Dickens
Wheeler, Edward T.
BOOKS Charles the Great L ickens was a hard man to _9 follow. He walked twelve D miles a day on average t i m i n g , a.. and kept up a pace of over four miles an hour. Peter Ackroyd leaves...
...This is his comment on the false turn Dickens almost made when he hoped to become an actor: The stage was not his destiny, and so he became ill on the day which that particular future opened for him...
...Peter Ackroyd leaves us a record of obsessive jaunts, day or night, through London, Paris, in Italy, or in the Kentish countryside...
...There is no explaining genius and there is no real separation of Dickens's art and life...
...Ackroyd has published books on all the writers he summons up...
...Dickens composed his "real" word and his "fictional" world: He could not escape his past, or the anxieties of his past which sometimes had more reality than the real world all around him....He only really felt it [an emotion] when he had composed it...
...t h e r e was something which ineluctably led him forward to his proper destination...
...On the other hand, his harsh criticisms of Haiti's bishops and of the "cold country to the north" might appear unfortunate, given his current position...
...The Washington Office on Haiti has indicated a few of the major planks in the new president's program...
...You know how hard it is to build Utopia on a garbage heap, indeed, it is hard to build even a decent poor man's home there...
...That, in some sense, he had not died"--a dream reconciliation between the writer who concealed and the writer who reveals...
...But the criticism had to be leveled and must be understood in light of the crucible that Haiti has been through...
...Given this commitment, no fellow traveler with Ackroyd can be meanspirited about the journey: Ackroyd seems to know everything there is to know, tells all, speculates honestly, and even gives the reader time to catch breath in a total of seven "inter-chapters," five in which Dickens talks to Ackroyd, his characters, or to George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Chatterton...
...to have left these sentiments unstated would have meant 4 ~ : Commonweal that, for him, they did not really exist...
...So far, and in spite of the unfortunate but understandable carnage in the aftermath of the Roger Lafontant coup attempt prior to Aristide's inauguration, the new president has made the shift with grace and acumen...
...But the comic caricaturist will not appear like that...
...Wilentz acknowledges the pivotal role of the Haitian church in the downfall of Baby Doc and uncovers the leavening role of the slight, intense Salesian priest...
...Edward T. Wheeler ning to end immediately...
...Jean Bosco are all recounted from Aristide's perspective...
...Indeed, Haiti has survived on that hope...
...We have not a rollicking narration, but certainly a characterization as eccentric and as engaging as any of Dickens's own fictions--which is Ackroyd's point...
...Ackroyd sees Bleak House as the true image of midcentury Britain and not the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace...
...Ackroyd's tale has too much weight...
...His uniqueness makes him universally appealing and representative...
...On December 16, 1990, over 67 percent of Haitian voters elected Pd Titid, the fiery preacher of the Word and defender of street kids and liberation theology, who had subsequently been drummed out of the Salesians for his outspoken criticism both of Duvalierism and the Haitian bishops...
...There is something curious about this argument: Dickens's uniqueness lies in the collapse of the distinctions between reality and fiction and only his genius saves him from being a solipsist...
...Indeed, Bishop Laroche, president of the Haitian episcopal conference, in his moving tribute at the Te Deum Mass, likened "cher Pkre Aristide" to Moses leading the Haitian people out of a desert of suffering...
...She indicates the "political symbiosis" between Aristide and Haiti's poor...
...The order form for the Oxford complete works lies filled out before me...
...Ackroyd sees Dickens's violent reaction to things American, for instance, as rejection of himself...
...now, each day, the Word that we love burns out the roots of the ton-ton macoutes...
...Jean's there emerged the future president of Haiti...
...In his last "inter-chapter" he recounts a dream of Dickens, in which, having completed the arduous task of writing the life, the biographer meets his subject and asserts, "I knew that it truly was Charles Dickens...
...Ackroyd also has intriguing things to say about Dickens's rejection of his wife of twenty-two years and his relationship with the actress Ellen Teman...
...He is the giant precursor, whose power and example must, by paradox, inspire and frighten...
...They include: 14 June 1991:409...
...We will either read Dickens or we will not...
...In these terms Ackroyd's biography is a complete success...
...On top of that he read most of the book-length critical studies "all the way through...
...As an editor, Dickens was always demanding that his contributors, "brighten, brighten" their stories or articles...
...It seems to me that the reader's response lies in his reaction to Dickens's novels...
...The foreword by Amy Wilentz provides an excellent overview of the period and insightfully introduces Aristide...
...Indeed, the sales of his books then and now force another paradox...
...This point is made over and over again and becomes the cause (and hopes to be the effect) of writing the biography...
...Paradox recurs in the analysis of Dickens's personality, his relationship to his family, his social views and reforming efforts, his ability to construe reality in fiction and in his relationship to his age...
...In fact, no one is leading in this complicated relationship...
...Hence Dickens's paradoxical nature and his greatness as an artist are a function of his success in depiction, in telling the story his way, as much as those characters, real or imagined--and quotation marks c o u l d surround e i t h e r term--would allow him...
...The energy that drove Dickens made him as great a pedestrian as it did a creative writer...
...The important test now for President Aristide is precisely whether he can lead and at the same time hold onto the "political symbiosis" he has with his people...
...The size of the narrative seems to subvert any reductive threats, any attempt to limit Dickens to the mere sum of biographical parts...
...One hopes that Dickens might pop out like a jack-in-the-box with the surprise and frolic of the "Here we are !"--the phrase with which he introduced himself to his first admiring Boston audience...
...There are some things we cannot know, Ackroyd tells us, but he hints at what we can admire...
...Jean Bosco Church on September 11, 1988, the message went out in Haiti: "Yon jou, dife makout boule Pawol Renmen-an--Pou--Chak jou, dife Renmen-an boule raisin makout" ("One day, the ton-ton macoutes burned the Word that we love...
...and two in which Ackroyd talks to himself...
...the circling pattern which he fmds in the biographical details and which he orchestrates in sonorous prose moves from beginDICBENS Peter Ackroyd HarperCollins, $35, 1,100 pp...
...Ackroyd had in his earlier "interview" of himself asked if he really understood Dickens and answered by leaving the judgment up to the reader...
...But that is all we ask, a decent poor man's home, and no more corruption, no more inflicted misery, no more children bathing in sewage...
...Thirty-five chapters, extraordinary in detail and acute in analysis...
...The story starts with Dickens's death, the comic face a death mask...
...Ackroyd, a novelist himself and a chronicler of London past and present in Hawksmoor and in The Great Fire of London, seems to come to terms with Dickens...
...The chest is a coffin...
...And indeed out of the attempt to assassinate the Reverend Jean-Bertrand Aristide at St...
...His inauguration speech on February 7 called for a "marriage" between the Haitian people and the Army but did not waver in asking for the discharge of six of the eight commanding generals--vestiges of the old guard...
...Ackroyd sets his own arduous pace in a biography that marches eleven-hundred pages through a fifty-seven year life and suggests that the way through the high places of libraries has been steep...
...We learn quickly why he wanted to light up his dark world with brightness, even as he appeared to scintillate...
...The author assures us in his acknowledgments that he has read all Dickens's extant correspondence, published and unpublished, and later explains that each of three readings of all the fiction took him three to four months...
...DEATH & RESURRECTION IN HAITI IN THE PARISH OF THE POOR Writings from Haiti Jean-Bertrand Aristide, translated and edited by Amy Wilentz Orbis Books, $10.95, 112 pp...
...The bulk of the text is taken up with a long letter to colleagues in the Latin American church...
...The familiar pattern of Dickens's life emerges, documented fully and extended by reference to the novels: childhood in Kent, father's debts, the blacking factory in London, the trauma caused by mother's wish to keep him working, early success in writing, instant fame with Pickwick and Oliver, the trials of serial publication, transatlantic tours, editing periodicals, the famed dramatic readings, and finally the premature death at fifty-seven, burnt out from burning too brightly--and charred too darkly...
...The letter is vintage Aristide but provides a hint of his later modest, to-the-point campaign...
...John P. Hogan tier the brutal murders and burning at St...
...With the publication of In the Parish of the Poor: Writings from Haiti, North Americans get a glimpse of Haiti's president...
...he pilloried American ambition, money-hunger, and hypocrisy because he could not bear to see outside of him what he hid within...
...This is a squat chest of a book, full of treasures...
...The letter gives a stark overview of some of Haiti's history but especially of the years since Jean-Claude Duvalier fled...
...In each of these cases, Aristide is able to cull a resurrection hope out of the clutches of death...
...But much we can know is intriguing: Dickens's skills as a court shorthand stenographer, which gave him phonetic accuracy in recording characters' voices, his love of the stage and the dramatic grounding of his novelistic style--he went to the theater at least once a week thoughout his life--and his fastidious organization of the projects of the philanthropist Miss Burdett-Coutts designed to improve living conditions for London's "inner city" poor...
...Indeed, the president has preached nonviolence and has promised only to try to lead Haiti from "misery to poverty...
...It is the symbiosis that has allowed Aristide's detractors, among them the church hierarchy, to assert that he is 'leading' his congregation in an unacceptable direction...
...there is in great artists a secret momentum that always draws them forward so that they can ride over obstacles and avoid side-tracks...
...He must shift from being the fiery proclaimer of the word to being the policy formulator and implementer...
...The killings at Fort Dimanche, the massacre at Jean Rabel, the ambush of Aristide and the other activist priests at Freycineau, the bloody election Sunday of November 29, 1987, and the brutal assault on parishioners at St...
...The paradoxical method seeks to resolve itself in appeals to genius, creative energy, mystery...
Vol. 118 • June 1991 • No. 12
