As for the ghosts -- "You will be haunted by Three Spirits," Marley's Ghost warns Scrooge -- they have become emblematic of our Christmases, too. The first of these phantoms is the easiest to bear. "It was a strange figure -- like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions."
Shortly thereafter, the spirit introduces himself: "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."
"Long past?" Scrooge asks.
"No. Your past," the ghost answers -- a chilling reply.
It is from the Ghost of Christmas Present that Scrooge is confronted by his own words; his own in-sensitivity is thrown back at him and leaves him "overcome with penitence and grief." This happens because Scrooge asks the spirit if Tiny Tim will live. "I see a vacant seat in the poor chimney-corner," replies the ghost, in a ghostly fashion, "and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved." When Scrooge protests, the spirit quotes Scrooge verbatim: "If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
As for the last visitor, that silent but most terrifying phantom, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears before Scrooge "draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him." This ghost is taking no prisoners; this spirit shows Scrooge his own corpse. "He lay in the dark empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think."
This is a Christmas story, yes; yet it is first and foremost a cautionary tale. We are that corpse whose face is covered with a veil; we dare not take the veil away, for fear we shall see ourselves lying there. ("Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion!") This is a Christmas story, yes; as such, it has a happy ending. But, as Marley's Ghost tells Scrooge, the tale is truly a warning. We had best improve our capacity for human sympathy -- or else! We must love one another or die unloved.
Most of us have seen so many renditions of A Christmas Carol that we imagine we know the story, but how long has it been since we've actually read it? Each Christmas we are assaulted with a new Carol; indeed, we're fortunate if all we see is the delightful Alastair Sim. One year, we suffer through some treacle in a Western setting: Scrooge is a grizzled cattle baron, tediously unkind to his cows. Another year, poor Tiny Tim hobbles about in the Bronx or in Brooklyn: old Ebenezer is an unrepentant slum landlord. In a few years, I'll be old enough to play the role of Scrooge in one of those countless amateur theatrical events that commemorate (and ruin) A Christmas Carol every season. We should spare ourselves these syrupy enactments and reread the original -- or read it for the first time, as the case may be.
It may surprise us to learn that there is not one scene of Scrooge interacting with Tiny Tim, although that is a cherished moment in many made-for-television versions; it is also surprising that, in the epilogue, Dickens anticipates his own detractors. Of Scrooge, the author writes: "Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
"He had no further intercourse with Spirits," the author adds in the final paragraph.
Ironically, the success of A Christmas Carol prompted greed of such a shameless nature that only Ebenezer Scrooge {before his conversion) could have been pleased. It was not the first time that Dickens was plagiarized. Previously there had been published The Posthumous Notes of the Pickwickian Club, and Nichelas Nickleberry -- and even Oliver Twiss. But the imitations of A Christmas Carol were more offensive, more bold; in a weekly called Parley's Illuminated Library there appeared a plagiarism of A Christmas Carol -- together with the outrageous claim that it was "reoriginated from the original by Charles Dickens." Dickens attempted to stop publication, but the pirate publishers argued that when they had "reoriginated" The Old Curiosity Shop and Bar-naby Rudge, Dickens hadn't objected. Furthermore, the pirates argued, they had actually "improved" A Christmas Carol; among their additions to the original was a song for Tiny Tim!
The legal efforts that Dickens made were not rewarded; in fact, his court costs of 700 pounds were a bitter blow to him. In A Christmas Carol, he had written of greed and redemption, but the law had treated him as if he "were the robber instead of the robbed." Only his readers would treat him faithfully.
To his readers, Charles Dickens called himself "Their faithful Friend and Servant." In his Preface to the 1843 edition of A Christmas Carol, Dickens bestowed a generous benediction; he confessed his hopes for his "Ghostly little book" and for his readers -- "May it haunt their houses pleasantly." In truth, even in the troupe tent of an Indian circus -- not to mention here and now, 150 years after the Carol was written -- Dickens's "Ghost Story of Christmas" continues to haunt us pleasantly.
The most famous child cripple in fiction is still wringing hearts. "His active little crutch was heard upon the floor," Dickens writes. Indeed, we can hear Tiny Tim's crutch tapping today.
An Introduction to A Christmas Carol (1993)
AUTHOR'S NOTES
A few fragments of this Introduction to A Christmas Carol first appeared in the same essay ("In Defense of Sentimentality") that The New York Times Book Review published on November 25, 1979, but that essay is more clearly identifiable as the origin of my Introduction to Great Expectations than it is recognizable as the origin of this Introduction. It is mystifying to me, however, to see how many readers reserve Dickens-- and hopefulness in general -- for Christmas. Indeed, what we applaud in Dickens -- his kindness, his generosity, his belief in our dignity -- is also what we condemn him for (under another name) in the off-Christmas season. (The other name is sentimentality.) The same Dickens of A Christmas Carol can be found in Dickens's other work; yet today A Christmas Carol is loved around the world -- while much of Dickens's "other work" is not nearly as widely read.
My Introduction to the Carol, not quite in its present form, was published on December 24, 1993, in The Globe and Mail, under the title "Their Faithful Friend and Servant"; it was also published, in the form you find it here, as "An Introduction to A Christmas Carol" in a Modern Library edition (1995).
More than a century and a half ago, Charles Dickens gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol; it was just two days after Christmas -- 2,000 people gave the author their rapt attention, and frequent applause. The reading took three hours, though in later years Dickens would prune A Christmas Carol to a two-hour performance; he liked it well enough that first time, however, to repeat the same reading three days later -- this time to an audience of 2,500, almost exclusively composed of working people, for whom he requested that the auditorium be reserved. He always thought they were his best audience.
"They lost nothing, misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried," Dickens said, "and [they] animated me to that extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together." He makes me wish I could have been there.
It was at the author's insistence that the price of A Christmas Carol was kept as low as five shillings -- so that it might reach a wider audience. Dickens needn't have worried.
GUNTER GRASS: KING OF THE TOY MERCHANTS
There is still a youthful restlessness to the work of Gunter Grass -- an impatience, a total absence of complacency, a shock of unexpected energy that must be gratifying to those German writers who, in 1958, awarded Grass the prize of the Group 47 for his first novel, The Tin Drum. In the more than 20 years since its publication, Die Blechtrommel, as it is called in German, has not been surpassed; it is the greatest novel by a living author. More than 14 books later, Grass himself has not surpassed The Tin Drum, but -- more importantly -- he hasn't limited himself by trying. He has allowed himself the imaginative range of an international wanderer, while at the same time, at 54, he has remained as recognizably German as he was at 31 -- he was only 31 when he wrote The Tin Drum.
One reason Grass remains forever young is that he exercises no discernible restraint on the mischief of his imagination or on the practical, down-to-earth morality of his politics. Gunter Grass is a writer whose political activism has included writing almost a hundred election speeches for Willy Brandt (in 1969), and 'whose recent fictional undertakings have included a dense, short, but crammed-full historical novel -- The Meeting at Telgte -- set at the end of the Thirty Years' War (1647), and a huge, discursive novel--The Flounder--that begins in the Stone Age and arrives in the present at a most contemporary "Women's Tribunal," where a talking fish is on trial for male chauvinism.
Fortunately for the pleasure of his readers, Grass has not acquired a single gesture of literary detachment or intellectual pompousness. He remains engaged -- at once dead serious and a tireless prankster. He is our literature's most genuine eccentric. Writers as unique as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and as derivative as Jerzy Kosinski are under the shadow of what Grass does better than anyone else: against the authoritative landscape of history, he creates characters so wholly larger than life, yet vivid, that they confront the authority of history with a larger authority -- Grass's relentless imagi
nation. He does not distort history; he outimagines it.
Perhaps, one day, he'll slow down and write an introduction to his work -- either to something new (if he feels old enough), or (if he feels patient enough to offer us some hindsight) to something old: possibly to a new edition of The Tin Drum, or to one of the less popular, more difficult works, Local Anaesthetic, From the Diary of a Snail, or Dog Years. (The last is an expansive Odyssey of a novel set in wartime and postwar Germany; it suffered popularly -- and wrongly -- by being ill-compared to The Tin Drum.) But until such a time, when Grass is willing to check his astonishing forward progress with the necessary calm required of reflection, we have no better general introduction to the methods of his genius than Headbirths.
Written in late 1979, shortly after Grass returned from China (from a trip with the film director of The Tin Drum, Volker Schlondorff), Headbirths is first a political speculation -- set just before the 1980 German elections, when Helmut Schmidt of the Social Democrats (Grass's party) defeated the Christian Democrat and Bavarian Prime Minister, Franz Josef Strauss. It is also the creative musings for a film Grass never made (with Schlondorff) about a fictional German couple who travel to Asia to investigate how that part of the world is living, carrying with them the loaded political and personal problem of world population growth and their own ambivalent feelings about having a child. The premise of this slim, innocent-appearing book is what Grass calls a "speculative reversal."
"What if," he writes, "from this day on, the world had to face up to the existence of 950 million Germans, whereas the Chinese nation numbered barely 80 million, that is, the present population of the two Germanys."
As Grass mischievously asks, "Could the world bear it?"