly-lovedhusband , remarries, less hap-

pily, and survives. There isno phoney " period flavour "in terms of. descriptions ofold biscuit boxes but the,reis a fine sense of the slightdifference between attitudesthen and now. The charactersare robust, a plausible mix-ture of sense and sensibility.Finally we, the readers, cometo understand that Emmareally did lose the best partof her life when her younghusband died, but that therest of it will always holdsome savour for her.

Meanwhile, bacX to Indiawith The Hill Station, whichthe author, J. G. Farrell, didnot complete before hisdeath. In fact, there is some-thing frustrating about road-ing a novel one knows willnot end and even more soif the author depends on plotand narrative , on what hap-pens, to convey the meaningof ! the book. Without anending, we feel , the novelwill never sum itself up.

Thus we begin in a railwaycarriage on the way to Simla ,where the good doctor andhis wife , their niece , newlyarrived and looking for ahusband, the dubious Mrs

Forester and the obsessedclergyman all meet. All thetensions are established , andthey are strong.

The trouble is that it isnot who the characters are,so much as what they areabout to do. which wouldhave made the book. As itstands it is a graceful start,with some excellent setpieces — a garden party, anarrival, a rush in the darkthrough dangerous streets —but , sadly, we shall neverreally find out what it wasall about.

Morris West's thriller. TheClowns of God, bites off thelot , chews it and , moreover,digests it. An author who canmake his main character firstthe lay best friend of adeposed Pope, then thevisionary ex-Pope himselfand finally bring in theliving Christ, all withoutbeing sickening, and who canwrite plausible thrills andsolid theology at the sametime must be a minor miraclein himself. Moms West doesall this, and more.

Virago and other feministpresses have proved themerits of republishing the

work of forgotten womenauthors and it is high timethat the work of good , if notgreat, authors of the past wasbrought back into the lightagain. So let us welcome thereturn of George Gissing'sEve's Ransom, a very reada-ble tale of a young man'sfolly where Gissing bril-liantly accounts for the unac-countable way in which•women behave when tryingto get the right mix of sexualattraction to and financialsupport out of men.

The heroine of CarolynSlaughter's Dreams of theKalahari is far from the sex-cash nexus, being more of theEmily Bronte school ofthought. This Emily, born inAfrica , feels, experiences andreacts intensely to every-thing. All is immediate —school, the first love affair ,the return to Africa — asthough seen by the author,for the character, for the firsttime.

The same kind of intensityruns through Brainchild byEve Croft. Trapped by preg-nancy into an early marriage,unable to bear suburbanliving, the intelligent work-ing class heroine blows herminimal chances again andagain and ends up in a coun-cil flat. The plea goes deeperthan the events described andthe voice behind the book isstrong,

ResidentalienGeorge Melly

How to Become a Virgin,by Quentin Crisp (Duck-worth, £6.95, Fontana,£1.50).

THE THEME of this, hissecond volume of autobio-graphy, is what happened toits author as a result of thesuccess of the televisionadaptation of his first , TheNaked Civil Servant. Whathappened was decidelyagreeable. From living inpenurous and squalid circum-stances in Chelsea, he has!become a modestly pros-perous public figure on bothsides of the Atlantic, shep-herded about Hike a pieceof fragile Dresden China. Atlong last destiny has smiledon Quentin Crisp and he,never one to bear a grudge,smiles conscientiously back.

After The Naked CivilServant was published asa book, and Mr Crispappeared in person in a docu-

mentary, he was muchabused and threatened , bothon the telephone and inperson. It wasn't until JohnHurt had impersonated him,had, as it were, transmittedhim into fiction , that hebecame the object of friendlyveneration. Largely I suspectbecause people were eager tocheck up on the original arti-fact , what Mr Crisp calls " theredemptive element in televi-sion " began to operate in hisfavour.

From then on the worldopened to him. America,since his youth a cinema-fuelled dream, turned into agolden reality. The final two-third s of the book are aseries of short essays dan-gling from the thread of MrCrisp's late apotheosis into StQuentin. They are polishedand deliriously shocking intheir unfashionable frivolousegotism.

He has, in his gilded ageseduced the straight worldwhich once contemptuouslyrejected him. Now it is thegays who consider him out-side the pale. If only, afterths film, he had remainedcooped up in Chelsea , hewould have become theirhero. Old-fashioned perhapsin clothes and gesture, butan early martyr who cameout in the bad old days. Bycamping for his supper, byexploiting his past for thereassurance of heterosexuals,he has blown it.

Quentin Crisp's virtue iswhat it has always been. Anobstinate refusal to conformto any stereotype. He walkstoday as bravely through thejeering lines of gay clonesas he did between the mock-ing ranks of homophobes inyesteryear. He has alwaysremained faithful to the pre-cept of the poet he wouldno doubt refer to as "MrShakespeare." He has beentrue to himself.

" Wherever I am on thisearth," he writes towards theend of his book, "I am, andshall always be, only a resi-dent alien."

Dickens in 1892

The last ofLord ByronGeoffrey Grigson on the Letters

For Freedom's B a t t l e .Byron's Letters a n dJournals, Volume eleven,edited by L. A. Marchand(Murray, £11.50).

Byron's Political and Cul-tural Influence in Nine-teenth Century Europe :A symposium, edited byP, G. Truenlood (Mac-millan, £15). .

HERE IS Byron at last .inall of his letters, the knownand till now unknown, com-plete in eleven volumes, withonly an index volume tocome. Do we now see a newByron, at least a differentByron, and not quite that oldcombination of impossibleperson, and poet who writesonly on the surface ?

Twenty-five years ago, asif Byron had no muse andno morals — at least nolitera ry morals — RobertGraves wrote that he pairedByron and Nero " as the twomost dangerously talentedbounders of all time." Didhe mean that Byron fiddledwhile poetry burned ? ThatByron was a stinker outsideof his poetry as well as insideof i t?

Of course there is a confus-ing doubleness or treblenessabout Byron.

view ? Or here is Byronabout Byron, from an earliervolume of these letters : hehears his carriage cominground , it is cold and his car-riage is open , he has orderedhis pistols and his greatcoat :" Clock strikes — going outto make love. Somewhat peri-lous, but not disagreeable."

What a lordly offhand, self-dramatising poet (but don'tlet us bother to read hispoems). Yes, he makes love,he tries incest, he concealsa club-foot, he is free of hiswife, he swims the Helle-spont etcetera — and ofcourse lie dreams that Greecemay still be free, he is Free-dom's Champion (and thenhe goes and dies in bed atMissolonghi before a shot hasbeen fired — much as thatlesser hero-poet RupertBrooke was to die in bed onSkyros, also en route towallon the Turks) .

Will that , or somethinglike it , do for Byron ? Thatit will do nothing of the kindis shown by the letters ; isshown often enough by asingle sentence in a letter ,by the way the words so,before we take in exactlywhat the words are saying.One thing these letters showis that no one lived more ina genuinely poetic (and prac-tical) immediacy, in more ofa here-and-now of experienceand feeling and response. .

It is being what he is, apoet, which brings the realByron out — if his letter isgoing to the right man ; let'ssay to Tom Moore : " I verilybelieve that not you, nor anyman of poetical temperament,can avoid a strong passionof some kind. It is the poetryof life."

In his letters, as in his bestpoems — in Beppo for one,or Don Juan, or the Visionof Judgement, Byron isn 't a"literary man ": "I don'tdraw well with literary men— not that I dislike them,but I never know what tosay to them 'after I havepraised their last publication.There are s'everal exceptions,to be sure : but then theyhave either been men of theworld, such as Scott, andMoore, etc., or visionaries outof it, such as Shelley, etc."And it was Byron, it shouldbe sometimes remembered,Byron the poet, who insistedthat Coleridge should publishhis Kubla Khan.

In this last volume of theletters, of course the readerneeds to skip, as before. Thatis a mild nuisance about com-plete letters, which have toinclude cash letters andbusiness letters when theysurvive. But then even induller stretches Byron dancesfrom phrase to phrase, to thedelightfully ironic or witty."A diuretic letter of themost pure urinary tender-ness " — that is Byron amus-ing himself and his corres-pondent , and us a hundredand fifty years or so later.Or this : " What is Cookeryto a leguminous eating asce-tic ? " Or this, about Dr Poli-dori going home from Italyw i t h Lord Guildford —" having actually embowelledLord Guildford at Pisa andspiced and pickled him forhis rancid ancestors."

His lordship fell on thechambermaid like a thunder-bolt." I won't guarantee myaccuracy, but as I rememberthem, these are the wordswhich P o 1 i d o r i , youngByron's physician and secre-tary, used to describe Byron'sarri val at an inn, on the wayto Italy. Is that Byron aspoet, and Byron as wickedhero, a common two-in-one

True, no doubt : Byron isto be taken as a force whichcan be — and is — expressedin his own words :Words are things, andL a

small drop of inkFall ing like dew upon a

thought producesThat which makes thousands,

perhaps viillions, think.All the same, the contribu-

tion I found most interestingand sympathetic is the oneby two Leningrad academicswhich considers Byron in hispoetic and cultural influenceon Pushkin and Zukovsky.

and needs of Greek versusTurk , towards the deathbedin Missolonghi, after thatride which Byron took in therain; I cannot say they arethe sprightliest most' personalor most entertaining in thelong sequence of elevenvolumes, though I mentionone letter which did strikeme as particularly wry ; lifecontinuing till death super-venes, in this one of Byron'slast letters to his old friend,little Hobhouse, he adds aP.S. listing ' some of thethings he urgently needs indistant Cephalonia — Epsomsalts, calcined Magnesia,Waite's toothpowder, Smith'stooth brushes, Acton's cornrubbers, and soda powders.

In the symposium byvarious authors, European,English and American , editedby the. American professorTrueblhod , Byron the Poet ismost of the while supplantedby Byron the radical andpolitical Influence. " Euro-pean nineteenth century cul-ture." you read on the title!page, in a quotation fromNorthrop Frye, " is as un-thinkable without Byron asifs historv would be withoutNanolean."

A correspondent on hisown wave-lenath — that isall h° rc^ds. Then his gaiety— often his profound sense— flashes out.

These final letters dwindleaway to the practical affairs

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