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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

Herzog

April 25, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Herzog (1964) won several literary prizes when it was first published, and was voted one of the best 100 novels written in English by Time magazine. As in the case of other major novels by Saul Bellow, it has a strong biographical basis. Herzog and Bellow were both Jewish academics and intellectuals from Chicago; they were the same age; and both had been twice married and divorced. Most tellingly, both their second wives had been involved in affairs with a husband’s best friend.

Herzog

The main feature of the novel which makes it very entertaining is the series of letters that Herzog writes to famous people, living and dead. He shares his hopes and fears with people he has never met (including God) and discusses abstract concepts with philosophers who were writing in the eighteenth century.


Herzog – critical commentary

Historical note

When it first appeared in 1964 Herzog was received generally as a comic novel – a knockabout story of a character who was disoriented and wrote letters to well-known political and historical figures. Herzog interrogates his relatives and friends, gives advice to famous politicians, and poses philosophic questions to writers who have been dead for centuries.

Bellow had invented earlier a new kind of free-wheeling narrator in his previous novel The Adventures of Augie March (1954) and he was perceived as a fresh voice from the well-educated streets of Chicago and New York. His novels offered ideas, rumbustious events plucked from modern American life, and lots of linguistic fun. He seemed willing to take an off-beat, radical approach to characterisation and his subject matter. As his protagonist Moses Herzog announces in the opening paragraph: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me’.

But reading Herzog half a century later, it seems that the sense of fun has receded. Now it is quite clear that the novel was written out of a very painful experience of marital breakdown and the bitter consequences of divorce.

Bellow was also carving out what was to become the central issue of his later novels – the history of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. In Herzog he covers two generations – the first who arrived from Russia (and elsewhere) and endured poverty and hardships in order to make a new life for themselves in the New World. Then the second generation, who stood on their shoulders and had the choice of continuing the family’s Jewish traditions, or becoming fully assimilated as Americans

Biography

It’s quite clear on even the most cursory reading of this novel that it was based upon deeply felt personal experiences. Bellow makes very little effort to conceal the proximity of events in his narrative to the details of his own biography. Herzog is born in Canada of Russian Jewish immigrants, lives in Chicago, and becomes an academic, specialising in literature and intellectual history – exactly the same as Bellow himself.

Bellow had been married twice when he wrote the novel. He had also recently discovered that his second wife Sondra had been having an affair with his best friend Jack Ludwig. Many novelists use elements from their own lives as materials for their fiction. The question is – how does this affect our understanding and interpretation of their work?

The first thing to say is that novelists are under no obligation to be truthful, fair, accurate, or even-handed in their use of this autobiographical material. Fiction has its own rules, and novelists are at liberty to use their life experiences in any way they wish.

But the corollary for the reader is that the fictional results must not be taken as an accurate account of the writer’s life. Just as good biography should be an accurate account of events, and should not include fictional inventions, good fiction should not be taken as the base material for biographical interpretation.

However, it has to be said that this is a somewhat purist approach to literary interpretation. Most literary critics and commentators will use any information they have to pass judgement on writers and their work. Many people might argue that Bellow’s depiction of the character Madeleine reveals his deep-seated misogyny and is a form of fictional ‘revenge’ for the personal affront he felt from his wife’s betrayal.

The same could be said for the character of Valentine Gersbach – though interestingly, there is much less venom heaped upon him, and in general he is depicted as a more benign character. It is Madeleine who Herzog thinks he would like to murder, not his love rival Gersbach.

The letters

At the beginning of the novel we are led to believe that Herzog is writing letters to friends and relatives about the break-up of his marriage. Then as he becomes more desperate he starts writing to public figures and historical philosophers, many of whom died centuries earlier.

Then gradually it becomes clear that the letters are never posted, and finally that they are not written at all. The ‘letters’ are Herzog’s internal dialogue with friends, family, and ‘the dead’ – as well as a form of critical dialogue with the intellectual history of which he feels a part. In other words the ‘letters’ function as a metaphor. They represent one of the three strands of the narrative which focus attention relentlessly on Herzog and his state of mind:

  • third person omniscient narrator
  • Herzog as first person narrator
  • Herzog’s letters to others

Herzog’s actions, thoughts, and feelings are sometimes presented by a third person omniscient narrator, but Saul Bellow seamlessly blends this presentation of events with Herzog’s first person account of his experiences, and even his commentary on his own thoughts. These two narrative strands are then supplemented by the ‘thought letters’ – which are presented in the printed text by italics

Philosophy

The principal weakness in Herzog as in many of Bellow’s other novels, is the long-winded ‘philosophising’ that goes on in the protagonist’s search for a resolution to the contradictions he finds in his life. To these speculations he also adds what have been called ‘reading lists’.

These are long references to western writers and philosophers by which Bellow suggests he has a detailed knowledge of political thinking from Greco-Roman classics, through Renaissance thought, to Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and anyone else worth mentioning in the twentieth century These names are offered up in a thick porridge of vague abstractions – a process which adds up to no more than a form of self-indulgent intellectual name-dropping. Bellow is far more successful when he sticks to deadpan (and very typically American) humour:

I am diligent. I work at it and show steady improvement. I expect to be in great shape on my deathbed.

Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

Herzog

There is something of an embarrassment for the reader in dealing with Herzog as the protagonist – who is quite clearly a cipher for Saul Bellow and his concerns. Herzog is being offered as something of a loveable rogue – a man who has warm ties to his Jewish immigrant family and its traditions, who has been badly treated by his second wife and friends such as Gersbach and Himmelstein. He is also in the tradition of the holy fool – the naive intellectual with his mind on higher matters who repeatedly makes bad decisions on his own behalf and does absurd things such as painting a piano green.

But by the same token we can say that he is self-obsessed; he is erotically incontinent; he has established his home with money inherited from his father, and spends most of the novel living off his brothers; and it’s even possible to argue that he is something of an intellectual snob. He certainly spends lots of mental energy railing against the beautiful but clever woman who has deceived him (Madeleine). Yet he discounts and feels sceptical about the beautiful and loving, but not-so-clever woman whom he believes wants to ‘snare’ him (Ramona).

There is no shortage of self-criticism in Bellow’s characterisation of Herzog, but it’s also impossible to escape a certain sense of smugness and self-regard, even if his soul-searching is wrapped up in multiple references to western philosophers – or maybe even because it is.

Kafka

There are distinct elements of Franz Kafka at work in Herzog. Both writers feature protagonists in search of justice who at every turn of events seem to make their own predicaments worse. They both create heroes with friends who protest their support but then undermine or betray the protagonist in some way. Both Kafka and Bellow explore the dilemmas of characters who seek to maintain high ethical ideals in a world founded on lying, greed, and deception – characters whose efforts often result in comic misunderstandings or grotesque embarrassment.

Herzog gives himself up to shysters such as Sandor Himmelstein, but when offered genuine sympathy and comforting friendship from Phoebe Sissler and her husband, he runs away from their kindness, thinking it is a ‘mistake’. He is full of contradictions – and he knows it.

Herzog is also like a Kafka figure in that many of his problems have been brought on because of his erotic behaviour. He has had two wives, and chosen for the second a woman who has validated all his worst fears about entrapment and persecution. Madeleine is the vagina dentata writ large. She has stripped him of his material assets and humiliated him sexually by adultery with his best friend. Yet when he is offered comfort and sexual healing by his very attractive lover Ramona, what does he do but run away from her. All this is very neurotic behaviour.

Even his struggles with society at a political level have elements of what we now call the ‘Kafkaesque’. Franz Kafka’s protagonists struggle to understand the byzantine processes of the powers that control them (largely the bureaucracy of the Hapsburg empire). Similarly, Moses grapples hopelessly as an individual with the complexities of a society controlled partly by democracy, and partly by a ‘political machine’ which includes graft, corruption, vote-fixing, and gangsters. Even his own father was a bootlegger.

Moses is also grappling intellectually with issues of the western European philosophic traditions and their inability to grant him some sort of overarching understanding of the modern society in which he lives. He is lost in a world of Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (so we are asked to believe) but meanwhile he doesn’t have the common sense to know that his wife is having an affair with his best friend.

Moses claims to be seeking resolution and peace of mind in a world full of conflicts – yet he positively embraces difficulties and hardship, even feeling the loss of them when they are not there. And this neurotic behaviour is expressed in distinctly Kafkaesque language and metaphors, including one of Kafka’s favourites – the vulture:

When a man’s breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown – he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions, and his sins.

Reflecting on the level of antipathy Herzog feels towards his ex-wife Madeleine who has betrayed him with his best friend, Bellow coins an epigram that could come straight out of Kafka’s diaries or notebooks:

It’s fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound, aching for each other.


Herzog – study resources

Herzog Herzog – Penguin – Amazon UK

Herzog Herzog – Penguin – Amazon US

Herzog Herzog – Library of America – Amazon UK

Herzog Herzog – Library of America – Amazon US

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

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

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

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

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Herzog


Herzog – plot summary

Moses Herzog is a Jewish academic who has moved from a large house in Berkshire to Chicago at the behest of Madeleine, his second wife. When Madeleine suddenly wants a divorce he leaves his home and his job and moves back to New York. City where he starts compulsively writing to people – both living and dead.

He consults a doctor, but there is nothing physically wrong with him. His lover Ramona invites him to take a holiday in her house, but fearing ‘commitment’ he travels instead to stay with some friends at Martha’s Vineyard.

He buys sporty summer clothes and thinks about Wanda, a married woman with whom he had an affair on a trip to Poland. He also reflects on relations with his mother in law and discussions about her with Simkin, his divorce lawyer.

On the train he thinks over Madeleine’s affair with his friend Gersbach and ‘writes’ to her aunt Zelda who has conspired in his deception.

His friend the zoologist Lucas Asphalter reveals Madeleine’s adultery with Gersbach. Herzog recalls analysis under Dr Edvig which spills over to include Madeleine. She becomes ill, goes on wild spending sprees, and finally attacks Herzog physically.

Herzog turns for help to his best friend Gersbach (with whom Madeleine is having the affair). Gersbach lectures him on dignity and suffering. Herzog writes letters to public figures, offering them advice.

He recalls a discussion between Madeleine and his old friend Schapiro about Russian culture. His letter to Schapiro is about political philosophy, but he also complains that Madeleine has been trying to take his place in the academic world. He borrows money from his brother Shura.

After the split with Madeleine, Herzog goes to stay with old friend Sandor Himmelstein, whose attitude becomes more and more critical. Sandor even tries to sell him some insurance., then hits him hard with Jewish sentimentalism.

Herzog arrives chez Libbie and her new husband Sissler in Martha’s Vineyard. They welcome him very warmly, but he immediately thinks the visit is a mistake. He leaves them an apologetic note and flies back home.

In New York he receives news of problems with his daughter who is living with Madeleine and Gersbach. He thinks back to a period when he was married to Daisy, involved with Japanese girl Sono, and preparing to leave them both for Madeleine.

In the early days of his relationship with Madeleine, she is a recent convert to Catholicism and full of guilt about adultery. But she gives up the Church, they get married, and go to live in the country, with the Gersbachs as neighbours. Madeleine squanders money, and they start to argue.

He looks back nostalgically on his first marriage to Daisy and reflects on his Jewish childhood. His father was a first generation immigrant and a small time bootlegger. The family have a drunken lodger and relatives who die back in Russia. Moses affectionately recalls the poverty yet warmth of the family in its early immigrant years.

Ramona phones with an invitation to dinner which he reluctantly accepts. He drifts into writing letters on political philosophy and drafting a proposal for an essay on ‘transcendence’. Then he recalls his relationship with Sono, his Japanese lover. She warns him against Madeleine, and in his imaginary letter to her he admits that she was right.

Ramona showers him with affection and understanding – but deep down he is reluctant. They discuss at length his problems with Madeleine and Gersbach.

He consults lawyer Harvey Simkin who urges him to take Madeleine and Gersbach to court and seek revenge. Herzog visits a courtroom where he witnesses a trial for child murder and he has a form of mild heart attack.

He flies to Chicago and visits his parents’ old house, recalling an argument with his father. Whilst there he secretly retrieves his father’s old pistol.

Fearing his own daughter might be at risk, he drives to Madeleine’s house with murder in mind. But when he sees Gersbackh bathing June, he cannot pull the trigger. He visits Gersbach’s wife Phoebe instead. She is in denial and claims that Gersbach is still living with her

He goes to stay with Lucas Asphalter with whom he discusses attitudes to death. He takes his daughter June out for the day, but becomes involved in a traffic accident. The police arrest him for carrying a loaded gun. Madeleine arrives at the police station, full of hostility. His brother Will is called to post bail.

After borrowing money from Will, he goes to his abandoned house in the Berkshires and sinks into eccentric behaviour. He begins a new series of letters to his psychiatrist, to Nietzsche, and to God.

His brother Will arrives, sees that Herzog is cracking up, and recommends medical care and rest. Herzog refuses and plans to invite his son Marco to stay.

Ramona visits a nearby town. He goes over, invites her to dinner, and begins cleaning up the house. He also finally decides to stop writing letters.


Herzog – principal characters
Moses Herzog a confused academic dreamer with marital problems
Madeleine his second wife, a beautiful and clever ball-breaker
Valentine Gersbach his neighbour and best friend, who has an affair with Madeleine
Dr Edvig psycho-analyst to both Herzog and Madeleine
Ramona Donsell a flower shop owner, Herzog’s attractive lover
Fritz Pointmueller Madeleine’s father, a theatrical impresario
Trennie Pointmueller his wife, Madeleine’s mother
Harvey Simkin Herzog’s divorce lawyer
Lucas Asphalter a zoologist and boyhood friend of Herzog
Schapiro an old friend of Herzog
Sandor Himmelstein a Chicago lawyer and friend of Herzog

© Roy Johnson 2017


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Filed Under: Saul Bellow Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, Saul Bellow, The novel

Him with his Foot in his Mouth

July 14, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Him with his Foot in his Mouth first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for November 1982. It is currently published with four other stories in a collection of the same name. The other stories are What Kind of Day Did You Have?, A Silver Dish, Cousins, and Zetland: By a Character Witness.

Him with his Foot in his Mouth


Him with his Foot in his Mouth – commentary

The surface detail of the story is Herschel Shawmut’s irrepressible urge to puncture pretentiousness and boredom with his insulting put-downs. Most of his victims deserve their fate. It is significant that the one person who doesn’t is the spinsterish librarian to whom he is writing with an apology.

Yet beneath this tragi-comic character sketch there are a number of serious social themes at work. Number one is Shawmut’s identity as a Jew in modern America. He is the son of Russian immigrants (as was Saul Bellow) and he has grown up with close ties to his family. He visits his dementia-stricken mother in a nursing home, and doesn’t resent the fact that she fails to recognise him, but talks admiringly of his rich brother Philip, who has recently plunged Herschel into debt with a crooked business scheme.

Philip has severed all his emotional ties with family and has assimilated with modern America by joining the worst excesses of dog-eat-dog capitalism. He is vulgar, wealthy, corrupt, and has a ‘perfect’ (perfectly horrendous) wife who breeds vicious pit-bull terriers.

Herschel Schawmut is qualified to fit into the intellectual milieu of college and university teaching that he inhabits. He has written a best-selling textbook on musical appreciation, and he conducts performances of classical music on television programs. But he feels himself an outsider, and his imaginative sympathies keep being drawn back to his early days as an immigrant. This is a theme Bellow had explored extensively in his earlier novel Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and he was to return to later in The Bellarosa Connection (1989).

The put-downs

Bellow is very fond of the quip and the one-liner in his writing. He quotes some of Winston Churchill’s bon mots approvingly and gives Herschel a series of witty (and insulting) put-downs which provide the basis for his feeling socially ostracised. The reader is invited to share the amusement factor because his victims are pretentious social bores, but Herschel’s indulgence and its negative consequences puts him into the category of the ‘holy fool’

A talkative woman apologises at the end of dinner: ‘I realize now that I monopolized the conversation, I talked and talked all evening. I’m so sorry. . . . ‘That’s all right,’ I told her, ‘You didn’t say a thing.’ ”

When a wealthy philanthropic lady announces that she is going to write her memoirs, he asks her ‘Will you use a typewriter or an adding machine?’

Schulteiss was one of those bragging polymath types who give everybody a pain in the ass. Whether it was Chinese cookery or particle physics or the connections of Bantu with Swahili (if any) or why Lord Nelson was so fond of William Beckford or the future of computer science, you couldn’t interrupt him long enough to complain that he didn’t let you get a word in edgewise … One of the guests said to me that Schulteiss was terribly worried that no one would be learned enough to write a proper obituary when he died. “I don’t know if I’m qualified” I said, “but I’d be happy to do the job, if that would be any comfort to him.”

Story or novella?

This piece could be considered as a long story or a short novella. Bellow was fond of both literary genres. But there are a number of arguments for classifying it as a novella. The strongest of these is the fact of there being so many unifying literary elements in the work.

Everything is mediated through the perspective of one character – Shawmut himself as first-person narrator. It has his anti-social joking as a recurrent theme and the initiating purpose in the plot – his letter of apology and explanation to Clara Rose.. It deals with his increasing sense of alienation – ending logically enough in his exile across the Canadian border, with the police at his heels. It has a number of other characters – but they all function as fictional entities in relation to Shawmut himself.

It’s true that the story does not have any strict unity of place – but none of the locations are imaginatively developed, nor do they have any special bearing on the events of the narrative.

Recurrent figures

Crooked businessmen and rapacious lawyers are recurrent figures in Bellow’s fiction – but so too are best friends who turn out to be Judas-characters, and even brothers who cheat members of their own family.

Philip Shawmut, Herschel’s bother, claims to be a successful businessman – but his success is built on corruption and illegality. When he learns that Herschel has spare money, he relieves him of it, claiming it is going into a scheme reclaiming spare parts from accident-wrecked motor vehicles. The scheme is in fact a cover for stolen luxury cars that are being cannibalised for parts in short supply. And the money invested goes straight to the account of Philip’s wife. When the business is exposed as fraudulent and Philip dies, Herschel is left as legal director with a mountain of debt.

It is not surprising that Bellow works into the narrative references to Balzac’s Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons – both of them novels that concern betrayal by relatives and instances of the greed to acquire someone else’s wealth. For good measure he also includes mention of King Lear.

Herschel is befriended by Eddie Walish in his early days as a teacher of music, but the same friend sends him a comprehensive account of all his personal weaknesses and faults thirty-five years later. The message is quite plain: you can’t trust anybody. And you certainly cannot trust lawyers, who not only give you bad advice and present enormous bills for their services, but also squeeze you for special favours.


Him with his Foot in his Mouth – resources

Him with his Foot in his Mouth – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Him with his Foot in his Mouth – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Humboldt’s Gift Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Humboldt’s Gift Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Humboldt's Gift Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Humboldt's Gift Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Him with his Foot in his Mouth


Him with his Foot in his Mouth – synopsis

Herschel Shawmut is writing to retired librarian Carla Rose to apologise for an offensive quip he made at her expense thirty-five years previously. He recalls his early days at the college where they both worked. He was befriended by Eddie Walish who has recently written him a letter listing all his faults – one of which is his habit of insulting people with cruel one-liner put-downs.

Shawmut is writing from retreat in Vancouver, British Columbia where he is hiding ‘on legal advice’. He has alienated himself from local intellectual society by his gaucheness and his put-downs.

He explains his ambiguous relationship with America as a Jew and a feeling of being an outsider. He writes approvingly of the radical Jewish and homosexual poet Alan Ginsburg as a similar character. Despite his self-awareness he continues to make amusing but socially disruptive remarks amongst his university colleagues and their wives.

He has been swindled by his rich brother Philip and has employed lawyers to fight the case. His brother is a ‘creative businessman’ with whom he has invested money, largely for sentimental reasons of family loyalty. The money has been used in illegal land deals, and following Philip’s death Shawmut is responsible for the company’s debts. He appoints his brother-in-law Hansl Genauer as legal advisor and absconds to Canada to avoid prosecution.

Shawmut visits his mother in a nursing home, but she does not recognise him. Genauer tries to gain control of his money, and then extracts favours from him. But Shawmut then insults a rich woman Genauer wishes to marry. In the end, Shawmut is in complete retreat in Vancouver, expecting the US authorities to arrive at any time to arrest him.


Him with his Foot in his Mouth – characters
Herschel Shawmut an elderly Jewish professor of classical music
Gerda Shawmut his wife, who is dying
Philip Shawmut his brother, a rich ‘creative businessman’
Hansl Genauer his brother-in-law, a dubious lawyer
Carla Rose a retired librarian living in Florida
Eddie Walish a literary professor, once Shawmut’s friend

© Roy Johnson 2017


More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
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Filed Under: Saul Bellow Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, Saul Bellow, The Short Story

Honeymoon

December 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Honeymoon was probably written in Paris and first appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum on 29 April 1922. The setting is not specified but seems to be the south of France, and the two characters in the story are ‘abroad’ which suggests that they are probably from New Zealand. In the workbooks for her writing Katherine Mansfield classified many of her stories by the designation L. or N.Z. according to their setting of London or New Zealand.

Honeymoon


Honeymoon – critical commentary

George is like many of the male figures in Mansfield’s stories – a catalogue of gaucheness and insensitivity. He summons cabs in a peremptory manner which worries Fanny; he speaks French badly; thinks living in a villa would be ‘deadly’ unless surrounded by other people; deals badly with the restaurant manager; is xenophobic; and congratulates himself on his rudeness.

Whilst Fanny wants to stay at their ‘little table’ and feels that ‘nothing matter[s] except love’, George suddenly wants to go back to their hotel – the clear implication being that since he feels a flush of physical well-being, he intends to have sex with her.

The story is related largely from Fanny’s point of view, so we are presented with a rather negative character sketch of a male as perceived by a female – which is one reason why Katherine Mansfield is admired by feminists. Much of this presentation is made by understatement and implication, so none of her criticism is explicit. Indeed, Fanny is full of admiration for this man she has married – which is why it is important to register distinctions between Fanny’s views and those of the Mansfield-as-narrator.

‘Here you are, sir. Here you will be very nice,’ coaxed the manager, taking the vase off the table , and putting it down again as if it were a fresh little bouquet out of the air. But George refused to sit down immediately. He saw through these fellows; he wasn’t going to be done. These chaps were always out to rush you. So he put his hands in his pockets, and said to Fanny, very calmly, ‘This all right for you? Anywhere else you’d prefer? How about over there?’ And he nodded to a table right over the other side.

What it was to be a man of the world! Fanny admired him deeply, but all she wanted to do was sit down and look like everybody else.

George is gauche and immediately in conflict with the manager. He congratulates himself on his antagonistic view of the interchange, and his suggestion for alternative seating puts everyone into an awkward position. Fanny naively perceives his behaviour as masterful – and yet her instinct is for a simpler, calmer resolution to the episode.

Thus we are provided with three points of view in this one brief scene: the narrator’s perceptive image of the manager’s gesture; George’s self-congratulatory egoism; and (simultaneously) Fanny’s naive admiration of her new husband at the same time as her instinct for a more sensitive response to the situation.


Honeymoon – study resources

Katherine Mansfield Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US


Honeymoon – plot summary

A young couple, George and Fanny, are on their honeymoon on the Mediterranean coast. George is a forceful and positive character, whilst Fanny is rather hesitant and uncertain about herself.

After shopping they decide to go for tea to a hotel-restaurant on the sea front. George patronises their cab driver, and Fanny feels a sense of trepidation at the freedom afforded her by her state of being as a newlywed.

At the restaurant George resists the manager’s attempts to control them, and Fanny admires his masculinity but wonders if he wants to understand her at a deep level.

Meanwhile a small group of musicians begin playing whilst they take their tea. Then the group is joined by an old man in faded clothes who sings in Spanish with passion and fervour.

Fanny is moved by the experience and wonders existentially about the cruelty and suffering in life; but George reacts differently, feeling optimistic and physically stimulated.

George suggests that they go back to their hotel at once, before the man can start singing again – so they leave.

Katherine Mansfield


Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Twentieth century literature
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Filed Under: Katherine Mansfield Tagged With: English literature, Katherine Mansfield, Literary studies, The Short Story

Howards End

March 13, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, video, study resources, further reading

Howards End, (1910) is what’s called a ‘a State of England’ novel, and is possibly Forster’s greatest work – though that’s just my opinion. Two families are contrasted: the intellectual and cultivated Schlegels, and the capitalist Wilcoxes. A marriage between the two leads to spiritual rivalry over the possession of property. Following on their social coat tails is a working-class would-be intellectual who is caught between two conflicting worlds. The outcome is a mixture of tragedy and resignation, leavened by hope for the future in the young and free-spirited.

E.M.Forster - portrait

E.M.Forster

E.M. Forster is a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth century novel. He documents the Edwardian and Georgian periods in a witty and elegant prose, satirising the middle and upper classes he knew so well.

He was a friend of Virginia Woolf, with whom he worked out some of the ground rules of literary modernism. These included the concept of ‘tea-tabling’ – making the substance of serious fiction the ordinary events of everyday life. He was also a member of The Bloomsbury Group.

His novels grew in complexity and depth, until he eventually gave up fiction in 1923. This was because he no longer felt he could write about the subject of heterosexual love which he did not know or feel. Instead, he turned to essays – which are well worth reading.


Howards End – plot summary

Howards EndThe book is about two families in England at the beginning of the twentieth century: the Wilcoxes, who are rich capitalists with a fortune made in the Colonies, and the half-German Schlegel sisters (Margaret and Helen), who have a lot in common with the real-life Bloomsbury Group. Running alongside as a narrative strand are the Basts, a couple who are struggling members of the lower-middle class. The Schlegel sisters try to help the poor Basts and try to make the Wilcoxes less prejudiced. The motto of the book is “Only connect…”

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

The Schlegels frequently encounter the Wilcoxes. The eldest, Margaret Schlegel, becomes friends with Ruth Wilcox, whose most prized possession is her family house at Howards End. She wishes that Margaret could live there, as she feels that it might be in good hands with her.

Ruth’s own husband and children do not value the house and its rich history, because notions of spiritual affinities are lost on them. Since Margaret and her family are about to be evicted from their London home by a developer, Ruth bequeaths the cottage to Margaret in a handwritten note on her deathbed. This is delivered to her husband from the nursing home, causing great consternation among the Wilcoxes. Mrs Wilcox’s widowed husband Henry and his children burn the note without telling Margaret about her inheritance.

Over the course of several years, Margaret becomes friends with Henry Wilcox and eventually becomes engaged to him. The more free-spirited Margaret tries to get Henry to open up more, to little effect. Henry’s elder son Charles and his wife meanwhile try to keep Margaret from taking possession of Howards End, even though she is going to be married to its owner.

Gradually, Margaret becomes aware of Henry’s dismissive attitude towards the lower classes. On Henry’s advice, Helen tells Leonard Bast to quit his respectable job as a clerk at an insurance company, because the company stands outside a protective group of companies and thus is vulnerable to failure. A few weeks later, Henry casually reverses his opinion, having entirely forgotten about Bast. But it is too late, and Bast has lost his tenuous hold on financial solvency.

Bast lives with Jacky, a former prostitute for whom he feels responsible and whom he eventually marries. Helen continues to try to help young Leonard Bast, but Henry will not countenance helping him. Then it is suddenly revealed that Basts’s wife had previously been Henry’s mistress in Cyprus. He had abandoned her, an expatriate English girl on foreign soil with no way to return home.

Margaret confronts Henry about his ill-treatment, and he is ashamed of the affair but unrepentant about his harsh treatment of her. In a moment of pity for the poor, doomed Bast, Helen has an affair with him. Finding herself pregnant, Helen leaves England to travel through Germany to conceal her condition, but eventually returns to England when she receives news of her Aunt Juley’s illness.

She refuses a face-to-face meeting with Margaret in an effort to hide her pregnancy but is fooled by Margaret – acting on the advice of Henry – into a meeting at Howards End. Henry and Margaret plan an intervention with a doctor, thinking Helen’s evasive behavior is a sign of mental illness. When they come upon Helen at Howards End, they also discover the pregnancy.

Margaret tries in vain to convince Henry that if he can countenance his own affair, he should forgive Helen hers. Mr Bast arrives having been tormented by the affair wishing to speak with Helen and reconcile however, Henry’s son, Charles, attacks Bast for the dishonor he has brought to Helen, and accidentally kills him. Charles is charged with manslaughter and sent to jail for three years.

The ensuing scandal and shock cause Henry to re-examine his life and he begins to connect with others. He bequeaths Howards End to Margaret, who states that it will go to her nephew – Helen’s son by Bast – when she dies. Helen reconciles with her sister and Henry, and decides to raise her child at Howards End.


Study resources

Howards End Howards End – Penguin Classics -Amazon UK

Howards End Howards End – Penguin Classics -Amazon US

Howards End Howards End – Kindle eBook edition

Howards End Howards End – Blackstone audio books edition – Amazon UK

Howards End Howards End – Merchant-Ivory film on DVD – Amazon UK

Howards End Howards End – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Howards End Howards End – audioBook version at LibriVox

Howards End Howards End – Brodie’s Notes – Amazon UK

Howards End Howards End – York Notes – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to E.M.Forster – Amazon UK

Red button E.M. Forster – biographical notes

Red button E.M.Forster at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button E.M.Forster at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources


Howards End – film version

The novel is arguably Forster’s greatest work, and this film adaptation by Merchant-Ivory lives up to it as an achievement. It is well acted, with very good performances from Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter as the Schlegel sisters, and Anthony Hopkins as the bully Willcox. Veteran luvvie and Trotskyist Vanessa Redgrave plays the mystic Mrs Willcox. The locations and details are accurate, and it gives an accurate rendition of the critical, poignant scenes in the original – particularly the conflict between the upper middle-class Wilcoxes and the working-class aspirant Leonard Bast. This is an adaptation I have watched several times over, and always been impressed.

1992 – screenplay by Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Principal characters
Margaret Schlegel cultured eldest sister, aged 29
Helen Schlegel romantic sister, in her early 20s
Tibby Schlegel their younger brother
Henry Willcox a rich industrialist
Ruth Willcox his first wife, who owns Howards End
Charles Willcox their priggish eldest son
Dolly Willcox lightweight fertile wife to Charles
Paul Willcox middle child, who goes to Nigeria
Evie Willcox youngest child
Leonard Bast young autodidactic clerk
Jacky Bast a former prostitute
Aunt Juley sister of deceased Mrs Schlegel
Percy Cahill Dolly’s uncle, who marries Evie

Howards End

first edition – Arnold 1910


Further reading

Red button David Bradshaw, The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, Cambridge University Press, 2007

Red button Richard Canning, Brief Lives: E.M. Forster, London: Hesperus Press, 2009

Red button G.K. Das and John Beer, E. M. Forster: A Human Exploration, Centenary Essays, New York: New York University Press, 1979.

Red button Mike Edwards, E.M. Forster: The Novels, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001

Red button E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, London: Penguin Classics, 2005

Red button P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, Manner Books, 1994

Red button Frank Kermode, Concerning E.M. Forsterl, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009

Red button Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E. M. Forster, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970.

Red button Nigel Messenger, How to Study an E.M. Forster Novel, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Red button Wendy Moffatt, E.M. Forster: A New Life, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010

Red button Nicolas Royle, E.M. Forster (Writers and Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1999

Red button Jeremy Tambling (ed), E.M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995

 


Other works by E.M. Forster

The Longest JourneyThe Longest Journey (1907) is one for specialists, and is widely regarded as Forster’s ‘problem’ novel. That is, it deals with important personal issues, but does not seem so well executed as his other works. Rickie Elliot sets out from Cambridge with the intention of writing. In order to marry the beautiful but shallow Agnes, however, he becomes a schoolmaster instead. This abandonment of personal values for those of the world leads him gradually into a living death of conformity and spiritual hypocrisy from which he eventually redeems himself – but at a tragic price.
E.M.Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
E.M.Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

A Passage to IndiaA Passage to India, (1923) was started in 1913 then finished partly in response to the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Snobbish and racist colonial administrators and their wives are contrasted with sympathetically drawn Indian characters. Dr Aziz is groundlessly accused of assaulting a naive English girl on a visit to the mystic Marabar Caves. There is a set piece trial scene, where she dramatically withdraws any charges. The results strengthen the forces of Indian nationalism, which are accurately predicted to be successful ‘after the next European war’ at the end of the novel. Issues of politics, race, and gender, set against vivid descriptions of Chandrapore and memorable evocations of the surrounding landscape. This is generally regarded as Forster’s masterpiece.
E.M.Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
E.M.Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


More on E.M. Forster
More on the novella
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Filed Under: E.M.Forster Tagged With: E.M.Forster, English literature, Howards End, Literary studies, Study guides, The novel

Humboldt’s Gift

March 12, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Humboldt’s Gift (1975) was Saul Bellow’s major follow-up to his two previous best-sellers, Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Herzog (1964). It is also his affectionate yet tongue-in-cheek tribute to his friend the poet and short story writer Delmore Schwartz who died in obscurity in 1966. Bellow had already won three National Book Awards for fiction, but Humboldt’s Gift propelled him in 1976 to both a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Humboldt's Gift


Humboldt’s Gift – critical commentary

Biography

The novel is a fictional memoir of Von Humboldt Fleischer – a Jewish American poet and philosopher of precocious talent. But the narrative is also a double portrait – both of Humboldt and of Charlie Citrine, his one-time friend who is telling the story, writing the memoir, and revealing the serio-comic events in his own life at the same time.

It is generally accepted that the character study of Humboldt Fleischer is based upon the figure of Delmore Schwartz – an American writer whose collection of poems and short stories In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was published in 1938 when he was only twenty-five years old. He was widely admired and at first very successful; but then later his life and reputation went into decline, and he died in poverty, an alcoholic with paranoid delusions.

Saul Bellow was a protegé of Schwartz, and Citrine has many of the features of Bellow’s own life – problematic relationships with ex-wife and mistress, great success as a writer, and a fashionable life as an intellectual who mixes with politicians and celebrities.

Bellow seems to invite readers to make close comparisons between his own biography and the details he supplies of his fictional narrator. Despite this however, readers should keep in mind that in terms of literary interpretation, a clear distinction should be maintained between biographical and textual evidence.

Characterisation

Without doubt, one of Bellow’s strongest points as a novelist is his creation of vibrant and amusing characters, many of whom combine sophisticated intellectual lives with tempestuous passions, rash behaviour, and modes of expression laced with street language and profanity.

Citrine is an intellectual show-off and a dreamer who wishes to keep the memories of his family and friends alive, long after they are dead. Yet he is driven by his sexual desire for young women; he is impractical and fails to see what is going on around him; and he is lost in a metaphysical haze of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. But he is driven by the need to talk and reveal himself at the same time as discussing his friend Humboldt. His observations are offered in a mixture of rich cultural reference, compressed philosophy, and street talk.

He was a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologuist and improvisator, a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine. Money always inspired him … But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest. Insomnia made him more learned.

Humboldt on the other hand is a man striving for the ideals of beauty and art amidst the harsh environment of modern American capitalism – yet he threatens people with a gun, tries to run his wife over with a car, and ends up in a psychiatric hospital. He too is an unstoppable fountain of talk, wisecracks, and cultural philosophy – even when it is directed against his old friend Citrine:

he went about New York saying bitter things about me and my ‘million dollars.’ “Take the case of Charlie Citrine. He arrived from Madison, Wisconsin, and knocked on my door. Now he’s got a million bucks. What kind of writer or intellectual makes that kind of dough—a Keynes? Okay Keynes, a world figure. A genius in economics, a Prince in Bloomsbury … Married to a Russian ballerina. The money follows. But who the hell is Citrine to become so rich? … There’s something perverse with that guy. After making his dough why does he bury himself in the sticks? What’s he in Chicago for? He’s afraid to be found out.”

One curiosity of characterisation is Bellow’s introduction of named characters who do not appear in the narrative, are not dramatised, and in some cases have no part to play in the drama at all. For instance, Citrine pokes a lot of fun at his sexual rival Flonzely, whom his mistress Renata eventually chooses to marry. Flonzely is named but never appears: Citrine simply make lots of jokes about the fact that he is an undertaker.

A more acute case of the same phenomenon is Richard Durnwald. He is an old friend of Citrine, by whom he is held in great respect. Yet we never learn anything about him; he plays no part in the story; and has no relevance to the themes or the structure of the novel. In a story that is already over-crowded with named characters, one wonders why he is introduced at all.

Weaknesses

The weakest parts of the narrative are the very repetitive passages of Citrine’s ruminations about the state of his soul. It is understandable that he wishes to keep alive memories of his family and friends who are now dead, but the dwelling on Rudolph Steiner and ‘Anthroposophy’ is somehow unconvincing. It does not sit coherently within Citrine’s other interests and his intellectual background.

Since it is very difficult to escape the feeling that Citrine is a fictionalised account of Bellow himself, it is very disconcerting that he is presented as very successful character, very well educated, and enormously popular with women. Small elements of occasional deprecation aside, the overall impression is one of enormous self-congratulation – of a kind very reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who also created fictionalised accounts of himself falling into the clutches of love-hungry women at every turn of his stories.

There may be an element of biographical truth in this. Famous male writers may well have lots of female admirers, law suits, and self-inflicted money problems – but they do not necessarily constitute the material of serious fiction,

The other principal weakness – perhaps inherited from the success of his earlier novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953) a work in which Bellow claimed he found his true voice as a writer – is that of amusing but rather improbable incidents. Citrine within the space of two or three days is kidnapped by a gangster, mixes with underworld figures, is harassed in court proceedings, goes to jail, travels from Chicago to New York and Texas then to Madrid, and finally (and very improbably) makes tens of thousands of dollars from a successful movie treatment he has co-written.

Saul Bellow may have had a colourful personal life (awards, wives, divorces) but this sort of intellectualised bohemianism simply isn’t persuasive as serious fiction – even though it is orchestrated to create some very amusing passages.

It also has to be said that the opening scenes of the novel where Citrine is menaced and taught a lesson by the gangster Rinaldo Cantabile are remarkably similar to the beginning of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream which was published ten years earlier in 1965. The parallels and similarities are quite striking. Mailer’s protagonist Stephen Rojack is a war hero, former politician, and television star, and just as Citrine is menaced on the sixtieth floor of a building site, Rojack goes on a frightening challenge around the parapet of a skyscraper.

Similarly, in a later scene of Humboldt’s Gift Citrine and his lover Renata engage in orgasme a pied under the cover of a dining table – a scene which replicates exactly a passage in An American Dream. Mailer was strongly criticised for his depiction of women in his novel, and Bellow has also been the target of feminist claims that the women in Humboldt’s Gift are either sex objects (Renata) or shrieking harpies like his ex-wife Denise.

The question of plagiarism is one that can be decided in the long term, as the critical reputations of Mailer and Bellow stabilize. At the moment (2017) Bellow’s is in the ascendant and Mailer’s in decline.

The sheer exuberance and verbal fecundity of Bellow’s literary style is enormously attractive, and his concerns for tolerance and what are generally known as ‘liberal values’ make him a distinguished and very talented novelist. But he is not beyond criticism.

Chronology

The novel has a very complex sequence of events – primarily because it is presented in the somewhat rambling mixture of Citrine’s memories of Humboldt, recollections of his own boyhood in Chicago, abstract reflections on Anthroposophy, and the narrative of the events of two or three days as he prepares to fly to Europe with his mistress Renata. These are worth tabulating for the purposes of clarification:

  • the history of his relationship with Humboldt
  • memories of a Chicago boyhood
  • reflections on Rudolph Steiner and Anthoposophy
  • conflicts with gangsters, lawyers, and an ex-wife

This is a very skilful arrangement of the events in a novel. It encompasses the historical background to its milieu, the presentation of a character, philosophic reflections on the nature of life and death, and a concentrated account of dramatic events over the space of a few days. There are not many novelists who could orchestrate this chronological complexity without resorting to a more clumsy structure.

Bellow keeps these four separate strands of narrative alive at the same time by having them all presented via the very engaging narrative style of his principal character and narrator, Charles Citrine.


Humboldt’s Gift – study resources

Humboldt's Gift Humboldt’s Gift – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Humboldt's Gift Humboldt’s Gift – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Humboldt's Gift Humboldt’s Gift – Library of America – Amazon UK

Humboldt's Gift Humboldt’s Gift – Library of America – Amazon US

Humboldt's Gift Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Humboldt's Gift Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Humboldt's Gift Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Humboldt's Gift Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Humboldt's Gift


Humboldt’s Gift – plot summary

Rich and successful writer Charlie Citrine gives an account of Von Humboldt Fleischer – an American poet and philosopher who has recently died. Humboldt was prodigiously intelligent, very widely read, and a great talker, but after a meteoric rise to success as a young man, his later life has collapsed into poverty, neglect, and alcoholism. Humboldt has high-flown, semi-delusional ideas about Art and Politics, and in his hey-day he secured a teaching post for Citrine at Princeton University.

Years later, a very successful Citrine has his Mercedes-Benz sports car vandalised over a gambling debt. He is heavily criticised by his ex-wife Denise for moving back to live in Chicago. He feels guilty about having avoided meeting Humboldt just before his death, and he resents the money he pays in taxes and in divorce settlements on Denise.

Citrine recalls friendships and his love of Chicago’s run-down urban landscape. He is menaced and humiliated by gangster Rinaldo Cantabile, to whom he owes money and towards whom he feels a certain sympathy. They go to the Playboy Club and mix with dubious elements of the underworld. Cantabile reveals that Citrine was boasting at the original poker game, and the humiliation was a lesson in hubris. He also wants Citrine’s help for his wife’s academic aspirations.

Citrine plans to write a study of boredom. He recalls Humboldt’s anger at being snubbed as a Jew, and his ambition to become a tenured professor at Princeton. They exchange blank cheques as a symbol of brotherhood against an uncertain future, and even though Citrine supports Humboldt’s bid for promotion, his friend takes money from Citrine’s account shortly afterwards.

Humboldt manages to wangle a chair at Princeton, but then the funding for it is withdrawn. He cracks up and tries to run over his wife Kathleen in a car. She leaves him and files for divorce. He starts threatening people with a gun, is taken into police custody, and is then sectioned in Bellevue mental hospital. On release he turns against Citrine and hires lawyers and psychiatrists. Citrine too goes into therapy, and his lover Demmie dies in a plane crash.

Citrine is visited by Cantabile, who claims to have his interests at heart but tries to drag him in to all sorts of criminal schemes. Citrine fears that Renata and her mother the ‘Senora’ are trying to trap him into a permanent relationship. He offers further reflections on death and questions his friend Szathman about Renata. Szathman arranged their first date, at which Renata passed out after too many Martinis.

In court Citrine distrusts his own defense lawyers. Denise is critical, yet proposes that they re-marry. Citrine is harassed by divorce judge Urbanovich. He meets Thaxter, his profligate business partner, and they are ‘kidnapped’ by Cantabile. Citrine reproaches Thaxter for his mismanagement of their publishing venture. Cantabile takes them to menace a crooked financier, who has them arrested. Citrine is rescued at the police station by the daughter of his childhood sweetheart.

He visits Naomi Lutz, who criticises him affectionately about his attitude to women. On the flight to New York he recalls George Swiebel’s advice to marry Renata whilst he still has a chance. He discusses Humboldt’s legacy with Orlando Huggins, who is Humboldt’s official executor. Then he collects the remnants of Humboldt’s papers from his uncle Waldemar in a Coney Island nursing home.

Humboldt’s legacy turns out to be no more than a letter to Citrine excusing his bad behaviour and an amateurish treatment for a movie script. Citrine then discovers that his brother is to have open heart surgery. Thaxter calls with news of new publishing contracts. He meets Kathleen, who has been given the same movie-plot gift from Humboldt – but she has actually placed it with agents.

He visits his rich and successful brother Julius on the eve of his heart operation. Julius offers to cut him into property development deals and advises him to be more realistic and self-protective. The operation is successful, so Citrine flies to join Renata at the Ritz in Madrid. However, he is joined by Renata’s mother, who dumps her grandson Robert on him. Renata meanwhile writes from North Africa to say that she has married undertaker Flonzely.

Citrine is running short of money, and he spends his time trying to communicate with people who are dead. Cantabile suddenly arrives with news that the movie scenario has been turned into a very successful film: he wants a stake in the copyright. Citrine flies with him to Paris where they watch the film. They negotiate a deal with lawyers for the film, and Citrine splits the proceeds with Humboldt’s uncle Waldemar. Thaxter is kidnapped in Argentina, and uses the event to generate money for himself. Citrine uses his share of the film money to re-bury Humboldt and his mother.



Humboldt’s Gift – principal characters
Von Humboldt Fleischer a celebrated Jewish writer who dies in obscurity
Kathleen Humboldt’s wife, who leaves him
Charles Citrine Humboldt’s friend and protegé – the narrator
Denise Citrine’s ex-wife, who is suing him for more alimony
Renata Koffritz Citrine’s young lover
the Señora Renata’s mother – the ‘procuress’
Julius Citrine a millionaire property developer
Demmie Vonghel Citrine’s girlfriend in adolescence
George Swiebel a building contractor
Rinaldo Cantabile a flamboyant small-time gangster
Alec Szathmar a lawyer, Citrine’s boyhood friend
Forrest Tomchek a lawyer acting for Citrine
Solomon Flonzaley an undertaker, Renata’s lover
Roger Renata’s young son

© Roy Johnson 2017


More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
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Filed Under: Saul Bellow Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, Saul Bellow, The novel

Hyde Park Gate News

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury juvenillia and journalism

This gem of Bloomsbury juvenilia was hidden for years in the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts. It comes to us now in a beautiful paperback edition with full scholarly notes and some contemporary photographs. Hyde Park Gate News is a compilation of family ‘newspapers’ written by Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) with her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby. What makes it of interest for Woolf scholars and readers is that it deals with the small events of domestic life out of which she was later to make so much imaginative use.

Hyde Park Gate News It’s a mixture of letters, stories, advice columns, answers to questions, and reports on family events – all retailed in a satirical and parodic fashion. The style is modelled on Tit Bits, which had been launched in 1881 and established a weekly circulation of around 500,000. The children satirise their parents, each other, and the visitors they received at the gloomy Victorian house at Hyde Park Gate. The entries reveal an amazingly precocious appreciation of literary genre, writing tone, rhetorical figures, and language in general. They are particularly good at ironic understatement and anti-climax:

Mr. Gerald Duckworth took a small walk this morning in Kensington Gardens. His young sisters and brothers accompanied him. He returned we hope without any fatigue.

It is interesting to note the seeds of material such as this from Vol II, No.35, Monday 12 September, 1892, reporting on their holiday in Cornwall, which would become a central feature in Woolf’s novel three decades later:

On Saturday morning Master Hilary Hunt and Master Basil Smith came up to Talland House and asked Master Thoby and Miss Virginia Stephen to accompany them to the lighthouse as Freeman the boatman said there was a perfect tide and wind for going there. Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go.

The issues of the newspaper are charmingly reproduced in their original double-column format, complete with their original mis-spellings and hand-drawn illustrations. The whole collection is also supplemented by some facsimile reproductions of the originals, a collection of early family photographs, and explanatory biographies on the people mentioned.

Following a three year gap, the issues for 1895 take a more serious and accomplished tone (though Virginia was then still only thirteen years old). There is a satire (‘Miss Smith’) of a women’s movement figure; and the sort of philosophic meditations for which Woolf became famous in her later works:

I dreampt one night that I was God…I created several worlds in order to see which one was best…The people lived as one great family. But were they real? And what was I? Why did I exist? Who made me and who made my maker? Was everything a dream, but who were the dreamers?

And the last entry in the final issue of April 1895 is almost a pre-echo of the experimental fictions she was to produce many years later – and an amazingly composed piece of writing in its own right. We get an impression not only of perceptive self-portraiture but of an artistic bird which is poised, about to take flight:

Scene – a bare room, and on a black box sits a lank female, her fingers clutch her pen, which she dips from time to time in her ink pot and then absently rubs upon her dress. She is looking out of the open window. A church rears itself in the distance, a gaunt poplar waves its arms in the evening breeze. The horizon at the west is composed of a flat – on the south a ledge of chimney pots from which wreaths of smoke rise monotonously, on the north the gloomy outlines of bleak Park trees rise.

This is an elegantly produced volume from newcomers Hesperus Press which any fan of Woolf or Bloomsbury will be glad to add to their collection.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Hyde Park Gate News Buy the book at Amazon UK

Hyde Park Gate News Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Thoby Stephen (eds), Hyde Park Gate News, London: Hesperus Press, 2005, pp.240, ISBN: 1843911418


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Hyde Park Gate News, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

In Search of Lost Time

February 11, 2010 by Roy Johnson

characters, resources, video, translations

There’s no doubt about it: if you’re going to tackle In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past as it is also known) you need to be in good intellectual shape. The sentences are long, the paragraphs are huge, and at a million and a half words his great novel is one of the longest ever.

But it can be done – and the benefits are enormous. Proust delivers gems on every page. He is of course celebrated for his psychological insights. His characters live and breathe in a way which makes you feel they become your personal friends. Don’t expect plot, suspense, or even story in a conventional sense. This modern classic is one of characters circling around each other in a way which depicts an entire world of upper-class fin de circle France before and shortly after the First World War.

However, the greatest depths he offers are in the form of profound reflections on some of the most important issues any novelist can approach – love, desire, memory, time, and death. These are written in the form of extended aphorisms, embedded as part of his narrative in such a way that you will hardly be aware where one ends and the other begins.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

Marcel Proust - portrait

Marcel Proust – portrait by Jaques Emil Blanche


Study resources

In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time – 6 volume boxed set (Modern Library) – UK

In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time – 6 volume boxed set (Modern Library) – US

In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time – 4 volume boxed set (Everyman’s Library) – UK

In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time – 4 volume boxed set (Everyman’s Library) – US

Red button Proust: an illustrated life – short biography with period photos

Red button Proust’s life and works – a detailed chronology

In Search of Lost Time A Reader’s Guide to Proust – Amazon UK

Red button Proust Website – general resources

In Search of Lost Time Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – web site with videos

In Search of Lost Time Reading Proust – various translations compared

Red button Swann’s Way – an essay on translations

Red button Swann in Love – 1984 DVD adaptation in English – Amazon UK

Red button Time Regained – 1999 DVD adaptation (English subtitles) – Amazon UK

Red button Monsieur Proust – the housekeeper’s memoirs – Amazon UK

Red button Marcel Proust at Wikipedia – biographical notes, web links

Red button Marcel Proust at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials


Proust in the original French

Marcel Proust - postage stamp

In Search of Lost Time A la recherche du temps perdu – 10 volumes, illustrated (Kindle) pp.2911 – £2.22 – Amazon UK

In Search of Lost Time Oeuvres complètes de Marcel Proust – Illustrated, with biography and criticisim (Kindle) pp.4100 – £1.32 – Amazon UK


Principal characters
Marcel the outer narrator of the novel
Bathilde Amedee the narrator’s grandmother
Francoise the narrator’s faithful maid
Baron de Charlus an aristocratic dandy and gay aesthete
Duchesse de Guermantes the toast of Parisian high society
Robert de Saint-Loup army officer and narrator’s best friend
Charles Swann a friend of the narrator’s family
Odette de Crecy a beautiful Parisian courtesan
Gilberte Swann the daughter of Swann and Odette
Elstir a famous painter
Bergotte a well-known writer
Vinteuil an obscure but talented musician
Berma a famous actress
Charles Morel a gifted violinist, patronised by Charlus
Albertine Simonet an orphan with whom the narrator has a romance
Madame Verdurin a rapacious social-climber

In Search of Lost Time – film adaptation

Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich


Further reading

Red button Aciman, André (2004) The Proust Project. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Red button Albaret, Céleste (Barbara Bray, trans.) (2003) Monsieur Proust. The New York Review of Books

Red button Alexander, Patrick (2009) Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time. Vintage Books, New York.

Red button Bernard, Anne-Marie (2002) The World of Proust, as seen by Paul Nadar. Cambridge: MIT Press

Red button Bloom, Harold. (2003) Marcel Proust, Chelsea House.

Red button Carter, William C. (2000) Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press

Red button Caws, Mary Ann. (2003) Marcel Proust: Illustrated Lives. Overlook Press.

Red button Curtiss, Mina. (2006) The Letters of Marcel Proust Turtle Point Press.

Red button Davenport-Hines, Richard (2006) Proust at the Majestic. Bloomsbury

Red button De Botton, Alain (1998) How Proust Can Change Your Life. New York: Vintage Books

Red button Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Red button Painter, George D (1959) Marcel Proust A Biography Vols. 1 & 2. London: Chatto & Windus

Red button Shattuck, Roger (1963) Proust’s Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in À la recherche du temps perdu. New York: Random House

Red button Shattuck, Roger (2000) Proust’s Way: A Field Guide To In Search of Lost Time, W. W. Norton

Red button Tadié, Jean-Yves: Marcel Proust: A Life. Viking, New York, 2000

Red button White, Edmund (1998) Marcel Proust: A Life. New York: Viking Books


Proust’s writing – I

Mont Blanc pen - Proust edition

Mont Blanc – Marcel Proust special edition

Don’t let this glamorous fountain pen deceive you. Marcel Proust’s writing instruments and his notebooks were quite humble. He used Sergent-Major nibs and pen holder which were the cheapest of their kind. For paper, he used the common French school children’s exercise notebooks which he purchased in bulk.


Parisian interior – La belle epoque

Belle Epoque - Paris interior


Proust’s writing – II

Marcel Proust - typescript and revisions

Revisions to a typescript

Proust’s method of composition was highly accretive. He wrote primarily in children’s exercise books, but his first drafts were supplemented by countless additions, revisions, and extensions of thought which he scribbled down on any paper which came to hand.

Envelopes, magazine covers, scraps of paper of different length and format were glued into the exercise books or joined together to form long scrolls sometimes two metres long.

This process also continued when proofs of his manuscript came back from the printer. This was a habit very similar to that of his illustrious predecessor Balzac. As Terrence Kilmartin observes:

The margins of proofs and typescripts were covered with scribbled corrections and insertions, often overflowing on to additional sheets which were glued to the galleys or to one another to form interminable strips – what Françoise in the novel calls the narrator’s paperoles. The unravelling and deciphering of these copious additions cannot have been an enviable task for editors and printers.


In Search of Lost Time – editions

Click the jacket covers for further details at Amazon UK

Marcel Proust - Scott-Moncrieff editionWhich translation should you read? In English there are three options currently in print. My favourite is the oldest by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. It was the first to appear as the original volumes were published, and it even had Proust’s own blessing. Although it is based on a version of the French original which was not complete, it has a charm all of its own. It is this version which gave the novel its alternative title Remembrance of Things Past when Scott Moncrieff chose a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX, rather than a literal translation of the original:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past

The jacket cover illustrated here is that of the old Chatto and Windus edition which was presented in twelve volumes. Snap these up if you see them, but in the meantime this translation is available from Penguin books.

Marcel Proust - six-packThe second option is an edition which is based on the Scott Moncrieff original translation, but which was revised and re-translated by Terrence Kilmartin in the 1990s. This version is also informed by updated versions of the original text in French, including new material which has come to light since the author’s death. Kilmartin’s work was then itself edited by D.J.Enright

So this version comes to us with a guarantee of completeness and accuracy, but with the traces of three different translators’ hands since the original work. Each volume contains its own notes, addenda, and a synopsis, so readers new to Proust can feel supported by this additional material. [It’s available as a boxed set which is also known slightly mischievously as the ‘Proust 6-pack’.]

Marcel Proust - box setThere’s also a more recent version produced by seven different translators. This has the advantage of being the most up to date. It is based on the latest version of a text with a very tangled provenance, and each translator writes a preface on the problems of translation. This version got a mixed reception when it first appeared. Some people argue that it removes a certain prissiness which had clung to the English version of Proust since Scott Moncrieff’s translation. Others have claimed that it introduces new problems and lacks a unifying voice. Perhaps the best reason for choosing it is that it’s now generally available at a cut-down price.


The Cambridge Companion to Proust The Cambridge Companion to Proust provides essays on the major features of Marcel Proust’s great work. These investigate such essential areas as the composition of the novel, its social dimension, the language in which it is couched, its intellectual parameters, its humour, its analytical profundity and its wide appeal and influence. This is suitable for those who want to study Proust in depth. The discussion is illustrated by textual quotation (in both French and English) and close analysis. This is the only volume of its kind on Proust currently available. It contains a detailed chronology and bibliography.

Marcel Proust: BiographyMarcel Proust is an excellent biography by George Painter. This study has become famous in its own right, because it combines deep insights with scholarly rigour – and it is also written in a very stylish manner. Painter sketches in the background to Parisian society, which provides a historical context for what follows. He then traces Proust’s singular life (the neurasthenia, the ‘job’ he kept for one day, the cork-lined bedroom) up to his death in 1922 – where he was still revising his masterpiece in bed, which is where he had written most of it. This is regarded as a classic of modern biography, and in 1965 it was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.


AND … now for something completely different


Other works by Marcel Proust

Red button Jean Santeuil
This was Proust’s ‘dry run’ for his major work. It’s an unfinished (though quite long) fragment of a novel about the life of a young Parisian man which tells the story of boyhood summers of strawberries and cream cheese, of garlands of pink blossom under branches of white may, of love and its lies, of political scandal and of his deep feeling for his parents.

Red button The Pleasures and the Days
Set amid fin-de-siecle Parisian salon society, these sketches and short stories depict the lives, loves, manners and motivations of a host of characters, all viewed with a characteristically knowing eye. By turns cuttingly satirical and bitterly moving, Proust’s portrayals are layered with imagery and feeling, whether they be of the aspiring Bouvard and Pecuchet, the deluded Madame de Breyves, or Baldassare Silvande, saturated with regret, memory and final understanding at the end of his life.

Red button Contre Saint Beuve
This series of essays has as its centrepiece Proust’s literary manifesto. In it he argues for an essentially modernist position – that works of art should be considered autonomously, rather than objects which we use as a means of exploring the author’s biography.

Red button The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

© Roy Johnson 2010


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It All Adds Up

May 14, 2017 by Roy Johnson

essays, memoirs, cultural history and criticism

It All Adds Up (1994) is a collection of non-fiction writing that Saul Bellow published shortly before his last two novels, The Actual (1997) and Ravelstein (2000). The collection includes reflections on the relationship between literature and politics, travel writing, potted biographies of his famous contemporaries, and a clutch of interviews – one of which he conducts with himself.

The collection benefits from spanning more or less the whole of his writing career – from the immediate post-war period when he visited Europe for the first time, up to his personal memoir of friendship with Allan Bloom that formed the basis for his highly acclaimed and last novel.

The assembly of these essays and social criticism also confirms the consistency of his interests and beliefs. He was very conscious throughout his writing career of being the son of a poor Jewish immigrants (his father was a bootlegger during the Depression). He was also from Canada – though the family moved to live in Chicago. This was a city with which he felt powerful emotional ties, even though he was well aware of its violence corruption.

As he became more successful he took up university teaching posts in New York and the Eastern seaboard – which he repeatedly contrasted with the mid-West in order to take the moral and social temperature of America as a whole. And as an immigrant he never stopped thinking about the choice every immigrant has to make – to maintain ethnic origins, or to assimilate as an ‘American’, even though it might never be possible to comfortably believe in oneself as such.

The earliest study is a piece of reportage commissioned by Partisan Review the left-wing journal with which Bellow (as a Trotskyite) was closely associated. The essay documents travels through Spain at a time when General Franco still held his dictatorial grip on the country. It includes details of the grinding poverty, the police arrests, and such bizarre details as the fact that possession of a radio required a permit.

He clearly felt at home with the freewheeling (and hard-drinking) intellectuals with whom he shared his academic life. He taught joint courses in political philosophy and what we now call cultural history with Allan Bloom. He supported the poet John Berryman in his battles again an unsympathetic administration and against the alcoholism that eventually contributed to his early death by suicide.

The collection also includes his acceptance lecture on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 The essay is a spirited and thoughtful summation of his reflections on literature and society. As something of a conservative he sketches a picture of falling standards and trivialization in public culture. (His friend Allan Bloom’s major opus was called The Closing of the American Mind.) Against this perceived vulgarity and ignorance he poses the humanising influence of classics:

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

This is quite a difficult argument to justify theoretically, because it assumes that we are somehow ‘morally improved’ by exposure to high art. John Carey in his excellent study What Good are the Arts? challenges this supposition using the term ‘the religion of art’. But it has to be said that Saul Bellow, throughout all his novels and his non-fiction writing has wrestled with this problem of the potentially ennobling power of great literature – and it was for this reason he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

It All Adds Up Buy the book at Amazon UK

Herzog Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2017


Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up, New York: Viking, 1994, pp.327, ISBN: 0141188820


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Filed Under: Saul Bellow Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, Saul Bellow, The essay

Italo Svevo biography

February 24, 2016 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and cultural context

Italo Svevo was the pen name of the Austro-Italian writer Aron Ettore Schmitz. He was born in 1861 in Trieste, which at that time was part of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire – and remained so until the end of the first world war. His mother was Italian, and his father a German Jewish businessman. He was educated with his brothers at a commercial school in Wurzburg, Germany, where he became fluent in the language. Italian was actually his second language, the first being the Triestine dialect which was used at home.

Italo Svevo

After two further years of business studies in Trieste, he was forced to abandon his studies when his father’s glassware business went bankrupt. He took up employment as a correspondence clerk in the Viennese Union Bank, where he stayed for the next twenty years. During this time he produced his first novel, Una vita (A Life) (1893). Like all his other books, it was published at his own expense.

Following the death of his parents he married his cousin Livia Veneziano, the daughter of a wealthy Italian who manufactured specialised industrial paints used on warships. In 1897 he became a partner in his father-in-law’s business and was quite successful in commercial activities, making profitable excursions to France and Germany, and setting up a branch of the company in England.

In 1898 he published his second novel Senilità (As a Man Grows Older). Both of these novels were largely ignored at the time, but in 1907 Svevo was enrolled at the Berlitz School of Languages to learn English, where his tutor was a twenty-five year old James Joyce, who had taken up exile in Trieste. Joyce read the novels and championed Svevo’s work. The two men became great friends.

However, Svevo was discouraged by his lack of literary success, and appears to have given up writing completely around that time. He devoted the next twenty-five years to his work as a representative for the family paint business in which, despite his cultural and intellectual interests, he was successfully enterprising. He lived for some time in the borough of Greenwich in south London, documenting the differences he encountered in Edwardian English culture in a series of letters he wrote to his wife: This England is So Different: Italo Svevo’s London Writings.

In 1925 when Svevo published La Conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), Joyce arranged for the work to be translated into French and published in Paris. The work was critically acclaimed and marked his first major success. He entered into a second phase of creativity and produced a number of stories, a novella, and an unfinished novel. He spent the last years of his life lecturing on his own work and writing Further Confessions of Zeno, which was never completed. In 1928 he was involved in a motoring accident in Trieste and he died a few days later from his injuries.


Italo Svevo – principal works

Italo Svevo 1893 – Una vita (A Life)

Italo Svevo 1898 – Senilità (As a Man Grows Older

Italo Svevo 1925 – La conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno)

Italo Svevo 1926 – La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla

Italo Svevo 1926 – Una burla riuscita (A Perfect Hoax)

Italo Svevo 1927 – La madre (The Mother)


Italo Svevo


Italo Svevo – study resources

Italo Svevo A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

Italo Svevo A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

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

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

Italo Svevo Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Italo Svevo Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

Italo Svevo Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2016


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Filed Under: Biography, Italo Svevo Tagged With: Cultural history, Italo Svevo, Literary studies, Modernism

Jacob’s Room

May 6, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Jacob’s Room (1922) was the first of Virginia Woolf’s novels that she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. She knew that the form of literary experimentation she contemplated would not be welcome by other publishers, so she took the opportunity to push her radical approach to narrative fiction as far as she could. The result was a big success in two senses. It produced a radical contribution to the modernist movement in a novel which sits coherently alongside other literary works such as T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). And it gave her the confidence to realise that she had succeeded in producing something new and original which expressed her own sense of an authentic ‘inner voice’.

I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time; no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, passion, humour, everything, as bright as fire in the mist. Then I’ll find room for so much—a gaiety—an inconsequence— a light spirited stepping at my sweet will. Whether I’m sufficiently mistress of things—that’s the doubt; but conceive Mark on the Wall, Kew Gardens, and Unwritten Novel taking hands and dancing in unity.

Virginia Woolf - portrait

Virginia Woolf


Jacob’s Room – critical commentary

Experimentation

This is the first of Virginia Woolf’s novels in which she made a radical and decisive shift away from conventional prose narrative. What the outcome would be, she wasn’t sure, but she realised that she was onto something quite new.

The most obvious innovation is that the narrative is discontinuous and the novel does not a have a plot in the conventional sense. The story starts on one topic or character, then switches to something or somebody else with no warning or explanation. Readers are dropped into a situation, and are left to work out the who, when, and where of the subject with very little assistance. Few clues are given, and after a few lines of developing a topic, Woolf changes it again to something else.

Connections between these fragments of narrative ultimately become perceptible, but only after a lot of patience and work on the reader’s part.

Point of view

There is also a repeatedly shifting point of view. A character such as Betty Flanders in the opening of the novel might be used as a focalising mechanism. We see events from her perspective or are presented with her inner thoughts – such as her ambiguous feelings about her correspondent and suitor Captain Barfoot. But then the narrative switches to present her not as the subject, but as the object of someone else’s point of view.

‘Scarborough,’ Mrs Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paint brush

Charles Steele has no connection with Betty, other than being on the beach at the same time, but for the next page or so we see Betty from his point of view as a figure in his painting, he speaks to Betty’s son, and we are given a glimpse into his thoughts about painting, and then he disappears and will never appear in the novel again.

Literary modernism

What is Virginia Woolf trying to achieve in this form of story telling? She had criticised contemporary fiction (particularly that of Arnold Bennett) in her 1919 essay Modern Novels because she thought most novelists failed to give a proper account of what life was like. They piled up fact after fact about their characters, but were unable to create any sense of the ‘pulse of life’ or the poetry of what it was like to be alive.

So her literary impressionism (or cubism?) was an attempt to give an account of the simultaneity of people’s existences as they lived alongside each other. Some connections were meaningful, others were no more than coincidence.

Interestingly enough, she uses the city as both a subject and symbol of modernism in exactly the same way as her contemporaries Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time (1913), Andrei Bely St Petersburg (1913), James Joyce Ulysses (1922), and Alfred Döblin Berlin Alexanderplatz, (1929).

The throngs of people flowing incessantly across Waterloo Bridge are offered as a compressed image of anonymous urban humanity in its many guises.

All the time the stream of people never ceases passing from the Surrey side to the Strand; from the Strand to the Surrey side. It seems as if the poor had gone raiding the town, and now traipsed back to their own quarters, like beetles scurrying to their holes, for that old woman fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a shiny bag, as if she had been out into the light and now made off with some scraped chicken bones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are hatless. They triumph.

Reflections and communication

But there are further elements to her technical experimentation. She added to her narrative strategies the device of embedding lyrically poetic reflections on life and the natural world – passages which are a combination of prose poem and philosophic meditation. Mrs Flanders and Jacob send letters to each other in an attempt at communication which often fails for Betty, because Jacob does not reveal his inner life (something many parents will recognise) but Woolf interrupts the story to reflect on written correspondence:

Let us consider letters—how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark—for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien.

Almost all the conversations between characters are fragmentary – snatches of speech which do little more than identify a subject and demonstrate that some attempt at communication is taking place, despite the fact that in many cases waht is revealed is a lack of understanding.

The flux of time

There are also some well-orchestrated temporal shifts which contribute to the destabilization of the narrative flow but reinforce the sense of ‘architecture’ Woolf said she wished to bring to the novel. Jacob and his brother Archer are tutored as a boys by the young clergyman Mr Floyd, who makes an unsuccessful offer of marriage to Mrs Flanders.

But the letter Mr Floyd found on the table when he got up early next morning did not begin ‘I am much surprised’, and it was such a motherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for many years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush of Andover; long after he had left the village.

The flash forward (technical term ‘prolepsis’) tells us that he later marries Miss Wimbush and leaves to live somewhere else. In fact within a short paragraph a potted life history gives the full trajectory of his future life as a clergyman, a college principal, and a writer, right up to his retirement, at which point he sees the mature Jacob in Piccadilly but does not speak to him.

Two hundred pages later, when the novel has followed Jacob’s development as a young man to (almost) full maturity the same incident is repeated, this time from Jacob’s point of view.

This fluid telescoping of time is also conducted at a macro level where the same scene might be described in the narrative present, then shift to consider how it might have seemed in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century.

Fragmentation

One problem in this technique of extreme fragmentation is that characters who seem important at one point in the narrative do not appear again and are not relevant to any major theme other than the fact that people’s lives sometimes overlap. There is no resolution to the Betty Flanders and Captain Barfoot connection for instance. He is an important suitor to Betty in the opening pages of the novel (even though he is already married – but to an invalid). But we never learn what happens to this connection. All it tells us is that Betty Flanders is obviously an attractive women to men of varied ages.

Woolf was to use all these techniques more successfully in her later works such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, where they seem to have been anchored more coherently to the characters and the underlying themes. But it is here that she was trying them out for the first time.


Jacob’s Room – study resources

Jacob's Room Jacob’s Room – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Jacob's Room Jacob’s Room – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Jacob's Room Jacob’s Room – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Jacob's Room Jacob’s Room – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Jacob's Room Jacob’s Room – the holograph draft – Amazon UK

Jacob's Room Jacob’s Room – Kindle annotated edition – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

Red button Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Jacob's Room


Jacob’s Room – plot summary

Virginia Woolf Jacob's RoomIt is extremely difficult to summarise the plot, for reasons that are made clear in the critical commentary above. Virginia Woolf was experimenting with a new form of narrative in which the ‘story’ shifts from one topic to another – even within the same paragraph or sentence. She tried to create a form of story telling in which several things are being discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity. This was not unlike the form of experimentation going on in the visual arts – particularly cubism, which strove to depict images of a single object from multiple points of view in the same two dimensional picture. For further comments on this feature of Virginia Woolf’s literary techniques, see my review article Virginia Woolf and Cubism.

Part I. Elizabeth (Betty) Flanders, recently widowed, is on holiday on a beach in Cornwall with her sons Archer and Jacob.

Part II. At home in Scarborough, Betty receives a marriage proposal from Reverend Floyd. Her friend Mrs Jarvis has romantic yearnings. Captain Barfoot (a married suitor) calls on Mrs Flanders.

Part III. Jacob goes to Trinity College Cambridge. He integrates with undergraduate life, though he’s a little awkward. Sunday lunch at a don’s house, and late night discussions with fellow students.

Part IV. Summer vacation. Jacob and his friend Timothy Durrant sail round the coast of Cornwall. They are present at a dinner party given by Timmy’s wealthy mother. He meets Clara Durrant.

Part V. Jacob in London after graduating, amidst scenes of metropolitan complexity. He visits the opera (Tristran and Isolde) with the Durrants. He writes a critical essay which is not published.

Part VI. Jacob socialises in London amidst artistic types. At November 5th celebrations he meets Florinda at a fancy dress party and takes her back to his lodgings.

Part VII. Jacob is present at a musical evening, and he meets Clara Durrant again.

Part VIII. Betty Flanders writes to Jacob, hoping for meaningful and substantial news. But Jacob does not reveal the essence of his life to her, which includes the fact that he realises that Florinda is a tart.

Part IX. Jacob goes hunting in Essex and socialises in upper middle class circles, and at the same times visits prostitutes. He also spends time in the British Museum Library, researching the poetry of Christopher Marlowe.

Part X. Ex-Slade School of Art student Fanny Elmer models for an artist and meets Jacob in his studio. She is deeply impressed with Jacob, and buys a copy of Tom Jones on his recommendation.

Part XI. Jacob inherits £100 from a relative and goes to France with his artistic friends. Betty Flanders visits the Scarborough moors with her friend Mrs Jarvis.

Part XII. Jacob travels on alone through Italy and Greece, writing to his friend Bonamy. He meets fellow English tourists Mr and Mrs Wentworth Williams and falls in love with the wife, Sandra.

Part XIII. The principal characters are seen in London during the summer. Bonamy’s gay infatuation with Jacob is made clear.

Part XIV. Bonamy and Betty Flanders clear out Jacob’s room following his death during the war.


Jacob’s Room – principal characters
Elizabeth (Betty) Flanders widow from Scarborough (45)
Archer Flanders her eldest son
Jacob Alan Flanders her middle son
John Flanders her youngest son
Charles Steele a painter on the beach in Cornwall
Mrs Pearce Cornish lodging house owner
Rebecca family servant
Captain Barfoot Betty’s correspondent and suitor (50)
Mrs Barfoot an invalid, his wife
Mr Dickens Mrs Barfoot’s wheelchair attendant
Seabrook Flanders Betty’s dead husband
Morty Betty’s brother who goes to the East
Andrew Floyd young clergyman and suitor to Betty
Mrs Jarvis Betty’s friend, a romantic and needy clergyman’s wife
Timothy (Timmy) Durrant Jacob’s friend at Cambridge who becomes a clerk in Whitehall
George Plummer Cambridge don and professor of physics
Mrs Plummer his wife
Mrs Pascoe a Cornish woman
Mrs Durrant Timmy’s rich mother
Clara Durrant Timmy’s sister
Richard Bonamy Jacob’s gay friend at Cambridge
Florinda a loose girl in bohemian London
Lauretta a prostitute
Fanny Elmer an ex-Slade student who falls for Jacob
Edward Cruttendon a friend of Jacob’s
Mallinson a painter friend of Jacob’s
Jinny Carslake a friend on the trip to Paris
Sandra Wentworth Williams flirtatious woman in hotel in Greece
Evan Williams her jealous husband

Jacob's Room

first edition, 1922 – cover design Vanessa Bell


Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Virginia Woolf's handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”


Other works by Virginia Woolf

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

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US


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

© Roy Johnson 2012


Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, English literature, Jacob's Room, Literary studies, The novel, Virginia Woolf

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