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THE
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW PENGUIN EDITION
OF
CHARLES DICKENS? NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
by Douglas McGrath
We
do very little as we used to. We don?t leave calling cards when
we visit. Men don?t ask their girlfriend?s fathers for permission
to get married; in fact, lots of people don?t marry at all, though
they do honor some time-tested customs like having children and
going out for cigarettes and never coming back. We don?t fight wars
the way we used to. Now we go to war by not going: we send laser
guided missiles ahead of us, then curl up in front of CNN and assess
whether a follow-up visit is worthwhile.
Almost
everything has changed except this: after all the battles and bothers
of our daily life, we still like to lose ourselves in a good story.
Dinner eaten, dishes done, we summon what remains of our energies
so that we might, for an hour or two, be enthralled witnesses to
the goings-on of the enchanted or the blighted.
Charles
Dickens is arguably the greatest storyteller who ever lived. Gasps
may go up at this claim. Some readers will go to war for Tolstoy,
others cherish the remembrance of Proust, while still others believe
that to deny this title to Dostoevsky is a crime. I can only say
that I did use the word "arguably."
What
cannot be quibbled with is Dickens? artistry: the mirth and majesty
and malice contained in his prose staggers even the most implacably
well read. Furthermore, Dickens is that rare artist whose work was
never resisted by the wider public. Indeed, people have been unresisting
Charles Dickens since he first put Pickwick down on paper. There
is the famous, if suspiciously promotional, story of crowds of Americans
in a state of near riot at the docks as they waited for the installment
of The Old Curiosity Shop which contained news of Little
Nell?s death.
Dickens?
popularity is undiminished today, though admittedly things have
calmed down at the docks. In just the ten last years, Penguin alone
has sold almost 12 million copies of Dickens? 14 novels.
Dickens?
success both delighted and distressed its creator. For while his
books were received with an enviable enthusiasm, because of the
era?s porous copyright laws, his books were continuously adapted
for the stage without his consent, and with no financial benefit
to him. According to the Oxford Reader?s Companion to Dickens, the
1845 London theater season boasted 17 versions of "The Cricket on
the Hearth." This ongoing fanaticism led the Saturday Review
to ask, "What will become of the English stage when the public has
grown weary ? of dramatic versions of the stories of?Mr. Dickens?"
The
Saturday Review need not have worried its head. There have
been an estimated 3,000 adaptations of his novels, 136 during his
lifetime. There have been 87 film adaptations and 71 for television.
Besides its film and television adaptations, Nicholas Nickleby
was adapted for the stage in the early 1980?s by the Royal Shakespeare
Company in a magical production that lasted over nine hours. It
took a whole day to see it. Never in modern times, in the commercial
theater, had an audience been asked to pay so much and sit for so
long. Yet people were not deterred; they were, in fact, thoroughly
terred. It played to sold-out houses in London, Stratford, and New
York.
I
myself was much inspired by that production. I then read the book
and fell even more deeply under its spell. Despite its length and
breadth, I longed for years to make a film of it. I happy to say
I have done just that, with a dream cast: Christopher Plummer is
Ralph, Jim Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson are the Squeers, Tom Courtenay
is Noggs, Jamie Bell is Smike, Charlie Hunnam and Anne Hathaway
are Nicholas and Madeline, and Nathan Lane, Barry Humphries and
Alan Cumming are members of the Crummles troupe.
Why
is Dickens so irresistible to dramatists? (Even he couldn?t resist
himself; he frequently adapted and performed his own works.) There
are four qualities that mark a great piece of dramatic entertainment,
on stage or screen, and Dickens handles each of them with the breezy
skill of a juggler.
First,
he was a virtuosic storyteller, almost helplessly in thrall to his
ability to create plot. Every character seems to come with a back-story
detailed enough to be the main story in any other book. In the early
pages of Nicholas Nickleby, Nicholas and Squeers stop at
an inn near Grantham on their way to Dotheboys Hall. They fall into
conversation with two gentlemen, one gray-haired, one merry-faced.
Each of these men offers a story, one titled, "The Five Sisters
of York," the other, "The Baron of Grogzwig." The first one lasts
8 pages, the second 9. Neither one concerns anything that has happened,
or will happen, in the rest of the story. They could stand on their
own as complete short stories; they are the literary equivalent
of bonus tracks. As a filmmaker for whom everything in the story
must have something to do with the larger plot at hand, I found
the inclusion of almost 20 pages of irrelevant storytelling fascinating?and
helpful. Always needing to trim this long story, this was one of
the easiest and most obvious things to omit.
It?s
as though Dickens can?t stop himself from telling stories. His fourteen
novels total 11,304 pages. Storytelling was his gift and he exercised
it as prodigiously as Picasso or Louis Armstrong or P.G. Wodehouse
did theirs: as an essential part of their understanding of what
it is to be alive.
Of
almost equal appeal to dramatists is Dickens? dialogue. It is exemplary
in its clarity and freshness, distinctively true to each character
and yet somehow always smacking overall of Dickens. It never seems
forced or wrought, yet is often wittily epigrammatic. "Subdue your
appetites," advises the appalling Squeers, "and you have conquered
human nature!" Dickens elevates anecdotal dialogue in a way that
makes credible even the most outlandish events. When Nicholas shares
a dinner with the grandly tattered theatrical, Vincent Crummles,
he hears from his host the tragic history of a horse that gave long
service to the troupe. It is surely one of the peaks in all comic
literature, yet so close does it come to being beyond what we will
accept?even from someone as broadly drawn as Crummles?that one wrong
word might have thrown it. The wrong word does not appear. I suspect
it was Dickens? talent as a performer that gave him such a pitch-perfect
ear for speech. (The story of the horse appears in its glory in
the film. While not directly pertinent to the plot, it tells us
so much about Vincent Crummles, and brings so much happiness to
all who hear it, that it seemed essential for reasons of character,
tone and balance.)
Then
there is Dickens? vaunted ability to create characters. In this
book alone, only his third, he gave birth to more fascinating people
than most authors create in a lifetime: Ralph and Nicholas Nickleby,
the Squeers, the Crummles, the Cheerybles, the Mantalinis, Smike,
Noggs, Brooker, John Browdie, Gride, Peg Sliderskew. This was on
top of Pickwick and his pals, as well as Oliver Twist, Fagin, Nancy,
Bill Sykes and the Artful Dodger who had peopled his previous books,
and who would be followed by Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Micawber, David
Copperfield, Pip, Magwich, Miss Havisham, Uriah Heep, Little Nell,
The Jarndyces, Sydney Carton, Madame Defarge?on it goes. The list
of his characters in the Oxford Companion runs to 18 pages.
Finally
-- and perhaps it is the quality that makes what he writes so Dickensian
-- Dickens was not just a storyteller but a reform-minded philosopher.
He was not only ambitious for himself, but for a better world. He
did not create his novels merely to exercise his storytelling skills
but to expose the cancers of the society in which his readers lived
and, through their exposure, inspire improvement. By creating the
stories he did and wounding us when terrible things happen to the
people he has made us love, he enlists his readers in his causes.
It?s a sly type of persuasion, equivalent to the approach Twain
took at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn: "Persons attempting
to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting
to find a moral in it will be banished."
He
shares many qualities with his American contemporary, Mark Twain:
both were great wits, both had an ear for refined as well as vernacular
speech, and, despite their financial aspirations at which Dickens
was more steadily successful (Twain made a series of unlucky investments),
both cared very much for the poor and distressed. They each had
a compassionate and fondly humorous gift for bringing fictional
youth realistically to life. But perhaps most of all, each man seemed
to embody the essence of his country. Twain seems as quintessentially
American as Dickens seems English. Yet both men were unsparing critics
of their homelands, and used their talents to expose, ridicule and
correct these failings.
So
there we are: gripping plots, sparkling dialogue, unforgettable
characters and numerous ideas for a better world. No wonder filmmakers
and playwrights return to Dickens with the dedication of a stalker.
Adapting Dickens must be the easiest work in the world, you say.
And
yet.
With
all Dickens had to think about, one thing that did not occupy him
was constructing a story that could be nimbly compressed to the
average length of a motion picture. (Interestingly, Dickens? structuring
anticipated ? perhaps suggested ? the crosscutting overlapping storylines
that are standard in film storytelling. For a more detailed and
graceful explanation of Dickens? influence on film, interested readers
should find an essay written by the great Russian filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein entitled "Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today.")
Most
modern films are in the two-hour range. There is the rare case when
a filmmaker can persuade a studio to release a film that is as long
as three hours. But it is the rare case, and even three hours of
a Dickens novel would involve an enormous reduction of the story.
The Royal Shakespeare adaptation of this book, and even that had
some compressions, was three times that length.
Having
previously adapted Jane Austen?s Emma for the screen, I knew
well the painful choices involved. Nickleby, at more than
twice Emma?s length and no less delightful, would require
a more extensive, and more excruciating, surgery. I could not merely
keep what I loved in the story; the film would run three days. (Don?t
ask me why, but theater owners steer clear of films that only accommodate
a biweekly showing.)
So
I did what I did with Emma: I reread the novel, and made
a note at the top of every page stating the action. Not reading
purely for pleasure, my eye assessed everything against the equation,
"Keep it or lose it?" Each new page brought alternating waves of
delight and alarm. "Oh, no!" I kept thinking. "This is good, too."
I wasn?t finding much that I wanted to lose. Most readers begin
a new chapter with the hope that it will have something interesting
in it. I often kicked off a new chapter with the hope that it contained
something boring I could remove.
While
my desire to be bored went regrettably unsatisfied, I was able to
take a clearer view when I assembled my outline, away from the charm
of his prose. I studied it, over and over, searching for the heart
of the story. Once I knew what the heart was, I could more easily
decide what was essential to its reconstruction.
The
outline revealed that Nicholas Nickleby had the same peripatetic
looseness of structure that marked the wandering exploits of Dickens?
first novel, The Pickwick Papers, a style then in vogue by
Fielding, Smollett and other of his contemporaries. (Thematically
though, Nicholas Nickleby shares many of the same interests
as its immediate predecessor, Oliver Twist: the physical
or emotional abuse of young boys; the sense of being young and unprotected
in the world; the loss of parents and the sometimes terrifying dependence
a child must have on strangers. Given the astonishing fact that
Dickens wrote Pickwick and Twist simultaneously, Nicholas
Nickleby is their love child: it merges the wandering, comic
qualities of the first with the gothic social vision of the second.)
Though
the title is Nicholas Nickleby, the novel follows the adventures
of the whole Nickleby family, not just Nicholas but his sister Kate,
his mother, and most importantly his Uncle Ralph. It delves into
the lives of their friends and sometimes their friends? friends.
This widened focus actually made the book easier to adapt than his
more tightly constructed later novels. I needed to narrow its focus
and concentrate on the stories that best supported the ideas behind
the novel.
As
I studied the book, I saw two stories continually intersect, each
causing a sharp, sometimes explosive, reaction in the other: it
was the story of Nicholas and his Uncle Ralph. They were the heart
of the story, their struggle, their contrasting philosophies, the
starkly different choices they made. I decided that I would only
retain those sections of the novel that best brought to life their
intertwining histories.
An
audience comes to a film with more rigid ideas about plot than it
brings to a novel or play. Maybe it?s the word "movie" that plants
the idea that things should continue to move, but people do not
allow a film the digressions and ruminations that they accept in
a novel. Thus went the many side stories and their characters. Sadly
went the Mantalinis, beloved of memory, on page and stage. (They
were superbly brought to life in the RSC production.) They were
influential in Kate?s story, but I only used her story in how it
affected Ralph or Nicholas. So while we hear of her employment at
the Mantalinis, we are denied the pleasure of seeing her under their
"demd" supervision. So, too, went the Kenwigs, Miss Petowker, Mr.
Lillyvick, Peg Sliderskew and Arthur Gride. There were outright
removals, and some people, like Miss Lacreevy, who were substantially
reduced.
Occasionally,
I would merge two characters, as I did with Sir Mulberry Hawk and
Arthur Gride. They were similar in a number of ways and performed
similar services in the plot. One is introduced quite late in the
story and again, by the mysterious laws of cinema, it can be unsettling
to have a major character introduced in the last part of a movie.
It lends the film a quality of being disjointed. (Perhaps because
one rarely reads a novel straight through, one is less sensitive
to this issue with books.)
Always,
in all my decisions, I sought to honor the spirit of the novel.
An adapter must sometimes turn a cold eye to the letter of the book.
Drawn to be a writer in part because I loved reading great writing,
making changes in a cherished author?s work was often agonizing.
The feelings of presumption and inadequacy were only quelled by
the knowledge that my film is not meant to replace Nicholas Nickleby,
as it never could, but to be a walking, talking supplement, one
that might bring new readers to the joys of a classic.
For
many people the word "classic" wears the musty shroud of age. But
the very thing that makes it a classic, which is to say something
that has long outlasted the time in which it was born, is the natural
and illuminating way it applies to any era in which it is being
read. Dickens? stays fresh because he is not just writing about
human events, which are always changing and dating, but human nature,
which is constant.
On
the surface, the world Dickens offers the 21st century reader in
Nicholas Nickleby is as different from ours as Star Wars.
But once you get past the coaches and bonnets and foolscap, you
have a world eerily like our own. Nicholas? father, a sweet-natured
country gentleman, loses his savings in an unlucky speculation in
the financial markets. What could more perfectly describe the cold-blooded
fleecing of small-time investors that has highlighted the recent
past on Wall Street than this sentence about the failure of Nicholas
Senior?s investment: "Four stock brokers took villa residences in
Italy and four hundred nobodies were ruined."
Nicholas
Nickleby was conceived in part to expose the notorious Yorkshire
boarding schools that were common dumping grounds for illegitimate
or unwanted children. Indeed, Dickens based one of the villains
of the piece, Wackford Squeers, on the infamous headmaster William
Shaw, whose neglectful cruelty caused the blindness of two of his
students. The barbarity of the Yorkshire school system is what you
might call the local, or "period," issue, long gone from our daily
worries. But surely the abuse and neglect of children continues
its mad way in our world, whether it is the pedophiliac scandals
of the Catholic Church or the terrible rash of child kidnappings
and killings that have recently filled the news.
More
and more, as I analyzed the story, I saw that there were three ideas
to which Dickens returned again and again. And it was around these
three ideas that I organized my film. The first idea is that there
is evil in the world, and that it must be confronted.
The
next idea is that there is evil in the world but it must understood.
If we do not comprehend its origin, we can only knock it down and
wait for its resurrection. Evil does not spring up. It takes the
nurturing of violence or, more often, neglect. Surely no murderer
ever had his mother sat by his bed too often at night, kissing away
his fears. No dictator?s father ever cupped his face too lovingly
in his hands. In showing us the seeds of evil, Dickens allows us
to understand, even pity, his villains.
This
is one of the many qualities that links Dickens to Shakespeare:
a thrilling, almost disorienting ability to induce in us a sympathy
for the villain. In Nicholas Nickleby, one of the triumphs
of the storytelling is that by the end, the man we have come to
hate the most, the man whose downfall we have prayed for most fervently,
is exposed and given his punishment, and it evokes from us no happiness,
no victory, only a sort of pitying sorrow. This is because Dickens
has shown us how this person has lost his way in the world: the
wrong choices he made, and the costs that came with them. As they
are revealed to us, so, too, is he revealed to us in a way that
surprises and complicates our reaction to him. He is still a villain,
but now we know how he became that way. By valuing fortune over
affection, he denied himself the vitality of human connection. This,
more than anything, seems to be the theme of Dickens? work: that
villainy is born from the feeling that we do not belong in any joyful
way to someone else.
And
this brings us to the third idea. If the lack of a nourishing human
connection is the problem, then what is the answer? Over and over
again in his books, Dickens provides it: family.
Being
an artist, Dickens does not mean it in the simplistic and manipulative
way that our politicians do. He means something more complex. Indeed,
in Nicholas Nickleby, one of the villains is a part of the
hero?s family. So, though Dickens offers the idea of family as an
answer to the problems of a society whose lust for money permits
cruelty to children and widows and men unlucky enough to be born
without a sense of vicious competitiveness, his answer carries a
question in its wake: what is family? Is it merely one man, one
woman, one son and one daughter? Or is it perhaps something larger,
more forgiving, more generous in its parameters?
In
my film, the story is shaped to answer those very questions. The
film begins with a single image of Nicholas? father in the center
of the screen, mirroring his place in his family?s universe. The
next scenes show him proudly raising his two children: coddling
them as infants, lifting them to the sun, pushing them in swings,
posing for their portraits, tucking them into bed. He is everything
to them. And when he dies, the family loses its bearings. They turn
to Ralph for help but when he abuses their trust, Nicholas knows
he must make his own way in the world. My film begins with a narrator
asking us, "What happens if too early we lose a parent, that party
on whom we rely for only everything?" At the end of the film, the
narrator answers his own question. He says we must "build a new
family, person by person."
What
is so beautiful and democratic about Dickens? story is that the
family Nicholas builds is most unorthodox. He does not, as in a
lesser fairy tale, merely fall in with rich people. Except for the
Cheeryble Brothers, the people he comes to cherish most are, by
the terms of that society, largely outcasts: the alcoholic servant
Noggs, the crippled Smike, the destitute Madeline Bray, the coarsely
boisterous John Browdie and, of course, the Crummles, a troupe of
actors. In Victorian society, especially middle-class society, actors
were the very idea of undesirable. But not to Nicholas.
And
not to me. Such is the Crummles? value to the story, so fully do
they embody its charity and kindness, that I broke my pattern of
continuous compression and enlarged their role in the story. In
the film, I have Vincent Crummles narrate Nicholas? story. His warm
theatricality lends the right tone to the struggles of good over
evil, villain over hero; the romance of young lovers; and the sense
we sometimes have, especially when the death of a parent comes,
of being unable to distinguish life from make-believe. To press
the point further, the opening credits are set in a Victorian toy
theater and the pieces which are pushed on and off are painted representations
of the main characters as embodied by the actors who play them.
In
making his film of Mozart?s The Magic Flute, Ingmar Bergman
said, "You can?t imagine what it?s like to have Mozart?s music in
the studio every day." Having spent almost two years adapting, directing,
and editing this genial, singing, sometimes chilling work, with
all its miracles of phrasing and philosophy, I think I can imagine
Bergman?s joyous wonder. If my pleasure was in any measure tinged
with regret by the omissions, compressions and eliminations I had
to make, you may proceed unencumbered by such sadness. For here
in your hands, in the enduring words of Garrison Keillor, is the
"real hot item." Nothing is merged or reduced or removed. Letter,
spirit and all.
Lucky
you.
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