THE life of Charles Dickens is a rich and stirring story, which has in it all the elements suggested by the term “Dickensian,” and a hero who is more interestingly complex than any of his own fictional creations. The latest Dickens biography — Edgar Johnson’s two-volume Charles Dickens (Simon & Schuster, $10.00) — is, to the best of my knowledge, the completest ever written. The author has studied a great quantity of documents not available to or not explored by previous biographers; and his meticulously documented narrative clarifies passages in Dickens’s life about which there has been heated controversy, most notably the tragedy of Dickens’s marriage and his liaison with the young actress, Ellen Ternan.

The picture which Mr. Johnson gives us of Dickens’s personality — enormously exuberant yet prone to moods of darkness; friendly, kindhearted, and a great liberal in spirit, but also demanding, quarrelsome, and dictatorial — is the fullest and the most convincing I have encountered. Besides being a model of scholarly thoroughness, the biographical chapters are vivid and engrossing reading. The critical discussion is distinctly less impressive.

It is probably true that derogatory criticism has blurred the modern reader’s sense of Dickens’s true greatness; but two of Mr. Johnson’s main lines of counterattack do not seem to me particularly persuasive. His leitmotif is Dickens’s penetration and scope as a critic of society; and he argues that, from Bleak House onward, Dickens is a “revolutionist” who attacks “the very root-assumptions of the social order” of his day. A similar thesis was advanced by Marxist critics in the thirties, and the flaws in it have, to my mind, been tellingly shown up in George Orwell’s Dickens, Dali and Others. It is significant, surely, that Dickens’s novels did not appreciably antagonize his upper-class English public. He was an embattled reformer, but his social criticism (as Johnson notes) remains primarily moral — its principal target is human nature. Even in Hard Times, the message is that the top dogs should be kind, not the underdogs rebellious. What is notable in Dickens’s outlook is not an acute insight into political and economic ills, but a shining generosity of spirit.

Another contention of Mr. Johnson’s is that Dickens’s failings as an artist have been somewhat exaggerated— that, for instance, his sentimentality is more “natural” than our contemporary fear of sentiment. This may be so, but for all that Dickens remains, par excellence, a case of the genius whose art has major limitations— he is seldom impressive when he treats the mature emotions; when he wishes to be serious, he is more often melodramatic than dramatic. Where Mr. Johnson’s critical chapters are completely successful— and this is an important achievement—is in revitalizing our awareness of the riches that Dickens’s fiction has to offer: its memorable characters and their memorable sayings; its laughter, its genuine pathos, and its matchless vitality.

Dickens and Ellen Ternan (University of California Press, $2.75) by Ada Nisbet reinforces Mr. Johnson’s evidence that Ellen Ternan eventually became Dickens’s mistress. This crisp, intriguing little book surveys the whole history of the DickensTernan relationship; and it reproduces for the first time, from Dickens’s letters, obliterated passages referring to Ellen Ternan which have now been transcribed by means of infrared photography.

I cannot recall, offhand, a biography which I have read with such a mixture of annoyance and interest as Michelangelo, His Life and His Era (Dutton, $10.00) by Giovanni Papini, whose Life of Christ was once a huge best seller. The main item on the credit side is that Signor Papini has been enormously industrious in his research: in the case of Michelangelo, about whom there is much that is known only sketchily, the more data a biographer presents the better. Papini devotes special attention to the people, celebrated or obscure, who played any part in Michelangelo’s life; and his dozens of portraits help to make his book a bustling panorama of the Cinquecento. So richly detailed a study of a titanic creator, his work, and his tumultuous times cannot help being highly absorbing.

Having made this acknowledgment, it is my grim pleasure to add that Papini seems to me an infuriating biographer. His prose is inflated, cliché-ridden, and bespattered with silly statements presented as portentous thoughts. He has a repulsive habit of boasting, “I am the first biographer to. ...” He unfailingly defends Michelangelo and strains to show him in the most favorable possible light; and he stupidly depreciates Buonarroti’s great artistic rivals, including Leonardo da Vinci. To compound these felonies, he contradicts himself about his subject’s personality. He starts out by rejecting the conventional portrait of the morose giant only to give us a portrait of a giant who was often exceedingly morose.

Annapurna (Dutton, $5.00) by Maurice Herzog — leader of the French Himalayan expedition of 1950 — is an account of the conquest of the highest mountain ever climbed: a peak of 26,493 feet in Nepal. Mountaineering in the Himalayas is a race against time, since the climbing season lasts less than two months: a great Himalayan climber concluded some years back that no expedition could scale any of the twelve highest peaks at the first attempt. Herzog’s party achieved this, without loss of life — and under a terrific handicap. Their objective was Dhaulagiri, which proved inaccessible, and two precious weeks were lost before they turned to Annapurna.

Their first problem was to find Annapurna — its approaches were uncharted. By the time the mountain was discovered and an advance party had detected a promising route to the summit, the monsoon was only twelve days distant. The reconnaissance was swiftly transformed into an assault. Six climbers and their brave Serpas (Nepalese mountaineers) battled with the upper reaches of the mountain, striking camps up to 23,500 feet. On June 3, Herzog and one companion reached the summit.

On the descent, disaster set in — an avalanche, frostbite, snow-blindness, delirium. It is impossible to conceive how Herzog, with his terribly injured hands and feet, negotiated the perpendicular walls of ice; or how later the Serpas managed to carry him down precipitous rock faces. For Herzog the worst ordeal was the long journey back, on a sledge, over rugged paths drenched by torrential rains — a nightmare of unceasing pain. He was still in the hospital a year after the expedition.

Herzog, who has never before turned his hand to writing, has told his story simply, with understatement and with extreme modesty. Unfortunately, he lacks the skill to re-create, as vividly and dramatically as one would wish, what is surely one of the great adventures of our time. Just how awesome the difficulties and dangers were is often left to the reader’s imagination. Even so, the book is vastly stirring once the assault on Annapurna has been launched.

Graham Greene was an obscure name when his England Made Me — now reissued as The Shipwrecked (Viking, $3.00) — first appeared in this country; and a masterly short novel went almost unnoticed. It does not, like Greene’s later work, have a religious theme. But for sheer literary effectiveness, it compares favorably with his more ambitious novels; and it has some of that fine atmosphere of cosmopolitan intrigue that you find in Greene’s incomparable thrillers.

The new title is apposite, for The Shipwrecked, whose setting is Stockholm, has to do with people who are clinging to rafts that will never carry them to shore — clinging to an illusion or an obsession or a loyalty that will bring them no reward. Anthony Farrant is an attractive English adventurer who has drifted jauntily from failure to failure, committed to the notion that something big will come his way. His firm-willed sister Kate, the mistress of a self-made Swedish tycoon, has for years had a single goal in life: to find a way to keep her beloved brother by her side. The tycoon, Krogh — now engaged in dangerous manipulations to defend his vast empire—has devoted all of himself to success; away from his desk he is a sorry figure, a total stranger to enjoyment.

In the secondary characters, Greene gives us a portrayal of seediness done in brush strokes as expressive as Eliot’s “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.” There is a decayed Swedish teacher of languages, learnedly gaga, whose dream is to produce Shakespeare’s Pericles in his own translation. There is Krogh’s English trouble-shooter, who carries with him the aura of the third-class railway carriage and of the peroxide tart. Above all, there is Monty, shabby and spiteful, whose panache is that he is an Old Harrovian and who lives by grubbing after scraps of news —a figure of ineffable crumbiness.

Few novelists believe less in the possibility of human happiness than Graham Greene. But he has a talent for treating defeat without drabness — with passion and wry humor.

Though he has achieved a considerable reputation in England, Anthony Powell — two of whose novels are now offered us in a single volume, Vennsberg and Agents and Patients (Periscope-Holliday, $4.00) — is as yet virtually unknown to American readers. Both novels are light social comedies somewhat similar to, and contemporaries of, the early books of Evelyn Waugh. Their edge has not been appreciably blunted by the passage of time. I found them the choicest entertainments that have come my way for many months; and those readers who relish the comic side of Waugh will enjoy Mr. Powell. Underlying Powell’s opéra bouffe plots and general invitation to hilarity, there is a serious scrutiny of human weakness — a scrutiny which is trenchant but humane.

The plot of Venusberg takes a British journalist to a Baltic country where the Communists are blowing up things, and it involves him in a love affair with the young wife of an absurd savant. In Agents and Patients, an exceedingly dim, resourceless young man with a large unearned income puts himself in the hands of two plausible spongers who undertake to brighten up his life, the one by psychoanalyzing him, the other by allowing him to finance an experimental movie. In both books, I was entranced by the abundance of richly comic characters, the succession of wildly funny situations, and the sustained humor of Mr. Powell’s astringent prose.