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Canny Cozenage
| Article
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14513 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1988 |
1,730 Words |
| Author
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Roger Lewis
Roger Lewis is a fellow of Wolfson College and a lecturer
at Mogdalen College, Oxford University, and writes
regularly for Punch. |
CHATTERTON
Peter Ackroyd
New York: Grove Press, 1988
234 pp., $17.95
Peter Ackroyd is the monitor of masquerade. An early book, which he probably does his best to forget, was a history of transvestism: Dressing Up (1979). That work exalts the arts of deception--cross-dressing as a hocus-pocus dealing with the mystery of personality; the anxious need humans have to dissemble, to appear as what they are not. Ackroyd is intrigued by purposeful confusion, absorbed by "sacred ritual and... the expression of social or political dissent."
Thus, his first novel The Great Fire of London (1981) involved a film crew and a snooty Cambridge professor both studying Dickens' Little Dorrit--the masterpiece of prison life and the constraints of self-enchainment. The actress cast as Dorrit is driven mad, as she fathomed a character much given to manic secrecies; Rowan Philips, the academic, is revealed as a doodler, his scholarship a burnt out firework display. The masks of the actress and the false don were shown to be bad disguises. Ackroyd's first novel is about cads and fools abliterated by the rough magic of Dickens' potent theatricality--Little Dorrit is heavily alluded to, and Ackroyd, hardly incidentally, is at this very moment engaged upon Dickens' biography--promised for 1989.
Oscar Wilde, like Dickens, was given to playacting and Ackroyd's The Last Testament (1983) (about Wilde) is metempsychotic wizardry. In a first-person confessional journal, his pastiche epigrams are entirely convincing: "I learned the first secret of the imagination: an amusing fantasy has more reality than a commonplace truth." And the book, passed off as Wilde's diary never actually jotted during the final days in Paris, portrays Wilde, in a hundred pages, more precisely than Richard Ellmann did in a thosand--because Ackroyd, a true Wildean, is a critic-as-artist, an artist-as-critc: "I saw everything as words, for in words I could hide from myself."
The preoccupation of Dressing Up lingers; toggery has given way to the games of language. Ackroyd treats the dictionary as a wardrobe; in Hawskmoor (1985), a black-magic thriller, a present-day cop case intermixes with chapters documenting eighteenth-century chapel building: a time-travel novel, where the journeying is conducted through elaborately reconstructed historical papers. Ackroyd slips into period grammar and syntax like he's kitted out in bespoke ruffs and
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