Time Traveling With
R.E. Prindle
Part I: G.W.M Reynolds and Charles Dickens
The study of social
progress is today no less needed in literature than is the analysis of the
human heart. We live in an age of
universal investigation and exploration of the sources of all movements. France, for example loves at the same time
history and drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and
the other the individual lot of man.
These embrace the whole of life.
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only,
to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
Alfred de Vigny, Cinq
Mars, 1826
I have
reached the time in life when it’s time to travel back through the years to
review my life. While my corporeal years
are few compared to eternity my mental psychological and historical life goes
back thousands of years but more specifically the last three or four
hundred. I am no St. Germain, I don’t
claim to have actually experienced those earlier centuries but I have made an
attempt to recreate them in my mind.
Looking back I find that mankind has made no emotional progress. As my ancestors were so am I, so are we
all. If one can’t empathize and
sympathize with them one is being snobbish.
I don’t mean
to bore you with a mere lineal presentation to the evolution of the human,
specifically the European mind, over three centuries. I intend to roam back and forth linking and
combining.
In today’s
mental climate some may be furious that I would specify the European mind but
it is the mind in which my own mind has developed. I have little empathy for the Asian mind, for
instance, except as represented by the European experience of it. Nor am I particularly interested in learning
another racial mindset when there is so much to be learned of my own.
As a base of
reference I have chosen the 1840s and 1850s, a time of great discoveries just
before the Darwinian and psychological explosions that were a quantum leap from
the past to the present. A leap which in
my own time we are in the midst of experiencing. The future will bear little resemblance to
the past. Western Civilization is on
the brink of extinction and has no desire to live. The Asian mindset seems poised to be its
replacement. Both the US and Europe are
on the brink of disintegration. Asian
hordes are at the door and breaking it down.
Kaiser Wilhelm was right about the Yellow Peril. Thus, it seems that I’m taking a sentimental
journey.
The journey
will be a literary one for the 1840s and 50s were years of great writers and
even greater literary masterpieces.
The decades
before the before the 60s and the annunciation of Darwin played John the
Baptist to Christ. My life has been
lived mostly in the literature of that period.
The great predecessor to the period was the beautiful time called the
Romantic era. The French and Industrial
Revolutions had put a period to what had gone before. Man hadn’t changed but the circumstances of
life had. Steam power had entered the
picture and with it the coming of the railroads and iron ships, those great
dividers between the medieval past and the present. Electricity, the telegraph and photography
made their appearance. Between the
moveable type developed in the fifteenth century and photographic pictures the
past could be captured as it was forever.
The movies of the twentieth century, even more effective, were an
improvement in film technology.
Science
destroyed the belief in supernatural beings, the fairies, the elves, the
elementals and, yes, even the gods. To
destroy the foundations of their belief was easy but to destroy the need for
them has proven difficult. Hence the
Romantic era when the mind groped to reconcile fancy with science and created
beautiful literary effects. It was then
that genre literature began to appear alongside so-called literary novels. Genres were considered inferior to literary
novels and still are although why isn’t clear.
What is clear is the genre novels rule modern literature.
Perhaps
literary novels disguise reality under the appearance of things creating an
artificial world that doesn’t exist except in the minds of the believers and
they don’t want their illusions disturbed.
Hence, the popularity of Charles Dickens for nearly two hundred
years. Dickens is no Shakespeare but
perhaps even better read. Dickens can
make grim facts seem palatable, perhaps because of Dickens authorial and censorial
distance from the facts diminishes the reality and more genteel and respectable minds can handle the
unpleasantness, which is quite grim, because it is happening to different
people under different conditions that bear no relationship to their own lives
except to be pitied. Dickens
specifically writes for the self-satisfied and well to do. Dickens pretties his characters up.
But for
every Dickens who has survived the ravages of time there are many, many more
who have sunk beneath the waves remembered only by those who think of a
vanished Atlantis. Amazingly one of
these writers who crashed beneath the waves during WWI, an English contemporary
of Dickens, who was as or more popular than he at the time was forgotten after
WWI. I don’t know large the market for
Reynolds was on the eve of the Great Destruction but I have a copy of The Rye
House Plot bound with Omar. It was advertised as rare but it should have been
unique. One Norman Hartley Rickard went
out and bought the parts for The Rye House Part one and two on 5/13/14 and the
two parts for Omar on 6/16/14 then went to the trouble of having them bound
together receiving the bound volume back on 7/22/14. He thought that much of Reynolds on the eve
of the war. The novels themselves were
printed sometime after 1880 by John Dicks as they advertise General Wallace’s
Ben Hur. Both books are more obscure
Reynold’s titles so that if they were available at the late date of 1914 indicates
fair interest in Reynolds. And then the
war came.
During a
time of prolific writers Reynolds was extraordinary. He not only wrote at least 43 novels, the
novels themselves were of extraordinary length.
Of his two masterpieces the first, Mysteries of London runs to 2500
pages of smaller type in the current Valancourt Press edition. His master work, Mysteries of the Court of
London is ten volumes running to 5000 pages.
He has numerous works running to 1500-2000 pages. These were not merely rambling stories but
tight and compact, serious sociological and psychological studies with strong historical
connections.
While
Dickens and Reynolds represent the English contribution to the period,
Reynolds, while being English, was also a Francophile. His writing style is a combination of the
English and French psychologies. His is such
an interesting case that I might as well devote a little space to it indeed these
rambles will center on his career.
Reynolds was
born in 1814, being two years younger than Dickens. He came from Kent in the South East of
England. Much of the scenery takes place
there, especially around Canterbury, in his earlier novels. His home town was called Eastry. His father was a naval officer who died in
1822 when Reynolds was eight; at fourteen he was placed in the Sandhurst
Military College by his mother apparently to follow in the footsteps of his
father. His mother died in early 1830
leaving Reynolds a complete orphan at the age of fifteen. How this affected his
situation is not clear but he either chose to leave Sandhurst or was encouraged
to seek a career elsewhere sometime in late July as he turned sixteen. His formal schooling ended there. He was one hellacious reader though.
Some say he
inherited twelve thousand pounds, some dispute this, but, at sixteen he must
have had had enough money to encourage him to emigrate to a new country with a
tender age and no skills. He seems to
have existed reasonably well. His
inquisitive nature led to him to examine all levels of society. His Pickwick Abroad demonstrates this.
There were
large numbers of English people who either moved to France, spent long absences
there of fled England for legal reasons. It is this society he depicts there in
Pickwick Abroad. There are opinions that
he was not a stranger to illegal activities there. Pickwick himself, in the novel, dwelt at the
Meurice Hotel. The Meurice was begun by
a Frenchman who realized that with the number of English in France they needed
a home away from home. He therefore
created the Meurice to cater strictly to English tastes. Reynolds seems to have been familiar with
both residential customs there and the riff raff who lived off the legitimate
residents. One wonders what his exact
situation was,did he live or perhaps prey on those who did. He was obviously very intelligent and
studious. He must have had abilities
because he was able to earn money as a journalist becoming familiar with
newspaper practices. On his return to
England at merely twenty-three years of age he was entrusted to edit the
Monthly Review which he revived and set back on its feet.
There is a
question of how long he was in France.
The general opinion is from 1830 to 1837. Dick Collins in his introduction to Reynolds’
The Necromancer as published by Vallancourt thinks he arrived there in 1835. That doesn’t seem quite right as Reynolds’
experiences would likely take more time to acquire. Reynolds himself says he lived in France for
ten years. To justify that he must mean
that he arrived in 1830, left physically in 1837 and lived on mentally for
another three years while physically being in England. The extra three years would coincide with his
writing which is French oriented through is Master Timothy’s Bookcase. This book would be his mental transitioning
from France back to England making up the ten years.
At any rate
his knowledge of France and French literature would indicate a seven year
residence. He returned to England just
as Dickens’ Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was being published in
parts- that is in installments published monthly or weekly. Reynolds had had an active journalistic and
literary career in France publishing his first book there in 1935 at the age of
21 and editing an English oriented magazine.
Rather
startlingly, even as Dickens’ Pickwick Papers was still in progress Reynolds
began a continuation of the novel called Pickwick Abroad that took place,
naturally, in France. As might be
expected this plagiarism caused an uproar that would mar his career. Nothing daunted by the uproar Reynolds next
appropriated the idea of Dickens’ Master Humphrey’s Clock with his own title
Master Timothy’s Bookcase. Both
plagiarisms were notably better than Dickens’ originals. The Bookcase took place in France and then in
a weak conclusion, one supposes, mirroring reality, shifted to England to end
with another Pickwick story, The
Marriage Of Mr. Pickwick, and several representations of Mortimer’s, the
narrator, life in England. As Bookcase
appeared at the end of the ten years this might be what Reynolds termed his ten
years stay in France.
Then comes a
two year hiatus in which Reynolds wrote nothing. Reynolds was well read. He frequently references his reading
including Homer’s Iliad, probably Mallory’s King Arthur, Walter Scott much of
the Gothic period and the Romantic Era, most especially Byron. Byron’s poems the Corsair and Giaour made a
great impression on him and indeed the next couple generations. He was well versed in French literature. Dick Collins in his introduction makes a very
telling point for Frederic Soulie (accent aigu over the e) being a direct influence
on Reynolds in his introduction to The Necromancer. Reynolds put together a two volume survey of
the literature of France published in 1938 composed mainly of extracts with
introductions to the authors. I
reproduce the intro for Soulie here in full from Collins which fairly
accurately portrays Reynolds approach to writing:
Quote:
Frederic Soulie
Turn we now
to that young and successful writer, who descends into the vault of the dead
and snatches the cold corse from the tomb, to introduce it into his tale, who
calls in the assistance of plague and fire to add fresh horrors to his
romances; and who delights more in the violated sanctuary of Death than in the
splendor and gaiety of the drawing-room.
Turn we to him who has revived the midnight terrors, the phantoms, the
robbers, the murderers, the executioners, and the violaters of virgin
innocence, that were wont to dwell in the legends of the olden times, or in the
folios of a German library; whose patrons were Maturin, Lewis and Radcliffe;
and whose readers were timid school-girls and affrighted nursery maids. Turn we to him who has regenerated that
school of horror which had nearly exploded within the dozen years;--yes, let us
turn to him whose favourite subjects are those which we have dreaded to think
of at night in the days of our childhood.
The writer
of an ordinary novel may possess a weak, pusillanimous and feeble mind, yet
produce an amusing tale. His book may be
called a good one; and he himself may pass as a man of talent and
capacity. But the author of a
romance…must own a powerful mind a vivid imagination and a fertile brain; or
else his lucubrations will be vain and futile.
His murders
must not be told with the coolness of a newspaper report: they must seem as if
they were written in letters of blood themselves. The very page, which narrates their tale,
must be surveyed with awe and a species of pleasing and fascinating
abhorrence—if the reader can comprehend the antithesis—which create much more
than a common interest in the mind. The
romance writer must indulge in nothing puerile; no tame or vapid description
will be pardoned in him: his work must be all fire, all vigour, all energy and
capable of producing a species of electric interest throughout.
Such is the
system of M. Frederic Soulie exemplified in his Deux Cadavres. This awe-inspiring romance, which seems as if
it had been written in a charnel-house, by the light of those flickering
candles that in Catholic countries surround the corpse, and by an iron pen
dipped in human gore, in the most extraordinary
creation of the brain that ever was yet, in the guise of a historical
tale, presented to the world. Let the
superstitious and the timid beware of it: they would not forget its terrible
incidents for many a long night, after they had once perused it. It is a romance which haunts its reader as a
man is haunted by a phantom of the victim whom he has slain: it is a book so
full of horrors—and all those horrors so natural and so probable—not once exaggerated
by the assistance of powers from beyond the tomb—that he, who reads it, lays it
aside with the impression that such things might have been, and interrogates
himself whether he be just awakened from a nightmare dream, or whether he have
witnessed a series of terrible realities.
The scene is
laid in England; and the epoch of the tale is the Protectorate of Oliver
Cromwell. The work commences with the
execution of Charles the First, which is described with painful accuracy. This is the first horror. Then comes the desecration of a grave in
Westminster Abbey—the parade of a corpse through the streets of London—the
hideous ceremony of presenting a jug of beer to the motionless lips of the dead
thing, as the procession moves up the Poultry—the visit of two adventurous men
to the Chapel in Windsor Castle at midnight—the exhuming of a coffin—the
circumstance of one of those men putting his hand to the dead body which that
coffin contained and finding by the disserved head that it was the corse of the
late King—the journey through dark and dismal roads with that coffin upon a
sledge drawn by dogs—rape of a beautiful girl by her lover in an hour of
madness—the progress of the plague—murders, duels, riots and deaths—and then
the horrid agonies endured by that young girl, who lingered through all the
stages of starvation, tied to a tree, till she was wasted away, expired, and
found a fleshless skeleton some time afterwards? This is the brief analysis of Les Deux
Cadavres: this is the frame-work of the book upon which was built the
reputation of M. Frederic Soulie.
Unquote.
This pretty
well expresses the style Reynolds adopted combined with his reading of the
Marquis de Sade. Reynolds used the
episode of the woman tied to tree in Robert Macaire. Unfortunately Frederic Soulie has no
translations into English so we can’t enjoy his spectacular style directly.
It appears
that this part of quote is an analysis of Dickens:
Quote:
The writer
of an ordinary novel may possess a weak,
pusillanimous and feeble mind, and yet produce an amusing tale. His book may be called and good one; and he
may pass for a man of talent and capacity but an author of a romance…must own a
powerful mind, a vivid imagination and a fertile brain; else his lucubrations
will be vain and futile....
Unquote.
That sums up
Dickens as accurately as possible. If
Dickens read this then one can imagine that he would be incensed and develop a
deep seated aversion to Reynolds. Indeed,
he would many years later say that Reynolds was a despicable person. The quote also expresses a certain amount of
envy in his dismissal of Dickens from whom he had just appropriated the format
of Pickwick Papers for his own Pickwick Abroad.
At the same time the quote illustrates the difference between Dickens
and himself.
Reynolds was
apparently a theater goer in Paris becoming familiar with the plays of Victor
Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, both of whom would be major influences of the period
1840-60 and beyond. Dumas, of course,
exists today through his incredible novels, The Three Musketeers and The Count
of Monte Cristo. Hugo lives on through
his work Les Miserables, recently a very successful stage musical in the US as
a revolutionary play. Also making a most
profound effect on Reynolds was another extremely prolific author, the great
Eugene Sue. In 1843, two years before
Soulie died, the parts for Sue’s Mysteries of Paris began appearing and that would
galvanize Reynolds back into activity.
He immediately began his own
first masterpiece, The Mysteries of London.
A French writer by the name of Paul Favel also wrote a work titled Les
Mysteres De Londres at the time also inspired by Sue. Favel was an excellent crime writer detailing
the activities of organized crime through his Blackcoats series. Written sometime after Reynold’s Robert
Macaire or the French Bandit in England that mentions Macaire as the leader of
a nationwide loose organization of criminal revolutionaries. It begins the
story of the great worldwide criminal organizations of today as well as the US’
Statewide and national criminal organizations.
The Revolution released them, and Democracy allowed them to prosper.
Reynolds
while bursting with ideas seemed unable to express them without a format
provided by someone else, hence his use of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and Master
Timothy’s Bookcase as wells as Sue’s Mysteries of Paris—he had to have a format
to follow. When Sue’s Mysteries of Paris
appeared the plan for Mysteries of London appeared. The basic premise had evolved in Reynolds’
mind, that of two brothers connected to two trees who go separate ways, one of
crime and one of rectitude, who then reunite to compare the results of their
systems.
This notion
may have evolved from Reynolds’ reading of Justine and Juliette by the Marquis
de Sade. In de Sade Justine who follows
a life of rectitude ends up trashed and her sister Juliette who followed a life
license ends up rich and happy. Reynolds
reverses the results, complaining that such may be case in individual
situations but certainly not systemic.
That is not
to say his novels are slavish copies of other men’s work. Oh no, they are amplifications and extensions,
completely original alternate versions.
Sue, himself had just entered his masterpiece period with The Mysteries
of Paris and its successor, the marvelous Wandering Jew. For my tastes The Wandering Jew far surpassed
the great Mysteries of Paris and that is saying something in a long way. All these works are massive while the
successor to Reynolds’ Mysteries of London, The Mysteries of the Court of
London is twice as long as any other novel of the period while its intensity
lifts one into the stratosphere. By the
time of Mysteries of London Dickens was pursuing Reynolds in an effort to keep
up. Reynolds by that time was more
successful than Dickens so the latter had even more reason to be bitter.
The novel
took four years of serialization to be completed and in that time both
Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew by Sue had appeared. The Wandering Jew in 1845, the year Soulie
died, so both novels would have had an influence of Reynolds’ novel. For myself, as great as Mysteries of Paris
is, I prefer The Wandering Jew. Its
style may be offensive and off putting to today’s readers but the book has
nothing to do with Jews; it is rather an anti-Jesuit story with the greatest
villain ever, the Jesuit priest Rodin and his Invisible Hand.
The story
involves a fabulous inheritance due to a number of inheritors including two
children from Germany. In order to claim
the inheritance they must be in Paris for the reading of the will on a certain
date. If they fail to appear the
fabulous fortune will fall to the Jesuits. It is Rodin’s task then to prevent
the inheritors from reaching Paris.
Simply killing them would arouse suspicions hence he has to engineer
delays and obstacles hence the Invisible Hand.
While without being apparent Rodin’s schemes are always at work.
Here we are
introduced to the concept of rather than outright assassination it is better to
exploit the weaknesses of the individuals so that they destroy themselves. Hence for one claimant Rodin easily leads him
into a life of dissipation in which the man essentially drinks himself to
death.
The closer
the children get to Paris the more intensely the climax resolves into a final
Armageddon in which all of the participants including Rodin and his Invisible
hand are killed. The only claimant left
standing is a good priest and he of course is a very charitable guy with no
other use for the money. With such a
model before him Reynolds digs deep keeping his own story racing along but to a
relatively weak ending, a slight disappointment very poorly handled. He does much better in Court of London which
ends in a real Armageddon.
Even as
Mysteries Of London was drawing to a close Reynolds began the eight years of
weekly installments of The Mysteries of the Court of London. The latter was a grandiose and magnificent
structure. At the time England was only
short of a fifty percent literacy rate.
So a pretty good living could be made by organizing a group to read
these stories to. Thus a man could
gather a reading group of perhaps thirty people to whom he read the weekly
installment. A really primitive radio
setup, eh? I suppose one could organize
two or three groups and live rather comfortably. I am not aware of what the readers charged
but the penny was divided into half-pennies and even farthings or quarter
pennies. For eight years people set
aside an hour or two to be read to. This
is not unlike todays filmed episodes that go on for years like the Game of
Thrones. This is quite marvelous. Reynolds would have been the talk of the town
for eight years, actually, combined with The Mysteries of London, twelve years. That’s something of an achievement.
His writing
style then was conceived as to sound like he was talking directly to these
hearers while always being so intense that their attention did not waver, and
he succeeded. One can’t be sure but
perhaps the memory of this success drove Dickens wild so that he himself
devoted the last years of his life reading from his novels, especially Oliver
Twist, to audiences.
Now,
Reynolds had a particularly capacious and powerful mind. While he was writing Court of London over
eight years he also wrote eighteen additional novels nearly all of which were
600 to 1500 pages. The ability to keep
weekly installments in mind and while either consciously or sub-consciously
planning several others is beyond phenomenal.
While these were coterminous the variety
of incident had to be kept fresh throughout the corpus or all would
fail. Reynolds was capable of doing that
while pacing his novels with fast flowing action. At the same time he is keeping up with social
and scientific developments and raising a numerous family. His psychology is usually thoughtful and spot
on. He refers, for instance, to Anton
Mesmer and his Animal Magnetism that moved toward perfection as hypnotism.
While revealing the unconscious, the realization of which would dominate psychology
through the system of Sigmund Freud about far off 1920. The unconscious still remains misunderstood.
He makes
reference to Franz Joseph Gall’s much misunderstood theory of phrenology, the
forerunner of the discovery of the function of brain localities.
His corpus
is perhaps too large to be read in full except by the most dedicated scholar,
and I mean that in the singular, who would receive no reward for his
efforts. The additional reading
necessary to understand the full import and value of Reynolds is even more
daunting.
The
discovery of influences, for instance, and familiarizing oneself with them is a
monumental task. Reynolds was born under
Romaticism and began his career on the cusp of the Positive period of August
Comte and Herbert Spencer.
Indeed
Romanticism has never left us. A
Romantic revival occurred post-Positivism and the then emerging scientific revelations. Literary styles were changing or
evolving through the decades and the
epigone of the 1840s and 50s were shadows of their forerunners while still
better than the pulp writers they engendered.
One of the finest of these was the Anglo-French writer George du Maurier
who wrote three classics, almost a trilogy: Peter Ibbetson, Trilby (Svengali)
and the Martian. While not as towering
as The Mysteries of the Court of London, The Count of Monte Cristo, The
Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew they are astonishing works of art.
One of the
great journalistic successes of all time, Punch or The London Charivari, the
famous humor magazine, was founded in 1842.
The magazine remained until the 60s of the twentieth century. During mid-nineteenth century Du Maurier was
a regular contributor with both drawings and texts. He probably would have continued with the
magazine until his death had not he been rejected for the editorship when it
became available. Fortunate for us, for
then he turned to writing his novels which were fabulous successes being
reprinted until recent times. Like
Reynolds his mind was divided between his French and English heritages. Born in France, he was removed to
England in his teen years. This was a traumatic experience for him as
the cultures of the French and English were so different. Reynolds had the advantage of developing an
affection for French culture before he removed from England and although an
orphan of only sixteen years he appears to have thought he was moving to a
wonderland and was never disappointed.
He had the misfortune to have expended his resources, bankrupting
himself, thus expediting his return to England.
Du Maurier’s
first novel, Peter Ibbetson, would detail his conflict with the English
mentality in a beautiful story. As part
of the Romantic revival Du Maurier combines the fairy world with proto-science
fiction and fantasy. His French childhood
in the novel is involved with fairies and his little girl friend Seraskier who
reappears in England as the adult Duchess of Towers. Not only that his next novel Trilby is built
on a character and situation created by the French Romanticist, Charles
Nodier. In his novel also named Trilby,
Trilby was a male Scottish fairy. Du
Maurier transposes sexes and makes Trilby a woman in his title of the same
name.
In Peter
Ibbetson, Peter is in the care of his uncle who, upon defaming Peter’s mother,
is murdered by him, justifiable homicide by another name; nevertheless he is
convicted and sentenced to death but spared hanging through the intercession of
the fairy Duchess of Towers.
Languishing
in prison he goes bonkers and is transferred to an insane asylum. There he finds that while sleeping he can
unlock a door and enter the dreams of the Duchess of Towers. A beautiful hundred pages follows.
Trilby, his
second novel, is in one respect a very long fairy tale masquerading as real
life. The novel records a fantasy of Du
Maurier’s experiences as an aspiring artist in Bohemian Paris. A real font of pleasant memories for
George. He remained a Bohemian all his
life and made the most of enjoying that life.
Trilby was a runaway smash hit equaling in impact Dickens Pickwick
Papers.
There is a
marked difference between the romanticism of Du Maurier and his contemporary
William Morris. Morris writes in an Arthurian
mode of pure fantasy while Du Maurier was affected not only by science but the
so-called occult world of the founder of Theosophy, Madame Helena
Blavatsky. Her The Veil of Isis
published in 1873 may very well had had an influence on him. I have as yet no real proof that he read
Blavatsky, other than the dream world of Ibbetson and the Duchess, but
Theosophy is something that Punch would have been ribald about as well as the
Spiritualist Movement.
While
Comte’s Positivism did intervene between Romanticism and the Revival the whole
fabric of the evolving mindset was blown apart by the issuance of Darwin’s
Origin of Species . The Earth trembled
beneath the feet of the Victorians and was further shifted by the rapid
emergence of psychological analysis.
Between Evolution and the developing knowledge of psychology that
solidified with Freud’s pronouncements after the turn of the century. The ancient supernatural and fairy mentality
had to be reconciled with the new scientific mentality; Mankind would not give
up the concepts of the supernatural so easily.
To travel
back in time again to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution: by the time of that revolution the Scientific
Revolution had been under steam for some little time. Thus, the European mind was developing
rapidly. There are some, blind to
reality, who will object to such a fact as racist. Associated with race, it may well be, however
the fact is that science developed as with no other race on earth. This is fact.
So, the European mind was solving nature’s mysteries. As simple as these solutions were they were
mind boggling at the time. The very
notion that air has weight is incredible to the mind. Even today no child believes air can be
weighed until he is so instructed. The
fact that air is made up of many gases and that these gases can be separated
and that one of these, Oxygen, was the substance of life must have been just
too astounding.
By the late
eighteenth century then other mysteries could be explained in other ways than
the supernatural. All those wonderful
fairies, elves and elementals could be demystified and explained
naturally. Thus the Gothic novel came
into existence and the Gothic novelists made it a point to explain supernatural
beliefs as perfectly natural. Thus, the
transition from the Medieval world to the modern or rational world
progressed. Lyell challenged the
supernatural belief that God had created the Earth four or five thousand years
previously. He presented the monstrous
belief that the planet was immeasurably much older and that it developed under
natural processes.
Inevitably
these incipient sciences were primitive and left more unexplained that they
explained. Resistance to all scientific
revelations was strenuous, the European mind having been deeply corrupted by
Biblical superstitions. Slowly the
superstitious was being rejected. The
wonderful and beautiful Romantic period was a confusion of the natural and
supernatural as the supernatural was gradually disproved.
Reynolds,
Dickens, Dumas, Sue and many others were born into the Romantic Age,
experienced and moved out of it as society evolved. Byron was only one important Romanticist but
one who influenced that generation experiencing the revelations of science and
technological inventions, such as applications like railroad and iron steam
ships and the telegraph.
By 1830
science had a firm hold on the imagination and European society was ready to
advance to the Positivism of August Comte who organized the loose sciences into
specific groupings or disciplines. Thus,
writers, who are on the cutting edge of developments, began to amalgamate these
developments. Reynolds wrestles to get
all these literary genres that affected him into a coherent whole; no easy
problem. He and Eugene Sue were prime
examples of making order of European intellectual developments. Reynolds especially was a prominent primitive
sociologist and psychologist. This makes
his work extremely compelling.
The
generation born into the Romantic Age and are bound into the transition from
the Romantic to the Positivist were passing their prime and from the stage by
the 1860s when their influences were being eclipsed by he march of time and a
generation was emerging that handled the same material in a different manner.
In 1859, as
the style of writing was changing, Darwin’s Origin of Species was published and
that put a definite term to the Middle Ages.
It was a new world from the 1860s on.
Evolution was the issue while in France Jean-Martin Charcot was making
great inroads in the study of psychology. The world could never be seen through
the eyes of previous years again. In
literature the giants had left the earth, their epigone would be much smaller.
Moving
across the water to the New World of the nineteen twenties and thirties we have
a strange phenomenon in the career of the short story writer, Damon
Runyon. Something that emerged out of
the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era that
wasn’t so obvious before was the rise of Organized Crime. Dickens touched on it in the career of
Fagin/Sikes in Oliver Twist. Reynolds,
Paul Favel and Sue developed the phenomenon but by the nineteen twenties and
thirties in NYC organized crime was virtually an alternate government. Democracy had no idea how to control it. Frank Costello, a leading Mafioso, wanted to make
organized crime a legitimate form of business.
In his way Damon Runyon aided and abetted Costello.
Runyon,
after a terrible childhood in Colorado was brought East to NYC by W.R. Hearst
as a sportswriter for his papers. Runyon
because of his childhood had an affinity for the outcasts and outlaws. Once in NYC he made Satan’s Square Mile
centered on 42nd and Broadway, known also as the Tenderloin, his
‘home.’ He took up a station at a deli
called Lindy’s that his stories made famous as Mindy’s.
He sat and
observed this immigrant store of criminals during the twenties, committing
their antics to print in his short stories.
Not really a very good writer other than that of this criminal milieu,
he turned rather gruesome situations into charming stories for the
uninstructed; the stories got grimmer as time wore on.
Without his
knowledge of the actuality of his stories, as I say, one is charmed. The stories are written in the illiterate
immigrant jargon of the times, a weak understanding of tenses and so forth that
some, the New York newspaperman, Jimmie Breslin who was there at the time but
wrote in the 60s, think that Runyon invented. I have actually heard people
speak that way so I think it was the lingua franca of Satan’s Square Mile.
At the time
I am writing, the American past of 1900-1950 has completely disappeared. At the time Runyon was writing in NYC,
Jewish, Italian and Irish colonies were well defined and not yet Americanized
except in a very superficial way. After
all, unlimited immigration was only suspended in 1924 so that there were hordes
of unassimilated immigrants clustered in their colonies. Dialects were heard constantly. Dialect humor didn’t disappear until after
the 1950s. My aunt’s had heavy German
accents until they died in the fifties or sixties.
In other
words, there were still large populations that hadn’t learned English at all
and many, many who had a flimsy grasp of it.
At any rate,
Runyon uses this immigrant dialect as the basis of his stories, and it is that that
really gives his stories interest. No
matter, he sat with these criminals ona daily basis and mostly all day at
Lindy’s. Without that there isn’t much
there. However, he sat with these
criminals as a very successful ‘real’ American.
He gradually insinuated himself into the underworld as a sort of
consiglieri. He was an important advisor
within the underworld. He, really became
one of them protected by his association with Hearst.
The stories
are entertaining enough but then Runyon tried to make romantic characters of
these thugs on the stage and in the movies.
The effort revealed the situation as it was without the glamour. In what was supposed to be a comedy Runyon
filmed a movie called A Slight Case Of Murder with Edward G. Robinson playing a
very convincing Mafia Don. It isn’t
charming on film.
Runyon
contracted Cancer in the thirties dying in 1946. His era died with him. Organized Crime had become Murder Inc. and
there was nothing funny about it anymore.
The sort of last gasp for Runyon came in 1955 when a big budget movie in
striking technicolor (the movies lost something when technicolor was
discontinued) called Guys and Dolls was released glorifying the
Underworld. Brando and Sinatra starred. The movie didn’t make it.
It would
take the horror film, Coppola’s Godfather to put a romanticized Mafia over a
decade or so on.
To slide
back a century and a half ago I will now review Reynold’s novel Robert Macaire
or, The French Bandit In England.
To be
continued in Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle, Part II, Robert Macaire.
