You've Got to Read This (34 page)

and dozens of dogs. But of the 150
human
members of the Great Royal Circus, including almost a dozen dwarfs, everyone was enjoying the epic.

The rest of the week, the videocassette players in the troupe tents treated the acrobats and wild-animal trainers to various wonders and excesses of the Hindi cinema. Nowadays, the Great Royal rarely travels outside the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat; the movies that are hits in Bombay are similarly successful with the circus performers. But that Sunday, after the conclusion of the weekly episode of the
Mahabharata,
I wandered away from the television set and into the family kitchen of the ringmaster's troupe tent. Sumi, the lion tamer's wife, made me a cup of tea. From the VCR, I heard a surprisingly familiar burst of dialogue—in English. I couldn't see the TV screen, but I knew that the speaker was none other than that most literary of ghosts, Jacob Marley—the dead business partner of the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge. It was that part when Marley's Ghost is rejecting Scrooge's compliment: "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob." Marley's Ghost cries out, "Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" It's a stirring speech, followed by the rattling of the ghost's chains.

I repaired to the television set in the Singh family's troupe tent to watch the video of
A Christmas Carol;
it was the Alastair Sim version. There—in Junagadh, at an Indian circus—the child acrobats were seated on the rugs that covered the tent's dirt floor; they were illiterate Hindu children but they were riveted to the story, which was as fascinating to them as it remains to
INTRODUCTION BY JOHN IRVING " 189

our children. If the principal point of
A Christmas Carol
is that Scrooge reforms—that he learns "how to keep Christmas well"—these child acrobats had never kept Christmas at all; moreover, they would never keep it. Also, they spoke and understood little English, yet they knew and loved the tale.

One of them—a twelve-year-old contortionist, a girl named Laxmi who was also skilled as a tightrope walker—saw me looking at the TV. Since I was the foreigner among them, I suppose Laxmi thought I needed to be told something about
A Christmas Carol;
she mistook my astonishment at what I was seeing and where I was seeing it, and assumed I was ignorant of the characters and the narrative.

"Scrooge," she said, identifying old Ebenezer for me. "A ghost," Laxmi said, indicating the shade of the late Jacob Marley. "More coming," she added.

"A Christmas Carol,"
I replied; this didn't impress Laxmi; I don't know if she knew the title.

It was then that the ringmaster and lion tamer, who was also the chief trainer of the child performers, spoke to me. Pratap Singh was not a man who kept Christmas either. "The children's favorite ghost story," Pratap explained. I remember thinking that Charles Dickens would have been pleased.

A Christmas Carol
was originally subtitled "Ghost Story of Christmas"; the accent on the ghostly (
not
the Christmas-y) elements of the tale was further emphasized in Dickens's Preface to the 1843 edition. "I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me."

If that doesn't alert his readers sufficiently, Dickens titles the first stave of his carol "Marley's Ghost,"
and
the author states no less than four times in the first four paragraphs that Marley is dead. "Marley was dead: to begin with"—the first sentence of the first paragraph. "Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail"—the last sentence of the first paragraph. "You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail"—the last sentence of the second paragraph. And, finally: "There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate"—the second and third sentences of the fourth paragraph. I think we get the idea. An editor of today's less-is-more school of fiction would doubtless have found this repetitious, but Dickens never suffered a minimalist's sensibilities; in Dickens's prose, the refrain is as common as the semicolon.

From the beginning, Scrooge's cantankerous character is unsparing with his cynicism; his miserliness—more so, his utter shunning of humanity—

makes him seem a fair match for any ghost. "The cold within him froze his old features," as Dickens describes him. "He carried his own low tempera-190 • A CHRISTMAS CAROL

ture always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas." Beggars don't dare to approach him. "Even the blindmen's dogs" give Scrooge a wide berth. "It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance"—Ebenezer Scrooge is the original Bah-Humbug man. "If I could work my will," Scrooge declares, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas,' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart."

Scrooge is such a pillar of skepticism, he at first resists believing in Marley's Ghost. "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!" Yet Scrooge is converted; beyond the seasonal lessons of Christian charity,
A Christmas Carol
teaches us that a man—even a man as hard as Ebenezer Scrooge—can change. What is heartening about the change in Scrooge is that he learns to love his fel-lowman; in the politically correct language of our insipid times, Scrooge learns to be
more caring.
But, typical of Dickens, Scrooge has undergone a deeper transformation; that he is persuaded to believe in ghosts, for example, means that Scrooge has been miraculously returned to his childhood—

and to a child's powers of imagination and make-believe.

Dickens's celebration of ghosts, and of Christmas, is but a small part of the author's abiding faith in the innocence and magic of children; Dickens believed that his own imagination—in fact, his overall well-being—

depended on the contact he kept with his childhood. Furthermore, his popularity with his fellow Victorians, which is reflected by the ongoing interest of young readers today, is rooted in Dickens's remarkable ability for rendering
realistically
what many adults condescendingly call "fantasy."

Additionally, it was Dickens's "fullness of heart" that caused Thackeray to praise
A Christmas Carol
to the skies. "Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this?" Thackeray wrote. "It seems to be a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness."

Even the dour Thomas Carlyle was so moved by
A Christmas Carol
that he was (in the words of his wife) "seized with a perfect
convulsion
of hospitality"; apparently, this was quite contrary to the Scots philosopher's nature.

George Hogarth, Dickens's future father-in-law, had reviewed the young author (when Charles was only twenty-four): "A close observer of character and manners, with a strong sense of the ridiculous and a graphic faculty of placing in the most whimsical and amusing lights the follies and absurdities of human nature. He has the power, too, of producing tears as well as laughter. His pictures of the vices and wretchedness which abound in this vast city are sufficient to strike the heart of the most careless and insensitive reader." Or, as Chesterton once wrote of Dickens, "The man led a mob." Part of the reason is that relationship which Dickens forces his readers to maintain with children.

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN IRVING - 191

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 insensitivity 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 verba-tim: "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 which commemorate (and ruin)
A Christ-1 92 " A CHRISTMAS CAROL

mas Carol
every season. We should spare ourselves these sentimentalized 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.

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. "And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!"

A C h r i s t m a s Carol

C h a r l e s D i c k e n s

Stave One

MARLEY'S GHOST

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years.

Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son's weak mind.