Weird Wilkie

THE LIFE OF WILKIE COLLINS (360 pp.) Nuel Pharr Davis--University of Illinois ($5.75).

It was a bright, moonlit night, and so, after entertaining Painter John Millais and his son at dinner, Wilkie Collins decided to see them home. Strolling together along the semirural roads of northern London, the three friends were halted suddenly by a piercing scream, and from out the gate of a villa dashed a young woman "dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight." Painter Millais exclaimed: "What a beautiful woman!", while Novelist Collins disappeared into the night crying: "I must see who she is and what's the matter."

So successful was Collins' pursuit that "the woman in white," Caroline Graves, was his mistress throughout his life. Nobody knows if the story she told him--that she was fleeing from a brutal hypnotist who kept her imprisoned in his villa--is true or not, but many still know the great piece of fiction that Wilkie Collins made of it. The Woman in White ran in 1859-60 as a serial in Charles Dickens' magazine, All the Year Round, and though it followed Dickens' own Tale of Two Cities, it boosted circulation above even the Dickens level. Serialized in the U.S. by Harper's Magazine at the same time, it was still in print under the Harper label 70 years later.

Wilkie Collins is recognized today as one of the most influential and readable of Victorian novelists. In an age when the three-volume serialized novel offered mostly narrative sprawl and chaos, Collins fashioned plot lines of watchwork precision for 36 separate books, including his masterpieces, The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Like his U.S. literary lookalike, Edgar Allan Poe, Collins used words as black magic to conjure up horror, doom and desolation. Some of this was sheer melodramatics, but in part it foreshadowed the revolt of the natural man against an age of prudery. Compared to his friend Dickens, the English writing colossus of the century, Collins was a minor Victorian, but in the sense that Marlowe is a minor Elizabethan alongside Shakespeare. He was the best of the secondbest, and his growing status as "must" reading for highbrow novelists has been signalized by a T. S. Eliot essay. This biography by Nuel Pharr Davis, a University of Illinois English instructor, is intellectually skimpy, but as a personal history of Collins it is thorough, which may be just as well: Collins' life was no less intriguing than his books.

Eccentric Human Nature. He was the son of a stuffy, snobbish Royal Academician named William Collins, whose only aim in life was to climb to the top of the ladder, kicking off old friends at every rung. Wilkie rebelled violently against his father's way of life--particularly because the elder Collins always deemed his social climbing to be a form of Christian uplift. Consequently, Wilkie developed a lifelong aversion to religion, preferred low society to high, and liked to dress for dinner in camel's-hair coats and pink shirts. He was shortsighted and short of stature, with tiny hands and feet. "Ordinary men," reports Biographer Davis, "could pick him up and carry him about like a child."

Wilkie Collins started as a painter, and out of deference to his father, the Royal Academy accepted one of his landscapes, but hung it so near the ceiling that only titans could glimpse it. After that he turned to fiction, and soon his peering, probing eyes began to follow their natural bent for research into the dark and dingy corners of life. He spent hours riding around in omnibuses making notes on the "eccentricities of human nature" and absorbedly eavesdropping. From Paris he brought volumes of reports of famous police work, diligently studied all the available details of crime and punishment.

Discreet Vice. In 1851 Collins met Dickens. At 39, with David Copperfield behind him, the great writer was undergoing a change. His prodigious vitality was waning slightly. Dissatisfied with his wife, cramped by his role of eminent Victorian, Dickens was "quite anxious to be led astray," and Wilkie Collins was just the man for the job. Dickens knew poverty and misery, but it was Collins who introduced him to "disreputable places" where a man could "dabble in vice discreetly and inexpensively." In Dickens, Collins found a literary teacher of unrivaled genius; from Collins, Dickens drew the darker, more somber tones of A Tale of Two Cities and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. "[He] had very high spirits and was a splendid companion," Dickens' daughter Kate said of Collins, "but he was as bad as he could be."

With Dickens as his constant pacemaker (he even challenged poor Wilkie to a mustache-growing contest), Wilkie Collins became immensely successful. He poured all his cheap South African sherry down the drain, stocked up with choice wines and cigars, hired French cooks and established one of the most convivial households in London. Caroline was his "housekeeper" and her daughter (of unknown paternity) his budding secretary.

Tidy Grave. Wilkie Collins' life wonderfully shows up the false front of Victorian respectability. Constant overwork brought him gout and rheumatism, which he fended off with huge doses of laudanum. Inevitably, laudanum drove Collins farther and farther into weirdness--the high point of which was Poor Miss Finch, a novel on the love between a blind girl who could not stand to think of the color blue and a man who stained himself blue by drinking silver nitrate. But long after Dickens had killed himself with overwork at 58, weird Wilkie Collins was still going strong. He treated himself with an "electrical contraption called Pulvermacher's Galvanic Belt," added morphia and colchicum to his diet of drugs. At night, he said, when he went to bed, a green woman with tusks sprang out at him on the staircase and "said goodnight by biting a piece out of his shoulder." Separated temporarily from Caroline, he acquired another mistress named Martha Rudd, who bore him three children, and when both he and Caroline died, Martha kept the grass tidy round their graves.

Collins' bequest to literature has been immense, but it remains unassessed. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and virtually all the professional detectives of crime fiction stem either from The Woman in White or The Moonstone. His choice and treatment of subjects have influenced writings of every kind, including (at least in Author Davis' opinion) George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession and Pygmalion. His bizarre themes and settings are outmoded, but the bloodshot eye that observed and pursued with such scrupulous diligence should still be a model to an era that considers itself so vastly superior, both in wisdom and in vice, to the Victorian.

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