Vincent Van Gogh, "A Woman Reading"
Sometimes our richest reading experiences are books we stumble across and read because there’s nothing else available. A. S. Byatt describes such an experience in her novel Still Life, and I feel I must share it because it concerns the author who was the subject of my dissertation.
I must admit that, after spending two years in the company of the 18th century Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett, I now can’t stand him. That’s probably less from the immersion and more because he’s such a cantankerous man. A former ship surgeon, Smollett was referred to by rival novelist Laurence Sterne as “Dr. Smellfungus.” However, a character in Byatt’s novel stumbles across him and finds herself captivated:
Madame took her to the city library in Nimes, a gaunt, dark building with high shutters behind grilles and dusty leather books, ceiling high. There was not much in English: she borrowed the complete works of Tobias Smollett. These were not what she was hungry for, but they were English, and narrative. Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilizers. They were at least long.
And a little later:
She was a good critic, despite her egocentricity, and decided briskly and miserably that writing was not her métier. So she gave up, and sat between the vines in the hot sun, alternately sleeping and working her way through the dusty volumes of Peregrine Pickle, bound in crimson and gold leather, with real book worms making agitated forays from their dark crannies into the heat and light across the extraordinary scenes where Smollett’s elderly ladies retained their urine indefinitely to put out putative fires, or sweetened their foul breaths with violet cachous to deceive desired young lovers. She did not ask herself then under what compulsion he had made his plots or constructed his worlds; she accepted them as one accepts fiery tales in childhood.
Despite my current feelings, Smollett is worth reading. The three of his novels that I recommend are, in order, Humphrey Clinker, Peregrine Pickle, and Roderick Random. Smollett is no Henry Fielding and would hate me for saying so since he was a fierce Fielding rival. But he has some great picaresque adventures, and Humphrey Clinker is filled with marvelous word play and enjoyable accounts of Bath and Scotland. Smollett is more intoxicant than tranquilizer and had a great impact on Dickens, who named one of his sons “Tobias Smollett Dickens.” Try him out.
