Illustration: Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)
For anyone who was wondering why there haven t been any of my periodical essays about my reading for a while, it is because I was tied down for 3 1/2 months with Clarissa, Samuel Richardson's small-type, 1,499 page epistolary novel that was among the first, and is still among the longest, works of fiction in the English language. It took me 104 days to finish it, a seemingly unimpressive clip of 14.41 pages per day, but I could hardly have gone much faster. Though (remarkably) this book remains in print in a gigantic unabridged Penguin edition, and can be found right on the shelf at Borders taking up space that could hold half a dozen or more contemporary novels, by page 400 I was certain no one living in modern society who was not being paid to do so could, or would, possibly finish the entire book. I was not certain I was going to be able to finish it myself, and I am an automaton where fulfilling the duties of my various lists are concerned. Somewhere in the middle wilderness of this endless and remote pine forest of words, in desperate search of any possible camaraderie, I went onto the Amazon.com site and found that 41 people had reviewed the book, which is an above average number, and an astounding one to me for this particular book. One person claimed to have read the whole thing in 8 days (187.38 pages per day, even at ten hours a day almost 19 pages an hour--I don't believe it). A good portion of the reviews came from England, where apparently a certain taste for the old warhorses of the national literature has yet to die out completely. Most were positive in some manner and I would say that half were downright enthusiastic. I cannot say whether these are people I would want to be good friends with or not but I am certainly curious about them. The blurbs on the cover and first page of the book proclaim it several times to be one of the greatest of European novels. That is misleading at the least, if not technically a lie. Within the subcategory of great novels, or famous works of prose literature, there are many more books noticeably superior than inferior to it.While most modern students of literature are overcome with a sense of dread even at the prospect of reading a Richardson book, I was caught off guard on this occasion, having taken up Pamela a few years ago and, while agreeing that at least two hundred pages of moral instruction (not that I don t need it) could happily have been edited, been otherwise deeply impressed by it. It is a dark book--Richardson I am quite certain had the overall darkest worldview of any English author of his age, almost so that one begins to feel bad for him--but the dark parts were written with such an evident urgency and agitation in the authors mind as made them absolutely believable. I do not, as many people always seem wont to do, understand this to mean that the nasty and depraved side of human behavior is the one in the most, or perhaps the only important truth, is ever to be found. Tristram Shandy, despite appearing to be full of outrageous and nonsensical episodes and conversations, is executed in such a way, so deftly in its details, as makes it seem to have really existed, as well as to relate a story well worth relating on the basis of the very specific and peculiar charms of its narrator s and other character s minds. Clarissa being considered Richardson s real, if neglected masterpiece by seemingly most of the experts, my anticipation was of a slog, but a slog that would give me in places a vision of life that would meaningfully expand my understanding of its possibilities and myriad truths. What I found was a book that I think induced a modest depression in me, to which I am already highly susceptible, over a period of several months
The massive popularity of the book on its publication indicates to me the extent of the hunger bourgeois society evidently felt for works of fiction in those days. Though there are several episodes in the story where it appears events and plotlines are building up for a grand crisis where action follows swiftly upon action, as in, say Tom Jones, this never happens. When Clarissa is locked in a room and threatened with all sorts of imminent danger, 400 pages go by before anything happens. Colonel Morden s return to England, at which event it is indicated, things will be shaken up, is anticipated and alluded for well over a thousand pages before the man actually appears, having missed everything that his possible presence threatened on so many occasions to make interesting. Coleridge s famous observation that reading Fielding after Richardson was like emerging from a damp sickroom into a sunny spring afternoon is, especially with regard to Clarissa, most astute. I was reading another book the other day where a character was walking on a dirt road and had to sit down on a rock to take a pebble out of his shoe. This was a fairly nondescript little detail, but it leapt out at me because not one instance of this sort had happened in Clarissa in 1500 pages. The book is claustrophobic, because there is no air, no atmosphere in its world. Characters spend hundreds of pages in rooms that present themselves to the imagination as blank places, so devoid is our author of any kind of telling description. Likewise carriage rides take place in the readers mind as if there is nothing outside the windows, or if a white curtain has been drawn over it as the Soviets used to do on their trains before passing a munitions factory. The book being told by a series of lengthy letters (535 in all) the characters must needs spend a great part of their time writing, even to the detriment of their sleep, which in their health both Clarissa and her persecutor Lovelace rarely indulge in for more than one or two hours a night! Richardson s whole approach to the subject of death is extremely bizarre even among the authors of his age though I suspect it was more representative of the general population than we usually say. I will expand on this later in the other posts.
I do not know much about the Clarissa BBC movie that I have a picture from here. I don`t know that it ever appeared on TV in the U.S. Certainly they must be running out of classic novels to adapt if somebody thought this one a good candidate for the Masterpiece Theatre treatment. Unlike the aforementioned Tristram Shandy, which despite its reputation for being unfilmable, actually has a good number of sections that would make interesting scenes in a series, the possibilities suggested by Clarissa are not really very exciting, being of the standard classic-European novel variety--duels, balls, grounds of country estates, devious servants, etc--better illustrations of which are available elsewhere. This Saskia Wickham looks kind of pretty though, in the great tradition of lovely actresses who appear in some BBC serialization of a classic novel and are never seen again. Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, is a past favorite of this type, and I have to confess that I found Sarah Pickering, the mousy, tiny, almost childlike star of the Little Dorrit movie, to be rather adorable in that role. They are all probably around my age too. Where are they now?
