And a Merry Christmas to all our readers

Benny Green

I am convinced that the damage which Dickens inflicted on the English psyche at the Battle of Dingley Dell is incalculable. I dare say that if you were mad enough to go out into the streets tomorrow, and stand in the middle of the heart of the centre of our annual orgy of gorging and guzzling and brutal sentimentality with the intention of tracing first causes, it would be at Dingley Dell, buried under the flagstones of Mr Wardle's kitchen, that you would find, among the bleached bones of a billion birds, the springs of the Greeting Card extortion racket, the Carol Singing conspiracy, the hired Santa Outfit business, and all the rest of the pagan industries built on the foundations of a religious festival. Once Dickens was enthroned—and rightly so—as the undisputed king of the literary world, and once he sensed the possibilities of scenes like those which take place at the Wardle farm, he institutionalised, not just Christmas, and not just himself, but the two together, in a series of seasonal tales of which A Christmas Carol, the most renowned, is only one among several.

It would be easy to say that Dickens did it for the money and leave it at that. But I doubt if the writer was ever born who could so consistently turn on the tap of Christmas sentiment and produce a gusher because his bank manager had given the signal. When it came to Christmas, the intensely emotional Dickensian reaction seems to have been a genuine one; probably it was symbolic of the political naIvete of his earlier novels, in which Dickens is suggesting that the lunacies and cruelties of laissez faire can all be mitigated overnight if only people will agree to stop being disagreeable to each other. And of all the moments in the year it was on Christmas Day alone that the world must have appeared to the younger Dickens to approximate to that beatific condition of brotherly love in which he so touchingly believed.

If there is any truth in this idea, then Dickens's view of Christmas must at last have become clouded by the same forebodings which darken his later landscapes. There is after all an unbridgeable chasm which obscures Pickwick's innocent view of that hideous muck-heap of irresponsible capitalism which dominates the landscape of Our Mutual Friend, and it follows that there should be discernible, corresponding shadows over the plum pudding and the mistletoe. When Pickwick and company arrive at Dingley Deli, Dickens apostrophises the moment with 'Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days.' Forty years later the magic is no longer working. When

Edwin Drciod examines Cloisterham on Christmas Eve, what does he find?

A few strange faces in the streets; a few other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces of Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women who come back from the outer world at long intervals to find the city wonderfully shrunken in size, as if it had not washed by any means well in the meantime.

The disenchantment is reflected in the real Christmas which the real Dickens experiences'. Family charades starring jocose strangers like Wilkini Collini gradually give way to marital stress and physical decline. One Christmas is ruined by the vagaries of the American railroad, another by catarrh, several others by gout, still others by the death of old friends; it was on Christmas Eve, 1863, that Dickens, returning to Gad's Hill, learned of the death of Thackeray, who had once brought his own child to participate in those charades. Commerce or Art ? It would be foolish to choose, because the correct answer is 'Yes.' At the time he was embroiled in the writing of the monthly parts of Dombey and Son, Dickens was offered a lucrative contract for a Christmas story, and wrote to Forster, 'I am very loath to lose the money. And still more so to leave any gap at Christmas firesides which 1 ought to fill.'

Dickens evidently believed, and he was surely right to so so, that by writing about Christmas, he had actually become a part of it, as essential to its flourishing fortunes as the nuts and the brandy sauce, and that if he should neglect his duties one year, it would be tantamount to barring the chimney against Santa Claus and stitching up the necks of the Christmas stockings. It is of course his earlier and not his later manner which has influenced so many writers as well as readers. I seem to recall Dylan Thomas composing a reminiscence of a Christmas childhood packed with chestnuts in every sense of the word. Thomas Burke is another reminiscer whose inner eye has been taught by Dickens what to look for, what to see, what to cherish: The glory was composed of many elements; of the street whose rumour came faintly through closed curtains; of a bright wood fire; of sprigs of green stuff with scarlet berries; of Kate Greenaway's pictures, and the odour of tangerine oranges and the frosty glitter of mince pies; of the unearthly mystery of voices in the outer dark singing songs about Good Kings and Shepherds; of shops radiant with storms of light and unimagined treasure; of cards showing scenes in crimson and green and gold of baronial halls or village streets or cottages with lit windows in landscapes of snow, into all of which I could enter as into the rooms of a real house or into the street round the corner; and of the carnival shapes of tins and boxes,. and the gay trifles called crackers.

It is not only the Dickensian eye which dictates the nature of the conventional Christmas, but also the Dickensian nose; Arnold Bennett, wandering through Hanley on Christmas Eve, 1903 is 'struck by the orange-apple cold Christmas smell of the greengrocers' shops.' As for the Dickensian ear, I believe it was Laurie Lee who first pointed out the curious fact that the carolsinger almost never saw his audience; it follows therefore that the audience almost never saw the singer, which is perhaps the mystery that Thomas Burke was referring to. When Lee was working the Christmas circuit as a child, he writes that :

Mile after mile we went, fighting against the wind, falling into snowdrifts, and navigating by the lights of the houses. And yet we never saw our audience. We called at house after house; we sang in courtyards and porches, outside windows, or in the damp gloom of hallways; we heard voices from hidden rooms.; we smelt rich clothes and strange hot food; we saw maids bearing in dishes or carrying away coffee-cups; we received nuts, cakes, figs, preserved ginger, dates, coughdrops, and money; but we never once saw our patrons.

Zuleika Dobson did much better than that ; in our abject devotion to that extraordinary predatory heroine, we tend to forget that at the very beginning of her career, Zuleika inscribes her name on the books of a Juvenile Party Entertainments Agency and quickly knows professional success, during the Christmas holidays. invited into a respectable home to give a performance, she tastes triumph not through any particular skill or originality but because the children, in deference to their hostess, pretended not to know how the tricks were done, and assumed their prettiest airs of wonder and delight.' It is hard to know which Dickens would have appreciated most in Zuleika, her sexual morality or her technique as an illusionist; at the festivities of 1843 Dickens, on his own admission, had: conjured bravely. ... a plum pudding was produced from an empty saucepan, held over a blazing fire kindled in Stanfield's hat without damage to the lining, a box of bran was changed into a live guinea pig which ran between my godchild's feet and was the cause of such a shrill uproar and clapping of hands ...

It is all very heart-warming, but after so much of this sort of thing, we begin to side With Anthony Hope, who is said to have emerged from the first of all the first nights of that Christmas blight, Peter Pan, muttering 'Oh, for an hour of Herod.' Sir Anthony was unlikely to get his wish unless he turned to the comedians and the foreigners, since it is only they who have ever made much of an attempt to wrest the ghost of Christmas Past from the hands of the benignity brigade. An Englishman can manage it but only, it seems, when on foreign soil. Christopher Isherwood in Berlin witnesses a Christmas street fight in which his friend Werner gets three bullets in the leg, but the case of Aldous Huxley is more difficult to unravel. In Eyeless in Gaza there is a short chapter headed 'Christmas Day 1934,' which turns out to be an ontological monologue so turgid that Huxley must surely have meant it to be a joke, a pagan joke. If that is so, then he is not nearly as funny as the Grossmith Brothers, whose Diary of a Nobody does more to redress the Dickensian balance so far as Christmas is concerned than almost any other English book of the last hundred Years. On Christmas Eve, Mr Pooter confides to his diary the magnificent `I am a Poor man, but I would gladly give ten Shillings to find out who sent me the insulting Christmas card I received this morning. I never insult people; why should they insult me?' At those words, the spirits, weighed down with turkey grease, begin to rise once more, and the outlook for the new year begins to improve.

Wodehouse's Sir Roderick Glossop responds to the yuletide aura only nominally: His mouth sort of flickered at one corner, Which I took to be his idea of smiling.' Leacock is even more heroic, composing a letter of rejection to a small child who has asked him to her party: I have not the honour of your aunt's acquaintance, yet I think I may with reason surmise that she will organise games in which she will ask me a river in Asia beginning with Z; on my failure to do so she will put a hot plate down my neck as a forfeit . . . May I say in conclusion that I do not consider a five-cent Pen-wiper any adequate compensation for the kind of evening you propose.

_ The Christmas tree in Thomas Mann's Ihe Magic Mountain, dispensing a fragrance Which 'wakes the minds and hearts of the guests to a realisation of the day,' verges dangerously close to the Wardle's parlour, but rescue is finally at hand from the United States. When two of Ring Lardner's characters go to see a Broadway show whose final act takes place on Christmas Eve, 1918. they become so disgusted with the maudlin appeal to the Dickensian in them that they decide that the gifts which the stage mummy and daddy are giving to their stage baby son must include a cocktail shaker and a shaving set, on the assumption, presumably, that the actor portraying the baby is a thirty-threeyear-old midget. Lardner was an expert pricker of balloons in this style, but the gold award for blowing a raspberry in the face of Tiny Tim must go to Lardner's friend and professional rival, Damon Runyon, who, in a story entitled Dancing Dan's Christmas, puts the skids under most of the cherished illusions which literary gentlemen have fostered over the years.

In this delightfully tart fable, all sorts of acceptable blasphemies occur, for instance that 'many people think Christmas is invented only to furnish an excuse for hot Tom-and-Jerry.' At the time Runyon's anonymous narrator is saying these scandalous words, he is relaxing in the bar belonging to Good-Time Charley Bernstein, a true poet whose attempts to enter into the spirit of things are frustrated by certain ethnic considerations: We try to think up a few songs appropriate to Christmas, and Dancing Dan finally renders 'My Dad's Dinner Pail' in a nice baritone and very loud, while I do firstrate with 'Will you love me in December as you do in May?.' But personally I always think Good Time Charley Bernstein is a little out of line trying to sing a hymn in Jewish on such an occasion, and it causes words between us.

In case the reader thinks that Runyon, in expressing sentiments of this kind, is in danger of overlooking the more spiritual aspects of Christmas, let me hasten to explain that, on the contrary, there can be few short stories in the world which more tactfully exploit the poignancy of human mortality than Dancing Dan's Christmas. The

eponymous hero decides to do himself a favour by going to the house of his beloved and filling the stocking of his beloved's old lady's old lady, who, having reached the age of ninety, is soon, as Runyon most feelingly puts it, 'about to put her checks back in the rack.'

In order to perform his good deed, Dan borrows somebody's Santa suit and goes out into the street, where a bunch of children and parents accost him for gifts. Dan solves this problem by taking a swing at some of the parents, and eventually completes his mission. The old doll wakes to find a stocking full of diamonds and dies happy, while Dan furthers the cause of his own romantic career without too much trouble. Only a year later does the narrator find out that Dan was due to die of lead poisoning at the hands of a couple of gorillas waiting for him outside Good Time Charley's, and that when they see Santa Claus emerge sipping a slug of rye, they never suspect it is Dan they are looking at. It is a well-knit tale, even if the ending bears a suspiciously close resemblance to the Chesterton story in which the quarry renders himself invisible by dressing up as a postman, to say nothing of the moment in Buchan where Hannay eludes his persecutors by borrowing his milkman's uniform.

Finally, to the myth of Empire. I have read a great many descriptions of Christmas Days spent in sub-tropical climes, of pioneers in New Zealand partaking of turkey and stuffing alfresco, of African settlers making punch with the mercury up into the hundreds, of Kiplingesque men of action pulling crackers on the North-West Frontier, but for the most moving of all these testimonies, I am indebted to the historian Brian Gardner for drawing posterity's attention to the most sensational Christmas Day menu in the long history of the British Empire: Anchovy Croutons Olives Consommé Windsor Oyster Patties Smoked Calves Tongue Giblet Pie Tournedos Parisienne York Ham and Madeira Sauce Fricasee of Veal Roast Fowl and Bread Sauce Boiled Fowl and Bacon Baron of Beef and Yorkshire Pudding Veal and Ham Roast Side of Lamb and Green Peas Sucking Pig and Apple Sauce Roast Saddle of Mutton Boiled Mutton and Capers Boiled Bacon Corned Beef Tongue and Ham Marrow, Green Peas, Baked and Boiled Potatoes Xmas Pudding, Mince Pies, Sandringham Jellies, Victoria Sandwich Dessert, Café Noir This superlative menu is headed 'Mafeking Hotel, Christmas Day, 1899.' In the fifth month of the Great Siege. Merry Christmas.