On Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, England, received Charles John Huffam Dickens — a pomegranate-colored, squealing, slick-haired baby boy. Portsmouth is (and was) a teeming small city. In 1812 it was a major port for the British Royal Navy. Today, it has a higher population density than London.
Dickens was born at No. 13 Mile End Terrace, Landport. His mother, of course, had no anesthetic. He was named, in part, for Christopher Huffam, an oar-maker in London — now perhaps the most famous oar-maker of all time.
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I love Dickens. Few writers have equaled his assessment of the human condition — somewhere between tragedy and comedy, with a poetic attention to beauty, and an investigation of man-made ugliness.
His characters have entered the popular imagination of even 21stcentury America — Scrooge becoming synonymous with miserliness, Miss Havisham with disappointed love, Wilkins Micawber with hopeful (if improvident) expectation. When Holden Caulfield refuses to set down his life story in the first sentence of “The Catcher in the Rye”…
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.
… it’s a rejection — and embrace — of the legacy of Dickens.
I wish I’d read Dickens by candlelight in my room as an adolescent. I wish I’d stacked his novels next to my bed and consumed them voraciously. I wish I could point back to that time when I was 12, and I read “Bleak House,” and yes — yes! — that’s when I knew I was going to be a writer.
But this isn’t what happened. I read the Hardy Boys, instead. And I got older. And I continued to not read Dickens. Not reading Dickens, actually, was pretty easy. Eventually, I received a Ph.D. in English literature from Cornell. I still had not read any Dickens, at all.
The fact that there was a massive gap in my reading life led — as massive gaps often do — to defensiveness. No novel, I argued, should be more than 400 pages! It was a crime, really, to claim so much of your reader’s attention! Down with the Victorians! Down with verbosity! Up with brevity! And on and on and on, ad nauseam.
So, for my 30th birthday, my older brother gave me my copy of “David Copperfield.” He included this inscription: This can be one of those books that exemplifies the awesome power of world-changing ultimate unbelievable incredibleness! Read it and be blown away!
And, like older brothers tend to be a lot of the time, he was right.
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This year, I’ve been rereading it all — all of Dickens’ novels, anyway — chronologically.
On Tuesday morning, I will wake up in the dark, make myself a cup of tea, and celebrate his birthday with the last page of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” the final novel that, at the time of Dickens’ death, was unfinished.
What have I discovered?
- There’s a good reason you’ve probably never heard of “Barnaby Rudge,” Dickens’ first attempt at writing historical fiction. Focused around the Gordon Riots of 1780, “Barnaby Rudge” is an ungainly, unwieldy book — with a rambling, loose narrative drive. It took me nearly a month to read it. I am still mad at Dickens for having written it.
- Yes, a hardbound edition of “Little Dorrit” does make an excellent doorstop.
- Use of the term “Dickensian” will not impress your friends. Well, at least they won’t admit, outwardly, to being impressed.
- “Our Mutual Friend” is a greatly underrated novel.
“Our Mutual Friend” also conceals one of the most interesting biographical moments in all of English literature.
On June 9, 1865, Dickens was returning from a trip to France with the woman who may (or may not) have been his mistress, Ellen Ternan. This being Victorian England — they were also traveling with Ternan’s mother.
Just outside of a tiny village named Staplehurst, their train derailed. It was a spectacular, horrific accident. All of the first-class carriages — except the one containing Dickens and the Ternans — plummeted off of a bridge and into the River Beult. Ten people died, over 70 were injured.
Dickens used broken planks to shatter a window and pull himself and his companions to safety. Then, he set about ministering to the casualties. In his pocket, Dickens had always carried a flask of brandy. Now, he gave sips of the liquor to the injured and the dying. He also carried fresh water to them — in his top hat.
But, after 30 minutes or so, something occurred to him. The sole manuscript of “Our Mutual Friend” was still in the carriage, in the carriage that was teetering atop the bridge, half-on and half-off the tracks. He didn’t even hesitate. Dickens crawled back in through the broken window and pulled the manuscript out of his coat pocket. “Our Mutual Friend” was saved.
Dickens described this moment in the book’s final, serial installment, in a chapter titled: “Postscript, in Lieu of a Preface.” The “Boffins” he refers to, here, are central characters in the novel:
On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin … were on the South-Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage — nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn — to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt…
… I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book: — THE END.
Dickens never fully recovered from the Staplehurt railway disaster. He had a stroke and died on its fifth anniversary. And he was haunted, for the remainder of his life, by the catastrophe’s lingering effects. He would have regular fits of trembling, vivid, dark nightmares, and he drank more heavily, in those last years, than he ever had before. He would never complete another book.
Yet — and here’s the amazing thing to me — the chapter he was working on at the time of the crash? It’s entirely unaltered, unblemished. It opens with a breakfast scene, contains a breakfast scene, and ends with a breakfast scene. The single largest trauma of the writer’s life has occurred during its composition and in no way, seemingly, does that trauma make it to the page.
Fiction writing is a solitary, private endeavor. As privacy and solitude are eroded throughout the world by Facebook and Twitter and email and cellphones, I wonder what will happen to the formal aspects of fiction.
These days, more and more writers use their own autobiographies as the basis of their books. I myself have done this with my second novel, “Evel Knievel Days,” which will be published in July. In March of last year I took a trip to Egypt with my Egyptian father — searching, in a sense, for my roots in that country. In “Evel Knievel Days,” the book’s protagonist, Khosi Saqr, goes to Egypt to track down the father who abandoned him when he was 3 years old.
There’s a bit — just a tiny, tiny (minuscule) bit — of similarity, there.
Even as my own life drove me to the page, I was reading Dickens — who kept himself away from the page, mostly, or at least tried to. And I can’t help wondering if anything is lost in the frank disclosures of our modern, first-person, memoir-driven fiction. It’s fun to read, fun to write. It’s a reflection of our culture, as it currently stands.
But I do miss the Victorians, somehow — going on vacation with their mistress’ mothers, wearing stiff-sided top hats and starched white collars, living in rapturous love with the powers, with the capabilities (and not the failings), of the human will.
One hundred percent of the bats in Iowa have rabies. Or so claimed the nurse at Iowa City’s Mercy Hospital.
“If you wake up and the bat is in the room,” she said, echoing the words of the Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, “you’ve got to get in here, immediately. There’s no way to tell for certain if you’ve been bit.”
But the writer Jen Percy wasn’t so sure. Admittedly, she’d awakened to a fluttering of wings in the darkness — to a small furry body landing on her neck at 4 a.m. And sure — she’d screamed and turned on the light and found the creature, bewildered and shaking and brown, huddled on top of the covers at the foot of her bed. Yes, the house was overrun with bats; just the day before she’d discovered one in her half-eaten bowl of Cocoa Puffs (bats like Cocoa Puffs?). To make matters worse, there was that whole business with the exorcism at the Bear Creek Ranch in rural Georgia, the exorcism that she’d described for “Demon Camp,” her forthcoming, book-length work of creative-nonfiction from Scribner. In that particular exorcism, a woman who called herself “The Son of Jesus” had said that Jen was being followed — day and night — by a demon in the shape of a bat. So, if anyone should worry about contracting rabies from a flying mammal in the order Chiroptera, it might be Jen Percy.
And yet. It was her inaugural week as a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In a matter of hours, Z.Z. Packer, one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” would be critiquing Jen’s first short story. For the past five days, Jen had been battling the stomach flu and now, well, rabies just didn’t fit into the picture. Jen resolved to do nothing. She’d spent the last three years, after all, interviewing badly traumatized Iraq veterans for “Demon Camp” — attending their exorcisms at a rural evangelical Christian ranch whose founders employed “spiritual warfare” to combat 21st century battlefield post-traumatic stress disorder. How much havoc could a four-ounce creature with webbed forelimbs create?
If this were a short story by Clive Barker or Stephen King, things would end badly. Certainly, the bat would be rabid. Perhaps it would be infected with a new kind of wildly contagious rabies — one that would then spread, over the course of 800 pages, throughout America’s Beleaguered Heartland. And PATIENT ZERO, JEN PERCY, would be immortalized in the literature of the apocalypse: “If only she’d have gone to Mercy Hospital for antibiotics and a series of rabies shots,” the survivors would say, “then maybe civilization could have been saved.”
Fortunately (for the editor in all of us), life is not that short story. And so on the morning of the bat attack, Jen wrote to her brother, the writer Ben Percy — who’s also in Iowa City this fall, teaching a class at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As older brothers often do, Ben offered his sage and calming advice. “Mom is going to freak,” he said. “A bat? You need to get tested ASAP. A girl in Milwaukee got rabies and ended up in a wheelchair with brain damage. Seriously. The sooner you’re tested, the better your chances, if positive. Go NOW.” Though he didn’t sign it Love, Ben, the sentiment was all but implied.
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Contemporary American literature has a number of well-known brothers: Richard and Robert Bausch, Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff, Michael and Matthew Dickman. Hollywood also seems to have a fascination with brothers — be they Coens, Wachowskis, Farrellys or Wayanses. But there are fewer brother-and-sister duos, and certainly none whose writing has achieved such notice in such a short time — or is so very marked by the Gothic. The buzz in publishing circles around “Demon Camp” is perhaps only equaled by the buzz around Ben’s second novel, “Red Moon” — which sold to Grand Central/Hachette in 2010 for $500,000.
“I feel a little like a hybrid writer,” says Ben, whose books include “The Wilding” and two acclaimed short-story collections. (He’s been published in Best American Short Stories, won the $50,000 Whiting Writers’ Award and been extravagantly praised by writers as different as Peter Straub and Ann Patchett.
“And even that’s not the right term. ‘Red Moon’ is a book with a seventh-century Scandinavian werewolf myth in it — but still — I want the sentences to be beautiful. Look. It doesn’t matter if there’s a ghost, or a robot, or a detective in the book, the question that should still preoccupy you is: Are the sentences worthy of hanging on the wall, one by one by one?”
Talk with either Ben or Jen Percy for any length of time and the thing that will impress you is this: They both have an intense — almost vicious — love of writing. They care deeply. They are actually hanging those sentences on their walls, one by one by one. And they will talk almost interchangeably about art, about writing and reading and growing up in Oregon’s high desert country. Family psychologists will tell you about deidentification, the process whereby siblings purposely pursue different career trajectories in order to differentiate from each other. This is not the story of the Percy siblings.
“We both wanted to be scientists,” Ben admits. “I wanted to do archaeology. My first job was an excavation of a Paiute village in the Christmas Valley region. That wobbled a bit, but then I went to Brown to study anthropology.”
“And I was a physics major,” Jen says. “Before I took a single creative writing class — I got a summer grant from MRSEC, the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at UMass Amherst, to work with their mass spectrometer.”
And yet writing snared both siblings — almost as if they were meant to do nothing else. What to make of this fact: A brother and sister, both setting out on similar career paths, but both diverted to the same, difficult, complicated, frustrating, esoteric art?
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Writing about childhood can be luminous, and since Ben and Jen Percy shared a childhood, their work in this arena is a fascinating glimpse into style, voice and character.
Ben writes:
I grew up on 10 acres of woods. One afternoon when I was 11, there rose a terrible screaming from them, as slow as smoke. I went to my window and opened it and stared off into the forest. A minute of silence passed and then the screaming began again. It was the worst sound I had ever heard; I was reminded of the banshee stories my grandfather liked to tell me, so that when the door to the bedroom clattered open, I jumped. It was my father. He was holding a rifle, a 30.06. He told me to follow him, and I did as he told me. We followed one of the many game trails that snaked past logs furred over with moss, past hemlocks and cedars and firs, and all the while the screaming continued, a woman’s wail, until we came to the fence that edged our property. In it hung a deer, a six-point buck, tangled up in the barbed wire. It thrashed at our slow approach and loosed another wretched wail and then went still for a moment with its tongue hanging from its mouth. Its hide was the color of cinnamon where it wasn’t oozing with blood. My father laid a hand on my shoulder. It was heavy enough to make my shoulder drop a little. He looked at me seriously and said I should kill the deer, as if killing were driving a stick-shift or installing a light fixture, something I ought to learn how to do.
And, now, Jen:
Sometimes my father would drive out to Fossil to go deer hunting. My father always came home in the evening, wearing neon orange, pine sap still soft in his beard, a few leaves stuck to his shoulder, sometimes dragging a four-prong buck behind him like a bag of laundry, his face looking like whatever it was he killed. I remember my father telling me that there are two ways to hang a deer: from its neck or from its legs. He preferred the neck.
I watched from inside our kitchen — windows open, screens shut — as my father worked the knife through a tough spot on the deer’s stomach. It hung from an old juniper tree, its neck twisted ninety degrees, spinning like a Christmas tree ornament. My father made an incision and peeled the skin off leisurely and with care, the way he might take off a woman’s jacket at a party. It made a sound. He turned, he explained: the sooner you skin the deer after it dies the easier the hide slides off. The deer was naked, purple and soft, like the deepest part of a peach.
Where is a writer’s voice formed? Is it in the crucible of childhood experience? Wide-eyed and standing before the slaughtered animal — is this where the writer first becomes self-aware? Does this moment imprint upon the psyche and remain, beneath the others, a foundation that cannot be destroyed?
In his 1907 essay, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Sigmund Freud explores a number of themes — among them, the role of childhood experience on the work of the writer:
The creative writer does the same thing as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy that he takes very seriously — that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion — while separating it sharply from reality.
A mimicry of childhood play — this is the deeper truth, perhaps, about the process of writing. The investiture of emotion into the imagination. An unreal world looked at with great scrutiny, taken very seriously. This sounds, perhaps, like the most fundamental underpinning of the writing workshop.
In 2012, both “Demon Camp” and “Red Moon” will be added to the shelves of the Frank Conroy Reading Room at the writers’ workshop, inserted after John Irving and Flannery O’Connor — but before Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut. There in the Dey House, these two texts will assume their places in the colorful phalanx — the variegated battlement — that is the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumni library. These two works are quite different but also somehow similar — strung through with the bond of familial love and perhaps, just perhaps, the memories of a bat attack and a butchered deer.
Pauls Toutonghi’s second novel, “Evel Knievel Days,” will be published in July 2012 by Crown, a division of Random House. He lives in Portland, Ore., where he teaches at Lewis and Clark College.
Do you know when the phoenix comes to Misrata?
Every 500 years. That’s twice a millennium. Twice a millennium, the phoenix builds its nest of sticks and leaves and sun-baked mud, and then it burns itself — a terrible immolation. Five centuries. Six thousand moons. From flame, a new generation.
Golden, soot-streaked feathers; its wings twitch. The new bird rises up and in its talons, it carries the ashes of its father, sealed in an egg of myrrh — carries them to Heliopolis, the Egyptian City of the Sun, for burial. Every phoenix is buried in Heliopolis, that city of the sun in the desert — like every city in this part of the world is a city of the sun in the desert.
We’re not far from Heliopolis, in Misrata. We’re only several hundred kilometers. The acrid scent of gasoline hangs over the highway that stretches between us. So if you’re lucky enough to be alive on that night, twice a millennium, when the phoenix appears, having just buried its father — stand outside, look toward the horizon. Do not be afraid. It will be a massive bird. A beautiful, wide-winged creature. It will reflect the sun as it sweeps in a great circle, sweeps out across Al Butnan and then the Gulf of Sidra and then, disappears.
We thought, at first, that the phoenix was born in 1911. We thought, next, that it was born in 1951. We thought, again, that it was born in 1969. Were we wrong? I worry that we were wrong, worry as I’m sitting here in this little, claustrophobic room, with my damn microwave and my 10-gallon container of water, and my woolen blankets, and my chessboard, and the ants, and these filthy clothes and my pistol.
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I stand at the windowsill. It’s a dirty windowsill. Dust settles on everything, here. Even the mortars won’t shake it off.
Everyone is bleeding. They come to me — as their brother, their colonel, their father, their comrade — they come to me in bandages. I touch their wounds to comfort them. They are different every day, these people; the old ones disappear; new ones take their place. Except Al-Mu’tasim; he’s here, each day, as always. This morning he appeared with his left arm wrapped in gauze. He was carrying a small brown bag. I looked at him and sighed.
“How were you injured, my brother?” I said. And I reached out and took his arm and held it, just here, in the center of my chest, beside my heart. I began to unwrap his wounded arm. I would touch the skin, I would press it to my own skin, and — I knew — it would begin to heal.
“Shrapnel,” Al-Mu’tasim said. “But it’s healing.”
I nodded and released his arm.
“What have you brought me?” I asked.
Wordlessly, he held out the bag. I opened it. I looked inside. Nestled in a bed of torn newspapers, slick and waxy and the color of cauliflower, was a human ear. I nodded.
“And the boy?” I said.
“Outside.”
I nodded again.
“Bring him in.”
And so that’s what he did. The boy was young — maybe 13. His arms were thin, so thin, the arms of a child, covered with soft, feathery hair. He’d been beaten, but not badly; he had one black eye and a cut across his mouth. If he knew that he was standing two feet from a paper bag that contained his father’s ear — he did not betray that knowledge.
“Do you play chess?” I asked.
He hesitated, then he nodded.
“My uncle taught me,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Sit down and we’ll set up the game.”
We played for half an hour. He was just a boy but I could tell he was proud of his skill. And he was good for his age — that is to say he was pedestrian and clumsy — but then again I’ve played against grand masters, against world champions, I’ve played on boards of elephant bone and onyx, of sapphire and saltwater abalone.
“What would you do if those pieces on the board were real men and women?” I finally asked him. “What if it was your family — if the queen was your mother and the king was your father?”
The boy shook his head.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“But would you play the game in the same way?” I asked.
The boy looked at me with his wide brown eyes. We waited there, for a moment, staring at each other. We waited and I could imagine the sound of the line of ants, shaking the dirt as they ate this forsaken house, one particle at a time. The boy said nothing — he continued staring at me. He would have stared for hours, I think, his eyes fierce and unblinking. There’s a Berber saying that I have always loved: Angels bend down their wings for the brave and the innocent.
Finally, I motioned to Al-Mu’tasim — who’d remained in the doorway that whole time. Al-Mu’tasim bent down. I brushed my lips against his ear. I rested them gently against the skin of it.
“Kill them in the night,” I whispered. “Do it so they do not suffer.”
And with that I had him take the boy away.
But it’s quiet here, now. Some part of me wishes I hadn’t done what was right. But in these sad, last days — what can I do? I can do nothing but tell the truth. I am the brother of the people. I am the golden bird. I am beloved by everyone.
(Credit: Wikipedia/iStockphoto) 
Ben and Jen Percy.(Credit: Courtesy of Ben and Jen Percy) 