Hildegarde

Every once in a while, I think I know what I’m going to write here.  I walk around with opening sentences in my head all day, and then I read through the comments from the day before, and everything goes to hell.

That is sort of what has happened this morning.   I was going to write about my peculiar obsession with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which tends to be a big deal around my house between Thanksgiving and  Epiphany, because that’s when I decided to run all my Christmas Carol videos back to back and over and over again.  And I have a lot of them.  I’ve got both the Patrick Stewart and George C. Scott versions, plus the one with Albert  Finney, plus A Christmas Carol:  The Musical (which I don’t like), plus at least two from the early days of sound movies, including the one with Alastair  Sim.  I’ve bot the  Muppets version (my favorite).  I’ve got a bunch of the modern retellings, too, like A Diva’s  Christmas Carol and a renamed one with Henry  Winkler set in the US during the Depression. 

By now this obsession is of the kind where I feel the need to have items even though I know from the start that I won’t like them–there’s a Barbie version out this year, which makes me cringe, but somebody will give it to me eventually.  It’s gotten to the point where pretty much everybody knows I do this.  On the other hand, there’s the Bill Murray movie Scrooged, which has been on television a few times, and which I definitely like, but that I haven’t yet come across at a time when I can pick it up.

Then there are the ones I’ve seen on teleivision and don’t actually know the names to–there’s a modern American version where the ghosts all go to the wrong house and Marley is a Jamaican Rastafarian.  There are also the versions that constituted a single episode of various television series I have no other particular interest in but that can only be acquired on DVD by the season.  The one that sticks in my mind is an episode of Highway to Heaven, the series where Michael Landon played an angel.  

I don’t know just what it is about A Christmas Carol that strikes me so, and it’s double hard to figure out because this is a relatively new obsession.  It showed up only after Bill had died.

When I was growing up, I always reread The Razor’s Edge (by W. Somerset Maugham) and Rebecca  (by Daphne  du Maurier) for Christmas, and also sometimes Hemingway’s supposed “memoir” A Movable Feast.  I knew what was going on with those even then, though.  They were my imaginary escape routes out of the emotionally barren, intellectually stultifying environment of my childhood, and they involved going to live in Paris (first choice) or England and being somebody else entirely.  Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter, called it the desire to be “a citizen of somewhere else.”  I know exactly what he meant, even now.

I’ve tried to analyze my fascination with A Christmas Carol several times, but every explanation I construct seems somehow false.  This year the explanation seems a little less false than usual, so let me try it out here. 

I have serially recurring e-mail conversations with a number of people about what I’d call Picking A Winner–that is, why it is that publishers are generally so God awful at knowing what books will sell and what will not.  Significant best sellers tend to come as a surprise, and although it is possible to manufacture the appearance of a best seller, the appearance tends to fall apart after awhile, and a good hefty minority of books with seven figure advances just fall off cliffs and into the slough of midlist.

Some of the people involved in these debacles are publishing brass who have been brought in from other kinds of companies and who have no idea why anybody reads books, since they don’t read books themselves.  These people use the It Worked Before method of figuring out what will sell–last year there was a big best seller where the detective was a cat?  and another one where the detective was a nun?  Fine!  We’ll publish a book where a nun solves crimes with the help of her cat!

There are some truly terribly books out there published on this philosophy, and it doesn’t matter that most of them fail to sell much of anything at all.  If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the outcome to be different each time, then there’s a certain kind of publishing executive who is demonstrably insane.  It’s all coming to a bookstore near you–mafia families, serial killers with sexual kinks that would curl the hair of the Marquis de Sade, cat and dog and guinea pig detectives, cozy English villages invented by the people who put marzipan figurines on wedding cakes…

The other method of picking books is to pick them by how well they’re written.  That method has the advantage of actually being about the quality of the work, and to an extent it does better than the we’re-all-doing-cannibals-this-year approach, but it really isn’t a good predictor of how well the book will sell.

It isn’t true that books that are well written sell less well than books that are written well–okay, that sentence was a train wreck.  You know what I  mean.  The fact is that how well a book is written has no effect at all on whow well it sells.  I suppose there is some great gaping hole at the bottom below which readers will not go.  Some of the rejected manuscripts I’ve seen in my years in th is business are so excruciatingly embarrassing, I can’t imagine even those people who insist that they “just want a good story” would put up with them.  But being badly written won’t make your book sell, and being well written won’t make it sell either.

I’ve come to the conclusion, lately, that the reason people read books is to live for a while in a thing I can only call a “controlling sensibility.”  That is, that they’re not looking for particular content, but for how the world the book creates makes them feel. 

I know, I know.  I should come up with a snappier phrase for this.  I haven’t been able to think of one. But the idea explains a lot of what’s confusing about present day publishing–why a right-wing author like Patricia Cornwell, for instance,  has so many devoted fans among liberals, and why so many very conservative readers are devoted to distinctly liberal novelists.

I’m sure that every reader has a threshhold beyond which he or she will not go–a level of in-your-face politicization that’s just too much to take.  Stay clear of that threshhold, though, and what you’re saying matters much less than the atmosphere you create around saying it.  That’s why so many people can read the same book over and over and over again, even though it’s a detective novel and they know who did it.   That’s why I read Miss Marple over and over and over again, and  probably why  I read (and watch) A Christmas Carol.

So what is it about A Christmas Carol that attracts me so much?  I find it hard to say.  It obviously is not the Victorian setting, because I like plenty of the modernizations, and you can’t exactly call the Muppets version Victorian.  And I keep playing around with a version of my own, or maybe a sequel.

Maybe it’s just that A Christmas Carol creates a vision of Christmas that I’ve never really had, but would like to.

Someday, I’m going to write a version with Gregor in it, and post it on the website.