Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (10 page)

The next important Faust after Marlowe’s was of course Goethe’s, and his Faust is also expansive in his desires; it’s this version that gives rise to the Gounod opera featuring the seduction of the unfortunate Marguerite via some very sparkly jewellery. Goethe’s Faust is ultimately redeemed, unlike Marlowe’s; but in this, Goethe was not inventing something new, as there are earlier stories in which the pacter-with-the-Devil achieves redemption. It’s not the big-spending, high-living, knowledge-seeking branch of the pact-with-the-Devil family from whom Scrooge is immediately descended, however. For Scrooge’s miserly daddy or granddaddy, we must turn to an American author, Washington Irving.

Dickens is known to have proclaimed his fondness for Washington Irving, a writer of the generation before his who was very well known by Dickens’s time. Irving is best remembered for his creepy tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the one with the Headless Horseman in it; but he wrote lots of other stories, and Dickens was familiar with them. One of them is called “The Devil and Tom Walker.” In this version of the Faustean pact, the pact-maker shows none of the love of luxury and largesse that branded earlier Fausts as worldly and therefore damned. Instead he’s the most miserly creature imaginable. He and his equally stingy wife live in a swamp in which some pirate treasure is hidden, and one day Tom comes across a black man — not, Irving emphasizes, a man who is black, but more like a blackened man, for his blackness comes from soot. This creature is rapidly identified by Tom:

“Since the red men have been exterminated by you white savages,” says the blackened man, “I amuse myself by presiding at the persecutions of quakers and anabaptists; I am the great patron and prompter of slave dealers, and the grand master of the Salem witches.”

“The upshot of all which is, that, if I mistake not,” said Tom, sturdily, “you are he commonly called Old Scratch.”

And so he is. Tom and Old Scratch come to terms: Old Scratch will show Tom where the pirate gold is hidden in exchange for the usual body-and-soul payment, but he insists that Tom must invest the money in a business of the Devil’s choosing. He wants Tom to go into the slave trade, but that’s too horrible even for Tom, so they settle on moneylending.

Tom Walker set up as a usurer in Boston. His door was soon thronged by customers. The needy and the adventurous; the gambling speculator; the dreaming land jobber; the thriftless tradesman; the merchant with cracked credit; in short, every one driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices, hurried to Tom Walker.

Thus Tom was the universal friend of the needy, and he acted like a “friend in need”; that is to say, he always exacted good pay and good security. In proportion to the distress of the applicant was the hardness of his terms. He accumulated bonds and mortgages; gradually squeezed his customers closer and closer; and sent them at length, dry as a sponge from his door.

In this way he made money hand over hand; became a rich and mighty man, and exalted his cocked hat upon change. He built himself, as usual, a vast house, out of ostentation; but left the greater part of it unfinished and unfurnished out of parsimony. He even set up a carriage in the fullness of his vain glory, though he nearly starved the horses which drew it; and as the ungreased wheels groaned and screeched on the axle trees, you would have thought you heard the souls of the poor debtors he was squeezing.

This is the Scrooge pattern: enormous amounts of money, sharp deal-making, the ruthless grinding of those in need, empty ostentation coupled with miserliness: Scrooge, like Tom, lives in a vast house that is sparsely furnished. But unlike the pre-ghost Scrooge, Tom knows that his soul is in danger, and takes to churchgoing and Bible-toting to protect himself from the Devil’s collection agency. He slips up, however — he summons the Devil with a careless oath, is caught without his Bible, and is carried away by the blackened man and never seen again.

As soon as this happens, all his wealth vanishes: his bonds and mortgages are found “reduced to cinders,” his gold and silver has turned to chips and shavings, the horses that once pulled his rickety carriage are skeletons, and his huge house burns to the ground. Washington Irving learned a great deal from folklore: in tales about visits to the land of the Fairies, the gold they’re given is traditionally found to be lumps of coal once the sun rises — leading us to wonder how many of these tales arose from experiences people had while under the influence of hallucinogenic substances. The wrong kind of wealth, we are shown, is a similar kind of intoxicated illusion, and vanishes with either of (a) death or (b) waking up in the morning with a terrible hangover.

Scrooge’s wealth is like this. The third spirit to visit Scrooge — the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come — shows him a vision of what his own death will be like if he stays on his present course. For instance, there’s a den of thieves where, in a masterful parody of Scrooge’s own counting house, Scrooge’s former servants are selling his worldly goods to a fence, who’s duly chalking up the sums owed, in best accounting practice. The goods are “a seal or two, a pencil-case, a pair of sleeve-buttons, and a brooch of no great value”; also the shirt Scrooge was to have been buried in — removed from the corpse itself — and his blankets, and the bed-curtains. That’s the lot. Somebody must have inherited Scrooge’s enormous wealth, but we are not told about this in the story. Instead we’re told about the cat tearing at the door and the rats gnawing beneath the hearthstone, and Scrooge’s corpse upon the bed, “plundered, and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for . . .” It’s a vision of absolute poverty, both material and spiritual.

But as we know, Scrooge is saved at the end of the story, whereas Doctor Faustus, a much more generous and considerate creature, has his body torn into pieces and his soul carried off to Hell. Why is it that the signs of Scrooge’s salvation — the turkey-buying and so forth — take the same form as the signs of Faustus’s damnation? Maybe it’s because, when Marlowe was writing, the set of ideal Christian virtues that had held sway during so many earlier centuries — the disdain for wealth, the asceticism, the willed poverty, the turning of the back upon the world — was still close enough in time to be recognizable as a pattern of saintliness. In those days, the official religious version was that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into Heaven, and the rich man burning in Hell while the poor man gloated down from Heaven was still an image dwelt upon in sermons, if only to make the rich disgorge in favour of the Church.

But between Marlowe and Dickens fell the full triumph of the Protestant reformation in England — a movement that had begun earlier, that had taken an English form with Henry the Eighth’s break with the Pope and his subsequent disbanding of the monasteries, and that by Marlowe’s era was incarnate in Elizabeth the First as head of the Church in England. The Protestants continued to gain ground over the next two centuries, and by the nineteenth century, although the land-based English aristocracy still had much power, the merchants and industrialists were replacing them as the biggest plutocrats. How was wealth to be viewed? Was it a sign of God’s blessing, as it had been in the days of Job, or was it, on the other hand, a precious bane — a sign of worldliness and corruption, as in the days of the ascetics and hermits? This was a debate that had been going on within and among various branches of the Christian faith for a long time. The camel squeezing through the eye of the needle was impossible on Earth, some argued, but in Heaven all things are possible, so why couldn’t you have both a fat bank account and a seat at the divine postmortem banquet? “By their fruits ye shall know them,” says Jesus, who clearly meant spiritual fruits; but these fruits were suspected by some apologists to be also material, and being rich was viewed by them as a sign of God’s blessing and favour — a position not without its adherents in certain fundamentalist circles of America today.

The other thing that happened during the Protestant reformation was that usury — which originally meant the charging of any interest on loans — was no longer formally forbidden to Christians. Christian bankers had previously got round the prohibition by calling what they made from their trade by other names — as Muslim bankers do today — but now the lid came off the box. After Henry the Eighth, interest-charging was legalized for Christians in England, and then later for Christians in other countries; and many leapt with alacrity into that marketplace. Attempts were made to limit the amounts that could be charged, but these attempts were not entirely effective, and they still aren’t — thus giving us loan sharks and daily interest rates on credit card borrowings.

In the nineteenth century, capitalism exploded in the West, scattering fiscal shrapnel hither and yon. Few people understood exactly how capitalism functioned. It seemed a great mystery — how some people got very rich without doing anything that used to be called “work”— and the superstitious might well believe that some hand other than a human one had stuck its infernal finger in the pie and helped the prosperous but surely wicked capitalist to pull out the plums. Without any regulating mechanisms, there were frequent boom-and-bust cycles; and as there were no social safety nets, there was widespread suffering during the busts. Fortunes were made by those who were in a position to profit from the roundabouts and swings — it was in the centuries after the prohibition on interest-charging was abolished that usury changed its meaning from mere interest-charging to exorbitant interest-charging — and Tom Walker and Ebenezer Scrooge, moneylenders both, are among the profiteers.

The recent fundamentalist Christian Church — especially in the American South — has identified sinning largely with sins of the flesh — especially sexual sins — though excessive drinking and drug-taking feature in there as well. The Catholic Church has also been in the sin-as-sex business for quite a long time. Whatever the intent, the effect has been to divert attention from money sins to sexual ones. But neither Washington Irving nor Charles Dickens are having any of that. Both Tom Walker and Ebenezer Scrooge are sexually abstemious: their sins are entirely due to the worship of Mammon, he of the golden calf.

The ghost of Scrooge’s former business partner, Marley, displaying the principles of post-mortem heart-weighing worthy of the Ancient Egyptians and also of medieval Christianity, has to pay after death for Marley’s sins during life. None of these sins involved a dalliance with Helen of Troy; all of them came from the relentless business practices typical both of Scrooge and of unbridled nineteenth-century capitalism. Marley totes a long chain made of “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” He is fettered, he tells Scrooge, by the chain he forged in life — yet another example of the imagery of bondage and slavery so often associated with debt, except that now the chain is worn by the creditor. Indulging in grinding, usurious financial practices is a spiritual sin as well as a material one, for it requires a cold indifference to the needs and sufferings of others, and imprisons the sinner within himself.

Scrooge is set free from his own heavy chain of cash-boxes at the end of the book, when, instead of sitting on his pile of money, he begins to spend it. True, he spends it on others, thus displaying that most treasured of Dickensian body parts, an open heart; but the main point is that he does spend it. The saintly thing in earlier times would have been for him to have given the whole packet away, donned sackcloth, and taken up the begging bowl. But Dickens has nothing against Scrooge’s being rich: in fact, there are quite a few delightful rich men in his work, beginning with Mr. Pickwick. It’s not whether you have it; it’s not even how you get it, exactly: the post-ghost Scrooge, for instance, doesn’t give up his business, though whether it remained in part a moneylending business we aren’t told. No, it’s what you do with your riches that really counts.

Scrooge’s big sin was to freeze his money; for money, as all students of it recognize, is of use only when it’s moving, since it derives its value entirely from whatever it can translate itself into. Thus the Scrooges of this world who refuse to change their money into anything else are gumming up the works: currency is called “currency” because it must flow. Scrooge’s happy ending is therefore entirely in keeping with the cherished core beliefs of capitalism. His life pattern is worthy of Andrew Carnegie — make a bundle by squeezing and grinding, then go in for philanthropy. We love him in part because, true to the laws of wish-fulfilment, which always involve a free lunch or a get-out-of-jail card, he embodies both sides of the equation — the greedy getting and the gleeful spending — and comes out of it just fine.

Was Dickens conscious of the meaning of Scrooge’s first name? Ebenezer means “rock that helps,” which points to both the good and the bad sides of Scrooge: the hard, unyielding, cold Bad Scrooge and the good, helping Scrooge that emerges. Bad Scrooge does what in our more selfish moments we ourselves might prefer to do — hog everything for ourselves and sneer at beggars. Good Scrooge does what we sincerely hope we’d do if only we had enough cash: we’d share the wealth and save all the Tiny Tims of this world.

But we don’t have enough cash. Or so we keep telling ourselves. And that’s why you lied to the charity worker at your door and said, “I gave at the office.” You want it both ways. Just like Scrooge.

SCROOGE IS
pre-eminently a nineteenth-century figure, and it’s the nineteenth century in which debt as plot really rages through the fictional pages.

When I was young and simple, I thought the nineteenth-century novel was driven by love; but now, in my more complicated riper years, I see that it’s also driven by money, which indeed holds a more central place in it than love does, no matter how much the virtues of love may be waved idealistically aloft. Heathcliff of
Wuthering Heights
loves Cathy passionately and hates his rival, Linton, but the weapon with which he is able to act out his love and his hate is money, and the screw he twists is debt: he becomes the owner of the estate called Wuthering Heights by putting its owner in debt to him. And so it goes, through novel after novel. The best nineteenth-century revenge is not seeing your enemy’s red blood all over the floor but seeing the red ink all over his balance sheet.