Ask the Book Lady

Ask the Book Lady About a Book She Hasn't Read in Twenty-Odd Years

Dear Reader,

First, I hope you don't mind my reproducing your letter as is.  I thought there was something sweet about your having written "begging" for "beginning."  It makes for a rather touching Freudian slip.  But work on the capitalization issue, won't you please?  Not that I'm a stickler -- wait, scratch that.  I am a stickler.  To be exact, I'm a stickler for good grammar and punctuation right up until I get caught in a mistake, at which point I fire off a rousing speech about how the English language is descriptive rather than prescriptive and anyway you knew what I meant so who cares.  But for book titles, capitalizing their titles (and even underlining or otherwise emphasizing them) is something I really do like to see.  It shows respect, and books need all the marks of respect they can get in an age when more and more people are reading fewer and fewer titles.

Now:  I have to admit that my first reaction to your question was something along the lines of, "For the love of Pete -- someone wants me to do their homework again!"  Actually, that's a highly cleaned-up version of what I said, but this is a family web site and I don't want to get sued.

My second reaction was to question my first reaction.  I do this quite a bit, which is why I never get anything done and my desk looks the way it does.  I'm too busy on-the-other-hand-ing for days on end, like Tevye on speed, and the papers just pile up and up and up.  Don't even ask about the state of my kitchen, unless you have a strong stomach.  Anyway, I looked at the question again and thought that I couldn't just dismiss it.  It might be a homework question; but other than the fact that the title in question is a high school staple, it really didn't sound like one.  There was no sense that someone had hastily cropped off a "give at least three examples; use both sides of the paper if necessary" at the end.  The question really sounded like someone just plain wanted to know.  I passed it around a bit -- you can't mind; you didn't even sign your name, so your secret's still safe -- and sure enough, everyone said that the writer just sounded curious and a little confused.

Once I'd decided in my roundabout way that, yes, indeedy, I'd be tackling your question, my first task was to see what the heck your question meant.  I wasn't assigned Catcher to read in high school, but then again I was absent so much (I suffered from a host of childhood maladies that kept me from school, boredom figuring prominently among them) that I might not have noticed if it had been on the required reading list.  But I read it anyway, following the sound reasoning that there it was on the shelf; and that was about twenty years ago, which is when I would have read it if I'd been a normal high school student instead of a deranged Book Lady in the making. 

Sitting in my room looking your question over, I couldn't remember any reference at all to David Copperfield.  But it's been twenty years, after all; plus maybe it was one of those subtle, disguised things, like in that Stephen King story, "The Last Rung on the Ladder," in Night Shift.  If you're just a normal schmoe like I was when I first read that, you just read it and think, "What a strange, sad little story."  If you're a human being possessed of any cultural literacy at all who followed the natural order of things by reading David Copperfield when you were twelve and Stephen King when you were a grownup instead of the other way around, you've had a lot less bad dreams, and you also know that King's story is a retelling of the Little Em'ly portion of David Copperfield.  I thought it might be some hidden-picture dealie like that, and hoped I'd be able to spot it.

Fortunately for me, since it's late and I've got a lot of dishes that have been waiting since yesterday to have their bath, it wasn't anything too cryptic.  The sentence in question was this one, for those readers who haven't read Catcher in twenty years either:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

I was vastly relieved when I saw this.  It meant that I'd be done in two minutes.  I wouldn't even have to do any research. 

Which in itself made me feel vaguely guilty.  Kind of like the plumber ought to when he comes out to fix some little leak and it takes him all of two seconds and zero physical or mental effort but he charges you a hundred dollars for the pleasure of his company and yes I'm still bitter.  I mean, sure, you're getting this for free, but that's not the point.  I'm not quite sure what is the point, but it just seems like you ought to get more than the two-second answer, which is that David Copperfield is so committed to the idea of being the über-autobiography that the first chapter is called "I Am Born," even though of course David could remember no such event in his own life; and this approach stands in stark contrast to that of the author of Catcher in the Rye, who leaves you in suspense about plenty of points and is happy to do so.

As I said, I could leave it at that, but it just didn't feel right.  If nothing else, you could have figured that out yourself.  Yes, you could.  But if you didn't, there's a reason why not.  And that interests me.

Maybe, when you read that Catcher paragraph in question, you naturally thought to haul out a copy of Copperfield and do a little digging.  But then you actually picked it up, and your heart, not to mention your arm, sank.  Just holding David Copperfield, you could tell what it's about.  It's about eight hundred pages, and you figured, quite rightly, that you might not live long enough to finish reading it, let alone give it the kind of study that might be necessary to answer your question. 

The next time you have any questions in that department -- don't.  Dickens is as straightforward and subtle as a hundred-dollar bill.  He says what he says.  He means what he means.  To know one is to know the other.  His work takes some reading-time to conquer, but very little in the way of fishing or analyzing.

That's another thing.  If you're currently a high-school student, you may belong to a generation that just isn't as conversant with Dickens as previous ones have been.  Don't get me wrong -- I'm not going off on any Vonnegut-like rant about how nobody reads any more, dag nab it.  (Not that I am for a moment accusing Kurt Vonnegut of ever uttering the words "dag nab it."  I'm just too lazy to poke around right this second for the essay in question, so I'm paraphrasing.)  And I'm not claiming to belong to the last blessed generation of Dickens readers.  But the point is, I remember reading some novel off the best-seller list when I was a teenager (all right, it was Flowers in the Attic; I was young, okay?), and it made some offhand reference to Dickens and that first chapter of David Copperfield, much in the way that Salinger did.  The author made some apology for not being able to tell a life story as well as Dickens could.  Dickens was still perceived as being well within the realm of pleasure reading, even aside from his being taught in school. 

Dorothy Parker took this assumption that Dickens was someone ordinary people might read and enjoy a step further some eighty years ago in a review of Upton Sinclair's then-latest book.  Maintaining that Sinclair was his own King Charles' head, she sighed, "He cannot keep himself out of his writings, try though he may."  She doesn't even bother mentioning Copperfield by name.  She just assumes that everyone will get the reference.  She's referring to a sweet old duffer of a character named Mr. Dick who's a good friend of David's and who's also a bit off his rocker.  Poor Mr. Dick's been working for years and years on some great writing project, but every time he thinks he's making headway, he finds himself making irrelevant references to King Charles the First, who was put on trial, found guilty, and beheaded for waging war on his own people.  As this took place some two hundred years before Dickens took up writing, you'd think any of his characters would be over it by now, but apparently not. 

There are some characters, quotes, and events from the fiction of Dickens that have made it into our common language -- Scrooge (what an inspired choice for a name!), The Artful Dodger, "Please, sir, I want some more," "God bless us, every one!", Fagin, and so on -- but Mr. Dick and his writing and his kite-flying seem to have sunk into obscurity.  Well, it's hard to tell what will float and what will sink, even in great literature.  Heinlein's horror-sci fi novel The Puppet Masters makes another reference, some decades after Dorothy Parker's review, to another part of David Copperfield.  The two main characters do some dancing around one another before they finally hook up and fall officially in love; and early on in the mating dance, one of them says to the other, "Barkis is willing."  Now, odds are that the average reader today wouldn't know that this was a Copperfield quote.  Today's average reader would simply wonder what Heinlein had been smoking the morning that he wrote that.  But fifty years ago, a science-fiction writer could safely assume that his readers had read enough Dickens to get it.  And not just in school, but just for the heck of it.  Nowadays, people who read genre fiction might not read much else, at least for pleasure, and no sci-fi or horror writer in his right mind would make an unexplained reference like that. 

Sorry.  You still with me?  I've actually got something else to say about the whole Copperfield-Catcher connection.  Here it is:

It would have been easy enough, back when this essay was a baby, to say simply that Salinger made reference to David Copperfield in order to distance himself from it.  He seems to be doing just that.  You stay on your side of the fence, and I'll stay on mine.  Salinger wrote Catcher on practically the hundredth anniversary of the publication of David Copperfield, and he wants the world to know what that means.  Something like:  We are not to be bound as readers or writers by the conventions of a century ago.  And of course at first glance you couldn't find two books with less in common than Copperfield and Catcher.

And yet.

And yet writers don't make references for no reason at all.  Not good writers, anyway, and like him or not Salinger is a great writer.  If he's mentioning David Copperfield (or anything else, for that matter), a reader would do well to take notice and make some mental note of it.  Because even if he's bringing up Copperfield just to dismiss him -- but why do that?  Especially after taking all the trouble of giving Holden a last name so close to Copperfield that over the phone you might mistake the two?  Why, if Salinger and his narrator disagree so strongly with one of Dickens' greatest and most famous works, bring it up at all?  Virginia Woolf, another revolutionary writer, doesn't make a laundry list in Mrs. Dalloway of all the novels it isn't like, which at that point was pretty much any that had ever been written.  She doesn't start her book with a report entitled "Why I'm Going to Write Differently From Everybody Else in the Whole Wide World, So Deal With It."  She just does it.

So Salinger may be doing something more (and less obvious) than distancing himself from Dickens and David by making direct reference to them.  Something that didn't occur to me until I started flipping through the pages of Catcher and catching things I'd forgotten.  I may not have read it in a while, but when I did read it I read it a lot.  So a little skimming reminded me of some important things.

Like the fact that neither Salinger nor Dickens can bear to have mixed feelings about women.  If women are sexual beings, they're bad.  If they're bad, they're sexual.  It's true.  Look at the girls Holden Caulfield tries to make time with -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not.  They're unbearable.  They're loud, obnoxious, wrong even when they're right (like when Sally refuses to elope with Holden; her arguments against doing so are all sound, but her delivery so grates on one's mental ear that the reader finds himself unwillingly rooting for youthful stupidity and impulse).  The only really likeable female characters in Catcher are:  Jane Gallagher, who is safely in Holden's past, wasn't pretty even when she was in his life (how aroused can anyone be by a girl even her admirer describes as "muckle-mouthed"?), and had a certain delicacy and aloofness that limited her physical contact with Holden to hand-holding and kisses that never land on lips; Mrs. Morrow, who, although attractive, renders herself completely unapproachable by the double whammy of being the mother of one of Holden's schoolmates and acting rather motherly to Holden himself (if you ever want to cool a man down a bit, just start calling him "dear" every other sentence); and Phoebe, who is completely nonsexual by virtue of her age (ten) and can't be an object of desire to Holden anyway since she's his sister. 

(Speaking of parallels between the works:  David Copperfield has a sister too, of a sort.  His aunt comes for a visit the day he's born, and is incensed when the child born isn't a girl and named after her; later, when David goes to live with this aunt, whenever he does something she doesn't like she tells him that his sister Betsey would have done better.  More ominously, David and his friend Steerforth have this exchange just before going to sleep at the boarding school in which they share a bedroom:

"Good night, young Copperfield," said Steerforth.  "I'll take care of you."

"You're very kind," I gratefully returned.  "I am very much obliged to you."

"You haven't got a sister, have you?" said Steerforth, yawning.

"No," I answered.

"That's a pity," said Steerforth.  "If you had one, I should think she would have been a pretty, timid, little-bright-eyed sort of girl.  I should have liked to know her.  Good night, young Copperfield."

(Steerforth ends by becoming the seducer of Little Em'ly, David Copperfield's adored childhood friend.  Ew.)

Dickens isn't much of one for sympathetic sexual women, any more than Salinger is.  His best-known heroines -- Little Nell, Little Dorrit, Little Em'ly -- are, well, little girls.  What happens when they grow up, and might be expected to be women, and therefore sexual beings?  Well, one of them doesn't grow up at all, and stays the picture of perfection; one of them runs off to be a Bad Girl, then repents and comes back looking as virginal as ever, forswears marriage and promises to be a daughter forever to her adopted father, thereby entering the ranks of the forever-children; and one of them stays looking just like a girl from face to figure till the end of her days.  It's actually kind of repulsive when she does end up getting married, because even though the guy loves her for her sterling inner qualities, you have to kind of be creeped out by anyone who'd be attracted to someone whom Dickens makes a point of describing as not looking a day over eleven. 

But what about David Copperfield's women?  He marries twice (in succession; calm down, this isn't that kind of book), and neither of his wives are grownups -- that is, sexual beings -- no matter how old they get.  They barely seem to be women at all.  David describes Dora Spenlow, his first love and wife, in terms that are sometimes deliberately non-human, often deliberately childlike:  "She was more than human to me.  She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don't know what she was -- anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted....She had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways....She was rather diminutive altogether.  So much the more precious, I thought."  Conveniently, this darling little person dies soon enough to spare the reader the trouble of killing her, as any sane person would wish to, and also soon enough to forestall any idea that she and David might have a sexual life.  They never have children, and frankly I have a hard time believing that either of them ever got the nerve up to do anything likely to beget them.  I mean, could you, with someone who perpetually called you "Doady"?  Me, neither.

And then, after Dora, David marries Agnes, who is most famous for piously pointing upward to Heaven for what seems like most of the novel -- Heaven, where Dora has gone, where David hopes someday to go, where we all dearly wish Agnes will go by the next train heading there.  Agnes is so nonsexual that although she's infinitely more mature than Dora (so's my pet lizard, but never mind), she's not in the least put out when David marries Dora and then waits for her to die and then marries Agnes, who's been waiting all this while on the sidelines, a bit wistfully but not at all jealously.  How can she be jealous?  What is there to be jealous of?  Some passing reference is made in the very last chapter of D.C. to David and Agnes having a family, but we never see the children, or any sign of the passion necessary to create them. 

There's another connection between Catcher and Copperfield -- and please keep in mind through all this that I'm not claiming any originality in these observations, and I haven't made any study of the two works even separately, let alone side by side.  I'm sure someone's done exactly that, and done it well, but I haven't had a chance to check.  I'm just telling you what I've noticed. 

Anyway, the death of Holden Caulfield's brother is shown to be the beginning of the end for him, the place where it all starts going downhill, or rather screeching to a halt.  He's never able to move past it, and so for all his humor he's a tragic figure, frozen in and by his grief. 

David Copperfield loses a brother to death, too.  In one of the more dramatically symbolic episodes of the book -- okay, I was wrong about there not being anything to interpret in a Dickens novel, sue me -- David learns on his tenth birthday that his mother has died.  When he goes home for the funeral, he finds out that the baby she'd recently given birth to, his infant brother, has also died and is being buried with her.  To David, "The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom."  Which sounds a trifle melodramatic and overstuffed even as I type it, but it's a crucial moment; it's after this double-funeral that David Copperfield's childhood really does end, and he's taken from school and forced into factory work that's at once demeaning and gruelling.

I'm sure there are other connections, intentional and otherwise, to be drawn between the two books, but I'm too tired to look for them and this should be more than enough for you to go on, anyway.  If you haven't read any Dickens, David Copperfield is a good place to start.  True, Oliver Twist has far more in the way of quotable quotes; but Copperfield is the finer piece of literature.  It may be a long read, page-wise, but it's by no means a difficult one; and though it may have sounded as if I've done nothing but take potshots at it all day, it's famous for a reason, and I've been able to talk about it this much because I've read it more than once.  I don't do that lightly -- not with an eight-hundred page book, I don't.  I say go for it; and then reread Catcher, and then write to me and tell me what you found that I missed.

All my best,

The Book Lady

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