Of course I knew that Charles Dickens had what was arguably the most brutal and public marital separation in literary history. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that in 1858 he left his wife Catherine, to whom he had married for two decades and who had borne him ten children. The dissolution occurred partly because the marriage had essentially been arranged and had never been happy, and partly because Dickens—then in his late forties—had fallen obsessively in love with an eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan.
When I decided that I would try to write a novel—eventually entitled Five Weeks in the Country—about the visit that Hans Christian Andersen paid to Dickens in 1857 and during which Andersen overstayed his welcome and made the family (and himself) miserable, I knew that the dissolution of the Dickens marriage—or at least the lead-up to the separation—would have to be part of the narrative.
I decided to end the novel before Dickens left Catherine, before he told anyone who would listen that she belonged in a mental hospital, before he forbid their children to see or speak to their mother. (Of the nine surviving Dickens children, only Charles, the oldest, disobeyed his father’s wishes and remained in contact with his mother). And I changed the ordering of events, so that Dickens’s attraction to Ellen Ternan began when Andersen was staying with him, when in fact it started shortly after Andersen left.
For one thing, I’d known about the disturbing facts of the case for so long that they could hardly surprise me into a new reading of the novels.
The events that surrounded the break-up would have overshadowed everything that came before and would have made it impossible to feel any sympathy for Dickens at all. As it happens, most early readers of my novel have found Dickens less sympathetic than I do. I realize that many people are understandably disturbed by the spectacle of a middle-aged man falling for a very young woman, but what had resonated with me (and not, apparently, with others) was the idea that even the most devoted, loving and deeply committed family member may experience a moment when they have seriously burned out on the pressures and demands of family life—especially, I imagined, a family as large as the Dickens household.
At this point, I should also note that I am a huge Dickens fan. Perhaps my love for his work began when, as a child, I saw on TV the early, black-and-white John Mills film of Great Expectations; certainly it began when I read Bleak House for a college survey course. I made a pilgrimage to see the Dickens memorabilia in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, which owns the writer’s “performance” copy of A Christmas Carol, marked up with prompts for the gestures he planned to make during public readings, as well as the letter opener he commissioned a taxidermist to fashion from the paw of his much adored dead cat, Bob. (Sentimental taxidermy was popular during the Victorian era.) I’ve read all his novels, some once, some several times. I visited his house in London.
Perhaps my passion for Dickens’s novels will help to explain why I was so taken aback—shocked, really—when the Kerri Miller, the smart, thoughtful, humorous person who interviewed me for Minnesota Public Radio, asked if knowing about Dickens’s bad behavior, about his loathsome treatment of his hapless wife, has affected my feelings about his work.
I suppose the main reason I was so startled was that I had never actually thought about the question. It simply hadn’t occurred to me. For one thing, I’d known about the disturbing facts of the case for so long that they could hardly surprise me into a new reading of the novels. For another, I am one of those people who believe that my feelings about an author’s misdeeds, crimes, failings are ultimately unrelated to my opinion about, and the pleasure I get from, their work.
Through the writing of much of it, I felt that I was taking a hard and (yes) sympathetic look at the way that we become someone else when we write.
I know that not everyone will agree, but Alice Munro’s books have stayed on my shelves and my respect for her work has remained unchanged despite the deeply disturbing revelations about the blind eye she turned on the fact that her second husband was molesting her daughter. I wrote a brief biography of Caravaggio, who is supposed to have killed someone over a fight about a bet on a tennis game, and I don’t think that I ever fully internalized the fact that my idol was a murderer.
Perhaps one reason that I find it so easy to separate the art from the artist is that I believe that the person and the work are two separate entities. That is, once I’ve written something, I feel that it takes on a life of its own, that is no more “mine” than are my children and grandchildren.
Even when I have written autobiographically—especially when I’ve written autobiographically—I’ve often felt as if I was writing about someone else, someone who lived during the time about which I was writing, someone who did many of the same things I did and shared many of the same feelings. The characters in my novels aren’t me, though the books may contain elements of my personal history, my daily life, my sense of the world. Once I’ve finished them, they’re on their own, sent out into the world to reach the people who want and need to read them, out in the world to do whatever they’re going to do.
In theory, the contradictions should have been greater, the divide between the life and the work should have been stronger and deeper in the case of someone like Dickens, whose fiction was so thoroughly suffused with empathy for humanity, so full of the compassion that he seems to have lacked for his own family.
But that was one of the things I was writing about—one of the aspects that interested and engaged me when I was working on Five Weeks in the Country. Through the writing of much of it, I felt that I was taking a hard and (yes) sympathetic look at the way that we become someone else when we write, someone wiser and deeper and maybe kinder than we are when we do the grocery shopping and cook a meal and call the family in for dinner.
The history of art is full of monsters. Is there more cruelty and criminality among artists than in the general population? I have no idea. And books can indeed have a profoundly and disastrously evil affect on their readers. But by and large, few paintings and novels are in themselves monstrous, and they continue to enlighten, to hearten us and to give us great pleasure, regardless of the moral failings of the flawed humans who created them.
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Five Weeks in the Country by Francine Prose is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.
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