My old friend Johnny Anderson, a man of excellent taste, reported recently that he’d just finished reading for his book club the unabridged text of Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. I was impressed by both his accomplishment and the ambition of his book club, and I decided that a long 19th Century classic was just what I needed to pass the winter. When I used to teach in boarding school, the trick to getting happily through the cold months for both students and teachers was to become as busy as possible. I would take on the directing of plays or musicals in addition to my regular winter classes, and thereafter the span between Thanksgiving and spring break would zip along. Now, after some weeks of pleasantly sinking into 1243 pages of Robin Buss’s eloquent translation for Penguin Classics, I have reluctantly emerged, grateful for the reading tip from my friend Johnny, and indebted forever to Alexander Dumas, whose work I had underestimated and dismissed as children’s fare. As Humphrey Bogart said in a different context, I was misinformed.
In a scholarly but accessible introduction to the edition I was reading, Robin Buss addresses immediately the mistaken assumption that Dumas is for kids. As Buss so deftly notes, “there are not many children’s books, even in our own time, that involve a female serial poisoner, two cases of infanticide, a stabbing and three suicides, an extended scene of torture and execution, drug-induced sexual fantasies, illegitimacy, transvestism and lesbianism, a display of the author’s classical learning and his knowledge of modern European history, the customs and diet of the Italians, [and] the effects of hashish.” I could add that Dumas manages to sustain a narrative that comprises several distinct genres, including swashbuckling romance, satirical social commentary, slapstick comedy, gothic melodrama, murder mystery, Arabian-nights fantasy, religious conversion, more than one tragic love story, coming-of-age, and psychological realism.
Furthermore, I registered how frequently other writers have plundered Dumas’s novel for devices that are now commonplace, how Edmond Dantès blazes the path for so many imitators. He escapes from the Chateau D’If by posing as the corpse of another prisoner. Think of Hannibal Lector’s ruse of replacing himself with the body of a dead policeman to escape confinement, or of Michael Chabon’s Joe Kavalier riding out of Nazi territory inside a coffin. Dantès, with his immense wealth, mastery of disguise, and ability to defeat any foe with any weapon, surely supplies the template for Bruce Wayne as Batman and all those other superheroes whose secret identities conceal their unlimited reach. Dumas was not the first to depend on revenge as a driver of the plot—his occasional allusions to Hamlet acknowledge as much—but the revenge comes with misgivings, regrets, changes of heart, and accrued wisdom, just as it does in so many modern tales of injustice rectified, from The Sting to the real-life stories of Nelson Mandela and Louis Zamperini, two men who lived a version of Dantès’s prison nightmare, rejected revenge altogether, and moved directly into forgiveness.
It’s easy to understand why so many of us might have thought of this novel as a mere entertainment. A story this grand would naturally appeal to adaptors for stage and screen, and yet, ironically, all adaptations must omit so much of what makes the novel so rich. According to Wikipedia, so far the world has seen thirteen film adaptations either for movie theaters or television. After I finished the book and gave myself a couple of days for it to settle in my memory, I rented the 2002 screen version written by Jay Wolpert, who in a sad coincidence died just over a month ago, in January of 2022. As demanded by Hollywood, Wolpert gives us a happier ending than Dumas does, but he, too, manages to include a chance for Dantès to grow out of his furious quest for vengeance and to replace rage with love. I’ll avoid spoilers, but I will salute Wolpert for coming up with an ingenious explanation for why Mercedes is so quick to marry Fernand and for making the inevitable Hollywood ending true to the spirit, if not to the letter, of the novel.
I understand now why James Joyce includes a moment when Stephen Dedalus fancies himself an avatar of Edmond Dantès in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and why James O’Neill, father of the playwright Eugene, spent much of his career playing the Count onstage and even in a silent movie: this character appeals to both the romantic excess of youth and the rueful self-reflection of middle age. Despite a lengthy interlude when he stops being a character and becomes a superhuman incarnation of vengeance, Dantès is, in the end, a sympathetically dynamic figure, and by the end of his story, when he realizes that his urge for revenge was petty and insufficient, he accepts an ending that is not so much happy as it is right and true. He settles for the best he can do, and the mixture of sadness and satisfaction we feel at that conclusion surely traces its source to our own grudging understanding that life does not follow the script we write for ourselves in childhood.