Zadie and Me

It’s very hard on the shoulders to bear the weight of literary history.

Charles Dickens in his study.

Don’t know how I missed this last summer, but the acclaimed novelist Zadie Smith wrote a piece for the New Yorker that escaped my attention. It was headlined, and subheadlined, thusly:

On Killing Charles Dickens
I did everything I could to avoid writing my historical novel. When I finally started “The Fraud,” one principle was clear: no Dickens.

I’ve just come across the piece and read it in one swallow. Let me say this: it was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

Zadie (if I may be so presumptuous) has been working on a historical novel plucked from the annals of 19th century British litigation. It was a confounding case, which I will not describe. I’ll say only that those familiar with 19th-century British literature will know that confounding litigation is not — ahem — a novel topic. The fictional case of  “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” was at the center of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. It was a protracted probate dispute that eventually, and famously, bankrupted both plaintiff and defendant.

Never mind those details, either. The point is, in her piece, Zadie cops to abandoning  two bedrock convictions in order to tackle The Fraud. One was her previous aversion to historical fiction (at least to writing it) and the other was her steadfast determination not to skulk around, or be skulked around by, the ghost of Charles Dickens.

Zadie:

To be my age, bookish, and born in England was to grow up under that tiresomely gigantic influence. Dickens was everywhere. He was in school and on the shelves at home and in the library. He invented Christmas. He was in politics, influencing changes in labor law, educational law, even copyright law. He was the original working-class hero—radiant symbol of our supposed meritocracy—as well as a crown jewel of the English Heritage tourist industry…. There didn’t seem to be a nineteenth-century pot he didn’t have his finger in.”

And, not surprisingly, in researching her book, she kept stumbling upon him:

I could be minding my own business reading about, say, an uprising in Jamaica, and suddenly there he was again, signing a petition on the matter. I’d be reading about a long-dead, long-forgotten writer, William Harrison Ainsworth—a resident of my neighborhood—and there Dickens would be, befriending him. I’d read a book about American slavery and discover him in the footnotes! At which point I’d find myself saying, Oh, hi, Charles, like an actual crazy person.

And then, to her dismay, she discovered she could not exile Dickens, because the flesh-and-blood man had been at various points connected not only to the characters she was dramatizing, but to the case itself. Her Dickens hunger strike thus ended.

OK, now it occurs to me why I’m six months late in seeing Zadie’s article. When it was published, I was in Serbia, working on my own book, also a work in progress:

In Spite of Everything
Exploring the Human Heart in the Most Belligerent, Absurd, and Weirdly Enchanting Autocracy on Earth

And I feel Zadie’s pain, because I too am haunted by the Ghost of Serbia Authors Past. My specter is Rebecca West, author of the monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941. It’s a masterpiece, and I’d say it’s the last word in journalistic exploration of the Balkans … but it definitely isn’t that. In the ensuing 82 years, important books on the region have advanced — but never surpassed — her genius. Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan. The Impossible Country, by Brian Hall. The Fall of Yugoslavia, by Misha Glenny. The Serbs, by Tim Judah, and many more.

But Rebecca — my docent, my muse, my spirit guide, my nemesis — has so infiltrated every dimension of my research that she has actually become a character in my book, as announced almost from the very outset in the second chapter, titled Becky and Me. Some key passages:

You could call Black Lamb and Grey Falcon a travel guide – and it is, in exactly the way the Sistine Chapel is a room. It is difficult for a mere mortal such as myself to convey the woman’s astonishing grasp of history and literature ancient and modern, art, architecture, food, geography, seafaring, botany, contemporary politics and (if we are to believe her) the Nature of Man.

I do not dish out such superlatives out of politeness, or some sense of historical obligation. Nope, this is sheer admiration speaking – or it would be if it weren’t significantly contaminated with envy. Envy both shallow and deep. I haven’t even mentioned her elegant prose, often verging on poetry, as she creates pictures as vivid as the most fetching photograph. Imagine being a passenger in a boat approaching a stone Dalmatian quay:

Becky: “As we drew near the shore the water under the keel was pale emerald, where the diving sunlight had found sand.”

I guess that’s the shallow part. “Where the diving sunlight found sand.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. Truly: couldn’t. In that circumstance, I might have written: “The water was clear and a soft shade of green.” Had I been touched by the angels, perhaps: “The water was clear as fuck, and a soft shade of green.” The sun would not have been noticed diving.

Later, in Vojvodina, upon entering the village of Vrdnik on the sloping terrain of the Fruska Gora mountains, she simply records the landscape en route to the town’s fabled monastery:

Becky: “Twisted thorn trees guard austere channels of turf; but the hillside that closed our road was broken by the fine-drawn iron-mongery of a pithead, and we came into a mining village, as monotonous as such are in every country and continent, but here radiant with white-wash.”

Note the vocabulary, technical and otherwise. And the gravitas, to which I can aspire only at the risk of foolishness. As you will see in these pages, I also spent time in Vojvodina, mainly at a paprikash festival. 

Zadie, I feel your haunting. I look forward to The Fraud. My own work is not likely to see the light of day before late 2025. But I hope you are a better sport than me. A recurring theme of my book is a history of spite. So when I encountered an important monastery in the Vojvodina region of Serbia that Becky had missed in her 1,200-page masterpiece, I titled the chapter:

Rebecca West Was Not Here