1.
Great Expectations came into my life three times prior to this post. The first time was in ninth grade, the year my family and I left my hometown in rural Utah and moved to a suburb north of Dallas, Texas. The second was my second year at The University of Texas at Arlington, the year I switched my majors from Architecture to English Literature, which was significant, since I’d planned on being an architect since I was eight. The most recent encounter was two years ago, the year my father died.
Great Expectations is a unique book in that it so accurately captures the span of a life from childhood, to young adulthood, to adulthood, that as you return to it throughout your life, the book’s focus seems to shift with your own perceptions. The Great Expectations I read in ninth grade was not the same one I read in college; nor was the Great Expectations I encountered in college the same as the one I received on my long, wintery drive back from Dad’s funeral two springs ago.
The book is so crammed with living that it provides a lifetime of meaningful encounters. It is now a winter afternoon at Dry Creek, eleven degrees outside, drops of water none-the-less dripping off the end of the icicles hanging from the roof eves in the afternoon sunlight. Beyond the glass doors, the white field stretches south toward the banks of the pond and the snow-loaded spruce behind, the mountains rising in deep blue shadow beyond that. Fire crackles in the fireplace, and I know that if I pursue Great Expectations a fourth time it will again unfold in new light. It is simply a book that expands with each reading.
First, however, I will indulge in a bit of nostalgia along with this eggnog and chocolate cherry. What better way to spend a winter afternoon?
2.
I must have first encountered Great Expectations in the fall for I see big, sloppy wet leaves strewn across the suburban lawns as I cut my way along the back streets between Central Expressway and the school. At one point there is a small pond with a cul-de-sac at one end of it. The water is stone still and sky and trees and backyards turn upside down in it. It makes sense that this small oasis of nature between Beltline and Arapaho enters my mind and not the actual school where I read the book. Ninth grade was not a pleasant experience and I’m sure I made that walk take as long as possible.
I want to say two classes made my days there bearable, but that would be a lie. Ninth grade was only bearable for me in the way war is for survivors. Yes, I did make it through alive, but I was no longer whole. I was missing the greater part of me and wouldn’t find it again until I was nearly forty. But Mr. Terrant’s US History and Mrs. Becker’s 9th Grade English classes did provide some intellectual framework, some spectacles, with which to make some sort of semblance of sense out of the brutality I encountered there. Perhaps that is why I’ve spent most of my adult life teaching middle school. Certainly, I didn’t plan on becoming Virgil leading young Dantes through the inferno of puberty, but then I don’t think spiritual journeys are ever chosen. All our learning and growth takes place in the exact areas we choose to avoid. Those unfortunate enough to have nothing to avoid never really grow up because they never have that ah-ha moment: “Oh, this is how that feels.”
Anyway, at some point, I arrived at school that day. I have blocked out the hallways--the pushing, the shoving, the stupid remarks by tobacco-chewing, Skoal-spewing jocks followed by the giddy laughter by the most beautiful women on earth (which is what ninth grade girls seem like to a ninth grader), the embarrassment, the self-loathing, the visions of smashing those smirking faces against the lockers even though it’s absolutely impossible as they are built like Greek gods and you’re a ninety pound Mr. Gumby with limbs having as much gumption as the swaying branches of a weeping willow. Okay, I haven’t quite blocked it out, but I’m trying.
So, instead, I’ll focus on Mrs. Becker’s class. She had the face of a prune, but she was clearly an angel, for she brought me the world of Pip--a world that didn’t make any more sense than my own, and therefore made all the sense in the world. Here was a youth, like myself, with great expectations, thrown into a world so brutal and unresponsive to dreams that the only thing that could develop is clarity, regret and spiritual growth. In this way, Great Expectations is clearly Victorian and not modern. Out of the chaos is born insight, and therefore meaning and order. But unlike many of its predecessors, that chaos doesn’t seem contrived to intensify the order that comes together with the happily-ever-after ending. In fact, there is no significant happily-ever-after ending, only regret, understanding and wisdom gained--the natural products of life. Or at least this is true if you read the original ending to the novel. Dickens rewrite does force Victorian expectations on the novel a bit more, but even so, the ending has a soberness to it, unlike the endings of a Jane Austin novel. In this way, it’s more mature than say many modern works, which are stuck in the nihilism of puberty: aware that great expectations are never reached, but unaware that growth occurs in the areas we are most disillusioned with. Much of modernism has the intellectual framework of an adolescent--a lashing out at what seems to be an unfair universe--without any openness to the grace inherent in imperfection. Great Expectations, on the other hand, neither clings to the childlike fairytale endings of Victorianism, nor does it sit on the steps, smoking dope, wondering why life sucks like much of modernism. Like life, Great Expectations is petty, grand, humorous and tragic. Like life, it’s comprehensive.
But, I jump ahead. I was not aware of all of this in ninth grade. No, what attracted me to Great Expectations then was Estella. I felt I knew her, longed for her, and like Pip, that I would never gain her love. She was one girl in particular, a girl from my home town, Kelly Krouse, who I’d loved since the fifth grade (which from a ninth-grade perspective, seems like an eternity), but she was also the girl sitting behind me in Mrs. Becker’s class, sandals off, sliding the metal bars of my bookrack between her toes while we read about Estella. I longed to turn around and tell her something courageous and true, something about how her feet were perfect, as were her eyes and smile. But I couldn’t, because I was flawed. I was a child and lacked the courage to reach up and partake of the forbidden fruit. She, on the other hand, was mature and to me at least, perfect.
This is what is so universal about the Pip/Estella relationship captured in Great Expectations. Estella is every girl to pubescent males. Not that all girls are raised to break hearts, not that all girls are cruel, but that the nature of male and female development make them so. Girls are busy developing into women while boys are still boys. Girls’ earlier development gives them a magic, a power that boys just can’t comprehend, which makes boys feel insignificant. It’s a matter of perception, but it seems fairly universal, even today, when boys and girls interact more with each other earlier in life. Girls, perhaps experience something similar, later on, in high school and college. But during the early teens, girls rule the world and boys long only to say, “As you wish.” Thus, during my first reading, Great Expectations was primarily a novel about the relationship (or lack of relationship) between Pip and Estella, captured so powerfully by Dickens:
Though she called me “boy” so often, and with a carelessness that was far from complimentary, she was about my own age. She seemed much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed; and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen.
3.
When I came to Great Expectations a second time, I was in college and never seemed to have enough money. I came to it voluntarily, devouring it in a cold dorm, instead of working on projects over at the School of Architecture with my peers. My roommate, Phil, and I didn’t have a microwave or fridge in the room and I didn’t have enough money for a meal plan. I’d eat cheap foods that didn’t require refrigeration, such as bread, peanut butter and Sure Fine cookies, for as long as I could and then splurge on a hot chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes smothered in country gravy from the dining hall in the student union building. It would have been much better to have rented a fridge and microwave and had some semblance of food in the room so that hunger wouldn’t force me to what, given my budget, were extravagant binges. I was never too bad with money, but I always seemed to need to buy CDs and clothes, and given my budget, these small purchases sent me into the red. I’d bounce checks, which then would cost me more money. During this time, Pip in London seemed to speak directly to me:
At certain times--meaning at uncertain times, for they depended on our humor--I would say to Herbert, as if it were a remarkable discovery:
“My dear Herbert, we are getting on badly.”
“My dear Handel,” Herbert would say to me, in all sincerity, “if you will believe me,” those very words were on my lips, by a strange coincidence.”
“Then, Herbert,” I would respond, “Let us look into our affairs.”
We always derived profound satisfaction from making an appointment for this purpose. I always thought this was business, this was the way to confront the thing, this was the way to take the foe by the throat. And I know Herbert thought so to.
We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of something similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds might be fortified for the occasion, and we might come well up to the mark. Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For, there was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationary.
Of course finances were not my only connection with the London portion of Great Expectations. Pip is an archetype male--as a youth, a young adult, and adult. His fears, his follies are ours. I had an English professor who accused us of “genuflecting greatness” and spoke of the omniscient twenty-year old embarrassed by his roots, knowing not who he really is. We were reading The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic, the story of a young minister who knows not himself, but we could have just as well been reading the London portion of Great Expectations. The sense of arriving, the sense of intellectual superiority, the embarrassment of being connected to common folk--this is the twenties and early thirties. And for most young men, the most common and embarrassing thing of all is Dad. There has never been a twenty-year-old male who wasn’t sure he was so much more sophisticated, so much more intelligent than his father. Joe fulfills the father role in Pip’s life and is no exception to this universal rule. Pip is embarrassed by Joe’s awkward, country ways around him now that he’s a gentleman, and only realizes after, “I had neither the good sense nor good feeling to know that this was my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me”.
At that age I too was embarrassed by my past, in my small town Mormon upbringing. But, I’m not unique in this. For at least children born of goodly parents, it is just the pattern: in our teens and twenties we believe we must set out to be everything our parents were not, and by our thirties and forties we realize they didn’t do such a bad job, and often wish we could be a little more like them.
4.
It is this realization that came to me while listening to Great Expectations on my drive down the Oregon and Northern California coast and across Nevada after my father’s funeral: we find ourselves after we’ve realized that not only did our great expectations elude us, but that it doesn’t even matter. As Pip says to Biddy, it is the journey, not arriving, that counts:
“My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life t hat ever had a foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy, all gone by!”
To the young, this may seem like resignation. But to the mature, it is a softening, an opening. Except for the short Victorian nod towards a happy ending with “I saw no shadow of another parting from her,” Dickens captures this perfectly. Estella begins:
“…I have been bent and broken, but--I hope--into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.”
“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.”
“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.
And the original ending never even makes that nod toward a happily-ever-after. The journey occurs to open Pip up to understanding, not joy.
