CHARLES DICKENS
By Jane Smiley.
212 pp. New York:
Lipper/Viking. $19.95.
IN ''David Copperfield,'' there is a character named Mr. Dick who has been attempting to write a life of ''the lord chancellor, or the Lord Somebody or other'' for more than a decade. Progress has been impeded, however, by the head of Charles I, some of whose troubles were accidentally put into Mr. Dick's head in such a way that the sovereign's keeps popping up in Mr. Dick's manuscript. ''The harder he worked at it,'' David Copperfield reports, ''the oftener that unlucky head of King Charles the First got into it.''
In her brief life of Dickens, Jane Smiley alludes to Mr. Dick's predicament with appreciative recognition, well aware that every writer has a head of King Charles to contend with. She calls it ''perhaps the most perfect image in literature of how a writer comes back and back again to the same concerns in spite of, or because of, how hard he tries to avoid them.'' As Dickens's image ingeniously suggests, in the ungoverned haunting of a writer's prose there often lurks an act of rebellion. It is hard to write about Lord Somebody or other at length without being visited by the urge to take a whack at him.
Smiley knows this, too, and she begins her book with a vow to keep the head of Charles Dickens undislodged. ''Writers and artists are often portrayed as carriers of their own works, rather like carriers of disease, who communicate them to the world at large unconsciously,'' she observes in her preface. ''My own experience as a writer and a reader is quite different. Writing is an act of artistic and moral agency, where choices are made that the author understands, full of implications and revelations that the author also understands.''
Smiley's ''Charles Dickens'' is a writer's writer's life. A novelist herself, she understands that the writing of fiction involves a performance not unlike acting. A shy person might succeed at it, as he could not with acting, but a sleepwalking or essentially clumsy person will fail. It is easy to overlook how theatrical novels are, because they are usually written with no one watching. A self-editing writer is like a film director with a budget so ample he can throw away hundreds of takes in pursuit of the perfect scene. But at least once his actors must give the performance he is looking for, and Smiley recognizes that the moment of improvisation is as crucial as the capturing of it. Since he wrote and published in monthly installments, Dickens came much closer to performing in real time than do novelists today. His lifelong passion for the stage was natural, she suggests, because he was not very distant in his style of creation from Shakespeare. She relates the story of young Mamie Dickens, unobserved, watching her father at work: between bouts of pantomime, face-making in a mirror and talking to himself in a low voice, he wrote furiously.
In her portrait of Dickens the writer, Smiley succeeds in presenting him as a conscious artisan. She points out the steps he took to enlarge his palette by exploring violent emotions and by disregarding the proprieties that would have kept working-class speech patterns out of print. She follows his attempts to build novels around a theme (''Martin Chuzzlewit'' around selfishness, ''Dombey and Son'' around pride) and to experiment with different ways of linking characters (through a lawsuit in ''Bleak House,'' through a circle of gossip in ''Our Mutual Friend'').
In an earlier era, synoptic essays on Dickens were troubled by the King Charles's head of socialism. Both George Orwell and Edmund Wilson considered Dickens morally rebellious but politically obtuse. They were at pains to locate his class origins precisely, and both likened his unhappiness on his first trip to America to the disillusionment of a European leftist after a tour of the Soviet Union. Smiley lays this ghost by pointing to Dickens's extensive charity work, arguing that he transcended class and positing that a novelist ''is naturally unsympathetic to a collective solution, while always more or less in favor of a connective solution.''
Occasionally Smiley's description of a novel is vague, as in: '' 'Nicholas Nickleby' is a lively and entertaining reading experience and, in the context of Dickens's other works, has several features of interest.'' In other words, she isn't crazy about it. Even with novels she does like, Smiley has a weakness for place-holding adjectives like ''interesting'' and ''Dickensy'' (''Great Expectations'' ''is totally Dickensy, yet shorter than the real Dickensy novels''). In two cases she describes a work as faithful to his state of mind while he was writing it, without being more specific -- a dodge that reminds me of the equivocal reply my grandmother used to make, after Alzheimer's had set in, when asked how she was: ''Fine, if you don't care what you say.''
I suspect that Smiley goes bland when it takes an effort for her to be respectful. In her portrait of Dickens the man, she is less cautious. His art may have been a series of conscious choices, but his life was full of mistakes and compulsions, and Smiley gives herself permission to know a little more than Dickens did about divorce, celebrity and the typical shape of novelist's career.
For anyone who grew up on Dickens, it's heartbreaking to read about his personal failings. As a child I felt relieved when David Copperfield's first wife, Dora, finally died, then puzzled that Dickens had led me to such a morbid feeling. In fact, Dickens was unhappy with his wife, Catherine. He liked her younger sister Mary better, and he reacted to Mary's death at the age of 17 with extravagant grief. His writing of ''Oliver Twist'' was interrupted for a month, and Mary eventually became the model for Dora Copperfield.
Despite the appreciation shown for her sister's demise, Catherine declined to imitate it. Instead she bore Dickens 10 children and grew fat and depressed. After more than two decades of marriage, Dickens separated from Catherine with scorn, cruelty and an embarrassing public letter of self-justification and quarreled with everyone who sympathized with her. He had become fascinated with the actress Ellen Ternan; his involvement with her continued until his death, in such secrecy that in a century and a half scholars have not been able to find out whether she bore him a child or even whether they consummated their romance.
Smiley believes that because we live in a ''divorce culture'' today, the emotional dynamics of the split are more intelligible to us than they were to Dickens. But a mystery remains, and in an attempt to reconcile the life to the art, Smiley is led into speculations of the sort she intended to avoid, about Dickens's novels as self-administered psychotherapy and the novelist's attraction to emotional extremes for purposes of research. They are mild and intriguing speculations, but the topic of divorce haunts Smiley like the head of King Charles -- or rather, the head of Anne Boleyn.
When Dickens sent David Copperfield to work in his stepfather's warehouse, he may have neutralized his childhood memory of pasting labels on bottles in a blacking factory while his parents were in debtor's prison. Dickens's years with Ternan, however, did not bring him peace. Smiley believes that his understanding of women deepened in his last three novels, but that he withdrew from his friends and instead pursued emotional connection through dramatic readings from his novels. Smiley puts a brave face on this period and views Dickens as a pioneer of celebrity lifestyle: ''In the last years of Dickens's life, he seems to have embraced a freer, more individualistic pattern . . . actively seeking the sorts of relationships that are primary in our century -- one-to-one intimacies on the one hand, joined with star-to-audience performances on the other.'' (Edmund Wilson was less sanguine: ''In the desperation of his later life, he gave in to the old ham and let him rip.'') Dickens's favorite scene and most successful crowd pleaser was the burglar Sikes's murder of his mistress, Nancy, taken from ''Oliver Twist.'' It was brutal, magnetic and physically exhausting, and after Dickens's death, everyone close to him believed that his insistence on performing it had killed him. But as Smiley observes, it is because Dickens was as free and passionate with the dark as with the light that we class him with Shakespeare.