The Mutual Friend

In Frederick Busch's The Mutual Friend (1978), it is the year 1900, and Charles Dickens' longtime assistant, George Dolby, lies dying in a charity ward. Unable to do anything except drink and write, Dolby grapples with his memories of "the Chief" by conjuring up a kaleidoscope of voices, ranging from Ellen Ternan to Dickens himself. Dolby's Dickens is a true horror--egotistical, narcissistic, a borderline paranoiac, selfish, adulterous. And hence Dolby's problem: what relationship does the biography have to the fiction?

To answer that question, Dolby has to work through the links among language, selfhood, and death. Near the end of the novel, Dickens tells Dolby that "there is a horror in looking at something that cannot return the look. I do not know if I hate it or am drawn to it, but nothing in our lives comes near that singular experience. It is a horror. But also, it is not" (202-3). For Dolby, this moment encapsulates the problem of Dickens' subjectivity: Dickens possesses an identity only insofar as he can watch and be watched--insofar, that is, as someone returns "the look." The simultaneous horror and fascination of the corpse's absent gaze lies in its perfect obliviousness to Dickens' own need to be seen. When he goes unrecognized, he splits into two; thus, in a hostile encounter with a fellow passenger on a train, Dickens "observ[es], as if an outsider, the tremble of my voice" (163). Dolby's "Dickens" really is a character, constructed by Dolby's narrative but also by Dickens himself. Hence Dickens' willingness to, in effect, commit suicide through his exceptionally popular series of readings: without his audience, he vanishes.  He can compensate temporarily by becoming his own audience--watching himself watch another--but only at the price of becoming aware of a fearful emptiness at his core.

But no language, no audience. Whether speaking in his own voice or ventriloquizing, Dolby returns again and again to the overwhelming--even threatening--force of Dickens' language:

Was his language overtaking the facts of the matter? Did that place in his brain which made his books so real, and his characters to actually walk the stage before the awed, persuaded eyes, finally burn with a heat and light which overwhelmed his sense of what was true? I had lived in his language too long. I believed it capable of anything; sometimes I saw it making me. (Underlined for emphasis.) (120)

Dickens obsessively rewrites the universe on his own terms, whether bending other human beings to his will through the fantastic power of imagination, or simply revising an event for others' consumption. "Everything changed by his pen to what he thought it should be," comments Dolby. "I didn't recognize the incidents he wrote of, often" (7). In the act of creation, Dickens burns down the barrier between his own mind and the outer world, simultaneously absorbing others into himself and reconstituting them according to his own desires. The characters walk the stage, but the audience, too, must play by Dickens' script.  Dolby's choice of "heat and light" is a loaded one, for Dickens throughout is terrified by fire; his language creates (let there be light) but deals death at the same time. 

Speaking in the voice of Kate Dickens, Dolby observes that "[i]t is curious, is it not, how what is written may come to pass? Perhaps it is testimony to his miraculous powers over the word, how what is written may come to pass" (72).  It's easy to see the novelist as God--but what happens when the God tries to work his miracles in the real world as well as within the pages of a novel? Dolby concludes, with pity, that Dickens' magic--no matter how black in its immediate cruelty--cannot save "the Chief" from his own mortality or sense of isolation; in the biographical sense, at least, Dickens is no better (or better off) than those around him.  And, given how he treats his family and Dolby himself, perhaps he is worse.  But, Dolby also concludes, there is Dickens the man, and Dickens the novelist:

Standing above the sleeping woman and child who now were under one more layer of futile cloth, my own, I thought instead of his brilliant indignation, and his penetrating ability to watch, to understand, and then to make.  I thought, as the smells of the Thames and the chime of the clock and the deep disturbed breathing of the little boy all mingled about me, that he had been great.  Yes.  Great to make us ache and sigh and fear for that woman and her child.  Whether or not he had enjoyed that mother's terror as he made it, felt the pleasure of the craftsman at his craft.  Whether or not he had thrilled to the devastating fear of the penniless father.  Despite his own needs or nastiness, he had sensed the slime on the stones at the Thames, and the hopelessness slick upon the souls at the Embankment.  He had captured a part of us, and had said our name.  He still was alive.  (183-84)

Dickens-the-author's greatness lies in his powers of perception and creation, which--while they are charged with that socially-aware quality of "indignation"--ultimately transcend the paradoxical littleness of Dickens himself.  This Dickens may be well-wadded with the stupidity of his owns "needs and nastiness," as it were, but he apparently cannot stop himself from stretching beyond those boundaries.  In speaking the "name" of the poor, he calls them into being as fellow men--and leads his readers to suffer along with them.  This is a moral act, to be sure, but Dolby's emphasis here falls not on Dickens' motives--after all, Dickens might have been enjoying himself--but on the aesthetic force that generates the reader's emotional entanglements.  There, then, is the Dickens that matters--that still lives. 

Comments

[Bob]

Thank you for this. It's been some time since I read this book, but you've done better than bring it back to me: you've made me think of things I hadn't before. BTW, Busch has another essay on Dickens in another volume, which isn't as good as this book, I think, but he's very shrewd. I believe he teaches somewhere upstate, perhaps near you. He also wrote a really nice story about his parents' courtship, which has some similarities with The Mutual Friend.