May 18, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS N. John Hall
Godine
ISBN 978-1567924121
238 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
If you loved Helene Hanff's "84, Charing Cross Road," this is the summer book for you. As you may recall, Hanff's little classic of bibliophilia presents the letters between a feisty New York writer and a gentlemanly English bookseller, the result being a kind of epistolary romance, with sidelights on many of the older classics of English literature. N. John Hall -- the world's leading authority on Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm, as well as a longtime New Yorker -- has adopted this format for his comparably delightful, if fictional, "Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters."
Larry Dickerson, "as American as you can get," is a retired bank clerk who has inherited a cache of letters written to his great-great-grandfather, a 19th-century English bookseller. But these aren't just any letters. Jeremy MacDowell corresponded with the greatest novelists of the day: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler. As the baseball fan Larry boasts, "How's that for a line up?" From all of these authors, MacDowell elicited frank statements of their literary aims and opinions. He also managed to snag two letters from Charles Darwin and several from the critic George Henry Lewes, the consort of George Eliot, as well as a few from the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell about the Brontes.
Having decided to sell this amazing archive, Larry writes to Christie's auction house in London and soon initiates a series of emails with Stephen Nicholls of the books and manuscripts department. The two men -- the unread, slightly vulgar but intelligent American and the suave, well-educated Englishman -- gradually come to like and trust each other. Before long, Larry decides he wants to transcribe all the letters himself, partly with the idea of producing a little book in honor of his great-great-grandfather. This leads to an intense course of reading and study, enrollment in a class on the Victorian novel at the New School, and a series of discussions with Stephen about book illustrations, 19th-century publishing practices, the nature of narrative and the impact of Darwinism.
But that's just the contemporary thread of "Correspondence." Inspired no doubt by the example of Beerbohm's virtuosity as a pasticheur, Hall boldly recreates a dozen or so seemingly genuine letters from Dickens, Hardy and others. In these, Hall mimics the various authors' styles convincingly, while the opinions they express reflect our modern knowledge of their lives and work. Here, for instance, Thackeray discusses his friend, the multi-tasking Anthony Trollope:
"He himself is right now charged with running nearly half of the Post Office of England. And he does it thoroughly while getting up withal every morning at five and writing a couple of thousand words on his latest novel. Then, after three hours' writing, he has breakfast, turns up fresh as paint at the Post Office and works fanatically at his 'chief occupation' -- getting letters to go where they're supposed to go. And in season he hunts every day. He's not altogether human. ... In all departments of life (he also manages to play whist every night at the Garrick Club and to spend an hour a day reading -- oh my! -- the Latin classics), Trollope evidences prodigious staying power. Of his writings since 'The Warden' and 'Barchester Towers' I've read most of what he has done -- nobody could read everything; he's a veritable locomotive. One book is practically as good as the next -- and that's saying much."
And here is George Eliot commenting on Dickens:
"But it is only fair for me to say -- and these lines are of course private and intended for your eyes only -- that Dickens lacks a concern for what I have called the suppressed transitions in human behaviour. He really does think that people for the most part are either terribly good or terribly bad. ... This means that Dickens misses the intermediateness, the grey areas in personalities. But perhaps he wanted to miss them. Perhaps he meant to create glorious fables or myths and not 'realistic' stories. I say this as one who has tried, and often failed, at the latter."
In this "Adventure in Letters," N. John Hall thus manages to convey a good deal about the Victorian novelists and their aesthetics, and to do so in a playfully entertaining manner. Jeremy MacDowell's own letters and notebooks provide the additional perspective of a shrewd contemporary reader. Of Wilkie Collins' "The Woman in White," MacDowell writes: "Disappointing. Perhaps the most ingenious plot ever conceived. But overwritten, too long, descriptions boring, the dialogue fair at best. Character of Fosco (the novel's villain) best thing in the book. Unless it be the old hypochondriac Frederick Fairlie. So Collins, for all his storytelling inventiveness, is not a good writer." This is certainly an apt assessment of the book's strengths and weaknesses (though, to my mind, the brilliant and brilliantly controlled plot overshadows any deficiencies).
As the novel proceeds, Larry grows ever more sure of his own literary judgment, there are quiet revelations about Stephen's personal life, and tension mounts when a brash New York manuscripts dealer learns about the letters. Near the end, Larry declares that of all he's read, "I like 'Vanity Fair' and Trollope best. I don't like 'Wuthering Heights' -- it's a teenage girl's book in my humble opinion. ... Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' wiped me out, in spite of his big words and abstract nouns. It's a fantastic 'read.' The mystery is how can anything that sad make you feel good. ... I know people in this game are forever quoting Virginia Woolf as to saying that George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' is one of the handful of novels in English written for grown-ups. I don't believe it, and the only mention of it in the correspondence is Samuel Butler saying he hated it."
In one of his emails, Larry writes that an English scholar would be better at explaining Victorian matters than "some American professor sitting over here and claiming to be an expert." Shocked at such anglophilia, Stephen quickly replies that "the leading scholars in bringing Victorian novelists back into favour have been, for the most part, Americans -- you yourself mentioned Edgar Johnson for Dickens; for Thackeray it's Gordon Ray; for George Eliot it's Gordon Haight -- and so on. Trollope, too, though I can't think of the name at the moment." I suspect that N. John Hall had particular fun writing that last sentence.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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