20C Authors

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

George Orwell chronology

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1903. George Orwell born as Eric Arthur Blair in Mothari, Bengal. His father was an English government official in the Opium department.

1904. Blair moves with mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin and older sister, to Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, to be educated in England, according to Anglo-Indian tradition.

1908. Attends Anglican convent school in Henley.

1911. Attends St Cyprian’s, a preparatory school in Eastbourne.

1917. Attends Eton as a King’s Scholar.

1921. Leaves Eaton, but does not go on to university.

1922. Joins the Indian Imperial Police and serves as an officer in Burma.

1927. Resigns from Indian Police and returns to England.

1928. Goes to Paris to become a writer.

1929. Money runs out – returns to England and becomes a tramp.

1932. Secures a job teaching in a private school.

1933. Publishes Down and Out in Paris and London using the pseudonym George Orwell.

1934. Works in a bookshop in London. Publishes his first novel – Burmese Days.

1935. Meets his future first wife, Eileen Maude O’Shaughnessy. Publishes A Clergyman’s Daughter.

1936. Visits the north of England, researching working conditions amongst miners. Marries Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Publishes Keep the Aspidistra Flying Goes to Spain and joins the POUM to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

1937. Shot through the neck and returned to England. Publishes The Road to Wigan Pier.

1938. Publishes Homage to Catalonia.

1939. Publishes Coming Up for Air.

1940. Publishes Inside the Whale

1941. Joins the BBC as a talks producer and broadcaster for India. Publishes The Lion and the Unicorn. Writes reviews for Time and Tide, Tribune, The Observer, Partisan Review, and Manchester Evening News,

1943. Resigns from the BBC and becomes literary editor of Tribune.

1944. Completes Animal Farm, but no publisher will accept it. He and Eileen adopt baby boy, Richard.

1945. Resigns from Tribune to become war correspondent for The Observer. Death of wife Eileen. Animal Farm published and becomes successful overnight.

1946. Leaves London to live with son and nurse on the island of Jura.

1947. Becomes ill and enters hospital near Glasgow.

1948. Returns to live on Jura.

1949. Enters a sanatorium in Gloucestershire. Nineteen Eighty-Four published to instant success. Admitted to University College Hospital, and marries Sonia Brownell, a former colleague from Tribune.

1950. Dies of tuberculosis and is buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays.

1953. Such, Such Were the Joys

George Orwell: A Life is the more-or-less standard biography, written in 1980 and revised twice since then. Bernard Crick puts his emphasis on Orwell’s politics. There are other more recent biographies, but Crick’s will help you to understand the social and ideological background to the turbulent period through which Orwell lived and wrote. It’s particularly good for understanding the strained allegiances amongst socialists and liberals caused by the Stalinist betrayal.

Gerald Brenan biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and adventures

Gerald Brenan (1894-1987) was born in Malta, the son of an English army officer. After spending some of his childhood in South Africa and India, he grew up in an isolated Cotswold village. He studied at Radley College and then the military academy at Sandhurst. Travel and adventure were to be his way of life, and at sixteen he ran away from home. His aim was to reach Central Asia but the outbreak of the Balkan War and shortage of money caused him to return to England. He studied to enter the Indian Police (as did his near-contemporary George Orwell) but on the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the army. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

Following the end of the war, his fellow officer and friend Ralph Partridge introduced him to the fabled Bloomsbury Group. It was through Partridge that Brenan met Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Virginia Woolf. As soon as he was released from military service he packed a rucksack and left England aboard a ship bound for Spain. He was disillusioned with the way of life in England and with the stifling social and sexual hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. He rebelled against becoming part of it and, being a romantic and adventurer, resolved to seek a more breathable atmosphere in which to live.

He also wanted to educate himself and become a writer. As he records in his best known travel memoir, South from Granada, he felt ashamed that his public school upbringing had left him with a very poor education. He shipped 2,000 books out to his chosen destination – an area deep in Andalucia known as ‘La Alpujarra’.

South from Granada is a classic in which Brenan describes setting up home in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s. He has a marvellous grasp of geography; he captures the rugged atmosphere of the region; and he has a particularly detailed knowledge of botany. Local characters and customs are vividly recounted. Bloomsbury enthusiasts will be delighted his by hilarious accounts of visits made by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf under very difficult conditions, as well as a meeting with Roger Fry in Almeria.

Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington, recently married, also visited him with Lytton Strachey in 1920, and Carrington’s fondness for Brenan is thought to have started on this trip. She carried on an extensive correspondence with Brenan for the next several years and in 1922 they had a brief affair, which was rapidly discovered by Partridge. There was a year of silence between the three, before reconciliation took place and the often-stormy friendship continued for the remainder of their lives.

In 1930 he married the American poetess Gamel Woolsey. In 1934 the Brenans left Spain and were unable to return until 1953, partly because of the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War he was an Air Raid Warden and a Home Guard. They spent this time in Aldbourne and Brenan expressed his feelings of exile from Spain by completing three major works on Spanish life and literature. On his return to Spain he began a series of autobiographical works, including South from Granada, A Life of One’s Own, and A Personal Record.

The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. It has all the vividness of Brenan’s personal experiences and intelligent insights. He tries to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published

After the death of his wife in 1968, a young English student of the poetry of the Spanish saint – St. John of the Cross – joined Gerald as his secretary and companion. This young lady Lynda Jane Nicholson Price remained with him for 14 years. In the later part of his life he was confined to an old people’s home in Aldermaston, but a group of his Spanish friends ‘kidnapped’ him and took him back to what they regarded as his spiritual home, just outside Malaga. He died on January 19, 1987 while in the hands of the Spanish Medical Services who had undertaken to care for him. He was acclaimed for his services to Spanish literature, buried in Malaga, and a plaque dedicated to his work was fixed to the house where he had lived in Yegen. It reads:

“In this house for a period of seven years [1920-1934] lived the British Hispanist GERALD BRENAN, who universalised the name of Yegen and the customs and traditions of La Alpujarra. The Town Hall, grateful, dedicates this plaque.” YEGEN, 3 JANUARY, 1982

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Gerald Brenan: A Personal Record

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

second volume of autobiography 1920-1972

This is the second volume of Gerald Brenan’s autobiographical writings. The first, A Life of One’s Own covers the period 1894 to 1920, and deals with his childhood and education, up to the point of his emergence from (honourable) service during the first world war. This volume starts with an account of his arrival in Spain as a young man of twenty-six – a subject he treats in a more general and less personal terms in his classic travel book South from Granada.

Although it purports to cover five decades, most of the book is devoted to his bohemian wanderings in the 1920s, which he spent oscillating between Spain and the Bloomsbury Group – of which he is not uncritical. Much of his narrative is dominated by an emotionally turbulent affair with Dora Carrington, who just happened to be married to his best friend Ralph Partridge. It also includes his dabblings with shop girls and prostitutes, and his attempts to secure allowances and inheritances so that he didn’t have to work.

He decided he was going to become a writer, but it was to be more than two decades before he got round to anything substantial. Having established a home in southern Spain, he returned to London to continue his on-off affair with Carrington and started to write a biography of Saint Teresa. In this period of his life he also mixed with various bohemians of whom he gives vivid character sketches – Arthur Whaley, Boris Anrep, Beryl de Zoete – almost all of whom had personal relations as tangled as his own.

The anguish of his affair with Carrington continued for years and is spelled out in quite intimate detail. She was married to Ralph Partridge but in love with Lytton Strachey, who was also in love with Partridge – and they all lived together. This is the Bloomsbury Group writ large. But as soon a long-awaited inheritance from an aunt arrived, Brenan got married to almost the first girl he met.

He is amazingly frank about this marriage, the first part of which was passed knowing that his wife was still in love with Llewelyn Powys, with whom she had been conducting an affair. He sticks at it and makes the marriage work, but the pages devoted to it are outnumbered by those on Carrington by ten to one.

There’s a vivid first-hand account of the Civil War in Malaga, following the military revolt which had started in the Spanish protectorates of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. He stuck it out as long as possible, then retreated to England to serve as an air-raid warden during the war.

The strange thing is that once he reaches 1940, the last three decades of his life are written off in no more than a few pages. However, I was mindful of the fact that he wrote these memoirs in the late 1960s, and there might have been an element of recapturing his lost youth in the enterprise.

In the post-war years he was spending his time doing nothing more demanding than writing letters to the newspapers. His social life included such heterogeneous folk as Dylan Thomas and Diana Dors. He inherited yet again following death of his father – though not as much as he felt he was entitled to.

In 1953 he and his wife returned to Spain, to the house which had been vacated during the Civil War. Before long he was engaged in an amorous adventure with Dora Carrington’s young niece, and couldn’t wait to tell his wife all about it.

His wife died in 1967, but Brenan had already started a relationship with a girl forty years younger than him. He sold his house and built a new one further inland, from which point he composed this memoir.

I must say that my regard for him as a human being went down quite a few notches reading this account, but he is undoubtedly a good writer, with a good eye for character and an interesting line in anecdotes. His reflections on the Bloomsbury Group are valuable, and South from Granada and The Spanish Labyrinth remain well established as classics.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Gerald Brenan, Personal Record 1920-1972, New York: Knopf, 1975, pp.381, ISBN: 0394495829

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Giacomo Joyce

October 28, 2015 by Roy Johnson

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

Giacomo Joyce is a short work written by James Joyce in 1914, immediately after the publication of Dubliners, his collection of short stories. Joyce produced the text when he was living in Trieste some time around 1914. The manuscript comprises sixteen sheets of paper covered in what look like notes. It was rescued by his brother Stanislaus and remained unpublished during Joyce’s own lifetime, passing into the hands of a private collector who has always remained anonymous.

It was first published in a one-time limited edition by the Viking Press in New York in 1968. The text was presented in a slipcase housing a collection of sixteen pages in facsimile. The work was eventually published in commercial paperback format by Faber and Faber in London in 1983.

Giacomo Joyce – the text

The current publication is a short book in four parts. The first part is an introductory essay by Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s definitive biographer. His essay places the text in its historical context and explains its provenance.

The second part of the book is the text of the story itself – a page-for-page transcription of the manuscript set in type, with its original widely spaced paragraphs.

Part three is a selection of the original pages reproduced in a facsimile of Joyce’s original spidery handwriting. The fourth part is a set of explanatory notes to references in the text.

Giacomo Joyce – critical commentary

Genre

This is a remarkably short piece of work, and yet it is rather difficult to categorise in terms of literary genre. It has some of the concentration of a novella in terms of location, theme, and action, but it is really too short to be considered as such. It’s about the same length as a typical short story, yet it is written in such a highly poetical style, it would seem disqualified from that category too.

In his introductory essay Richard Ellmann calls it ‘A love poem which is never recited’ but then later as ‘this most delicate of novels’. Certainly it is not a poem in the conventional sense, and calling it a ‘novel’ is stretching that term way beyond its natural breaking point.

Perhaps the nearest available category is the ‘prose poem’ It is a short piece of work which deals with a brief episode in the sentimental education of a young man. It is written in a highly wrought and very poetical style, and its main narrative interest is on the evocation of an erotic obsession and its resolution in an epiphany. The theme of this epiphany is the need for realism.

Style

The story is largely cast as an interior monologue, with occasional use of a first person narrative mode. Giacomo’s thoughts and observations are offered in a flow of images and fragments of sentences which often have no subject or finite verb.

Twilight. Crossing the piazza. Grey eve lowering on sagegreen pasturelands, shedding silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendenous neck, the fine-boned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder ….

There is a great deal of assonance, alliteration, and conscious poetic repetition. Very little distinction is made between thought and speech, and much of the speech itself is unattributed – until the end of the work, when Joyce introduces what was to become his trade-mark use of the dash to mark separate utterances.

The work also reflects Joyce’s incorporation of foreign languages into his work – which was to reach its most extended use in Finnegans Wake. The English text here incorporates Italian, German, Latin, and even a Triestine dialect.

Biography

There is very little doubt that the incident is autobiographical in origin. During the narrative Joyce refers to Giacomo as ‘Jamesy’ and ‘Jim’ and at one point refers to his wife as ‘Nora’. Giacomo is the Italian form of the author’s own name James, but it is also a familiar epithet applied in Italy to denote a ‘great lover’.

At the time of its composition Joyce was working in Trieste, Italy (which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire). He was giving lectures on literature and teaching English the Berlitz school of languages – just as his protagonist Giacomo is doing.

Ellmann identifies a number of incidents that act as sources for the events of the piece – all of them taking place between 1911 and 1913. Joyce was working on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the same time – and Giacomo even shows Amalia some of the early drafts of his own work with the same name.

The main theme of the work is that of an older man in unrequited love with a younger woman – something Joyce had discussed with his friend and former pupil Italo Svevo (real name, Ettore Schmitz) who had written a novel on the same theme over a decade previously – As a Man Grows Older (1898).

Ellmann also traces elements of Giacomo Joyce which were later to be reworked directly into passages in Portrait and Ulysses.

Giacomo Joyce – story synopsis

A young Irish tutor of English in Trieste is attracted to one of his students. She is a beautiful young Jewess: he is married with a family. Her father passes on her compliments and praise for his skills as a teacher.

He looks up at her house at night and visits her family grave in the Jewish cemetery, fantasising about undressing her.

On a cold morning he joins her in church for mass, then he lectures on Hamlet. She is suddenly taken away for the removal of her appendix.

He gives her the manuscript of his novel to read (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and watches her from a distance at the opera.

He then fantasises on the fact that her hands have touched his manuscript and she has shared his written thoughts.

His friend Gogarty arrives to discuss Ulysses and he is reclaimed from his fantasies about the girl by a kiss from his wife Nora.

He feels that he must pass from a youthful to a more adult state of being – and that he must write about the experience.

Giacomo Joyce – study resources

Giacomo Joyce – Amazon UK
Giacomo Joyce – Amazon US

Envoys of the Other (essays) – Amazon UK
Envoys of the Other (essays) – Amazon US

James Joyce (biography) – Amazon UK
James Joyce (biography) – Amazon US

James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce, London: Faber and Faber, 1983, pp.64, ISBN: 0571131646

James Joyce – web links

This short selection of James Joyce web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

James Joyce and Samuel Beckett

Very funny short film featuring James Joyce playing pitch and put with Samuel Beckett.

The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
Buy the book here

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Glory

April 8, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Glory was written in the later part of 1930 when Vladimir Nabokov was living in Berlin, exiled from his native Russia. The Novel originally had a working title ofRomanticheskiy vek (Romantic Times) but this was discarded in favour of Podvig (‘gallant feat’ or ‘high deed’) under which title it was first serialized in a Russian emigré journal in Paris 1932. Like his other early works, it was published under the pen name of “V. Sirin” which he had adopted earlier to distinguish himself from his father, who was also called Vladimir Nabokov and was a prominent writer and politician.

Nabokov later translated the novel into English in collaboration with his son Dmitri as part of the post-Lolita refurbishment of his earlier works that had been written in Russian and were largely unknown to readers in the English-speaking world. It appeared simultaneously in America and the UK in 1971.

Glory – critical commentary

The biographical element

Vladimir Nabokov was adept at transforming the events of his own life into the materials of his fiction and non-fiction works. His first novel Mary (1926) is a metaphoric reflection of separation from his native Russia (as it then was). He used the details of his own life in the semi-autobiographical novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in 1938 – his first novel written in English. His later non-fictional Speak Memory (1967) covers memoirs of individuals and events from his ‘Russian years’, and he continued to mine the same subject matter through the comic burlesque of Pale Fire (1962) to the almost self-parodic Look at the Harlequins (1974).

It is strange but true that having lost a personal fortune as a result of the Russian revolution, having been separated from his home and culture, endured exile, and been forced to live in countries where he did not feel comfortable (Germany) – despite all this, Nabokov’s work is full of positive, optimistic, and even ecstatic evocations of everyday life. He seems to find life-affirming responses and a persistent delight in the aesthetics of common events – the visual textures of busy streets, the atmospheric effects of weather systems, and the colour schemes of a sunset. Martin Edelweiss, the protagonist of Glory is the concentration of this pleasure in phenomena into one character. His exile from his native land is never seen in terms of regret or a peeved sense of injustice. He experiences epiphanies and ‘moments being’ wherever he happens to find himself:

An automobile advertisement, brightly beckoning in a wild, picturesque gorge from an absolutely inaccessible spot on an alpine cliff thrilled him to tears. The complaisant and affectionate nature of very complicated and very simple machines, like the tractor or the linotype, for example, induced him to reflect that the good in mankind was so contagious that it infected metal. When, at an amazing height in the blue sky above the city, a mosquito-sized airplane emitted fluffy, milk-white letters a hundred times as big as it, repeating in divine dimensions the flourish of a firm’s name, Martin was filled with a sense of marvel and awe.

His movements are a close approximation to Nabokov’s own – retreat from a privileged home in Russia, exile in Europe; material support from a rich uncle; education at Cambridge University; coaching tennis as a spare time job in Berlin, which is exactly what Nabokov was doing at the time he wrote the novel.

The conclusion

When Nabokov wrote the novel in 1930 his personal biography had reached no further than literary ambitions and spare time work as an exile in Berlin – so the parallels between Nabokov and his protagonist Martin Edelweiss are quite exact. But he decided not to make Martin into “an artist, a writer” – so how is Martin to find ‘fulfilment’ (which was another possible title for the novel)?

From the very early chapters of the narrative Martin has been fascinated by fairy tale-like scenes of woodlands into which he sees himself disappearing. He has such a framed picture in his bedroom; he sees a similar landscape in Provence; and ultimately he disappears figuratively into a woodland scene he imagines waiting at the Latvian border.

Similarly, throughout the novel, Martin has been touched emotionally by Russian connections – its people, its intellectual and literary culture, and even its cuisine. He has a deep-seated yearning for connections with his homeland of which he is only half conscious – seeing his escapade of re-crossing the border almost as a romantic dream. Nabokov himself on the other hand made no secret of his understandable yearning for his Russian heritage, and his clear understanding that it was impossible to ‘go back’ to it.

The ambiguity of Nabokov’s own personal feelings is perhaps reflected in the fact that he sends his protagonist Martin on an expedition back across the border – but we do not know if he gets there or not. We do not know if he is killed by the secret agents, the border guards, or the spies he knows will line his route – or if he simply ‘disappears’ into mother Russia.

This is a logically explicable ending to the trajectory of Martin’s life, but it does not make for a very satisfactory conclusion to a novel. We expect some sort of resolution or ‘closure’ to events. Having a protagonist simply ‘vanish’ from the proceedings of the narrative is not good creative practice. The absence of any conceptual structure reduces the narrative to what is not much more than a well decorated memoir, an autobiographical sketch, or a chronological record of life in exile. It is clever and well-articulated picture, but it is not constructed in a manner that produces a satisfying whole.

Glory – study resources

Glory – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Glory – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Podvig – Russian original – Amazon UK

Podvig – Russian original – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Glory – principal characters

Martin Edelweiss	a young Russian exile
Sonia Edelweiss	his mother
Henry Edelweiss	his rich uncle, later his stepfather
Alla Chernosvitove	a flirtatious poet
Darwin	Martin’s bosom friend at Cambridge
Archibald Moon	gay professor of Russian at Cambridge
Mihail Platonovich Zilanov	a liberal politician and activist
Mrs Zilanov	Martin’s Russian landlady in London
Sonia Zilanov	her flirtatious but fickle young daughter
Vadim	student at Cambridge – a practical joker
Alexandr Naumovich Igolevich	a Russian patriot
Bubnov	a Russian emigre writer
Guzinov	a Russian exile in Lausanne

Glory – chapter summaries

1 The background of Martin’s Swiss grandfather and his Anglophile mother Sofia.

2 Martin’s mother reads to him English fairy tales. He dreams imaginatively of entering the forests in paintings and stories.

3 Martin’s parents separate, and shortly afterwards his father dies.

4 Martin is full of stoical self control, but he has romantic dreams of courage and heroic deeds.

5 On summer holiday in the Crimea he is capable as a teenager of experiencing transcendental ‘moments of being’.

6 This experience evokes memories of childhood holidays via overnight train journey to Biarritz.

7 In 1919 Martin and his mother escape from the revolution, sailing from the Crimea to Constantinople.

8 On board ship he is forced into the company of businessman Chernosvitov and his flirtatious wife the poet Alla, with whom Martin falls in love.

9 In Greece Alla and Martin become lovers, and he has his first ‘peek into paradise’.

10 Martin and his mother sail on to Marseilles and then travel to Lausanne, where they stay with his rich uncle Henry.

11 Martin wonders romantically what form his future instances of happiness will take. Arriving in London, he spends a night with a prostitute, who robs him the next morning.

12 In London his knowledge of English culture suddenly seems out of date. He lodges with family friends, the Zilanovs.

13 At Cambridge University he is forced to learn the conventions and rituals of undergraduate life. He befriends Darwin, to whom he embellishes his life experiences.

14 Darwin is an individualist, a veteran of the first World war who has published a collection of short stories.

15 Martin is attracted to various subjects of study, but finally chooses Russian history and literature.

16 Archibald Moon, Martin’s tutor, is an eccentric English Russophile. They receive Mrs Zilanov and her prickly daughter Sonia for afternoon tea.

17 They are joined by Vadim, a raffish undergraduate who is given to practical jokes, slang, and obscenities.

18 At the Christmas vacation Martin visits his mother in Switzerland, where because of the snow he thinks of himself as back in Russia.

19 Martin calls on Mihail Zilanov in London, who talks to him about his father’s death.

20 Martin feels awkward in Sonia’s presence. She behaves in a cavalier way to his friend Darwin. Martin wants to travel, but his uncle Henry says he must wait.

21 Whilst climbing in Switzerland Martin has a fall and a terrifying experience on a narrow ledge. He calls on the Zilanovs, where there has been a death in the family.

22 They are joined by Igolevich, who imparts terrible news from Russia, which rouses strange feelings in Martin that he does not understand. He has a nocturnal meeting with Sonia, who gets into his bed but rejects his physical advances.

23 After the vacation Martin discovers that Moon is a homosexual. He feels jealous of Darwin’s relationship with Sonia, and still dreams of performing heroic deeds.

24 Martin’s mother marries his uncle Henry. Martin has an affair with Rose who works in a tea shop. She becomes pregnant.

25 The pregnancy is a lie, and Rose is bought off by Darwin. Martin continues to hanker after Sonia.

26 Martin feels that his. Imaginative reveries can be turned into reality, and he has one of making an ‘illegal, clandestine. expedition’. Martin plays football for Trinity College. Darwin proposes to Sonia, who refuses him.

27 The Zilanov family move to Berlin. Martin reproaches Sonia for her ill-treatment of Darwin. Punting on the Cam, Martin and Darwin have an argument ostensibly about Rose.

28 Martin and Darwin have a fisticuffs duel – which Martin realises is really about their rivalry over Sonia.

29 Having finished university, Martin is not sure what to do, but he hatches a dream to ‘explore a distant land’.

30 Martin is disappointed by the matter-of-fact letters he receives from Sonia. His uncle reproaches him for his lack of employment and ambition. He decides to go to Berlin.

31 Berlin has changed and there is a recession. Martin recalls his earlier visits. And meanwhile he works as a tennis coach.

32 Martin visits the Zilanov family and becomes acquainted with the expatriate. Russian community.

33 He mixes with the literary exile community who try to keep Russian culture alive.

34 Sonia continues her coquettish behaviour towards him, but she does join in his fantasy of Zoorlandia – an imaginary distant northern country.

35 He continues his thankless pursuit of Sonia, but she treats him disdainfully, so he decides to leave Berlin.

36 He travels south through France by train, ambiguously outlining his plans to a fellow passenger.

37 Seeing lights in some distant hills, he gets off the train in the middle of the night.

38 Leaving his luggage at an inn, he walks to the nearest town Molignac.

39 He works as an agricultural labourer and has reveries that combine English and Russian culture. Despite the idyllic experience, his planned ‘expedition’ nags at his mind. He returns to his uncle and mother in Lausanne.

40 He successfully retraces his climb of the perilous mountain ledge from which he almost fell. Then he meets the ‘adventurer’ Gruzinov.

41 He borrows money from his uncle and announces his departure for Berlin.

42 He asks Gruzinov for advice about making an illegal entry to Russia – but feels that Gruzinov makes fun of him.

43 Despite his mother’s entreaties to stay, Martin takes leave of his uncle’s house.

44 He arrives in Berlin and is caught between the daring of his enterprise and the attractions of staying.

45 He calls on the Zilanovs and takes a very awkward farewell of Sonia

46 He dines on borsch in a Russian restaurant.

47 He visits Bubnov who is ill but still writing, then he goes to wait for Darwin at his hotel.

48 He tells Darwin his plans, but his friend refuses to believe he is serious. Some time later Darwin checks with the Zilanovs and even visits various embassies in Riga, but Martin has disappeared. Darwin breaks the news to Martin’s mother.

Vladimir Nabokov – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Granite and Rainbow

January 14, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

Granite and Rainbow (1958) is the third and final volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays to be collected, edited, and published by her husband Leonard Woolf after her death in 1941. She published two collections of essays in her own lifetime – The Common Reader first series (1925) and The Common Reader second series (1932).

Leonard Woolf discusses the difficulties of locating and verifying these examples of her non-fiction writing in the editor’s notes which preface these collections. The problem of identification was exacerbated by the fact that many of them had been published anonymously. Until relatively recently for instance, essays and book reviews in The Times Literary Supplement were not attributed to any author. Another reason for essays remaining undetected was that some of the earlier examples had been published under her maiden name of Virginia Stephen.

Granite and Rainbow was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1958. Since that time, any further non-fiction prose writings by Virginia Woolf that have come to light have been published in the six-volume edition of her complete essays edited by the distinguished Woolf scholar Stuart N. Clarke.

Granite and Rainbow – critical commentary

The essays and reviews in this collection are arranged in two parts. The first is The Art of Fiction and the second The Art of Biography, and it has to be said that her richest and most profound observations come in the first half amongst her meditations on the nature and the future of fiction.

‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ explores reasons for the death of poetic drama. She argues that the poet cannot fully cope with the contradictions of modern life and that poetic ideas might be taken over by the novel. Speculating about the nature of what such a novel might be, she is in effect talking about her own work, which combines prose narrative with a poetical sensibility. But she does so without actually mentioning it – which is commendably modest.

‘Hours in a Library’ is a meditation on the relationship between classic and modern literature. She is urging modern readers to look sympathetically upon contemporary writing, but she knows that it will be judged against the standards of the past. Her argument is however cast in characteristically dialectical manner in which she sees a reciprocity of influence:

But if we need all our knowledge of the old writers to follow what the new writers are attempting, it is certainly true that we come from adventuring among new books with a far keener eye for the old.

This is not unlike the apparently paradoxical argument made by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges – that a contemporary writer can ‘create’ his own precursors. In other words, the work of modern authors can alter the way in which we view the writing of the past

Woolf finds qualities in apparent failures — such as DeQuincy whose ‘impassioned prose’ she offers as a positive model to other writers, even though his own work (with the exception of the Opium Eater) is now largely forgotten.

It’s interesting to note that she even makes efforts to see positive merit in George Meredith, a writer who had been a major literary figure during her own lifetime, but whose reputation had gone into decline. She notes his poetic style, his lavish metaphors, and his lack of ‘realism’ – but she realises that his time has passed.

The most ambitious essay in the collection is a long article from The Bookseller in 1929 called ‘Phases of Fiction’ in which she looks at a collection of novelists and categorises them as Truth-Tellers (Defoe, Maupassant, Trollope) Romantics (Scott, Stevenson, Radcliffe) Character-Mongers (Dickens, Austen) Comedians (Peacock, Sterne) Psychologists (James, Proust, Dostoyevski) and Poets (Meredith, Hardy, Bronte).

These studies offer what we might now call a ‘reader response’ type of criticism. She does not analyse the subject matter of their texts that makes them so valuable, but concentrates instead on what effect they have on her – which she generalises as ‘us’. She describes Henry James’s concentration on psychological states for instance:

By cutting off the responses that are called out in actual life, the novelist frees us to take delight, as we do when ill or travelling, in things in themselves. We can see the strangeness of them only when habit has ceased to immerse us in them, and we stand outside watching what has no power over us one way or the other. Then we see the mind at work; we are amused by its power to make patterns; by its power to bring out relations in things … It is a pleasure somewhat akin, perhaps, to the pleasure of mathematics or the pleasure of music.

The second section of this collection dealing with biography is mainly book reviews of biographies, letters, and memoirs. The subjects range from Walter Raleigh, via Laurence Sterne and Horace Walpole, to Thomas Coutts (the banker) and the best-selling novelist Marie Corelli – which was not her real name.

Woolf wrote biographies herself, and she sees the art of biography as a difficult choice between the ‘granite’ of hard facts and the ‘rainbow’ of the subject’s personality. Too many facts, and the account of someone’s life becomes boring (or even unreadable): too much rainbow, and the account becomes fiction. This is possibly why her own fictional biography Orlando (1927) is so dazzlingly successful, and her fact-heavy Roger Fry (1940) very dull.

She argues, quite justly, that Harold Nicolson held these two elements of fact and invention in successful equilibrium in his hilarious collection of biographical vignettes, Some People (1927):

he has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as if they were at once real and imaginary. He has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, in making the best of both worlds. Some People is not fiction because it has the substance, the reality of truth. It is not biography because it has the freedom, the artistry of fiction.

Granite and Rainbow – study resources

Granite and Rainbow – Amazon UK
Granite and Rainbow – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The six-volume Complete Essays – Amazon UK
The six-volume Complete Essays – Amazon US

Granite and Rainbow – free eBook format – Internet Archive

Grantite and Rainbow – complete contents

Part I : The Art of Fiction

The Narrow Bridge of Art
Hours in a Library
Impassioned Prose
Life and the Novelist
On Rereading Meredith
The Anatomy of Fiction
Gothic Romance
The Supernatural in Fiction
Henry James’s Ghost Stories
A Terribly Sensitive Mind
Women and Fiction
An Essay in Criticism
Phases of Fiction

Part II : The Art of Biography

The New Biography
A Talk About Memoirs
Sir Walter Raleigh
Sterne
Eliza and Sterne
Horace Walpole
A Friend of Johnson
Fanney Burney’s Half-Sister
Money and Love
The Dream
The Fleeting Portrait:
1. Waxworks at the Abbey
2. The Royal Academy
Poe’s Helen
Visits to Walt Whitman
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Guide to Remembrance of Things Past

November 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

handbook, explanation, plot summary, and characters

After nearly 100 years, Marcel Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past remains as formidable a reading task as when it first appeared. Indeed, possibly more so – since it was originally published in single volumes at intervals, which gave contemporary readers a chance to digest its contents slowly. But it now exists in seven volumes totalling 3,200 pages, a million and a half words, and containing more than 400 characters.

This is not an intellectual journey to be undertaken lightly, and even experienced readers need all the help they can get to deal with a literary construction of this magnitude. Patrick Alexander’s guide is an attempt to provide all the assistance that’s required. The book is in three parts. The first offers an overview then a summary of what takes place in each of the seven volumes of the novel. Part two is a who’s who – thumbnail sketches of the principal characters, what they do, and to whom they are related.

Part three offers a brief account of Proust’s life, notes on Paris and the Belle Epoque, and brief essays on French history and the notorious Dreyfus affair in particular.

During the course of his paraphrase, Alexander examines the ‘epiphanies’ for which Proust is famous; he shows the links between characters and events spanning the whole of the seven volumes which will not be apparent to a first-time reader; and he looks at Proust’s techniques of detailed and protracted analysis which, to anyone who has paid close enough attention, are not simply analyses but highly imaginative and extended metaphors which demonstrate his intellectual skill for seeing similarities between apparently disparate objects.

As Alexander points out, Proust’s novel is also an amazing cultural encyclopedia. Whilst the narrative explores issues of love, friendship, jealousy, memory and time, it is also packed with cultural references:

His literary references range from Xenophon to (then) contemporary novelists such as Zola; his musical references cover western music from Palestrina to Puccini, and he refers to more than one hundred individual painters from Botticelli to the avant garde Léon Bakst. All of these references are used to express and illustrate startlingly original insights into every aspect of the human condition, from love and sex to religion and death – and all with a freshness and comic sense of the absurd.

It is often observed by those who have read Proust that so powerful are the evocations of place and the recreation of his life experiences, that readers afterwards find it difficult to believe that they are not their own. “Yes – That’s exactly how it is!” sums up this sort of reaction, though of course it is his genius to have put it into words in the first place.

And for a writer so renowned for prolixity (even longeurs) what is not so frequently observed is the fact that he is much given to placing pithy aphorisms in his text, deeply embedded in huge paragraphs though they might often be.

This book should appeal to the intelligent ‘Common Reader’ who wants to undertake the extended literary journey that a reading of Proust presents. And it will be a reliable guide mainly because it was written by exactly such a person, composed as a homage to a writer he had come to love.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Patrick Alexander, Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time: A Reader’s Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past, New York: Vintage, 2009, pp.3391, ISBN 0307472329

More on Marcel Proust
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

Harold Nicolson biography

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

diplomat, writer, socialite and politician

Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was born into an upper middle-class family in Tehran, where his father (Lord Carnock) was the British ambassador to Persia. as it then was. He was educated at Wellington College then Balliol College Oxford, where he graduated with a third-class degree. He entered the diplomatic service in 1908 and was posted to Constantinople where he became a specialist in Balkan affairs. In 1910 he met Vita Sackville-West and despite her reservations about his diplomatic career (and her parents’ about his social status) they married in 1912 and had two sons.

He published biographies of the French poet Verlaine and studies of other literary figures such as Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne, and Saint-Beuve. His first major success (and still probably his best book) was Some People (1927), a witty collection of short stories and character sketches based on people he had met in the diplomatic service.

He and his wife were fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group, as well as visitors to Ottoline Morrell’s weekend parties at Garsington in Oxfordshire. Whilst Vita had affairs with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis, he had liaisons with a series of men, including the literary critic Raymond Mortimer. They had a rather unusual marriage in which they lived separately a lot of the time, wrote to each other on almost a daily basis protesting their undying love to each other, and continued to have affairs with members of their own sex. All of this was recorded by their son in his Portrait of a Marriage.

After the end of the first world war he took part in the Paris Peace Conference, and he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies (which also caused his fellow Bloomsburyite John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission). At the end of 1929 he left the diplomatic service and went to work for Lord Beaverbrook on the Evening Standard. Despite (or maybe because of) his literary skills, he hated journalism: “It is a mere expense of spirit in a waste of shame. A constant hurried triviality which is bad for the mind.”.

In the 1930s, he and his wife bought Sissinghurst Castle, in the rural depths of Kent, the county known as the garden of England. There they created the renowned gardens that are now run by the National Trust. However, during the week he lived at the Albany, the famous bachelor chambers just off Piccadilly in London. He flirted briefly with Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists, but then entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party member for Leicester West in 1935. (His wife refused to visit the constituency, regarding it as ‘bedint’ – a family slang term for ‘unacceptably low class’.)

He was very active as a parliamentarian, and became a keen supporter of Winston Churchill, especially during the second world war, when he was appointed private secretary to the Minister of Information in the government of national unity. He lost his seat in the 1945 election, and then despite joining the Labour Party, he failed to get back into parliament.

He turned to broadcasting and returned to journalism as an occupation. He was personally acquainted with a wide variety of figures such as Ramsay MacDonald, David Lloyd George, Duff Cooper, Charles de Gaulle, Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, along with a host of literary and artistic figures. His Diaries provide a rich source of information on the world of diplomacy and politics in the years 1910-1960, and record meetings with Picasso, Diaghilev, Matisse, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

He never achieved high office, and when eventually awarded a knighthood, he was so snobbish he felt it as an insult, because he thought he ought to be made a member of the Lords – so that he could escape what he felt as his ‘plebeian’ surname. He spent the latter part of his life writing and developing the gardens at Sissinghurst.