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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

A Cup of Tea

December 23, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Cup of Tea was written on 11 January 1922 in the space of just ‘4-5 hours’ and was published in a popular magazine the Story-teller in May of the same year. It then appeared in the collection The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories compiled by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry and published in 1923.

A Cup of Tea


A Cup of Tea – critical commentary

The ostensible point of the story is that a rich and self-regarding woman has her complacency disturbed. On a whim, she makes what she thinks of as a charitable gesture to a destitute lower-class girl, only to discover (via her husband) that the girl has qualities that she herself does not possess.

However, there is another reading of the story buried subtly in the narrative and its dialogue. Rosemary is a rich and spoiled woman with a self-indulgent lifestyle who feels that her sudden encounter with a girl off the streets could be ‘an adventure … like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky’ – which in a sense that Rosemary would not understand, it does turn out to be.

She takes the girl back home, ushers her into her private bedroom, and undresses her (in the sense of taking off her hat and coat). She has the intention of leading her into another room for tea but does not do so. When the girl begins to cry, she puts her arm around the girl’s ‘thin, bird-like shoulders’ and promises to look after her.

When Rosemary’s husband Philip interrupts, the young girl gives what is clearly a false name (‘Smith’) and is strangely unfazed by the situation in which she finds herself: she is ‘strangely still and unafraid’. Rosemary describes their encounter in terms of procurement: ‘I picked her up in Curzon Street. She’s a real pick-up’.

Philip, the husband, is shocked by two things – first, by how attractive the girl is, and second by the inappropriate relationship that exists between the two women. He asks satirically if ‘Miss Smith’ will be dining with them, in which case he might be forced to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.

The surface implication of this remark is that the girl might be an unemployed shop girl who is sponging off his wealthy wife, but at a deeper level there is a suggestion that she might be a prostitute of some kind. At that time in the early twentieth century, the employment of single females in occupations such as milliner (hat maker) shop assistant, and other forms of casual jobs was regarded as loosely equivalent to prostitution. This suggestion in the story is reinforced by what happens next. Rosemary pays off the girl with three pound notes and sends her on her way.

The sting in the tale for Rosemary is that she wonders if she, for all the wealth and luxury in her life, lacks the animal magnetism possessed by the lower-class young girl which has left her husband Philip ‘bowled over’ after a single glance.

Narrative voice

The literary quality in the story comes largely from the skillful manner in which Mansfield creates a fluid narrative voice which combines an engagement with her subject, her readers, and even (to some extent) with herself as an identifiable narrator.

Technically, the story starts in third person narrative mode: ‘Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful’ – but that ‘not exactly’ establishes a conversational style and an attitude to the character. She raises questions, cancels thoughts (‘No, not Peter—Michael’) employs slang (‘a duck of a boy’) and speaks to an imaginary interlocutor (‘she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street’).

It is also interesting to note that her use of fashionable exaggeration is remarkably similar to that being used today – almost a hundred years later: (‘her husband absolutely adored her … the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her’). This captures perfectly the speech mannerisms and the attitudes of the nouveau riche milieu in which the story is set.


A Cup of Tea – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US


A Cup of Tea – plot summary

Rosemary Fell is a socially poised young woman who has been married for two years to a rich and devoted husband. She shops in the fashionable and expensive part of the West-End in London. An ingratiating antiques dealer shows her a small enamelled box which she covets but asks to be put by for her.

Coming out of the shop into the rain, she is accosted by a poor young woman who asks for the price of a cup of tea. Rosemary sees the incident as a potential adventure and invites the girl back home.

When they reach the house Rosemary takes the girl into her bedroom and relieves her of her hat and coat. The girl breaks down in tears and says she cannot go on any longer.

Rosemary gives the girl tea and sandwiches, whilst she herself smokes cigarettes. This relieves the girl, and they are about to start a conversation when they are interrupted by the arrival of Rosemary’s husband Philip.

Philip takes Rosemary into an adjoining room and asks her what is going on. She explains that she is merely trying to be kind to a poor girl. But Philip points out that the girl is remarkably pretty, but the relationship not desirable.

Rosemary gives the girl some money, and she leaves, after which Rosemary asks her husband if she can have the enamel box she has seen – but what she really wants to know from him is if she is pretty or not.

Katherine Mansfield


Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Filed Under: Katherine Mansfield Tagged With: English literature, Katherine Mansfield, Literary studies, The Short Story

A Handful of Dust

February 23, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, and further reading

A Handful of Dust (1934) was Evelyn Waugh’s fourth novel. It was very well received on first publication, and he followed it up with similar acerbic satires such as Scoop (1938) and Put Out More Flags (1942). After the war his novels became more serious. Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-1961) explore similar themes in a more sober fashion, though there are still brilliant flashes of humour in all his work.

A Handful of Dust


A Handful of Dust – critical commentary

Social decline

Evelyn Waugh’s essential subject matter is the study of upper-class decline and its causes. He is powerfully attracted to a nostalgic view of traditional aristocratic life in grand country houses and estates, together with all their culture of inherited wealth and property. This includes the architecture of previous centuries, and the social life of weekend parties, plentiful servants, and an existence divided between London and a house in the country.

But he knew it was a social system that was coming to an end. It was a privileged economy which could not be sustained. And he knew that the principal characters caught up in this decline were conspiring in their own downfall – by over-indulgence, wilful excess, and moral blindness to the changing world in which they lived.

The middle class characters in his novels are largely endeavouring to claw their way into this decadent echelon, and their tastes and habits are generally presented as inferior, awkward, and doomed to failure. The lower orders hardly feature at all, except as occasional servants. Waugh does not have a simplistic hope that any working class people are going to be the saviours of this decline.

Humour

Waugh’s early novels were once regarded as the last thing in barbed humour and rib-tickling satire. They don’t seem quite so humorously pointed now, but there remain traces of comic characterisation, and he does have the distinction of introducing an element of black comedy into the modern novel.

Mrs Beaver’s greed and relentless opportunism are funny because they are linked to the main theme of downward social mobility. She has come from the upper echelons of society but has fallen on hard times as a widow with a socially useless son. She lives in Sussex Gardens – then a downmarket region of Bayswater- but she misses no opportunity to sell people what we would now call fashionable junk or tat from her shop

She has also devised the entrepreneurial scheme of splitting up houses into smaller flats to rent. Her clients are people who have dubious purposes, as does Brenda, and those who are downwardly socially mobile such as ‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar. Mrs Beaver simultaneously promotes her services to these people as a so-called interior designer.

She also embodies all that Waugh finds offensive in modernism and a lack of sensitivity to tradition. In the middle of the novel she is converting one of the rooms in Tony Last’s old Tudor home Hetton Abbey by lining the walls with chromium plate.

It is interesting that Waugh sees the issue of social decline in architectural terms – from the draughty grandeur of Hetton Abbey to these ‘service flats’ carved out of the Victorian splendour of London’s Belgravia.

Another marvellously comic character is Mr Tendril the local preacher at Hetton. He is a hopelessly indurate creation who goes on preaching sermons he has written years before for troops in British expeditionary wars in India. His speeches contain references to the pitiless sun, threats from tigers, and loved ones back at home – when he is addressing a congregation in what seems to be rural Warwickshire.

How difficult it is for us to realise that this is indeed Chhristmas. Instead of the glowing log fire and widows tight shuttered against the drifting snow, we have only the harsh glare of an alien sun; instead of the happy circle of loved faces, of home and family, we have the uncomprehending stares of the subjugated, though no doubt grateful, heathen. Instead of the placid ox and ass of Bethlehem, we have for companions the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant.

And of course the most memorable scene in this novel is the black comedy of Mr Todd forcing Tony to read the works of Charles Dickens. The mad settler Todd cannot read himself, but enjoys their entertainment value, and uses that as an excuse to keep Tony prisoner.

The two endings

There is interpretive difficulty and even a possible dilemma concerning the end to A Handful of Dust. This is not surprising, because Waugh wrote the most reprinted version of the conclusion before he wrote the novel. On a visit to South America in 1933, whilst he was stranded in Boa Vista (‘Good View’) in northern Brazil, Waugh spent his time writing a story called The Man Who Liked Dickens, based on an eccentric character he had met. The story was published in Hearst’s International in the United States and reprinted in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine in the UK.

It was ten months later before he began work on what was to become A Handful of Dust – and he did not have any clear plan for how it was to end. This problem of two endings was created because the novel was issued as a serial in America as well as a stand-alone one-volume publication in England. His story The Man Who Liked Dickens had already been published in America, so Waugh produced the alternative ending for serial publication.

The two endings are completely different, and they also create quite different meanings for the novel as a whole. Tony’s imprisonment by the quasi-madman Mr Todd is the more dramatic, and the more frequently reprinted. It continues the theme of downward social mobility that Waugh had explored earlier in Decline and Fall (1928) and it takes it to a new extreme.

Tony is the upholder of traditional aristocratic values and he cherishes the house and the country estate he has inherited. But he is betrayed by his adulterous wife, and when he seeks solace in foreign travel, he encounters only misery, discomfort, and finally a sort of living death. Mr Todd’s final thwarting of Tony’s hopes for rescue is truly black humour at its most grim. Tony’s relatives inherit Hetton Abbey, his wife marries one of his friends, and his existence is reduced to a memorial plaque in the chapel.

The problem with this ending is that there is an abrupt shift in tone, mise en scene, subject matter, and geographic location between the first three-quarters of the novel and its conclusion. The principal events and characters have been established at Hetton Abbey and in fashionable London. The sudden switch to an equatorial jungle and deranged explorers such as Doctor Messinger and Mr Todd is too much. It disrupts the coherence of the narrative. Waugh’s friend the novelist Henry Yorke wrote to him: “the end is so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion”.

The serial version of the ending is far more logical and coherent – but it is much shorter, not so dramatic, and it is not funny. In the alternative ending Tony merely returns from what has been a therapeutic cruise, and he ruefully drifts into a reconciliation with Brenda. It is a downbeat, not a catastrophic ending to events.

The setting, the characters, and the subject matter remain the same, as does the tone of the narrative. But there are important ramifications to this version of the novel’s conclusion. Tony returns to his estate as its living inheritor. He has also commissioned renovations to Hetton Abbey during his absence on the Caribbean cruise – and these works reverse the absurd ‘improvements’ Brenda has made at the suggestion of Mrs Beaver (the chromium-plated walls). Moreover, Tony secretly retains ownership of the flat in Belgravia, and he lies to Brenda about having got rid of it.

This alternative ending leaves Tony a little bruised, but intact. He has lost nothing – except his son – and Brenda is pregnant again. Hetton Abbey will have its new bathrooms, and he obviously has plans for a little ‘private life’ in the Belgravia flat. This is altogether a different ending – which in turn creates a different novel. It forces the reader to regard the preceding events in a more light-hearted manner. What was previously a downhill plunge into disaster and destruction suddenly becomes no more than a series of minor comic setbacks from which the protagonist emerges unscathed.


A Handful of Dust – study resources

A Handful of Dust – Penguin – Amazon UK

A Handful of Dust – Penguin – Amazon US

A Handful of Dust – Study Guide – Paperback – Amazon UK

A Handful of Dust – DVD film – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb


A Handful of Dust – plot summary

Chapter One — John Beaver lives with his mother in the unfashionable district of Bayswater in reduced circumstances. She has an antiques shop: he is twenty-five, unpopular, and has no occupation.

Chapter Two — Tony Last and his wife Brenda live at Hetton Abbey – a cold Gothic country house. John Beaver arrives for the weekend as their largely uninvited guest. Everyone feels uncomfortable, but Brenda tries to be hospitable to Beaver.

Brenda thinks to have a pied-a-terre for her trips into London, and Mrs Beaver can supply rooms in Belgravia. John Beaver takes Brenda to dinner and they make the opening moves of a flirtation.

Their relationship develops into an adulterous affair, and it becomes the subject of social gossip in London, even though people wonder what she sees in him. Brenda moves into the flat then announces to her husband that she is going to take up some sort of study courses.

Chapter Three — Tony and Jock Grant-Menzies get drunk at their club and threaten to call on Brenda, who is at the flat with Beaver. They go to a nightclub instead. Brenda stays at the flat during the week and only goes home at weekends. She hopes to distract her husband with her pushy neighbour ‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar, but Tony does not like her. Jock brings to Hetton his ‘shameless blonde’ friend Mrs Rattery, who arrives by aeroplane.

There is a hunt meeting at which young John Last is killed by a frightened horse. Brenda is brought back from London, but she feels it is all over for her with Tony, and she asks him for a divorce.

Chapter Four — Tony arranges to take a prostitute from the nightclub to Brighton for the weekend to provide evidence for a divorce. Milly the prostitute insists on bringing her awkward young daughter along. Brenda’s family reveal that Beaver will not marry her unless she receives a large settlement as alimony. This means Tony would be forced to sell his house, so instead he refuses to proceed with the divorce.

Chapter Five — Tony embarks on an expedition to South America with the very dubious Doctor Messinger in search of a ‘lost city’. En route via the West Indies he has a brief on-board flirtation with an eighteen year old girl. When he reaches the jungle he is tormented by insect bites and thinks wistfully of home. Native bearers desert the expedition, so Tony and Messinger are stranded. Messinger is clearly lost and incompetent. Tony catches a fever and becomes delirious. Messinger goes to seek help, but he drowns in river rapids.

Meanwhile back in London John Beaver and Brenda cannot move on because there has been no divorce. His mother, sensing that the marriage might not happen, plans to take him to America. Brenda tries to get money from the family solicitor, but Tony has tied up their finances to restore Hetton – and he has made a new will.

Chapter Six — Tony is rescued and cured by an eccentric settler Mr Todd, who forces him to read aloud the works of Charles Dickens. As the months go by Todd thwarts Tony’s attempts to leave the jungle. A previous prisoner tried to escape, but died at the encampment. When a passing traveller calls, Tony secretly gives him a note begging for help. But some time later, when Tony is unconscious for two days from the effects of a local drink, rescuers arrive from Europe. Mr Todd gives them Tony’s watch, shows them a cross on a grave, and sends them away.

Chapter Seven — Hetton is inherited and taken over by Tony’s cousin Richard Last and his family. Brenda marries Jock Grant-Menzies. A commemorative plaque is unveiled in the Hetton chapel to record Tony’s death as an ‘explorer’.

The alternative ending — Tony returns from a sea cruise in the West Indies and is met by Brenda, who has been ditched by John Beaver. They re-unite faux de mieux, Tony returns to Hetton Abbey, and he secretly takes over Brenda’s flat in Belgravia.


A Handful of Dust – principal characters
Mrs Beaver an aggressively commercial antique shop owner
John Beaver her lacklustre and talentless son
Tony Last the owner of Hetton Abbey and estate
Brenda Last Tony’s adulterous wife
John Andrew Last their young son
Marjorie Brenda’s sister
Jock Grant-Menzies Tony’s friend
‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar Brenda’s next door neighbour in Belgravia
Mrs Rafferty the ‘shameless blonde’, an aviatrix
The Revered Tendril the eccentric vicar attached to Hetton
Mr Todd a mad explorer and settler
Doctor Messinger an incompetent explorer

© Roy Johnson 2018


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A Hunger Artist and Other Stories

April 14, 2012 by Roy Johnson

short stories by a master of modernism

A Hunger Artist is a collection of short fictions by one of the most remarkable writers of the early twentieth century. Franz Kafka was a completely original writer. He’s classified as a novelist and writer of short stories, and yet most of his novels were not finished, and many of his short works don’t have normal characters or recognisable stories. Many of them are not continuous, logical narratives that we expect in work classified as fiction. Much of his writing is closer to being philosophic meditations or the exploration of bizarre images and metaphors. Yet such is the power of his symbol-making and his imagination that there is really nowhere else for him to be categorised.

A Hunger ArtistSome of his stories are as short as one-sentence aphorisms or the exploration of curious metaphors, striking images, and parables that present one idea in the guise of another. In one story a man is a bridge, stretched across a chasm, terrified of the responsibility he bears. In another a man spends his entire life at a gateway, pleading to be admitted to the Law. On the point of his death he asks the gatekeeper why nobody else has ever requested entry. The gatekeeper tells him “Nobody else could be granted entry for this entrance was meant only for you. I shall now go and close it.”

Kafka was a writer of great contradictions: the semi-mystical believer who doubted everything; the prudish sceptic of personal relationships who consorted with prostitutes; the neurasthenic who was devoted to sunbathing and swimming; the self-denying ascetic who was described by one of his friends as ‘the best-dressed man I have ever known’.

He wrote a great deal about animals, birds, insects, and rodents which nevertheless have human thought processes. In one of his most famous stories The Metamorphosis a young travelling salesman wakes up to find that he has changed into a giant insect. Another story features the effect on a small village when it is visited by a giant mole. In The New Advocate a horse is appointed as a lawyer, and A Report to an Academy is the transcript of a lecture in which the speaker describes his former life as an ape.

All the now-familiar elements of Kafka’s world are tried out in these stories, parables, and fragments – the inaccessible palace or castle, the closed gate, incomprehensible foreigners, the remote unknowable figure of Authority, and the unspecified menace from without. The essence of a Kafka story is often an inexplicable mystery, a paradox, or a vague un-named threat. He establishes a situation then immediately undermines it by introducing the opposite or a contradiction

It was a beautiful day and K. intended to go for a stroll. But he had scarcely taken two steps before he was already in the graveyard.

In fact K. finds that he is a witness to his own burial. A story such as The Burrow combines the animal motif with a study in paranoia when an unspecified rodent describes the building of a giant network of tunnels against some un-named exterior threat. But the construction is eventually so elaborate that maintaining it becomes a threat in itself.

This collection is made up of some of his earliest and his last published works – from the almost journalistic Aeroplanes at Brescia (1909) to Josephine, the Singer or The Mouse People (1924) completed the year of his death. It also contains some of his most famous and anthologised stories – Investigations of a Dog, The Burrow, Before the Law, and The Great Wall of China.

This volume makes an excellent starting point for anyone who has not tackled Kafka before. The translations in these new Oxford University Press editions are recently commissioned, and the texts come with an extensive critical apparatus of introductory essay, explanatory notes, biographical details, and lists of further reading.

A Hunger Artist Buy the book at Amazon UK

A Hunger Artist Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, trans. Joyce Crick, 2012, pp.218, ISBN: 0199600929


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A Life

April 8, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

A Life (Una vita) was the first novel written by Italo Svevo, and like all his other works it was published at his own expense. He wrote it in 1888 and originally gave it the title Un inetto (A Bungler). Svevo submitted his manuscript to the publishing house Treves, where it was turned down. Eventually it was accepted by Vram and published in 1892, with the stipulation that the title be changed and Svevo pay for the printing. Once published, it was completely ignored. Not until twenty years later did Svevo find any degree of literary success, following the support and encouragement of his English language teacher, the young James Joyce, who was living in exile in Trieste at the time.

A Life

Italo Svevo


A Life – critical commentary

Setting

Although it is not explicitly named in the text, there is no reason for thinking that the location of events is anywhere other than Trieste. Svevo set all his major novels in his native city. Characters go for walks along the Corso; the city is located on the sea; and the bank of Maller & Company has commercial relationships with Italy, Germany, and France – all of which were close geographic and political connections with Trieste, the fourth largest city of the Hapsburg Empire and its only Mediterranean sea port in the late nineteenth century.

The main theme

As its original title implies (Un inetto – An Inept One) the novel is a study in social alienation and personal failure. Alfonso is in one sense a precursor of the modern and existential anti-hero. He acts from the best motives and strives for honourable and spiritually elevated relationships with those around him, but he is defeated by petty bureaucracy on one hand and his own emotional weakness on the other.

Svevo repeatedly dwells on the ironic twists of fate that beset his protagonist. At the start of the novel Alfonso feels that he is not well regarded in his lowly position of correspondence clerk, yet his boss and head of the bank Signor Maller specifically assures him that he respects his work, and proves it by inviting him to his home.

This gives Alfonso the opportunity to meet Annetta, the attractive daughter of his boss – yet it is significant that having socially recognised Alfonso with an invitation to his own house, Signor Maller absents himself on the occasion of his visit, and Alfonso is left to the frosty reception provided by Annetta and the housekeeper Francesca (who is also Maller’s ex-mistress).

Alfonso is in an ambiguous position in terms of social position – from a lower middle-class family, with enough education to escape his rural native village and to secure a clerk’s job in the city, but not enough status or capital to mix easily with those he sees as his peers. He inherits money from the sale of his family home following the death of his mother – but he improvidently sells it for below its market value. He is yearning ambitiously for connections that are socially beyond his means. His relationship with his boss’s daughter Annetta only exposes him to suspicions of fortune hunting, as well as being emotionally calamitous.

He is noble and self-sacrificing in nursing his dying mother , and with his inheritance he provides a dowry for the unlovely daughter of his landlady – only to have his generosity misunderstood and even held against him.

Alfonso is similar to one of Kafka’s characters – Franz Kafka being a writer who Svevo clearly prefigures. Alfonso’s plight would be one of comic misunderstanding if it were not so painful and ultimately tragic. The scene where his feckless landlord Lanucci tries to sell him a personal insurance policy he neither needs nor can afford is like a passage from another tragedian of the comic grotesque – Samuel Beckett.

Pre post-modernism

There are elements of post-modern meta-fiction in the text. Annetta suggests writing a novel collaboratively with a plot which is Alfonso’s own story of a provincial boy who falls in love with a rich woman. This is also the plot of Una vita in which they are both characters. This theme is not explored or developed any further, since once Alfonso returns to his native village and his dying mother, the subjects of his literary collaboration and his relationship with Annetta are both abandoned.

Tightness of structure is not one of Svevo’s strong points as a novelist. He follows the day to day events of Alfonso’s life in an almost naturalistic manner, which renders the account tedious. Apart from the slow-moving development of Alfonso’s relationship with Annetta, there is a noticeable absence of any narrative tension or drama. Instead, the narrative comprises a detailed account of the minutiae of psychological processes – the relentless analysis of people’s conversations, their possible and actual motivations, and the cataloguing of trivial events. Svevo’s interest seems to be mainly in the shifting, contradictory, and sometimes paradoxical nature of human consciousness – something he was to explore in even further detail in Confessions of Zeno (1925).

The only evidence of formal structure to the novel is the fact that it begins and ends with two letters. The first is from Alfonso to his mother expressing his homesickness, and the second is from the bank to the family solicitor disclaiming any financial responsibility following Alfonso’s suicide.


A Life – study resources

A Life A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

A Life A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

A Life As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

A Life As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

A Life Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Life Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Life Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

A Life Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

A Life Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

A Life Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US


A Life – chapter summaries

1   Alfonso Nitti writes a letter to his mother back home in the countryside. He is poor, homesick, and feels inferior in his work at the bank.

2   The clerks at Maller and Company are kept late copying letters. Signor Maller knows that Alfonso has written home complaining and reassures him that he is well regarded. Alfonso has ambitions, but they are daydreams.

3   Alfonso lodges with the impoverished Lanucci family. Signor Lanucci gauchely tries to sell Alfonso life insurance that he cannot afford and does not need.

4   Alfonso is invited to Signor Maller’s house. He is impressed by his boss’s wealth, but Signor Maller leaves him with his housekeeper Francesca and daughter Annetta, who treats him very rudely. Annetta’s cousin Macario later explains that she is snobbishly disdainful towards her father’s employees.

5   Alfonso and his work colleagues are trapped in a routine of petty rivalries and bureaucratic divisions of responsibility – as a result of which Alfonso receives a promotion.

6   Alfonso finds his new work very demanding. To relieve his sense of alienation he takes up the study of philosophy and criticism.

7   Driven by romantic desire, Alfonso takes to following women in the street – but he is too timid to make any serious contact with any of them. He gives lessons in Italian grammar to Lucia Lanucci, but she is not a good student. They quarrel, and Alfonso believes Signora Lanucci is trying to snare him into a relationship with her daughter.

8   Alfonso falls ill and takes up walking every day as a cure. He also launches an ambition to write a philosophic thesis, but gets nowhere with it. He meets Macario in the library: they discuss literature and both read Balzac’s Louis Lamberrt.

9   Alfonso pays a second visit to the Maller family home, where he finds Annetta very friendly and encouraging. But Francesca is rather distant with him.

10   Francesca asks Alfonso’s mother for a room in her house, but Signor Maller countermands this request. Alfonso decides he is in love with Annetta, but when he attends her Wednesday salon he feels no desire for her.

11   When Alfonso visits Annetta on his own, she has the idea of writing a novel in collaboration, and she suggests a plot which is exactly Alfonso’s own story. They describe to each other ‘previous works’ that they haven’t actually written. But Alfonso doesn’t know how to begin writing.

12   They collaborate enthusiastically, but Annetta asks Alfonso to re-write his drafts because she claims they are dull. Writing the novel becomes as burdensome to him as working at the bank, but he suppresses his criticisms of the novel because of his rapture for Annetta. He discovers that Fumigi is also in love with Annetta and has plans to marry her. Annetta turns down Fumigi’s offer, but she reproaches Alfonso for compromising her social reputation. Fumigi later appears in an agitated state, which Prarchi diagnoses as incipient paralysis.

13   The Lanucci family become further impoverished. Alfonso is encouraged to bring friends home to pay court to Lucia. Finally, the printer Mario Gralli is prepared to marry her.

14   Francesca advises Alfonso to win Annetta by feigning coldness, but he finds it very difficult. They start work on the novel again, and eventually they spend a night together and become lovers.

15   The next day Alfonso feels disappointed. Annetta is going to tell her father, and advises Alfonso to leave Trieste for a while, before the marriage. Francesca advises him not to leave. Next day he is given a fortnight’s leave from the bank.

16   When Alfonso returns to his native village he discovers that his mother is dying. He feels ashamed of his dalliance with Annetta. A letter from Francesca tells him that all will be lost unless he returns, but the bank grant him an additional two weeks’ leave. He nurses his mother through to her death, then he himself gets typhoid fever. He sells the house for much less than its value, and returns to Trieste.

17   On return he learns that Annetta is now engaged to marry Macario, and Lucia has been jilted by Gralli. He is received in a cool manner at the bank, and the Lanucci family is beset by anxieties following Lucia’s problems.

18   Alfonso works hard at the bank and eventually finds some satisfaction from his job. There are rivalries over the appointment of a branch manager for the Venice office. Alfonso preaches stoicism to Lucia but cannot suppress the jealousy aroused by his rival Macario.

19   Lucia has been made pregnant by Gralli, who refuses to marry her. Alfonso offers to pay Lucia’s dowry, and Gralli changes his mind. The Lanucci family are reluctantly grateful, but Lucia does not love Gralli, so Alfonso’s generous gesture is wasted.

20   The bank clerks are given their annual bonuses, but Alfonso is demoted to the counting room. He protests to Maller, but to no effect. Feeling unjustly persecuted, he appeals to Annetta for a meeting. However, at the appointed hour Annetta’s brother appears and challenges him to a duel. Alfonso goes home and commits suicide.


A Life – principal characters
Alfonso Nitti a bank correspondence clerk (22)
Signora Carolina Nitti his widowed mother
Maller & Co the bank where Alfonso works
Signor Maller his austere boss
Annetta Maller his attractive daughter
Frederico Maller Annetta’s brother
Signor Lanucci Alfonso’s feckless landlord, a sales representative
Signora Lucinda Lanucci a friend of Alfonso’s mother
Gustavo Lanucci their son (18)
Lucinda Lanucci their unattractive daughter (16)
Signora Francesca Barrini Maller’s housekeeper and his ex-mistress
Avvocato Macario Maller’s nephew, and lawyer
Signor Fumigi a maths enthusiast and inventor
Doctor Prarchi a member of Annetta’s salon
Signor Gralli a printer, suitor to Lucia
Signor Marotti notary to the Nitti family

© Roy Johnson 2016


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A Room with a View

February 23, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

A Room with a View (1905) is a comedy of manners and a satirical critique of English stuffiness and hypocrisy. Lucy Honeychurch must choose between cultured but emotionally frozen Cecil Vyse and the impulsive George Emerson. The Surrey stockbroker belt is contrasted with the magic of Florence, where she eventually ends up on her honeymoon. Upper middle-class English tourists in Italy are an easy target for Forster in some very amusing scenes.

E.M.Forster - portrait

E.M.Forster

E.M. Forster is a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth century novel. He documents the Edwardian and Georgian periods in a witty and elegant prose, satirising the middle and upper classes he knew so well. He was a friend of Virginia Woolf, with whom he worked out some of the ground rules of literary modernism. These included the concept of ‘tea-tabling’ – making the substance of serious fiction the ordinary events of everyday life. He was also a member of The Bloomsbury Group.

His novels grew in complexity and depth, until he eventually gave up fiction in 1923. This was because he no longer felt he could write about the subject of heterosexual love which he did not know or feel. Instead, he turned to essays – which are well worth reading.


A Room with a View – plot summary

A Room with a ViewLucy Honeychurch, a young upper middle class woman, visits Italy under the charge of her older cousin Charlotte. At their guesthouse, in Florence, they are given rooms that look into the courtyard rather than out over the river Arno. Mr. Emerson, a fellow guest, generously offers them the rooms belonging to himself and his son George. Lucy is an avid young pianist. Mr. Beebe an English clergyman guest, watches her passionate playing and predicts that someday she will live her life with as much gusto as she plays the piano.

Lucy’s visit to Italy is marked by several significant encounters with the Emersons. George explains that his father means well, but always offends everyone. Mr. Emerson tells Lucy that his son needs her in order to overcome his youthful melancholy. Later, Lucy comes in close contact with two quarreling Italian men. One man stabs the other, and she faints, to be rescued (and kissed) by George.

On a country outing in the hills, Lucy again encounters George, who is standing on a terrace covered with blue violets. George kisses her again, but this time Charlotte sees him and chastises him and leaves with Lucy for Rome the next day.

The second half of the book centers on Lucy’s home in Surrey, where she lives with her mother and her brother, Freddy. A man she met in Rome, the snobbish Cecil Vyse, proposes marriage to her for the third time, and she accepts him. He disapproves of her family and the country people she knows. There is a small, ugly villa available for rent in the town, and as a joke, Cecil offers it to the Emersons, whom he meets by chance in a museum. They take him up on the offer and move in, much to Lucy’s initial horror.

George plays tennis with the Honeychurches on a Sunday when Cecil is at his most intolerable. Cecil reads from a book by Miss Lavish, a woman who also stayed with Lucy and Charlotte in Florence. The novel records a kiss among violets, so Lucy realizes that Charlotte let the secret out. In a moment alone, George kisses her again. Lucy tells him to leave, but George insists that Cecil is not the right man for her. Lucy sees Cecil in a new light, and breaks off her engagement that night.

However, Lucy will not believe that she loves George; she wants to stay unmarried and travel to Greece with some elderly women she met in Italy. She meets old Mr. Emerson by chance, who insists that she loves George and should marry him, because it is what her soul truly wants. Lucy realizes he is right, and though she must fly against convention, she marries George, and the book ends with the happy couple staying together in the Florence pension again, in a room with a view.


Study resources

A Room with a View A Room with a View – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Room with a View A Room with a View – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Room with a View A Room with a View – unabridged classics Audio CD – Amazon UK

A Room with a View A Room with a View – BBC audio books edition – Amazon UK

A Room with a View A Room with a View – Merchant-Ivory film on VHS – Amazon UK

A Room with a View A Room with a View – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

A Room with a View A Room with a View – audioBook version at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to E.M.Forster – Amazon UK

Red button E.M.Forster at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button E.M.Forster at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources


Principal characters
Lucy Honeychurch a musical and spirited girl
Mrs Honeychurch her mother, a widow
Freddy her brother
Charlotte Bartlett Lucy’s older, poorer cousin and an old maid
Mr Emerson a liberal, plain-speaking widower
George Emerson his truth-seeking son
Cecil Vyse an over-cultivated snob
Mr Beebe the rector in Lucy’s home town
Miss Lavish lady novelist with strident, commonplace views
Mr Eager self-righteous British chaplain in Florence

A Room with a View – film version

Merchant-Ivory 1985 film adaptation

This is a production which takes one or two minor liberties with the original novel. But it’s beautifully acted, with the deliciously pouting Helena Bonham Carter as the heroine Lucy, plus Denholm Eliot as Mr Emerson, Daniel Day-Lewis as a wonderfully pompous Cecil Vyse, and Maggie Smith as the poisonous hanger-on Charlotte. The settings are delightfully poised between Florentine Italy and the home counties stockbroker belt. I’ve watched it several times, and it never ceases to be visually elegant and emotionally well observed. This film was nominated for eight Academy awards when it appeared, and put the Merchant-Ivory team on the cultural map.

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Further reading

Red button David Bradshaw, The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, Cambridge University Press, 2007

Red button Richard Canning, Brief Lives: E.M. Forster, London: Hesperus Press, 2009

Red button G.K. Das and John Beer, E. M. Forster: A Human Exploration, Centenary Essays, New York: New York University Press, 1979.

Red button Mike Edwards, E.M. Forster: The Novels, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001

Red button E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, London: Penguin Classics, 2005

Red button P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, Manner Books, 1994

Red button Frank Kermode, Concerning E.M. Forsterl, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009

Red button Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E. M. Forster, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970.

Red button Nigel Messenger, How to Study an E.M. Forster Novel, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Red button Wendy Moffatt, E.M. Forster: A New Life, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010

Red button Nicolas Royle, E.M. Forster (Writers and Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1999

Red button Jeremy Tambling (ed), E.M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995


A Room with a View – film interview

Daniel Day Lewis on Cecil Vyse


Other works by E.M. Forster

Where Angels Fear to TreadWhere Angels Fear to Tread (1902) is Forster’s first novel and a very witty debut. A spirited middle-class English girl goes to Italy and becomes involved with a local man. The English family send out a party to ‘rescue’ her (shades of Henry James) – but they are too late; she has already married him. But when a baby is born, the family returns with renewed hostility. The clash between Mediterranean living spirit and deadly English rectitude is played out with amusing and tragic consequences.

Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Howards EndHowards End (1910) is a State of England novel, and possibly Forster’s greatest work – though that’s just my opinion. Two families are contrasted: the intellectual and cultivated Schlegels, and the capitalist Wilcoxes. A marriage between the two leads to spiritual rivalry over the possession of property. Following on their social coat tails is a working-class would-be intellectual who is caught between two conflicting worlds. The outcome is a mixture of tragedy and resignation, leavened by hope for the future in the young and free-spirited.

Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 


E.M.Forster: A LifeE.M.Forster: A Life is a readable and well illustrated biography by P.N. Furbank. This book has been much praised for the sympathetic understanding Nick Furbank brings to Forster’s life and work. It is also a very scholarly book, with plenty of fascinating details of the English literary world during Forster’s surprisingly long life. It has become the ‘standard’ biography, and it is very well written too. Highly recommended.

E.M. Forster Buy the book here

 

© Roy Johnson 2010


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A Silver Dish

August 9, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

A Silver Dish (1984) is one of five pieces in the collection Him with his Foot in his Mouth. The story was first published in The New Yorker for 25 September, 1978. The four other stories in the collection are Cousins, What Kind of Day Did You Have?, Him with his Foot in his Mouth, and Zetland: By A Character Witness.

A Silver Dish


A Silver Dish – commentary

This story is essentially one of ethnic and religious allegiance. Woody Selbst, like many of Saul Bellows’ other protagonists, is the son of Jewish immigrants to America. His father Morris is a non-believing Jew, and his mother is a Christian convert who has brought up her son Woodrow in an environment of evangelical proselytising.

Woody appears to be religiously neutral—he respects his mother and is very sceptical about his father, who is a gambler, a womaniser, and a completely improvident parent. His father even cheats Woody out of his hard-earned part time savings in order to desert the family, and believes he is offering Woody a useful lesson in life—to trust nobody.

Pushing this dubious behaviour even further, his father pressures Woody into asking for financial support from his philanthropic sponsor the pious Mrs Skoglund. Despite his father’s tales of needing to repay for someone else’s misdeeds, Woody knows full well that his father is probably going to use the money to settle his own gambling debts—yet he assists him in this fraudulent enterprise.

The story reaches its emotional climax when his father steals a silver dish from Mrs Skoglund while they are in her house asking for financial assistance. Woody is shocked by his father’s outrageous anti-social behaviour, and the two of them become locked in an Oedipal fight on the floor.

His father claims to have replaced the silver dish before they leave the house, but Woody is quite right – his father lies to him, steals the silver dish and pawns it. As a result of this theft Woody is expelled from the seminary where he is a student as Mrs Skoglund’s protégé.

Nevertheless, when his father is later dying, Woody visits the hospital and climbs into the bed where his father is in his death throes—to hold him and prevent him pulling out the needles that are helping to keep him alive. It is his father to whom he gives his final allegiance – not his mother and the Christian fundamentalism she represents.

Father and son

Throughout the story Woody appears to be in conflict with his father. The improvident Morris deserts his family when Woody is young, and he sets up an irregular relationship with Halina, a Polish woman. He virtually steals from his own son, lies to him, and drags him into the hugely embarrassing episode of the stolen dish. At each stage he rationalises his bad behaviour as valuable (negative) lessons in life for his son.

And yet Woody’s life turns out to be a close parallel to that of his father. Following the theft of the bowl, Woody lies to the people at the mission: ‘He denied that he or Pop had touched Mrs Skoglund’s property. The missing object – he didn’t even know what it was – had probably been misplaced, and they would be very sorry on the day it turned up’. And as an adult in the narrative present of the story, Woody also has an ex-wife and a mistress, just like his father. He is also a risk-taker – smuggling hashish back through customs after his African holiday.

Religion

In religious terms the story is one of Woody’s choice between Christianity and Judaism. Christianity is the institutional religion of the country in which he lives – America. Judaism is the religion of his family’s cultural heritage as recent immigrants. This split is also echoed in his own family. His mother is a Christian convert, whilst his father is a non-believing Jew.

Woody has even been educated and converted to Christianity as a child – and bears witness in the services he attends. But it is significant that he is paid, bribed to do so. ‘He was often sent by Aunt Rebecca to get up and tell a churchful of Scandinavians that he, a Jewish lad, accepted Jesus Christ. For this she paid him fifty cents.’ Even more significant is that the goal of the mission is to convert Jews – as it has done in his own case.

In the narrative present of the story Woody is drinking coffee on a Sunday morning in his apartment above his office, surrounded by the clamour of church bells: ‘the Ukrainian, Roman Catholic, Greek, Russian, African Methodist churches’. These are all branches of Christian belief, and it is against this summons to church attendance and Christian belief that he makes his final decision:

It wouldn’t conclude as Mrs Skoglund, bribing him to round up Jews and hasten the Second Coming, imagined it, but in another way. This was his clumsy intuition.

Moreover, his choice is made explicitly between the two religious options represented by his parents. Despite his mother’s virtues, and despite his father’s shortcomings, it is his father’s influence to which Woody gives his allegiance:

He was like a horseman from Central Asia, a bandit from China. It was Mother, from Liverpool, who had the refinement, the English manners. It was the preaching Reverend Doctor in his black suit. You have refinements, and all they do is oppress you? The hell with that.


A Silver Dish – resources

A Silver Dish A Silver Dish – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish A Silver Dish – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Silver Dish A Saul Bellow bibliography

A Silver Dish Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Silver Dish Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

A Silver Dish Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish


A Silver Dish – plot synopsis

Woodrow (Woody) Selbst is a sixty year old Chicago building tile contractor with an ex-wife and a mistress. He has recently buried his father Morris. As a boy Woody was educated partly as a Christian, and his mother is an evangelical proselyte.

Surrounded by the sound of church bells on a Sunday morning, Woody confronts his grief in recollections of his youth during the Depression. His father deserted the family, and even cheated Woody out of his part-time savings to fund the escape.

Woody recalls a winter snowstorm when his father insists on visiting the devout Mrs Skoglund, Woody’s patroness, to scrounge some money from her. Woody is reluctant and sceptical when Morris gives Mrs Skoglund a hard luck story about his business, claiming that he is trustworthy. Mrs Skoglund leaves them whilst she seeks guidance in prayer.

Whilst she is absent Morris steals a silver dish from her display cabinet. Woody is mortified with embarrassment and tries to retrieve the dish. The two of them scuffle and fall to the floor. Mrs Skoglund returns and gives them a cheque. Morris tells Woody he has replaced the dish.

A few days later it is revealed that he was lying, and Woody is expelled from the seminary in disgrace. His father has pawned the dish, and many years later confesses that he spent the money betting on horses. He also claims that he did his son a favour in separating him from Christian zealots.

As an adult Woody looks after his mother and his invalid sisters. His final recollection is his father’s death in hospital, when he climbs into Morris’s bed and holds him whilst he is dying.


A Silver Dish – characters
Woodrow (Woody) Selbst a Chicago building tile contractor
Morris Selbst Woody’s improvident father
Mrs Selbst Woody’s mother, an evangelical Christian
Halina Morris’s Polish mistress
Mrs Aase Skoglund Woody’s Swedish benefactor, a widow

© Roy Johnson 2017


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A Smile of Fortune

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a harbour tale

A Smile of Fortune is one of Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known long stories. He was essentially a nineteenth century writer who anticipated and then lived into the modernist age of the early twentieth century, helping to shape its spirit of uncertainty, anxiety, and moral ambiguity. Even his own life and works share the contradictions of the era. He is best known as an author of mannish sea tales, yet he only achieved success with a novel set largely on dry land which had a woman as its central character (Flora Barral in Chance).

A Smile of FortuneHe is now regarded as a great figure in the tradition of the English novel, yet he was Polish, and English was his third language. He’s also regarded as something of a conservative, yet his political views were scathingly radical (see The Secret Agent).

A Smile of Fortune comes from his mature period (1911) and features the familiar Conradian device of a young sea captain who is confronted by a puzzling ethical dilemma. The first person narrator is a confirmed bachelor given to a philosophic approach to life, but whom Conrad cleverly makes vulnerable to the duplicities of the more experienced people around him.

He arrives at an island in the Indian Ocean to take on a cargo of sugar, but is also given an open invitation by his ship’s owners to do trade with a local merchant.

The trader turns out to have a brother, and the two of them have diametrically opposed characters: one is socially well respected, but is a brute; the other is a social outcast who wishes to ingratiate himself with the unnamed narrator.

For reasons he himself cannot fully understand, the captain opts for the outcast and allows himself to be drawn into his domestic life whilst waiting for his ship to be made ready. The principal attraction for this delay is a mysterious young woman, who might be the trader’s daughter, with whom the young captain becomes romantically obsessed.

The trader meanwhile is encouraging the captain’s attentions, whilst trying to lure him into a speculative commercial venture. It’s as if the young man is being lured and tempted on two fronts – the erotic and the pecuniary.

In typically modernist fashion, this conflict reaches an unexpected and ambiguous resolution which despite the captain’s commercial profit leads to his resigning his commission and heading back home.

Formally, it’s a long short story, rather than a novella such as The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line with which it is frequently collected. And in terms of achievement, it seems to me to fall between the level of those excellent longer tales and the often embarrassingly bad short stories which Conrad turned out at the height of his commercial success.

It’s a story full of symbols and half-concealed inferences which is crying out for (at least) Freudian analysis, and can certainly be added to the list of lesser-known tales which deserve interpretive attention from anyone who admires Conrad’s achievement.

© Roy Johnson 2008

A Smile of Fortune Buy the book at Amazon UK

A Smile of Fortune Buy the book at Amazon US


Joseph Conrad, A Smile of Fortune, London: Hesperus Press, 2007, pp.79, ISBN 184391428X


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A Theft

August 17, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

A Theft (1987) is one of three stories in the collection Something to Remember Me By. It was originally intended for magazine publication, but was rejected as being too long. Saul Bellow took the unusual step of publishing it as a single volume – directly as a paperback book. The two other stories in the collection are Something to Remember Me By and The Bellarosa Connection.

A Theft


A Theft – commentary

The main theme

The story (or novella) is largely a character study of Clara Velde – her deep emotional conflicts, erratic behaviour, and her problematic relationships with the people close to her. But the most important feature, which unites all these elements, is the complexity of her feelings for ex-lover Ithiel (Teddy) Regler.

Teddy is an intelligent and impressive figure in his own right, but so far as Clara is concerned he is all men; he is the man; but he has remained beyond her reach, unobtainable. This might explain why she has had so many failed marriages. But she has one tangible link that expresses the bond she feels between them. He has given her an expensive emerald ring that she treasures and provides the story with its central symbol.

When she first loses the ring she feels that her world has come apart. She has three children, a successful career, and a loyal but ineffectual husband, Wilder. But after twenty years she still regards Teddy as her soul mate. The ring is a powerful emblem of what he means to her and the love they once shared (which curiously enough, is not really dramatised, even in her retrospective musings).

The ring is recovered, but then disappears again when it is stolen by the boyfriend of her au pair, a petty crook from Haiti. Clara more-or-less fires the au pair Gina, but then immediately feels guilty about how rashly she has acted. Once again she feels that a cornerstone of her identity has been removed, and she flies to Washington where Teddy gives her the support that she needs.

Gina the au pair recovers the ring from her boyfriend and returns it via Clara’s daughter Lucy, who completes the transaction without question or fuss. Clara is not only relieved, but feels she has learned a valuable lesson about herself from the much younger woman.

‘I do seem to have an idea of who it is that’s in the middle of me. There may not be more than one in a million, more’s the pity, that do have. And my own child possibly one of those.

It is a moment of catharsis that draws the very loose ends of the story together. But for all the moral and existential anxiety that arises from these twin episodes, it is worth noting that the only theft which remains outstanding at the conclusion to the story is Clara’s. When the ring first goes missing, she claims on her insurance policy – sixteen thousand dollars – but does not return the money when the ring turns up again in her bedroom. This particular theft is left unexamined.

Weaknesses

The early part of the story concerns Clara’s incontinent confessions about her private life and loves to her assistant Laura Wong. These confidences are largely about her continued enthusiasm for former lover Teddy Regler. But Ms Wong hardly features at all in the latter part of the story – so she is introduced for no meaningful purpose.

The same is true of the early scenes describing Clara’s meetings with Giangiacomo and Spontini in Italy. The fictional character Giangiacomo is a thinly disguised portrait of the Italian radical Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – best known as the publisher of Boris Pasternack’s Doctor Zhivago. The character is introduced, but then blows himself up whilst trying to dynamite power lines. [This was one interpretation of Feltrinelli’s controversial death in 1972.] There seems very little connection between this slightly larger-than-life character and the main theme of the story.

In the case of Spontini, his significance is reduced to a single incident. When he is driving Clara in his car she threatens to ward off his wandering hands with the red hot element of a dashboard cigarette lighter. She goes on later to make him the third of her four husbands – but he too never emerges again in the story with any significance, and it is difficult to understand why he is named and included.

Saul Bellow is rightly celebrated as a writer who can bring fictional characters alive by carefully observed physical details, idiosyncratic speech patterns, and a Dickensian sense of comic exaggeration. These approaches to fictional entertainment work well in the expansive scope of novels—which Henry James called ‘large loose baggy monsters’. But these vivid but inconsequential characters can unbalance the more restrained and delicate requirements of the short story and the novella.

Bellow gives the impression in A Theft of writing that is lower his usual standard. For instance, there is a glaring technical flaw part way through the narrative. The story is told almost exclusively from Clara’s point of view. Even passages that switch briefly into third person omniscient narrative mode have Clara as a point of focus. But following an argument between Clara and Teddy, the narrative suddenly switches from her point of view to his when he leaves her and checks into a hotel:

He went to the bed and sat on the edge but did not lie down. It was not in the cards for him to sleep that night. The phone rang—it was a mean sound, a thin rattle—and Etta said: “Clara has swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She called me and I sent the ambulance.”

The only justification for this sudden change of perspective is that it allows the shock of her attempted suicide to be seen from his point of view. After this the story switches back again to Clara to give a brief history of her first three marriages.


A Theft – resources

A Theft A Theft – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Theft A Theft – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Theft A Saul Bellow bibliography

A Theft Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Theft Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Theft Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

A Theft Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

A Theft


A Theft – plot summary

Clara Velde is a successful fashion advisor with three children living on Park Avenue in New York City. She has been married four times, but is mostly enthusiastic about her former lover Ithiel (Teddy) Regler. She hires a young Viennese girl Gina Wegman as an au pair, and she confides personal concerns to Laura Wong, her design assistant.

She recalls meeting revolutionary Giangiacomo in Italy, and is pursued by Spontini (who later becomes one of her husbands). When Teddy takes a secretary to South America on a business trip, she moves Frenchman Jean-Claude into his apartment. Clara and Teddy are reconciled, but when he does the same again on another foreign trip, Clara tries to commit suicide. She survives, and goes on to a career of serial matrimony.

She marries four times, and Teddy marries three. She loses the expensive ring he once bought her, claims on the insurance, then finds it but does not repay the insurance money.

When Teddy’s third wife leaves him, Clara goes to Washington to offer comfort. On returning to New York she finds the au pair Gina has had a party with her Haitian lover and lots of friends. Clara is suspicious, and when she discovers that her emerald ring is missing she assumes the boyfriend has stolen it. She orders Gina to return it next day – or leave. She feels devastated again by the loss, but then guilty about her peremptory dismissal of Gina.

Clara visits her psychiatrist, then meets Teddy, who recommends a private investigator. Some time later the ring suddenly reappears on her bedside table. Clara thinks Gina has replaced it, and wishes to thank and reward her. She meets Gina who explains that she returned the ring by giving it to Lucy, her daughter.


A Theft – principal characters
Clara Velde a successful business woman and fashion advisor
Wilder Velde Clara’s lazy fourth husband
Laura Wong Clara’s assistant and confidante
Ithiel (Teddy) Regler a government diplomat, Clara’s former lover
Gina Wegman a young Viennese au pair girl
Bobby Steinsalz Teddy’s lawyer
Lucy Clara’s eldest daughter
Gottschalk a private investigator
Dr Gladstone Clara’s psychiatrist
Mike Spontini an oil tycoon, Clara’s third husband

© Roy Johnson 2017


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Alejo Carpentier further reading

November 14, 2017 by Roy Johnson

novels, novellas, short stories, criticism

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) was a Cuban writer who made a connection between European culture and the native history of Latin-America. His literary style is a wonderful combination of dazzling images and a rich language, full of the technical jargon of whatever subject he touches on – music, architecture, painting, history, or agriculture.

Alejo Carpentier further reading

He was also the first to use the techniques of ‘magical realism’ (he coined the term, lo real maravilloso) in which the concrete, real world becomes suffused with fantasy elements, myths, dreams, and a fractured sense of time and logic.

Carpentier is generally considered one of the fathers of modern Latin American literature. His complex, baroque style has inspired such writers as Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.


Alejo Carpentier – novels in English

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Kingdom of this World (1949) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Kingdom of this World (1949) – Tutorial, study guide, web links

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Lost Steps (1953) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Lost Steps (1953) – Tutorial, study guide, web links

Alejo Carpentier further reading Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading Reasons of State (1974) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Consecration of Spring (1978) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Harp and the Shadow (1979) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Harp and the Shadow (1979) – Tutorial, study guide, web links


Alejo Carpentier – stories in English

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Chase (1956) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Chase (1956) – Tutorial and study guide

Alejo Carpentier further reading The War of Time (1963) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading Journey Back to the Source (1963) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading Journey Back to the Source (1963) – Tutorial and study guide

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Road to Santiago (1963) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading The Road to Santiago (1963) – Tutorial and study guide

Alejo Carpentier further reading Right of Sanctuary (1967) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading Right of Sanctuary (1967) – Tutorial and study guide

Alejo Carpentier further reading Baroque Concerto (1974) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading Baroque Concerto (1974) – Tutorial and study guide


Alejo Carpentier further reading


Alejo Carpentier – novels in Spanish

Alejo Carpentier further reading Ecue-yamba-O! (1933) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading El reino de este mundo (1949) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading Los pasos perdidos (1953) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading El siglo de las luces (1962) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading El recurso del metodo (1974) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading La consegracion de la primavera (1978) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading El arpa y el sombra (1979) – Amazon UK

Alejo Carpentier further reading Cuentos completos (1979) – Amazon UK


Alejo Carpentier web links

Alejo Carpentier further reading Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

Alejo Carpentier further reading Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

Alejo Carpentier further reading Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

Alejo Carpentier further reading Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

© Roy Johnson 2017


More on Alejo Carpentier
More on the novella
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Filed Under: Alejo Carpentier Tagged With: Alejo Carpentier, Literary studies, The novel, The Short Story

Alejo Carpentier greatest works

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

major works in English translation

Alejo Carpentier greatest worksAlejo Carpentier was a Cuban writer who straddled the connection between European literature and the native culture of Latin-America. He was for a long time the Cuban cultural ambassador in Paris. Carpentier was trying to place Latin-American culture into a historical context. This was done via a conscious depiction of the colonial past – as in The Kingdom of This World, and Explosion in a Cathedral (title in Spanish El Siglo de las Luces – or The Age of Enlightenment).

His literary style is a wonderful combination of dazzling images and a rich language, full of the technical jargon of whatever subject he touches on – be it music, architecture, painting, history, or agriculture.

He was also the first to use the techniques of ‘magical realism’ (and he coined the term, lo real maravilloso) in which the concrete, real world becomes suffused with fantasy elements, myths, dreams, and a fractured sense of time and logic.

Carpentier is generally considered one of the fathers of modern Latin American literature. His complex, baroque style has inspired such writers as Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

alejo carpentier greatest worksThe Kingdom of This World is a marvelously compressed account of the slave uprising and first revolution of the early nineteenth century in San Domingo – now Haiti. Carpentier uses ‘magical realism’, long before it became fashionable, to depict the contradictions between political reality and religious or mythical beliefs. The story passes rapidly in a series of vivid scenes from the early unsuccessful uprising led by Macandal, then Bouckman who led Haiti in its fight for independence from France, and finally to Henri Christophe the revolutionary leader who later became Emperor of Haiti, and who built Sans Souci and La Ferrière Citadel.
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

alejo carpentier greatest worksThe Lost Steps (1953) is a story told twice. A disillusioned north-American musicologist flees his empty existence in New York City. He takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization – the upper reaches of a great South American river (which we take to be the Amazon). The novel describes his search, his adventures, the revival of his creative powers, and the remarkable decision he makes about his life in a village that seems to be truly outside history. This novel offers a wonderful evocations of Latin America from the founder of ‘Magical Realism’.
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

alejo carpentier greatest worksExplosion in a Cathedral is set in Cuba at the time of the French Revolution. The novel aims to capture the immense changes sweeping the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century – complete with its wars, sea-life, and people. It is a biographical novel which focuses on the adventures of Victor Hughes, a historical figure who led the naval assault to take back the island of Guadeloupe from the English. This is a historical novel of epic proportions, reflected in its Spanish title, El siglo des luces (The Age of Enlightenment)
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

alejo carpentier greatest worksThe Chase is set in Havana of 1956 where Batista’s tyrannical rule serves as the backdrop for the story of two young men whose lives become intertwined with the prostitute, Estrella. An anonymous man flees a team of shadowy, relentless political assassins, and ultimately takes refuge in a public auditorium during a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. This novella is particularly interesting because of the multiple, disjointed narrations and its polyphonic structure.

Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US


Alejo Carpentier web links

Alejo Carpentier at Mantex
Biography, tutorials on the novels, novellas, and stories

The Chase Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

The Chase Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

The Chase The Kingdom of this World
Lecture by Rod Marsh – University of Cambridge

The Chase Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

The Chase Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

© Roy Johnson 2004


More on Alejo Carpentier
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: Alejo Carpentier Tagged With: Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral, Latin-American literature, Literary studies, Magical realism, Modernism, The Chase, The Kingdom of this World, The Lost Steps

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