Like a comet, its time has come again. Frantic and austere, the feeling for personal bewilderment running fast beneath the author’s plain style, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) brims with recognisable situations – the wealthy thundering down the road to Oxford and safety, the poor condemned by the riskiest essential employments (searching, guarding, nursing, burying), the revelation of powerlessness in authority, the joy of deliverance, and the shortness of memory. It’s tremendous in every respect, as an invention sprung from fact, as a dramatic monologue, as a composition disordered by its own subject-matter. To offset its evil charms, I’ve tried reading it alongside Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale (1869) – as different a novel as one can imagine – only to find strange resonances. In both books the act of fascinated witness has a sort of immunising property, and Frédéric Moreau wandering the streets of the 1848 insurrection in Paris is uncannily similar to HF, Defoe’s narrator, making his way past plague victims screaming at their casements in London in 1665. In each description of chaos and disaster, the past tense is full of threat, because the past is where we’re all headed. I imagine scenarios for a film version of Journal and then watch the evening news: like Defoe, I’m inventing things that have already happened.
It would make a terrific, if unusual, film. The novel is a quasi-documentary of the last great visitation in this country, and it draws on a variety of reportorial (and sermonising) sources, including London’s Dreadful Visitation (1665), which supplied the statistics and bills of mortality, and Thomas Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1667), as well as a not-too-remote historical memory of the capital as it was when Defoe was a young child – London in all its working vitality and stupid luxury in the middle of the gay restoration. Producers would want to know: whose story is this? But that is the wrong question to ask. They tend to confuse narrative fluency with heroism, and the two have no necessary relation to each other. Main characters are a secondary consideration when your main character is an epidemic. Protagonists are swept away, and Defoe drives the point home: “It is not the stoutest courage that will support men in such cases.” The disaster tops the bill, so to speak, and like a villain or avenging angel, it doesn’t look so bad at first, beginning in Long Acre in December 1664, appearing sporadically, but confined to St Giles, Cripplegate and adjacent parishes, until early summer, then breaking out and surging east across the city and the suburbs before raging south and north, and onwards, with the remnants of trade and waves of refugees, to other cities in August and September, when thirty thousand died in three weeks alone.
Look at the YouTube posts of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. The wave is a trickle of water, an uninterpretable swell, until we see it up close at the last minute, smashing boats and houses with a kind of lazy insistence. In the same way, the key to getting a screen adaptation right would be to reproduce the novel’s air of delayed or haphazard suggestion, the filtered awareness of what’s really happening at which humans and governments, alike frightened for their survival, excel. No period bile, no endless suppuration, no Matthew McConaughey and his blinding teeth (again, not usefully heroic: rotten “teeth” killed 946 people in August and September, says Defoe). Much better to have people disappear in the night, as they do, and did; for the red cross to appear on the door and go unremarked. By day, people carry on, at least for a while: this is the British reserve in full muffled cry, and a proof of our natural tendency to exceptionalism. In one grimly funny scene, Defoe has a citizen boasting about the good health of his drinking companions, “upon which his neighbour said no more, being unwilling to surprise him”. (Defoe is not, as a friend put it, the most “huggable” of novelists.) Have the mayhem in long shot or parenthesis – the man who runs mad and naked into the Thames while others conduct business on the foreshore, the dead cart running down Aldgate with the driver in his seat but the reins fallen from his hands, a shop opening while the house next door is boarded up. Get it wrong, cast for charisma, and you end up with a seventeenth-century zombie movie, where survival becomes heroic, and we are once more at the predictable mercy of over-directed acts and motivations.
The presumption is still that stories should reassure us, and Defoe dismisses it. Yes, he holds the camera, but he keeps dropping it, because there are so many bodies in the way. Defoe wrote at speed (the book was finished in just over three weeks), and it contains contradictions, though they seem to embrace the predicament described. They’re confusions that belong to panic: there were always enough people to bury the bodies; there were no people left in some streets to bury the bodies; the plague didn’t reach the ships moored in the Thames; then again, it did. HF gives thanks to God, towards the end, when partial abatement brings people back into the light, but the homiletics are designedly unconvincing. Some things are so overwhelming they destroy our fixed beliefs. Surely what the Great Plague finally did, in a busy interconnected early-modern world, was to cremate faith in divine appointment of any sort. It fired up the engine of the Enlightenment. More powerful by far than HF’s thanksgiving is his italicised outburst as the citizens break their quarantine: “the best physic against the plague is to run away from it”. The implied scepticism about divine protection chimes with the author’s own vinegary Dissent but also gives an answer to the question that has bothered the narrator from the start, and which drives the whole story: “Should I stay, or should I go?”
His younger brother leaves London early on, and advises HF to do likewise. HF stays to protect his business and property – he’s a saddler – but trade packs up anyway, and he is left to make shaky memorandums of events, nervous forays across the river, brief appearances as an examiner of infected houses. The film, like the book, ought to be a caravan of episodes, made up of people going through the same horror in different ways. The route it follows circles back to the one central question. Some episodes are no more than quick, terrible visions. Once the houses begin to be shut up and watchmen appointed, the afflicted have no choice but to die where they are. Except that the sound are confined with the sick; torn between love and the love of life, they pre-empt the council men with the bloody paint, daub their own doors with crosses so that they will appear already to have been shut up, and then flee by night. But “whither should they fly”? Many of the afflicted wander abroad in a state of disinhibition, dancing in the streets, kissing strangers, or bringing infection with them to inns of refuge where the maid forgets to attend until the morning, finds a corpse, and then perishes herself.
Two other sequences, assuming the larger proportions of a play within a play, are fully elaborated responses to the governing dilemma. In the first, after two weeks of self-isolation, HF walks to the post-house to deliver a letter to his brother. He goes further, testing the bounds of liberty, and comes at last to the river’s edge, at Blackwall stairs, where he finds a waterman, whose wife and child are both ‘visited’, nearby, in a “very little, low-boarded house”. The waterman makes what money he can from tending to the rich merchants and their families on board the ships at anchor midstream, and rows as far as Greenwich, Woolwich and “farm houses on the Kentish side” to buy eggs and butter for his family. He leaves food and money on a stone at a safe distance from the house, and is waiting, now, as HF finds him, for his wife to emerge. She has a swelling, “and it is broke, and I hope she will recover; but I fear the child will die, but it is the Lord – ”. Good writers know when to rest the pen; actors and directors, when to stop moving. The masterly handling of this scene hasn’t much to do with the disease or the waterman’s plight. It is just the shocking fact of his name, of there being someone to call it, and of our being allowed to hear it, adrift on the tide of anonymising destruction: “At length, after some further talk, the poor woman opened the door and called, ‘Robert, Robert’.”
The second major episode, an unlikely Utopian experiment, or parable, could be extracted from the novel and adapted on its own. It concerns three impoverished but resourceful men – an ex-soldier turned biscuit maker, a lame seaman and sailmaker, and a joiner – and has its dramatic roots in the preceding cataclysm of the Civil War. The skill and cunning of servicemen abandoned by the ship of state are brought back to life. The men leave the city, by circuitous means, avoiding checkpoints, thinking carefully about what they can carry (they are but “three men, one tent, one horse, one gun”) and how to get provisions, when they are met by wary villagers on the outskirts of Walthamstow. By wrapping sticks in rags to look like muskets and building a series of widely-spaced fires in the tall grass, the soldier (John) persuades the villagers that they are a large company and extorts from them plenty of bread and beef. On coming to Epping, the ruse is reversed. This time, John says, far from being a desperate company, they are pious and few. They win over the locals and establish a self-sufficient commune. In a further reversal, the commune is so successful it attracts the Epping villagers themselves, some of whom are already sick with the plague, and so the mirage of sanctuary dissolves.
HF counsels flight, but flight is an illusion, Defoe says, because fear of the stranger cuts both ways – the people offering refuge are strange, too – and safety doesn’t lie at home, either. You can ask questions of the seeming well, but will you be satisfied with the answers, “if the arrow flies unseen, and cannot be discovered”? The position of the citizens is pitiable, insoluble, but not to be wondered at. Their condition is not bleakly illustrative, as it is for the characters in Albert Camus’ La Peste. (Like Defoe, Camus knows that lessons, philosophical or religious, tend to disappear inside the experience of catastrophe, but somehow, at the level of tone, the later writer finds them harder to resist.) Defoe’s victims are subject to the dramatic irony of history, of course: we know, as they do not, how the disease was spread. Most guesses about transmission in the novel are wrong, though not wildly so – carrier “insects” are briefly invoked at one point – and to feel that the characters act mistakenly, when they slaughter thousands of cats, the rats’ natural predators, is to side with superficial narrative resolution. In fact, the book is remarkably open-ended. A film would be free to imagine survivors who were more than lucky – people who sold onions or pepper, or made strong-smelling oils for apothecaries, or who pursued noisy occupations, all rodent deterrents – but it would have to come back to the eyeless zeal of the pathogen itself, from which point of view objective cause and cure are limited by their expression in human beings. Terrible things come to pass, and then pass away. This is a fact. Now: what are we to make of it?
First published in The Times Literary Supplement, May 15, 2020