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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

Orlando

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Orlando (1927) is one of Virginia Woolf’s lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures.

Virginia Woolf

Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at the time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.

Orlando – plot summary

The novel tells the story of a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He is briefly a lover to the decrepit queen, but after her death has a brief, intense love affair with Sasha, a princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy. This episode, of love and excitement against the background of the Great Frost of 1683, is one of the best known, and is said to represent Vita Sackville-West’s affair with Violet Trefusis.

Woolf - OrlandoFollowing Sasha’s return to Russia, the desolate, lonely Orlando returns to writing The Oak Tree, a poem started and abandoned in his youth. This period of contemplating love and life leads him to appreciate the value of his ancestral stately home, which he proceeds to furnish lavishly and then plays host to the populace. Ennui sets in and a persistent suitor’s harassment leads to Orlando’s appointment by King Charles II as British ambassador to Constantinople. Orlando performs his duties well, until a night of civil unrest and murderous riots. He falls asleep for a lengthy period, resisting all efforts to rouse him.

Upon awakening he finds that he has metamorphosed into a woman—the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman’s body. For this reason, the now Lady Orlando covertly escapes Constantinople in the company of a Gypsy clan, adopting their way of life until its essential conflict with her upbringing leads her to head home. Only on the ship back to England, with her constraining female clothes and an incident in which a flash of her ankle nearly results in a sailor’s falling to his death, does she realise the magnitude of becoming a woman; yet she concludes the overall advantages, declaring ‘Praise God I’m a woman!’

Orlando becomes caught up in the life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, holding court with the great poets (notably Alexander Pope), winning a lawsuit and marrying a sea captain. In 1928, she publishes The Oak Tree centuries after starting it, and winning a prize.

Study resources

Orlando Orlando – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Orlando Orlando – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Orlando Orlando – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – free eBook editions

Orlando Orlando – audio book (abridged) – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – a film screenplay = Amazon UK

Orlando The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

Orlando Orlando – Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation – Amazon UK

Red button Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links,

Red button Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Orlando – film version

1992 film adaptation by Sally Potter

Redbutton See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Orlando – principal characters
Orlando the protangonist – a man, then a woman
Sasha a Russian princess, who Orlando loves
Shel a gallant seaman, in love with Orlando
Archduke Harry a cross-dresser who is in love with Orlando
Sir Nicholas Greene a 17C poet then later a 19C critic
Alexander Pope himself – an 18C poet
Rustum an old Turkish gypsy
Queen Elizabeth I English monarch, in love with Orlando
Rosina Pepita a Spanish gypsy dancer
Clorinda a mamber of St James’s court
Favilla the second of Orlando’s loves at court
Euphrosyne Orlando’s ‘intended’ before he runs off with Sasha
Orlando

Further reading

Red button Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Red button Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Red button Marsh, Nicholas. Virginia Woolf, the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Red button Mepham, John. Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Red button Reinhold, Natalya, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

Red button Rosenthal, Michael. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Red button Sellers, Susan, The Cambridge Companion to Vit=rginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Showalter, Elaine. ‘Mrs. Dalloway: Introduction’. In Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, edited by Julia Briggs. London: Virago Press, 1994.

Red button Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harvest Books, 2002.

Red button Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Original inspiration

Vita Sackville-West

Knole – Kent, UK

Knole - Kent

365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and 7 courtyards

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

The Complete Shorter FictionThe Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon US

The Bloomsbury GroupThe Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

Ralph Partridge Buy the book at Amazon UK
Ralph Partridge Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

Red button Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Virginia Woolf web links Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Virginia Woolf web links Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Virginia Woolf web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Red button Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Virginia Woolf web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

Virginia Woolf web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

© Roy Johnson 2010

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Pale Fire

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tutorial, study guide, commentary, and web links

Pale Fire (1962) is a bizarre and playful ‘novel’ from the master of literary inventiveness, Vladimir Nabokov. It was written at the same time that he was editing his scholarly translation of Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. What Pale Fire offers is a comic parody of the same enterprise. It is a novel comprised of a spoof academic introduction written by the editor, a long poem written by his neighbour which gives the novel its title, and then the editor’s elaborate commentary which purports to explain hidden meanings in the text. All the notes are cross referenced with a scholarly apparatus. He then even adds an index.

Pale Fire

Pale Fire – critical commentary

Structure

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel is its successful parody of an academic study – complete with bibliographic introduction, cross references, a scholarly apparatus, critical commentary, and index. All of these are brought to bear on the central text – John Shade’s poem Pale Fire – which has absolutely nothing to do with the Boy’s Own adventure story into which it is embedded.

Moreover, as a self-proclaimed ‘editor’, Charles Kinbote is a comic failure in his enterprise. He not only completely fails to understand Shade’s poem; he gets lots of details wrong; he fails to spot things that are obvious; he can’t be bothered to follow up his own ‘researches’; and he sets up links in his commentaries which turn out to be non-sequiturs.

Nabokov also makes Kinbote quite laughable as a character. He misunderstands what is happening around him. He is insensitive to the reactions of the people he encounters. And he is given quasi-absurd opinions – such as his half-baked critique of Proust and A la recherche du temps perdues (which is incorrectly capitalised in the index).

The unreliable narrator

Nabokov was a master of fiction delivered by unreliable narrators. From his earliest works as a writer of short stories such as The Eye (1930) and Spring in Fialta (1936) he created narrators who recount events that the reader is invited to interpret otherwise. Some of these narrators tell lies or attempt to mislead the reader. They play a form of literary hide and seek in which they deliver information which does not seem quite consonant with the rest of the story – and we begin to doubt their judgement. It is a skilful manipulation of point of view on the author’s part, and an invitation to readers to ‘participate’ in creating the ‘true meaning’ of the story.

This literary device can sometimes be stretched over the length of a novel. Henry James used it in The Sacred Fount (1901). But it is usually confined to the short story or the novella – for good reasons. The most important reason is that once the reader has realised that information is coming from an unreliable source, dramatic tension in the tale is put at risk.

It should be immediately apparent to most intelligent readers of Pale Fire that the editor-narrator Kinbote is both unreliable and not who he claims to be. In the Foreward he relates that a certain ‘ferocious lady’ says to him ‘What’s more you are insane’. She is quite right, and most readers will have no trouble realising that his account of the King’s ‘escape’ from Zembla is his own (factitious) autobiography. Shortly afterwards, if not at the same time, they will realise that the whole story is the delusion of a madman.

The problem is that they will realise this quite quickly, when there is still considerable plot-commentary to be revealed – which dilutes the effectiveness of any dramatic tension that follows. To offset this weakness, Nabokov introduces a second plot element in the character of political gangster Jakob Gradus whose role is to pursue and assassinate King Charles.

This too turns out to be part of Kinbote’s delusion – for the man who shoots John Shade is not a foreign political assassin but an escapee from a lunatic asylum seeking to avenge himself on the man (Judge Goldsworth) who has sent him there.

Interpretation

It has to be said that the apparent levels of fictionality in the novel have thrown critics into all sorts of acrobatic interpretations. There are some who believe that the commentary to the poem was written by John Shade himself, and others who think the ghost of Hazel Shade is somehow involved.

Nabokov, as the author of all the mischievous hints and clues scattered throughout the book, muddies the water even further by introducing a character called Professor V. Botkin, whom he describes as ‘an American scholar of Russian descent’. This sends other commentators into analytic raptures, pointing to the fact that the name Botkin is merely Kinbote in reverse. Perhaps Kinbote is the alter-ego of Botkin – or the other way round?

But the multiple levels of fictionality are apparent rather than real. Kinbote is clearly a fictional character, created by the author Vladimir Nabokov. Kinbote is operating as a teacher in a fictional (but credible) American university called Wordsmith College in the Appalachians. Kinbote claims to be the exiled king of a not-so-credible country called Zembla – and his escape from it is related via cardboard and comic operetta sequence of events. He is clearly delusional and his tale is a fantasy-invention. Interpretation of the novel is much simpler than its complicated story.

We know that Nabokov ‘lost his kingdom’ and had to flee Russia following the revolution; we know that he eventually emigrated to America; we know that he taught at a provincial college (Wellesley College) and wrote about the experience in other fictional productions (such as Pnin). We know that Nabokov had been translating and editing a scholarly version of Eugene Onegin – which comprised an introduction, the text of Pushkin’s poem/novel, and two volumes of commentary plus an index.

Pale Fire is nothing more than a literary spoof which re-mixes these biographical elements to offer a playful charade, a jeu d’esprit that is laced with the sorts of in-house jokes, narrative tricks, and literary spasms (wordplay, neologisms, and obsessive alliteration) that mark his later works following the high point of Lolita in 1955.

Extras

It should be clear from a few pages into the novel and everything following that Kinbote is a homosexual. What is not clear is why Nabokov should add this characteristic to his protagonist. The repeated and coy references to young boys and ‘manly behaviour’ become quite irritating – mainly because they are not in any way connected to the rest of the narrative. They eventually assume a sort of schoolboy smuttiness and reinforce other silly elements of the plot.

Pale Fire – study resources

Pale Fire – Penguin – Amazon UK

Pale Fire – Penguin – Amazon US

Pale Fire – Library of America – Amazon UK

Pale Fire – Library of America – Amazon US

Nabokov’s Pale Fire – Princeton – Amazon UK

Celestial Keys to Pale Fire – Sputnik – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire

Pale Fire – plot summary

Foreward

The ‘editor’ Charles Kinbote presents a scholarly description giving the provenance of John Shade’s poem Pale Fire. He details the rivalries surrounding ownership and publication of the manuscript. He meets Shade and his wife Sybil when he becomes their next door neighbour whilst teaching at the same institution – Wordsmith College. Kinbote is a figure of fun at the college, and is clearly a homosexual.

Pale Fire

The poem in four cantos is an autobiographical meditation on Shade’s domestic life and his reflections on the borderlines between life and death. His parents die when he is young, and he is raised by his aunt Maude. He loses his religious belief, but searches for a meaning in life and wonders about the possibilities of life beyond the grave.

He meets his wife Sybil at high school, and still loves her forty years later. They have a daughter Hazel who is solitary, dyslexic and unattractive. She goes out with friends as a teenager and is shunned by the group. She pretends to go home, but drowns herself in an icy lake.

Shade meditates on life as a preparation for what will happen after death and the possibilities of reincarnation. He wonders who we might meet in the afterlife. Sybil thinks she receives signals from their dead daughter. After giving a lecture one evening Shade has a minor heart attack and a ‘vision’ of being briefly ‘dead’, when he sees the image of a white fountain. When he reads of a woman who has had the same experience he goes to interview her – but she thinks it is a social call. Nevertheless, he feels he has discovered some hidden pattern in life which gives it meaning.

He reflects on the difficulties of poetic composition and describes shaving whilst in the bath. He thinks about his wife, his dead daughter, and the books of poetry he has written. Finally he finds some comfort in his appreciation of the everyday life that surrounds him.

Commentary

Charles Kinbote examines the poem in close detail and explains meanings hidden in the text. He has forcibly befriended his neighbour the American poet John Shade and recounted to him the amazing story of King Charles II’s escape from a revolution in Zembla. Kinbote hopes that Shade will re-tell this story in a long poem on which he is currently working.

Kinbote’s story is that when a revolution occurs in Zembla, the king is imprisoned in his castle, from which he escapes via a secret passageway. He travels over mountains and eventually reaches the seashore. Zembla is divided politically into supporters of the king (Karlists) and their rival Extremists, including would-be regicides (the Shadows) who elect Jakob Gradus as their assassin.

The king is eventually parachuted into the USA where his friend Sylvia arranges for him to teach at Wordsmith College. He rents a house from Judge Goldsworth, next door to John Shade and his wife Sybil. Although he has only been there a short time, he claims to be close friends with Shade – though it is quite clear that these feelings are not reciprocated.

Kinbote spies on Shade day and night, whilst Sybil makes transparent excuses to protect her husband’s privacy by keeping Kinbote away from the house. Meanwhile the stupid and incompetent Gradus is making his way across northern Europe in search of King Charles. Gradus fails at every point, until he is eventually instructed to go to America.

Kinbote is saving a big surprise for John Shade when he completes his poem. It is quite clear that this is the revelation that he is King Charles. But on the very day the poem is finished and Kinbote has invited Shade for a celebratory drink, Gradus arrives and bungles the assassination, killing Shade in error.

Believing that Kinbote tried to protect Shade from the assassin, Sybil gives him the right to be the poem’s official editor. Gradus turns out to be an escaped lunatic who has gone to kill the person who sentenced him to an asylum – Judge Goldsworth, Kinbote’s landlord. Gradus subsequently commits suicide in jail.

Kinbote confiscates the manuscript of Pale Fire and at first is horrified to realise that it contains no mention of his escape from Zembla. Later he convinces himself that Shade has cleverly hidden the account in minor details of the poem – and so his commentary is designed to squeeze meaning out where none exists.

Pale Fire – principal characters
Charles Kinbote the deposed King Charles II of Zembla
John Shade an American poet and college teacher
Sybil Shade his protective wife
Hazel Shade their teenage daughter who commits suicide
Jakob Gradus aka Jack Grey a bungling criminal and lunatic
Judge Goldsworth the absent owner of Kinbote’s rented house

© Roy Johnson 2018

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Party in the Blitz

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Canetti amidst English modernists during the war

The first three volumes of Elias Canetti’s memoirs cover the period 1905 to 1937. The Tongue Set Free traces his precocious childhood in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna, and Zurich; The Torch in my Ear describes his years in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Berlin as he mixed with German modernists and established his reputation as a writer; then The Play of the Eyes details his affair with Alma Mahler’s daughter as well as his friendships with writers such as Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. This fourth volume Party in the Blitz takes up the story when like many other European refugees he sought asylum in England (London, Hampstead) during the war.

Elias Canetti He is very grateful to England and the protection it offered him, and some of the better pages of this volume are devoted to an appreciation of English history and culture. There’s very little in the way of a continuous argument or a well-planned chronology – because the memoir is put together from journal entries, diaries, and fragments he left behind on his death in 1994. The lack of coherence can sometimes be disconcerting – William Empson’s parties and Margaret Thatcher’s Argentinean war policy discussed on the same page for instance.

Basically he takes a character or a topic and dredges up his ideas and impressions from fifty years previously. He seems to have known everybody who was anybody around that time – Dylan Thomas, Roland Penrose, Vaughan Williams, Herbert Read, Arthur Waley, Bertrand Russell, and J.D. Bernal.

The most amazing thing is that there’s no account of his own development as a writer or an intellectual. He doesn’t say what he was reading or writing; there is no sense of work completed that would lead to the Nobel Prize in 1981; and nothing he says is related to either his own cultural heritage or the development of European modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.

He is largely concerned with anecdotes and character sketches of completely inconsequential upper-class toffs and their servants amongst whom he seems to have spent his time. For a man who was supposed to be an intellectual and a writer, it’s amazing to note that the bulk of these pages are taken up by either attacking his contemporaries or driving round Britain in fast cars with dissolute members of the fallen aristocracy – people who he is pleased to relate, can trace their ancestry back to the Norman conquest.

He seems to be most sympathetic to people like himself – the self-confessed misogynist Arthur Waley; the womanizer Bertrand Russell; and a young Enoch Powell, smarting with anguish at the loss of India as part of the British Empire.

London in the war years was a centre for European emigres of all kinds – Kurt Schwitters and Oskar Kokoschka mingle with native artists Stevie Smith, Henry Moore, and Katherine Raine. There are pitilessly cruel portraits of Iris Murdoch, Katherine Raine, and Veronica Wedgewood – all of whom were his former lovers.

You could call Iris Murdoch the bubbling Oxford stewpot. Everything I despise about English life is in her. You could imagine her speaking incessantly, as a tutor, and incessantly listening: in the pub, in bed, in conversation with her male or female lovers … She invited me to Oxford, and met me at the station. She was wearing grotesque sandals, which showed off her large flat feet to terrible disadvantage … she would always come in slovenly academic gear, graceless in her wool or sacking dresses, never really seductive, sometimes in the wrong colours (she didn’t have the ghost of an aesthetic sense where her own clothes were concerned)

What he doesn’t take into account or ask himself is why if he found these women so repugnant, he should become sexually involved with them – as he was, with the full knowledge of his wife. Whilst he fills pages listing the shallowness and failures of his lovers, he says nothing whatever about his wife Veza, the woman to whom he was married throughout all these years. You would never know from these pages that she was a novelist in her own right, and that she had sacrificed much of her time to help him finish Crowds and Power.

But he reserves his most concentrated vitriol for T.S. Eliot, who he berates for embracing English traditions, working in a bank, and writing plays for money.

An American brings over a Frenchman from Paris, someone who died young (Laforgue), drools his self-loathing over him, lives quite literally as a bank clerk, while at the same time he criticises and diminishes anything that was before … and comes up with the end result: an impotency which he shares around with the whole country; he kowtows to any order that’s sufficiently venerable … tormented by his nymphomaniac of a wife …

And for all that Canetti obviously considers himself the great “Dichter”, the only two books he mentions in the four volumes of these memoirs are Auto-da-Fe which he had written by the time he was twenty-six, and Crowds and Power, a study that took him thirty years to bring to completion – a study that in the words of Clive James ‘advanced a thesis no more gripping than its title’.

These are memoirs written in spleen and resentment, and it’s possible that there might be even more to come. Canetti put a twenty-two year embargo on his diaries and personal writings that will not expire until 2024. But it seems unlikely that further revelations will endear him to a new generation of readers, even if that Nobel committee did give him a prize.

Party in the Blitz Buy the book at Amazon UK

Party in the Blitz Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012

Elias Canetti, Party in the Blitz: The English Years, New York: New Directions, 2005, pp.249, ISBN: 0811218309

The Tongue Set Free Volume One of the memoirs — The Tongue Set Free

The Torch in My Ear Volume Two of the memoirs — The Torch in My Ear

The Play of the Eyes Volume Three of the memoirs — The Play of the Eyes

Party in the Blitz Volume Four of the memoirs — Party in the Blitz

Twentieth century literature
More on biography

Patrick White – greatest works

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Patrick White - portraitPatrick White was born in Australia but sent to be educated in England, which he disliked intensely. He settled to live in London during the 1930s and served in the RAF during the war. After the war he returned to live in Australia, eking out his small private income by farming. His novels offer great variety in their themes, subjects, and settings – but what they have in common is his use of powerfully rich language, his deeply psychological character portraits, the dramatic incidents of his stories, and a semi-mystical belief system which he invites us to contemplate without making his narratives depend upon it. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.

 

The Tree of Man (1955)
This is White’s first major work. (He actually dis-owned some of his earlier work.) It is an epic account of a young farmer, Stan Parker and his wife Amy and their struggles to build themselves a life and a family in the middle of the Australian wilderness at the beginning of the twentieth century. The life they make is full of small triumphs and some bitter disappointments. This is a novel which has been compared with D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, yet the tale is recounted in a bare simple prose which gives no hints of the baroque complexities of his later style.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
This novel is the re-telling of a true nineteenth century incident which has become a mythical Australian narrative. It’s the story of Mrs Fraser, an English woman who is shipwrecked on the island which now bears her name. She gets back to the mainland, only to be seized and held semi-captive by Aboriginal natives. She escapes from them and teams up with an escaped convict to make an epic journey on foot back to ‘civilization’. The implication of the novel is that she is spiritually transformed by her experiences of suffering and deprivation. It conjures up a very romantic evocation of the period, with all White’s touches of vivid and dramatic scene painting.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Voss (1957)
This is another nineteenth century epic tale – this one based on the true story of the tragic and doomed journey made in 1845 by the German explorer Leichardt. He leads a group across the Australian desert, and is accompanied imaginatively by a young woman, Lara Trevalyen from her home in Sydney. She suffers with him, right up to the point of his death – and then keeps his memory alive. The scene painting of the Australian outback and desert is truly wonderful, and although an outsider, Voss lives on as an increasingly legendary, martyred figure. This is another of White’s novels which seeks to capture the essence of Australia, its national spirit, and cultural heritage.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

The Vivisector (1970)
This is the story of Hurtle Duffield, an Australian painter – a portrait loosely based on Sydney Nolan, with whom White was once friendly before they fell out because of a fairly trivial disagreement. It traces very convincingly the relationship between the artist’s experiences of life and their translation into artistic expression. What makes this novel particularly interesting is its dramatic conclusion as Duffield sinks into a psychologically chaotic old age. His memories from a past which we have fictionally shared are woven into his crumbling grip on the present. The fragmented narrative is demanding on the reader, but very impressively written, as we are invited to remember the origins of sane incidents which lie beneath his apparently deluded old age.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

The Twyborn Affair (1979)
This novel; presents readers with a real challenge. It’s White’s version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Without giving away too much of the very intriguing story line, White is exploring the relationship between gender and sexuality. The same character experiences life in quite different ways with different sexual identities. The setting changes from the south of France, to an Australian sheep farm, then back to a brothel in London. It’s baffling and uncompromising at first reading – but eventually makes a kind of sense.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Riders in the Chariot (1961)
Many critics see this as White’s greatest work. The story puts together four completely different characters – all outsiders in one way or another. It’s not difficult to see them as various aspects of White’s own complex personality. Himmelfarb is a refugee Jewish professor struggling to come to terms with his persecution and the murder of his wife by the Nazis. The other misfits are a half-caste painter, a spinster, and a washerwoman, Ruth Godbold, who finds a mystic feeling of togetherness with her living friends and the dead ones. It contains White’s most ferocious criticism of Australian gentility and ugliness, plus the subtle gradations of racism, ignorance, and hypocrisy in contemporary suburban society.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
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Flaws in the GlassFaws in the Glass (1981) is an amazingly frank self-portrait. In this he reveals the truths about his homosexuality; his feelings of inhabiting different personae and sexual identities; his lifelong feud with his mother; his alcoholism, and his later political radicalism. Reading it will certainly help you to understand his complex fictions, but more importantly it lays bare his relationship with Australia. White reveals a great deal about the psychological processes through which his experiences and ideas are transformed into art. It is a fascinating if at times almost uncomfortable reading experience.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

Patrick White biographical notes

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Patrick White - portrait1912. Patrick White born in Sydney – his father was a wealthy sheep farmer. Both parents were indolent, snobbish, and never worked. White always felt very distant from them.

He was sent to England to be educated at a boarding school in Cheltenham College. He hated it, and reproached his parents:

“I resented their capacity for boring me and their dumping me in a prison of a school at the other side of the world.”

He spent adolescent holidays in Dieppe and Germany, and read mainly poetry as a youth, then went on to take a degree in French and German literature at Cambridge University.

1930s. His father finally made him an allowance of £400 per year, and he settled in bohemian London, making friends with the painters Francis Bacon and Roy de Maistre. He made a break with Australia which was part cultural, and partly to do with his struggle with sexual identity:

“I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of a man and woman according to actual situations or the characters I become in my writing.”

1939. Published his first novel, Happy Valley, which he later disowned. He emigrated to the USA, but returned on the outbreak of war to join the RAF. He served in the middle East in the Intelligence Corps, working as a censor.

“Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.”

1941. Published his second novel, The Living and the Dead, about which he later said “Perhaps it should not have been written”.

1945. He settled back in Australia with his Greek partner Monoly Lascaris, and they attempted a form of self-sufficiency on a smallholding, making a living from selling flowers, vegetables, milk, and cream.

1948. Published The Aunt’s Story and traveled widely throughout England, France, Germany, Egypt, Palestine, and Greece, as well as Australia and the USA. His spiritual life is particularly tempestuous.

“Those who are doomed to become artists are seldom blessed with equanimity. They are tossed to drunken heights, only to be brought down into a sludge of headachy despair.”

1955. Published The Tree of Man – a family saga, which focused on ordinary people at the beginning of the twentieth century. Stan Parker is a young farmer. He establishes a family and farm in the Australian wilderness, has children and grandchildren, but the land is eventually engulfed by suburb.

1957. Published Voss “Much of Voss was written in bed”

1961. Published Riders in the Chariot.

1966. Published The Solid Mandala

Flaws in the GlassFlaws in the Glass (1981) is an amazingly frank self-portrait. In this he reveals the truths about his homosexuality; his feelings of inhabiting different personae and sexual identities; his lifelong feud with his mother; his alcoholism, and his later political radicalism. Reading it will certainly help you to understand his complex fictions, but more importantly it lays bare his relationship with Australia. White reveals a great deal about the psychological processes through which his experiences and ideas are transformed into art. It is a fascinating if at times almost uncomfortable reading experience.

1970. Published The Vivesector.

1973. Published The Eye of the Storm. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – but White, who guarded his privacy, did not attend the award ceremonies. He persuaded his friend, the artist Sidney Nolan, to accept it in Stockholm on his behalf.

1976. Published A Fringe of Leaves

“I first went to Fraser Island after Sydney Nolan gave me the story of Eliza Fraser and the wreck of the Stirling Castle. I went there on my own and began A Fringe of Leaves but gave up on deciding that Australian writers should deal with the twentieth century. Years later Manoly and I went to the island together and explored it more thoroughly. From two visits and a certain amount of necessary research, it became part of my life, and the novel I wrote as painful and sensual a situation as one I might have lived through personally whether as Ellen Roxburgh or Jack Chance.”

1979. Published The Twyborn Affair

1981. Published Flaws in the Glass

1986 Published Memoirs of Many in One

1990 Died, after a long illness.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Portrait of a Marriage

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conjugal life a la Bloomsbury

Nigel Nicolson is the son of writer Vita Sackville-West and diplomat-politician Harold Nicolson. When his parents died he found a locked leather Gladstone bag in his mother’s study, cut it open, and discovered a diary containing an autobiographical account of her affair with Violet Trefusis. Portrait of a Marriage is made up of these diary entries, interspersed with his own explanations of what went on in those parts of the story his mother doesn’t cover.

Portrait of a Marriage It’s not really a portrait of a marriage at all until the final chapter. Harold Nicolson remains a vaporous non-presence throughout, and there is almost nothing about the relationship between them except for her protestations at ‘depending’ on him. The central issue is her passionate three-year fling that has her dressing up as a man, leaving her husband and children behind to ‘elope’ to France, and to live in Monte Carlo, gambling at the tables with money they didn’t have, whilst Trefusis was debating the wisdom of marrying her fiancé Denys, whom she didn’t love or desire.

It’s an amazing story, and most instructive in class terms. Husbands colluding with their wives’ lovers for the sake of money to keep estates solvent, whilst paternity suits raged to the tune of £40,000 (this in the 1900s).

I was also very struck by how much of Sackville-West’s literary style is similar to Virginia Woolf’s. She is a great fan of the stream of immediate memory, and a narrative couched in extended metaphors and rhapsodic interludes. There are lots of schooners breasting silvery waves with the wind full in their sails, and that sort of thing.

There’s nothing here that will be remotely shocking in the sexual sense to modern readers. ‘I had her’ is about as explicit as it gets. But the behaviour – duplicitous, self-seeking, naive, and hypocritical – is breathtaking. Vita Sackville West finally broke off the relationship with Trefusis because she thought she might have had some sexual connection with Denys Trefusis – the man she had recently married – whilst West had two children with Harold Nicolson. Actually, Violet Trefusis hadn’t had any such connection, having made it a condition of her marriage contract.

There’s a lot of utterly snobbish ancestor-worship to get through and Nicolson’s chapters are written in a creakingly old-fashioned manner: ‘She permitted him liberties but not licence’. In fact Nicolson fils seems as wrapped up in snobbery as his mother:

her real friends were souls, but real souls who had some breeding and a gun, who could make a fourth at bridge, and who knew the difference between claret and burgundy

I found it quite hard to keep my rage down when reading of the almost unbelievable concern for money, status, and class. The events are only just over a hundred years ago, and this account of them was written in the 1970s, but it was like reading about social dinosaurs.

The latter part of the book outlines West’s affairs with Geoffrey Scott and Virginia Woolf – both of which she recounted in detail to her husband. Their son makes the case that the bond between them was strong enough to outlast these affairs – which it did, though on the basis that they had no sexual relationship with each other.

Of course you don’t need a brass plaque on your door to realise why a child would want to portray his bisexual and adulterous parents in the best possible light, but I must say all this is sometimes difficult to accept calmly.

As time went on the affairs petered out and the Nicolsons settled down to a quieter life, the major part of which they spent separately – he in London, she in their house at Sissinghurst – which might account for the longevity of the union.

These were people who seemed to have separated out sex from marriage, who obviously cared for each other, and yet spent most of their time apart, writing endless letters saying how much they missed each other. They also made sure their children were kept out of the way at all times. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere?

However, there is one very good thing to say for this memoir-cum-history. Anyone who wants a vivid, living example of the social values and the bohemian behaviour of the Bloomsbury Group need look no further. It’s all here.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Portrait of a Marriage   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Portrait of a Marriage   Buy the book at Amazon US

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, London: Orion Books, 2004, pp.216, ISBN: 1857990609

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Put Out More Flags

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tutorial, study guide, web links, plot summary

Put Out More Flags (1942) is the sixth novel by Evelyn Waugh. It deals with British society at the outbreak of war in 1939 and features characters who first appeared in his earlier novels Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), and Black Mischief (1932). Most of the characters are drawn from upper-class society, but there are also satirical portraits from metropolitan Bohemia and the higher echelons of government and publishing. The story line is dominated by the outrageously unscrupulous character Basil Seal – a clever, womanising, ne’er-do-well.
Put Out More Flags

Put Out More Flags – commentary

This is something of a transitional work for Evelyn Waugh, containing much of the comic satire (and the characters) of his earlier novels, but at the same time it looks forward to the more serious elements of Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-1961).

Whilst being largely a farcical comedy, it also contains interesting elements of well-observed social history – particularly the decline of the English upper class, the institutions of government, and ideological movements of the period in what we would now call ‘culture wars’.

Social history

The novel opens with Basil Seal’s sister, Barbara, trying to maintain a sense of normality in her two-hundred-year old country manor house. The servant class, on which her family’s privileged comforts have depended for generations, is melting away in the face of better employment prospects elsewhere. “Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make aeroplanes”.

For servants, the pay would be better working in a manufacturing industry, but they would also have more personal liberty and be free of the patronising and authoritarian discipline imposed by traditional upper-class employers. They would be free of the stifling deference required by the landed gentry who for generations had regarded themselves as superior beings.

This well-observed social development is also accompanied by a movement in the opposite direction – the arrival of evacuees from the larger cities. To protect children from the threats of bombing which were expected, it was government policy for them to be sent into the countryside. This social experiment had mixed results. Not all of the evacuees wanted to be there, and not all were suited to rural living. Waugh makes comic plunder of these issues in the scenes where Basil Seal acts as a bogus billeting officer.

Fashionable art

One of Evelyn Waugh’s favourite targets for satire in his early novels was contemporary fashions in the arts. In Decline and Fall the society Margot Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Metroland) destroys a historic Tudor building to put in its place a monstrosity of plate glass, leather walls, and modernist furniture. In Put Out More Flags Waugh aims at the literary world. Much mention is made of the two proletarian poets Parsnip and Pimpernel.

They were great supporters of the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, but as soon as Britain was under threat they emigrated to the United States. This is a satirical dig at Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden who did exactly that in 1939.

Poppet Green is a feather-brained ‘artist’ who follows whatever the latest fad happens to be – which in 1939 was surrealism. Her subjects are:

bodiless heads, green horses, and violet grass, seaweed, shells, and fungi, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in the manner of Dali. Her work in progress on the easel was an overlarge, accurate but buttercup-coloured head of the Aphrodite of Melos, poised against a background of bull’s-eyes and barley sugar.

She is also a communist – of a particularly simple-minded type. When her friend Ambrose Silk goes to work in the Ministry of Information, she immediately labels him a ‘fascist’ – and even worse, a Trotskyist. She thinks in slogans and labels: this is an accurate account of left wing orthodoxy at the time.

Characterisation

Ambrose Silk is a more subtle and nuanced example of fashion. He is a dandy and an aesthete who has been a communist sympathiser – a fellow traveller in the jargon of the time. Waugh pokes fun at him on two fronts. He is terrified of what might happen to him if the Germans invade Britain – since he is aware that the Nazis have persecuted left sympathisers. And more comically, he is writing a memoir Monument to a Spartan which describes his love for Hans, a German brown shirt fascist youth.

Ambrose eventually morphs into a slightly tragic figure – exiled in Ireland – which rescues him from being a two-dimensional character. The same is true of Angela Lyne, Basil’s ‘so-called’ lover. She is estranged from her husband the dilettante architect Cedric, and at the outset of the novel she is returning from the south of France where she has been fruitlessly waiting for Basil.

She closes her grand London home and moves into a top floor flat in Grosvenor Square. There, she gradually becomes a sad and lonely alcoholic. She maintains a veneer of respectability on her rare appearances in public – only ever drinking Vichy water. Alone, she slumps into an oblivion of vodka and Calvados cocktails. There are some truly touching scenes as this rich and fashionable society woman slowly degenerates and loses touch with reality.

So, amidst all the absurdity and tomfoolery in the rest of the novel, Waugh displays a mature touch as a writer in creating characters who change in time, who are not two-dimensional or vehicles for fun. Another example is Alastair Digby-Vaine Trumpington. He first appeared in the very opening scene of Decline and Fall, a Hooray Henry at Oxford, and he has lived a very conventional upper-class life ever since. Very rich, slightly naive, yet maintaining a ‘schoolboy’ sense of honour:

For him there was no ‘they’. England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words

And true to his principles, whilst the other characters are all trying to scuttle into cosy government sinecures or soft commissions as officers, Alastair volunteers to join the ranks. He endures the miseries of basic training without complaint (although he makes sure his wife Sonia has booked a comfortable nearby hotel for weekends). And in the end he is volunteering for Special Services – though it does seem to be the Boy’s Own Adventure prospects which appeal to him. But he is a character who develops, and he obviously represents what Waugh sees as the remaining strand of decency in upper-class values.

Put Out More Flags – study resources

Put Out More Flags – Penguin – Amazon UK

Put Out More Flags – Penguin – Amazon US

Six novels by Evelyn Waugh – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: The Height of his Powers – essay

Books of the Times: Put Out More Flags – essay

Put Out More Flags

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Put Out More Flags – plot summary

Chapter I.   At the outbreak of the Second World War Barbara Sothill’s country manor at Malfrey loses staff who prefer to work in factories. The estate is surrounded by evacuees from Birmingham. Lady Cynthia Seal asks her friend Sir Joseph Mainwaring to find a position for her wayward son. Angela Lyne returns in disappointment from the south of France, having been let down by her lover Basil Seal. In Fitzrovia, mixing with arty bohemians, Basil is living in a dissolute manner, and he bungles the army interview that is arranged for him.

Ambrose Silk visits the Ministry of Information where memos are exchanged regulating the display of personal effects in government offices. As an aesthete and a well-known left-wing sympathiser, he is concerned about his safety in the event of a German invasion. Basil is in the same building, promoting the idea of annexing Liberia.

Chapter II.   Basil goes to stay with his sister at Malfrey, where three delinquent evacuee children are forced onto them. Basil pretends to be a billeting officer and dumps the children onto a retired couple in their beautiful old home. When a few days later they are at their wits end, Basil charges the couple money to take the children elsewhere.

Alastair Trumpington endures the petty bureaucracy of life in the ranks. Ambrose Silk is working at the Ministry of Information, worried that even fellow-travellers might be at risk. Angela Lyne has shut down her home and is enduring a lonely existence in a Grosvenor Square flat. Alastair Trumpington is involved in absurd training exercises.

Chapter III.   Basil sells the three delinquent evacuee children to an adjacent billeting officer and returns to London. He bluffs his way into the War Office and is taken on as an intelligence agent by an old acquaintance. Lord Peter Pastmaster is trying out a girl with a view to marriage. They meet a bemused and drunk Angela Lyne at a cinema. Basil consoles her.

Cedric Lyne goes to see his estranged wife before his departure for Norway. Basil plans to reveal Poppet and Ambrose as communist sympathisers. Cedric is met by a shambolic embarkation of troops at the port.

Ambrose writes about his lost love for Hans, a German brown shirt youth in Mr Bentleys new magazine The Ivory Tower. Basil persuades Ambrose to change his memoir, making it more pro-German. He then reports him to the War Office as a Nazi sympathiser.

When warrants are issued for arrests Basil helps Ambrose escape to Ireland and takes over his Bloomsbury flat – to which he invites Susie, secretary to his boss. The police are only able to arrest Mr Rampole, the magazine publisher. Cedric Lyne is in a disoriented state on the battlefield and is killed in an attack.

Epilogue

Sir Joseph Mainwaring believes all the myths and rumours circulating about the war. Alastair is posted to coastal defence and wishes for more excitement. Rampole reads ‘light fiction’ in prison, and Basil joins a special service unit.

Put Out More Flags – main characters
Basil Seal a disinherited playboy, womaniser, and confidence man
Lady Cynthia Seal his widowed mother
Sir Joseph Mainwaring a government minister and confidant to Lady Seal
Barbara Sothill Basil’s sister
Mrs Angela Lyne Basil’s lover, daughter of a millionaire
Cedric Lyne her estranged husband, a dilettante architect
Ambrose Silk left-wing gay Jewish aesthete
Alastair Trumpington an aristocratic bohemian
Sonia Trumpington his wife
Poppet Green a surrealist painter and ‘communist’

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Ravelstein

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Ravelstein (2000) was Saul Bellow’s last novel. It follows a pattern established by his earlier work, Humboldt’s Gift (1975) in being a fictional character sketch based on one of his real-life friends. In this case the novel is a homage to Allan Bloom, a philosopher and cultural theorist colleague with whom he collaborated at the University of Chicago.

Ravelstein

And like the earlier work it is also a double portrait, since we learn as much about the first-person narrator, his biographer ‘Chick’, as we do about the subject Ravelstein. There is every reason to believe that Chick is a fictionalised version of Saul Bellow – who like Chick is a distinguished intellectual beset by problems with women, old age, and money.

Ravelstein – critical comment

Biography

The novel raises interesting problems in the relationship between imaginative fiction and the lives of real historical human beings. Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow were colleagues at the University of Chicago, and like their fictional counterparts (Ravelstein and Chick) they ran joint seminars on political and social philosophy.

It is quite clear that, apart from changing a few names, Bellow makes little attempt to hide or blur the distinctions between fiction and reality. The novel becomes a sort of memoir-cum-documentary, and it should be said that it is very much a ‘campus novel’. Ravelstein might be a larger-than-life character – but the depiction of university life is perfectly credible. Ravelstein is hated by his colleagues because of his cleverness, and because he has produced a best-selling book.

Ravelstein promotes the interests of his favoured students, who remain faithful to him when they pass on to employment in the institutions of government and state. And both he and his friend Chick hold the rest of the staff in lofty disregard, honouring only a few eccentrics and originals.

Some of the more amusing excesses are clearly exaggerations of Allan Bloom’s personal idiosyncrasies. However, the difficulty for most readers is that the boundaries between literary invention and documentary memoir are quite blurred. Ravelstein is technically a fictional character, and should be interpreted as such – but the gravitational pull towards regarding the events and opinions of the novel as representing an accurate portrait of Allan Bloom are almost too strong to resist.

The novel was controversial when it was first published – largely because it presented a frank depiction of Allan Bloom’s homosexuality, which had not been widely recognised previously. Even more so, the novel presents an unsparing depiction of his death from HIV-AIDS, which many commentators felt was an unwarranted trespass upon his privacy.

Bellow’s defence is built in to the novel itself. Bloom (Ravelstein) had asked Bellow (‘Chick’) to write a memoir which was truthful and did not hold back on any unpleasant details. Both writers are now dead – so the debate on taste and accuracy can take place with time and distance from the historical events.

The subject

The novel is an amusing and very entertaining character study of the larger-than-life university professor Ravelstein. It is also a portrait of his friend ‘Chick’, the fellow academic who is composing the fictional memoir. Ravelstein is trying to keep alive classical erudition in the face of cultural vulgarity and what we now call ‘political correctness’.

Chick casts himself as a supportive colleague who appreciates Ravelstein’s ‘greatness of soul’ and who struggles in his own social wake of previous wives, financial problems, and worries about his own cultural identity. What they have in common, and what becomes the gradually emerging subject of the novel is their Jewishness. As Ravelstein approaches death he becomes more and more concerned with the standards against which he measures the people. He is particularly acute at spotting the faintest traces of anti-Semitism, and holds every suspect up against their record of political allegiance in the 1930s and the Second World War.

Chick is initially sceptical about Ravelstein’s demanding standards, but he too eventually reflects on the very big issues of Jewish identity in the twentieth century:

I’m thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labour camps. Why does the century—I don’t know how else to put it—underwrite so much destruction.

This is the real subject of the novel – and what makes it a powerful statement, almost a summation of Saul Bellow’s work over a quarter of a century. These are major world issues, and he does not shrink from including the Gulag with Auschwitz and Treblinka

In connection with the issue of race and American society, it might be worth mentioning that at no time does Bellow consider the subject of African-Americans who were also ‘immigrants’. They however were imported against their will into a protestant God-fearing society who exploited and persecuted them.

He was not obliged to cover every racial issue in the flux of American life in this one novel. But it is slightly surprising that the close parallels between European Jewish immigrants (fleeing from persecution) and Africans (imprisoned in a slave culture) did not occur to him as a fruitful point of comparison.

Structhure

The first three quarters of the novel are entirely homogeneous. The subject matter, tone, and location are skilfully integrated and fluently handled. But then following the death of Ravelstein there are switches in location and subject, which severely disrupt the unity of the novel’s effect.

At this point Ravelstein disappears as the central figure of interest, and the geographic location switches from Boston to the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. What was a study in intellectual history, a comic study of academic life, and a meditation on death becomes a satirical critique of shoddy popular tourism.

This part of the story leads to Chick’s gastric poisoning and his own confrontation with near-death. In this sense there is a continuity of the theme of ‘meditations on death’. But then the final scenes of the novel are packed with Chick’s hallucinatory fantasies which add very little to the novel’s central concerns.

Bellow describes Chick’s close encounter rather than lingering over the details of Ravelstein’s final days – and the parallels of the two acute medical experiences help to rescue the book’s structure in its final stages. But there is a very unnerving narrative wobble for fifty pages which almost ruins the book’s final effect.

Ravelstein – study resources

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon US

Ravelstein Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

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

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

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Ravelstein

Ravelstein – plot synopsis

Abe Ravelstein and his colleague Chick are academics from Chicago staying at the Hotel Crillon in Paris. Ravelstein wants someone to write an account of his life before he dies. His older friend Chick reflects on the nature of biography. Ravelstein is rich, successful, and has connections in high places.

Ravelstein has very expensive tastes in food, clothes, and home decor. Previously he was in debt, but Chick persuaded him to write a popular book on political philosophy. It was a big success and made him wealthy – but he has remained unpopular with his colleagues. In Paris Ravelstein buys an expensive jacket, but then spills coffee on it.

Chick is tolerant of his foibles, because he feels that Ravelstein has important issues in view and is maintaining high standards in cultural values. At the same time however, Ravelstein throws pizza parties and invites his students to watch sport on television, meanwhile taking phone calls from state department insiders on the progress of the Gulf War.

Chick’s English colleague Battle thinks that Ravelstein is looking even more ill than normal. Chick reveals that Ravelstein had an attack of an unspecified disease (HIV-AIDS) whilst in Paris. He recovers slowly, continuing to smoke whilst in hospital.

Ravelstein buys an expensive BMW for his lover Nikki. Whilst waiting for his discharge from the clinic, Chick reads a biography of John Maynard Keynes, which is focussed on Jews present at the Armistice negotiations in 1919 and anti-Semitism amongst the participants. Chick also reveals being divorced by his previous wife Vela.

Ravelstein arrives back from the clinic in a hospital bed, severely disabled by AIDS. Chick reflects on his childhood and what he has learned from life. Ravelstein was critical and jealous of Chick’s earlier marriage to Vela. He also criticises Chick as a fellow Jew for escaping into what he regards as a phoney arcadia of New Hampshire. And he is scathing about Chick’s socialising with a Balkan charmer who was a pre-war Nazi sympathiser.

Both Chick’s brothers die, and Vela sues him for divorce. Ravelstein again asks Chick to write his memoir. Chick prectises by producing sketches of their colleagues Rackmiel Kogan and Morris Herbst. Battle and his wife visit Ravelstein for advice about their planned suicide pact. Chick and Ravelstein discuss the onset of death and what it means.

Six years later Ravelstein is dead. Chick has problems starting his memoir. Instead, he considers mass exterminations in Russia and Germany in the twentieth century. He recalls Ravelstein’s last days and their discussions of anti-Semitic writers Kipling and Céline.

As he approaches death, Ravelstein turns to his Judaism and urges Chick to do the same. Chick reflects on ‘the final solution’.

After Ravelstein’s death, Chick and Rosamund take a vacation in the Caribbean. It is supposed to be a paradise of relaxation, but Chick describes it as a ‘tropical slum’. He falls ill with an infection that becomes quite serious. They fly back to Boston where he is taken into intensive care with pneumonia. He becomes delirious and starts hallucinating and at one point is put into a strait-jacket. He almost dies, but revives with the help of doctors and his wife Rosamund. On recovery he realises that he owes it to Ravelstein to start work on the memoir.

Ravelstein – principal characters
Abe Ravelstein a professor of philosophy and classics at the University of Chicago
Tay Lang (“Nikki”) Ravelstein’s Malaysian gay lover
’Chick’ Ravelstein’s old friend at Chicago – the narrator
Vela Chick’s previous wife, a chaos theorist
Rosamund Chick’s current wife and former student
Radu Grielescu a Balkan charmer and former fascist

© Roy Johnson 2017

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Twentieth century literature

Reasons of State

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot summary

Reasons of State (1974) first published as El recurso del metodo has a curious history. It was written as the result of a bet between Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel Garcia Marquez – both of them Nobel prizewinners. Marquez produced The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Carpentier wrote Reasons of State. Both novels deal with an issue which still blights Latin-America today – political stranglehold by dictatorships. As literary works they owe a great deal to El senor presidente (1946) which was the first novel to deal with this issue, written by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Asturias, an equally distinguished predecessor . The English translation is by Francis Partridge, one of the last survivors of the Bloomsbury Group.

Reasons of State

Reasons of State – commentary

Magical realism

Carpentier is one of the many Latin-American writers who have employed the technique of ‘magical realism’ – a term that he coined himself. This is an approach to fictional narratives that combines traditional realism with elements of fantasy, exaggeration, and the supernatural.

In Reasons of State for instance, the president from his Parisian embassy socialises with other fictional characters such as the distinguished academician, his daughter and his secretary, Peralta. Combined with this fictional world, he is also acquainted with real historical figures such as the Italian fascist and poet Gabriele D’Dannunzio (1863-1938).

There is therefore a close mixture of the fictional with the ‘real’, historical worlds. But he is also connected in the narrative with people such as Elstir (a painter), Vinteuil (a composer), Morel (a violinist) who are fictional characters from Marcel Proust’s great novel Remembrance of Things Past. This brings a second level of fictionality to the narrative – with the subject of one fictional text appearing in another. This is sometimes known as ‘intertextuality’.

For good measure, the president is also personally acquainted with Reynaldo Hahn, the Venezuelan composer who was a close friend of Proust. The narrative therefore switches between a fictional realism of its own making, references to real historical events and people, and the inclusion of elements from a parallel world of cultural aesthetics and history.

Narrative mode

It should be clear from the outset that the narrative is delivered in a mixture of first-person and third-person narrative modes. The novel begins with the president’s thoughts and feelings as his day begins in the Parisian embassy:

I’ve never been able to sleep in a rigid bed with a mattress and bolster. I have to curl up inside a rocking hammock, to be cradled in its corded network. Another swing and a yawn, and with another swing I get my legs out and hunt about with my feet for my slippers which I have lost in the pattern of the Persian carpet.

But gradually this first-person account becomes a third-person presentation of events delivered in conventional manner, as if by an anonymous omniscient narrator. These events are largely concerned with revealing the President’s scandalous and hypocritical behaviour:

“The cunt! The son of a bitch!” yelled the Head of State hurling the cables to the ground. “I’ve not finished reading it,” said the Cholo Mendoza, picking up the papers. The movement had spread to three provinces of the North and threatened the Pacific zone.

Carpentier manages these transitions very skilfully, but this technique does pose some aesthetic problems. There is a blurring and eventually very little distinction between the two modes. The result is that many lengthy passages of narrative, packed with literary, historical, cultural, and philosophical references, have the appearance of representing the president’s point of view.

We now know that many dictators can be culturally sophisticated at the same time as being social barbarians who countenance torture and the savage repression of all criticism. But somehow the range and depth of cultural references attributed to the president never seem persuasive.

There is also the problem (shared with Carpentier’s other novels) of a disruptive volume of material concerned with music and architecture. These are both subjects Carpentier studied as an undergraduate and has written on extensively, but their appearance in Reasons of State constitute what elsewhere would be considered digressions. They are not fundamentally linked to the main themes of the novel.

The main theme

The principal subject of the novel is obviously the life, thought processes, and behaviour of a dictator. The novel traces his desperate attempts the cling to power, his decline, exile, and death. In this sense it follows the tradition established by Miguel Asturias with Mister President (1946) and is similar to The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes. All of them have catalogued the disruptive and tyrannical effects of Central American regimes lacking democracy – in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Mexico – though all of them have chosen to write about fictional, imaginary, and un-named countries.

However the underlying theme of Carpentier’s novel (as in many of his other works) is the tension and contradictions between native Latin-American history and the traditional western culture that has arisen out of Europe. Carpentier was born in Switzerland and educated largely in Paris, where he began his literary career in the 1920s. But his family also spent a lot of time in Havana, and he was a founding member of the Cuban Communist Party in 1921.

This is not to suggest that he suffered from ‘divided loyalties’ but to point out his abiding attempts to fuse the two very different cultures he had absorbed. His 1953 novel The Lost Steps deals very explicitly with this theme.

Reasons of State is interesting because he attributes a great deal of this interest in European culture to the President himself. This presents the reader with a certain problem of fictional credibility. We are asked to believe that this cruel and vulgar man is also a connoisseur of fine art, poetry, and opera. He abuses women, he is an alcoholic, an embezzler, and he rules by torture and executions; but we are expected to accept that he is also an enthusiast for classical music, painting and poetry, and a close friend of Reynaldo Hahn.

Readers will make up their own minds if he is a coherent and credible character or not. But there are two further points which might be made about this contradiction or imbalance. First, it might be said that Carpentier is forcing his own cultural enthusiasms into the novel – at all costs. Second, it could be said that despite the president’s unpleasant behaviour, Carpentier is in an an odd sense writing about himself.

It is in this sense that the contradiction between political mis-rule and cultural sophistication (the Latin-America/European divide) is the theme of the novel, as distinct from its overt subject, which is the decline and fall of a dictator.

Reasons of State – study resources

Reasons of State (2013) – Amazon UK

El recurso del metodo (2009) – Amazon UK

Reasons of State (2013) – Amazon US

El recurso del metodo (2009) – Amazon US

Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (2014) – Kindle

Reasons of State – plot summary

ONE

The president of an un-named Latin-American country wakes up in his Paris residence recalling a visit to a high-class brothel the previous night. He also reflects on his friendship with Gabriele D’Annunzio. There is a visit by a right-wing French academician, offering the president’s daughter Ofelia an introduction to Cosima Wagner. The academician sponges on the president by selling him some ‘rare’ manuscripts. Suddenly an ambassador arrives with news of a military uprising back home. There is an immediate council of war.

TWO

Arms are purchased in the USA with money from concessions ceded to the United Fruit Company. The president and his entourage sail to Havana incognito. Arriving in the home country, the president cracks down on protesting students and workers.

After a day’s military action the president and his entourage shelter from tropical storms in a cave, where they discover pre-Colombian embalmed bodies in urns. Next day they cross the Rio Verde, but the enemy has retreated. The rebel general Galvan is pursued, cornered, and executed.

In Nueva Cordoba the president and his men lay siege to a town which at first capitulates, but when resistance begins the president’s army slaughter the population. He then returns to the capital where a rigged election reaffirms his position. However, he is suffering from a frozen right arm and returns to France for treatment.

THREE

On arrival in Paris he is shunned by all his old contacts. The French press has reported all the atrocities in Nueva Cordoba. Only the reactionary academician shows any sympathy and excuses his ‘excesses’. In exchange for bribes the academician arranges for a press campaign flattering to the President. In the midst of ensuing confusion, the First World War breaks out.

In the lull before fighting begins, the president looks down on Europe and bolsters his flagging confidence with reflections on the profusion of religious Virgin saints in Latin-America. Then news arrives of a treacherous revolt by his minister of war, General Hoffman.

The President prepares for departure with a visit to a brothel. He realises he will have no convincing arguments to offer back home. He decides to attack German culture and promote Latinism in an attempt to curry popular support. His secretary tries to tempt him to remain in Paris, but he has grandiose notions of ‘Destiny’.

FOUR

General Hoffman is deserted by his troops and dies falling into a swamp. The president then goes on holiday to his seaside retreat. News of German atrocities in the war begin to appear, which the president cannot reconcile with the peaceful German colony living in the capital.

The European war brings prosperity to the country. The president decides to establish a national capitol, and architectural contests are held. A huge naked female statue is commissioned, but it turns out to be too big for its setting.

When the Germans torpedo an American ship, it brings the USA into the war. Amidst ridiculous propaganda about the comforts of the trenches, the president despatches troops. The capitol is completed and inaugurated with a lavish banquet, but the celebrations are followed by a bomb attack on the palace. The president immediately orders repressive measures against the university, teachers, students, bookshops, and the working public. The common element is identified as communism, which the president does not understand. But suddenly the European war ends.

There is an elaborate opera season which ends with another bomb attack. A model prison is built. The price of sugar collapses. Banks close. A period of celebratory carnival merges into armed revolt – which is put down with extreme repression, torture, and executions.

FIVE

North American influence grows and Europe is seen as chaotic and backwards. When the New York Times publishes a scathing critique of the country the national press merely responds with tabloid reports of sensational domestic crimes. Holy week is replaced by Santa Claus and a commercial Christmas.

Strikes begin, followed by the appearance of a radical bulletin Liberation. A spate of public misinformation ensues. Everything is blamed on a single trouble-maker – The Student. Someone is arrested and interrogated personally by the president, who cajoles then threatens him. The interview is cut short by an explosion.

The economy collapses and the city deteriorates. Strikes continue in the provinces. The presence of the USA grows. There is a general strike, to which the president responds by machine-gunning closed shops. There is public demand for the abdication of the president. A rumour is spread that the president is dead. People emerge to celebrate, and are slaughtered by troops.

SIX

The following day order collapses completely. US marines land in the North and the president escapes in an ambulance, disguised as a patient. He is given shelter by the provincial US consul. The secretary Peralta deserts to the rebels.
The president waits anxiously to be smuggled away by speedboat to a US ship.

SEVEN

The president arrives back in Paris to find his residence full of modern art and his louche daughter partying. Former contacts are unavailable or dead. He laments the changes in modern life and finds solace only in the brothel.

The Mayorala buys exotic fruits and cooks native dishes in the house, which the president and even Ofelia enjoy. Meanwhile Dr Martinez assumes power back home and promises reforms. The Student meets delegates to an international socialist conference in Paris.

The president grows thinner, time goes by, and he lives in the past, recalling how he cheated the country economically. He begins to confuse past and present, loses the use of his legs, and eventually dies.

Reasons of State – characters
— the President, head of state, dictator of a central American country
Dr Peralta his secretary
Ofelia his spoiled self-indulgent daughter
Ariel his son, ambassador to the US
Mayorala Elmira his housekeeper
General Ataulfo Galvan a rebel leader
Dr Martinez a professor of philosophy and rebel leader
Colonel Walter Hoffman the minister for war
Enoch Crowder the US ambassador
The Student a figure representing all youthful resistance

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Right of Sanctuary

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

Right of Sanctuary (El derecho de asilo) has a rather strange publishing history. Its first appearance was in the collection of stories Guerre de temps published in France (Paris: Gaillmard, 1967). Next it appeared in English, published by Victor Gollancz in 1970 and translated by the Bloomsbury Group diarist Frances Partridge. Only in 1972 did it appear in Spanish, published by Editorial Lumen, in Barcelona. The collection The War of Time contains a group of stories all told in radically different styles, but with a recurrent theme of exploring various notions of time and chronology.

Right of Sanctuary

Right of Sanctuary – critical commentary

The most unusual feature of this story is the fact that Carpentier uses all three possible narrative modes to deliver the sequence of events. The story begins in a conventional third person omniscient mode. That is, an unspecified narrator reveals information about the Secretary, his actions, and (some of) his feelings, referring to him using the third person pronoun ‘he’:

Going into his office, which was decorated in the Pompeian style, the Secretary found several dossiers that could quickly be dealt with, waiting for him beside an inkpot surmounted by a Napoleonic eagle. This task over, he passed the time until Sergeant Raton should serve his luncheon [by] walking through the Palace.

But from the next section of the story onwards, he uses a combination of first and second person narrative modes – and switches in and out of all three modes for the remainder of the story. The first person narrative mode will be familiar to most readers – a sequences of events related from the point of view of a specific character – in this case the Secretary himself, who refers to himself as ‘I’:

I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m bored. And I’m surrounded by things that contribute some new elements to my boredom.

But the second person narrative mode is likely to be less familiar. This takes the form of ‘you’ being used as the form of address – and that ‘you’ can be thought of as singular or plural. It can be the individual ‘I’ of the first person narrative mode, speaking about himself; or it can be either the first person narrator or the author addressing the reader – as if saying ‘this is what you would do in these circumstances’:

You take advantage of the momentary respite to leave the bar and hurry off to the offices of the National City Bank of New York, which is crowded with people quite unaware of what is going on fifty yards away. You take the next street and plunge into the old part of town, where you know no one.

This mixture of narrative modes seems to create a distance between the author and his work. The reader is being invited to contemplate a series of tableaux vivants rather than become engaged psychologically and emotionally with the characters and their predicaments. But this is entirely consistent with Carpentier’s general approach to fiction, which does not follow the norms of traditional European literature

The story is a slightly improbable jeu d’esprit, but strangely enough it has a close link to historical reality – because Alejo Carpentier, having been a political exile from Cuba during the Batista regime, was actually made Cuban ambassador to France in 1966 by Fidel Castro. It is worth noting that this is only twelve months before the story was first published. Carpentier even draws attention to this strange phenomenon during the course of the story:

the Consul told me that in his country—’our’ country—the position of Ambassador was not generally given to a professional diplomat, but to brilliant or able men: writers, financiers, men of the world, journalists. Moreover, it was an American tradition to appoint men from other nations of the continent to diplomatic and educational posts

This might even be considered Alejo Carpentier obliquely patting himself on the back, or it could alternatively be seen as the ‘real’ part in ‘lo real maravilloso’ – a term he coined to describe the type of literature which emerged from Latin-America in the wake of the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

The story also embraces one of Carpentier’s favourite conceits – the idea of circularity, or things returning to their original state – but maybe in a changed form. At the beginning of the story, the Secretary (whose name is Ricardo – which is only mentioned once) is working for the Ambassador of an un-named country. The embassy is located in what seems like a Latin-American state which is in the grip of a military coup. To escape danger, the Secretary seeks asylum in the embassy of another small Latin-American country. As a result of his knowledge of the country’s history he is appointed its Ambassador – replacing the diplomatic incumbent, who is incompetent.

This neat irony is underscored when he goes to present his credentials to General Mabillan, who knows who he is, appreciates the ironic political twist, and shields him from possible negative publicity. As the story closes, the Secretary returns to more or less the same work (but in a different Embassy) and he returns to a normal sense of time, having been ‘outside’ it during his period of refuge.

Right of Sanctuary – study resources

Right to Sanctuary is one of five stories contained in the collection The War of Time. The other four stories are Journey Back to the Source (1944), The Road to Santiago (1948), Like the Night (1947), and The Wise Men (1967).

Right of Sanctuary Right to Sanctuary – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

Right of Sanctuary El derecho de asilo – at Amazon UK – (Text in Spanish)

Right of Sanctuary Right to Sanctuary – at Amazon US – (Text in English)

Right of Sanctuary El derecho de asilo – at Amazon US – (Text in Spanish)

Right of Sanctuary – plot summary

Part 1.   On a Sunday some time in the early 1940s, in the lavish and empty rooms of a government Palace, the Secretary to the President hears rumours of a possible military coup d’etat . He shares the news with Sergeant Raton, a mild-mannered adjutant who is a fan of Clausewitz and his theory of Total War. The country is in a border dispute with an adjacent state.

Part 2.   Next day the Secretary arrives at the Palace to find government ministers being arrested. When the President himself arrives for a cabinet meeting there is an exchange of gunshots. The Secretary escapes from the building and takes refuge in the embassy of a small Latin-American country. The foreign Ambassador is reluctant to have him, but his wife is more hospitable. The rebel General Mabillan makes a patriotic broadcast, but the Secretary foresees nothing but potential corruption in all his declared new public works.

Part 3.   Some days later the Secretary has become bored, cooped up in a small spare bedroom in the foreign embassy. He passes time itemising the contents of a hardware store in the street outside his window.

Part 4.   The frontier dispute intensifies, and General Mabillan makes further patriotic broadcasts on radio and television. He organises a display of anti-aircraft defence forces which does nothing but injure his own population. The Secretary studies the history of the Frontier Country in its post-Colombian development, and comes up with an ambiguous compromise solution to the border dispute

Part 5.   After some months the Secretary more or less takes over the business of the foreign Embassy, enhances its trade in folkloric merchandise, and becomes the lover of the Ambassador’s wife, Cecilia.

Part 6.   The Secretary loses track of time, whilst in the streets below riots erupt against General Mabillan. Meanwhile, he and Cecilia plan to poison the Ambassador.

Part 7.   The Secretary is eventually granted nationality by his host country, and because of his efficiency he is made Ambassador by the visiting Consul, to replace his incompetent host, who has been recalled and posted to Gothenburg. The Secretary presents himself formally to General Mabillan, who is aware of the diplomatic trick. Next day the Secretary, now Ambassador, returns to work and resumes a normal relationship with time.

Right to Sanctuary

Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier web links

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2015

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