Mostly About Stories

Leaving an Impression: My First Dickens – Bleak House

Well, that took a while. A month and a half, pretty much exactly. Bleak House, which I read because I had heard it was the best Dickens, was also my first Dickens – the first I finished anyway. I think I started Great Expectations about ten years ago. And how do I feel? Overwhelmed, that’s for sure. This wasn’t the life-changing event that some other books are, but it was awe-inspiring in its own way. I know about Dickens, of course – how can you avoid him? That he is larger than life, that his characters and books and everything else are all massive – well, yes, I was half-ready for it. But still, faced with such a whirlwind, no amount of preparedness will let you stay anchored to the ground. Readers, I was blown into the air by this mad book, and only now am I beginning to sink back down to earth.

Bleak House has a hugely intricate, complicated plot, filled with more characters than I and my extended family have fingers and toes to count on. It is a state-of-the-nation novel, one that aims to contain everything and everyone, every idea, and every thought, every word, and every punctuation mark. And so, it does, so far as I can tell. We deal with a murder mystery, our narrator’s mysterious parentage, and many other bits and pieces as Dickens accumulates and articulates everything he wants to say about the world. Much as with War and Peace, which I read and couldn’t write about here, I struggle to know where or how to begin. But as this is my first Dickens, perhaps there’s some value in thinking about that most distinctive of Dickensian elements – his characters.

Character

I think it was James Wood who said of Dickens’ characters that they are real, far more real than real people, not because of their depth, but precisely because of their flatness. Most of the people here can be reduced to a single trait or mood or thought or image. Mrs Jellyby is surrounded by papers, so obsessed with bringing civilization to the Niger delta that she neglects to bring it to her own family, who live in squalor. Mr Chadband sweats oil whenever he speaks. Mr Turveydrop is extremely proud of his deportment, to the detriment of everything else. Volumnia Dedlock is as airy as her name. I could go on. Give me one of the silly names and the character returns, here bent over like Mr Smallweed, there standing tall like the ex-soldier George.

In the preface to my edition, Terry Eagleton suggests that Dickens’ broad-brushstroke method of characterisation reflects the urbanising environment in which the novels were written. When we see people for only a brief moment, on a street corner say, then they will inevitably be reduced in our minds to their simplest and most striking characteristics. I quite like the idea, save that the characters really do not have any depth, for the most part. They are who their name literally says they are, mostly incapable of change, mostly without any complexity going on behind the scenes.

And yet they are real. The more I read and live, the more I appreciate that character is the hardest thing for a writer to make. A simulacrum of a human being, this can be done – “a man enters the room”. But the realification of the image within an author’s mind is a sacred mystery. Plots, by comparison, are easy. Intelligence alone and a bit of time will allow the majority of us to weave some interesting interconnection(s), to build a network of symbols and thoughts and motives. But a network is dull and empty without life, without character.

Who are the characters that I remember? Dostoevsky’s mostly, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Dostoevsky simply adored Dickens, and there are even legendary if false stories of their having met in London. Dostoevsky’s characters – the ones we remember – burn with passion for ideas. This fact simplifies them just as Dickens’ characters are simplified. But Dostoevsky understood that to take an idea into your soul and to live by it is to transform yourself utterly so that no interaction is left unaltered. This is inspiring, which is why we want to be, especially when we are young, like his characters. With the exception of those whose lives end in suicide, nobody can accuse Dostoevsky’s people of being empty. Repulsive at times, doubting-stricken, but always filled.

Dickens’ characters are not like this. They are startling because of their lack of interiority – it does not matter if their souls are filled because they do not seem much concerned with them, to begin with. Very few of them seem capable of reflection or thought, only our occasional narrator Esther and a few of her friends. The rest float through life in an uncomprehending daze.

A character’s reality lies in the little details, more even than the big ones. One of the first moments in Anna Karenina that had me on the verge of awestruck tears is when Levin, at a party, repeats the same joke twice. Few authors would consider writing something similar because it’s a waste of space and might convince an editor that they don’t actually proofread their own work. But it’s also a truth, a real truth, that some of us social incompetents really are socially incompetent. It is showing, rather than telling, at its very best. Thomas Mann got from Tolstoy the importance of such details for allowing for many characters within a relatively short book. Buddenbrooks, that supremely realist novel, features a number of minor characters who are distinctive only because every time they are mentioned we hear the same thing about them – whom they tailor, for example.

Dickens’ characters are their details, as I’ve said. Name, description, and speech with them are all possessing a certain unity. They create an overwhelming impression which means that within a few lines we know all we need to know and know enough to remember them even as a wave of other such characters crashes over us. I never remember what a character looks like – hair colour, eyes, and all those traditional bits and pieces – I cannot even picture most characters in my mind as I read the description. But Dickens does it, easy as that. In Bleak House, their simplicity, and their purpose, give them energy.

And I suppose that’s what makes them interesting, beyond the book. What does it say that these people are so powerful in our minds? I am no Dickens, but I have been alive. How many people do I know whom I could write about as Dickens does? Nobody, because people in real life are not so simplistic – I am being ridiculous to suggest that such a thing is possible. But I also think I can say, begrudgingly, that few people, even those close to me, leave such a vivid impression as these characters have. And is that not something to be regretted, even worried over?

Perhaps only if we are as anxiety-ridden as I am. We look at ourselves and find ourselves wanting. If only I could be so distinctive, as one of Dickens’ characters. I won’t change my name, but all the rest… – don’t I want to be remembered? For one thing, success in life is at least partly dependent upon standing out in people’s minds. We don’t just want to be an office drone, we want to be the guy who is selected for a promotion, or the girl whose work is remembered for a commendation. If we want an active social life we should message other people, but we should also be the person who comes first into someone’s head as they lie on their bed, aimlessly scrolling through their contacts looking for something to do.

All this raises the perennial question, what must we do? Must I focus on one distinctive facet of my character and ham it up to no end? As a ginger, ought I not perhaps exclusively dress in reds, so that the impression of being aflame is so overwhelming that people rush for a fire extinguisher every time I enter the room? There was a moment, after watching the anime Death Note as a young teen, when I started crouching on tables and making structures from match sticks – do I need an obnoxious hobby, perhaps, or an unattractive habit?

Almost certainly not, for the simple reason that memorability is not the only reason why we might succeed in life. We must marry it to being attractive – having those traits that make others think of us positively when we come into their minds. The last thing I want to be known as is that ginger with the dreadful dress sense. But it must be admitted also that the traits that are most attractive are also, for the most part, ones that are less memorable than their Dickensian counterparts. Esther Summerson, our narrator for part of Bleak House, is boringly good and kind. As Eagleton notes in his preface, Dickens was faced with the rather common problem of “how to make virtue artistically attractive”. Esther, whose defining trait is her radiating goodness, is ultimately memorable for being annoying.

Working hard, being clever, being kind – these are all things that leave a positive impression. But they are also to some extent incompatible with leaving a strong impression. If you work hard, you have no time for being distinctive in other ways, and being kind requires modesty to really leave a positive impression, or else it just annoys people. And modesty is quiet. Some things work for positive impressions and strong impressions, but I cannot think of many – things like wit and the ability to laugh easily and make people feel at ease.

Where, then, does Dickens come in? We are often told to be ourselves, and authenticity is almost always an attractive trait in a conforming world. Being an individual then, perhaps, is already enough to be distinctive. Mixed together with some good traits, we may not be as memorable as Mr Tulkinghorn or Detective Bucket, but we will still be pretty well-off compared to some. Have a hobby, read the odd book, go outside, think for yourself, and do your own thing. We cannot achieve a Dickensian personality, nor should we aim to. But there is plenty we can do to avoid being a forgettable a side character in everyone’s lives, even our own.

If there is something in Dickens that we must take note of for our own lives, besides the obvious social messages, it must be the importance of distinctiveness. When we meet many more people over the course of a week than we do even in the madness of Bleak House, we see just how important being a non-mushy part of someone’s experience of the world is. Sometimes this is impossible, for example because at work people may adopt a mercantile attitude towards others that only allows them to exist provided they bring a benefit, but for the most part it is not so. So, reader, let’s go and exist distinctively, so that we may become memorable for the right reasons, and fill the hearts of others with joy.

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts that my first full encounter with Dickens inspired in me.

Two Days in Trieste

Of course, I wanted to stop at Trieste, not Venice, on the way to visit my brother in Slovenia. Venice, even discounting my having been there once before, is the more familiar city, even if you haven’t yet visited. It is the habitual inspirer. I, who have barely any interest in travel literature, know of at least three serious writers who were besotted with the place. Venice is the home of schemes, daggers in the dark, and romance of a certain sort. But it is also a place that you can picture, that you know already, and so you know that even if you do go there you probably won’t be able to see it through the fog left by so many images, so many cliches, all those things that clog the brain.

I wanted to see Trieste instead. This was Joyce’s home, his place of exile – he wrote Portrait and most of Dubliners and much of Ulysses here. But more than Joyce, I wanted to see the ghosts of Austria-Hungry. More so even than Vienna, I thought that Trieste, the port city purpose-built by the Austrians to cater to their imperial and maritime ambitions and filled with Austrians, Jews, and Italians, surrounded by villages speaking mostly Slovenian, would be the place where the traces of that multi-ethnic medley would be most visible. Traces, memories carved into brickwork perhaps, but nothing more – I knew I could only ask so much.

Leaving the city after the first night, on a bus to Ljubljana, you rise up onto the karst – the hard rocks that mountainously surround the city and are covered with a dense thickness of green pines. From up there the view back down to the city, provided the twists and turns of the road have spared you seasicknesss and allow you to look back the way you came, in my mind is more than anything else reminiscent of the south of Crimea, which I visited two years ago. There too a mountainous forested landscape, rising above a civilized beach community with pretentions to Europeanness, with its promenades and serious stony buildings. Nowadays few foreigners visit Yalta or Alupka, and those that did would find a past as badly distorted as the dreadful statue inspired by Chekhov’s “Lady and the Little Dog” which blights the boardwalk.

Trieste was the Austrians’ port, its window to the East just as Saint Petersburg was Russia’s window to the West. The Baron Revoltella, whose museum-house is the main touristic attraction within Trieste’s city limits, was the largest private shareholder of the Suez Canal, and a noted Egyptophile. The first ship to pass through the Canal, before even its official opening, flew the flag of Trieste. Venice was wrest from the Austrians in the course of the Risorgimento, but Trieste miraculously survived until the empire itself collapsed at the end of the First World War. Returned to Italy, it no longer had any purpose and began a long decline that I suppose continues to this day.

There were only two trains in the train station the morning I left Trieste for second time, on the way back. It was as if the station itself were trying to tell me that this place is a dead end. Once trains ran to Vienna, via Ljubljana (then Laibach) and Graz; to Salzburg and Munich via Undine; to Prague via Gorizia; and southward to Pola, today’s Pula, at the bottom of the Istrian peninsula. Now the southern station is closed, half the northern one is bricked up, and only the tracks along the waterfront remind us that once this place was really alive, pulsing with imperial energy, and the hustle and bustle of world trade.

What remains? A beautiful square, some equally beautiful buildings, a pier. And the atmosphere, of course. Jan Morris, in her Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, which I picked up in a local bookshop, calls it “a city made for exiles.” And there is something in that. Trieste was built for a world that no longer exists, for a country that no longer exists. No matter how much tourism and research, the city’s main contributions these days, may attempt to rejuvenate it, or its authority over the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, this city still seems to sit waiting for the return of the country that gave it purpose. It seems to be waiting to go home. Any exile finding herself in Trieste would know the feeling well.

The view towards the sea from the Piazza Unita d’Italia, once Piazza Grande

Besides Joyce, we might know his local friend Italo Svevo, author of the novel Zeno’s Conscience, about a man attempting to quit smoking. As a neurotic novel from the early 1900s, it fits rather comfortably into the other literature that the dying Viennese empire was producing at the time – all depressed people, dispossessed people, and people dislocated from reality. A wander round the art gallery that occupies the same building as the Revoltella Museum reveals that literature was not the only area in which Trieste seemed to live under the influence of Vienna. Cartoons, illustrations and paintings, all seem to be by someone – Egon Schiele or Klimt or any other more famous Austrian – anyone, in short, other than who they actually are by: native Triestinos who had studied in the same places, whether Munich or Vienna, at around the same time. This is rather startling, yet another push towards disorientation. We can no longer trust ourselves.

Trieste is not a big city. Like Vienna, the collapse of the Empire left it in a death spiral that it took time to recover from. It is a planned city, so walking around it is not difficult. There is only a single canal, the Canal Grande, and as it is covered with bridges and surrounded by cafes, it is unlikely to impress. But more than I remember Venice doing, Trieste has inspired me. There is something disconcerting by all these buildings, whose original purpose has been lost, standing so confidently around as if someone forgot to tell them their party is over. Everything seems alright, but clearly is not. I do not mean that the city is in decline, because those days have passed – now Trieste is quietly successful and a lovely place to visit. I mean that the city seems to tell two contradictory stories, making it every bit as schizophrenic as the modernisms that once argued amongst themselves at its literary cafes.

Saint Petersburg is also a great city that has lost its way. Wonderful, awe-inspiring, magnificent, today it is also dilapidated, poorly kept, and falling apart. In its visible decay it mimics its sad decline from Imperial capital into the place where Muscovite businessmen keep their mistresses. But this makes Petersburg, and its story, rather simple. Trieste is not like this. It is a fantastical city, like Gogol’s Petersburg, because it seems incapable of speaking straight to us. Even its truths it speaks with a wry smile. And so out of its paltry collection of old buildings and oversized squares it goads us into imagining something more. That’s what makes it exhilarating.

The Revoltella Museum is the best thing in the city, although I might be saying that because it’s pretty much the only museum in the city. Baron Revoltella was born in Venice, but spent most of his life in Trieste, building a business empire on the mainstays of 19^th century capitalism – speculating in grain and other goods. His house is closer to a palace, with a sublime trickling fountain at the foot of the winding stair up to his receiving rooms and his private quarters, the latter of which is unsubtly filled with paintings of coquettish women, sleeping girls, and all sorts of other paintings which would only be vaguely excusable in the home of a committed bachelor.

With Revoltella’s success, and the Slovene inscriptions we might catch site of on the walls of the odd building, and the docks and their ghostly bustle, we might allow ourselves the comfort of imagining that Trieste was a successful Mitteleuropan melting pot – the primary delusion of those of us who suffer nostalgia for the Austrian Empire. Morris’s book is interesting because it complicates that picture without destroying it entirely. Trieste’s growth came off the various privileges that were granted it by the Habsburgs, including relative religious freedom for the Jewish merchants who went there. There is a Serbian and a Greek Orthodox Church, a synagogue of course, and plenty of other places of worship. At one point or other, an awful lot of different people must have been comfortable here.

But then the nationalisms came, and things were ruined. The Italian irredentists wanted Trieste, and disaffected youths started throwing bombs about. In miniature, Trieste reflected the fate of the 19^th century nation, with its collapse into ethnic disharmony. The 20^th century only made things worse, as the Italians were finally granted the city in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1919. Mussolini began a process of Italianization, with predictable results for the non-Italians who had thought of the city as their home. Then the Nazis came, and Trieste became the only extermination camp on Italian soil. And with that, another people, another part of Trieste’s colour and vibrancy, was annihilated. Nowadays the Slovenes are allowed their schools and their language, but after the Second World War ended Trieste was briefly a free zone, contested by the Yugoslavs and the Allies, filled with spies and excitement, before being returned to Italy to bubble away, working out what to do with itself.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is filled with this melancholy note – its subject matter, naturally, is contagious. It was nationalism that broke Trieste, as it broke Odessa and indeed Crimea’s southern shore (Stalin also played his part in the case of the latter), and Morris does not conceal her hatred of it. There was a time when Trieste was every bit as comfortably multicultural as Vienna was – it had been under Habsburg rule since 1382, after all. And were it not for that poisonous idea, no doubt it would have been under some kind of Habsburg rule for many years longer than reality allowed. Joyce left Trieste after it went over to Italy – something had departed the city, some kind of magic – and went back to Switzerland, that most unnationalistic of places.

In Trieste now we have only these ideas and these memories. We can have our gelatos and our pasta dishes – I had some octopus on mine and was not sick afterwards, which with seafood I always count as a success – and we can sit in the sun, watching the waveless Adriatic at the end of the Piazza Unita d’Italia, once Piazza Grande. We are exiles from that past Trieste and what it meant. We have come too late. It comes in our heads to represent a world and time that seems, at least sometimes, preferable to our own. But it is a world that is inaccessible. All we can do is learn about it, live and walk its streets, and with a bit of luck we will draw closer to the ghost of what once was here. We cannot cross over, but we can reach the border, we can see its forms through the haze beyond the barbed wire fence, and for an exile even that is an immense comfort.

Trieste is special not because it has a history – for any number of Italian cities reek of the stuff. It is special because it has an idea, a fantastical past image of itself that seems close enough to still have practical value. Rome of course bespeaks another Rome, but what in that world of gladiators and slaves can seem to offer us a home? Cosmopolitan Trieste, with its transients and its exiles, its artists and its capitalists, seems to say that everyone is welcome, would be welcome, if only it still lived. And so we sit imagining, inspired by what remains. And that is the true magic of the city – its hidden world, its hope.

Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea

Certain friends were rather sceptical of me reading this book. I myself am not a serious tea-drinker. My beverage of choice is water. I do not drink coffee and can’t stand alcohol either. At their most exotic my tastes generally reach only as far as hot chocolate and apple juice. But when I was in Moscow at the beginning of this year, I did spend a little time drinking tea. I even, with what proved atrocious timing, bought an expensive tea set from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg the day before Russia invaded Ukraine.

I do not like the taste of tea that much, though it does provide a little variety. What I do like, however, is the ritual surrounding it. Kettle on, teabag in, steep, remove the bag, wait for the temperature to become bearable, and then finally drink. To this list, we might add various intermediary stages – hot water to the teapot, teapot to teacup, the ubiquitous milk and sugar. There is something (comforting? Or homely?) about drinking tea that seems to suggest that life is good. It is a stabilising act. You can’t successfully make tea while running or in a rush. You have to be calm and have a little time on your hands. It both requires stability and order, and plays its part in creating them. I look forward to the next time I will feel at ease enough to want to brew myself a cuppa.

By comparison with me and my little ritual of kettle-to-cup, the ceremonies described in Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea are elaborate pageantry. But I did not read The Book of Tea to learn about tea, so I was not upset to find that the book, which is really a long essay broken into short chapters, does not have that much to do with tea. Instead, it is about the meaning of tea drinking and its connection with Eastern philosophy. Written in English, its goal is at least partly to illumine us westerners’ ideas of Japan and its culture, and it does this by connecting the culture to the sources and ideas that inspire it. In my case, specifically, I was inspired to read Okakura’s book by its connection with Heidegger, who was given a copy in 1919. Some philosophers, such as Tomonobu Imamichi, say he was inspired to create one of his key concepts, that of “being-in-the-worldness” after he read it.

My fancy tea set, now stranded in a dacha outside of Saint Petersburg with the rest of my things.

The Book of Tea is broken up into seven sections, each of which deals with a different aspect of tea and culture. Some of these were more relevant to my search than others. Things like section II, “The Schools of Tea”, a look at the curious history of tea drinking in East Asia, in particular in how its preparation differed in different periods and places, and why that was so; section IV, on the tea room itself, and the architectural principles lying behind it; and finally, section VI, about flowers and what our treatment of them says about us and our cultures, were all interesting but not necessarily as philosophically dense as the third section, dealing with “Taoism and Zennism”.

Less philosophically dense, less explicit on that topic, but not devoid of philosophy either. If “Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence”, then every attention given to that beauty within these pages has a part to play. Okakura describes his little philosophy as “essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.” The ritual of tea drinking is not a mere mechanical process for him, but rather seems to contain an image of life that we would do well to absorb into ourselves –

“It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.”

It is a ritual that elevates simplicity above tacky grandeur, that beatifies it. The austerely adorned tea rooms of Japan are not empty because of poverty, but because of love and respect for what they do contain. A single painting or flower, together with the tea itself, can do more to summon an atmosphere and create a mood, than an entire forest of bric-a-brac can. Okakura notes in connection with this the obvious but memorable fact that “one cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time.” In short, unity of effect, or that oft-repeated word, harmony, is more important than merely proving one’s power and riches, intentionally or not, by a clutter of shiny objects.

The thing that The Book of Tea does best, I think, is serve as a bridge between cultures. Okakura’s English is every bit as harmonic and beautiful as the tea scenes he describes, and he brings many new thinkers and characters into our world as we read. No matter how philosophical he is waxing, he is always willing to use traditional stories and anecdotes to make his points. My favourite of these concerns Rikiu, a legendary tea-master, and his son. One day he asked his son to clean to the way to the tea house. Shoan, the son, swept the path and tidied everything up. Despite this, Rikiu said he had not done the job properly, so Shoan returned to his task. Eventually, he said to his father that he could clean no further, that the whole thing was spotless. But his father shook his head and walked to the nearest tree and shook it, scattering over the garden path its red and gold leaves. Cleanliness is one thing, but the master’s goals were always beyond it, in the creation of a full and perfect impression.

“Teaism” grew out of Taoism and Zennism, two of the major Eastern traditions. Taoism has been called the “art of being in the world” (Heidegger no doubt spat out his own tea at this point) by some Chinese historians, Okakura informs us. Taoism’s key message in Okakura’s reading lies in adaptability, “a constant readjustment to our surroundings”. A readiness for change led practically to an emphasis on hesitancy and care when going about our lives, a sort of reverence arising through respect for the malleability of life and things. The second part of the puzzle is Zennism, whose key contribution is “its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual.” In reorientating ourselves towards the everyday, and making us treat it seriously, we have the philosophical foundations necessary to drink tea as a Tea-ist. “Taoism furnished the basis for aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical.”

I myself have not had a proper Eastern philosophy “phase”. At school, the furthest I got was downloading the Tao-Te-Ching on my Kindle, and then never getting around to reading it. At various times I have tried meditating but never got very far with that either. As for a literary approach, both my Schopenhauer and my Siddhartha (the Hesse novel, which apparently isn’t a fantastic representation of Buddhism, anyway) are stuck in Russia for the time being, alongside the tea set I mentioned earlier. As I have not had such a phase, I was very much treading new ground reading The Book of Tea, and have no way of telling how well it represents its themes.

Yet who needs all that to know that this is a book presenting some sensible ideas? Especially today, when much of the world’s problems seem connected to our having too much stuff and thinking we need more, The Book of Tea emphasises the way that reality can be transfigured if we only alter our attitude towards it a little bit. “When we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.”

In all this, Teaism fits nicely into the world of Wendell Berry, and indeed of other environmental thinkers with their emphasis on the local and the small instead of the boundless and consumptive. In a single room, with a single cup, there can be more fodder for the imagination than in the greatest houses of the world. Whether or not we choose to make this the guiding principle of our lives, it still has much to offer us. Because anything that teaches us reverence and to find beauty in the everyday can never teach us that truth often enough.