20C Authors

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

The Man who Disappeared (Amerika)

May 8, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, commentary, study notes, reading

The Man who Disappeared (1913) (also known as Amerika) was Kafka’s first attempt at a novel, and like most of his others, with the exception of The Trial, it was left unfinished. He began writing it (for the second time) in 1912, then broke off to compose Metamorphosis and apart from producing a couple of subsequent fragments he never returned to it. Only the much anthologised first chapter, The Stoker was published in Kafka’s lifetime, in a collection of modernist texts edited by Kurt Wolf in 1913.

Readers expecting the usual Kafkaesque elements of existential terror and bureaucratic nightmares will be surprised and maybe delighted to discover that the story is a light-hearted and at times quite amusing fantasy of a young German boy at large in the USA.

Needless to say, Kafka had never been anywhere near America, and his account of it is entirely constructed from clichés of the New World – skyscrapers, non-stop traffic, and at times some Keystone Cops chase scenes.

The Man who Disappeared – commentary

The novel is an ironic reversal of the rags to riches story that is normally attached to immigration from the Old World to the New. Karl Rossman manages to go from riches to rags. He starts off with a wealthy and powerful uncle who showers him with luxury, but by the end of the narrative he has nothing, he is searching for work, and he is mixing with criminals and a prostitute. It is worth noting that Karl is not exactly an innocent abroad. He has been expelled from his family home following a sexual dalliance with an older servant woman that resulted in her bearing a child. So although he is only seventeen (or even fifteen) years old, Karl is in fact himself a father.

Authority figures

The authority figures in each chapter appear in pairs. When Karl becomes involved in the defence of the stoker and his claims of ill-treatment, it is to the ship’s Captain and the ship’s Purser that he is answerable and who challenge his actions and question his motivation.

His uncle Edward’s business associates are Mr Pollunder and Mr Green, both of whom have power over Karl. It is the invitation from Pollunder which displeases Karl’s uncle, and Mr Green who carries the letter which contains the orders of dismissal that expel Karl from his newfound paradise in New York.

He immediately falls into the hands of Robinson and Delamarche, who take advantage of his naivete and bully him into becoming virtually their servant. Interesting to note also that these authority figures are usually slightly different – of what we might now call the ‘good cop, bad cop’ kind. One of them will pretend to befriend Karl, the other will resort to naked threats. Karl tries to resist them both, but fails.

When he is disciplined for a minor infraction of discipline at the Hotel Occidental, it is the Head Waiter and Head Porter who perform this same dual function

Women

The women in the story are either all-embracing mother figures, sexual predators, or vulnerable waifs.

Grete Mitzelbach offers Karl somewhere to sleep when he is in need; she secures him a job; and she offers her support when he is being threatened with dismissal at the hotel. In fact she also recommends him to another employer.

On the other hand Johanna Brummer, the thirty-five year old servant woman who seduces the fifteen (or seventeen) year old Karl does so in a comically grotesque manner – but one which Karl finds ‘disgusting’. Klara, Mr Pullender’s daughter, appears to be a a more sympathetic figure, but she ends up attacking Karl physically, then invites him to her room – but only to reveal her sexual connection with Mr Mack, the millionaire’s son.

Delamarche’s mistress Brunelda is almost a grotesque parody of a sluttish courtesan:

Her red dress was rucked up at the front and a long stretch of it hung down to the floor, her legs were visible almost to the knees, she was wearing thick white woollen stockings, and had no shoes on.’How hot it is, Delamarche,’ she said, turning her face from the wall and holding her hand negligently in front of Delamarche, who seized and kissed it.

Terese and Fanny are waif figures, with Terese offering a particularly poignant version of the emigrant’s story, searching for work with her mother, who is eventually killed in an accident on a building site.

Visions of America

Following the Second World War, images of America were widely manifest in Europe and the rest of the world via radio, newspapers, and cinema – but at the time that Kafka was writing in 1912 it would be literally Another Country to him, an unknown and exotic place (even though it was a place to which many Europeans were emigrating). Given this, and the fact that he had obviously never been there, it is surprising that he captures so much of its essence in images of very tall buildings (skyscrapers), the grid system of straight roads, of people living in tenement blocks, and the non-stop traffic.

There is also a passage describing a mechanical desk in Uncle Edward’s office which is strangely prophetic:

On its top part, for example, it had a hundred drawers of various sizes, and even the President of the Union could have found a suitable place for every one of his files, but in addition it had a regulator at the side, and by turning the handle one could rearrange and reorganize the drawers in a great variety of ways according to one’s wishes and needs. Thin side partitions slowly descended and formed the base or the top of new drawers that rose up, a single turn of the handle gave the top a quite different appearance, and everything happened slowly or with wild rapidity, depending on how you turned the handle. It was a brand new invention …

This is amazingly prescient of the Memex machine that Vanevar Bush described in imagining computers and hypertext in his 1945 article As We May Think:

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications … Most of the contents are purchased on microfilm, ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place.

If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions … Any given book from his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf.

Study resources

The Man who Disappeared – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Man who Disappeared – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Amerika: The Man who Disappeared – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Amerika: The Man who Disappeared – Schocken Books – Amazon UK

Kafka: A Very Short Introduction – OUP’s mini series

The Stoker – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg (in German)

The Complete Novels of Kafka – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon UK

Principal characters

Karl Rossmann	a seventeen or fifteen year-old German boy from Prague
Johanna Brummer	thirty-five year-old servant who seduces Karl
Jakob	Karl and Johanna’s son
Butterbaum	Karl’s fellow traveller on the ship
—	The ship’s stoker
—	The ship’s captain
Schumbal	the Romanian chief engineer
—	The ship’s chief purser
Senator Edward Jakob	Karl’s uncle, a rich businessman
Mr Pollunder	a banker and business associate of Karl’s uncle
Klara Pollunder	his daughter
Mr Mack Jnr	son of a millionaire, fiancé to Klara
Mr Mack Snr	millionaire head of a large building firm
Mr Green	gross, bachelor business associate of Karl’s uncle
Robinson	an Irish hypochondriac
Delamarche	a French bully
Grete Mitzelbach	Head Cook at the Hotel Occidental (50)
Terese Berchtold	secretary to the Head Cook (18)
Giacomo	lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Rennel	lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Bess	chief lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Isbary	head waiter at the Hotel Occidental
Feodor	head porter at the Hotel Occidental
Brunelda	Delamarche’s mistress, a fat ex-singer
Joseph Mendel	a student in Delamarche’s apartment block
Fanny	Karl’s trumpet-playing friend

Photomontage

Kafka, family photos, and old Prague

The Man who Disappeared – plot summary

Karl Rossman arrives in New York, having been sent abroad by his parents following an incident with an older servant that resulted in the birth of a son. Karl goes back into the ship to retrieve his umbrella and meets the ship’s stoker, who complains about his treatment on board. Karl accompanies him to plead his case with the ship’s captain. There he meets his uncle Edward Jakob, who is now a rich businessman and a Senator.

Karl lives with his uncle for two months, takes English and riding lessons, and is provided with a piano. He meets a millionaire’s son, Mr Mack, and is invited to the home of banker Mr Pollunder, although his uncle disapproves of the visit.

At Mr Pollunder’s country house Karl is oppressed by the behaviour of his business associate Mr Green, and then is subject to a physical attack by Klara, Mr Pollunder’s daughter.. When he decides to return to his uncle’s house, many obstacles are put in his way to delay his return. It is revealed that Mr Mack is Klara’s fiancé. Finally, Mr Green presents Karl with a letter from his uncle disowning him for going against his wishes. Mr Green gives Karl a train ticket to San Francisco (which he never uses).

Karl meets two unsavoury characters Robinson and Delamarche who take advantage of him. They set off in search of work, eat at his expense, and steal his belongings. Karl escapes from them, and arrives at the Hotel Occidental, where he is befriended by Grete Mitzelbach the head cook and invited to stay for the night.

The cook arranges for Karl to be a lift boy at the hotel. He works twelve hour shifts and sleep in a dormitory filled with smoke, noise, and lift boys boxing and wrestling. Karl befriends Terese, the cook’s secretary, who recounts her difficult life and her mother’s death as poor emigrants.

Robinson reappears at the hotel drunk, and vomits into the stair well. Karl offers him money to leave and puts him into his own bed to sober up. But this briefly takes Karl away from his post on the lifts, for which misdemeanour he is interviewed by the head waiter and head porter, then sacked, despite pleas from his friend the head cook. Karl is physically bullied by the head porter, but finally manages to escape from the hotel – only to find Robinson waiting for him again.

Karl and Robinson are driven to a tenement building where Delamarche is living. There is an altercation involving the police, from which Karl escapes again, only to be rescued by Delamarche and taken back to a squalid and cramped apartment where he lives with Brunelda, a fat ex-singer. Robinson complains about the skivvy work he does for Delamarche and Brunelda, and reveals that they plan to make Karl their servant. They all watch a political rally and procession from the balcony of the apartment. Karl then makes another attempt to escape, which ends up in a fight. He then has a conversation with a student on an adjacent balcony, who advises him to stay with Delamarche.

Novel fragments

Robinson and Karl prepare breakfast for Delamarche and Brunelda in the late afternoon, amidst the squalor of the apartment.

Karl departs with Brunelda, who is hidden under a blanket on a cart.

Karl enrolls in the Theatre of Oklahoma where he meets an old friend Fanny who is playing a trumpet to welcome newcomers. He goes through a complex and bureaucratic recruitment process and is taken on as a technician. At a feast for new recruits he meets his fellow lift boy Giacomo from the Hotel Occidental. They travel by train for two days towards Oklahoma.

Kafka’s writing

a page of Kafka’s manuscript

Franz Kafka: Illustrated Life This is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle in old Prague – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. This is an excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.

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Other works by Franz Kafka

Metamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.

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The Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules, striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism. Read the stories and The Trial as a start and a minimum.
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Franz Kafka – web links

Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

More on Franz Kafka
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Moment

January 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Moment (1947) is the second collection of essays and reviews by Virginia Woolf that were gathered and edited by her husband Leonard after her death in 1941. She herself had supervised the earlier collections The Common Reader first series (1925) and The Common Reader second series (1932) which were published during her lifetime

The Moment and Other Essays includes writing on literary criticism, biographical sketches, political polemics, and book reviews. Some of the essays were being published for the first time; others had appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, the New Statesman and Nation, Time and Tide, the New York Saturday Review, and John Lehmann’s New Writing. The collection includes two essays with the same title, Royalty; the first was commissioned, but not published by Picture Post; the second was published in Time and Tide.

The Moment – critical commentary

There are some essays in this collection that have become quite well known in their own right. On Being Ill for instance takes as a starting point the subject of illness in literature, a topic which she spins out into an extraordinary display of reflections on subjects including solitude, the psychology of reading, and the nature of language.

‘The Art of Fiction’ is one novelist’s response to the theorising of another – her critique and appreciation of E.M. Forster’s now classic study of fiction, Aspects of the Novel (1927). She agrees with his analysis of plot and structure, but playfully rebukes him for not paying more attention to the very medium of literature, which is words.

She is a writer (and a reader) who is inclined to look at the most fundamental aspects of her subject – which is the production and consumption of literature. In ‘Re-Reading Novels’ for instance she tackles head-on the problem of reading long Victorian novels such as Vanity Fair (1847) and (Meredith’s) Harry Richmond (1870).

First, there is the boredom of it. The national habit of reading has been formed by the drama, and the drama has always recognised the fact that human beings cannot sit for more than five hours at a stretch in front of a stage. Read Harry Richmond for five hours at a stretch and we shall only have broken off a fragment. Days may pass before we can add to it; meanwhile the plan is lost; the book pours to waste; we blame ourselves; we abuse the author; nothing is more exasperating and dispiriting.

She argues with Percy Lubbock’s notion of the novel’s ‘form’ — in The Craft of Fiction(1921) — that it is not something analogous to visual ‘shape’ in painting, but an arrangement of feelings with which we are left after the first reading of a text, and which might be re-arranged on a second or subsequent reading.

It’s a popular myth about Woolf and her fellow Bloomsbury artists and writers that they were elitist and not interested in politics. An essay such as ‘The Leaning Tower’ shows how the exact opposite was true. She analyses the tradition of English literature from an ideological, almost Marxist point of view, showing how the education of its writers was based on class privilege. It is no accident that the majority came from families who had the wealth to afford a public school and university education. She ends her survey with a rallying cry for an end to class divisions altogether, and the hope that ordinary men and women will borrow more books from public libraries. But then this essay was delivered as a paper to an audience of the Brighton Workers’ Educational Association in 1940 – so maybe we should not be surprised at its radical message.

This is not to say that all the essays and sketches are deadly serious. The attitudes she struck were obviously determined by the publications for which she was writing. There are shorter and more lightweight pieces such as her satirical account of the life of Benjamin Haydon, monumental painter and diarist, her reflections on the relationship between painting and literature, and even some thoughts on the poetry of fishing.

But whether the essays are short and witty or long and serious, she always has something thought-provoking to say. For instance, on individual writers, she admits her reservations regarding D.H.Lawrence, but produces a deeply felt appreciation of Sons and Lovers. She recognises that people have stopped reading the novels of Walter Scott altogether – but still manages to find something admirable in his ambition. And although she believes that David Copperfield is part of the national consciousness, she confesses that considered as a human being she ‘would not cross the road to dine with … Dickens.’

The Moment – study resources

The Moment – Amazon UK
The Moment – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Moment – free eBook format – Gutenberg

The Moment – complete contents

The Moment: Summer’s Night
On Being Ill
The Faery Queen
Congreve’s Comedies
Sterne’s Ghost
Mrs. Thrale
Sir Walter Scott. Gas at Abbotsford
Sir Walter Scott. The Antiquary
Lockhart’s Criticism
David Copperfield
Lewis Carroll
Edmund Gosse
Notes on D. H. Lawrence
Roger Fry
The Art Of Fiction
American Fiction
The Leaning Tower
On Rereading Novels
Personalities
Pictures
Harriette Wilson
Genius: R. B. Haydon
The Enchanted Organ: Anne Thackeray
Two Women: Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley
Ellen Terry
To Spain
Fishing
The Artist and Politics
Royalty
Royalty

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

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

The New Bloomsday Book

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

A guide through James Joyce’s Ulysses

Anyone who has ever tried to read James Joyce’s Ulysses will know that it is a long, complex novel that is quite difficult to understand – especially on first acquaintance. But it is worth the effort, because it is also a twentieth-century masterpiece. The New Bloomsday Book by Joyce scholar Harry Blamires is designed to help you if you feel in need of support. It tells you what is going on from first page to last.

Ulysses, as its title suggests, is based loosely on Homer’s Odyssey, and Joyce made the events of his narrative, set on a single day in June 1914, parallel the events of the epic poem. Instead of Ulysses making his way home after fighting in the Trojan wars, Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, after a day of wandering around Dublin, makes his way home to his wife Molly. But the subtelties and echoes are not always easy to pick up – so Blamires guides you through the story, explaining what is going on, and pointing out the Homeric parallels.

And he points out much more besides. Joyce’s novel is constructed from countless numbers of small cross references, echoes, allusions, and cultural leitmotivs. This has become a standard work of Joyce scholarship.

The ‘new’ in the title of this third edition refers to the fact that it now contains page numbering and references to the three most commonly used editions of the novel – the Oxford University Press ‘World Classics’ (1993), the Penguin ‘Twentieth-Century Classics’ (1992), and the controversial Gabler ‘Corrected Text’ (1986) editions.

It’s certainly a complete explanation, a summary of what ‘happens’ in the novel – but of course it cannot paraphrase the poetry and the glamour of the prose, whose style changes in almost every chapter – and in one memorable episode (Oxen of the Sun) within the chapter itself. As Blamires explains in his introduction to the novel’s opening chapter:

Joyce’s symbolism cannot be explained mechanically in terms of one-for-one parallels, for his correspondences are neither exclusive nor continuously persistent. Nevertheless certain correspondences recur throughout Ulysses, establishing themselves firmly. Thus Leopold Bloom corresponds to Ulysses in the Homeric Parallel, and Stephen Dedalus corresponds to Telemachus, Ulysses’s son. At the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey Telemachus finds himself virtually dispossessed by his mother’s suitors in his father’s own house, and he sets out in search of the lost Ulysses. In Joyce’s first episode Stephen Dedalus feels that he is pushed out by his supposed friends from his temporary residence, and leaves it intending not to return. The residence in question is the Martello tower on the beach at Sandycove, for which Stephen pays the rent.. Buck Mulligan, a medical student, shares it with him, and they have a resident visitor, Haines, an Englishman from Oxford.

Blamires explains all the allusions, symbols, and Homeric parallels as he goes along, whilst offering a paraphrase of the story. This will help readers to understand a dense and complex novel which might otherwise take several readings to unravel.

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Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book, Abingdon: Routledge, 1996, pp.253, ISBN 0415138582

More on James Joyce
Twentieth century literature
More on study skills

The New Spaniards

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

culture and society in post-Franco Spain

It’s easy to forget that only a few decades ago Spain was an under-developed country with a fascist dictator. Tourists were arrested for wearing shorts, and outside major cities many villages didn’t have electricity or street lighting. Today, Spain is one of the biggest, the most democratic, and technologically advanced countries in Europe. John Hooper’s book The New Spaniards is all about the social, political, and cultural consequences of this very rapid development during the last four decades.

As he observes, it’s possible to see this reflected in a typical family gathering of three generations. The grandparents, reflecting a poorer agricultural past, will be short and dark; their children, beneficiaries of the post-Franco boom, and raised on a Mediterranean diet, will be tall and slim; but the grandchildren, victims of current prosperity, might well be overweight.

The first part of the book is a detailed political history of Spain following the death of Franco. His rule had held Spain in a fossilized state since the end of the Civil War in 1940. The aftermath was, unsurprisingly, a sweeping away of the old, corrupt, and backward-looking practices – to be replaced by an essentially socialist government dominated by one party.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that people who had been excluded from public life for a generation, when they came back in contact with it, feathered their own nests. Post 1980 Spain has a long history of local graft, corruption, kick-backs, and ‘influence’ which make it seem closer to the world of Italian Mafiosi than the rest of Europe. And I have to say that this sort of thing still continues in the part of Andalucia where I live part of the time.

He deals with all the features of Spanish society which outsiders find surprising and puzzling – such as the church, for instance. It’s been disestablished since 1986, yet the state supports it with public funding. Its membership has decreased since the advent of democracy, yet many Spaniards consider themselves Christians, and the slightly dubious Opus Dei organisation has its greatest numbers and influence there.

On sexual mores, the country has passed from being against topless sunbathing in the 1970s to accepting gay marriages thirty years later. The birth rate is declining, more women are working, and adult children are living at home as the family unit, which is seen as the bulwark against unemployment and the harsh economic climate of the 2000s.

John Hooper explains the astonishingly murky finances of the National lottery, and throws in the amazing fact that the Spaniards spend/lose more on gambling each week than they do on fresh milk, fruit, and vegetables.

That’s one of his strengths – bringing sociological data to life with striking examples. Against this, he has a slightly annoying habit of looping back historically into the nineteenth century. The idea is to show how certain political conditions have originated, which is understandable, but it produces the unfortunate effect of a book in which the narrative is going backwards.

He’s much more lively and interesting when he deals with contemporary life, such as why Basques, Catalan, and Galicians feel so keen on independence, why bullfighting is still tolerated in a country with strong support for animal rights (not dissimilar from fox-hunting in the UK) and how the Spaniards feel about the influx of second home owners who bring mixed blessings to the country.

There’s plenty of detail on the Spanish royal family which I could have done without, but his chapters on the press and the extraordinary explosion of modern art and architecture really bring alive the sense of renewal and positive exploration of new ideas which anyone who visits the country regularly cannot fail to register.

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John Hooper, The New Spaniards, London: Penguin, second revised edition, 2006, pp.480, ISBN 0141016094

More on Gerald Brenan
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The novels of Edith Wharton

June 3, 2013 by Roy Johnson

Edith Wharton (1862—1937) was a prolific and very successful American novelist of the early twentieth century whose critical reputation faded somewhat under the impact of literary modernism which took hold in the 1920s. However, it has recovered since her work was ‘rediscovered’ by feminists in the 1960s and the years that followed.

She writes in an elegant and measured style, not unlike that of her close friend Henry James. Like him she also wrote lots of short stories, and she is particularly well regarded for her ghost stories. Her subjects are men and women trapped between the conventions of an old nineteenth century order trying to break through to various forms of self-discovery and personal freedom made possible in the twentieth.

Like her younger contemporary Vita Sackville-West she was also an authority on gardens and interior decor. She designed her own forty-two roomed house in Lennox, Masachusetts. All of her major works have been turned into films, and she is now fairly well established as a major figure in the American literary tradition.

Ethan Frome (1911) tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this novella’s powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. Every detail of the story contributes to a shocking and powerful conclusion you will never forget. This book is now regarded as a classic of the novella genre.
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The Age of Innocence (1920) is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War. It’s a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s. Newland Archer is charming, tactful, and enlightened. He accepts society’s standards and abides by its rules, but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future – until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, and scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
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The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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The Reef (1912) deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
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Edith Wharton’s house – The Mount

Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Obelisk – short stories

March 8, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tales from E.M.Forster’s reserve collection

The Obelisk is a collection of stories taken from The Life to Come (1972), works not published during Forster’s lifetime, which ended in 1970, not long after the famous trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Exit to Brooklyn. One reason is that they all deal quite explicitly with homo-erotic topics which would not have been tolerated in print before 1970. The other reason might be that they fall so far below the artistic standards of his other work.

Some are mild satires of middle-class snobbery and hypocrisy set in a slightly indeterminate era which might be Edwardian or Georgian at the beginning of the last century. Others are satires of Biblical and mythical subjects treated in a manner which is supposed to be amusing, but which conjure up an embarrassing attitude poised somewhere midway between lyricism and schoolboy smuttiness. If these stories belonged to Forster’s desk drawer, there might be some good arguments for having left them there.

In the title story a conventional married couple meet two slightly dubious sailors on a day out. The wife enjoys a snatched liaison with one of them, but then is shocked to discover that her husband might have done the same thing with the other.

A missionary converts a local chieftain by succumbing to his sexual advances, then feels guilty for doing so. The two men grow apart and marry, but when the chieftain is about to die there appears to be an emotional reconciliation. What actually happens is a tragedy of Imperialism.

In another story, an old country squire who is dying imagines that he is still desirable to a young man working on his estate as a hired labourer. The story is related in a lyrical, quasi-poetical manner, but it reads as a rather unconvincing piece of homo-erotic wishful thinking on the part of an older man.

Similarly, in the unfortunately titled ‘Arthur Snatchfold’ a sexual encounter between a young workman and a rich industrialist is the occasion for a critique of society’s punitive attitude to gay men, and another improbable piece of ill-sublimated wish-fulfilment about older men being sexually desirable to male youths.

Almost all these stories have in common sexual encounters between an older man from the upper echelons of society and a much younger man from the lower. It very difficult to escape the suspicion that Forster was writing these stories late in life as therapeutic exercises.

‘What does it matter?’ is a silly tale set in a Gilbert and Sullivan Ruritania-like country whose president is caught in flagrante with a handsome young guardsman. Some of the other pieces are not much more than extended jokes, using classical mythology and even religion as a vehicle for nudge-nudge remarks about fig leaved statues and well-endowed young boys.

The best story in the collection – ‘The Other Boat’ – is the only serious attempt to explore both the gay and the Imperial theme. A young British officer becomes entangled in a shipboard dalliance with his Anglo-Indian cabin mate. The forbidden passion ends in murder and suicide, but at least their relationship is explored in some depth

We know that Forster stopped writing fiction after A Passage to India because he could no longer believe in creating credible heterosexual relationships, and of course at the time it was not possible to publish fiction which was explicitly homosexual. But this leaves us with something of a conundrum, because the homosexual relationships Forster did manage to write about (even if he did not publish them) are far less credible than the heterosexual ones which were a product of his creative imagination.

So this collection The Obelisk acts as a salutary tale to those who believe that authors can only write well on subjects known from personal experience. And it also supplies evidence that even distinguished writers sometimes produce work which is well below their normal standards, even when writing on topics which are close to their hearts.

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E.M.Forster The Obelisk, London: Hesperus Press, 2009, pp.169, ISBN: 1843914360

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The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

April 24, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot summary, web links

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) is something of a curiosity in the work of Evelyn Waugh. It is usually classed as a novel, but has more of the characteristics of a novella. Quite clearly it is autobiographical in origin, and in essence it has only one character – Gilbert Pinfold himself. In this sense it can also be regarded as a psychiatric case study – except that the condition it dramatises was eventually diagnosed as a pharmacological, not a psychological problem. It continues Waugh’s fictional strategy of combining serious problems with dramatic irony and comic misunderstandings.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – commentary

Story – novel – novella

The publication could easily be classed as a long story. It deals essentially with one person’s experiences. It starts with the onset of his problems in a domestic English setting. It follows his escapist travels and the intensification of his psychic dramas. Then the narrative returns to its starting point and the solution to his problems. Pinfold is cured, and he decides to write the book we have just been reading.

None of the secondary characters have any real substance, and some of them do not even exist. In this sense it is simply a yarn or a tale whose principal interest is the depiction of a mental disorder from the sufferer’s point of view – and the comic consequences to which this breakdown leads.

To regard it as a novel raises problems. As an account of Pinfold’s psychological difficulties it lacks substance, since the majority of the drama is composed of imaginary events. After a perfectly credible opening, the story drifts into a dreamlike state which lacks the concrete reality that is normally part of a realistic novel.

More importantly, there is no acceptable explanation given for the resolution of the psycho-somatic tensions Pinfold is suffering. His physical pains suddenly and inexplicably disappear half way through the story, and the hallucinations evaporate just as suddenly when he reaches home. No reason is given for their origins or dissolution.

This might be the result of using personal experience as the material of what purports to be fiction. The events of the story are very closely based on Evelyn Waugh’s own ‘mid life crisis’ during which he undertook a sea voyage in an attempt to cure writer’s block. He also suffered from a form of persecution mania and delusions.

The cause of these problems was eventually identified as poisoning brought on by his heavy use of drugs and alcohol. As soon as his medication was changed, the hallucinations disappeared completely. There is no comparable resolution provided within the text. The story simply ends with the sort of ‘It had all been a dream’ conclusion to a schoolchild’s creative writing exercise.

But a stronger case can be made for considering it as a novella. It has unity of theme, unity of tone, and unity of character. It also has a neat triangular structure. The story begins with the origins of the drama in an English country house. Its central section deals with the development of Pinfold’s ailments during a sea voyage. And the problems are resolved on finally returning home.

This is simply an alternative view of the same literary material. It suggests a formal coherence in the events of the story, but it doesn’t provide the logical inevitability normally expected from narratives in the form of a novella. This essential element of formal resolution, unfortunately, is missing.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – study resources

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – Penguin – Amazon US

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Four novels by Evelyn Waugh – Amazon UK

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – extensive Wikipedia entry

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – plot summary

Gilbert Pinfold is a successful middle-aged author with conservative views and habits. He lives privately on an estate in what seems to be the West Country. He has problems sleeping, drinks heavily, and takes barbiturates. Following an unpleasant interview by the BBC, he finds his memory playing tricks.

He decides to go somewhere hot to finish his latest book. Despite being in ill health and unable to complete everyday tasks, he continues to drink heavily. On board ship he begins to lose track of time and starts having hallucinations. He loses social control at dinner, then overhears a riot on deck – which is severely quelled by the captain.

After lunch the next day he hears the trial and torture of a crew member coming from the captain’s cabin. The crewman dies. Following this, the pains in Pinfold’s legs suddenly disappear.

He hears a radio broadcast criticising his work as a novelist, then at the dinner table thinks to challenge the captain by raising the subject of murder. He stays awake to check that the captain does not dispose of the crewman’s body at night. Then he overhears two drunken youths who are threatening to beat him. The youths wake up other passengers, all of whom have criticisms of Pinfold.

Next morning Pinfold hears two girls planning to give him presents. The two loutish youths begin to taunt him again. They accuse him of being homosexual, a German (Peinfeld), a Jew, and a communist. Pinfold plans to bring them to trial in the ship’s lounge.

As the ship nears the Mediterranean, Pinfold learns that an international conflict has arisen over possession of Gibraltar. The captain reveals that the Spanish authorities want to capture a secret agent who is on board. He proposes giving them Pinfold as a substitute. When nothing happens Pinfold wonders if he is going mad, but decides it was all a hoax.

He becomes convinced that all the passengers on board are talking about him. A young girl called Margaret whom he has never met makes amorous overtures to him. Her parents intervene – but only to encourage her to visit Pinfold’s cabin at night. She is urged on by her father in military terms, but nothing happens.

When Pinfold overhears passengers laughing over telegrams he has sent he complains to Captain Steerforth and changes his cabin. He also thinks the practical jokes played on him have been orchestrated by Mr Angel, the man from the BBC who interviewed him.

He decides to thwart Angel’s plans by leaving the ship at Port Said and flying on to Colombo. He writes to his wife explaining the plot against him and signalling his intentions.

In Colombo he continues his conversations with Margaret. His wife sends a cable, urging him to come home. When he does return, the voices pursue him all the way back to London. He meets his wife and the voices stop. When they get home he decides to write The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.

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The Original of Laura

January 8, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a novel in fragments

The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) is a novel from beyond the grave by Vladimir Nabokov. Everyone has now woken up to the fact that Nabokov has been writing stories and novels about older men and younger women (and even younger girls) for quite some time. It’s no good taking his word for it (as he claims in his preface) that the original inspiration for Lolita came from a ‘painting’ by a chimpanzee in the Jardin des plantes. He had already written an entire novella (The Enchanter 1939) on exactly the same theme of what is now technically classed as paedophilia.

We now have his posthumous (and presumably last) work, which has been released even though he made an express wish that it should not be published if it were to be unfinished at the time of his death. And it certainly isn’t finished. Even to call it ‘a novel in fragments’ is stretching definitions somewhat. It consists of the drafts of three discernable and coherent chapters, plus lots of notes for other vaguely related materials which Nabokov was working on at the time of his death in 1977.

The novel-to-be seems to contain two main themes. The first is the sexual life of a flirty young girl called Flora (aged twelve in the semi-completed chapters) who is pursued lecherously by an ageing roué called (believe it or not) Hubert H. Hubert. She survives this and moves with her mother to an American college, where she studies French and Russian. Readers of Nabokov’s other novels will recognise elements from Laughter in the Dark, Lolita, and Pnin already.

Part way through, the index cards on which Nabokov famously composed his novels change from relating a story to notes and instructions to himself – ideas for the plot, memos to invent a plausible name for a pharmaceutical, and lists of unusual words he was obviously striving to coin.

The second theme, which gives the book its sub-title, concerns Dr Philip Wild, a teacher at the college, whom Flora eventually marries. He is overweight, has bad feet, and he embarks on a quest of what he calls ‘dying by auto-dissolution’. It seems quite clear that the connections between these two parts of the narrative had not been conceptualised by Nabokov – which provides an interesting glimpse into his methods as a writer.

There are also hints that his story is the original source material for another book called My Laura written by somebody else that went on to become a best-seller. Here we have further echoes of Lolita, and typical Nabokovian playfulness – but since this theme remains undeveloped it warrants little attention.

This brings us to the book as a physical object and a product of print production. It’s the nearest a reader could get to seeing the system of writing for which Nabokov was famous. The index cards on which he wrote are photographically reproduced at the top of each right-hand page, with the text of the card reproduced below, complete with mis-spellings, grammatical errors, and slips of the pen.

The cover of the book is a photo-print of a typical index card, and each of the 138 index cards also has perforated edges, so theoretically they can be removed from the book and arranged in a different order if required. I imagine this gimmick will be dropped when the book is published in paperback, but Nabokovians and bibliophiles will undoubtedly want to possess this novelty edition.

That’s the good part. The not-so-good news is that the book is set in a font (Filosofia, by Zuzana Licko) which is a version of Bodoni. The body text is quite elegant and readable, but some headlines are set in the font’s unicase version, which has capitals and lower case of the same height. I am quite confident that Nabokov would have detested such affectation, and the results on some pages look awful.

The book has been created by Chip Kidd, a respected graphic designer, but I’m afraid this does not add anything to the appeal of this particular book or to Nabokov’s oeuvre as a whole. The index cards come out of this well enough, but reading the text in black print on dark grey paper is no joke.

The story is presented in an interesting and very allusive manner. There are unexplained shifts in the temporal sequence of events and the narrative point of view. These suggest that Nabokov was still experimenting with narrative strategies right up to the end of his life. [I have examined this phenomenon in my study of his short stories.] However, it has to be said that in common with the prose style of his other late works, it is contaminated by lots of irritating quirks and tics, such as his weakness for alliteration – though it might be slightly unfair to judge him from what was obviously a work in progress.

‘foetally folded … narrow nates … He brought from the favourite florist of fashionable girls a banal bevy of bird of paradise flowers’

It has been claimed that Nabokov would envisage a novel complete in his mind before starting to write it. This was supposed to allow him to work on any section his wished, then place a card in the stack already written. The cards in this volume cast severe doubts on that claim. There is some sense of fluency in the semi-completed chapters, but it’s of a kind that characterises his less distinguished novels; and the remainder prove that he was thinking aloud and making it up as he went along.

The volume has a preface written by his son Dmitri which is a pompous and badly-written piece of self-indulgence that tells us very little about the manuscript and why it came to be published. What it does tell us is how not to behave as the offspring of a famous person.

So, it’s a production with a number of interesting features. It’s clearly a piece of gross commercial opportunism; it gives more ammunition to those who see Nabokov as a great writer with a dubious interest in under-age girls; it’s unlikely to enhance his reputation as a writer; but for me it’s a fascinating glimpse into the writer’s workshop – and further proof that we shouldn’t take what writers say about their own motivations and methods at face value.

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Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura: (Dying is Fun) a novel in fragments, London: Penguin, 2009, pp. 278, ISBN 0141191155

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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

The Platform of Time

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs of Family and Friends

This is a new collection of largely unfamiliar memoirs, edited by the Bloomsbury scholar S.R.Rosenbaum (who also edited The Bloomsbury Group). It includes the first ever publication of Woolf’s long sought-after and newly recovered talk on her role in the famous (and infamously silly) Dreadnought Hoax which she delivered to Rodmell Women’s Institute in 19940. The Platform of Time collection also includes the complete version of her memoir of her nephew Julian Bell, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

The Bloomsbury Group were very fond of writing memoirs. They even had a Memoir Club where members read out their compositions for each others’ amusement. And Virginia Woolf’s family was also much given to written records of their relationships. Her own father Sir Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph albumn and wrote an epistolary memoir to commemorate the death of his wife Julia in 1895. It’s now available as The Mausoleum Book.

The Bloomsberries also wrote sketches of their relatives and friends, on some occasions to reinforce the friendship network, and on others to provide an obituary for the Times. There are examples of both in this collection: two very warm sketches Woolf wrote in memory of her father, recounting the cheerful way he read to his children, taught them each morning, and played with them sailing toy boats in Kensington Gardens. These recollections counteract the rather severe portraits of Leslie Stephen given elsewhere

Many of Woolf’s memoirs ooze with the sort of confident generalisations of the post-Victorian era celebrating itself in the coterie of what they would call the national press, but which was in fact a tiny minority, talking to itself. Speaking of her aunt, the famous Victorian photographer Julia Cameron, Woolf writes:

Mrs Cameron had a gift for ardent speech and picturesque behaviour which has impressed itself on the calm pages of Victorian biography. But it was from her mother, presumably, that she inherited her love of beauty and her distaste for the cold and formal conventions of English society.

There is quite a sympathetic portrait of Ottoline Morell, who during her own lifetime had to endure the affront of writers who accepted her generous hospitality at Garsington and Bedford Square, then went home to write spitefully satirical accounts of her.

The collection also includes what are called ‘fantasy memoirs’ – fanciful inventions based loosely on the lives of Saxon Sydney Turner and John Maynard Keynes. These are witty, allusive sketches which explore the outer limits of biography – something she was to bring to a stunning climax in Orlando, her meditation the life of her then lover Vita Sackville West.

In fact many of the sketches reveal more about the author than they do about their ostensible subject. For instance, you would never guess from her encomium to the celebrated war poet and ‘hero’ Rupert Brooke that he in fact never saw military action, and died of a mosquito bite.

One of the longest pieces is her account of attending a meeting of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, along with her husband Leonard Woolf. Life as We Have Known It is a thoughtful and reflective meditation on the women of the co-operative movement in the 1930’s, a very practical piece of feminist sympathising, and a paean for social-democratic values which foreshadows the arguments she was to develop in Three Guineas a few years later.

This is a useful collection from the Hesperus Press, which produces reprints and updated compilations which are given a scholarly editing and are elegantly designed and printed. If you don’t have these pieces in other forms, this is an excellent edition.

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Virginia Woolf, The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, London: Hesperus, 2008, pp.262, ISBN: 1843917114

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The Play of the Eyes

July 5, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Vienna – Strasbourg – Paris – Prague

The Play of the Eyes is the third volume of the memoirs of Elias Canetti, a trilogy which I have read with a growing sense of frustration. He was an amazingly clever, talented, and well-connected writer who at only twenty-six produced what has become a European modernist classic novel (Auto-da-Fé) he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981, and he was personally acquainted with some of the most prestigious artists of the modernist period of the early twentieth century – Karl Kraus, Bethold Brecht, Georg Groz, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Alban Berg – and yet he tells you almost nothing about them. Every attempt at a character sketch or an artistic evaluation is shrouded by either abstract generalizations, his own egoism – or both.

When Hermann Broch is given a chapter of his own we are presented with nothing except Canetti’s own reactions to him, including the quite ridiculous notion that Canetti was able to detect Broch’s secret method for penetrating insights into other people through his manner of breathing. When introducing the conductor Hermann Scherchen he ends up talking about his own play The Wedding, how powerfully moving it is, and how talented must be the writer who can create such moving effects. It is not surprising that he is somewhat unloved by most commentators.

He moves on to describe Alma Mahler (the composer’s widow) and falls in love with her daughter Anna, a sculptor, through whom he meets her tutor Fritz Wotruba, who was considered one of the more avant-gard artists of the Vienna Sezession movement. He doesn’t bother explaining what his wife Veza thought about his affairs with other women.

In fact there is very little by way of personal revelation of the kind you might normally expect in someone’s memoirs. He makes no mention of his emotional life, which was very complex; there’s nothing about his family, which was very important in the first volume, The Tongue Set Free; and it’s not at all clear how he earned his living – or even if he earned it at all.

The most moving chapter is a description of the funeral of Manon, Alma Mahler’s daughter from her second marriage to the architect Walter Gropius. Manon died of polio at the age of only eighteen, and the occasion was immortalized in the violin concerto Alban Berg wrote and dedicated ‘To the memory of an angel’. Canetti manages to combine a heartfelt tribute to the girl with a fulsome picture of her grieving mother which is tinged with satire (Alma Mahler was well known for very theatrical public displays).

Even after his marriage and the publication of Auto-da-Fé in 1935, the long-running conflict with his mother continues just as intensely as it is described in the first two volumes. On a visit to her in Paris she predicts what will happen to him with amazing critical zeal and foresight:

She saw me surrounded by women, who would worship me for the ‘misogyny’ of Auto-da-Fé and long to let me chastise them for being women. She saw a fast-moving procession of bewitching beauties at my home in Grinzing, and in the end she saw Veza [his wife] banished and forgotten in a tiny apartment just like her own in Paris.

And sure enough, the very next chapter is a self-indulgent description of a nineteen year old girl fan throwing herself at him in a night club.

The general picture he creates of Viennese artistic circles is one of snobbery, one-upmanship, rivalries, and undisguised private enmities. This is mixed in his own case with a marked degree of self-loathing that seems to be endemic in Austrian culture (one thinks of the extreme case of Thomas Benhard).

He makes a laughing stock out of the biographer Emil Ludwig. Robert Musil cuts him dead for daring to mention the very name of Thomas Mann. Heimito von Doderer is reduced to a vain fool. No doubt all these people had character flaws: writers are not renowned for being models of virtue – but Canetti seems to relish negativity, just as he elevates his personal heroes into saints.

The book ends with his mother’s death in 1937 – which is another quite moving chapter. Two years later he moved to live in Hampstead, London, a story which is taken up in the continuation to this grizzly but fascinating memoir, Party in the Blitz

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Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, London: Granta Publications, 2011, pp.329, ISBN: 1847083552

Volume One of the memoirs — The Tongue Set Free

Volume Two of the memoirs — The Torch in My Ear

Volume Three of the memoirs — The Play of the Eyes

Volume Four of the memoirs — Party in the Blitz

Twentieth century literature
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The Man who Disappeared (Amerika)

tutorial, characters, commentary, study notes, reading

The Man who Disappeared – commentary

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The Man who Disappeared – plot summary

Kafka’s writing

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The Moment

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Moment – critical commentary

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culture and society in post-Franco Spain

The novels of Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton – web links

The Obelisk – short stories

tales from E.M.Forster’s reserve collection

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

tutorial, commentary, plot summary, web links

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – commentary

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – study resources

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – plot summary

The Original of Laura

a novel in fragments

The Platform of Time

Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs of Family and Friends

The Play of the Eyes

Vienna – Strasbourg – Paris – Prague

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