my father's Great Expectations

さて、今年はチャールズ・ディケンズの生誕200年の年です。昨年の暮れ辺りからディケンズ関連の記事がイングランドの各新聞で取り上げられ、元日にもディケンズの特集記事などが挙げられていました。わたし自身は、前期に研究の合間を縫って『大いなる遺産』を読んで(pore over)、語りによるキャラクターの細かい心理描写とキャラクターの台詞の間の空気に感銘を受けました。記者がこのような記事を書くことができたのも、ディケンズが風景や人物の描写の精密さに長けていたからでしょう。長い記事ですが、とても面白く読めました。

ひとつだけ英語表現を拾います。赤字で示したby handは『大いなる遺産』のVolume 1で頻繁に登場する言葉です。これはbring someone up by handで「手塩にかけて育てる」という意味で登場します。この他にも原書に登場する言葉がたくさん出てきますので、読んだことのある方なら、きっとニヤっとするはずです。(Othello)

We are on holiday on the coast of Yorkshire, not far from Whitby. It's a campsite and there are two families with a couple of friends added in.

It is 1959 and I'm 13. Just as it's getting dark we are called to the biggest tent where my father is pumping up the tilley lamp, a large green light that works by burning paraffin under pressure in a "mantle" – a white cylinder of cloth that sits at the top of a tube. He loves faffing about doing this, and that's what he calls it when he pretends it's bothersome. "It's a bit of a faff," he says, while adoring the way that it's his expertise with the paraffin can, the funnel and the little brass handle that delivers this hard, white light.

So we sit ourselves down on sleeping bags, blankets and cushions. The tilley lamp sits on a fold-up wooden chair; my father sits on another in the middle of us. Looking round the tent, I can only see our faces catching the light, as if we are just masks hanging there, our bodies left outside in the dark perhaps. In my father's hands is a book – Great Expectations – and every night, there in the tent, he reads it to us. Without any hesitation, backtracking or explanation he reads Pip's story in the voice of the secondary-school teacher he is, but each and every character is given a flavour – some more than others: Magwitch, of course, allows him to do his native cockney.
（中略）
So as Great Expectations got read and re-enacted, and these re-enactions were absorbed and reabsorbed into our family life down through the years, I could see various characters and situations in the book intertwine with these missing people. Alf, whom we didn't ever see, was lovely. My father loved Uncle Alf. He talked of his kindness and the special treats. He was a lovely man, he would say. So was he a Joe Gargery figure to my father? Or, in his mind, was his loving grandfather the Joe figure who kept the stern aunts at bay, those aunts who seemed always in my mind to be frowning at the boy and complaining that he was getting the tastiest bits of the chicken – the "fliegel" or the "pulke". These women were all at once Pip's sister, bringing him up "by hand".

Of course there doesn't have to be a like-for-like match between people. Part of the power of stories is the way in which we can see facets of this or that fictional person in the people we know, and scenes from the fictional world have echoes in the events of the real world. As the book and my father's reading of the book, and my feelings about the book developed, I felt from him a sense of yearning. Pip is desperate to get away from his old home and, once he's had a sniff of what Miss Havisham appears to offer, he follows the dream of a better life.

My father had some kind of dream. It was that his father, who lived in America, would turn up and take him away from these horrible aunts. His father would arrive in his swell car, in his swell suits, and say: "Hey, Harold, let's make tracks." And he would drive down Nelson Street in a convertible while all the family and the kids with their bedbugs and dirty faces would watch open-mouthed.

But his father never came. Morris Rosen stayed in America. Rose never said bad words about him. He had special things to do. He was a union organiser. He was standing for the State Senate of Pennsylvania for the Socialists. He was organising support for anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been framed and would be executed. He was busy. So he never came.

But the yearning stayed until my father was old enough to realise that he never would. By then, like Pip, he had become what one of the relatives had called a "psy-college boy". He had studied English literature – books such as Great Expectations. When I too came to do the same thing, I saw how so many things had ended up getting intertwined here: my father's performance of the book; how the scenes became part of our daily lives and language; how all this spoke to me about the kind of family my father had come from and the changes he had been through before I was in this world. Books can do this. I'd also say that there is an added dimension, when books leave the page and become spoken out loud in a room full of people: of course they become live and vivid, but they also become social, they end up belonging to everyone in the room (or tent) at that moment. My father also read us Little Dorrit, Walter Scott's Guy Mannering and, much later, most of Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22. Even more memorably, he also read out loud his own memoir, which he called Are You Still Circumcised?

A few years ago I went to Boston because I had found out where Morris Rosen was buried. It was on a long road through the north of the city. I walked past tattoo parlours and empty car dealerships until there were no more buildings, just waste depots and cemeteries. It was November, cold and raining, and I found the graveyard, the Jewish Workmen's Circle Cemetery.

And there was Morris Rosen. On his grave it said: "Beloved father." Beloved father? Beloved?! As one of my relatives replied: "Haven't you heard of Jewish humour?" There was also a number on the grave: the number of the branch of the Workmen's Circle, the self-help organisation that Jewish workers set up. It was number 666. For several days I scanned pages on the internet trying to find where branch 666 was. In the end I found it: Mattapan. Boston's biggest mental institution.

So there in the graveyard was where all that misplaced yearning had ended up, with a number representing the name of an "asylum" on it. No Magwitch came out from behind any gravestones while I was standing there, but in a way all my cemeteries are Magwitch cemeteries. That's how my father in the tent in Yorkshire goes on working.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/01/michael-rosen-fathers-great-expectations