20C Authors

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad

November 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad is a series of tutorials and guidance notes on all the shorter fiction of Joseph Conrad. The stories are commonly given the name ‘tales’ or ‘shorter fiction’ because hardly any of them are now what would be considered traditional short stories. Some of them were originally published as serials in magazines, as was common with novels at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one or two (such as The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line) are now commonly regarded as novellas. The series is shown here in alphabetical order.

A Smile of Fortune — (1911)
Amy Foster — (1901)
An Anarchist — (1906)
An Outpost of Progress — (1897)
Because of the Dollars — (1915)
Falk: A Reminiscence — (1903)
Freya of the Seven Isles — (1912)
Gaspar Ruiz — (1906)
Il Conde — (1908)
Karain: A Memory — (1897)
Prince Roman — (1911)
The Black Mate — (1908)
The Brute — (1906)
The Duel — (1908)
The End of the Tether — (1902)
The Idiots — (1896)
The Informer — (1906)
The Inn of the Two Witches — (1915)
The Lagoon — (1897)
The Partner — (1915)
The Planter of Malata — (1915)
The Return — (1898)
The Secret Sharer — (1910)
The Shadow Line — (1917)
The Tale — (1917)
The Warrior’s Soul — (1917)
To-Morrow — (1902)
Typhoon — (1902)
Youth — (1898)

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

The Custom of the Country

July 20, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Custom of the Country (1913) presents a central character who ignores any positive influences which surround her, and always does the wrong thing with the worst possible motives. The novel deals with issues which now seem amazingly contemporary – the striving for wealth, fashionability, and a nouveau riche lifestyle which is something like an early twentieth century version of Hello magazine. And yet because these issues are connected so closely with class and wealth the narrative also has its ideological roots in Balzac.

Edith Wharton

When Jane Austen wrote Mansfield Park she created a heroine (Fanny Price) who is increasingly difficult for readers to tolerate – because she never puts a foot wrong. No matter that all the other characters around her have human weaknesses and failings, Fanny Price suffers in silence and always does the Right Thing. This makes her tediously self-righteous and insufferably priggish. Edith Wharton’s Undine Spragg is the opposite: she is insufferably self-seeking and obnoxious, and she claws her way to success by trampling on anyone who gets in her way.

The Custom of the Country – critical commentary

This is a study of ruthless social ambition, material greed, and self-indulgence which seems almost to presage the bitchy anti-heroines of contemporary television soap operas. Undine Spragg has almost no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, and in some senses it is a mystery why Edith Wharton shoud have spent so much of her creative energy documenting such a negative example of American social life.

Undine Spragg claims that her ambition is simply “amusement with respectability”, and a number of commentators have been happy enough to take her at face value. But this simple formula is neither truthful not sufficiently comprehensive. Her notion of ‘amusement’ also includes constant change. For instance, she is married four times within a decade. It also includes an extravagant standard of living and self-indulgent expenditure on an almost industrial scale. Needless to say, it also includes egotism writ large and no effort on her part to play any constructive part in creating the ‘amusement’.

The term ‘respectability’ is in fact her portmanteau term for both fashionability and high class – and she is incapable of making the necessary distinction between the two. She mistakes Ralph Marvell’s class for wealth which he doesn’t have, and Raymond de Chelles’s class for fashionability, of which he and his family are the antithesis.

The only accurate assessment she makes is to see that she and her ex-husband Elmer Moffatt are two of the same kind – new world fortune seekers who wish nothing to stand in the way of their ambition.

It’s a mystery why Edith Wharton should have them both triumphant in the end. The only disappointment Undine Spragg faces is the recognition that there are some echelons of society which will remain forever shut off to her. As a divorced woman, she can never become an ambassador’s wife. Oh dear.

The Custom of the Country – study resources

The Custom of the Country – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Custom of the Country – Bantam Classics – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country – Bantam Classics – Amazon US

The Custom of the Country – Penguin classics – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country – Penguin classics – Amazon US

The Custom of the Country – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Custom of the Country – audioBook version at LibriVox

The Custom of the Country – audio CD (unabridged) – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country – Kindle eBook edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country – plot summary

Undine Spragg is an ambitious and visually attractive young woman with decent but indulgent parents who she has persuaded to move from their mid-western province to upper class New York. This is to enable her to realise her dreams of becoming a fashionable socialite. She is uneducated, gauche, and snobbish, and everything she does is motivated by vanity, greed, laziness, and self-interest.

By mixing with what she thinks are the right sorts of people, she manages to secure a husband from ‘old money’ New York society – not realising that he has no personal wealth and very few social prospects. She quickly becomes bored with him, and even though he takes up a job to provide them with additional income, she overspends, ‘borrows’ money from one of her married admirers (Peter Van Degan), and even neglects her own child.

Elmer Moffatt, a shady figure from her past keeps appearing in the story. He agrees to remain silent about a previous engagement in her past if she will introduce him to people of influence. She is eventually instrumental in facilitating a business venture between Moffatt and her own husband. They both profit from the deal – but she uses the money to leave her husband and child whilst she goes on an extended trip to Paris, where she hopes to secure a richer new husband in the form of Van Degan.

Whilst her husband looks after their child and works hard to pay her bills, she goes on a tour of European pleasure resorts with Van Degan. She receives messages that her husband is desperately ill, but chooses to ignore them. Van Degan takes her to out-of-the-way spots where they will not be seen, and when she returns to the United States in order to secure a divorce, he abandons her.

As a divorced woman, Undine fails to reconnect with New York society, so she returns to Paris using her parents as a social smokescreen, When they return to the USA she stays on, mixing with minor aristocracy, and re-meeting Raymond de Chelles, a former admirer.

Still living beyond her means, she asks Elmer Moffatt for money, which he refuses, In order to marry Raymond de Chelles (who is a french Catholic) she needs a papal annulment of her marriage, which costs a lot of money. So she claims custody of her child Paul (who she has abandoned) hoping that Ralph will buy back from her the right to keep his son. Ralph borrows money and invests it in a speculative business deal with Elmer Moffatt to raise the funds.

The scheme fails to materialise, at which point it is revealed that Undine had previously been married to Moffatt (which explains the pact of confidence between them). In desperation at his predicament, Ralph shoots himself – which leaves Undine a widow rather than a divorced woman. She inherits Ralph’s money, and the portion allotted to her own son, and marries Raymond de Chelles. A year later the business deal with Moffatt pays off, and she receives that money too.

However, she feels stifled and trapped in the marriage with de Chelles and his very traditional family, and when Moffatt turns up yet again to buy some of the de Chelles family antiques heirlooms, Undine can see that he has become a very rich and even influential man. She proposes a secret affair with him – which he refuses, insisting on a proper marriage.

As the novels ends, Undine is re-married to Moffatt and lives at the pinnacle of New York society – but she is already becoming bored with her fourth husband and realises that there are some echelons of society to which she will never be able to aspire.

Principal characters

Undine Spragg	a social climber from midwest USA
Abner Spragg	her indulgent father, a financier
Leota Spragg	her indulgent mother
Ralph Marvell	poetic aspirations, lightweight son of old New York family
Mrs Heeny	manicurist, masseuse, and confidant to Mrs Spragg
Elmer Moffatt	business man from Undine’s provincial past
Peter Van Degan	rich, loud, boorish socialite
Clare Van Degan	his wife, who is in love with Ralph
Raymond de Chelles	a French aristocrat with a traditional family
Paul Marvell	Undine and Ralph’s son, who lives with his father, then his stepfather
Claud Washingham Popple	a society artist who paints Undine’s portrait

Edith Wharton at her writing desk

Other works by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome (1911) tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this novella’s powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. Every detail of the story contributes to a shocking and powerful conclusion you will never forget. This book is now regarded as a classic of the novella genre.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
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The Age of Innocence (1920) is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War. It’s a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s. Newland Archer is charming, tactful, and enlightened. He accepts society’s standards and abides by its rules, but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future – until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, and scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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Buy the book at Amazon US

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Dean’s December

April 24, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Dean’s December (1982) was Saul Bellow’s first novel after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. Like many of his other works it has a strongly autobiographical basis. Between 1975 and 1985 Bellow was married to Alexander Ionescu Tulcea, a mathematician from Bucharest in Romania. Both of her parents were distinguished academics – as are those of Minna, the fictional wife in the novel.

The events of the narrative move back and forth between Bucharest and Chicago – two cities about which Bellow draws a number of subtle parallels. The totalitarian oppression of the ultra-Stalinist state in Romania results in corruption and inefficiency of one kind. The wild anarchy of free-market capitalism in the USA results in desperation and horrors of a different order. Bellow’s protagonist Albert Corde attempts to find an accommodation with both systems whilst struggling to retain his humanitarian system of values.

The Dean’s December – critical comment

Historical background

In the period covered by the events of the novel, Romania was in the ‘sphere of influence’ of the Soviet Union, and was ruled by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The country was a police state, with extensive corruption, spying on its own citizens by the secret police (the ‘Securitate’) and a ‘cult of personality’ around the dictator and his wife. The country was depleted by food shortages, and both press and broadcasting media were state controlled. It was reputed to be the most totalitarian all the Eastern Block countries.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ceausescu was eventually overthrown in 1989. He and his wife escaped by helicopter but were captured fleeing the country. They were tried, found guilty of embezzlement of state funds and genocide, then executed on Christmas Day in 1989.

Chicago at the same time was governed by what is called ‘machine politics’. That is, political power and decision-making was controlled by a small elite who relied on a corrupt system of patronage, bribes, and collusion between political appointees, the police, trades unions, and gangsters. The city had a very high rate of violent crime, extensively related to the control of drugs amongst rival gangs.

The city was governed for twenty-one years by mayor Richard J. Daley. Many of the members of his administration were charged and convicted of corruption. He was notorious for his manipulation of the democratic process, and is remembered for the cynical piece of political wisdom: “Vote early—and often”.

Narrative style

Saul Bellow is renowned for his novels which have fast-talking first person narrators. They are fictional characters who deliver the events of the story, an amusing commentary on contemporary society, and quasi-philosophic reflections – all at the same time.

Technically. The Dean’s December has an outer third person omniscient narrator – who introduces Albert Corde as a character. But the truth is that the majority of the novel is taken up with Corde’s thoughts, his observations, and his first-person reflections on life in Bucharest and Chicago.

Bellow moves very skilfully from third to first-person narrative mode and back again. The following extract starts in third person omniscient narrative mode. It then moves into interior monologue, and switches to Corde’s point of view. It then goes back to an objective account of Corde’s thoughts – including comments on his own reflections – and ends in a first person narrative mode.

She gave him a fully open look. But he didn’t have the confidence he had once had in these open looks. It wasn’t that he distrusted Vlada, but people were never as sincere as they revved themselves up to be. They couldn’t guarantee that their purposes were fixed and constant. Yes, constancy. Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds. What did love have to do with it? She only wanted to show that he could really trust her. And what he thought was, I’m pale, I look unwell, I look rotten, I’m skittish and jumpy—I’m all over the place (quoting Shakespeare out of context). She wants to be nice to me. I had an especially blasting morning. It’s still with me. All right, I trust you, Vlada, but you want to get me to take on this job. Probably she’s somewhat surprised that I don’t jump at the chance.

The Dean’s dilemma

The novel can be seen as a series of discussions that Albert Corde conducts with the other characters in the novel – including an ongoing debate with himself, He finds himself at odds with the other figures in the narrative – even those who are close to him and with whom he shares what he thinks of as ‘core values’.

He is devoted to his new younger wife Minna, but she is a scientist, an astro-physicist dealing with issues he does not understand. He deals in literature and the humanities, and although she respects his standing as an academic and journalist, their intellectual worlds are foreign to each other.

He is very sympathetic to his sister Elfride, but her wayward son Mason puts a barrier between them. Mason represents a part of contemporary society that is very much at odds with Corde and all he stands for. Mason is the spoiled child of rich parents who has decided to be contrarian. He identifies with the black ghettos (whilst robbing his own mother) and challenges Corde’s defence of a young white woman whose husband has been murdered.

Mason claims that Corde is out of touch with Chicago reality – and so does the boy’s father, the tough lawyer Zaehner who accuses Corde of taking the soft option of a tenured academic professorship – comparing him with ‘an unmarried mother on welfare with ten kids’.

The implication is that Corde, for all his protestations of concern, is hiding in a privileged sector of society whilst others face up to the problems of modern capitalistic democracy and some of the horrors it creates. There is a certain amount of truth in this claim – which is partly why Corde renounces his professorship at the end of the novel and decides to help the scientist Beech with his work on environmentalism.

Corde is also not without a sense of self-criticism. He worries about his articles in Harper’s which have exposed unpleasant details about life in modern Chicago. Everybody is telling him that he has gone ‘too far’ and exposed too much unpleasantness. This criticism is brought to its most subtle and exquisite pitch in the character of Alec Witt, the college Provost. Witt appears to be sympathetic to Corde with his brilliant wife and a mother-in-law who is dying, yet he wraps all his supportive conversation in an invisible film of veiled threats.

It is quite clear that the novel is inviting us to accept Corde’s traditional, humanistic, and sceptical set of values. It contrasts those with the attitudes of time-serving bureaucrats – in both eastern Europe, where the difference is almost grotesque, and the West, where the differences are more nuanced.

It is worth noting that Corde is sympathetic to the socialist values of his relatives in Bucharest – even showing a degree of understanding to those who have been forced to become police informers in order to survive. He also appreciates the sacrifices and deprivations suffered by those who have been former Party members but kept their old allegiances and beliefs alive. He reflects on the elderly figure of Gigi, who is facing the death of her sister

She was studying her death, that was for sure. Corde thought of her with extraordinary respect. Her personal humanity came from the old sources. Corde had become better informed about these sources in Paris and London.

Those ‘old sources’ are the heart of what the novel wishes to promote – and they are the moral and social values based upon the canon of western philosophy and literature. This was something Bellow defended in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the reason why he is regarded by some as holding conservative political values and by others as a defender of liberalism.

The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as ‘true impressions’. This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But our connection remains with the depths from which these glimpses come.

The Dean’s December – study resources

The Dean’s December – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Dean’s December – Penguin – Amazon US

The Dean’s December – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Dean’s December – Library of America – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

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

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

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

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

The Dean’s December – chapter summaries

i. Albert Corde is an American college dean and a professor of journalism. He and his Romanian wife Minna are in Bucharest, visiting her mother Valeria who is in hospital following a heart attack. They are confronted by bureaucratic intransigence, and the city is in the grip of shortages and the secret police.

Corde recalls his appreciative relationship with his mother-in-law, who has been a distinguished doctor. She has read his articles on Chicago, and he has escorted her on holidays in London, where he has sensed that she is getting too old for such trips.

ii. Corde and Minna devise strategies to circumvent the punitive rules denying them access to her mother. They think of employing a corrupt brain surgeon who was once her father’s student. They also hope for support from friends in Chicago.

iii. The previous summer Corde was called to identify a dead white student who was involved in an inter-racial murder. Corde raises a reward for information, and black suspects are arrested. His student nephew Mason accuses him of prejudice and misunderstanding. Corde tries to consider the evidence from the boy’s point of view, but fails. Corde is writing about Chicago, but Mason claims he doesn’t really understand the unpleasant truths of modern society.

iv. Corde is well looked after by Gigi, but they battle against rationing, shortages, and primitive social conditions. He is invited to the US embassy where he asks the ambassador for help in gaining access to Valeria. The. Ambassador reveals that a childhood friend and rival of Corde’s is in Bucharest on a journalistic assignment.

Receiving news from home, Corde recalls his last meeting with his sister. She seeks to defend her son Mason who has threatened trial witnesses and gone on the run. Corde also reflects on his cousin Max , a crooked lawyer who has cheated him out of a lot of money.

v. The hospital will allow only one further visit, for which bribes will be needed. Corde meets his old college friend Dewey Spangler who is now a well-connected reporter They reminisce about Chicago and Corde reflects on his own ethical values which have been formed by traditional literary culture.

vi. Corde and Minna bribe their way into a hospital visit where Valeria is clearly dying. Corde reflects on how his westernised values and behaviour must seem to his socialist relatives.

vii. Corde reads through the scientific proposal from geologist Beech. It is an environmental warning about lead poisoning. Corde’s secretary Miss Parsons sends a bundle of mail that rakes up all the problems back in Chicago. His defence of former county jail governor Rufus Redpath is held against him.

viii. Corde reviews some of the horrible crimes and court scenes he has reported in his articles. He also reads his own gruesome account of patients on kidney dialysis machines in the county hospital.

ix. Valeria dies in the hospital Corde and Minna are caught up in the bureaucratic procedures for the funeral. A telephone call from the college provost pretends to be supportive, but is full of veiled threats Corde recalls visiting a poor neighbourhood community centre run by two former drug addicts.

x. Corde re-reads his interview with a public defence lawyer in a particularly savage case of rape and murder. They discuss the philosophic basis of a criminal underclass in society and what can be done about it.

xi. Corde, Minna, and friends attend Valeria’s funeral. Many of her old comrades turn out to pay their respects, despite the Party’s disapproval.

xii. Corde and his friend Vlada discuss the Beech proposal on environmentalism. She tries to persuade him to collaborate: he remains sceptical and explains his reservations. This leads to global philosophies and her news that Corde’s sister is marrying judge Sorokin.

xiii. Corde and Spangler reminisce about their Chicago boyhood together. Spangler has been impressed by Corde’s articles, but he criticises him for hiding away as a tenured professor. He also reveals that he has medical problems and is using a colostomy bag.

xiv. The family are assembling heirlooms to smuggle out of the country. Minna is angry about her mother’s death. Conflicts of opinion arise with Corde, despite his wish to protect her. He reflects on differences between his own ideology and that of the business-based world of Chicago commerce.

xv. Minna becomes ill. Corde attends the interment of Valeria’s ashes at the cemetery. He discusses American and eastern European values with Vlada. The Chicago trial has found the defendant Lucas Ebry guilty.

xvi. Back in Chicago Minna goes into hospital. Corde hides away from the urban squalor and violence he has written about and which still surrounds him.

xvii. When Minna recovers they attend a swanky party given in honour of a dog’s birthday. It is revealed that his friend Dewey Spangler has written an embarrassing article about Corde.

xviii. Spangler’s article is a friendly stab in the back. He has used material Corde gave him during their conversations but has put it into a very negative context.

xix. Corde and Minna travel to Mount Palomar where she is doing research. He has been reproached by the college Provost and has resigned from the college. He decides to help Beech with his environmental work.

The Dean’s December – principal characters

Albert Corde	an American college dean and professor of journalism
Minna	his wife, a Romanian astro-physicist
Valeria	Minna’s dying mother,
Tanti Gigi	Valeria’s sister
Elfrida Zaehner	Corde’s sister
Mason Zaehner	Elfrida’s wayward son, a student
Dewey Spangler	Corde’s childhood friend, a rival journalist
Alec Witt	Corde’s college provost
Vlada Voynich	a Chicago scientist
Fay Porson	Corde’s secretary, a cougar

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

The Death of the Moth

January 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Death of the Moth (1942) is the third volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays to be published after the success of her earlier collections The Common Reader first series and The Common Reader second series. Early preparations were made by Virginia Woolf herself, and then it appeared one year after her death, edited by her husband Leonard Woolf.

He explains in his introduction that the essays had previously appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman & Nation, the Yale Review, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, the Listener, the New Republic, and Lysistrata. He also goes on to point out that Virginia Woolf took immense care with even the shortest and least important of her essays and book reviews – often producing up to eight versions of a text before she was satisfied.

At the point of assembling this collection Leonard Woolf thought that the totality of Virginia’s finished essays and reviews had been located, edited, and published. But subsequent researches and retrievals from newspaper archives were to produce the later collections The Moment and Other Essays (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958).

The Death of the Moth – critical commentary

The brief essay that gives this volume its title illustrates perfectly her gift for spinning literary gold out of straw. The subject is trivial and mundane – a moth fluttering against a window pane. But she observes it as a philosopher who uses the image to reflect on the most fundamental force of nature – the struggle between life and death.

She also draws out the complexities in apparently simple things – such as the words we use to speak and write. In an essay called ‘Craftsmanship’ – which was built from a radio broadcast for the BBC in a series called ‘Words Fail Me’ – she reflects on the volatility of language and our difficulties in pinning down meaning. The following Youtube illustrated audio clip gives an extract from the broadcast:

In some pieces, such as ‘Evening Over Sussex’ she not only explores the complexities of expressing her appreciation of the countryside but she also weaves into the verbal landscape her reflections on the nature of multiple personalities which construct the individual sensibility making such observations.

Three reviews of Henry James – two memoirs and the letters – almost take on the famous style of her author-subject – the long sentences, baroque syntax, and complex metaphors that his fans so admire and his detractors bewail. She dwells mainly on his relationship with England and his not-uncritical admiration for its traditions, through which she expresses her own reverence for James as a figure representing a bygone age.

Her literary criticism is of a kind that hardly exists any more. In an extended study of E.M. Forster’s novels she is lofty and magisterial, but she evaluates the works using bafflingly abstract metaphors:

there are moments — and his first novel [Where Angels Fear to Tread] provides several instances — when he lays his hand on the prize.

She believes that one of his greatest novels is Howards End – it ‘mark[s] his prime’, yet when she gets round to looking at it in detail exclaims ‘we may wonder in what mood of the moment we can have been prompted to call it a failure … the book as a whole lacks force’.

In ‘The Art of Biography’ she points out that fiction and biography cannot be easily combined because they have different goals – one towards factuality, the other towards invention. As a novelist and biographer herself, she resolves this contradiction by suggesting that biography is a young genre, that it should explore new methods, and that it acts as a modest handmaid to the work of truly imaginative and great artists.

Her reflections on the condition of young English poets in 1931 are cast in the form of a letter to ‘John’: (this is John Lehmann, who worked for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press). Against his despair that poetry was ‘dead’ she invokes the great English tradition – of Shakespeare, Donne, Crabbe, Hopkins – urges him and his friends to stop looking inward and write about other people, and implores him ‘for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty’.

The volume ends with some vivacious polemics – a critique of lectures as a teaching method in the university education system (sixty years ahead of its time); an account of how she was forced to kill the Victorian notion of ‘The Angel in the House’ (the ideal woman) in order to become a professional author; and what might be the best antidotes to the clamour for aggression and war.

These essays are a wonderful reminder of how Woolf managed to successfully combine serious and profoundly new ideas about everyday life (particularly the lives of women) with both the wit and the erudition of someone who was truly steeped in the traditions of English literary culture.

The Death of the Moth – study resources

The Death of the Moth – Amazon UK

The Death of the Moth – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Death of the Moth – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Death of the Moth – complete contents

The Death of the Moth
Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
Three Pictures
Old Mrs. Grey
Street Haunting: A London Adventure
Jones and Wilkinson
“Twelfth Night” At the Old Vic
Madame de Sévigné
The Humane Art
Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole
The Rev William Cole
The Historian and “The Gibbon”
Reflections at Sheffield Place
The Man at the Gate
Sara Coleridge
“Not One of Us”
Henry James: 1. Within the Rim
Henry James: 2. The Old Order
Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James
George Moore
The Novels of E. M. Forster
Middlebrow
The Art of Biography
Craftsmanship
A Letter to a Young Poet
Why?
Professions for Women
Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

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

The Defence

April 26, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot, study resources, web links

The Defence was Vladimir Nabokov’s third novel. It was written in the French Pyrenees and Berlin during 1929, then first serialized as Zashchita Lubina in the Russian emigre quarterly Sovremennye Zapiski. This was followed by publication as a single volume novel by Slovo in Berlin (1930).

Nabokov had composed chess problems and various puzzles (as well as short stories) for the Russian emigre newspaper ‘Rul that his father had established in Berlin in the early 1920s. All of these contributions were composed under the pen name of ‘V. Sirin’ which he adopted to distinguish himself from his father, whose name was also Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was later serialized in The New Yorker and then appeared simultaneously in the UK and the USA in 1964, translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author.

The Defence – critical commentary

Autism?

In a typically tongue-in-cheek, semi-boastful introduction to the novel, Nabokov congratulates himself on the complex structure of the novel and the compositional chess references and allusions he weaves into his narrative:

the chess effects I planted are distinguishable not only in these separate scenes; their concatenation can be found in the basic structure of this attractive novel. Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board, sixteen years elapse in the course of one paragraph, and Luzhin, suddenly promoted to seedy manhood and transferred to a German resort, is discovered at a garden table

It is certainly true that the moving backwards and forwards in the chronology of events is handled in a masterful fashion, but Nabokov’s more remarkable achievement is the creation of a narrative related largely from the perspective of someone we would now call autistic.

Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is sullen, withdrawn, and uncommunicative. He fails to recognise social norms and does not respond to the positive efforts and signals of those around him, including his own parents. He isolates himself from his peers at school, and has obsessive compulsive disorders such as stepping on the cracks between paving stones and memorising car number plates in case they will come in useful at a later date .

Later he is unable to distinguish between dream fantasies and reality, he clings to ‘favourite books’ (Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes) and he rejects replacements because they are ‘the wrong edition’ – that is, they are not visually identical to the volumes he read as a child. In the medical jargon of autism, this is called ‘sameness’ – a pathological clinging to what is already known.

Luzhin is emotionally detached from both his mother and father, feels only a glimmer of interest in his aunt because she shows him the rudiments of chess, and he lives in a parallel universe of abstract metaphors and tapping every tree he passes with his walking stick. These are all classic symptoms of autism, which at the time of the novel’s composition in 1929 was not as widely recognised as a psychological disorder as it is today.

Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins Hospital first used autism in its modern sense in English when he introduced the label early infantile autism in a 1943 report of 11 children with striking behavioral similarities. Almost all the characteristics described in Kanner’s first paper on the subject, notably “autistic aloneness” and “insistence on sameness”, are still regarded as typical of the autistic spectrum of disorders. [Wikipedia]

Nabokov’s skill is to create Luzhin’s sense of detachment and failure to understand or empathise with what is going on around him, whilst the same time giving the reader enough information to see both Luzhin’s point of view and that of the other characters.

Names

Nabokov appears to have been making some strange and not always successful experiments regarding the naming of his characters in this novel. His protagonist Luzhin is referred to by his surname (family name) throughout – even by his fiancée and then wife, which would not be at all likely or realistic. Apart from this distancing effect reflecting the character’s emotional isolation from other characters, the device doesn’t seem to be much more than a literary mannerism on Nabokov’s part. This is underlined by the fact that Luzhin’s birth name and patronymic are dramatically revealed in the very last lines of the novel – to no apparent purpose.

Even more strangely, and for no evident dramatic reason, we never learn the name of his fiancée and bride at all. She is referred to as his fiancée and ‘Mrs Luzhin’. Yet on the other hand, Nabokov does name completely inconsequential characters who have no importance in the development of the novel. They are named, only to disappear a few pages later after making their brief appearances.

The Defence – study resources

The Defence – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The Defence – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon UK

The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon US

Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon UK

Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon US

The Defence – chapter summaries

1 Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is a shy, sullen, and awkward boy – possibly what would now call autistic. When his parents take him home from summer holiday back to St. Petersburg, he runs away and goes to hide in a wood shed.

2 His father is a writer who hopes that his backward son is specially gifted. But young Luzhin is not happy and is undistinguished at school, where he is bullied by the other boys. He has two favourite books – by Jules Verne and Conan Doyle. He develops an interest in jigsaw puzzles and number games.

3 Luzhin sees a chess set for the first time and immediately wants to play. There is friction between his father and mother regarding relations with her more attractive sister. Luzhin watches a game played at school then starts playing truant to learn the game from his aunt.

4 He learns more about chess from an elderly admirer of his aunt, then he advances to learn chess notation and replays games in his head. He plays against his father and beats him. He stops going to school, loses track of time, and eventually has a breakdown. His parents take him to an Adriatic resort where, after his mother returns to St Petersburg, her sister joins his father.

5 His mother dies. Luzhin tours Russia as a chess prodigy. His father plans to write a novel about a child chess champion. Luzhin goes go on a European tour with his tutor-manager Valentinov, and when the first world war breaks out he refuses to go home. Valentinov acts in a suspicious and unprofessional manner. His father has difficulty writing the novel and dies before it is produced.

6 Luzhin meets a young woman at a German spa where he is playing exhibition matches. Valentinov has kept him on a Spartan regime, and when he is no longer a youthful prodigy, abandons him. Luzhin announces to the woman that she must become his wife. She introduces him to her mother, who thinks Luzhin is an ill-mannered boor.

7 The mother cannot take Luzhin seriously, but she is mildly impressed when he asks for her daughter’s hand in marriage in a gentlemanly manner.

8 In Berlin he meets the woman’s father, who he bamboozles with chess arcana. The mother continues to be hostile and rude. His fiancée is worried about his ‘illness’. He begins to confuse dreams and reality, and he develops spatial dislocation. He engages in a stressful chess tournament against his rival Turati. There is an adjournment, after which he has another nervous breakdown and imagines he is back in his Russian childhood.

9 Luzhin is found unconscious in the street by some drunks and taken to his fiancée’s house. He is placed in a sanatorium and the chess competition is considered ‘unfinished’.

10 His psychiatrist says that he will recover, but that chess is forbidden for the time being. The fiancée’s parents angrily try to forbid the marriage to ‘this penniless crackpot’. Luzhin gradually emerges from his breakdown. He recaptures childhood memories with great difficulty.

11 Luzhin leaves the sanatorium, and preparations are made for the marriage. A flat is rented, he gives up chess, and he begins to behave more normally. After the marriage ceremony he and his new bride return to the flat, where Luzhin immediately falls asleep.

12 He amuses himself in a desultory manner with an office typewriter and a phonograph. At a charity ball he meets someone from his old school who quizzes him about the past in a way that is disturbing.

13 There are further discussions about making a journey abroad. Mrs Luzhin has a lady visitor from the Soviet Union who is mindlessly patriotic about the Stalin regime. Luzhin thinks he has discovered a hidden pattern in the events of his life. He finds a pocket chess set in the lining of his jacket and recreates his game against Turati at exactly the point it was abandoned.

14 Luzhin gradually rejoins the world of chess and believes his life is a contest being played against an invisible opponent. His wife invites Russian emigres to the home, but Luzhin ignores them all and thinks about a plot to beat his unknown opponent. He wants to devise an unbeatable ‘defence’ Valentinov reappears and invites him to appear in a seedy film that involves chess, but Luzhin thinks this is a trap to lure him back into competitions. He decides that the ultimate defence against his antagonist is to ‘leave the game’ – and following the logic of this notion he commits suicide.

The Defence – further reading

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Vladimir Nabokov – Routledge Critical Heritage- Amazon UK

Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels – Cambridge UP- Amazon UK

Women in Nabokov’s Life and Art – paperback- Amazon UK

Strong Opinions (Essays) – Penguin Classics paperback- Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov – Writers and their Work- Amazon UK

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

The Edwardians

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Vita Sackville-West’s best-selling novel

The Edwardians first appeared in 1930, and was a deliberate attempt on Vita Sackville-West’s part to write a best-seller. The amazing thing is that like so many of the other things she did in her rich and unusual life, she succeeded. It sold 20,000 copies in its first two months, outstripping the success of her friend, lover, and fellow author Virginia Woolf. It’s a story of the aristocratic milieu from which she herself sprang, and is a rich blend of sentimental nostalgia for a world which had almost disappeared by the time she came to write it, and a critical analysis of some of the reasons why that disappearance occurred.

The principal characters are from a single grand family: Lucy a widowed baroness, Sebastian her young Duke-to-be son, his sister Viola, and the glamorous Lady Roehampton who becomes his mistress. But the main character is the Elizabethan house where they live – served by its small army of servants. What makes her account of the period artistically successful is that she divides the tensions in her own opinions between the various characters. All the positive portrayal of the Edwardian haute monde is given full force, but it is offset by the sceptical views of outsiders such as the explorer Leonard Anquetil who sees through the shallowness and pointlessness of the characters’ lives.

The writing is elegant, well-paced, witty, and vocabulary-rich without being intimidating – all qualities which West’s original publisher Leonard Woolf correctly predicted would make the book a best-seller. She’s rather a playful narrator, speaking to the reader, or pretending that there are things which must be left unsaid, out of deference to propriety:

“It makes one’s blood run cold, doesn’t it, to think of the hands one’s letters might fall into? I suppose it’s a letter to …” and here she uttered a name so august that in deference to the respect and loyalty of the printer it must remain unrevealed.

West keeps the narrative very firmly in her own hands as an omniscient narrator. And at times she is given to brief apercus which are like a watered-down version of Proust. The explorer Anquetil reflects on his brief invitation to a weekend party at the Great House:

For his own part, he felt convinced that he would never see Chevron again; the incident would be isolated in his life; he was too active for England ever to hold him long, and already he had other plans in preparation, but the short incursion into this strangely segregated world had surprisingly enriched him, as one is enriched by any experience one had believed to be entirely outside the scope of one’s sympathies, and which unexpectedly acquires a life of its own in a new reach of one’s comprehension.

The only plot as such is the succession of affairs embarked on by Duke-to-be Sebastian as he vainly attempts to break free from the weight of tradition in which the House, the Estate, and family expectations gradually engulf him. A much larger issue is the conduct of the entire class itself, and how it tries to preserve itself through property, marriage, and inheritance. This is satirically presented, and is counterbalanced by a surprisingly sympathetic view of the new and rising forces of the Edwardian era which, together with the imminent debacle of 1914-18 would virtually wipe it off the map altogether.

The novel offers a wonderfully rich lesson in the social history of a bygone world: not only the fine details of social ranking below and above stairs, but such arcana as the distinctions between a carriage, a victoria, and a brougham as modes of transport, plus the social niceties of giving offence whilst appearing to be polite by proffering two or three fingers instead of the full five when shaking hands.

Vita Sackville-West was herself an aristocratic snob of the highest order, but this novel is proof positive that gifted authors can rise above the limitations of their own opinions to create a picture of the world which is rich, complex, and even capable of expressing values which they themselves do not hold. Highly recommended.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians, London: Virago, 2003, pp.349, ISBN 0860683591

More on Vita Sackville-West
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The Enchanter

December 23, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

The Enchanter (1939) was one of the last works Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Russian, using his original pen name of V. Sirin. It was composed in Paris, at a time when he had just started to create works in English – the third of his childhood languages (the two others being his native Russian, and French which was the lingua franca of the Russian aristocracy). Following his arrival in America the manuscript appeared to have been lost, but it surfaced again in 1959 and was first published in English translation in 1987, ten years after the author’s death.

Because of the sensational publication of Lolita in 1955 and the scandal that ensued, The Enchanter was very obviously ripe for its own commercial success, since it dealt with the same subject – the obsession of a middle-aged man for a young girl. Yet strangely, the novella has never generated nearly as much interest with the reading public – even amongst Nabokov specialists.

The Enchanter – critical commentary

Form

Unusually for Nabokov, there is no effort made to locate the events of the story either temporally or geographically. – and none of the characters are given names, although there is a possibility (discussed by his son and translator Dmitri Nabokov in an afterward) that the protagonist’s name at one time might have been Arthur.

In terms of genre, the narrative is too long to be classified as a short story, and too short to be a novel. But the fact that its subject is concentrated so powerfully on one character and his obsession means it might justly be considered a novella.

It has the classical unities of time, place, character, and action to warrant this classification. The story is entirely concerned with the protagonist’s obsession. The other characters, even the woman he marries and the daughter he abducts, are of secondary importance. The events take place in one location, they are orchestrated in once continuous movement, and their outcome culminates in the protagonist’s tragic downfall.

Nabokov and paedophilia

In recent years, careful scrutiny of Nabokov’s work as a whole has revealed that the subject of paedophilia has been a recurring feature of his novels, from earliest to last. Consequently, there has been an embarrassed effort by some critics and editors to downplay and obfuscate the issue of a distinguished writer who had such an apparently unhealthy interest in the seduction of young girls.

For instance, the contents of this slim volume come heavily protected by double ‘explanatory’ prefaces from Nabokov himself and an afterward and running commentary by his son and translator Dmitri Nabokov. Both of these additions to the text seek to deflect attention from the uncomfortable subject of paedophilia towards the genesis and aesthetic details of the work itself.

In an afterward to Lolita (written in 1956) Nabokov claimed that the idea for its main subject had come to him from a newspaper report of a drawing produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes. The drawing showed the bars of its cage, the implication being that the poor beast was imprisoned both literally and metaphorically.

The protagonist of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, is a character who produces a written account of his seduction of a young girl who is his step-daughter, and his murder of a rival who also abducts and seduces her. Humbert’s written deposition (the novel) is produced from his prison cell whilst awaiting trial.

This round-about appeal to our sympathy deflects attention from two uncomfortable facts. The first is that Humbert Humbert, is not imprisoned by his obsession for under-age girls: he acts fully conscious of his desires with the free will of an adult.

The second fact is that Nabokov had been writing about older men having sexual encounters with under-age girls ever since his earliest works – such as A Nursery Tale (1926) and <Laughter in the Dark (1932). Moreover, he had already written The Enchanter (1939) which was based on that theme, and he was still including mention of what we would now class as paedophilia in works as late as Ada or Ardor (1969) and Transparent Things (1972).

Neither The Enchanter nor Lolita are isolated examples of this theme: they are merely the most explicit and fully developed examples of a topic to which Nabokov returned again and again in his work.

The Enchanter and Lolita

There is no escaping the fact that the plots of Lolita and The Enchanter are virtually identical. A middle-aged man is obsessed by young girls of a certain age – generally around twelve years old. In order to secure access to one such girl, the man marries her widowed mother and then plans to kill her. When the mother unexpectedly dies, he takes the young girl away by car to a hotel where he plans to seduce her.

Lolita herself is a far more fully developed character than the un-named girl in The Enchanter. She is more fully described and dramatised, with a quite witty line in teenage American slang.

But if The Enchanter had been published around the time it was written, Nabokov might well have been accused of self-plagiarism when Lolita appeared. It is Nabokov’s good fortune (or his skilful management of his own literary reputation) that the manuscript of The Enchanter did not emerge until three decades after the work which established his worldwide fame – and after his death in 1977.

Point of view

The whole of The Enchanter is related from the protagonist’s point of view. In fact the tale starts in first person singular narrative mode, documenting his turbulent thoughts as he tries to justify his aberrant cravings to himself:

This cannot be lechery. Coarse carnality is omnivorous; the subtle kind presupposes eventual satiation. So what if I did have five or six normal affairs—how can one compare their insipid randomness with my unique flame?

But after a few pages the narrative switches to a conventional third person mode – which is worth noting for two reasons. The first reason is technical. The story must be delivered by someone other than the protagonist if he is to die at the end of the story. (In the case of Lolita Humbert Humbert’s account of events is written whilst waiting for his trial in jail, where he dies.)

Nabokov, presenting the story in third person narrative mode, expresses the protagonist’s desires in a very sympathetic manner = almost as if they are a burden imposed upon him by forces outside himself.

having, by the age of forty, tormented himself sufficiently with his fruitless self-immolation

The protagonist’s thoughts and actions are dressed up in all the elaborate and metaphorical imagery for which Nabokov is famous, as if he wishes to obscure and intellectualise his protagonist’s desire – almost as if as an author he does not wish to address his subject directly.

The second noteworthy reason is one of persuasion. It is interesting that the articulation of the protagonist’s thoughts in the first few pages and the presentation of his acts in the remainder of the text are recounted in a remarkably similar literary style. And the style is one that regular readers of Nabokov will instantly recognise: it is the witty, elegant, and very sophisticated ‘literary’ prose he uses in most of his other works:

At daybreak he drowsily laid down his book like a dead fish folding its fin, and suddenly began berating himself: why, he demanded, did you succumb to the doldrums of despair, why didn’t you try to get a proper conversation going, and then make friends with the knitter, chocolate woman, governess, or whatever; and he pictured a jovial gentleman (whose internal organs only, for the moment, resembled his own) who could thus gain the opportunity—thanks to that very joviality— to collect you-naughty-little-girl-you onto his lap.

The reader is given every encouragement to identify and sympathise with the protagonist – which creates a moral and aesthetic problem that few people have been able to resolve in Nabokov’s work. His supporters have concentrated on the skill of his literary invention and his glossy poetic style; his detractors have pointed to his apparent lack of concern for the victims of the outrages perpetrated by his protagonists.

The Enchanter – study resources

The Enchanter – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Enchanter – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Enchanter: An Adventure in the Land of Nabokov – Amazon UK

The Enchanter: An Adventure in the Land of Nabokov – Amazon US

The Annotated Lolita – notes & explanations – Amazon UK

The Annotated Lolita – notes & explanations – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

The Enchanter – plot summary

A forty year old man tries to justify his passion for young girls. His fervid thoughts swirl around memories of some earlier instances of attraction in his life.

He sees a pretty young girl roller-skating in a park, then goes back the next day to befriend the old lady who is looking after her. Following this, he arranges to visit the girl’s widowed and invalid mother on the pretext of buying some furniture.

He visits again, and they exchange information about each other – she her medical problems, he his wealth and prosperity. Despite her warnings that she might not have long to live, he eventually proposes to her.

He wants to keep the girl at home, but the mother insists on peace and quiet; she insists that the girl live with friends. On their wedding night he cannot face their nuptials, and walks the streets, planning to poison her. But he gets through the occasion, after which she reverts to being a full time invalid.

In the months that follow, her health deteriorates and she is hospitalised. He receives news that an operation has been successful, and feels outraged and disappointed. But she does die, and he makes preparations to take the girl away.

He plans to escape with her into a world of permanent sexual indulgence shielded from any influences of everyday life. He has rhapsodic visions of a love life between them which will grow with time – so long as she is not distracted by contact with other people.

He collects the girl from her minder and they go off in a chauffeur driven car, staying overnight at a hotel. After some delays with the management, he joins her in bed and explores her body whilst she is asleep.

Overcome by his desire for her, he abandons all his plans of caution and restraint, and begins to molest her. But she wakes up and screams, and this disturbance awakens other people in the hotel. He panics, escapes into the street, where he is run over and killed by a passing truck.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Enchanter, London: Penguin Classics, 2009, pp.96, ISBN: 014119118X

Vladimir Nabokov – web links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

Vladimir Nabokov at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plot, box office, trivia, continuity errors, and quiz.

Zembla
Biography, timeline, photographs, eTexts, sound clips, butterflies, literary criticism, online journal, scholarly essays, and an online annotated version of Ada – housed at Pennsylvania State University Library.

Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. This volume offers a concise and informative introduction into the author’s fascinating creative world. Specially commissioned essays by distinguished scholars illuminate numerous facets of the writer’s legacy, from his early contributions as a poet and short-story writer to his dazzling achievements as one of the most original novelists of the twentieth century. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading. Buy the book here

More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

The Face of Spain

June 29, 2011 by Roy Johnson

Revisiting central Spain and Andalucia in 1949

Gerald Brenan is best known for his travel classic, South from Granada, which details his early bohemian existence in Andalusia where he entertained visiting members of the Bloomsbury Group. On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he went back to England and never returned until 1949. The Face of Spain book is a diary and travel journal of the visit he made to assess the state of the nation more than a decade after the war, travelling from Madrid down to the area west of Malaga where he had once lived.

Franco is in power, and all the hopes of the republican movement and the International brigades have been crushed. (It should be remembered that Franco succeeded partly because of Stalin’s treacherous policy of using the civil war as an excuse to exterminate his rivals and his enemies – even though they were fighting on the same side.)

It’s not surprising that this book is not so well known as South of Granada, because all the freshness and optimism of his Spanish experience in 1919-1934 has been tempered by the terrible events of the civil war and its aftermath. But one thing that does link this book with its predecessor is his love of plants. Everywhere he goes he records the vegetation, producing something like like a botanist’s field notes.

The situation is beautiful. Ilexes and lotus trees stand around in solemn dignity and under them grow daises, asphodels, and that flower of piercing blue – the dwarf iris.

What makes his account more than a surface travelogue is that Brenan is steeped in a knowledge of Spanish history and culture. He points out for instance that the Spanish Inquisition was so brutal and prolonged for a simple economic reason. The property of heretics was seized by the torturers and paid over to the State.

Every visit to a church turns into a mini lecture on Baroque architecture, or a trip to yet another white hill town becomes a lesson in the history of the Moors in Andalucia. But everywhere he travels the human story is the same – grinding poverty, hunger, and unemployment. It’s also a ghastly reminder of what it’s like to live under a repressive regime – widespread bureaucracy and red tape, a black market, political corruption and inertia, permission required to travel.

He returns to his old home in Malaga (in a village now almost swallowed up by the airport) having left it in the care of his gardener thirteen years before. To his surprise he finds that despite the civil war, the second world war, and the era of post-war austerity, it is completely intact – books stored, rooms undisturbed, and the garden flourishing.

Everwhere he goes people complain of the official corruption and incompetence which kept most Spanish working people shackled to misery well into the second half of the twentieth century. It’s no wonder that the country exploded with relief on the death of Franco in 1975.

Amidst much generalizing about the Spanish national character, Brenan suddenly expresses a pan-European vision that reflects exactly why his opinions and impressions are to be taken seriously:

In the Federal Europe of the future we shall find it quite natural to have a second patria in some other European country – a patria of our ideals, of our super-ego. We shall each of us marry a foreign nation and those marriages, whether platonic or otherwise, will be the bond which will keep our federation of diverse speeches and races together.

To read all this at a time when the modern cities of Malaga, Cordoba, and Seville have (despite current unemployment) come into a twenty-first century as contemporary urban centres just as sophisticated as Manchester, Bruges, and Milan, is to realise how enormous a leap forward Spain has made in the last fifty years. Yet Gerald Brenan’s insight into the historical depth of what he views reminds us that much of Spain’s character comes from events that happened not decades but centuries ago,

So it might lack the youthful optimism and the amusing anecdotes of his earlier travel book, but this journal provides a fascinating insight into a modern European democracy at a time when it was a dictatorship, almost a forgotten country, and certainly a pariah state.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Gerald Brenan, The Face of Spain, London: Serif Books, 2010, pp.248, ISBN: 189795963X

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The Glimpses of the Moon

June 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Glimpses of the Moon was first published in 1922 by D. Appleton and Company. It is one of the least well known of Edith Wharton’s full length novels – perhaps with good reason. It takes a subject she had written about many years previously in her short story The Reckoning (1902) – in which two characters draw up what we would now call a ‘pre-nuptial agreement’ and then have to live with its consequences.

The Glimpses of the Moon – critical commentary

It is worth noting that the essential subject of the novel (or the donnée as Henry James would call it) had already been used by Edith Wharton in a short story written twenty years earlier. Two people of limited means arrange a marriage of convenience on the understanding that they will agree to a divorce if a better prospect emerges for either of them at a later date. The short story version of this theme in The Reckoning is tightly constructed narrative in a triptych of scenes – the agreement, how it came about, and its consequences.

In the case of The Reckoning the motivation is to preserve a sense of individual autonomy within the constraints of a monogamous bond, but in The Glimpses of the Moon the motivation is financial – since neither Nick nor Susy has sufficient funds for long term survival within the social set amongst whom they wish to mix.

The Glimpses of the Moon is almost the opposite of the tightly constructed story. It is a long, rambling, and repetitive novel, with the dramatic situation stretched to breaking point and beyond. Nick and Susy separate quite early in the story. Their rationale for living independently is plausible enough, as are the temptations of the alternative partners who seek their favours. Susy has her friend the ultra-rich Earl of Altringham begging at her feet, and Nick is courted by the plain-but-intelligent heiress Coral Hicks. But the indecision, the ‘will-they, won’t-they’ , and the endless impediments which are placed in the way of any resolution – all drag on far too long, as if Wharton were trying to fill out the pages of a three volume Victorian serial novel.

Once the dramatic tension between Nick and Susy has been established, there’s rather a lot of uncertainty in the psychological motivation of the protagonists. Susy and Nick both doubt, suspect, and then forgive each other in a way which is credible in terms of human uncertainty, but does not make for a very satisfactory narrative.

This major weakness is compounded by the conclusion to the story line which is as rushed as it is improbable. We are asked to believe that two people who have spent the previous eighteen months living in a Venetian palace and on board a luxury yacht, suddenly find personal satisfaction staying in a provincial French boarding house for a weekend whilst looking after someone else’s five children.

This fairy tale resolution is simply not plausible, and it is brought about with no serious consideration for the important issues of the preceding narrative – in particularly that of money. Susy may well be prepared to give up cashmere shawls and dinners at the Hotel Luxe, but we know perfectly well that Nick’s couple of published articles will not be enough to live on. It is not enough to assume that they have had a change of heart in their attitudes to money and their place in society. They have no more means of economic survival than they had at the outset of the novel.

The Glimpses of the Moon – study resources

The Glimpses of the Moon – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The Glimpses of the Moon – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Glimpses of the Moon – Kindle version at Amazon

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Glimpses of the Moon – plot summary

Chapter I. Nick and Susy Lansing are on honeymoon, living in a borrowed villa on Lake Como. She is poor but socially ambitious, and a hanger-on amongst rich fellow Americans. She reflects on how her initial relationship with Nick was criticised socially and led to a split from him.

Chapter II. Nick is talented but has no money, and he feels an affinity with Susy as a poor outsider. When they meet up again at the home of some unfashionable but artistic friends, she proposes to him a marriage of convenience. They will scrape together some money, live off their friends for a year or so, and agree to divorce if anything better comes along for either of them.

Chapter III. After a month in Como they are forced to move on to Venice. Nick is prepared to make realistic sacrifices, but wonders if Susy will be capable of doing the same. She organises their transfer to Venice with opportunistic sharp practice, attempting to take with them some expensive cigars provided by their host, Charlie Strefford.

Chapter IV. In Venice, the owner’s wife (Ellie Vanderlyn – a friend) has left her child behind, plus some letters to her husband to be posted on secretly, whilst she is absent with a lover. There is an explicit request attached that this be hidden from Nick. Susy feels morally compromised, but needs to stay somewhere for the summer.

Chapter V. Small differences and secrecies begin to put a distance between Nick and Susy. After some weeks they are joined at the Palazzo by Charlie Strefford. He pumps Susy for information, but she merely reminds him about the terms of her marriage contract with Nick, about which Strefford is understanding but sceptical.

Chapter VI. The summer goes on. Nick has begun to write a ‘philosophic romance’; Ellie Vanderlyn does not return as scheduled; and they are joined in Venice by the Mortimer Hickses, who are rich but unfashionable and unsuccessful, despite their yacht and an entourage.

Chapter VII. Nick begins to find new and deeper happiness in his ‘work’ and his life with Susy, and he hopes they can stay in Venice for the rest of the summer. However, when more of their friends begin to visit, he puts his writing on one side.

Chapter VIII. Ellie Vanderlyn suddenly returns , and since her husband might shortly appear it is important that her earlier absence not be revealed. Susy confides in Strefford that Nick should not find out that their stay in Venice was based on a plot to deceive Nelson Vanderlyn.

Chapter IX. Vanderlyn arrives, but is only en route to join his mother somewhere else. Nick resumes his writing and meets Coral Hicks in a church, where they discuss archeology. When Ellie Vanderlyn departs for another assignation, she thanks Nick for his ‘co-operation’ in the deceit of her husband, which shocks Nick.

Chapter X. Nick demands that Susy reveal the whole story of the deception to him. He argues that it is dishonourable. Susy claims that she did it to keep them both together. The question of the marriage ‘pact’ is re-opened in a painful manner.

Chapter XI. Nick goes out alone, leaving Susy to dine with Strefford and others. They go out afterwards to a party at the Hicks’ Palazzo, but Susy goes home alone. She finds a letter from Nick waiting for her, to say that he has gone to Milan for a couple of days to think things through.

Chapter XII. In fact he goes on to Gerona, where he meets Mr Buttles who is leaving employment with the Hicks entourage because of an unrequited passion for Coral. Nick also reads of an accident which has made Strefford into the Earl of Altringham, one of the richest men in England. He writes to Susy, honouring their agreement and offering her up to Strefford, then leaves on an extended cruise of the Augean with the Hicks entourage

Chapter XIII. Susy retreats to the house of a friend at Versailles which she thinks will be empty, but finds its owner Violet Melrose at home promoting the reputation of painter Nat Falmer. Susy is terrified that Nick has abandoned her, but she receives a message from Strefford.

Chapter XIV. When they meet in Paris Strefford discusses her situation sympathetically, but then offers to marry her. When she refuses, he also offers to lend her money. She refuses this too, and says she will wait to see if she hears from Nick.

Chapter XV. Whilst in Paris she goes to see Grace Falmer, who is very pleased with her husband’s sudden success and who presents a very positive picture of married life. Susy procrastinates over making any plans, and resisting Violet Melrose’s attempts to bribe her into staying to look after the Falmer children.

Chapter XVI. Nick is enjoying a sabbatical break on board the Hicks’s yacht, hoping to hear from Susy, who does not write to him. Coral Hicks suggests that he take son Buttle’s old job as secretary to her father. Nick reads in the paper that Strefford and Susy are socialising in England.

Chapter XVII. Susy is alone in London, waiting to join Strefford and oppressed by the meanness of boarding house life. She meets Ursula Gillow, who invites her to stay at her home, so as to distract her husband). Susy reluctantly accepts, because she will meet Strefford there.

Chapter XVIII. In Paris Susy meets Ellie Vanderlyn who snobbishly patronises her. Susy defends herself by revealing her situation in full. Ellie tells her she is getting rid of her husband Nelson for the super-rich Borkheimer. The two women quarrel over social morals.

Chapter XIX. Strefford visits Paris to receive Susy’s answer to his proposal of marriage. She realises that the world she wishes for can only be gained by the wealth of the people she dislikes. Strefford flaunts his wealth and takes her to an exhibition which includes some of his own family’s art. treasures.

Chapter XX. The Hicks are in Rome, having befriended an archeologist-Prince who is travelling with his mother. They pretend to be democratic and outsiders, but in fact they are sponging off the Hicks on behalf of themselves and their friends. Nick perceives that they are angling for a financial union with Coral to ‘replenish’ the family coffers. Nick feels that he himself has no future.

Chapter XXI. Susy remains with Strefford, promising to look into a formal divorce from Nick. But she becomes more critical of Strefford. At the lawyer’s suggestion, she reluctantly writes to Nick, having so far failed to communicate with him.

Chapter XXII. When Strefford reveals that he let off his villa in Como to Ellie and her lover, Susy feels contaminated by the deception, even though (or maybe because) she was implicated in it herself. She tells Strefford she is not the right woman for him.

Chapter XXIII. On her way back to her hotel she meets Nelson Vanderlyn, who is in Paris for his divorce from Ellie.He takes a cheerful matter-of-fact attitude to his situation, but secretly he is a broken man. Susy writes a letter of renunciation to Strefford, and begins to reflect on the deeper issues of shared experience and understanding that keep people together in a marriage.

Chapter XXIV. Nick meanwhile has written to Susy agreeing to a divorce, and he feels dissatisfied being a patronised employee of the Hicks. The wealthy Coral Hicks offers herself to him as she prepares to be married to the Prince, but he declines the offer, whilst respecting and even admiring her.

Chapter XXV. Susy is looking after the Falmer’s children in Passy whilst their parents are in Italy – and quite enjoying the challenge. Strefford has been dismissed, but he tries to cling on. Nick agrees to come to Paris to see the lawyers.

Chapter XXVI. Nick arrives, intending to go back and marry Coral, but his head is full of Susy. He goes to Passy and sees her at the door – but at that very moment Strefford arrives and is admitted.

Chapter XXVII. Strefford re-asserts his plea to Susy, but she holds him off, and feels that Nick might be nearby (which he is). She writes to him, requesting a meeting, to which he sceptically agrees.

Chapter XXVIII. They meet and talk without revealing their true feelings for each other, or the changes in their circumstances. – and so part without any resolution. Susy realises that she has had another lesson in what true love is – and feels that it is now too late.

Chapter XXIX. Next day Susy is preparing to leave when Nick arrives – and suddenly everything is clarified between them with very little discussion. They decide to go away for a couple of days, taking the Falmer children with them.

Chapter XXX. The excursion is a fairy-tale success. Nick has had some articles published, and they put all the events of the recent past behind them.

Principal characters

Nick Lansing	clever but poor and unsuccessful
Susy Lansing (neé) Branch	his new wife, poor and ambitious
Ursula Gillow	her rich and successful friend
Fred Gillow	Ursula’s husband
Ellie Vanderlyn	another rich and successful friend of Susy’s
Nelson Vanderlyn	a US banker based in the UK
Charlie Strefford	English friend of the Lansings who becomes Earl of Altringham
Mortimer Hicks	rich American yacht owner
Coral Hicks	his intellectual but unattractive daughter
Mr Buttles	polyglot secretary to Hicks
Nat Fulmer	an American painter
Grace Fulmer	his wife – a violinist
Violet Melrose	‘a wealthy vampire’

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
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The Harp and the Shadow

July 7, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

The Harp and the Shadow (1979) is one of the many novels by Alejo Carpentier in which he explores the history of Latin-America. He also deals with the ambiguous relationship between European culture and that of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. These themes were very close to his own experience, since although he was raised in Cuba, his parents were Russian and French, and he spent a lot of his life living in Paris – where he was eventually made the Cuban cultural ambassador. He spoke in French, but wrote in Spanish.

The novel is a mixture of political history, social documentary, and the re-imagined character of a real historical figure – Christopher Columbus. Most of the events in the novel are related from his point of view.

The Harp and the Shadow – commentary

Who was Columbus?

Christopher Columbus is often thought of as ‘the man who discovered America’ or ‘the first man to make a sea crossing to the New World’. Neither of these claims are true, and Carpentier’s novel is his way of setting the record straight. At the same time, he is trying to imagine what would be the real problems and preoccupations of a fifteenth century seafaring adventurer.

The person known in the west as Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in Genoa, which was then a small independent Mediterranean republic with its own language. It was not incoporated into what became modern Italy until 1871.

His name was Christophoro Colombo. He spent much of his adult life in Portugal and Spain, where he was called Christobal Colon. This is the name by which he is now known throughout the Spanish-speaking world. But the name was also Anglicised as Christopher Columbus

In north America his name is built in to the expression ‘pre-Colombian’ – which refers to art and archaeology in the Americas (north and south) which pre-dates the so-called ‘discovery’ of America. It is also worth noting that Columbus never set foot in what is now the United States of America. All his activity was in the Caribbean islands and on the South American coast.

Magical Realism

It was Alejo Carpentier who coined the term ‘magical realism’. The expression is used in literary studies to describe the mixture of realism and fantasy elements in a single text – two approaches to fiction which are normally kept in separate genres.

This approach originated in Latin-American fiction with Carpentier, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), and it was made most popular by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) with his best-selling novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

The Harp and the Shadow starts off in a reasonably conventional manner. The first two sections could easily be considered as parts of a historical novel. Section one concerns a real nineteenth century pope’s mission to Chile and his considering the beatification of Columbus on return to Europe.

Section two steps back temporally to the late fifteenth century and presents events from the perspective of Christopher Columbus as he organises and undertakes his voyage of ‘exploration’ to locate the East Indies by sailing westwards across the Atlantic.

But in the third part of the novel these two centuries are brought together. A nineteenth century papal tribunal is considering the application for his sainthood, but other historical figures make arguments for and against the decision. Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Leon Bloy (all French writers) participate in the debate. Even Columbus himself is present as the shadowy ‘Invisible One’

When the tribunal reaches its negative conclusion, Columbus then meets Andrea Doria, a fellow Genoan sixteenth century military commander, and they discuss the vagaries of fame and historical reputation.

As readers we are not expected to take these chronological liberties too seriously. They are fanciful, imaginative, and (sometimes) entertaining. But they are not arbitrary. or random. They are thematically linked and justified.

The whole novel is concerned with how history, from the perspective of Latin-America, sees the invasion of Christopher Columbus – not as a ‘discoverer’ (he discovered nothing that didn’t already exist) but someone who brought disease, greed, slavery, and imperialist domination to the continent from which it then had to spend the next two or three centuries liberating itself.

The world map

Columbus was sailing from Europe in a westerly direction, thinking that he could reach what are now known as the East Indies in Asia. These had already been visited and described by European explorers such as Marco Polo – but they had travelled by land routes in an easterly direction from Europe. Nobody at that time knew how big the earth was, and it had certainly not been circumnavigated or accurately mapped.

The first mistake of Columbus was to assume that on reaching what we now call the West Indies, that he had reached Asia. This accounts for his failure to understand where he was and his inability to locate all the spices which had been reported by earlier land explorers. His second mistake was to be blinded by his mistaken idea that there was a huge gold mine ‘just around the corner’, no matter where he found himself.

It is also obvious that he did not ‘discover’ America. Both continents of South and North America were already in existence, occupied by their native inhabitants. It is interesting that the indigenous population on both continents are still referred to as ‘Indians’. Columbus was merely amongst the first Europeans to visit what we now know as Latin-America. It is certainly worth noting that he never set foot in what is now the United States of America.

There is a third ironic mistake, though it is not discussed in the novel. Columbus lands in the West Indies and thinks he has reached the East Indies. Hence the ambiguous and double use of the term ‘Indian’ to describe the inhabitants. Explorers travelling in both easterly and westerly directions thought they were going to India.

Sea travel was very difficult and hazardous at that time, and Columbus must be given credit for his journeys if not his behaviour. But the fact is that he only reached the Caribbean, and his actual goal still lay at the other side of the world. Even discounting central America, he was still separated from his goal by the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific covers half of the earth’s surface. He thought he had sailed half way round the world, but had only covered less than a quarter of its navigable surface. This is a misconception of distance that is still perpetuated today. It is very common for maps of the world to omit the Pacific Ocean, giving the impression that Central America and Asia are not very far apart – when in fact the distance between them is 12,000 miles.

Anti-heroism

Carpentier is clearly offering an anti-heroic account of Columbus – a figure to whom statues have been erected all over the Spanish-speaking world as a great pioneer. In the novel he is cut down to size as a human being riven with flaws. He confesses that his younger days were those of a rake – a regular visitor to brothels. He lies about his achievements in order to secure patronage. He makes mistakes in navigation and geography – and much of the time does not know where he is. Nevertheless, he inflates himself with artificial pride about his ‘achievement’.

He is fuelled by an infantile lust for easy riches – the dream of a ‘mother load’ of gold just beyond the horizon. When this dream fails he turns to the slave trade as another source of easy wealth – at other people’s expense. He fails completely to deliver the results promised to his patrons, and in an act of petty greed, he keeps the reward offered to the first man to sight ‘land’. As old age and death approach him at the end of his journeys, he is terrified of meeting his ‘confessor’. He has been hailed as a hero – but he knows what sins he has committed.

The Harp and the Shadow – study resources

The Harp and the Shadow – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

El arpa y la sombra – at Amazon UK – (text in Spanish)

The Harp and the Shadow – at Amazon US – (text in English)

El arpa y la sombra – at Amazon US – (text in Spanish)

Alejo Carpentier – further reading

Alejo Carpentier

The Harp and the Shadow – summary

The Harp

The first part of the novel is set in the middle of the nineteenth century.

In the Vatican City, Pope Pius IX hesitates over making Christopher Columbus a saint. As a young man, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Perretti, he is scholarly but poor. Because of his knowledge of Castillian, he is appointed envoy to Chile, where Bernado O’Higgins has liberated the country from Spanish rule. The mission arrives in Uruguay, where Montevideo is full of horses and mud, but the upper classes have imported European culture and modern ideas. The group crosses the Argentinian pampas, climbs over the Andes, and descends into Santiago de Chile.

Bernado. O’Higgins is overthrown by Ramon Friere. Mastai pretends to be radical, but the mission is eventually forced to leave Chile. They return via Cape Horn, where Mastai conceives the idea of uniting Europe and the Americas by elevating Chistopher Colombus to sainthood. So – as the later pontiff Pius IX he signs the papers recommending the beatification of Columbus, whose blameless life has recently been revealed in a specially commissioned biography.

The Hand

The second part of the novel is set towards the end of the fifteenth century.

An old seafarer is in the last stages of his life, and is preparing to make a religious confession of his worldly sins. He reveals his youthful lusts and his knowledge of Mediterranean brothels. He lists his beliefs in fabulous sea beasts and medieval myths, plus his enthusiasm for maritime navigation.

He recounts being on board a ship bound westwards towards the end of the known world at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He has gathered tales of earlier expeditions made by Vikings which had reached Greenland and even further west.

The old sailor is revealed as Christopher Columbus who confesses that he is an ambitious fake. He has constructed the myth of exploration westwards and promoted it in order to find sponsors. He operates from Portugal, and embellishes his reputation with exaggeration and lies. Despite repeated setbacks, he eventually wins the support of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who have recently driven the Muslims and Jews out of Granada.

He sets off with an inexperienced crew who soon become discouraged because of the length of the journey. He falsifies the ship’s records to make the distance seem shorter. When they finally sight land Columbus is filled with a vainglorious sense of his own importance and his ‘achievement’.

They think they have reached the East Indes. Columbus hopes no other missionaries have already reached there. Worthless gifts are exchanged with the natives, but Columbus is immediately in search of gold. He takes hostages by force and they sail on to Cuba which he finds beautiful – but it doesn’t contain the spices and the gold he expects. He does not know where they are, and he fears going back empty-handed.

They sail on to Haiti (Hispaniola) laying claim to ownership of all the places they visit, but they still find no spices and no gold. Reading over his journal of the voyage, he is ashamed by his obsession with gold, and unconvincingly vows to make religious penances.

They sail back to europe where he is given a hero’s welcome and summoned to the court in Barcelona. There he displays the captured ‘Indians’ (who are dying) and describes his expedition as a great triumph. But Queen Isabella sees through his claims as a vain bluff. Nevertheless she commissions another expedition in order to compete with the Portugese.

On the second voyage Columbus still doesn’t find any gold, but instead he captures natives and turns them into slaves. He argues that this is equally profitable, and regards the captives as ‘rebels against the Crown’.

He makes further journeys, still finds nothing, and lapses into a delusion that he has located an ‘earthly paradise’ in the ‘orient’. He proclaims by decree that Cuba is not an island but a continent. He feels that he has been overtaken by rivals and has been dispossessed of a national identity. He then faces the final confession before death.

The Shadow

The third part of the novel takes place in the late nineteenth century.

In the Vatican under pope Leo XIII the petition for beatification for Columbus is being considered by a tribunal. His bones and remains have frequently been moved and cannot be authenticated. There is a debate about the validity of his claims, with contributions from Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Leon Bloy. The tribunal considers his illegitimate son and his involvement in slavery – for which two reasons he is denied sainthood.

Columbus meets Andrea Doria after the tribunal. They discuss the limitations of fame and justice as two Genoan sailors.

The Harp and the Shadow – characters

Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti	a young clergyman, later Pope Pius IX (1792-1878)
Christobal Colon	a seafaring navigator and explorer (1451-1506)
Bernado O’Higgins	leader of the Chilean independence movement (1778-1842)
Queen Isabella I	Spanish monarch and patroness of Columbus (1451-1504

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Revisiting central Spain and Andalucia in 1949

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