In fact most Victorian novelists were perfectly capable of writing convincingly about sex, whether the subject is the Marquis of Steyne's assignations in Vanity Fair or the male prostitute who wanders into Trollope's The Prime Minister. Anyone who wants a brisk demonstration of what a Victorian novelist could do with sexual passion should start with the scene in Trollope's Phineas Finn where Lord Chiltern greets the news that Violet Effingham is prepared to marry him with a cry of "My God! She is my own!" while bounding across the carpet with such bull-like eagerness that Violet is half-terrified by the emotions she has aroused.All this is clearly prime operational territory for the novelist who follows a century or so in its wake. Suddenly the world is fall of "bran-new people", to use Dickens' description of the ghastly Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend, and the fictional consequences have been with us for a century and a half.Dimly visible beneath the ebb and flow of the average Victorian novel is a second, buried world whose representatives are occasionally let out into the first world with devastating results. Television dramatists who adapt Victorian classics for the small screen occasionally pronounce that it is their duty to lob in various bits of sex and seediness on the grounds that George Eliot, Thackeray and co would have done so themselves had they not been constrained by the Victorian censors. Socially, his and Thackeray's novels take place half-way up a metaphorical ant-heap, whose inhabitants are scurrying to make their way through a society where most of the barriers that previously worked against social advancement have either been removed or fallen away. Dickens' career, for instance, began in the era of the stage coach and ended in the age of the locomotive, taking in everything from parliamentary reform and scientific revolution along the way.
When writers stopped believing in God, their characters lost a dimension, became the "people in paper houses" of Graham Greene's essay on Mauriac, and no amount of post-modern trickery or stream-of-consciousness mongering has ever brought this environmental tethering back.The other great enticement of a novel like Vanity Fair or Dombey and Son - published side by side in the late 1840s - is the sense of a society in flux, a world taking shape almost too rapidly for the writers who are monitoring its convulsions to keep up. What is it that even now that gives Victorian fiction its tremendous psychological heft? Why is it that I would far rather sit down to a re-read of George Gissing's Born in Exile or Arthur Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets than the latest Salman Rushdie? Part of this is down to the immense solidity of character than Victorian novelists manage to bring to their cast, the sense of real people, rather than social constructs or representatives of a particular aesthetic theory busily at large in a world that, to quote Melville on Trollope, looks like a slice of England placed under glass, people - more to the point - who are confident of the foundations on which their lives are built. However familiar you happen to be with the seamier side of 19th-century life, the statistics for child prostitution and the incidence of venereal disease, it is impossible to drag open the door to the Victorian closet without a gust of Romanticism surging out: a kind of compound made up of fog-bound streets and gas-light, steam trains and Hansom cabs, tubercular faces and high, cracked voices echoing from attics where the sun never penetrates. It would be odd if this view of the age of Darwin, Florence Nightingale and Herbert Spencer weren't inextricably bound up in, if not actually created by, the Victorian novel. The people in it might sport billycock hats, carry parasols and wear impractical-looking dresses, but they are connected to us, if only by dint of appearing in photographs, in a way that the subjects of a Gainsborough portrait are not. Simultaneously, the world they inhabit is intriguingly remote, full of bright, exotic images: Gordon at Khartoum, Prince Albert's whiskers, the glass dome of the Crystal Palace exhibition, the line at Balaclava.
Here am I, for example, a hip young fortysomething, raised in the era of Sergeant Pepper and the Three Day Week, reaching out to embrace the tumult of the 21st century, and yet my grandfather, whose picture sits in the frame in my parents' dining room, fought in the Boer War. Viewed from the angle of the family album, consequently, the Victorian age turns suddenly sharp, hard and tangible. 'The Victorian tree," the antiquarian and ghost-story writer M R James once declared, "cannot but be expected to produce Victorian fruit." In making this point, James - who lived almost exactly half his life within the Victorian age and half outside it - was simply acknowledging his own cultural upbringing. In fact the Victorian tree has gone on producing bumper crops with a vigour that would have surprised even Mr Gladstone. More than a century after the Widow of Windsor's death, in the 64th year of her reign, we are still clustered on the margins of her curiously elongated shadow. As I left him, I was struck by the thought that Augusten Burroughs's life - for the very first time - is at exactly the place that he always dreamed it would be. But his furniture, at the time of writing, is out in the garden..
It's something I have never experienced before, and a stewardess tells me it's the first time that this has happened to her in her six years of flying. When I get to London there is an email from Burroughs who - possibly having forgotten to stroke the calf while I was with him - got home to discover that the water pipes in his new house had - to use his word - "exploded", soaking his sofas, rugs and chairs, and leaving the whole of the lower level in ruins.Which must have come as a particular shock because Burroughs had told me, in the restaurant, that his current existence was "real, solid and stable", and appeared finally to be free of the turbulence that has followed him like a curse. He has not entirely shaken off his own superstitions, and does say at one point that he visualises Jesus in the sky accompanied by a baby cow, which he feels he has to stroke in his imagination, to guarantee luck."I know you wrote about that as an idea," I say to him. "But do you actually do it?""Yes."After I leave him, in the late afternoon, I drive down to New York and board a plane which has to empty its fuel tanks in the Atlantic before making an emergency landing in Newfoundland. I still believe that, were he a villager in Southern Italy, Burroughs would be widely shunned as having the malocchio.
I am not proud of that."I think a lot of that spirit dates back to his drinking. Now, as he says, he has mastered the skills of survival."You mentioned a plane crash," he says. "If I was in a plane that was going down, I wouldn't sit there praying, or holding the hand of the person next to me. I would land the plane."He is understandably proud of his transition from obsessive-compulsive behaviour, as exemplified by his constant desire to boil money, to the tranquil existence he now leads in his spotless mansion on the hill. That said, when we drive back into Amherst to have lunch, I can't help noticing that he washes his hands both on leaving the house and on entering the restaurant: a sensible precaution I'm sure, but a reminder of the mad life he's left behind him. You tell her: 'Just because your husband is screwing your daughter at home is no reason to take it out on people at the office,' and then fantasise about willing her under the wheels of a bus.""Right.""Were you making that up?""No.""You said that to her.""Right.""And later, when she had an aneurysm and dropped dead, holding an armful of storyboards, you say: 'That's better than a bus.'""It's awful, I know I do have a cruel streak. But in New York City, there is no difference."You could trace this school of writing back through Thomas De Quincy who, in his essay titled "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts", argued that a fire which allows itself to be extinguished should be hissed, like "any other performer that arouses public expectations which it later disappoints".But there are moments in Burroughs that go beyond satire, and enter the realm of real spite."There is an episode in Magical Thinking where you recall an argument with a woman advertising colleague in Chicago.