Not Quite Dead (24 page)

The threat was not Shadduck the man but the change he represented. A voice within told Grisse that Philadelphia would never again become the city he once thought it was, or wanted it to be.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

Philadelphia

Let us dine Boz, let us feed Boz,
But do not let us lick his dish
after he has eaten out of it.

        —
The Philadelphia Inquirer

F
or a moment, Dickens forgot that he was on a train. Certainly he knew it was a train when he boarded. Since then, however, it had become not a train but a cocoon, stuffed with indeterminate shapes cloaked in damp serge and worsted. It was the same cocoon that had prevented him from seeing the magnificent vestibule of his hotel in New York, or the spectacle of Broadway itself, or the architecture of the railway station. Once again this same moving, sweating, muttering human wall surrounded his seat, spitting tobacco juice on the floor, scribbling in shorthand, and eyeing his every move.

The journey from New York to Philadelphia required a train and two ferries, and would take between five and six hours. Already he was feeling fidgety and trapped. He looked down at his hands as though they belonged to someone else. Dispassionately he watched them pluck at one another, as though bent on parting skin and bone.
Whoever owns those hands should see a doctor
…

Dickens would have given anything for a good English cigarette. Yet there were none to be obtained in the colonies other than by rolling it oneself. Dickens had made several attempts to do so, but his nervous fingers were not up to the task, and the twisted result resembled a woman’s curling papers. Lacking his preferred smoke, he had resorted to cigars. They made his tongue sore, but at least he knew which end to put in his mouth.

Now he felt a sore throat coming on, which worried him. Was it
the cigars, or the onset of a cold? Tobacco was the lesser evil by far. Smoking would not cause death, but with colds you never knew. It would be ironic if his trip to America killed him. A high price to pay for a few weeks’ respite from one’s life and one’s wife.

“Oh, Mr. Putnam, would you be good enough to find me a glass of water?”

After replying in an incoherent drawl, his American assistant muscled his way through the crowd to comply. Dickens watched his retreating back, with a sigh: thus far, only the man’s style of ties and waistcoats appealed to him. He was not even certain where the man came from, or how he came to be his assistant. “An official appointment,” was the only explanation.

As Dickens drank his water, through the heel of his glass he thought he could see the eye of a reporter, peering down his throat.

I
T HAD BEEN
a miserable Atlantic crossing, in a shuddering, smoking hulk of a steamer. For the first five days Dickens lay seasick in his tiny, suffocating cabin, on a bed like a flattened muffin, with pillows like slices of bread. No sooner did he find his sea legs than a terrific storm pulverized the vessel. For three days the
Britannia
lurched and throbbed and shivered its way through waves the size of warehouses while her passengers lay in their cabins, huddled in the fetal position with sickness, distracted by terror—not of drowning but of burning to death.

The
Britannia
had barely reached Boston Harbor when the first reporters clamored aboard to shake his hand, pester him with questions, and scrutinize his appearance—though not to assist with his luggage. His new friends accompanied him on the packet ship to the dock, where more gentlemen awaited him, reaching out to shake his hand, fingers grasping for him like the antennae of sea creatures. A circular wall of overcoats then surrounded him, hustled him forward, and stuffed him into a waiting brougham.

On the way to his hotel, having summoned the courage to peer out the carriage window, he could see nothing but other hacks, their windows open, with heads sticking out and fingers pointing at him all the way.

Inside the hotel another swarm awaited, filling the vestibule and the
lobby to capacity and wound to such a pitch of excitement that the manager had found it necessary to station two stout porters to block the grand staircase, hands joined. Otherwise, the crowd would have chased Dickens all the way to his bedroom to watch him change his clothes.

As he escaped up the stair, someone called out:
Mr. Dickens, would you be kind enough to walk entirely around the room so that we can all have a real good look at you?

“If you don’t mind, I shall have a good look at myself first,” he replied. “I could be an impostor, you know.”

Through every waking hour since his arrival (other than in the bath or water closet, thank heaven), Dickens had not had five minutes to himself. Every move he made, every breath he took occurred in the company of vigilant gentlemen with notebooks, who spelled each other off like firemen. Over time he noticed that a sort of daisy chain took place, with one gentleman introducing the author to another—who, at the end of his shift, handed him off to another, and so on throughout the day Even his nights were not necessarily his own. At one point, hours after he had retired, a group of singers, inspired by one or another of his books, stood in the hall outside his door and serenaded the boots he had left out for cleaning.

On the other hand, he might have dreamed this last episode: seeing and dreaming tended to merge when the two worlds were equally fantastic.

From what he had managed to see of Boston and New York by peering between a pair of shoulders, or from a carriage, or the window of his room, urban America possessed a disconcerting brightness, a brittle unreality, a shimmer—in the way that things look when one has taken too much of a stimulant. As well, everything seemed to be in motion; even the buildings had an agitated quality, as though worried that they could at any moment be torn down and replaced by something bigger and better.

Not that Dickens had had a moment for reflection during the public dinners, receptions, balls, assemblies, and dignitaries without end, with always at least three reporters scratching his elbow. It was a level of scrutiny he had not experienced since his birth. At first, the fuss over him pleasurably inflated his self-regard; but it was not long before he realized, to his puzzlement and hurt, that to be famous is not the same as to be admired, or even liked.

Each morning, after a night of rapturous embraces, songs in his honor, and eloquent tributes to his genius, Dickens would pick up the morning newspaper, and would scarcely recognize the brute who went under his name.
Rather thick set and surprisingly short; wears entirely too much jewelry; very English in appearance, and not the best English
…

As an Englishman, this sort of comment struck him as distressingly physical and personal, this almost medical interest in his “juglike ears,” his “dissipated mouth,” his “surprisingly dark complexion,” his “stubby, simian fingers.” Nor, despite their own tendency to slovenliness, did his critics lack an eye for fashion.
His whole appearance is foppish and partakes of the flash order
, went one scribe, which sounded scarcely simian to Dickens. Indeed, these reports so lacked consistency that he wondered if he might have a doppleganger in the city, a thoroughly unpleasant double, set on ruining his reputation.

When he absentmindedly combed his hair at a dinner table because it was in his eyes, the discussion required eight column inches in the
Daily Advertiser
. During an informal debate on female beauty, when he referred in jest to a lady’s “kissability,” he was upbraided for coarseness in every lady’s publication in Hartford, and was the object of cautionary sermons next Sunday on the deadly sin of lust.

Although American journalists viewed him with skepticism (though not yet with that unfriendly feeling that would later become so violent and even malignant), their sense of critical distance did not inhibit them from presenting their manuscripts—to be read, assessed, and returned, together with any alterations he thought proper, preferably by next morning, at which time they would discuss its publication in England.

And the letters. Bales of them, wrapped in twine, awaiting his attention at every stop. One gentleman from Cincinnati requested that he write an original epitaph for the tombstone of an infant. A Southern gentleman thought Dickens might provide him with an autographed copy of a poem by someone named Leo Hunter, to an expiring frog. A woman from New Jersey wrote that many funny things had happened to her family, and many tragic events also, and that she had all the records for a hundred years past, which Mr. Dickens was to arrange and rewrite and send her half the profits. An elderly lady from Pittsburgh urged him to write an expose of Mormonism (about which he knew nothing), and to lecture on its evils worldwide.

At other times it seemed as though he had been admitted to a national orgy of self-flagellation over the inferiority of American culture, as though they expected a literary messiah to rescue them from their miserable state and lift them to the heavens. How disappointed they must have felt that he did not float above the ground!

And always the same question nagged: If the Americans found his appearance and manners such a disappointment, why were they so eager to take a look at him? Was he unusually ugly, like a sideshow exhibit? Or was he to be seen for no other reason than that others had seen him? Did celebrity in America engender itself, build upon its own substance like a fungus?

In New York, he was met at the station and given a golden key by a stout gentleman claiming to be the mayor, whose assistant immediately took it back again. He was then surrounded, hustled out of the building, and deposited in an open carriage. Seated in this vehicle he was paraded down Broadway in a procession that resembled the funeral of a royal, excepting that the corpse was expected to wave. Citizens roared on either side, many of whom could not have read
any
book, let alone his book.

Following a pause barely long enough for him to change his clothes and empty his bladder, Dickens was fetched from his hotel on Broadway and frog-marched to the first of several “Boz Balls.” This was a genial gathering of three thousand celebrants, for whom the Park Theater had been turned into a ballroom, its walls covered with white muslin and adorned with huge medallions, each representing one of his novels. The stage itself was made to represent a Gothic setting, on which a singer performed appropriate English songs, while a seemingly unending series of
tableaux vivants
represented scenes from his works. Most imposing of all was the portrait of Dickens himself over the proscenium arch, jug ears and all, with a laurel crown hovering above in the grip of an eagle. It was not clear to him whether the eagle was in the act of presenting the laurel, making off with it, or dropping it on his head.

This morning he was awakened, stuffed with breakfast, and put on the train for Philadelphia. The train consisted of three cars: the ladies’ car, the gentlemen’s car, and a car for Negroes—the last painted black. Every second window was open, and from each a spray of spit emanated like down from a burst feather pillow.

Once seated, he had turned away from the watch chains of the men in the aisle only to face another wall—of faces in the window, noses flattened against the glass like children at the sweet shop.

At last the train seemed to be pulling out of the station. Wheels clanked and rattled beneath him and the car lurched forward, while the engine in front screamed like a dying horse, lashed and tortured in its last agony.

“Mr. Putnam, do you have a lucifer?” he called to his American assistant in the opposite seat.

“A what, sir?” Putnam noted the unlit cigar, leaned forward, and obliged. “Round here we call it a match.”

“A match for what?”

“I dunno. For a cigar, maybe.”

“Have you ever been in England?’ asked Dickens.

“In print I have sir, like most Americans,” said Putnam. “But not otherwise. We are a reading people here, sir.”

Dickens had never encountered anyone quite like Putnam: a strapping, square-jawed young man with a Frenchman’s taste in neckties— soft bow, soft collar—that gave him the look of a foppish boxer.

Though impressed by the egalitarian spirit behind the open train carriage, it caused Dickens not for the first time to wonder at the American love of chewing tobacco, and their disregard for the spittoon. Even now the gentleman in the seat behind Putnam was busily employed in cutting a plug from his cake of tobacco, whistling softly to himself—another favorite pastime of this cheerful, resourceful people. When he had shaped it to his liking, he took his old plug out of his mouth and deposited it on the back of the seat in front of him, while he thrust the new wad into the hollow of his cheek, where it rested like a large walnut or a small pippin. Finding everything satisfactory, he stuck the point of his knife into the old plug and held it up for Dickens’s inspection, remarking with the air of a man who had not struggled in vain that it was
used up considerable
. Then he tossed it out the window, put his knife into one pocket and his tobacco into another, placed his elbow on the sill and his chin in his hand, and appeared to fall instantly asleep, still chewing regularly and spitting out the window, though unconscious.

Such vignettes of American life took place between encounters with gentlemen he did not know from Adam. For not the first time,
he wondered: Does the spirit of liberty grant any man the freedom to bother any other? Are all men free to finger his coat, jab his ribs, ask him personal questions, and grow shirty if he fails to deliver a satisfactory reply?

For the writer of books, a normal day is spent for the most part in his own company, staring out the window, and engaging in a controlled sort of dream. To find oneself perpetually on display and on duty morning, noon, and night was neither natural nor wholesome, nor did it bring out the best part of his character. Well before the Hartford appearance, Dickens had already begun to feel chronically ill-used, cheated, outraged. It became his secret pleasure to identify the hypocrisy and cant of Americans—though he knew perfectly well that, were a score to be taken on cant, the English would beat them raw.