Tutorials

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biography, guidance notes, and literary criticism

This comes from a new series by Routledge which offers comprehensive but single-volume introductions to major English writers. They are aimed at students of literature, but are accessible to general readers who might like to deepen their literary understanding. The approach taken could not be more straightforward. Part one of the Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad is a potted biography, placing Conrad’s life and work in its socio-historical context. Thus we get his early years in Poland, his career as a seaman, his influences and ambitions, and his (relatively slow) rise to fame as a novelist. One of the interesting features of Conrad’s development as a writer is that his early novels were largely adult versions of boy’s adventure stories.

However, as his work became richer he tackled themes of intense political complexity. Read Heart of Darkness today and you would swear it had been written quite recently. Part two provides a synoptic view of his stories and novels. The works are described in outline, and then their main themes illuminated. This is followed by pointers towards the main critical writings on these texts and issues. I must say that reading through the synopses of some of his lesser known works made me want to go back to them again.

Part three deals with criticism of Conrad’s work. This is presented in chronological order – from contemporaries such as Richard Curle and his collaborator Ford Madox Ford, via early champions such as F.R. Leavis and Albert Guerard, to critics of the present day, with the focus on colonial and post-colonial criticism.

The book ends with a chronology of his life, a commendably thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Conrad journals.

This is an excellent starting point for students who are new to Conrad’s work – and a refresher course for those who would like to keep up to date with criticism.

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Tim Middleton, The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad, London: Routledge, 2006, pp.201, ISBN 0415268524

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Twentieth century literature
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Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biography, guidance notes, and literary criticism

This Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett comes from a new series by Routledge which offers comprehensive but single-volume introductions to major English writers. In this case it’s a writer who was Irish, who wrote in English, then in French, then translated his own work back into English. It is a guide aimed at students of literature, but it’s also accessible to general readers who might like to deepen their understanding.

The approach taken could not be more straightforward. Part one is a potted biography of Beckett, placing his life and work in a socio-historical context. Thus we get his early influences and his move from Trinity College Dublin to life in Paris working as secretary to James Joyce. We are also nursed through an introduction to the literary Modernist movement of which he formed an important part. Part two provides a synoptic view of Beckett’s stories, novels, plays, and poetry.

The works are described in outline, and then their main themes illuminated. This is followed by pointers towards the main critical writings on these texts and issues. Beckett is not an easy writer to categorise. We think of him mainly as a dramatist – but he is equally influential (if not so highly regarded) as a writer of novellas and short stories.

Part three deals with criticism of Beckett’s work. This is presented in chronological order – from the work of the 1960s which sought to explain what seemed at the time an odd view of the world, to critics of the present day.

The book ends with a commendably thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist journals.

This is an excellent starting point for students who are new to Beckett’s work – and a refresher course for those who would like to keep up to date with criticism. These guides have proved to be very popular. Strongly recommended.

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David Pattie, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, London: Routledge, 2000, pp.220, ISBN: 041520254X

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Twentieth century literature
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D.H.Lawrence close reading

March 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

a tutorial in literary analysis

This tutorial features a close reading exercise on the opening two paragraphs of D.H.Lawrence’s story Fanny and Annie, taken from his collection England, My England which was first published in 1922. It tells the story of a young woman Fanny, returning with some trepidation to her home town in the north of England, to meet her young man, Harry.

In the tutorial notes that follow, each sentence is considered separately, with comments highlighting whichever features of the prose seem noteworthy. The focus of attention is largely on Lawrence’s choice of vocabulary and some of the rhetorical devices he employs.

A close reading exercise is not a guessing game or a treasure hunt: it is an attempt to understand the mechanisms by which a narrative is constructed and its meanings generated. However, a really successful close reading can only be made when you know the work as a whole. So, if you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

Fanny and Annie

D.H.Lawrence – portrait

Fanny and Annie – the text

Flame-lurid his face as he turned among the throng of flame-lit and dark faces upon he platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting countenance, like a piece of floating fir. And the nostalgia, the doom of homecoming went through her veins like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now! The pulse and darkness of red fire from the furnace towers in the sky, lighting the desultory industrial crowd on the wayside station, lit him and went out.

Of course he did not see her. Flame-lit and unseeing! Always the same with his meeting eyebrows, his common cap, and his red-and-black scarf knotted round his throat. Not even a collar to meet her! The flames had sunk, there was shadow.

D.H.Lawrence close reading

01. In the first sentence Lawrence plunges straight into the use of alliteration and repetition to give dramatic emphasis to his scene. ‘Flame-lurid his face’ is the first of many alliterative uses of f and l in the passage, and the term flame is repeated within the sentence at ‘flame-lit’. Moreover the single word ‘flame’ itself contains the two alliterated letters. This is very much in keeping with the theme of the story, which is about sexual passion and the physical attraction between Fanny and Harry, despite her reservations about his status as a working-class male. Fire, heat, and flame are all traditionally associated with passion.

Moreover, ‘lurid’ is a rather emotionally charged term – an item of vocabulary taken very much from the literary register. Note too that the sentence lacks a main verb: there is an implied (but missing) verb was in ‘Flame-lurid his face’.

And the term ‘upon’, where today we would just write ‘on’, gives the sentence quite a serious tone: it has an almost Biblical ring to it. Lawrence was very influenced by his non-conformist religious background, and uses lots of its imagery in his work.

02. ‘Furnace’ and ‘floating fire’ continue the use of alliteration. They lend an incantatory rhythm to the narrative voice, which is actually giving Fanny’s point of view.

A simile is used to compare his face (poetically described as ‘his drifting countenance’) with the piece of fire. And ‘drifting’ here seems to carry two meanings: both literally as in ‘moving along the platform’, and metaphorically as ‘independent and untroubled’. We subsequently learn that this is how Fanny perceives Harry. ‘Countenance’ is another literary and quasi-Biblical term. And ‘a piece of floating fire’ is a fairly striking image – but perfectly in keeping with the charged manner of Fanny’s perceptions.

03. Following ‘nostalgia’ the term ‘doom of homecoming’ is almost a tautology, but Lawrence is obviously piling on emphasis here – as the onomatopoetic ‘doom’ illustrates. ‘Doom’ gives a sense of heavy inevitability, as though her life is predictably blighted by her origins.

Note too that he is using the phenomenon of nostalgia in its negative sense (it can mean both ‘homesickness’ or ‘sentimental regret’.) The simile ‘like a drug’ is another strongly emotive comparison.

04. The adjective ‘eternal’ is used to powerful effect here as it again suggests inevitability. The word ties in with the biblical vocabulary noted earlier. ‘Eternal’ usually describes God and therefore it is positive, but in the context of the passage it works in a negative way to suggest that Fanny feels trapped.

I take it to represent Fanny’s annoyance: she does after all resent the fact that she is having to come back to Harry. And I support this reading by pointing to Lawrence’s use of the exclamation mark to indicate that the sentence is a segment of narrative written from Fanny’s point of view.

05. ‘The pulse and darkness of red fire’ gives a very strong impressionistic image in the sense that although very literally red fire cannot possess darkness, we know that Lawrence means alternating periods of lightness and dark. And the terms ‘pulse’, ‘darkness’, ‘red’, and ‘fire’ are all charged with very elemental connotations relating to life in a very primitive sense. This is appropriate as it is an important point in Fanny’s emotional development.

06. ‘Of course’ is rather conversational in tone, and it is an expression which reinforces the fact that we are seeing the events from Fanny’s point of view.

07. ‘Flame-lit’ is the fifth occasion of the f/l alliteration in these two paragraphs: this is Lawrence being unashamedly rhetorical in his prose style. Rhetoric is ‘the art of speakers or writers to persuade, inform, or motivate their audience’. Here Lawrence is using these rhetorical devices to show Fanny’s emotional turmoil. .

‘Unseeing’ is another term which is not immediately clear: I take it to mean ‘not paying attention’. In Fanny’s implied voice, this is a statement of bitter irony where ‘flame-lit’ is ‘literally juxtaposed with ‘unseeing’, suggesting that he is blinded by his own light. The sentence as a whole is another which is very impressionistic — incomplete in the strictly grammatical sense.

08. This sentence too omits an implied ‘He was’ at its beginning: (the technical term for this device is elision). ‘Meeting’ is being transferred from its use as a verb to be an adjective. The effect of this is to animate his features by implying that the eyebrows are conscious, and ‘meeting’ each other.

09. This is another grammatically incomplete sentence in which, apart from the last word ‘her’, we are almost in Fanny’s mind. Lawrence is using a form of stream of consciousness here to reflect the technical incompleteness and sometimes fragmentary nature of our thoughts. His third exclamation mark reinforces this impression.

10. The very absence of rhetorical devices in this sentence seems to indicate that Lawrence is preparing the reader for a transition to a less highly charged and impressionistic narrative manner. This proves to be the case in the next part of the story.

Selected Stories of D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK

The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird – Amazon UK

Close reading – general

In your own close reading of this text you might have noticed features different than those listed here. These points are just examples of what can be said and claimed about a text, and help us to understand the technical details of how prose fictions work.

In literary studies there are various types of close reading. It is possible and rewarding to scrutinise a text closely, keeping any number of its features in mind. These can reveal various layers of significance in the work which might not be apparent on a superficial reading. You might focus attention on the text’s –

language
meaning
structure
philosophy

The most advanced forms of close reading combine all these features in an effort to reveal the full and even hidden meanings in a work.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the language you will need for studying prose fiction. It explains the elements of literary analysis one at a time, then shows you how to apply them. The guidance starts off with simple issues of language, then progresses to more complex literary criticism.The volume contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent tales in their own right. The guidance on this site was written by the same author.
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Close reading tutorials

Sample close reading of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

Sample close reading of Katherine Mansfield’s The Voyage

Sample close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday

Other work by D.H.Lawrence

Sons and Lovers This is Lawrence’s first great novel. It’s a quasi-autobiographical account of a young man’s coming of age in the early years of the twentieth century. Set in working class Nottinghamshire, it focuses on class conflicts and gender issues as young Paul Morrell is torn between a passionate relationship with his mother and his attraction to other women. He also has a quasi-Oedipal conflict with his coal miner father. If you are new to Lawrence and his work, this is a good place to start. This novel has become a classic of early twentieth-century literature.
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The Rainbow This is Lawrence’s version of a family saga, spanning three generations of the Brangwen family in the north of England. It is the women characters in this novel who remain memorable as they strive to express their feelings and break free of traditions. The story concludes with the struggle of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, to liberate themselves from the stifling pressures of Edwardian English society. The two young women also feature in his next and some say greatest novel, Women in Love – so it would be a good idea to read this first.
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D.H.Lawrence – web links

D.H.Lawrence at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, study guides, videos, bibliographies, critical studies, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the novels, stories, travel writing, and poetry – available in a variety of formats.

D.H.Lawrence at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, publishing history, the Lady Chatterley trial, critical reputation, bibliography, archives, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of Lawrence’s work for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production, box office, trivia, and even quizzes.

D.H.Lawrence archive at the University of Nottingham
Biography, further reading, textual genetics, frequently asked questions, his local reputation, research centre, bibliographies, and lists of holdings.

D.H.Lawrence and Eastwood
Nottinhamshire local enthusiast web site featuring biography, historical and recent photographs of the Eastwood area and places associated with Lawrence.

The World of D.H.Lawrence
Yet another University of Nottingham web site featuring biography, interactive timeline, maps, virtual tour, photographs, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence Heritage
Local authority style web site, with maps, educational centre, and details of lectures, visits, and forthcoming events.

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D.H.Lawrence web links

December 9, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

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

D.H.Lawrence – web links

D.H.Lawrence at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, study guides, videos, bibliographies, critical studies, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the novels, stories, travel writing, and poetry – available in a variety of formats.

D.H.Lawrence at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, publishing history, the Lady Chatterley trial, critical reputation, bibliography, archives, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence and Eastwood
Nottinhamshire local enthusiast web site featuring biography, historical and recent photographs of the Eastwood area and places associated with Lawrence.

The World of D.H.Lawrence
Yet another University of Nottingham web site featuring biography, interactive timeline, maps, virtual tour, photographs, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence Heritage
Local authority style web site, with maps, educational centre, and details of lectures, visits, and forthcoming events.

The Cambridge Companion to Lawrence contains fourteen chapters by leading international scholars. These specially-commissioned essays offer diverse and stimulating readings of Lawrence’s major novels, short stories, poetry and plays, and place Lawrence’s writing in a variety of literary, cultural, and political contexts, such as modernism, sexual and ethnic identity, and psychoanalysis. The concluding chapter addresses the vexed history of Lawrence’s critical reception throughout the twentieth century. Features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

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Daisy Miller

November 4, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Daisy Miller is one of Henry James’s most famous stories. It was first published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1878 by Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) and became instantly popular. It was reprinted several times within a couple of years, and it was even pirated in Boston and New York. On the surface it’s a simple enough tale of a spirited young American girl visiting Europe. She is a product of the New World, but her behaviour doesn’t sit easily with the more conservative manners of her fellow expatriates in Europe. She pushes the boundaries of acceptable behaviour to the limit, and ultimately the consequences are tragic.

the Colosseum in moonlight

Daisy Miller – critical commentary

Story or novella?

Daisy Miller represents a difficult case for making distinctions between the long short story and the novella. Henry James himself called it a ‘short chronicle’, but as a matter of fact it was rejected by the first publisher he sent it to on the grounds that it was a ‘nouvelle’ – that is, too long to be a short story, and not long enough to be a novel.

It should be remembered that the concept of the novella only emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, and publishers were sceptical about its commercial appeal. This was the age of three-volume novels, serial publications, and magazine stories which were written to be read at one sitting.

If it is perceived as a long short story, then the basic narrative line becomes ‘a young American girl is too forthright for her own good in unfamiliar surroundings and eventually dies as a result’. This seems to trivialize the subject matter, and reduce it to not much more than a cautionary anecdote.

The case for regarding it as a novella is much stronger. Quite apart from the element of length (30,000 words approximately) it is a highly structured work. It begins with Winterbourne’s arrival from Geneva, and it ends with his return there. It has two settings – Vevey and Rome. Daisy travels from Switzerland ‘over the mountains’ into Italy and Rome, one of the main centres of the Grand Tour. And it has two principal characters – Winterbourne and Daisy. It also has two interlinked subjects. One is overt – Winterbourne’s attempt to understand Daisy’s character. The second is more complex and deeply buried – class mobility, and the relationship between Europe and America.

Class mobility

Daisy’s family are representatives of New Money. Her father, Ezra B. Miller is a rich industrialist. He has made his money in unfashionable but industrial Schenectady, in upstate New York. Having made that money, the family have wintered in fashionable New York City. This nouveau riche experience has given Daisy the confidence to feel that she can act as she wishes.

But the upper-class social group in which she is mixing have a different set of social codes. They are in fact imitating those of the European aristocracy to which they aspire. In this group a young woman should be chaperoned in public, and she must not even appear to spend too long in the company of an eligible bachelor because this might compromise her reputation.

Daisy has the confidence and the social dynamism provided by her father’s industrial-based money back in Schenectady, but she is denied permanent entry into the upper-class society in which she is mixing because she flouts its codes of behaviour.

Conversely, Winterbourne is attracted to Daisy’s frank and open manner, but he does not understand her – until it is too late. In fact he fails to recognise the clear opportunities she offers him to make a fully engaged relationship, and as she rightly observes, he is ‘too stiff’ to shift from his conservative attitudes. The text does not make clear his source of income, but he obviously feels at home with the upper-class American expatriates, and his return to Geneva at the end of the novella to resume his ‘studies’ underscores his wealthy dilettantism.

He is trapped in his upper-class beliefs in a way that Daisy is not in hers. She has the confidence of having made a transition from one class into another at a higher level. She has a foot in both camps – but her tragedy is that she fails to recognise that she cannot enjoy the benefits of the higher class without accepting the restrictions membership will impose on her behaviour.

Daisy Miller – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

Daisy Miller – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Daisy Miller – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Daisy Miller – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon UK

Daisy Miller – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

Daisy Miller – Cliff’s Notes – Amazon UK

Daisy Miller – DVD film version – Amazon UK

Daisy Miller – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Daisy Miller – plot summary

Part I. Frederick Winterbourne, an American living in Geneva is visiting his aunt in Vevey, on Lake Leman. In the hotel garden he meets Daisy Miller via her young brother Randolph. He is much taken with her good looks, but puzzled by her forthright conversation. He offers to show her the Castle of Chillon at the end of the lake.

Part II. Mrs Costello, his rather snobbish aunt warns him against the Miller family on the grounds that they lack social cachet. When he visits the castle with Daisy she teases him, offers to take him on as tutor to Rudolph, and is annoyed when he reveals that he must leave the next day. Nevertheless she invites him to visit her in Italy later that year.

Part III. Some weeks later on his arrival in Rome, Winterbourne’s friend Mrs Walker warns him that Daisy is establishing a dubious reputation because of her socially unconventional behaviour. Daisy joins them, and Winterbourne insists on accompanying her when she leaves to join a friend alone in public. He disapproves of the friend Signor Giovanelli who he sees as a lower-class fortune hunter, and Mrs Walker even tries to prevent Daisy from being seen alone in public with men.

Part IV. The American expatriate community resent Daisy’s behaviour, and Mrs Walker then snubs her publicly at a party they all attend. Winterbourne tries to warn Daisy that she is breaking the social conventions, but she insists that she is doing nothing wrong or dishonourable. He defends Daisy’s friendship with Signor Giovanelli to her American critics. Finally, Winterbourne encounters Daisy with Giovanelli viewing the Colosseum by moonlight. Winterbourne insists that she go back to the hotel to avoid a scandal. She goes under duress, but she has in fact contracted malaria (‘Roman Fever’) from which she dies a few days later. At the funeral Giovanelli reveals to Winterbourne that he knew that Daisy would never have married him. Winterbourne realises that he has made a mistake in his assessment of Daisy, but he ‘nevertheless’ returns to live in Geneva.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Daisy Miller – principal characters

Frederick Forsyth Winterbourne	a young (27) American expatriate of independent means who purports to be studying in Geneva
Ezra B. Miller	a wealthy American industrial businessman (who does not appear in the story)
Mrs Miller	his wife, who is a hypochondriac
Annie P. (‘Daisy’) Miller	their spirited daughter
Randolph C. Miller	her outspoken nine-year-old brother
Eugenio	tall and distinguished courier and factotum to the Millers in Europe
Mrs Costello	Winterbourne’s snobbish aunt in Vevey – a ‘widow of fortune’
Mrs Walker	Winterbourne’s friend in Rome
Sig Giovanelli	Daisy’s friend in Rome – a solicitor

Daisy Miller – film adaptation

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich (1974)

Starring Cybill Shepherd and Barry Brown

Daisy Miller – further reading

Biographical

Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James, London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

William T. Stafford (ed), James’s Daisy Miller: The story, the play, the critics, New York: Scribner, 1963.

Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

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David Garnett biography

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

author, editor, bookshop owner

David Garnett (1892-1981) was the son of Edward Garnett, an influential publisher’s reader and Constant Garnett, a translator who did a great deal to popularise the Russian classics in England. He first met members of the Bloomsbury group in 1910, but was not a regular member until 1914 when he became Duncan Grant’s lover.

Like most of the members of the Bloomsbury group, Garnett was a pacifist. In order to be exempted from military service during World War I, he and Duncan Grant moved to Wissett in the Suffolk countryside to become farm labourers. Although they were at first refused exemption by a tribunal, they appealed and were eventually recognised as conscientious objectors.

When Duncan Grant formed his lifelong relationship with Vanessa Bell, Garnett went to live with them at Charleston. What happened after that fully illustrates the complex personal relationships which characterise the Bloomsbury Group and the behaviour of its members. First of all in 1918, Vanessa gave birth to a child Angelica, which was fathered by Duncan Grant. But because Vanessa was still married to Clive Bell, the child was given to believe that Clive Bell was her father – a deception which was to have problematic consequences.

At Angelica’s birth, Garnett admired the child and wrote to Lytton Strachey “I think of marrying it. When she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?”

Quentin Bell was one of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury circle. In Bloomsbury Recalled he offers a candid portrait gallery of major and peripheral Bloomsbury figures. His father, Clive Bell, married the author’s mother, Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s sister) in 1907 but pursued love affairs while Vanessa, after a clandestine affair with art critic Roger Fry, lived openly with bisexual painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter. Clive, Duncan and Vanessa were reunited under one roof in 1939, and the author conveys a sense of the emotional strain of growing up in ‘a multi-parent family’. Along with chapters on John Maynard Keynes, Ottoline Morrell and art historian-spy Anthony Blunt, there are glimpses of Lytton Strachey, novelist David Garnett, and Dame Ethel Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.

Garnett operated a bookshop in Soho. In 1923 he married Rachel (Ray) Alice Marshall, a book illustrator. He had a success with his first novel Lady into Fox (1922) and its follow-ups A Man in the Zoo (1924) and The Sailor’s Return (1925).

When the marriage to Ray Marshall failed, he turned his attentions back to Angelica Bell (really Angelica Grant) who was now growing up. When she became nineteen, she found out the truth of her father’s true identity. A year later she married Garnett, her father’s former lover, just as he had profetically suggested twenty years earlier. This relationship was disapproved of by her mother Vanessa Bell, and it caused a rift between them which lasted for years. Angelica Garnett gives her side of this odd story in her memoir of Bloomsbury childhood, Deceived with Kindness.

Garnett also edited the letters of T.E.Lawrence and the novels of Thomas Love Peacock. Later in life he produced three autobiographical volumes: The Golden Echo (1953), The Flowers of the Forest (1955), and The Familiar Faces (1962).

Bloomsbury Group – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature

De Grey: A Romance

August 1, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

De Grey: A Romance first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for July 1868. It was not reprinted during James’s lifetime, and next appeared in the collection Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919.

De Grey – critical commentary

This tale is not much more than a sentimental anecdote, told in very general terms with very little attempt to provide concrete historical detail or even a realistic setting. James was only twenty-five years old and in his apprenticeship phase, writing for popular magazines such as The Galaxy. Even he seemed to be aware of the shortcomings in his work at that time:

I write little & only tales, which I think it likely I shall continue to manufacture in a hackish manner, for that which is bread. They cannot of necessity be very good; but they shall not be very bad.

The only points of interest in this particular tale are buried deep within its chronology. Mr De Grey has been great friends with Father Herbert, but they quarrelled – possibly ‘over a woman’. There is also an implication that Mr De Grey’s life had been ‘blighted by an unhappy love affair’ with the woman in the small portrait who died thirty-four year previously. “George De Grey met and loved, September 1786, Antonietta Gambini, of Milan”. This is the same period in which De Grey travelled in Italy with his close friend Herbert, so Miss Gambini might be the woman over whom they quarrelled.

Both Paul and his father appear to be victims of the family curse: their first loves die (both Italian girls). Whilst touring Europe Paul formed a relationship with Miss L, who died in Naples – so Paul is following in the family tradition. But then Paul’s father dies within one year of marrying Paul’s mother, and Paul dies shortly before his marriage to Margaret.

It is interesting to note that if Mrs De Grey is sixty-seven and Paul is (say) in his twenties, he was conceived when she was in her early forties.. And yet Mr De Grey dies (from ‘repeated sensual excesses’) by the time he is thirty-five, and he must therefore have been much younger than his wife.

De Grey: A Romance – Study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

De Grey: A Romance – see the original text

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

De Grey: A Romance – plot summary

Mrs De Grey is a rich sixty-seven year old widow who lives a socially isolated life. Her catholic priest Father Herbert is tutor to her son Paul, who has no profession or ambition but is idolised by his mother. Whilst Paul is away touring Europe Mrs De Grey begins to feel lonely. She takes a poor girl Margaret Aldis as a companion, who blossoms under her patronage. Father Herbert is deeply smitten with the girl.

Margaret becomes enchanted by the very idea of Paul. She reads his letters to Mrs De Grey, closely watched by Father Herbert. Paul writes telling them that his engagement to an Italian girl has been broken off, and the girl later dies.

When Paul returns everyone is very impressed with his development. Paul and Margaret spend a lot of time together, talking about each other’s lives, and eventually falling in love. However, Father Herbert reveals to her that the family has a long tradition of male heirs forming relationships with women who die within a year. Margaret decides to defy the curse, throwing herself enthusiastically into preparations for the marriage.

But one day she suddenly collapses in pain. She recovers, but then Paul falls ill. She feels as if she is taking her life from him. He goes out riding and falls from his horse. Margaret finds him, and he admits that she is killing him. He dies, and she becomes distracted.

De Grey – principal characters

Mrs De Grey	a handsome Irish woman (67)
Father Herbert	her friend, an English Catholic priest and scholar
Paul De Grey	her American son
Margaret Aldis	her young companion

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.
Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Death in Venice

February 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, video, further reading

Death in Venice (1913) is a classic novella – half way between a long story and a short novel. It’s a wonderfully condensed tale of the relationship between art and life, as well as love and death. Venice provides the background for the story of a famous writer Von Aschenbach who departs from his usual routines, falls in love with a beautiful young boy, and gets caught up in a subtle downward spiral of indulgence. The unity of themes, form, and motifs are superbly realised – even though Mann wrote this when he was quite young.

Thomas Mann

Death in Venice – plot summary

Gustav von Aschenbach is a famous author in his early fifties. He is a widower, dedicated to his art, and disciplined to the point of severity. While strolling outside a cemetery in his native Munich he has a disturbing encounter with a red-haired man, after which he resolves to take a trip. He reserves a suite in the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido island of Venice. While en route to the island by vaporetto, he sees an elderly man with a wig, false teeth, makeup, and foppish attire, which disgusts him. Soon afterwards he has a disturbing encounter with a gondolier.

At dinner in his hotel he sees an aristocratic Polish family at a nearby table. Among them is an adolescent boy in a sailor suit. Aschenbach is startled to realize that the boy is beautiful. His sisters, however, are so severely dressed that they look like nuns.

The hot, humid weather of Venice begins to affect Aschenbach’s health, and he decides to leave early and move to a more salubrious location. On the morning of his departure however, he sees Tadzio again, and a powerful feeling of regret sweeps over him. When he reaches the railway station he discovers his trunk has been misdirected. Secretly overjoyed; he decides to remain in Venice and wait for his lost luggage. He returns to the hotel, and thinks no more of leaving.

Over the next days and weeks, Aschenbach’s interest in the beautiful boy develops into an obsession. He watches him constantly, and secretly follows him around Venice. One evening, the boy directs a charming smile at him. Disconcerted, Aschenbach rushes outside, and in the empty garden whispers aloud, “I love you!”

Aschenbach next takes a trip into the city of Venice, where he sees a few discreetly worded notices from the Health Department warning of an unspecified contagion and advising people to avoid eating shellfish. He smells an unfamiliar strong odour everywhere, and later realises it is disinfectant. However, tourists continue to wander round the city, apparently oblivious.

Aschenbach at first ignores the danger because it somehow pleases him to think that the city’s disease is akin to his own hidden, corrupting passion for the boy. During this period, another red-haired, disreputable-looking man crosses Aschenbach’s path – a street singer who entertains at the hotel one night. Aschenbach listens entranced to songs that, in his former life, he would have despised – all the while stealing glances at Tadzio, who is leaning on a nearby parapet in a classically beautiful pose.

Aschenbach decides to uncover the reason for the health notices posted in the city so he can warn Tadzio’s mother. After being repeatedly assured that the sirocco is the only health risk, he finds a British travel agent who reluctantly admits that there is a serious cholera epidemic in Venice. Aschenbach, however, funks his resolution to warn the Polish family, knowing that if he does, Tadzio will leave the hotel and be lost to him.

One night, a dream filled with orgiastic imagery reveals to him the sexual nature of his feelings for Tadzio. Afterwards, he begins staring at the boy so openly and following him so persistently that the boy’s guardians finally notice, and take to warning Tadzio whenever he approaches too closely. But Aschenbach’s feelings, though passionately intense, remain unvoiced; and while there is some indication that Tadzio is aware of his admiration, the two exchange nothing more than the occasional glance.

Aschenbach begins to fret about his aging face and body. In an attempt to look more attractive, he visits the hotel’s barber shop almost daily, where the barber eventually persuades him to have his hair dyed and his face painted to look more youthful. Freshly dyed and rouged, he again shadows Tadzio through Venice in the oppressive heat. He loses sight of the boy in the heart of the city; then, exhausted and thirsty, he buys and eats some over-ripe strawberries and rests in an abandoned square, contemplating the Platonic ideal of beauty amidst the ruins of his own once-formidable dignity.

A few days later Aschenbach feels ill and weak, and discovers that the Polish family plan to leave after lunch. He goes down to the beach to his usual deck chair. Tadzio is there accompanied by an older boy. Tadzio leaves his companion and wades over to Aschenbach’s part of the beach, where he stands for a moment looking out to sea; then turns around to look at his admirer. To Aschenbach, it is as if the boy is beckoning to him: he tries to rise and follow, only to collapse back into his chair. His body is discovered a few minutes later. When news of his death becomes public, the world decorously mourns the passing of a great artist.

Death in Venice – study resources

Death in Venice – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Death in Venice – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Death in Venice – Kindle eBook edition – Amazon UK

Thomas Mann – biographical notes

Der Tod in Venedig – eBook (in German) at Project Gutenberg – [FREE]

The novella – study notes

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann – Amazon UK

Death in Venice – the 1971 Luchino Visconti film – Amazon UK

Death in Venice – unabridged audioBook edition – Amazon UK

Thomas Mann at Wikipedia – biographical notes and web links

Thomas Mann at Mantex – tutorials, web links, and study resources

Death in Venice – film adaptation – I

Luchino Visconti – 1971

Visconti produced a visually glamorous version of Mann’s novella which captures the original very faithfully. Shimmering scenes of the Venice lido are interspersed with menacing glimpses of the impending plague. The film is famous for two features – the spectacular use of a slowed-down version of the adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony as a sound track, and the outstanding performance of Dirk Bogard as the ageing Gustav von Aschenbach – one of his last and greatest screen performances. Visconti takes the liberty of transforming Aschenbach from a writer into a composer, but the film as a whole is a visually spectacular rendering of the original story.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Mont Blanc – Thomas Mann special edition

Opera adaptation

Benjamin Britten 1973

Classical references

Achelous	chief river deity
Cephalus	one of the lovers of the dawn goddess Eos
Cleitos	officer of Alexander the Great
Elisium	final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous
Eros	the primordial god of sexual love and beauty
Hades	the ancient Greek underworld, and its God
Hyacinthus	a beautiful young man admired by the god Apollo and the West Wind, Zephyr
Kritobulous	son of Crito, who was friend of Socrates
Mercury	a messenger, and god of trade, profit and commerce
Narcissus	a beautiful youth, changed by Echo into a flower
Orion	a giant huntsman
Phaeax	son of Poseidon and Cercyra
Phaedrus	a friend of Socrates
Poseidon	god of the sea – and earthquakes
Zephyr	god of the west wind

Other works by Thomas Mann

Mario and the Magician
Using settings as varied as Germany, Italy, the Holy Land and the Far East, these stories explore a theme which always preoccupied Thomas Mann – “the two faces of things”. Written between 1918 and 1953, they offer an insight the development of his thought. The title story concerns a German family on holiday in Italy who fall under the hypnotic spell of a brutal magician. It is often seen as a warning against the seductive power of fascism.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
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The Magic Mountain
This is a curious but impressive novel, written on either side of the First World War. The setting is a sanatorium in the Alps – a community organized with exclusive reference to ill-health. There the characters discuss love, politics, and philosophy. Much of the novels ‘activity’ is intellectual debate between characters such as Settembrini and Naphta (who are said to represent Mann’s brother Heinrich and the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs respectively). It’s an intellectual drama of the forces which play upon modern man. Don’t expect tension or plot in the conventional sense. The novel also marks a transition in Mann’s political philosophy – from a conservative to a more liberal ideology.

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Deceived with Kindness

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

insider victim’s take of Bloomsbury goings-on

Angelica Garnett is the daughter of Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant. At the time of Angelica’s birth, Vanessa was still married to Clive Bell, so Angelica was passed off to the world as his daughter, though many people in the inner circle of the Bloomsbury Group knew the truth. This crucial fact of her provenance was concealed from her until she was nineteen years old – whereupon she ‘avenged’ herself on the family by marrying David Garnett, who had been her father’s lover even before she was born.

This was the central drama of her life, and this memoir is her side of the story. But it is also a vivid recollection of being raised in the heart of all that was Bloomsbury. She starts with a psychological portrait of her mother, childhood memories of living at the family home Charleston amongst Vanessa, Clive, Duncan, and their friends Roger Fry and relatives Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. There are also idyllic holidays in France which seem to come from a bygone era.

At first, when she deals with the deception perpetrated by Vanessa, Clive, and Duncan she lets them all off quite lightly, providing them with convenient excuses and admitting (rather surprisingly, but par for this course) that her own true father’s feelings are unknown to her.

There are lots of very charming scenes: life in Gordon Square, being washed in the bath by Maynard Keynes; Christmas with her ‘grandparents’ the Bells, surrounded by cooks, housemaids, and servants. There are some very lyrical episodes evoking upper-class life which although taking place in the 1920s might as well have been the late Victorian or early Edwardian period.

Some of her most perceptive passages are those in which she describes the relationship between her mother’s artistic theories and her practice as an artist. The fact for instance that since Vanessa considered the subject matter of pictorial art unimportant, it was unnecessary for her to go any further than the bottom of the garden to find something worth painting.

There are extended portraits of Clive Bell and Duncan Grant, though it is odd that neither of them is referred to as ‘father’ – even though throughout the whole of her childhood Bell had been falsely ascribed to her as such.

On the subject of her aunt Virginia Woolf she wonders if she had ever made love to her husband Leonard. Yet she is writing as an adult, by which time she would have not only known the answer, but also that Virginia had also slept with Vita Sackville-West. The book is a charming evocation of a privileged youth, but for an in depth knowledge of its subjects, additional sources are definitely required.

She saves the most dramatic part of her story for last. Her very unequal relationship with David Garnett (she was twenty-six years younger) takes place against a backdrop of family disapproval, the onset of the second world war, and the suicide of her aunt Virginia.

Despite the apparent sophistication of the Bloomsbury set, most of the adults behave badly in concealing the important details of their former liaisons from her, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. She is at her most insightful in analysing the shortcomings of her mother, her father, and her husband – all conspirators against her psychological wellbeing.

After one hundred and fifty pages of indulgence and lyric evocation of a privileged upbringing, I finally began to admire her and it made this Bloomsbury memoir worth reading after all.

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Angelica Garnett, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, London: Pimlico, new edition 1995, p.192, ISBN: 0712662669

More on biography
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Twentieth century literature

Decline and Fall

March 24, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Decline and Fall (1928) was Evelyn Waugh’s first novel. It was very well received on first publication, and he followed it up with similar acerbic social satires in Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). Waugh is probably best known for his later novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) which was the basis of a very successful television series. But Decline and Fall has the distinction of introducing what became a hallmark of Waugh’s style – the use of black comedy.

Decline and Fall – commentary

The novel is in the comic tradition of the naive young innocent who becomes the victim of ever increasing disasters. This is a theme that goes back to Voltaire’s Candide (1759). Paul Pennyfeather is an orphan who is punished for a misdemeanour he did not commit and is cast out into the world with virtually nothing.

He is the blameless victim of the Bollinger Club’s vandalism, then his guardian refuses to give him his rightful inheritance and expels him from home. All the people he then meets (with the exception of Peter Beste-Chetwynde) are frauds, liars, criminals, and social failures living in a world of deception, incompetence, and villany.

Dr Fagan, his employer, is a posturing academic fraud who runs a seedy private college (a ‘public school’) with no regard for the students education or welfare. Fagan has a ‘butler’ Philbrick who turns out to be a confidence trickster, and who is later arrested for fraud. The glamorous and wealthy Mrs Beste-Chetwynde might have poisoned her husband and lives off the earnings of prostitutes. The prison governor Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery is a naive penal reformist who is responsible for a prisoner being murdered.

Contemporary readers will have little difficulty in seeing this as a radically irreverent critique of what in the 1920s was politically correct. The targets for Waugh’s satire range from moral blindness to modernist architecture. But there are also some excruciating passages which reveal the astonishing levels of racism that were considered acceptable at that time.

Margot Beste-Chetwynde arrives at the school sports day accompanied by her black lover Sebastian ‘Chokey’ Chalmondley. The reactions of the other guests are voiced using expressions that seem quite shocking: ‘What price the coon?’, ‘I think it’s an insult bringing a nigger here’, and ‘to put it bluntly, they have uncontrollable passions … it’s just their nature. Animals, you know’.

These opinions might reflect the social blindness and narrow prejudices of the fictional characters in the scene, but Waugh also makes Sebastian himself a figure of fun. Whilst wishing to claim an appreciation of traditional English culture, he responds to most enquiries with the stock phrase ‘I sure am that’. He makes a perfectly articulate plea for tolerance and understanding, but it is difficult to escape the impression that Waugh to some extent shares the prejudices he is satirising. For a fuller discussion of this topic, see David Bradshaw’s excellent introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Decline and Fall.

Black humour

In addition to the comically villanous characters, there are several instances of what we now call black humour scattered throuout the narrative. These often involve a certain amount of criminality or violence. Three years befor the story opens, the Bollinger Club dinner featured a caged fox that had been stoned to death with champagne bottles. At the school sports day, the young Lord Tangent is shot in the foot by the drunken Prendergast with his starting pistol. It is mentioned quite casually in a later chapter that his foot has been amputated.

Margot Beste-Chetwynde not only owns a chain of brothels in South America, she demolishes a listed Tudor building, to put in its place a monstrosity of plate glass, lifts, leather walls, and modernist furniture designed by a twenty-five year old ‘professor’ of foreign extraction. Moreover it is quite possible that she has poisoned her husband (with ground glass).

The governor of the first prison to which Paul is sent is a theoretical reformist who believes hardened criminals can be reformed by appealing to their ‘creative’ instincts. When a religious maniac reveals that he was formerly a cabinet-maker, the governor issues him with a set of carpenter’s tools – which he promptly uses to saw off a man’s head.

The scenes at the Llanabba College that feature locals are drenched in anti-Welsh sentiment. Waugh captures brilliantly the fractured syntax of the local stationmaster speaking in English, which for him is a foreign language:

‘To march about you would not like us? … We have a fine yellow flag look you that embroidered for us was in silks.’

The stationmaster divides his time between squeezing more money out of Dr Fagan and trying to sell his sister’s services as a prostitute at cut-price rates. Doctor Fagan then philosophises about the Welsh in general:

From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters mate freely with the sheep but not with human kind except their blood relations … The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.

Waugh attributes these outrageous opinions to the foppish and incompetent Doctor Fagan, but once again it is difficult to escape the suspicion that he is hiding his own prejudices behind this literary strategy. When introducing the local brass band into the narrative he does so in third person mode that is just as insulting:

They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape.

In fact the black humour and the comic potential of naively thwarted expectations are rather prescient of attitudes that only became more popularly widespread in Britain after the Second World War. Evelyn Waugh was well ahead of his time in this respect.

Decline and Fall – study resources

Decline and Fall – Penguin – Amazon UK

Decline and Fall – Penguin – Amazon US

Decline and Fall – York Notes – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Decline and Fall – DVD film – Amazon UK

Decline and Fall

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Decline and Fall – plot synopsis

Prelude Paul Pennyweather has his trousers removed by the Bollinger Club and is unjustly sent down from Oxford University for ‘indecent behaviour’.

Part One

I. Paul is castigated by his guardian for this misadventure. He withholds Paul’s rightful inheritance and expels him from home. Paul secures a post as schoolmaster at a private college in Wales.

II. Paul arrives at the inhospitable Llanabba Castle, where he meets Dr Fagan and his daughters. He is given as special subject something he knows nothing about.

III. He meets student Peter Beste-Chetwynde and ex public school Captain Grimes, who regales him with stories of his failures. Grimes is engaged to the unappetising elder Fagan daughter.

IV. Paul meets ex-clergyman Prendergast, who bores him with tales of his fundamental religious doubts.

V. Paul tries to establish discipline with his form, and becomes popular. Doubts are cast about Philbrick.

VI. Paul is offered £20 compensation from Oxford, thinks to refuse it on principle, but Grimes accepts it on his behalf. Paul will treat his colleagues to dinner with the money.

VII. Dr Fagan makes grandiose arrangments for the sports day. The ‘butler’ Philbrick reveals his unsavoury (and imaginary) criminal connections to Paul, and reveals his intention to marry Diana Fagan.

VIII. The sports events are a mis-managed farce. Prendergast, who is drunk, shoots a boy in the foot with his starting gun.

IX. Mrs Margot Beste-Chetwyde arrives with her black lover Sebastian ‘Chokey’ Chalmondley. He is the object of virulent racist commentary from the guests.

X. In the aftermath of the sports day, Paul has fallen for Mrs Beste-Chetwynde.

XI. The butler Philbrick has given the staff various fantastic stories about his origins.

XII. Dr Fagan disapproves of Grimes as a potential son-in-law. The staff go out to celebrate Grimes’ forthcoming marriage to the principal’s daughter. Grimes (who already has a wife) laments falling into the trap of matrimony.

XIII. Grimes is depressed by his marriage, and resents being patronised by Dr Fagan. The police arrive to arrest Philbrick for fraud. Grimes stages his own disappearance.

Part Two

I. Margot Beste-Chetwynde demolishes a historic Tudor building at King’s Thursday and has a modern replacement designed by young modernist ‘Professor’ Otto Silenus.

II. In the Easter holidays Peter Beste-Chetwynde invites Paul back to his mother’s new house.

III. There is a weekend party to show off Margot’s new modernist construction. She stays in bed, taking drugs. Paul proposes marriage to her, and he is accepted.

IV. Grimes reappears, working for a Latin-American night club consortium owned by Margot.

V. Margot is in London, interviewing hostess applicants for her Latin-American night club business (brothels).

VI. Elaborate preparations are made for the wedding. Paul moves in to the Ritz. Paul’s friend Potts is working for the League of Nations. Paul goes to Marseilles to sort out visa problems for the hostesses. He returns to his much-publicised marriage day, but is arrested by the police.

Part Three

I. Paul is sentenced to seven years imprisonment for white slave trafficking. At the trial Potts is chief witness for the prosecution. Margot flees to her villa in Corfu. The prison is run in a repressive and punitive manner. Paul meets Philbrick as a fellow prisoner and Prendergast is the prison chaplain.

II. Paul wishes to remain in solitary confinement, which is against the rules, so the governor makes him the subject of a rehabilitation experiment.

III. Paul exercises with a religious homicidal maniac, and complains to the governor. Since the man was formerly a cabinet maker, the governor issues him with a set of carpenter’s tools for ‘therapeutic rehabilitation’. The prisoner saws Prendergast’s head off.

IV. Paul is transferred to Dartmoor prison, where he meets Grimes, who has been sent down for bigamy. Peter Beste-Chetwynde becomes an Earl. Margot visits to announce her forthcoming marriage to Miles Maltravers (son of the Home Secretary).

V. Grimes escapes from Dartmoor but is thought to have perished in a mire. Paul thinks of him as inextinguishable.

VI. The Home Secretary arranges for Paul’s removal to a nursing home owned by Dr Fagan. A fake death certificate is provided by a surgeon who is drunk. Paul is smuggled away to Margot’s villa in Corfu.

VII. Paul recovers in Corfu, where he meets ‘Professor’ Silenus again. Paul returns to his old college at Oxford to study theology.

Epilogue Peter Beste-Chetwynde, now Earl Pastmaster, visits Paul as an undergraduate at Oxford. Margot has married Maltravers and become Viscountess Metroland, with Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington as her accepted lover.

Decline and Fall – principal characters

Paul Pennyweather	a young student of theology
Dr Augustus Fagan	foppish Llanabba Castle headmaster
Captain Grimes	schoolmaster with wooden leg
Mr Prendergast	ex-clergyman with a wig and religious doubts
Solomon Philbrick	college ‘butler’ and fraudster
Professor Silenus	a modernist architect (with no experience)
Margot Beste-Chetwynde	rich and glamorous society woman
Peter Beste-Chetwynde	Paul’s friend and student
Miles Maltravers	marries Margot, and becomes Vicount Metroland
Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington	Margot’s lover

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