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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

Alejo Carpentier life and works

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biographical notes and major works

Alejo Carpentier life and works1904. Alejo Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. His father was a French architect and his mother a Russian professor of languages and a musician. The family moved soon afterwards to Havana, Cuba. He speaks French, but writes in Spanish.

1916. The family moved to live in Paris. Studies music theory at the Lycee; begins writing.

1920. The family return to Havana, He studies architecture – a course he never completed.

1921. Goes into journalism when father abandons family. His writing was considered leftist. He helped to found the Cuban Communist Party.

1924. Editor of Carteles; writes music and theatre criticism; studies black music; his oratorio La Passion Noire is performed in Paris.

1927. Founds avant-guard review Avance – which lasts for only one issue.

1928. Cuba – arrested for political activity against dictator Machado; writes novel Ecue-yamba-O! in seven days in jail – an exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions among the poor of the island; the novel was later revised then disowned.

1929. Escapes to Paris, where he becomes active in avant-guard literary movement with Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Eluard; works as a journalist and publicist for magazines and radio; absorbs European avant-guard culture, but meanwhile studies Latin-American history, anthropology, and music; writes librettos for operas; association with composer Edgar Varese. Meets Guatemalan author Miguel Angel Asturias, whose work on pre-Columbian mythology influenced his writing.

1930s. Visits Berlin, Madrid, and Paris; works as musical director for French radio; works with Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguette; produces Kurt Weil; meets Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and John dos Passos.

1933. Ecue-yamba-O! published.

1939. Returns to Cuba to work in radio; commissioned to write history of Cuban music.

1943. Makes an importantl trip to Haiti, during which he visited the fortress of the Citadelle Laferrière and the Palace of Sans-Souci, both built by the black king Henri Christophe. This trip provided the inspiration for his second novel, El Reino de Este Mundo (The Kingdom of this World).

1945. Political problems in Cuba under dictator Batista; Carpentier emigrates to Caracas (Venezuela) to work in an advertising agency.

1946. La musica en Cuba published.

1947. Trip up Orinoco river into the Venezuelan jungle – provides material and background for The Lost Steps.

1949. El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World).

1953. Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps) written three times.

1956. El Acoso published (The Chase).

1959. Returns to Cuba following Castro’s overthrow of the Batista regime; appointed Professor of History of Culture at Havana University.

1962. El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral); appointed head of state publishing house.

1966. Appointed cultural attache/ambassador in Paris.

1974. El recurso del metodo (Reason of State) and Concierto barroco published.

1977. Awarded the Cervantes prize.

1978. La consagracion de la primavera (The Consecration of Spring).

1980. Dies in Paris – his remains were taken back to Cuba, and he was buried in the Cemetery Colon, Havana.

© Roy Johnson 2004


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Filed Under: Alejo Carpentier Tagged With: Alejo Carpentier, Biography, Latin-American literature, Literary studies

All Passion Spent

February 1, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

All Passion Spent first appeared in 1931 under the imprint of the Hogarth Press, the independent publishing house run by Leonard Woolf and his wife Virginia. Vita Sackville-West had been Virginia Woolf’s lover and they remained good friends, yet they were rivals in literary popularity. Readers today might be surprised to know that Vita Sackville-West’s work around this time sold more copies than that of Virginia Woolf. Sackville-West had best-sellers with The Edwardians (1930) All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932) all of which which portrayed English upper-class manners and life in a critical and often satirical manner.

All Passion Spent


All Passion Spent – critical commentary

Biographical interpretation

Two years before the publication of this novel Vita Sackville-West had suffered the emotional shock of losing her beloved home at Knole when her younger brother inherited the title of Baron Sackville-West on the death of their father. She was passionately attached to the ancestral home, which was known as a calendar home – with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances, and 7 courtyards. It was a disappointment, but the traditional laws of primogeniture meant that inheritance passed automatically to the eldest male heir – both property and title.

As a form of compensation for this disappointment, Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson bought the run down castle at Sissinghurst (Kent) and began its restoration into what is now a world-renowned country house and gardens. This experience might account for the issues of inheritance, property, and the attachment to particular houses that forms the substance of All Passion Spent.

Sackville-West is exploring the issues of spiritual empathy that Virginia Woolf had outlined in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Woolf’s principal characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith never meet each other, but their thoughts and attitudes are linked through a series of literary symbols and congruence of attitude, such that when Septimus-Smith commits suicide at the end of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway understands completely why he has done so.

Deborah, Lady Slane, and Mr FitzGeorge have a similar relationship – except the understanding is on his part. He had been struck by her (even ‘fallen in love with her’) as a younger woman when they met in India – he a rich young traveller, and she the wife of the Viceroy. Forty years later he meets her and in an amazing frank and revealing conversation explains how he understands the sacrifices she has made in her life – abandoning her aspirations to be a painter in order to become the wife of a politician.

FitzGeorge is a rich and spoilt bachelor who collects art objects, and Lady Slane is the wife of a very successful politician and diplomat, yet this scene is the artistic highpoint of the novel. Sackville-West does not supply any evidence as to how or why FitzGeorge should have this special insight into Lady Slane’s personal ‘tragedy’ (after all, he is a crusty old private bachelor) but if we as readers are prepared to suspend our disbelief, this is a plea for intuitive understanding and sympathetic recognition of shared values that transcends gender, class, and age group.

This notion is reinforced by the concluding scene of the novel when Lady Slane’s great grand-daughter reveals that she rejects the family’s greedy and acquisitive values and wishes to be a musician. Lady Slane sees her own early life reflected in the girl’s aspirations and feels reassured that this alternative, independent system of values is still alive – even though she dies at this point in the narrative.

Feminism

The feminist notions which pervade the novel should be easily apparent to most readers. Lady Slane has the glimmer of aspiration to an independent existence which comes to her as a young woman. She has the idea of becoming a painter. So far as we know, she does not make a single brush-stroke across a canvas – so there is no evidence that she is in possession of any creative potential: the whole idea goes unexamined. But this is not the point. Any such aspirations are completely ignored by the weight of family and social conventions which force her into a marriage.

Sackville-West does not take a simplistic attitude to this situation. Deborah Lee (to give Lady Slane her maiden name) does not love the man she marries, but she has a reasonably happy married life, has a large family, and is successful as wife to the Viceroy to India, but her socially unacknowledged personal ambition is rather like the grit in the oyster which produces the pearl that is her vision of an alternative life.

Satire

Sackville-West offers a vision of upper-class life that spares no criticism or satirical edge. The novel begins with a six page eulogy to the Earl of Slane who has just died, detailing his public service to parliamentary life in way that makes it quite clear he is a an unthinking nonentity who has done nothing in his life except what the tradition of his class laid before him.

Lady Slane has done the same thing during her lifetime, but the point of the novel is that she had the spark of something more creative within her. She has suppressed this impulse whilst raising her family, but she makes a bold move to express it at the end of her life when she has the opportunity, and she is happy to see the same seeds of creativity in her great-grand-daughter just before she dies.

This criticism of class attitudes extends to the whole Holland family. Lord Slane didn’t even like his children and his wife only felt sympathetic to two of them – the eccentric bachelor Fay and the awkward visionary Edith. But the rest of their children, all conventionally married, are revealed as grasping and hypocritical toadies who pretend to be concerned for their ageing mother but actually do not want the responsibility of looking after her for entirely selfish reasons.


All Passion Spent – study resources

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – Paperback – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – Paperback – Amazon US

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – (Kindle) – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – (Kindle) – Amazon US

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – DVD – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – DVD – Amazon US


All Passion Spent – chapter summaries

Part I

On the death of Henry Holland, the Earl of Slane, the members of his large family are faced with the problem of what to do with their elderly mother, whom they regard as rather simple-minded. They discuss the issue of inheritance in a greedy and competitive manner, all the time protesting their lack of self-interest. They pretend to welcome the responsibility of looking after their mother, which they all secretly wish to evade.

The elderly bachelor son Kay Holland has dinner with an old friend FitzGeorge, who knew Lady Slane in India. There are preparations for a funeral in Westminster Abbey, during which time the mother assumes an unusual degree of authority. After the funeral she suddenly announces that she wants to live in a little house in Hampstead she saw thirty years before – and she doesn’t want any grand-children or her great-grand-children visiting. The family are all shocked – except Edith, who is delighted.

The mother gives away all her jewellery to her eldest son and his wife. She then travels by tube to Hampstead thinking about her late husband and how he didn’t really like his children, except for Edith. She feels a quasi-mystic union with the empty and dilapidated house. The eccentric owner Mr Bucktrout has similar ideas to those of Lady Slane on enjoying old age and avoiding young people. He approves of her as a tenant and is almost reluctant to set the rent.

The family are horrified by the casual nature of this tenancy. Lady Slane and her maid Genoux get on well with the craftsman Mr Gersheron, and Mr Bucktrout begins to present Lady Slane with flowers. They discuss his theories about the imminent demise of the world.

She realises that she has lived at one remove from understanding the world, but now feels more relaxed about it. She rejects the idea of strife and competition, and wishes only to enjoy the support and comforting presence she feels with Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gershon.

Part II

Lady Slane luxuriates in the comfort and solitude of the house and its garden. She looks back on her life and examines the forces that have shaped it. As a girl of seventeen she had a romantic ambition to be a painter, but under family and social pressures she became engaged to Henry Holland. The preparations for their marriage were like an arcane ritual which left her completely puzzled.

At the time, she was not in love with Henry, and she was very conscious that he would continue to enjoy all the freedoms of masculine life, whilst she would gain nothing as a woman except the responsibility of being eternally on hand to look after him. Nevertheless, she felt that she could not escape the weight of expectations placed upon her.

Henry became a faithful and patronising husband, and she became a devoted wife, even though she sacrificed all her ambition to fulfil her role as a wife and mother. She now wonders about the foundation of her own individuality, as a separate entity to her husband, and she questions the relative values of the life he has offered her and the potential life that he has taken away from her. Apart from her favourites Kay and Edith she feels that all her other children belong to Henry.

Part III

Lady Slane lives in seclusion in the Hampstead house with her maid Genoux. Her relatives call infrequently and great-grandchildren are more or less forbidden. She receives a visit from Kay’s friend Mr FitzGeorge who flatters her and brags about his collection of precious objects. He appreciates her almost as a work of art in her own right. He recalls their meeting in India and confesses that he fell in love with her, then moves on to criticise her husband. He reveals to her the truth about the sacrifice she has made in marrying. She admits that he is right, and they agree to remain friends.

Kay Holland notices that his friend FitzGeorge isn’t at the club so often, and is glad that he has stopped asking for an introduction to Lady Slane. But then FitzGeorge suddenly dies, leaving his valuable collection of art objects to Lady Slane. The family members immediately assemble with offers to ‘help’ her, their covetousness and self-interest flimsily masked by a completely insincere pretence of concern. Lady Slane consults Mr Brooktrout and devises a plan to donate the treasures to the nation’s museums.

The family are horrified. Lady Slane remains at a distance from them and keeps track of their doings via the services of a press-cuttings agency. Finally, she is visited by her great grand-daughter who bears her own name and wants to be a musician, rejecting the family’s conventional values. The two of them share an appreciation of independently-generated values and an understanding of each other which spans the generations. Following this meeting of minds Lady Slane dies at the age of eighty-eight.


All Passion Spent – characters
Henry Holland the Earl of Slane, who has just died
Deborah, Lady Slane his widow
Kay Holland elderly son of the family, a bachelor
Mr FitzGeorge his friend, a bachelor art collector
William Holland another son, frugal and stingy
Lavinia William’s equally frugal wife
Genoux Lady Slane’s French maid
Mr Bucktrout eccentric owner of the Hampstead house
Mr Gorshon an eccentric craftsman and builder
Deborah Lee Lady Slane’s great-grand-daughter

© Roy Johnson 2016


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Filed Under: Vita Sackville-West Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, English literature, Literary studies, Vita Sackville-West

Almayer’s Folly

August 19, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Almayer’s Folly (1895) was Joseph Conrad’s first novel, It deals with events which take place around 1887 in the Malay Archipelago, where Conrad had spent some time as a seaman. Many of the characters in the story are based on real people he met around that time. Some of these people crop up again in his second novel An Outcast of the Islands which deals with events that take place earlier, in 1872. An Outcast is what might in modern media terms be called a ‘prequel’ to the first novel. There is also a third volume in the series called The Rescue that deals with events set even further back in the 1850s – but this was not published until 1920.

Joseph Conrad - author of Almayer's Folly

Joseph Conrad


Almayer’s Folly – critical commentary

Race

Despite all the local political rivalries and machinations, the temporal complexities of the plot, and the problem of tracking who is where in geographic terms – the most striking underlying theme in the novel is that of race.

Conrad’s family were Polish political refugees who had been exiled in Russia; he spoke French and English as his second and third languages; and by the time he became a writer he had travelled around the world

Almayer has agreed to marry Captain Lingard’s adopted Philippino daughter in exchange for a business partnership (a subject dealt with at greater length in An Outcast of the Islands). His wife has grown to detest him. This is partly justified by the fact that he is lazy, incompetent, and a boor. But she hates other white men too. She is very conscious that they come with kind words – and carry guns. She shares this view with Lambaka – with whom she has been having an affair.

She also conspires with the other local nationalists in their plots against Almayer and the trading post – and she is complicit in the gruesome disfigurement of the drowned corpse. This is a move designed to cover Dain Maroola’s tracks in his flight with Nina. Mrs Almayer approves of this match – partly because it has brought her money in the form of the dowry, but on racial grounds, because she feels that Nina will bring honour and dignity on herself by association with a Balinese prince.

Almayer himself, on the other hand, feels racially affronted by Nina’s attachment to Dain. He thinks of her as ‘white’ and European educated, and he feels she is lowering and demeaning herself in this relationship – even though Dain is a prince in his own society.

Nina herself undergoes a transformation of consciousness when she falls in love with Dain. She is at first torn between her western and eastern cultural heritage. But the force of her feelings is reinforced by a powerful sense of racial bonding with Dain She is proud to love Dain and devote herself to him. She too, like her mother, scorns the Europeans. She even finally rejects her own father when he demands that she obey him.

Critical approaches

A great deal of the first critical commentary on these early works is focused on their accuracy in relation to what was known of Conrad’s biography. That is, the works were assessed on the basis of the relation between their fictional representations and the real places he had visited, the real people he had met, and even the books he had read.

That is understandable given the conventions of literary criticism at the time. But now we recognise that authors are not in the least obliged to make a faithful copy of ‘reality’. They can pick and choose from the real world and from their imaginations exactly as they see fit. Our only demands as readers is that the result should be convincing.

Setting

In the first part of the novel Almayer recalls his earlier days in Macassar, a provincial capital in southern Indonesia. The remainder and majority of the events take place in the fictional town of Sambir, which is loosely based on Berau in north-east Borneo (today called Kalimantan) very close to the equator.

The river Pantai on which Sambir is based plays an important part in the story. Captain Lingard has established his prosperous trading business based on his monopoly of navigational skills on the river which is the source of much annoyance to his business rivals.


Almayer’s Folly – study resources

Almayer's Folly - Wordsworth edition Almayer’s Folly – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Almayer's Folly - Wordsworth edition Almayer’s Folly – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Almayer's Folly - Kindle edition Almayer’s Folly – Kindle eBook

Almayer's Folly - Dover edition Almayer’s Folly – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

Almayer's Folly - Dover edition Almayer’s Folly – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

Almayer's Folly - eBook Almayer’s Folly – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad - biography Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Conrad - Notes on Life and Letters Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Conrad - biography Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Almayer's Folly


Almayer’s Folly – plot summary

Almayer's FollyAt the outset of the novel Almayer thinks back to his earliest days in Macassar when Captain Lingard offered him a partnership in exchange for marrying his adopted Philippino daughter. Since then Almayer’s fortunes have sunk, and he yearns to become wealthy and return to Europe with his half-caste daughter Nina. He now feels distinctly hostile towards his wife – a feeling which is reciprocated. He sends Nina to Singapore to be educated amongst Europeans. The experiment is not successful, and she returns home. Lingard seems to be missing somewhere in Europe.

Almayer begins to construct a large residence and reception centre for British traders and military, but jurisdiction in Sambir passes from British to Dutch hands. Local chief Abdulla offers Almayer money in exchange for his daughter who he wishes to marry to his nephew Reshid – but Almayer indignantly refuses.

Then Balinese prince Dain Maroola (masquerading as a trader) visits Almayer, and although very little trade is done he is visually impressed by Nina. He pays Mrs Almayer money (a dowry) to allow him access to Nina for courtship. Mrs Almayer is happy to do this for financial as well as racial reasons.

Almayer also has grandiose dreams of exploring for gold in the interior of the country. He prepares boats for the expedition, even though he has no idea where this gold is located. Meanwhile Dain meets Nina secretly for romantic trysts, and she feels drawn to him culturally, despite her European ‘education’.

Dain meets Lambaka to discuss policy and despite being threatened, he departs during a thunderstorm to meet Nina. He is apparently drowned during the storm, and washed up as an almost headless corpse at Almayer’s compound the next morning.

Taminah, a simple seller of cakes has secretly observed the Nina-Dain relationship and is desperately jealous because she is herself in love with Dain. She sees Nina as a ‘white’ interloper.

Meanwhile a Dutch ship arrives, the officers of which are looking for Dain, who has blown up his own ship in escaping them, causing the deaths of two Dutch seamen. Almayer temporises, and they accuse Almayer of hiding him.

The Dutch officers demand that he produce Dain. Almayer promises to do so, invites them to dinner, and gets drunk. Finally he produces the dead body. But Babalatchi arrives with the true version of events – that Dain escaped and planted his own bracelet and ring on a dead comrade who was killed during the storm.

Nina leaves home to join Dain, and her mother plans to leave Almayer, supported by the money for the dowry. Almayer is awakened from a drunken nightmare by Taminah, who tells him all that has been going on.

Dain waits in hiding, and is joined by Nina. But they are followed by Almayer, who wants his daughter back and feels racially insulted by her liaison with Dain. The two men challenge each other. Nina refuses to obey her father. Finally, Almayer offers to take them away – just as the Dutch troops arrive in pursuit of Dain.

Almayer takes Nina and Dain to an island where they are to be rescued. He parts from his daughter with great bitterness, after which he goes back to Sambir, sets fire to Lingard’s office (and his own home) then declines into opium addition and eventually dies – as news of the birth of Nina’s child is announced.


Biography


Principal characters
Tom Lingard an experienced sea captain with a monopolistic knowledge of river navigation – ‘Rajah Laut’ (King of the Sea)
Kaspar Almayer Lingard’s Dutch business partner, married to his adopted daughter
Mrs Almayer his Philippino wife, who despises him
Nina Almayer’s beautiful mixed-race child
Ali Almayer’s Malaysian assistant
Babalatchi a one-eyed vagabond, handman to Lakamba
Rajah Lakamba trader-cultivator and war-lord
Said Abdulla bin Selim great trader of Sambir
Sayed Reshid his nephew
Sambir trading post town in Borneo
Dain Maroola a rich and handsome prince from Bali
Bulangi a rice trader (who does not appear)
Taminah Bulangi’s slave girl who sells cakes

Almayer's Folly

Almayer’s Folly – first edition 1895


Further reading

Joseph Conrad - reader Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Joseph Conrad - Poland Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Joseph Conrad - Dispossession Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Joseph Conrad - dialogue Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Joseph Conrad - novelist Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Joseph Conrad - language Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Joseph Conrad - sexuality Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Joseph Conrad - genre Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Joseph Conrad - essays Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Joseph Conrad - life Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Joseph Conrad - introduction John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Joseph Conrad - autobiography Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Joseph Conrad - companion J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Joseph Conrad - mariner Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Joseph Conrad - his work Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.


Other works by Joseph Conrad

The novels of Joseph Conrad - An Outcast of the IslandsAn Outcast of the Islands (1896) was Conrad’s second novel, and acts as a ‘prequel’ to the first, Almayer’s Folly. English sea captain Tom Lingard rescues the corrupt Peter Willems and gives him a second chance by setting him up with a business in a commercial outpost. However, Willems lacks the moral fibre to profit from this act of generosity. He becomes obsessed with a beautiful native girl, deserts his wife and is overwhelmed by local political factions. All this takes place in southern Indonesia against a background of British and Dutch imperialist squabbling for supremacy in the region. Willems is eventually abandoned by his protector, feels desolate and isolated, then has to face the wrath of his wife who comes in search of him.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad - adaptations 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.

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad - concordance 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


Filed Under: Joseph Conrad Tagged With: Almayer's Folly, English literature, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, The novel

An Outcast of the Islands

August 19, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

An Outcast of the Islands (1896) is Joseph Conrad’s second novel, following closely on his first, Almayer’s Folly which was published the previous year. In fact An Outcast has a close relationship to Almayer, because it deals with some of the same characters and events.

Joseph Conrad - author of An Outcast of the Islands

Joseph Conrad

In fact it is part of what might be called a ‘trilogy in reverse’. An Outcast deals with events that take place in 1872, whereas Almayer’s Folly is set about 1887. An Outcast provides what might in modern media terms be called a ‘back story’ to the first novel. There is also a third volume in the series called The Rescue that deals with events set even earlier in the 1850s – but this was not published until 1920.

Conrad first conceived An Outcast as a short story called Two Vagabonds, but like many of his planned fictions it expanded as soon as he started writing it.


An Outcast of the Islands – plot summary

Peter Willems is a conceited bully who works as a ‘confidential’ clerk for Hudig & Co in Macassar in Malaysia. He has secured the job through the kindness of Tom Lingard, a sea captain who has rescued him as a youth. As the story opens, Willems is embezelling money of Hudig’s to finance a deal he hopes will make him a partner in the company.

An Outcast of the IslandsBut Willems’ illegal doings are revealed, and he is expelled by Hudig, who has only tolerated Willems because he was prepared to marry his daughter. Willems is on the point of complete despair when Lingard sails into port, bails him out financially, and recruits him to work in a commercial outpost at Sambir where he has commercial dominance. However, Willems does not get on with Almayer, the chief at the outpost. He is also unaware of a plot to cause trouble being hatched by Babalatchi, a louche character at the outpost. Willems is sinking back towards despair when he meets a young woman Aissa and is completely overwhelmed by her beauty. He leaves the outpost and goes to live with her and her blind father, Omar.

Five weeks later he returns to Almayer with the warning that plots are being hatched against the trading outpost. He asks Almayer for a loan to set up as an independent trader – a request that Almayer scornfully refuses, correctly surmising that Willems has been expelled from Hudig & Co for embezellement.

Meanwhile Babalatchi conspires with Omar against Willems, plotting to bring in outside help from rich trader Abdulla, who wishes to displace Lingard in the area. Abdulla visits Sambir, and is negatively briefed by Babalatchi Abdulla negotiates with Omar and with Willems (who he knows from Hudig & Co) and leaves with plans to return two days later.

Willems feels trapped and humiliated by his overwhelming desire for Aissa and despairs because he realises they are from completely different cultures. Aissa wish to know what has passed between Willems and Abdulla. She is conscious of her power over him but resents the trouble he brings as an outsider.

Willems has the sole objective of running away with Aissa but she refuses. Whilst they are consoling each other Omar attempts to kill Willems and it seems to Willems as if the daughter might even be helping him.

Almayer gives Captain Lingard a lengthy and somewhat confused account of Abdulla’s attack on the trading post. There is a conflict caused by both Dutch and British flags being raised over the outpost. All Almayer’s gunpowder is thrown into the river and Willems has Almayer sewn into his own hammock, before making off.

Captain Lingard has lost his ship Flash and proposes a new scheme for prospecting upriver for alluvial gold. He has brough Willems’ wife and child to Sambir, still feeling he has a responsibility for them.

Lingard is smarting from the unusually bad state of his affairs (lost ship, lost supremacy on the river). He receives notes of invitation from both Willems and Abdulla. Almayer urges him to act against their rivals.

Lingard arrives in Sambir apparently with the intention of killing Willems. He is met by Babalatchi, who urges him against Willems. Then he is intercepted by Aissa, who is distraught because Willems has become distant from her.

When Lingard confronts Willems, he punches him severely, but thinks he is not worth shooting. Willems wants Lingard to ‘rescue’ him from his plight. But Lingard does the opposite – and condemns him to remain in permanent exile with Aissa. He regards Willems as his ‘mistake’, and his ‘shame’.

Almayer feels a rancorous anxiety at what he sees as Lingard’s tolerant attitude to Willems, and he is apprehensive about his own position. He thinks of killing Willems, but then persuades Mrs Willems to ‘rescue’ her husband. He then sets off with a group of men in a boat, which through his ineptness runs aground.

Willems feels an existential dread at having been abandoned by Lingard. He thinks of himself as deracinated, cut off from all civilized help, and without any human resources to survive the ordeal – even though he has Aissa with him and Lingard is supplying him with food. Eventually his wife Joanna arrives with their son. Willems feels doubly oppressed and thinks of killing both women – but Aissa gets to the gun first and shoots him.


Study resources

An Outcast of the Islands - classics edition An Outcast of the Islands – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

An Outcast of the Islands - classics edition An Outcast of the Islands – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

An Outcast of the Islands - Kindle edition An Outcast of the Islands – Kindle eBook

Red button An Outcast of the Islands – DVD film adaptation at Amazon UK

Red button An Outcast of the Islands – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Red button Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button An Outcast of the Islands – DVD film adaptation at MovieMail

Red button An Outcast of the Islands – film details at IMD

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

An Outcast of the Islands


Principal characters
Peter Willems a Dutch confidential clerk at Hudig & Co
Joanna da Souza his wife – a half-caste
Louis Willems his pasty son
Leonard da Souza his brother-in-law
Mr Vinck cashier at Hudig & Co
Tom Lingard an experienced sea captain with a monopolistic knowledge of river navigation
Kaspar Almayer Lingard’s Dutch business partner, married to his adopted daughter
Babalatchi a one-eyed vagabond
Lakamba trader-cultivator and war-lord
Patalolo local leader in Sambir
Omar el Badavi blind Arab chief
Aissa his beautiful daughter
Sambir trading post town in Borneo
Syed Abdulla bin Selim prosperous Muslim trader and distant relative of Omar
Nina Almayer’s child
Ali Almayer’s Malaysian assistant

Biography


Setting

The first part of the novel is set in Macassar, a provincial capital in southern Indonesia. The remainder and majority of the events take place in the fictional town of Sambir, which is losely based on Berau in north-east Borneo (today called Kalimantan) very close to the equator.

The river Pantai on which it is based plays an important part in the story. Captain Lingard has established his prosperous trading business based on his monopoly of navigational skills on the river which is the source of much annoyance to his business rivals.


An Outcast of the Islands

first edition – New York, D. Appleton, 1896


Further reading

Joseph Conrad - critical study Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Joseph Conrad - critical views Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Joseph Conrad - modern temper Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Joseph Conrad - novelist John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Joseph Conrad - identity Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Joseph Conrad - narrative Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Joseph Conrad - companion Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Joseph Conrad - polish Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Joseph Conrad - biography Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Joseph Conrad - morals George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Joseph Conrad - genre James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Joseph Conrad - critical issues Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Joseph Conrad - several lives John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Joseph Conrad - nineteenth century Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980


Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table


Other works by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Under Western EyesUnder Western Eyes (1911) is the story of Razumov, a reluctant ‘revolutionary’. He is in fact a coward who is mistaken for a radical hero and cannot escape from the existential trap into which this puts him. This is Conrad’s searing critique of Russian ‘revolutionaries’ who put his own Polish family into exile and jeopardy. The ‘Western Eyes’ are those of an Englishman who reads and comments on Razumov’s journal – thereby creating another chance for Conrad to recount the events from a very complex perspective. Razumov achieves partial redemption as a result of his relationship with a good woman, but the ending, with faint echoes of Dostoyevski, is tragic for all concerned.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad ChanceChance is the first of Conrad’s novels to achieve a wide commercial success, and one of the few to have a happy ending. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, the abandoned daughter of a bankrupt tycoon, and her long struggle to find happiness and dignity. He takes his techniques of weaving complex narratives to a challenging level here. His narrator Marlow is piecing together the story from a mixture of personal experience and conversations with other characters in the novel. At times it is difficult to remember who is saying what to whom. This is a work for advanced Conrad fans only. Make sure you have read some of the earlier works first, before tackling this one.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

The novels of Joseph Conrad - VictoryVictory (1915) is set in the legendary port of Surabaya and in an outpost of the Malayan archipelago. It is the story of Swedish recluse Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young woman from a touring orchestra and runs off to live in remote seclusion, influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of his father. But he is pursued by two lying and scheming English gamblers, who believe he is concealing ill-gotten wealth. They corner him in his retreat, and despite the efforts of Lena to shield Heyst from their plans, there is a tragic confrontation which brings destruction into their island paradise.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad - adaptations 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.

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad - concordance 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


Filed Under: Joseph Conrad Tagged With: An Outcast of the Islands, English literature, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, The novel

As A Man Grows Older

February 27, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot and study resources

As A Man Grows Older (Senilità) was first published in 1898, and like all of Italo Svevo’s other books, it was published at his own expense. His first novel A Life (Una Vita) had appeared five years earlier and had been completely ignored. The same fate befell Senelità and Svevo was so discouraged by this lack of success that he virtually gave up writing for the next twenty-five years. But in 19o7 he was being tutored at the Berlitz School of languages in Trieste by a young James Joyce who had gone to live in exile there. Svevo showed the novel to Joyce, who encouraged and championed his work. It was Joyce who suggested the English title for the novel, and it was eventually translated into English in 1932.

As A Man Grows Older

Italo Svevo


As A Man Grows Older – commentary

Modernism

At a surface reading, As A Man Grows Older appears to be a rather traditional, low-key novel whose subject is not much more than an unsuccessful love affair. But it has many of the elements of modernism that were to be developed in the three decades that followed its publication.

The novel has a noticeable lack of dramatic tension, and attention is focussed instead on psychological analysis and presentation. The protagonist is an anti-hero who fails in almost everything he attempts. There are also modernist elements of unreliable witness, since the majority of events are seen from Emilio’s point of view, and he repeatedly misjudges people and attributes motives to other characters for which he has no evidence, and these attributions often turn out to be wrong.

There is a great deal of emphasis on the modern city as the theatre of events. All the drama in Emilio’s life takes place between the claustrophobic apartment he shares with his sister, and the public spaces which are the backdrop to his courtship of Angiolina

Characters

Emilio is both the protagonist of the novel, and the point of view through which almost all events are seen. He wishes to present himself in a positive light – but he is inept, he deceives himself, misreads others, and is a self-deceiving character, full of comic contradictions. There is a persistent disjuncture between his intentions and his actions. He is irresolute, he changes his mind, is indiscreet, and is trapped in what is often seen as a satirical or ironic attitude to life.

Stefano is something of an alter-ego figure to Emilio. He is muscular, handsome, and energetic – everything that Emilio is not. He is a rich and successful artist (though very little convincing evidence is provided for this) and most importantly he is successful with women. Emilio looks to him for advice regarding his love life and even his dying sister.

Angiolina is presented largely from Emilio’s point of view as an attractive woman, but it becomes rapidly obvious to the reader that she is first a flirt, then a schemer, and finally (even to Emilio) a whore. She is certainly a convincingly erotic figure, but from the start we know she has a record of former affairs (with Merighi for instance). For a poor girl, she is also suspiciously well dressed and has a luxuriously furnished room in the family apartment.

Her scheming nature is revealed when she devises the strategy of establishing a ‘decoy’ relationship as a safety net before she gives herself to Emilio. She becomes engaged to the ugly tailor Volpini as a social fall-back. But all this time she is accepting money from Emilio, and eventually her stories of visiting the Deluigi family are exposed as lies. At the end of the novel she has run off to Vienna with a man who has robbed a bank.

The modern city

It is interesting to note that As A Man Grows Older was written in a period at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century which saw the production of a number of novels that featured the city as the symbol of modern industrial and commercial life (though Charles Dickens had done the same in the middle of the nineteenth century for the establishment of the Industrial Revolution).

Andrei Biely’s Petersburg appeared in 1916, set in what was then the capital of pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1922 James Joyce’s Ulysses featured the Irish capital Dublin as it was in 1904. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925 is set exclusively in London, and Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is a portrait of the capital of the Weimar republic of the 1920s. Similarly, a huge amount of Kafka’s work is set in Prague, although he rarely names the streets and buildings, and Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos is almost a prose poem to New York City.

What all these novels did was to position the modern city as the location of modern sensibility. All the events of As A Man Grows Older take place in Trieste – which at that period was the fourth largest city of the Hapsburg Empire, its most important port, and a centre for literature and music. It is entirely in keeping with this culture that Emilio has published a novel, and at one point attends a concert of Die Walküre.

To many readers (particularly English-speaking) Trieste probably seemed like ‘a faraway place’ of no consequence that they had never heard of – but in fact it was a crucial centre of commercial and military power in an Empire which just happened to be on the verge of collapse. Svevo was an appropriate chronicler of its fortunes in the character of Emilio Brentani who symbolises lethargy, failure, despondency, and self-regard.

The complex relationships between Svevo’s work and language with these political ambiguities are addressed by Eduardo Roditti in his introduction to Confessions of Zeno:

Svevo’s works are indeed difficult to place properly in the complex and conflicting traditions of the Italian novel. The society that he describes is not typically Italian: his characters illustrate many qualities and faults of the Austrian bourgeoisie; his language, far from being the literary Tuscan of classical idealists or a colourful dialect such as the regional realists or Veristi affected, is rather the sophisticated and nerveless jargon of the educated Triestine bourgeoisie which spoke Italian neither as a literary nor as a national language, but as a convenient and easy manifestation of local patriotism.

The Kafka connection

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, discussing similarities in the work of Robert Browning and Franz Kafka, observed:

The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

There is a very good case to be made for Svevo as a precursor to Kafka. Emilio Brentani the contradictory, obsessive, and self-analysing protagonist of As A Man Grows Older could step directly out of any number of Kafka’s stories and novels – from Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis to Joseph K in The Trial.

But there are equally good reasons of a material, geographic, and cultural origin to explain the similarity between the two writers. First, the two men were contemporaries. Although Svevo was older and started writing earlier, they died within four years of each other in the 1920s. Second, they were both born in what was then the Hapsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian political dynasty whose domination reached from Prague to the Mediterranean port of Trieste.

Both Svevo and Kafka had fathers who were German-Jewish businessmen, and both of them were non-practising Jews. Both writers were raised in a linguistically ambiguous environment. Svevo’s family spoke a Triestine dialect, but Svevo himself was educated in German and wrote in Italian. Kafka lived in a Czech culture, was part of a Jewish family, and was educated (and wrote) in German. This level of cultural ambiguity was a product of the imperialism of the Hapsburg Empire which had sought to impose itself on very diverse ethnic groups and nationalities. As writers, both of them worked professionally in commercial offices – Svevo in banking, Kafka in insurance – and both of them wrote in the evening, produced a lot, but published little.

There are two further similarities. Both of them chose neurotically obsessive characters as their protagonists – characters who are ill at ease in the society they inhabit. When a problem occurs, every possible explanation or solution is examined in fine detail, including the possible motives of the other people involved. This level of pathologically neurotic behaviour is a function of both social insecurity and existential anxiety – both of which became well-recognised features of the early twentieth century. It is no accident that writers such as Svevo and Kafka were interested in the writings of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Freud. Indeed, Svevo went on to produce his third novel Confessions of Zeno entirely posited on the notion of a character who is undergoing Freudian analysis – with a semi-comic lack of success.

The second similarity is the spatial obverse of the capital city as a setting of events – the family apartment building as the site of claustrophobic domestic life. Both writers feature heavily the geography of the apartment with its adjoining rooms, its lack of privacy, and its inhabitants who are forced to overhear each other’s conversations and take into account sleeping arrangements and the clothes they can wear.

The apartment is technically the scene of private, domestic life as distinct from the public life of the streets. But the contiguity of the tiny rooms becomes an oppressive symbol of the intrusion of domestic responsibilities onto the dignity of the individual. At one point Emilio overhears his sister’s private thoughts because she talks in her sleep, and then is forced to hold a conversation with her conducted through the keyhole of an adjoining door, all the time dressed in his nightshirt. This is the sister who will shortly afterwards die very painfully in the very same room, dressed only in her own thin chemise.

As A Man Grows Older


As A Man Grows Older – study resources

As A Man Grows Older A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

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

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

As A Man Grows Older Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

As A Man Grows Older Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

As A Man Grows Older Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US


As A Man Grows Older – chapter summaries

I.   Emilio Brentani works in an insurance office, has published a novel, and lives a quiet humdrum existence with his younger sister, who looks after him. When he meets attractive young Angiolina he thinks he can enjoy a flirtation without any responsibilities or consequences. He learns that she has been involved in romantic intrigues in the past, but this only arouses his interest even more. He confides in his spinster sister Amalia.

II.   Emilio rather gauchely questions Angiolina about her past. He has no real experience of life himself, but he conceives a plan of ‘educating’ her. He misinterprets her reactions to him and advises her to be more unscrupulous, which she finds insulting. He objects to her name, and uses French diminutives when addressing her. At home his sister reproaches him for leaving her alone, which only makes him angry.

III.   Emilio calls unannounced at Angiolina’s house and is vexed to see that she has photos of men in her luxurious reception room. When she goes away to visit some friends of her family, Emilio criticises her to his friend Stefano Balli. Later, as he and Angiolina approach the point of sexually consummating their relationship, she suggests that they need a third party on whom they could blame any ‘consequences’. But when she announces that she has become engaged to Volpini, a short and ugly tailor, Emilio thinks of her as a ‘lost woman’.

IV.   Emilio is disconcerted by Angiolina’s flirtatious behaviour when they are in public together. He seeks advice from his fiend Stefano, who suggests an outing a quatre with his girl friend Margherita. But when they meet, Stefano behaves boorishly and flirts with Angiolina, who responds coquettishly. Volpini the tailor postpones the marriage for a year, but insists he cannot wait that long to possess Angiolina.

V.   When Stefano calls to see Emilio the next day his friend reproaches him for his bad behaviour. They argue and Emilio’s sister (who is in love with Stefano) is asked to adjudicate in the dispute. She takes Stefano’s part in the disagreement. Over dinner Stefano boastfully recounts the story of his rich patron who has left him all his money. Stefano discovers that his girlfriend Margherita has other men in her life, and he vows to get rid of her.

VI.   Stefano sees Angiolina in town with an umbrella-maker. He sends for Emilio to expose her duplicity. He urges Emilio to give up Angiolina, as he will give up Margherita. Emilio rehearses how he will avenge himself on Angiolina, and walks around the town trying to find her – without success. He goes home to hear his sister talking in her sleep.

VII.   Next day he goes to Angiolina’s house intending to expose her duplicity – but he fails to do so. She lies to him about the previous night. Eventually he breaks off the relationship, then walks around town looking forward to meeting her again ‘some time’. He meets Sorniani who confirms that Angiolina has had several lovers. Then he bumps into Leardi, from whom he tries to extract further information about Angiolina, but without success.

VIII.   The next day Emilio confers with his friend Stefano again, and is clearly jealous of his friend’s liberty to have access to Angiolina. Overhearing his sister talking in her sleep again about Stefano, he realises that she is in love with him, and vows to ‘save’ her. After another dinner, he accuses Stefano of compromising Amalia by his regular visits. Stefano protests his innocence, and the two friends are eventually reconciled.

IX.   Stefano stops visiting the house, which makes Emilio feel very sorry for his sister. He confides in her about Angiolina, who he has not seen for a week. She cries and complains that Stefano has no right to assume that he is compromised by their regular meetings. She insists that Emilio make him resume his visits to the house. But when he does visit again he behave coldly towards Amalia. Emilio takes his sister to a concert, and feels uplifted by the music of Die Walkuyrie.

X.   Emilio’s anguish regarding Angiolina grows less, and he begins writing again, turning his relationship with Angiolina into a novel. But he is not satisfied with the results. He wants to see Angiolina again, and so does Stefano, who has the pretence that he wishes to model her. When Emilio meets Angiolina in the Gardino Pubblico one night, they become reconciled. She reveals that she has given herself to Volpini, but she takes Emilio back home and goes to bed with him. She asks him to keep the fact secret, to guard her social reputation. He immediately tells Stefano about it. He hires a room in a house, but the very gestures and language Angiolina uses inflame his jealous fear that she has other lovers. He is due to be reproached by her father, but the old man turns out to be slightly crazy.

XI.   Stefano makes the sculpture of Angiolina, but he respects Emilio’s jealous fears. Emilio visits the artist’s studio where Stefano is seen as a positive and creative being. Emilio is happy in his sexual relationship with Angiolina, but he becomes jealous again when he thinks it is a result of Stefano’s influence. The tailor Volpini breaks off his engagement to Angiolina because of her reputation. Emilio helps her to write a letter back to him in response.

XII.   When Emilio returns home he finds Amalia in a delirious state. A helpful neighbour stays with her whilst he goes to Stefano for advice. A doctor is summoned: he suggests that Amalia has been drinking. Emilio is doubtful about both his diagnosis and his remedial prescription. Emilio feels guilty about neglecting his sister, and thinks this is a good reason for breaking off his relationship with Angiolina. When Stefano reveals that Angiolina has made advances to him, Emilio meets her and challenges her with accusations of multiple infidelities, calling her a whore. They argue, whereupon she leaves him..

XIII.   Amalia’s delirium continues. She invents a rival called Vittoria, and drifts from one deluded topic to another. The neighbour Elena tells them the sad story of her ungrateful stepchildren, during which more of Angiolina’s lies are revealed. Emilio wants to see her again – just to reproach her. Meanwhile he discovers that Amalia has been taking drugs. Here delirium eventually peters out, and she dies.

XIV.   Some time later Emilio hears that Angiolina has run off to Vienna with man who has robbed a bank. He visits Signora Elena and then Signora Zarrii, and ends by blending together memories of both Angiolina and Amalia to produce a comforting amalgam of the two.


As A Man Grows Older – principal characters
Emilio Brentani a bachelor insurance clerk (35)
Amalia Brentani his younger sister, a plain spinster
Angiolina Zarri a poor but very attractive young woman
Signora Zarri Angiolina’s mother
Stefano Barri Emilio’s best friend, a rich sculptor
Sarniani a lady’s man and gossip
Merighi Angiolina’s former lover, a businessman
Leardi a womaniser
Datti a photographer
Volpini a small ugly tailor, Angiolina’s fianceé
Margherita Stefano’s tall girlfriend
Signora Paracci landlady of a rooming house
Signora Elena Chierici Emilio’s helpful neighbour

© Roy Johnson 2016


More on Italo Svevo
Twentieth century literature


Filed Under: Italo Svevo Tagged With: Italo Svevo, Literary studies, Modernism, The novel

Baroque Concerto

January 17, 2015 by Roy Johnson

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

Baroque Concerto (Concierto barroco) was first published in Mexico by Siglo Ventiuno Editiores in 1974. It is one of a number of novellas written by Alejo Carpentier in which he uses the literary conceits of magical realism to explore the relationships between Europe and Latin-America, to compare historical periods with the present, and to mix realism and fantasy, producing a hybrid narrative style for which he coined the term ‘magical realism’.

Baroque Concerto

Baroque Concerto – commentary

The theme

A major theme in the work of Alejo Carpentier is the history and relationship of ‘Old World’ Europe with ‘New World’ America – and that is, largely South (Latin) America. Of course the ‘New World’ was only new in the sense that it had not yet been ‘discovered’ by Europeans. This tension (and conflict) was most dramatically symbolised by the expeditionary force of Hernan Cortes in his conquest of Mexico in 1519.

This event brought into sharp conflict the ideals and values of the European renaissance (The Age of Enlightenment) with those of the so-called ‘primitive’ values of the natives of Latin America – and the social and cultural mix was also given a further degree of complexity by the presence of slaves in the region.

Carpentier explores the clash of civilizations in many of his major works, such as The Kingdom of this World – El reino de este mundo (1949), Explosion in a Cathedral – El siglo de las luces (1962), and The Harp and the Shadow – El arpa y el sombra (1978).

In Baroque Concerto this idea is examined almost in reverse. A rich Mexican is visiting the ‘Old World’, and encounters European culture in the form of three of its most distinguished musical composers – Scarlatti, Handel, and Vivaldi.

It should be obvious from even the most cursory reading of Baroque Concerto that Carpentier was fascinated by two subjects – music and architecture. He studied architecture and musical theory, wrote a book on the history of Cuban music (La musica en Cuba 1946), and composed an opera La Passion Noire which was performed in Paris in 1924.

Carpentier’s own life also straddles these two worlds. He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland to Russian and French parents, but he grew up in Havana, Cuba. He also spoke French but wrote in Spanish. For all these reasons he seems to have allegiances with the cultures of both the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds.

In the novella Scarlatti, Handel, and Vivaldi perform their Baroque Concerto in the Ospedale dell Pieta, but Filomeno (representing the less harmonically developed but no less vigorous musical heritage of the slaves of African descent) performs his own energising supplement on whichever percussion instruments are to hand. He also takes up the military-based instrument – the trumpet – ready to articulate the clarion call to freedom (“The trumpet shall sound / And we shall be saved”) and is last seen watching somebody from the same ethnic background doing the same thing – Louis Armstrong raising the roof in his own concerto at the imaginary theatre performance.

Magical realism

It was Alejo Carpentier who first coined the term ‘magical realism’ (lo real maravilloso) to describe the literary style that combines realism with fantasy, and which characterises much of the Latin-American fiction that emerged from the period of experimental modernism in which he was an active participant in the 1920s and 1930s. This was an approach to narrative that combined the very realistic tendency to give object and matters of nature and history their true names, with fanciful notions and imaginative inventions that telescoped time, defied logic, and overturned rational explanations.

In Baroque Concerto the fictional character of the rich Mexican burger meets the historical figures of Scarlatti, Handel, and Vivaldi at the highpoint of the European renaissance in the early eighteenth century. After their imaginary concert performance in Venice they repair to the cemetery island of San Michele. There they picnic on the grave of Igor Stravinsky, who did not die until 1971 and is indeed buried there, alongside other twentieth century artists such as Serge Diaghilev, Joseph Brodsky, and Ezra Pound.

This mixture of realism and fantasy was very much a popular feature of Latin-American fiction in the post-war years, and it reached the height of its influence with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1967. It also has an ‘Old World’ parallel with the work of writers such as the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov whose The Master and Margerita was first published in the West at exactly the same time.

This influence is to be seen in the work of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum – Die Blechtrommel (1959) which in its turn can easily be seen as the source of many scenes in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). These novels seemed like innovative works at the time of their first publication (and were enormously successful in commercial terms) but it should be noted that both of these authors have suffered steep declines in their critical reputations ever since. It is as if the fanciful literary devices of Latin-American magical realism do not sit easily with the empirical realist traditions of the English and the European novel.

In Baroque Concerto we can easily accept the idea of a rich Mexican burger meeting three European composers on a journey to Italy – where all three of them worked at one time or another and actually did meet each other in 1709. It can be taken as a fanciful idea which is given a realistic historical substance to make it credible. But jerking temporally forward to also include Igor Stravinsky and Louis Armstrong snaps the thread of our suspended disbelief. It is as though we have been tricked or had the carpet pulled from under our feet.

At least that is the negatively critical view on this matter. Other readers might choose to focus on the thematically congruent issue of music in the Vivaldi-Stravinsky-Armstrong continuum and regard the tale as a meditation on the transformative power of works of art. As the Negro servant Filomeno says to his Master as they go their separate ways at the end of the novella:

of what good is the illusion of theatre if not to remove us from where we are and take us to where we can’t get to on our own? Thanks to the theatre we can go back in time and live in periods forever gone – something impossible for us in our present flesh.


Baroque Concerto – study resources

Baroque Concerto Baroque Concerto – at Amazon UK – (Text in English)

Baroque Concerto Concierto barroco – at Amazon UK – (Text in Spanish)

Baroque Concerto Baroque Concerto – at Amazon US – (Text in English)

Baroque Concerto Concierto barroco – at Amazon US – (Text in Spanish)


Baroque Concerto – plot summary

Part 1.   The Master, a rich Mexican burger, is taking stock of his house prior to embarking on a journey to Europe. He drinks wine with his servant and is visited by his mistress. Other visitors arrive with requests that he bring back various luxury items from his excursion.

Part 2.   He travels from Veracruz to Cuba where the ship has to be repaired. Havana is in the grip of a plague. When his servant dies he takes on Filomeno, a freed Negro, as his replacement. Filomeno relates a story of European adventurers pillaging in the Caribbean who were defeated by his grandfather, who was given his freedom as a reward. The victory was celebrated for two days with primitive musical instruments.

Part 3.   When he arrives in Madrid, the Master finds the capital squalid, the cuisine boring, and cultural life poor in general compared with his homeland. He and Filomeno travel to Valencia, then on to Barcelona, where they prepare to continue their journey to Italy.

Part 4.   When they arrive in Venice, the Carnival is in full swing, with people taking opportunities for licentious behaviour behind their costumes and masks. The Master is dressed as the Aztec king Montezuma, and he meets Vivaldi, Handel, and Scarlatti who decide they are overwhelmed with the celebrations and wish to play some music.

Part 5.   They repair to the Ospedale della Pieta, where the young abandoned girls under Vivaldi’s tutelage provide the orchestra for a grand concerto – with Handel at the organ and Scarlatti at the harpsichord. After this, Filomeno leads a primitive bachannalian song and dance around the church. At dawn, they leave in gondolas with picnic hampers.

Part 6.   They repair to an island cemetery where the Master recounts the story of Montezuma, which Vivaldi thinks will make a good plot for an opera. They discuss the plots of Shakespeare’s tragedies whilst breakfasting around the grave of Ivor Stravinsky. Then they return to St Mark’s Square.

Part 7.   Next day the Master and Filomeno attend a performance of Vivaldi’s opera Montezuma at the Teatro Fenice. The story of the conquest of Mexico by Cortes has been changed in its historical detail and accuracy. There is a re-enactment on stage of battles, the capture of a princess, and then a happy finale when Cortes forgives and pardons all his prisoners. The Master protests at the lack of historical accuracy, but Vivaldi argues that artifice has its own rules of logic and aesthetic structure.

Part 8.   Afterwards the Master and Filomeno discuss the relationship between history and art, and the differences between a European and (Latin) American view of the world. They visit a music shop where they see copies of The Four Seasons and The Messiah. They part company at the railway station, after which Filomeno stays behind to visit the theatre again, where there is a recital given by Louis Armstrong.

Boroque Concerto

Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier – other works

alejo carpentier greatest worksThe Kingdom of This World is a marvelously compressed account of the slave uprising and first revolution of the early nineteenth century in San Domingo – now Haiti. Carpentier uses ‘magical realism’, long before it became fashionable, to depict the contradictions between political reality and religious or mythical beliefs. The story passes rapidly in a series of vivid scenes from the early unsuccessful uprising led by Macandal, then Bouckman who led Haiti in its fight for independence from France, and finally to Henri Christophe the revolutionary leader who later became Emperor of Haiti, and who built Sans Souci and La Ferrière Citadel.
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
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alejo carpentier greatest worksThe Lost Steps (1953) is a story told twice. A disillusioned north-American musicologist flees his empty existence in New York City. He takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization – the upper reaches of a great South American river (which we take to be the Amazon). The novel describes his search, his adventures, the revival of his creative powers, and the remarkable decision he makes about his life in a village that seems to be truly outside history. This novel offers a wonderful evocations of Latin America from the founder of ‘Magical Realism’.
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US


Alejo Carpentier weblinks

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Between the Acts

January 29, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Between the Acts was started in April 1938 and the first draft completed in November 1940 just months before Virginia Woolf died in 1941. Her husband Leonard Woolf decided to go ahead with publication in conjunction with his partner John Lehmann, editing the text only for spelling and minor errors. It had originally been called Pointz Hall and Woolf wrote it at the same time as dragging herself through the composition of the biography of her friend Roger Fry.

Virginia Woolf - portrait

Virginia Woolf


Between the Acts – critical commentary

Narrative

For this, her last and posthumously published novel, Virginia Woolf returned to and developed further the narrative technique she had created for herself in Jacob’s Room in 1922. Any conventional notion of a continuous story or plot is abandoned in favour of fragmentary glimpses into the consciousness of various characters. These fragments are held together by the presentation of an aloof and rather witty narrator.

The narrative passes from one point of view to another via loosely associative threads and links, forming a pattern rather than a continuous chain. And into this pattern there are woven what Woolf herself called the ‘orts, scraps, and fragments’ which constitute human life.

The effect of continuity and apparent formlessness is intensified by the fact that Woolf abandons any formal divisions between the parts of her story: there are no chapters or any conventional breaks between the various parts of her story. You might also notice that the narration slips from the objective point of view of an author to the entirely subjective views of various characters and back again – sometimes within the same sentence.

As if to compensate for this apparently formless collection of fragments, there is a rich pattern of echoes and repetition which strengthens the construction as a whole. The characters speak and think in clichés, but the arrangement of their thoughts and utterances is like a densely patterned mosaic. Very often the dialogue echoes the narrative, and vice versa.

History

The large scale historic elements of the staged pageant are amusingly contrasted with the small scale individual drama going on amongst members of the audience. Isa is disenchanted with her husband Giles, and invents a romantic liaison with Rupert Haines the gentleman farmer, even though nothing at all happens between them except a few furtive glances. Meanwhile the angry Giles flirts with Mrs Manresa, the uninvited guest, by going off with her into the greenhouse.

There is also a recurrent theme of failed communication between the characters. People fail to remember the words of poems and songs; the actors forget their lines; other characters mis-hear what is said to them; and all in all there is sense of a failure of things to happen. The two oldest characters (Bart and his sister Cindy) mis-remember the past and fail to understand fragments of culture. Even Miss La Trobe feels that her efforts as a playwright have not been understood or appreciated by the audience.

It is true that members of the audience have entirely different interpretations of what the tableaux mean as a whole – but that is no reason that artistic creation should cease its efforts. As she consoles herself with a drink in the local pub, Miss La Trobe feels the stirrings of her next work take place in her imagination.


Between the Acts – study resources

Red button Between the Acts – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Between the Acts – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button Between the Acts – eBook edition

Red button Between the Acts – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Between the Acts – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button Between the Acts – Kindle edition

Between the Acts The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Red button Between the Acts – critical essays at Yale Modernism Lab.

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Between the Acts


Between the Acts – plot summary

On a day in June 1939 just before the outbreak of the second world war, a village historical pageant is held at Poyntz Hall, family home of the Olivers. Members of the family assemble for lunch whilst preparations for the event are made by villagers. The actions of almost all the characters are quite inconsequential, but their inner thoughts, feelings, and memories are sewn together by a narrative which creates links and patterns out of the fragments of mundane life to express a sense of community and continuity.

Virginia Woolf Between the ActsThe pageant, written and directed by Miss La Trobe, is a series of tableaux showing periods of English history from the medieval age to the present, The first part is a prologue, recited by a child; the second is a parody of a restoration comedy; and the third is a series of scenes from Victorian life directed by a traffic policeman. At the conclusion Miss La Trobe presents a finale entitled ‘Ourselves’ by turning mirrors onto the audience.

When the pageant ends, the audience disperses wondering what it all meant. Miss La Trobe initially feels that her work has failed in its effect, but then she retreats to the local pub and has an epiphany of the birth of her next creation.

The Oliver family meanwhile settle back in the house at Poyntz Hall and the day draws to a close.


Principal characters
Bartholemew Oliver a a retired Indian civil servant, owner of Poyntz Hall
Lucinda (‘Cindy’) Swithin Oliver’s eccentric widowed sister (‘old flimsy’)
Giles Oliver his son, a stockbroker with no capital
Isabella (‘Isa’) Oliver Giles’ wife with unfulfilled romantic yearnings
Amy a nurse at Poyntz Hall
Mabel a nurse at Poyntz Hall
George a young boy, Oliver’s grandson
Rupert Haines a gentleman farmer
Mrs Haines his wife, with protruding eyes
Caro a baby
Sohrah an Afghan hound
Mrs Sands (‘Trixie’) cook at Poyntz Hall
Candish a gardener
Mrs Manresa a middle-aged bohemian vamp
Ralph Manresa her husband, a Jew
William Dodge a foppish and probably gay clerk
Miss La Trobe a bossy lesbian author
Bond a cowman
Albert the village idiot
Eliza Clark shopkeeper who plays Elizabeth I
Mabel Hopkins plays ‘Reason’
Mr Page reporter for the local paper

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words


Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Between the Acts – first edition

Between the Acts - first edition

Cover design by Vanessa Bell


Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Jacob's RoomJacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Virginia Woolf Mrs DallowayMrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of her great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features her rich expression of ‘interior monologue’ as a narrative technique, and it offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. This novel is now seen as a central text of English literary modernism.
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..

Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013


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Black Mischief

April 25, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Black Mischief (1932) is Evelyn Waugh’s follow-up to Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930). It is another sharply satirical novel which features his sceptical view of society between the two world wars. The setting is a fictional African country (Azania), but the main target of his satire is the English upper and ruling class. The novel also introduces the unscrupulous playboy character Basil Seal, who was due to re-appear in some of Waugh’s later work, particularly Put Out More Flags< (1942).

Black Mischief


Black Mischief – commentary

Characters

A great deal of the satire and comic drama of the novel is generated via the characters and their absurdly inappropriate attitudes to the situation in which they find themselves. These characters might have become stock figures in the time that has elapsed since they first appeared in 1932, but they are nonetheless funny and in some cases the hapless victims of black comedy.

The Emperor Seth is a typical example, and might also be considered something of a prophetic figure, given the number of African state rulers who have been educated in the public [that is, private] schools and the universities of Europe. He is a graduate of Oxford, from which he has emerged with a naive desire to import modern ideas and culture into a population that is still living in mud huts and that believes in witchcraft.

His proposals to promote birth control are embraced rapturously by the inhabitants of Azania – but only because they completely misunderstand the message. The official propaganda promotes the advantages of small families, but the natives cling to their traditions of unrestrained fertility. Seth prints new banknotes carrying his image – which are worthless – and he plans to introduce compulsory Esperanto as the lingua franca of his country.

Sir Samson Courteney (the ‘Envoy Extraordinary’) is a wonderful example of everything a English diplomatic panjandrum should not be. He is criminally idle, evades all responsibilities, and at the height of a civil war in the country is reluctant to attend to business because he is playing with a child’s rubber toy in his bath.

His wife is terminally naive: amidst war, bloodshed, and public hangings she is only concerned with planting flowers in the legation gardens. Their daughter Prudence is virtually a simpleton who ‘practises’ romance with the attache William Bland, and then becomes the helpless plaything of Basil Seal. When on return to England her plane is forced into a crash landing, she ends up as the main ingredient in a cannibal’s celebration cooking pot.

Basil Seal is an enduringly wonderful creation, a scabrous rogue, and a quite complex character. He has been successful academically at Oxford, but has squandered his inheritance. He is master of several languages, but he is unscrupulous to a degree. He scrounges money from his married lover, steals from his mother, and following his African adventures goes back unchanged to the trivialities of his life in upper-class London. His story is taken up in more detail in the later novel Put Out More Flags (1942).


Black Mischief – study resources

Black Mischief – Penguin – Amazon UK

Black Mischief – Penguin – Amazon US

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: Six Novels – Amazon UK

Black Mischief

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb


Black Mischief – plot summary

Ch. One Debra Dowa is the capital city of Azania, an imaginary country in Africa. When the founder dies, rule passes to his grandson Seth, who has studied at Oxford University and is keen to adopt modern European culture into a country that is clearly not ready to accept it.

There is a civil war and people are fleeing the country. Cheating, corruption, and lying are rife, and executions by hanging are everyday events. But the victorious army is loyal to Seth, who is mainly concerned with the arrangements for his coronation.

Ch. Two Members of the British Legation concern themselves with trivia, complain about shortages, and are completely out of touch with their surroundings. There is absurd rivalry between foreign embassies.

Ch. Three Basil Seal has given up his position as an English member of parliament and thinks to go out to Azania, but he has no money, having squandered his inheritance. He cadges money from his lover and steals an emerald bracelet from his mother.

Ch. Four Basil arrives in Azania on the day of Seth’s inauguration, which is a shambles. The French legation regard him as a spy. There is a grand ball, fuelled by ‘Champagne’ supplied by the corrupt Armenian trader Youkoumian that he has made the same day.

Ch. Five Basil is appointed Minister of Modernisation with Youkoumian as financial secretary, who imports boots nobody needs. Basil and Youkoumian appoint themselves on to government concessions. A dispute arises with General Connolly over the supply of boots to troops. The boots are eventually issued, but the troops eat them.

Meanwhile Seth pronounces totalitarian edicts on birth control and compulsory physical exercise. Basil is having an affair with Prudence the British ambassador’s daughter. Youkoumian is a profiteer on all the ‘improvements’. The campaign to promote birth control is completely misunderstood by the natives. Seth prints new currency to enrich himself.

Ch. Six The animal rights campaigner Dame Mildred Porch arrives en route to England. The legation are ‘too busy’ to deal with her. Meanwhile Prince Achon the rightful heir to the throne is rescued from imprisonment in a monastery. Europeans leave the town, fearing trouble. Dame Mildred and her companion Miss Tan witness the birth control parade and a riot from the roof of their hotel. The oppositionists seize control.

Ch. Seven The English residents and travellers shelter at the legation, which irritates Sir Courtney. Prince Achon is crowned the new emperor, but dies during the ceremony. Basil arrives with camels, disguised as a native trader.

Planes arrive from Aden to rescue the English residents. The plane carrying Prudence is forced to crash land. Basil traces Seth, only to find that he has been killed by rival Boaz, who is himself killed by his own troops. Basil delivers a funeral oration for Seth, after which there is a ceremonial feast. It transpires that they have eaten Prudence.

Ch. Eight Basil returns to London where his friends have lost money after the UK has come off the gold standard. They do not want to hear his traveller’s tales. Azania becomes an Anglo-French protectorate and is administered by a new set of incompetents.


Black Mischief – main characters
Emperor Seth Oxford-educated chieftain
Krikor Youkoumian Armenian store owner and racketeer
General Connolly Irish head of Seth’s army
Black Bitch his common law native wife, later ‘Duchess of Ukaka’
Sir Samson Courteney British envoy to Azania
Prudence Courteney his simple and romantic daughter
William Bland honorary attache
Basil Seal amoral ex-Oxford adventurer and playboy
Mrs Angela Lyne Basil’s lover
Dame Mildred Porch animal rights campaigner
Lady Margot Metroland a rich and glamorous society woman

© Roy Johnson 2018


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Brideshead Revisited

February 10, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Brideshead Revisited (1945) was the ninth novel written by Evelyn Waugh. He had established his literary reputation with a series of comic satires in the inter-war years including Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). But Brideshead is altogether a more serious work, with only a couple of amusing interludes punctuating a study of aristocratic decline in the 1920s and 1930s. It was written during the Second World War, and along with Waugh’s later trilogy Sword of Honour (1952-1961) represents some of the most successful English fiction of that period.

Brideshead Revisited


Brideshead Revisited – commentary

The framed narrative – I

A framed narrative is one story enclosed within another. The term is used typically when the principal story is preceded or given its context by some sort of introduction. The ‘outer’ story might set the scene or supply the provenance for the ‘inner’ narrative. Then, when the principal story has been related, there may – or may not – be a return to the scene of the first. The outer elements ‘frame’ the main substance of the narrative. (For more on the framed narrative see below.)

Brideshead provides an excellent example of this framing technique. The novel opens towards the end of the Second World War when Charles Ryder’s infantry unit is stationed at Brideshead Castle. The mood and the atmosphere of this Prologue are austere and grim, with an emphasis on wartime food rationing and physical discomfort. But when the protagonist Ryder reaches the country estate and its ancestral house, he recognises it as the background to his earlier life during the previous twenty years.

His recollection of those years form the principal events of the novel – and they are in marked contrast to the prologue. Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University and is introduced to the extravagantly rich and somewhat decadent lifestyle of the English aristocracy. The events of the following years unfold in a privileged, indulgent, and cultivated milieu.

But then in the Epilogue the narrative frame is closed by a return to Ryder’s military existence in the 1940s. The beautiful ancestral home of the Flyte family at Brideshead is being vandalised by the billeted troops. The closing frame of the narrative matches that of the opening , and emphasises the contrast between the cultural values of the old and the new regime.

The first person narrative

Evelyn Waugh handles the delivery of the novel via first person narrative very skilfully. This mode is required to perform two important functions simultaneously– to reveal the character of the principal character, Charles Ryder, and to relate the series of events in which he becomes involved.

Charles is a sensitive and honourable chap who for the most part of the novel is operating outside his social depth. He comes from a lower social stratum than the people he befriends. It becomes immediately obvious to the reader that he is in danger of being led astray by his friendship with the recklessly indulgent Sebastian.

Fortunately, Sebastian is honourable too, even though he is on a self-destructive trajectory. But Charles does not fare so well with Sebastian’s sister Julia. Despite his attraction to her (which is signalled in the early part of the novel) it is obvious to the reader that she is essentially manipulative and cold-hearted, and in the end she rejects Charles in favour of her religious scruples.

Waugh also uses the device of narrative ellipsis: the reporting of important events are missed out of the story in order to create dramatic tension. For instance, Charles recounts his success as an architectural painter and his trip to Latin-America without at first revealing to the reader that he is married. It gradually emerges that he has discovered his wife’s infidelity – and thus has convincing reasons for not foregrounding the information.

He refers to at least one of their offspring as her child, which suggests that he suspects he might not be the father. All the subsequent exchanges between them reveal that Celia has been a cold and manipulative wife – just as Julia will ultimately be as a lover.

The main theme

There are two main themes in the novel – but they are closely linked. The more important theme is the decline of the English aristocracy, and the secondary theme is Charles Ryder’s attraction to all that its culture implies. As Evelyn Waugh remarked of his own design: “When I wrote Brideshead Revisited I was consciously writing an obituary of the doomed English upper class.”

The country estate of Brideshead Castle is the seat of the Flyte family and its head Lord Marchmain. The castle is gorgeously appointed and serviced by a large retinue of servants. But the titular head has decamped from the family home and is living with his mistress at a separate establishment in Venice. He is unable to regularise this situation socially because his wife refuses to give him a divorce, since she is a Catholic (a secondary or even tertiary theme).

But it gradually emerges that Lord Marchmain is running up debts because of this extravagant life style. And his offspring show every sign of accelerating the family’s decline. The family’s eldest son, emotionally constipated Bridey, eventually marries the middle-aged widow of a fellow matchbox collector. The daughter Julia marries arriviste Mottram, who cannot be formally recognised by the family because he is a divorcee. Even when Julia forms a relationship with the unhappy Charles Ryder, she cannot marry him because of a sudden resurgence of her Catholic beliefs.

The two younger members of the family are similarly blighted. Sebastian becomes a hopeless dipsomaniac and ends up destitute, attaching himself to a monastery in Tunisia. His younger sister Cordelia is entirely given up to nun-like behaviour and the pursuit of charitable works in war zones.

Yet Charles Ryder is clearly attracted to the world this family represents. He comes from a lower echelon of society. His father is rich enough to send him to Oxford and give him an allowance, but he limits this support – in a very amusing manner. Charles clings to Sebastian’s coat tails and accepts his generous hospitality and support.

He also falls in love with Sebastian’s sister, with whose good looks hers are frequently compared. There is another tertiary theme to the novel in the quasi-homosexual relationship between the two young men. And Ryder does eventually live at Brideshead with Julia (who inherits the house from her father). But he is denied his ambition to merge with the family because Julia is shocked by her father’s death into a resumption of her Catholic beliefs. Ryder’s outcome is to become “homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless”.

It is no accident that this nostalgic yearning for an aristocratic heritage (even whilst recognising its decadence) has been the principal mood of two very glamorous and successful film adaptations of the novel. There was an eleven part television series in 1981produced by Granada Television, and an independent feature film in 2008 – both of which put enormous emphasis on this aspect of the narrative.

The novel also seems to have spawned any number of further aristocratic country house television dramas of the Upstairs, Downstairs variety. These depict late Victorian and early Edwardian upper-class life in a manner which simultaneously offers a sympathetic view of toffs with patronising sketches of life ‘below stairs’.

But the main purpose of these television and film dramas is to present comforting images of luxury, wealth, and cultivated living which offer a reassuring depiction of an earlier age to the viewer. Evelyn Waugh is partly responsible for dressing Brideshead Revisited in this nostalgic and escapist presentation of life.

But his view is also modified by having the glamour of Brideshead and transatlantic voyages sandwiched between grim scenes of Britain at war in the 1940s. He hopes the social vandals will not prevail, but he is not sure, and that doubt ultimately gives the novel its cutting edge.

The framed narrative – II

A typical and famous example of the framed narrative is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). His novella begins with an after-dinner conversation between sailors on the Thames. One of the characters (Marlow) relates his experiences sailing up river in the Belgian Congo. When he has finished, the story returns to the group still moored on the Thames. The main story is framed both by the geographic location and the philosophic reflections Marlow offers on historical comparisons between Europe and Africa.

Another famous example demonstrates the incomplete or one-sided frame. Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) opens with a similar group of people swapping stories after dinner. One of the party relates a horrifying tale which reveals the experiences of a governess looking after two children in an old house that appears to be haunted. But when the fears of the governess reach their dramatic climax, the novella ends, without returning to the opening scene.


Brideshead Revisited – study resources

Brideshead Revisited – Penguin – Amazon UK

Brideshead Revisited – Penguin – Amazon US

Brideshead – Study Guide – Paperback – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Paperback – Amazon UK

Brideshead Revisited – DVD – Amazon UK
The full 1980 Granada television series in 11-parts

Brideshead Revisited – DVD – Amazon UK
The 2008 BBC feature film version.

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb


Brideshead Revisited – plot summary

Prologue

During the latter years of the Second World War, Captain Charles Rider and his infantry army unit arrive at their temporary headquarters in the requisitioned country house of Lord Marchmain at Brideshead Castle.

Book One

Ch 1 Ryder recalls his early days at Oxford University twenty years previously and his meeting Sebastian Flyte, who takes him to his family’s stately home at Brideshead.

Ch 2 Charles is reproached by his cousin Jasper for mixing with the ‘wrong set’. Then aesthete Anthony Blanche reveals a critical account of Lord and Lady Marchmain’s troubled marriage.

Ch 3 Ryder returns home for the long vacation. He is in debt, but his father ignores his requests for help, and makes his life a misery behind a facade of loving concern. Sebastian tricks Charles into returning to Brideshead, where he meets his sister Julia Flyte.

Ch 4 Charles spends an idyllic summer at Brideshead with Sebastian. They visit Lord Marchmain in Venice, where Marchmain’s mistress Cara gives Charles a vivid account of the Lord’s hatred of his wife, who refuses to divorce him.

Ch 5 During a subdued second year at Oxford, Charles meets Rex Mottram. There is an excursion to a party in London where Charles, Sebastian, and Boy Mulcaster get drunk and spend time in jail. Christmas at Brideshead finds the Oxford don Samgrass being pious and boring. Sebastian feels oppressed by his family and starts drinking heavily. Lady Marchmain puts emotional pressure on Charles, and Sebastian is eventually sent down for a term. Charles decides to quit Oxford and take up painting.

Book Two

Ch 1 As a punishment, Sebastian is sent on a tour of Levantine monasteries with Samgrass, and on return to Brideshead is forbidden drink. He reveals to Charles that whilst on holiday he gave Samgrass the slip and is still drinking.

Charles is reproached by Lady Marchmain and he leaves Brideshead. He sets up as a painter in Paris, where he is visited by Rex Mottram, who reveals that the Flyte family are losing money through profligate over-indulgence. Mottram marries Julia later in the year in a very quiet wedding.

Ch 2 Charles recalls Julia’s ambitions to marry and its arriviste connotations. She becomes secretly engaged to Rex Mottram only because she is jealous of his affair with a married woman. Rex tries (unsuccessfully) to become a Catholic. It is then revealed that he is divorced after a former youthful marriage in Canada. The family object, and the marriage is low key and disastrous for everyone..

Ch 3 Charles returns from Paris to join National Service during the General Strike of 1926. Lady Marchmain dispatches Charles to bring back Sebastian from Morocco, where he finds him in hospital. Lady Marchmain dies. Charles makes paintings of the Flyte’s house in London, which is being sold off to developers to pay Lord Marchmain’s debts.

Book Three

Ch 1 Charles eventually becomes a successful architectural painter. He travels alone in Mexico and Central America for nearly two years, then joins his wife Celia in New York. Sailing back to England they meet Julia Flyte with whom Charles is in love. There is desultory socialising on board and a heavy storm. Charles and Julia exchange accounts of their failed marriages, sleep together, and arrange to meet in London.

Ch 2 Charles has an exhibition in London, and he evades going home. Anthony Blanche reappears, reports that Charles’ affair with Julia is public knowledge, and criticises his paintings. Charles and Julia travel to Brideshead, where her husband Rex is living.

Ch 3 Two years later Charles and Julia are living at Brideshead. Bridey announces that he is going to be married but cannot present his fiancee because Charles and Julia are ‘living in sin’. He plans to move his new family into the house, with his father’s consent.

Ch 4 Divorce proceedings are set in motion by Charles and Celia, then Rex and Julia. Cordelia returns from nursing the wounded in the Spanish Civil War with news of Sebastian. He has continued drinking, has become derelict, and attached himself to a monastery in Tunis.

Ch 5 Suddenly Lord Marchmain returns from Italy in a severely enfeebled condition to die in his ancestral home. There is discussion about who will inherit Brideshead. Lord Marchmain disapproves of Bridey’s middle-class fiancee Beryl, and leaves the stately home to Julia in his will. Marchmain on his death bed reverts to his original religious belief. Julia then tells Charles that she cannot marry him and they must separate for ever.

Epilogue

Ryder and his men are occupying the ground floor of Brideshead, where troops have been vandalising the building and the grounds. He learns that Julia and Cordelia have gone out to Palestine to help in the war effort.


Brideshead Revisited – principal characters
Charles Ryder the narrator, a young man who becomes a painter then a soldier
Lord Marchmain head of the Flyte family, living in Venetian exile
Lady Teresa Marchmain his wife, a devout Roman Catholic
Earl Brideshead ’Bridey’ the elder son, emotionally bankrupt
Sebastian Flyte the charming, troubled younger son who becomes a derelict and alcoholic
Julia Flyte the attractive but remote elder daughter
Cordelia Flyte the younger daughter who is a selfless and devout Catholic
Celia Ryder Charles’ vivacious but unfaithful wife
’Boy’ Mulcaster Celia’s brother, a ‘Hooray Henry’ at Oxford
Rex Mottram a Canadian arriviste who marries Julia then tolerates her affair with Charles
Anthony Blanche an aesthete and homosexual friend of Charles and Sebastian

© Roy Johnson 2018


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Filed Under: Evelyn Waugh Tagged With: English literature, Evelyn Waugh, Literary studies, The novel

Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf’s previously unpublished early works

This is an unusually exciting event for Woolf fans – the first publication of an undiscovered notebook which had been lost for seventy years. Carlyle’s House was written in 1909 when Virginia Woolf was living with her brother Adrian in Fitzroy Square. She was struggling with her first Novel, The Voyage Out and wondering if she would ever be married. It was discovered only a couple of years ago, in Birmingham. The contents of the notebook (which she made herself, by hand) is a series of seven portraits written, as she says of them herself as a sort of artist’s notebook: “the only use of this book is that it shall serve for a sketch book; as an artist fills his pages with scraps and fragments, studies of drapery – legs, arms & noses … so I take up my pen & trace here whatever shapes I happen to have in my head … It is an exercise – training for eye & hand”.

Carlyle's House and Other Sketches They are an attempt to capture people visually, socially, and even morally. She is trying out the literary techniques which were later to make her famous – capturing the sense of life by a combination of shrewd observation, making imaginative connections between disparate subjects, and sliding effortlessly into philosophic reflections on the topic in question.

Some of her observations and commentary are amazingly snooty and condescending. Speaking of the children of Sir George Darwin who she visits in their campus home in Cambridge, she observes:

Margaret is much less formed; but has the same determination to find out the truth for herself, and the same lack of any fine power of discrimination. They enjoy things very much, and fancy that this is due to their superior taste; fancy that in riding about the streets of Cambridge they are building up a theory of life.

Even people’s furniture and choice of paintings and home decor is subject to a scrutiny so close that it becomes like a moral measuring tape:

In the drawing room, the parents’ room, there are prints from Holbein drawings, bad portraits of children, indiscriminate rugs, chairs, Venetian glass, Japanese embroideries: the effect is of subdued colour, and incoherence; there is no regular scheme. In short the room is dull.

As Christopher Reed argues in his authoritative study of this subject, Bloomsbury Rooms, the aesthetics of interior design and furnishing held amongst the Bloomsberries was shot through with a political ideology.

Woolf idolatrists will have to swallow hard to stomach the disgusting anti-semitism of her revealingly entitled piece ‘The Jews’ – for it is in fact a sketch of a single person, Mrs Loeb, who she had visited at Lancaster Gate.

There’s a commendably thorough introduction by Woolf specialist David Bradshaw, full explanatory footnotes, and a foreward by Doris Lessing which is so poorly written that it throws the style of the young Virginia Woolf into high relief. Bradshaw also offers a commentary on each sketch, setting it in context and bringing together all the observations from wide-ranging Woolf scholarship which throw light on these episodes.

This might be the work of the young and untried Woolf, and it might reveal the less-developed and even unappealing side of her character. But we know that she revised many of these attitudes and beliefs in later life. This is a brief collection which enthusiasts will not want to miss.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Carlyle's House Buy the book at Amazon UK

Carlyle's House Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches London: Hesperus, 2003, pp.88, ISBN: 1843910551


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Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Carlyle's House and Other Sketches, Essays, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

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