Marley Was Dead, To Begin With . . .

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judi ceme terpercayaWhen I came home from work yesterday my son came up to me and said, “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that,” and walked away. I asked him where he learned that, and he told me that there’d been an assembly in school. Fourth grade students put on a production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Cormac was fascinated with the character of Jacob Marley, and couldn’t stop talking about the fact that the student actors were dressed in heavy winter clothes in the gym. “They must have been hot, Dad!” said Cormac.

Cormac’s fascination with A Christmas Carol brought back many good memories for me. When I was in second grade, a year older than Cormac is now, my grandmother gave me a copy of A Christmas Carol as a gift. She was a dietician but she loved to read. She had floor-to-ceiling book shelves on either side of her fireplace, and they were filled with paperbacks. Her favorites were detective fiction and mystery novels, but she also had a great love for classic literature.

The book was obviously advanced for me, but I plugged away at it, determined to complete the work. I remember thinking how long it was, and of course it’s not very long at all. I still have my copy of that edition. It’s 128 pages, and Stave One begins on page nine. I fell in love with the story. From that point on, I read it every year around Christmas time. I would hide a candle and matches in my bedroom, and after I was supposed to be asleep I would get up and surreptitiously light the candle and read by its light. The candle was my way of creating some sort of nineteenth-century atmosphere to accompany the text and get myself into the right mood for reading about Scrooge. I did this every year through high school. Eventually I knew the work inside and out, and could quote long passages of it. I also watched every production I could find. My favorites are the 1970 version with Albert Finney, the 1951 version with Alastair Sim, and the 1999 made-for TV version with Patrick Stewart. Scrooged (1988) with Bill Murray is pretty good, too, as is the Muppet version (1992) with Michael Caine in the lead.

The Albert Finney version is a musical with Alec Guinness as Marley. The only thing I don’t like about this one is that there are some odd scenes created for the movie that don’t exist in the novel, like Marley’s ghost taking Scrooge to hell, where it is always cold, like it is in Scrooge’s office. What I really like about the Patrick Stewart version is that it includes many scenes normally elided from film versions, like when the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to see miners working in the moors, and two men living alone in a lighthouse, as well as sailors on board a ship. I don’t know of any other production that shows these things.

Another favorite scene of mine that I have never encountered in any production takes place with the Ghost of Christmas Past, who forces Scrooge to revisit the moment of his estrangement from Belle, the girl who was his fiancèe. Every version of the book shows the scene in which the two argue and Belle walks out, but what follows is that the “relentless” ghost “pinion[s]” Scrooge and forces him to see what Belle has become and thus what he has lost. Dickens’ description of the mature Belle and her almost identical-looking daughter grew more captivating to me as I got older and understood some of the subtleties of Dickens’ language.

The narrator shifts to the first person in describing Belle’s daughter’s beautiful hair, face, and figure as she plays with children that must be hers, as well as perhaps some nieces and nephews. The children climb upon the young woman, encircle her waist with their arms and let loose her braided hair. The narrator says, “I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips, to have questioned her, that she might have opened them, to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush, to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price; in short, I would have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.” I read that as an adult and understand so much more fully the agony that Scrooge must have felt to witness this scene. And yet we never see it in film. Perhaps it is too erotic and too difficult to convey. The narrative voice would have to be done in a voice-over.

My wife and I also used to go see the Hartford Stage production each year. We used to live in and around Hartford, and before we had kids we had season tickets to the stage, and we went to see A Christmas Carol every year from its inception in 1997 till 2002. Cormac was born in 2003. I think next year he might be old enough to see it and not get scared by the ghosts, but not yet. My almost three year old daughter is crazy and fearless. She could probably go tomorrow and not get scared.

So Cormac has been acting out scenes from the play he saw, and drawing pictures of scenes he remembers. He drew me a picture of Marley’s ghost, and another funny one in two panels, with the Grim Reaper on one side and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come on the other. Cormac said, “The only difference is that one has a face and the other carries one of those things for cutting grass before there were lawn mowers.”

“A scythe,” I said. “How do you spell that?” asked Cormac as he picked up his marker.