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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

Sanctuary

January 30, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Sanctuary was first published in 1903, and is thus only Edith Wharton’s third published fictional work, after the two earlier novellas The Touchstone and The Valley of Decision.

Sanctuary – critical comment

Structure

The structure of the tale is relatively simple – and is closely connected with what seems to be its principal meanings. The narrative is divided into two parts which are connected by the presence in both of Kate Orme-Peyton. In the first part Kate is presented with a moral dilemma. Her fiancé Denis inherits money from his step-brother Arthur by morally underhand means.

Arthur’s wife and child have been disinherited. Denis has known about the existence of Arthur’s wife all along, and yet he has not revealed the fact at the court proceedings. He is prepared to accept the tainted inheritance, even though he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of Arthur’s wife and child – because the wife has taken their lives in despair.

Denis has looked after his step-brother Arthur (just as Dick will look after Paul) – but he has betrayed him nevertheless, by withholding knowledge of the marriage during the court proceedings. He has also tried to buy off the wife and salve his own conscience by offering her money – which she refuses.

Kate is appalled by this behaviour and what she sees as a lack of moral fibre. She suggests to Denis that he has a duty to own up to the truth publicly and that he should forfeit the money. When he refuses to do so, she ceases to love him and puts the marriage on hold.

But she then conceives of her grand sacrificial scheme. She realizes that Denis is likely to marry somebody else and have a child ‘born to an inheritance of secret weakness, a vice of the moral fibre, as it might be born with some hidden physical taint’. Rather than that, she decides to marry Denis and bring up his child under her own protection.

In the second part of the tale she has therefore raised her son Dick in this self-sacrificing manner, and her husband Denis has proved himself a moral wastrel after all by squandering his inheritance. But she now fears a repetition of the same events, which are directly paralleled in the case of Dick and his close friend Paul Darrow. The friend dies, leaving Dick an inheritance of the architectural designs which could win the competition. These designs have even been passed over to Dick quite willingly, and there is a temptress in the sidelines (Clemence Verney) urging him to profit from this morally dubious act.

His mother is anxious that he will succumb to the temptation, but does nothing to directly interfere. In the end we are asked to believe that his mother’s moral influence prevails – though it is stretching credibility when Dick renounces the prospect of marriage to Clemence only twenty-four hours after becoming engaged to her – and at that point the tale takes on a distinct suggestion of nineteenth century melodrama, with a last-minute resolution to the drama.

A Freudian interpretation

Edith Wharton was over forty when she wrote Sanctuary. She had no children of her own, and her marriage to her husband Teddy was less than satisfactory – but it is difficult to find anything in her private life that would explain or throw light on the extraordinary illustration of the Electra complex which this tale reveals.

Kate Orme is radiantly happy with her fiancé at the start of this tale, but then discovering that he is morally flawed, she rapidly falls out of love with him. Nevertheless, she decides to marry him so that he will not marry and father a child with someone else (from whom he is likely to conceal his moral turpitude). Kate reasons to herself that by taking on his ‘sin’ she can prevent it from being passed on unknown to another generation.

In other words, she embarks upon a path of controlling biologically and psychologically the next generation. We do not have an account of the intervening years, but when Dick Peyton emerges as a young architect on Fifth Avenue, presumably twenty-odd years later, the bond between him and his mother is pitched at a very serious emotional level. She has travelled to France and lived with him during his post-graduate studies at the Beaux-Arts. She wishes to control his actions; she disapproves of his fiancée Clemence and they dispute quite openly over the ability to influence him.

Eventually, Dick reverses his actions and allegiances, and allies himself with his mother – knowing that he is sacrificing his success as an architect and his prospective marriage to Clemence. He is resisting the compromising lure of easy success – for morally good (though scarcely credible) reasons – but the decision ties him even more closely to the mother who has had his destiny in mind before he was even born.

We do not know what happens beyond the text, but by the end of the tale Kate Peyton emerges as a successfully controlling mother figure (with good motives) whose feckless husband is dead and who has a somewhat unhealthily close relationship with her son. It is reasonable to see this as an illustration of the Jocasta complex first proposed by Raymond de Saussure in 1920 – which may be described as ‘different degrees of attachment, including domineering but asexual mother love – something perhaps particularly prevalent with an intelligent son and an absent or weak father figure’.

Form

This is a difficult piece of work to place in terms of literary form. The narrative lacks the range and the social depth of even a short novel, and for that reason it is often categorised as a novella – the story of young woman who discovers ‘the moral sewage that surrounds her’ (Houghton Mifflin). But Kate has made this discovery half way through the tale, and spends its second part making what turns out to be a successful act of resistance to it. She does not learn anything new in the second part of the narrative: she merely hopes that her passive moral stance will prevail – which is does. This is not the shape or the structure of events shared by classic novellas.

It also does not have the densely concentrated complexity of a novella, apart from the similarity of the two ‘inheritances’. And given that the events are stretched over the time scale of two generations, it lacks the temporal unity and the compression of events required by the novella form. Yet it is more ‘shaped’ than simply a long story – and might therefore better be classified as a tale – a form sufficiently elastic to accept anything which is squashed into it. However, others might wish to argue that the structural parallels of the two temptations and the continuity of Kate’s presence constitute the case for it being considered a novella.

Sanctuary – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Sanctuary – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Sanctuary – plot synopsis

PART ONE

Part I. Arthur Peyton has died under dubious circumstances after a long illness, leaving his inheritance to his step-brother Denis, who has been engaged to Kate Orme for two months. Denis arrives to see Kate with the news that a woman claiming to be Arthur’s wife has killed herself and her child, having lost an inheritance claim in court against the family, who denied that Arthur was married.

Part II. Kate has lived a protected life and now feels that she is facing the grim realities of the world. But when she expresses her sympathetic understanding of the dead woman’s situation to Denis, he reveals that he knew all along that Arthur was married.

Part III. The woman previously nursed Arthur through his illness, married him, and bore him a child. A lawyer has pursued her claim for inheritance in court, but lost the case. Arthur made over his inheritance to Denis, but no witnesses to this agreement are traceable, and Denis could face jail for misleading the court. Kate feels that Denis is responsible for the deaths of two people and is bitterly disappointed in him.

Part IV. Denis’s mother visits Kate to pleads his case, based upon the supposition that he is honourable and innocent. Kate feels socially pressured, but feels that she must stand by a decision to postpone the marriage.

When her father returns home from business, he reveals to Kate a similar scandal in another remote part of their family. Kate reflects on the element of corruption lurking beneath the polite surface of life. She then persuades herself that she might expiate Denis’s sin by marrying him – so that he does not pass on his tainted inheritance to some other woman’s child.

PART TWO

Part I. A generation later Kate’s son Dick is in an architecture practice on Fifth Avenue. Denis has died long ago, after squandering the inheritance. Kate has devoted herself protectively to her son, who she fears might have inherited his father’s weakness of character. Dick has entered an architecture competition along with his industrious friend Paul Darrow. Dick also wishes to impress a female admirer, Clemence Verney.

Part II. Kate discusses ambition and architecture with Miss Verney at Dick’s office tea party. Then she discusses Miss Verney with the clever but gauche Paul Darrow, who has completed his own competition entry designs. Both of them suspect Miss Verney of being an ambitious social climber.

Part III. Dick has not completed his competition designs, and is running out of time. Darrow falls ill with pneumonia, and Dick hastens to look after him. Kate feels guilty that she has sacrificed everything for her son, when he now appears to shirking his responsibilities to his chosen profession. But then Darrow dies, and it transpires that he has generously left Dick his own competitions designs to use.

Part IV. Dick inherits all Darrow’s effects, and decides his own competition plans are not good enough to submit. His mother protests, and asks to see both sets of designs so that they can judge. But he does not comply with her request, and she fears that all her vigilant protection of him will come to nothing.

Part V. Next day Dick leaves for the office without discussing the matter. Kate fears that his weak character will lead him into the easy temptation of passing off Darrow’s designs as his own. She meets Miss Verney at a concert, where the young woman admits her interest in Dick and her ambition on his behalf. Kate reveals the issue of Darrow’s bequest, but Miss Verney argues that this fully justifies Dick’s appropriation of the designs as his own for the competition.

Part VI. Two days later Dick decides to dine out, but then his business partner Gill calls at the house looking for him. He phones to Miss Verney’s house, and the conversation reveals to Kate that Dick is using Darrow’s sketches to complete his own competition entry. When Dick arrives home, it is to announce his engagement to Clarence Verney.

Part VII. Kate feels that Miss Verney has triumphed over her in the struggle for Dick’s conscience.However, Miss Verney has stipulated that the engagement should not be made public until after the competition result has been announced.

Part VIII. On the eve of the competition judgements Kate goes to the opera, spots Miss Verney, and retreats in defeat. She calls at Dick’s offices on her way home. There he reveals that after a long struggle he has felt his mother’s silent influence prevailing, and has decided to give up the competition – and by implication his engagement to Miss Verney as well.

Video documentary

Principal characters

Kate Orme	a young American woman
Denis Peyton	her fiancé
Mrs Peyton	Denis’s mother, the second Mrs Peyton
Arthur Peyton	Denis’s step-brother
Mr Orme	Kate’s father
Dick Peyton	Kate’s son, an architect
Mr Gill	Dick’s partner in business
Clemence Verney	a young American social climber
Paul Darrow	Dick’s friend, also an architect

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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Edith Wharton – web links

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

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
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Saul Bellow – greatest works

November 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Saul Bellow (1915—2005) was born of Russian-Jewish parents in Canada, but lived most of his life in Chicago, a city which features in many of his novels. His work features characters struggling to understand themselves, and searching for identity in an often irrational world. He has a wonderful ear for the rhythms of modern speech, and he captures city life particularly well. Linguistically, he manages to successfully combine an intellectual-philosophical vocabulary with the language of the street. And his narratives are often very funny. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976.

Dangling Man (1944) his first novel, is concerned with existential philosophy and the sense of identity which was much in vogue at the time of its publication. It’s an accomplished debut, thoughtful and serious, about a man who does not want to go into the army. This reflects the serious side of Bellow, who repeatedly inspects the human condition. But it doesn’t have much of the rib-tickling bravura of his later work. This is early Bellow flexing his wings. It is perhaps best appreciated after you have read some of his later works.
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The Adventures of Augie March is an ambitious, rambling, almost picaresque novel. Its first half is a moving and seemingly authentic account of a young boy growing up in Chicago during the Depression – which is where Bellow himself was raised. The story then goes off in a free-wheeling account of a series of bizarre jobs and relationships, and he ends up in Mexico. Bellow’s purpose seems to be to question how much compromise is desirable and how much is necessary, and what make us think about which parts of ourselves we want to remain individual. The second half of the novel however is far less coherent and less credible than the first – but some critics think otherwise.
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Seize the Day (1956) is a novella in which you get a sense of Bellow finding his true voice. It’s a light, swift work with dark shadows that looks at the events of one day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, a fading charmer. He confronts his sense of personal failure and a love-hate relationship with his father. This is his day of reckoning and he is scared. In his 40s, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of havoc. In the course of this one climatic day, he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise. This is a short work which is held together by the sort of concentrated sense of unity which is the hallmark of a good novella. It is now widely regarded as the first of Bellow’s great works.
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Henderson the Rain King (1959) was his first major success. It is a comic character study of American millionaire Gene Henderson, a larger-than-life 55-year-old who has accumulated money, position, and a large family, yet nonetheless feels unfulfilled. The story plots his frustrations with modern life, and his quest for revelation and spiritual enlightenment in Africa, where he fights with a lion, is hailed as a rainmaker, and becomes heir to a kingdom. He meets two tribes, one of which he virtually destroys in an attempt to purify their main water supply of a plague of frogs which goes disastrously wrong. Much of the novel’s humour derives from such antics from Henderson, a character-exaggeration clearly based on Ernest Hemingway (who was a highly regarded writer and public figure at the time).
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Herzog (1964) became highly regarded and a classic almost as soon as it was published. It centres intensely on the life of Moses Herzog, a Jewish intellectual who is driven close to the verge of breakdown by the adultery of his second wife with his close friend. He writes letters to famous people, both living and dead – Spinoza, Nietzsche, Winston Churchill, and the President of the USA – giving them a piece of his mind and asking their advice about how to live. The novel begins with a statement which sets the tone for everything that follows: “If I am going out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog”.
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Humboldt’s Gift (1974) traces the life and memories of writer Charlie Citrine as he reflects on the influence of his boyhood friend and mentor, Humboldt. This character is based loosely upon Delmore Schwartz, the Jewish poet and short story writer whose early promise was never fulfilled. He descended into alcoholism and poverty, and died in a cheap hotel room, creating the modern version of the myth of the ‘doomed poet’. The novel deals with the ‘gift’ for aesthetic appreciation he passes on to his close friend Charlie, the narrator of the novel.
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Ravelstein (2000) is something of a double portrait. Abe Ravelstein, a mega-successful Jewish academic realises that he might be dying. He invites his friend Chick to write an biographical study of him. What we get is a not-so-thinly disguised portrait of the critic Allan Bloom written by a character who has had all the brushes with life which Bellow experienced in his own: near-death illness, late-life divorce, and happiness with a new wife. Since his death, it has become a lot clearer just how much of his own life Bellow put into his fiction.
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Saul Bellow chronology

August 14, 2017 by Roy Johnson

1915. Saul Bellow born Solomon Bellows in Quebec, Canada to immigrant Jewish parents from St Petersburg, Russia.

1918. Family moves to Montreal. Bellow begins religious training and speaks French in the street and Yiddish at home.

1923. Childhood illness. His father is a bootlegger across the Canadian/USA border.

1924. Family moves to Chicago as illegal immigrants into the USA.

1928. Childhood friendship with writer Isaac Rosenfield.

1933. Reads Trotsky and Lenin. Death of his mother from breast cancer. Enrols at University of Chicago.

Saul Bellow chronology

1935. Transfers to Northwestern University, reading literature and anthropology.

1937. Appointed associate editor of the monthly journal The Beacon. Friendship with James T. Farrell. Graduates with BA in anthropology.

1938. Returns to Chicago. Marriage to Anita Goshkin. Working as college teacher in literary studies.

1940. Travels to Mexico to interview Leon Trotsky – arriving on the day of his assassination.

1941. First published story in Partisan Review. A novel accepted but not published. Meets Alfred Kazin and Delmore Schwartz in New York.

1943. Works part time writing for Encyclopedia Britannica.

1944. Dangling Man his first published novel – praised by Edmund Wilson.

1946. Associate professor of literature at the University of Minnesota.

1947. Publication of his second novel, The Victim.

1948. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Moves to live in Paris for two years. Meets European writers and intellectuals. Critical of their political naivete.

1950. Returns to USA and lives in Queens, New York City.

1952. University lectureship as assistant to Delmore Schwartz. Friendship with Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man).

1953. Publication of The Adventures of Augie March to great critical acclaim.

1955. Death of his father, Abram. Second Guggenheim fellowship. Residence in Reno, Nevada for divorce.

1956. Publication of Seize the Day. Marries Sondra Tschachasov. Teaches at Yado writers’ colony. Friendship with John Cheever. Buys house in New York with inheritance from father.

1957. Teaching at University of Minnesota and University of Chicago. Meets John Berryman and Philip Roth.

1959. Publication of Henderson the Rain King which is criticised for his abandonment of urban and Jewish themes.

1960. Founds literary magazine The Noble Savage with his friend Jack Ludwig, who is having an affair with his wife Sondra. Divorce from Sondra.

1961. Teaching at University of Puerto Rico. Marries Susan Glassman.

1962. Honorary degree from Northwestern University. Five year professorship at University of Chicago.

1964. Publication of Herzog which has great critical and commercial success. His play The Last Analysis fails on Broadway.

1966. Further theatrical failures. Separation from his wife Susan.

1968. Publication of Mosby’s Memoirs. Divorce from Susan Glassman.

1969. Publication of Mr Sammler’s Planet.

1972. Honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale Universities. Death of John Berryman.

1973. Six week residency at Rodmell, Sussex, the home of Virginia Woolf.

1974. Marries Alexandra Ionesco Tulcea, a Romanian professor of mathematics.

Saul Bellow chronology

1975. Publication of Humboldt’s Gift. Travels in Israel.

1976. Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature.

1977. Protracted legal problems over divorce settlement to Susan Glassman.

1978. Travels to Romania with Alexandra to see her dying mother. Court orders Bellow to pay $500,000 to Susan Glassman.

1982. Publication of The Dean’s December. Death of John Cheever.

1984. Publication of Him with his Foot in his Mouth, a collection of stories.

1985. Death of two brothers and Anita, his first wife.

1987. Publication of More Die of Heartbreak. Travels in Europe with Janis Freedman.

1989. Begins work on two novels, both left unfinished at his death. Publication of A Theft. Marries Janis Freedman. Publication of The Bellarosa Connection.

1990. Begins a study of Latin.

Saul Bellow chronology

1992 His friend Allan Bloom dies of AIDS.

1993. Publication of It All Adds Up, a collection of essays. Leaves University of Chicago after three decades and moves to Boston.

1994. Hospitalised after food poisoning contracted in Caribbean island of San Martin.

1997. Publication of novella, The Actual. Death of former wife Susan.

2000. Publication of Ravelstein, novel based on the life of Allan Bloom.

2005. Bellow dies at his home in Brooklyn, NYC.

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Saul Bellow Chronology

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Twentieth century literature

Saul Bellow essays

March 11, 2018 by Roy Johnson

essays, memoirs, cultural history and criticism

Saul Bellow generated a prodigious output as a writer of novels, stories, novellas, travel books, even plays – though these were largely unperformed. But in addition he wrote essays, book reviews, memoirs, lectures, and towards the end of his life he produced lengthy surveys of the culture and politics of American life at the end of the twentieth century.

He published his own selection of non-fiction in It All Adds Up (1994) which was issued whilst he was still alive. There is Simply Too Much to Think About is a collection of book reviews and occasional essays from Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New York Times Book Review. The selection also includes interviews – one of which he conducts with himself.

He takes almost as a recurrent theme the issue that illuminates all of his mature fiction – that he is the son of an eastern European immigrant who has grown up in the United States (and Canada). He feels both passionately attached and occasionally divided by the two cultural traditions these sources of his identity represent.

One the one hand his intellectual roots are in Europe and he is dismayed by what he sees as unbridled Western capitalism. On the other hand he does not wish to be held back by his family’s traditional Judaism, and he relishes the liberty and the free-wheeling culture afforded to him as a successful immigrant.

Stylistically his great strength lies in having the courage to combine fine writing with the language of the street. His mental hinterland is furnished by the Great European Classics, but he is prepared to combine their prose rhythms with the cadences and vocabulary of the inner-city tenement, the Russian bath house, and the interstate highway diner.

He’s at his best with character sketches. A Talk with the Yellow Kid is a marvellous account of the Chicago confidence trickster Joseph ‘Yellow Kid’ Weil, who is like a figure from one of Bellow’s novels. Weil is a man who made millions from rackets, scams, and Ponzi schemes, then lost it all in legitimate business investments.

There are some marvellous bon mots. He observes ‘Hemingway detested tourists – other tourists’. And of film writer Ben Hecht he says ‘He is one of the creators of Spectre of the Rose, a picture I would rather eat ground glass than see again’.

If there’s a weakness in his approach it’s a tendency to discuss large issues in rather abstract terms with lots of generalising. I found myself mentally supplying the concrete examples I wished he had mentioned as evidence to support his arguments.

His survey of ‘Recent Fiction’ (1963) throws up some interesting judgements. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is … ‘A pedestrian work, lacking in colour and passion, in dramatic vision’. And James Baldwin’s Another Country … ‘should perhaps be judged as a document and not a novel. It is hard to believe that Baldwin, with his talents, could himself take it seriously as a piece of fiction’. But for J.D. Salinger he has nothing but praise: ‘a brilliant performer, easily the best’ of modern American writers.

Being a self-confessed humanist and a writer who has enjoyed many invitations to lecture and write on the ‘modern condition’, he has a tendency to repeatedly drift into a lot of social anthropology – a subject he studied at university. And yet he is very sceptical about received opinions and philosophies – even about his former heroes Freud and Marx. However, his social anthropology is put to excellent use when explaining the lack of intellectual culture in New York City or the flight of modern writers into the universities.

And we need to take his critiques seriously, for they are built on an intimate knowledge of the basics. He was reading Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky in the 1930s, and he sees, rather perceptively I believe, that Freudianism is a form of literary criticism, an analysis or close reading of the text of someone’s life. It is certainly not a science, with objective tests, measurements, and repeatable experiments.

He writes with great feeling about the formation of his own cultural history – growing up in Chicago conscious of his Russian family heritage, his sympathies for its revolution, and his identity as a Jew in America. He became a Trotskyist, and even went to interview the revolutionary in Mexican exile, only to arrive on the day of Trotsky’s death at the hands of Stalin’s assassin.

This is an intellectually bracing collection that throws interesting light on the background to Bellow’s greatest works of fiction. It also confirms that most of his novels have distinctly biographical origins for their plots – both from his own life history and those of others.

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Saul Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, London: Penguin/Viking, 2015, pp.532, ISBN: 0670016691

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Saul Bellow letters

August 31, 2017 by Roy Johnson

an essay-review of the collected letters

Saul Bellow left behind a sizeable body of fiction , travel writing, and essays on his departure in 2005 – but he was also a prolific correspondent. This huge selection of his letters includes examples from seven decades of his adult life. He writes to friends, fellow writers, academic colleagues, lovers, wives, and even fans.

The earliest letters date from the 1930s when he was a student and a Trotskyist. They deal with political issues arising from the world economic depression, the gathering war in Europe, splits on the Left, and then problems with his first marriage.

His spiritual and intellectual home was Chicago, where he had grown up, but he migrated to New York to pursue his literary ambitions. He earned his living as a teacher and a journalist, and had the usual difficulties getting his early work accepted. There were a couple of false starts before his first novel Dangling Man was published in 1944.

His skills as a writer come into shining prominence when he writes a long and superbly entertaining letter to his literary agent Henry Volkening. It describes several weeks of his ‘exile’ in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship. He travels between Paris, Geneva, and Marseilles, pursued by a rapacious, opium-smoking socialite vamp, gets drunk with Scott Fitzgerald, and is thrown out of hotels – all of which turns out to be pure fantasy (Fitzgerald having died ten years previously).

The letter dates from around the time that he began writing The Adventures of Augie March, a novel that was to prove his big break-through success in 1953. This free-wheeling approach to narrative invention and verbal exuberance is precisely what established his distinctive voice as a modern novelist.

However, it’s not all fun. Some of the letters make for quite uncomfortable reading. Bellow had friendships with fellow writers which sometimes included elements of rivalry. When differences become apparent he can take a lofty, holier-than-thou tone with correspondents. His childhood friend Isaac Rosenfeld is the object of a spiteful clash over merely teaching in the same university (New York). And he was downright rude to his English publisher, John Lehmann.

If you can find nothing better to say upon reading Augie March than that you all “think very highly of me”, I don’t think I want you to publish it at all … Either you are entirely lacking in taste and judgment, or you are being terribly prudent about the advance. Well, permit me to make it clear once and for all that it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference to me whether you publish the novel or not. You have read two-thirds of it, and I refuse absolutely to send you another page. Return the manuscript to Viking if you don’t want to take the book.

On the other hand he is very loyal to many of his friends – to John Berryman, Philip Roth, Ralph Ellison, and John Cheever in particular. Even to Delmore Schwartz, his early mentor who eventually descended into paranoia and turned against him (and everyone else).

It’s amazing to note how he goes on writing, no matter what the circumstances. Whilst holed up in an isolated shack outside Reno, Nevada (waiting for his first divorce to come through) he was finishing off Seize the Day (1956) and starting work on Henderson the Rain King (1959) at the same time.

In a single year he published Henderson, underwent psycho-analysis, started a magazine (The Noble Savage), and received a huge grant ($16,000) from the Ford Foundation, which he spent on a holiday in Eastern Europe. He also started writing plays – which were not successful when staged – and his second marriage came to an end when his wife Sondra filed for divorce.

Even this cornucopia of events had its further complications. He was devastated by the split from Sondra, but she assured him that there was ‘nobody else’. The truth was that she was having an affair with his friend and co-editor, Jack Ludwig. Bellow took his own revenge for this betrayal in his next novel Herzog (1964).

This use of real lives as the material for fiction became something of a leitmotiv in his work. The letters confirm that he repeatedly used events from his own life and the experiences of others as the basis for what he wrote. It is well known that Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000) featured characters based on his friends Delmore Schwartz and Allan Bloom. Moreover, anyone reading The Dean’s December (1982) cannot fail to conclude that the story is a fictionalised account of his own visit to Bucharest which he made with his Romanian-born third wife.

This list goes on, even into shorter works such as Him with His Foot in his Mouth (1982) which is something of an apology for an insulting remark he made to a colleague years before. Similarly, What Kind of Day Did You Have? (1984) is an account of an illicit affair between his old friend Harold Rosenberg and a woman called Joan Ullman.

Some of the people concerned who recognised the origins of these stories were outraged by Bellow’s unauthorised use of biographical details in this way. Joan Ullman didn’t take kindly to having her personal life used in this way and she published her own account of events. Bellow responded with a literary shrug of the shoulders.

Suddenly in 1966 whilst still married to Susan Glassman, he fell in love with the young and single Margaret Staatz. Not surprisingly, this episode was rapidly followed by Susan’s filing for divorce.

He was an obsessive traveller, even though he often complained of the places he visited. The letters have postmarks from Lake Como, Uganda, London, Tel Aviv, Athens, Puerto Rico, and Belgrade. He was also endlessly critical of Chicago, but regularly went back there.

It’s obvious that he found teaching a necessary evil to pay the bills, yet he continued in a variety of university lectureships even after becoming commercially successful and winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature in the same year (1976). However, his multiple marriages were an expensive form of self-indulgence. The final divorce settlement from Susan Glassman left him with a bill for $500,000, plus $200,000 legal costs. Confessing to his own extravagances he says of himself “I’ve always lived like a sort of millionaire without any money”.

There is one rather curious strand to this correspondence – his lengthy exchanges with the English academic (and solicitor) Owen Barfield on the subject of Rudolf Steiner’s ‘anthroposophy’. This was a form of quasi-mystic ‘philosophy’ dealing with the condition of the human soul – the vague and abstract ruminations on which Bellow had padded out Humboldt’s Gift.

It’s a curious part of the correspondence because it is difficult to accept that Bellow took these ideas seriously when they sit so ill-at-ease with the very practical and concrete nature of his perceptions of everyday life. In his most deeply felt writing Bellow is dealing with money and sex; politics and history; gangsters, lawyers, and real estate developers; crime, violence, and shysters of all kinds. Rudolf Steiner’s notions of ‘spiritual science’, ‘esoteric cosmology’, and ‘the second coming of Christ’ simply do not fit convincingly alongside such matters. The letters confirm Bellow’s sincere personal interest in these matters, but they are not at all persuasive when he attempts to embed them in his fiction .

In 1985 his first wife Anita and his two brothers Maurice and Sam died, then his third wife Alexandra divorced him. He faced yet more draining legal costs, but without breaking his stride and at seventy years of age, he simply married his secretary Janis Freedman, who had previously been his student. A decade and a half later at the age of eighty-four he became a father for the fourth time. His eldest son Gregory was at that time fifty-five years old.

In 1994 whilst on holiday in the Caribbean, Bellow contracted a virulent strain of food poisoning that left him unconscious in a coma and on the point of death for four weeks. Recovery was slow and left him with coronary and neurological complications. From this point onwards he felt he was living on borrowed time, and his correspondence reads like a series of medical bulletins. Nevertheless he manages to throw off some thought-provoking cultural observations:

Let me add my name to the list of Freud’s detractors. If he had been purely a scientist he wouldn’t have had nearly so many readers. It was lovers of literature (and not the best kind of those) who made his reputation. His patients were the text and his diagnoses were Lit. Crit. The gift the great nineteenth century [pests] gave us was the gift of metaphor. Marx with the metaphor of class struggle and Freud with the metaphor of the Oedipus complex. Once you had read Marx it took a private revolution to overthrow the metaphor of class warfare – for an entire decade I couldn’t see history in any other light. Freud also subjugated us with powerful metaphors and after a time we couldn’t approach relationships in anything but a Freudian light. Thank God I liberated myself before it was too late.

As the years go on his letters become lengthy apologies for not having written sooner – or not having replied at all. He turns politically towards the right, and the death of one old friend after another makes him (understandably) concerned about his own mortality. Yet he goes on being creatively productive into his eighties. Many people see his last novel Ravelstein (2000) as amongst his finest.

Of course the selection of letters tend to be chosen to show the Famous Author in the best possible light – but Benjamin Taylor’s editorship presents Bellow as cantankerous, considerate, hard-working, vain, ambitious, and engaged – so we have no grounds for complaint. We are presented with The Man in Full.

Saul Bellow Letters – Viking – Amazon US

Benjamin Taylor (ed), Saul Bellow: Letters, New York: Viking, 2010, pp.571, ISBN: 0670022217

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Twentieth century literature

Saxon Sydney-Turner biography

December 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

intellectual, aesthete, enigma, and civil servant

Saxon Sydney-Turner (1880-1962) is one of the lesser-known and more enigmatic figures in the Bloomsbury Group. Very little is known about his life – largely because he took a lot of trouble to keep much of it private. His father was a doctor who ran a home for mental patients at Hove near Brighton. As a child he attended Westminster School in London and then went on in 1899 to Trinity College Cambridge. There he met Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, and Thoby Stephen, who had all arrived the same year. He was on the same staircase as Clive Bell, and he later shared rooms with Leonard Woolf, who described him as ‘an absolute prodigy of learning’.

He was introverted and ferociously intellectual, and was rarely seen by day at Cambridge, since he rose late and stayed up reading late into the night. Together with his new friends he was elected as a member of the not-so-secret society the Apostles. This met late at night to discuss cultural and philosophic matters – all its members deeply influenced by the ideas of G.E.Moore and his Principia Ethica (1903). However, Saxon Sydney-Turner is mainly remembered for his silences rather than any positive contribution to the debates.

He was interested in poetry, painted a little, and was a music lover with an especial liking for opera. He regularly attended the Wagner Ring cycles at Bayreuth. He loved puzzles, crosswords, riddles, and acrostics, and won one of the scholarships in Classics because he was able to identify and solve a riddle in the centre of an obscure Greek text which was set for translation.

In his finals he took a double first and did well enough in the Civil Service exams to gain a choice opening as a civil servant in the Treasury. He moved into the job and stayed there, working in obscurity for the rest of his life. Through his friendships with Leonard and Thoby, he became an accepted part (though a peripheral figure) in the Bloomsbury Group, though his reputation as an intellectual intimidated some of its members, and he sometimes exasperated his more outgoing contemporaries because he might turn up as one of their causeries, stay for sixteen hours, and say nothing.

He was modest, unassuming, and kind, but despite his formidable erudition people found him slightly infuriating because of his lack of drive and motivation. His friend Leonard Woolf described him as ‘an eccentric in the best English tradition who wrote elegant verse and music and possessed an extraordinary supple, and enigmatic mind’. And yet –

The rooms in which Saxon lived for many years in Great Ormond Street consisted of one big sitting room and a small bedroom. On each side of the sitting-room fireplace on the wall was an immense picture of a farmyard scene. It was the same picture on each side and for over thirty years Saxon lived with them for ever before his eyes while in his bedroom there were some very good pictures by Duncan Grant and other artists, but you could not possibly see them because there was no light and no space to hang them on the walls.

Unlike many of his Bloomsbury friends, he was not at all sexually active. He did fall in love with Barbara Hiles, a former Slade student who was a friend of Dora Carrington. When she revealed that she was going to marry Nick Bagenal but could retain Saxon as a potential lover, he wrote to say that he felt unable to share her with somebody else. However, he did manage to reconcile himself to the loss and remained a close friend to Barbara Hiles and her children – indeed the friendship lasted longer than the Bagenal’s marriage.

When Lytton Strachey moved into the Mill House at Tidmarch with Dora Carrington, Saxon had a £20 a year stake in it for occasional use, though Gerald Brenan‘s account of his visits there illustrates why he described him as ‘one of the greatest bores I have ever known’.

he took to going every summer to Finland, coming back each time with a collection of snapshots that showed nothing but fir trees of varying heights and small railway stations. When he arrived at Lytton Strachey’s house for the weekend he would bring these photographs with him and one dreaded the moment when he would fetch them out and display them one by one, very slowly, in that muffled yet persistent voice of his, with brief comments: ‘I took that one of a railway station in the tundra because when I first went to Finland it had not been built.’

In later life developed a weakness for the horses – though he never went to any races. He gambled away almost all his modest savings and was forced to scrounge from neighbours for essentials. He ended his days in a small flat where he watched television on a set purchased for him by friends.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Twentieth century literature

Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster

April 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, further reading, plot, and web links

Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster was written in English and first published in The Reporter in 1950. The story then appeared in the single volume collection of Nabokov’s short stories Nabokov’s Dozen (1958).

Vladimir Nabokov

Critical commentary

The term ‘scenes’ in the title should alert readers to the fact that it is not a short story in the conventional sense, but a sketch or the unfinished germ of an idea. Having set up the conceit of a narrative told from the point of view of a conjoined twin, Nabokov does not seem to have known what to do with it. Not only is there no development or elaboration in the point of view, but the chain of events simply comes to an abrupt halt when the two boys are captured by their uncle. The only sense of closure to the narrative is the grim revelation that the brothers remain captives twenty years later.

It is interesting to note that in contrast to all that is known about the telepathic levels of communication that normally exists between twins, Nabokov completely excludes the second brother Lloyd from the narrative. Indeed Floyd’s consciousness is rigorously individualistic, and he even observed that the two brothers do not speak to each other. He distances himself from Lloyd, observing of their dead parent the ‘bliss’ he feels in calling her ‘my mother’. And he mentions a propos their miserable childhood that Lloyd ‘forgot much when he grew up. I have forgotten nothing’.

The story is a typically Nabokovian mixture of pathos and the grotesque, but the Black Sea setting remains quite unconvincing.

Study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Plot summary

The story is narrated in the first person by Floyd, one of conjoined twin brothers who are born as a result of their mother being raped. Following her death in childbirth, they grow up on a remote farm somewhere near the Black Sea which is owned by their villainous grandfather.

As children, local villagers are allowed to regard them as a circus-like curiosities, and the grandfather quickly realises he can make money from exhibiting them as such. Floyd naively wonders (exclusively on his own behalf) if normal ‘single’ children have any advantages in life, whilst he and his twin Lloyd are forced into humiliating proximity with each other

The twins grow to the age of twelve, at which point their wellbeing is threatened by another relative – a newly arrived uncle. Floyd dreams of being separated from his brother and escaping to freedom, and when the uncle threatens to tour them as a freak show spectacle, they escape from the farm and head to the nearby seashore. However, the uncle is waiting for them when they arrive. He abducts them, and for the next twenty years they are in his power. It is from this point, at the age of thirty-two, that the story is related.

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
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Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
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Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Scoop

April 26, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, plot summary, web links

Scoop (1938) was Evelyn Waugh’s fifth published novel. It continues the comic themes he had established with Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and A Handful of Dust (1934). A naive and innocent young man is swept up into events which are beyond his control. He is surrounded by villainy and deception on all sides. Farcical misunderstandings abound, and the workings of the press come in for a great deal of satire.

Scoop – commentary

There are three main targets for Evelyn Waugh’s satire in Scoop – African government, the English upper class, and the profession of journalism.

Like its predecessor Black Mischief, Scoop is largely set in a fictional African country – Ishmaelia. The government is run entirely on a system of nepotism: every official is a member of the same family. Voting is rigged, and ‘the adverse trade balance [is] rectified by an elastic system of bankruptcy law’.

When a quarrel breaks out in the ruling family (leading to civil war) one faction declares that the Ishmaelites are in fact a white race who must ‘purge themselves of the Negro taint’. A military coup takes place, the first result of which is a proclamation abolishing Sundays. The coup is overthrown the following day.

And although there is fun made of native incompetence in running the government, the naivety of its original colonisers is not forgotten:

Various courageous Europeans, in the seventies of the last century, came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft-treaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged to leave. They came as missionaries, ambassadors, tradesmen, prospectors, natural scientists. None returned. They were eaten, every one of them; some raw, others stewed and seasoned

Evelyn Waugh worked in journalism for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express and made journeys to Africa and South America reporting for a number of newspapers. He had satirised the behaviour of journalists in earlier novels, but Scoop mocks the entire profession, from individual reporters to editors and even newspaper owners.

It is the lofty vanity of Lord Copper, owner of the Daily Beast that precipitates the misunderstanding about Boot’s identity in the first place. It also provides the toe-curlingly embarrassing finale when Copper is forced to address his celebration banquet with William Boot’s uncle Theodore, the aged roue, representing the ‘achievements of youth’.

Journalists and the upper class are combined as targets of his satire in a wonderful episode where the foreign editor Mr Salter is forced to visit William Boot at his home in the depths of the West Country. Beyond Taunton he is just as out of his depth as Boot has been in Africa. The family’s home at ‘Boot Magna’ is a parody of upper-class rural existence. It is remote, cold, and unwelcoming, offering superficial consideration with no human warmth. The accommodation is austere, and an extended family of quasi-eccentrics is characterised by each member locked into isolated self-interest.

But the main target for Waugh’s satire is journalists – particularly the English. They cluster together at the Hotel Liberty as if it were a gentleman’s club. None of them do anything active in the way of news gathering; they hardly ever venture outside the confines of the hotel bar; and their main source of information is each other. Yet they all want to claim the kudos for being the first to report important new events – hence the title of the novel.

William Boot is not unlike his historical counterpart Candide – a simple and naive young man confronted by the villany and absurdity that exists outside his sheltered world. He is living in peaceful rural seclusion, happy to be writing his articles on countryside matters. Because of the incompetence of other people he is pulled out of this simple and untroubled life and plunged into an almost farcical situation. He is surrounded by liars, cheats, and frauds; his gullibility is preyed upon by charlatans; and like many naive innocents he falls in love with an unscrupulous vamp.

Katchen is virtually a prostitute who squeezes money out of him at every possible opportunity. She claims to be married, but isn’t. She claims to be German, but is of mongrel Pan-European origin. William is well to be rid of her when she departs in his collapsible canoe.

And at the end of it all, just like Candide, William Boot is happy to simply return home and ‘cultivate his garden’. He eventually rejects the lure of Fleet Street and returns to the profound depths of the West Country and resumes his column Lush Places:

the wagons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves, maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble

Scoop – study resources

Scoop – Penguin – Amazon UK

Scoop – Penguin – Amazon US

Scoop – study guide – Amazon UK

Six novels by Evelyn Waugh – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Scoop – DVD film – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Scoop – plot summary

Book I – The Stitch Service

Socialite Mrs Stitch recommends novelist John Boot to Lord Copper of the Daily Beast to cover a political crisis in Ishmaelia. The newspaper’s foreign editor by mistake invites William Boot, who writes a countryside column for the newspaper. William is a naive and hopelessly inexperienced provincial young man.

He is nevertheless engaged and kitted out with ridiculously inappropriate equipment. After obtaining visas from rival consulates he flies to France and catches the train in Paris where he is joined by a dubious and boastful fellow passenger. On a ship from Marseilles he is harrassed by the crude agency journalist Corker who spies on Boot’s telegrams from the Beast and collects tourist junk from the bazaars.

Book II – Stones £20

Ishmaelia is a country theoretically organised on rational liberal principles but is actually dominated by a corrupt family and run incompetently. During a period of political turbulence, journalists from several countries are based at the Hotel Liberty.

When William Boot and Corker arrive their luggage has been lost in transit. The journalists desperately seek information from each other. One cables news of a new Bolshevik envoy simply because he has a false beard – but the man turns out to be a railway ticket collector.

Boot is given information by the British vice-consul, but Corker denies its validity. A special train arrives with their lost luggage and lots more journalists. Boot moves into a pension and meets a married German girl who immediately dupes him out of twenty pounds.

The journalists depart en masse into the interior to visit a city which does not exist. William stays in the capital and falls in love with Katchen, who is not married and is not German. He is sacked from the Beast but the same day sends them some gossip he has picked up from Katchen, who is fleecing him mercilessly.

The British envoy reveals to Boot the mining rights to gold mineral deposits that are the cause of political tensions. He relays this information to the Beast and is re-instated. Katchen’s ‘husband’ appears to recover his gold ore and Katchen herself. They escape in William’s collapsible canoe.

The mysterious Mr Baldwin arrives by parachute and gives Boot lots of detailed political information. The Soviet Union of Islamaelia is proclaimed. Its first act is to abolish Sundays. A counter-revolution occurrs on the same day.

Book III – Banquet

Lord Copper of the Beast recommends Boot for a knighthood – but it is awarded in error to the novelist John Boot, the author of smutty stories.

William returns to great acclaim but turns down public adulation and goes straight back home. Mr Slater is despatched to Boot Magna to sign William to the paper in fear that he will join the rival Daily Brute. Slater is poorly received and pestered by William’s garrulous uncle.

Lord Copper gives a banquet to honour William, but it is his aged uncle Theodore Boot who is mistakenly presented as the hero and commended as the ‘triumph of youth’.

Scoop – main characters

William Boot	a young writer on rural matters
John Courtney Boot	a remote cousin, writer of ‘smutty’ novels
Theodore Boot	William’s elderly uncle, a roue
Lord Copper	owner of the Daily Beast
Mr Salter	obsequious foreign editor of the Beast
Mrs Stitch	well connected society lady
Corker	vulgar agency reporter
Katchen	a mercenary blonde prostitute

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Seize the Day

June 22, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and plot summary,

Seize the Day was first published in 1956 along with three short stories and a one act play in the USA by Viking. But such is the critical reputation it has developed in the intervening years that it is now published separately as a novella (or a short novel) of outstanding importance. It was Saul Bellow’s fourth major work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the same year – 1976.

Seize the Day – critical comment

The American Dream

The American Dream is a a set of ideals that has its origin in the American Declaration of Independence (1776), which proclaims that “all men are created equal” with the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Dream embraces a notion that regardless of social class or circumstances of birth, everyone has the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers.

This is a somewhat utopian idea which has historically ignored the fact that America was a society founded on the near-extermination of native Americans, on the racist enslavement of African-Americans, and on a free market capitalist economy that drove millions of people into poverty.

Many artists and writers have criticised this Dream and its shortcomings, and Seize the Day is a very good example of an almost dystopian view of America in the mid twentieth century. Tommy Wilhelm is presented as an Average Man – but his life and the Dream he yearns for are in ruins.

He was employed as a travelling salesman (selling junk toys for children) but he has been forced out of his job by a combination of competition and nepotism on the part of his employers, who have appointed a relative to take over his sales patch. The ‘free’ market has impoverished him. He has a wife and two children, but his marriage has soured (for reasons unknown) and it has become nothing but a financial burden to him, which has led to his being insolvent.

Another feature of the American Dream is the idea that not only does everyone have the ability to be successful, but they can also become famous as well. Tommy was lured by an unscrupulous ‘talent scout’ into abandoning his college studies for the lure of a Hollywood ‘screen test’. His career in the cinema amounted to nothing more than a humiliating scene playing bagpipes:in an unknown movie: even the sound was dubbed in afterwards.

He lives in squalor; he is in bad health; and he clutches at every flimsy hope of the no-hoper – such as the idea that he could invent something: “Everybody wants to make something. Any American does.” But the central plank of the American Dream to which he clings like a man in a shipwreck is the idea that he can become rich by investing on the stock exchange. Tamkin lures him with stories of easy wealth, and over the course of the day his investment (in lard) is wiped out by falling prices.

In almost every aspect of the Dream, Tommy is a failure. He is even downwardly socially mobile – an unemployed commercial traveller (as they used to be called) in children’s toys, whereas his father has a far higher status as a successful doctor. Tommy’s life is an illustration of the fact that the American Dream remains a myth.

Mephistopholes

Mephistopheles (or the Devil) is a common figure in European literature, associated with the Faust legend. He appears in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s Faust, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Common features of his presentation are that he is clever, witty, and offers temptations to those before whom he appears. He also comes and goes suddenly, and in some cases changes his outer appearance.

Dr Tamkin is very much the Mephistophelean figure. He winds himself around Tommy like a snake, feeding him with dreams of easy wealth, a successful life, and rationalisations for taking the short route to success. He even gives the novel it’s title, with his injunctions to live in the moment, in the here and now, and to ‘Seize the Day’ (Carpe Diem). His anecdotes, flights of fancy, and tales of his own exploits are marvellously entertaining, and (almost) persuasive – but we are reminded by Dr Adler’s cautions and Tommy’s own doubts, that Tamkin is a fraud.

Tamkin takes Tommy into the central Hell of the stock exchange, where he disattends to Tommy’s concerns and pursues his own ends. Indeed he has fraudulently cheated Tommy, with whom he is supposed to be in a business partnership, and enriched himself at Tommy’s expense. And like Mephistopheles, he comes and goes at will, disappearing just when Tommy has hit rock bottom and needs him most.

A Freudian reading

The novella also invites yet another interpretation – a reading based on the classical Freudian trinity of the Ego, the Super-Ego, and the Id as the structure of human consciousness itself. It is certainly not difficult to see that the three characters namely Doctor Adler, Tommy, and Tamkin as corresponding closely to the three Freudian categories.

Freud’s theory posits the Ego, the Super-ego, and the Id as the three parts of the human psyche. They are in potential or actual conflict with each other, fighting for control of the individual. The Ego represents the conscious and realistic of the psyche which must deal with the challenges of life and must mediate between the competing demands of the Super-ego and the Id. It includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. The Super-ego represents the critical and moralising set of social values and cultural rules which are embodied in the Law and authority figures. The Id represents the amoral and instinctive desires It is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. The id contains the libido, which acts according to the ‘pleasure principle’.

Freud’s basic notion is that these three components of consciousness represent different types of morality which are in potential conflict with each other:

From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral and then become as cruel as only the id can be.
The Ego and the Id

It is not at all difficult to see the three principal characters in these terms. Tommy is the Ego writ large. He is struggling to solve the many problems in his crumbling life, and he is being pulled apart by the conflicting demands of ‘Dr’ Tamkin and his father. Doctor Adler is a perfect example of an authority figure. He is Tommy’s father, with whom Tommy is in very Oedipal competition. He is successful; he has economic and social power; and all the advice he gives to his son is sensible, moral, and socially correct. But he is pitiless in his attitude to Tommy.

‘Dr’ Tamkin on the other hand is nothing but a temptation figure goading Tommy towards the pleasure principle – of easy money, instant gratification; sexual freedom, and rationalized explanations for any actions he wishes to take. Tommy knows that his father represents what is morally right – but he craves mercy or at least sympathy from him, but Doctor Adler shows none. Similarly, Tommy feels that the temptations offered by Tamkin are probably too good to be true: he doubts his veracity and thinks he might be a fraud, yet he has cast in his lot with him.

Narrative

The narrative is a wonderful mix of third person and first person narrative modes, switching fluently between an authorial account of Tommy’s movements throughout the day, into his thoughts about the plight in which he finds himself, and back out again. In all this Bellow combines the language of ‘literature’ with that of the street – a masterly feature which was to become one of his hallmarks in later novels

It made Wilhelm profoundly bitter that his father should speak to him with such detachment about his welfare. Dr. Adler liked to appear affable. Affable! His own son, his one and only son, could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him. I wouldn’t turn to Tamkin, he thought, if I could turn to him. At least Tamkin sympathises with me and tries to give me a hand, whereas Dad doesn’t want to be disturbed.

Novel or Novella?

The work is less than 40,000 words long – so it could be considered a long short story. Many of Henry James’s tales are similar in length. Or it could be seen as a rather short novel. But there are very good reasons for regarding it as an outstandingly good example of a novella.

The strongest reason is the amazing< em>unity of time, place, action, and character. The events of the narrative take place on a single day, in a single place (New York City); the action is continuous; and everything is centred on the figure of Tommy Wilhelm. In fact the action forms a downward spiral in his fate. He begins the day in a desperate state but hopes the events of his day will improve matters. The reverse happens, and things go from bad to worse. The events are also punctuated symbolically by what seem like the signs of incipient heart attacks as the disappointments pile up to invade his failing health.

It could also be said that the narrative ends on a tragic note, with Tommy sucked into the funeral of a complete stranger – who might almost be regarded as another version of himself, just when he has reached the rock bottom of his hopes. Yet this negative denouement is tempered by the crisis in Tommy’s feelings as he feels a kinship with the dead man.

It is the compression of these fictional elements that characterise the novella and give it a concentrated unity of purpose and design. The events of the narrative may appear fairly trivial (an unemployed middle-aged man who has a problematic wife) but they represent something larger than themselves. Tommy Wilhelm is not simply Doctor Adler’s son – he is Mr Middle America – in the same way as Willy Loman can be seen in Arthur Miller’s drama Death of a Salesman

Seize the Day – study resources

Seize the Day – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon UK

Seize the Day – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon US

Seize the Day – Library of America – Amazon UK

Seize the Day – Library of America – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

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

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

Seize the Day – plot summary

Part I. Tommy Wilhelm is a young middle-aged travelling salesman who feels an Oedipal resentment towards his successful father Doctor Adler, who is comfortably retired. They both live in apartments in the same hotel in New York City. Tommy quit college when a bogus talent scout (who turned out to be a pimp) offered him a screen test. Tommy failed in his quest for stardom in Hollywood, he has lost his job as a salesman, he is separated from his wife and children, and he is losing money on stock market investments recommended by a fellow resident at the hotel, ‘Dr’ Tamkin. He feels guilty about having changed his name, and he realises he cannot really change the person he is – or what he has inherited from his forebears.

Part II. On collecting his mail in the hotel lobby he is confronted by bills from his wife which he cannot afford to pay. At breakfast in the dining room he meets his father talking to a fellow guest and feels annoyed
because his father talks up his son and daughter, neither of whom is successful. Tommy smokes heavily, takes pills, lives in squalor, drives an untidy car, and drinks Coca-Cola for breakfast. He feels guilty and annoyed having to explain away the loss of his job to his father’s breakfast friend. Doctor Adler thinks that Tamkin might be a fraud, yet Tommy has given him his last $700 to invest.

Part III. His father advises him to stop drinking and taking pills, recommending instead water therapy and exercise – all of which Tommy sees as mean-spirited and showing a lack of understanding. Tommy complains about his wife, and how she demands more and more from him – especially money. He feels as if she is trying to kill him with her demands. They discuss the failure of his marriage: his father remains implacably critical and unsympathetic. Doctor Adler accuses him of having been fired from his job, and possibly being in trouble with some other woman. He even reproaches him for having joined the armed forces during the Second World War. He refuses to give him (or his sister) any money, and they part in anger.

Part IV. In the hotel lobby he meets ‘Dr’ Tamkin who reveals the embarrassing details of their very unequal speculative investment in lard on the stock exchange. Tommy tells him about the argument with his father, and Tamkin spins him some rather improbable ‘case histories’ concerning his patients. He then boasts about his own accomplishments, his social connections, and his travels. Tommy continues to wonder if Tamkin is a fraud, but Tamkin persuades him with a theory of Twin Souls within one person.

Part V. Tommy and Tamkin go to the stock exchange. Tommy feels overwhelmed by the city but recalls a transcendent feeling of love for humankind. Tamkin continues to expound his philosophy of the Here and Now and living for the moment, whilst watching his own investments rise.

Part VI. Over lunch Tamkin continues to offer Tommy theories and rationalisations connected with money, father-son conflicts, and how to deal with ex-wives – all illustrated with barely credible stories from his own experience. Tommy takes elderly Mr Rappaport to buy some cigars. When he gets back to the exchange his share prices have dropped, wiping out all his investment, and Tamkin has disappeared.

Part VII. Tommy goes back to the hotel in search of Tamkin, but cannot find him. He goes down into the bath house in the basement, where his father refuses to pay his hotel bill. Tommy phones his wife, who complains about a post-dated cheque he has given her. They argue: she refuses to work. He feels she is killing him with her demands for money. On Broadway he gets caught up in the funeral of a stranger, and the sight of the dead man causes him to break down in tears.

Seize the Day – principal characters

Tommy Wilhelm	an unemployed commercial salesman
Doctor Adler	his father, a successful retired doctor
‘Dr’ Tamkin	claims to be a psychiatrist
Maurice Venice	a pimp, claims to be a talent scout
Margaret	Tommy’s demanding wife
Catharine	Tommy’s sister, a would-be painter
Mr Perl	German fellow hotel resident
Olive	Tommy’s Catholic woman friend in Roxbury
Mr Rappaport	almost blind stocks trader and bigamist

Other works by Saul Bellow

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Sir Edmund Orme

December 29, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Sir Edmund Orme (1891) is one of James’s ghost stories, a literary genre which was very popular towards the end of the nineteenth century. It first appeared in the Christmas edition of the magazine Black and White and features a variation of the supernatural tale in which the ‘ghost’ is only visible to certain people. And although the story contains a suicide and two sudden deaths, the ghost actually appears to have a benign, protective purpose. It is presented as almost a ‘friendly’ ghost.

Brighton – 19th century

Sir Edmund Orme – critical commentary

The framed narrative

The story is presented to us by an un-named outer narrator who has come across a written account of events. These have been written by the inner narrator who is also the principal male figure in the story, and is also un-named.

This is a device James used a number of times – most notably in The Turn of the Screw, and like that more famous novella, the story in not in fact fully ‘framed’. That is, we are given an account of the origin of a text, but the story finishes at the end of that text. We do not go back to rejoin the introduction in any meaningful way.

The outer narrator also admits that he has no proof that the events described actually took place. The author of the text, which has been kept in a locked drawer, has written the account for his own purposes. This leaves scope for ambiguities within the tale – as well as for a variety of possible interpretations.

The ghostly element

We normally expect ghosts to be sinister and threatening. They usually appear at night, dawn, or dusk, and have a disreputable appearance and a malevolent purpose. But Sir Edmund Orme appears in broad daylight, in very public places (Brighton seafront, Tranton church) and he is well dressed and behaves with impeccable reserve.

In fact we learn, first from Mr Marden and then from the narrator’s surmise, that Sir Edmund has a protective function. He appears to Mrs Marden as an uncomfortable reminder of her previous cruelty in jilting Sir Edmund in favour of Captain Marden, but he is acting to prevent any repetition of such behaviour by her daughter. The narrator’s analysis is based on the egotistical supposition that he is being protected:

It was a case of retributive justice … The wretched mother was to pay, in suffering, for the suffering she had inflicted, and as the disposition to trifle with an honest man’s just expectations might crop up again, to my detriment, in the child, the latter young person was to be studied and watched, so that she might be made to suffer should she do an equal wrong.

However, it is open for us to observe that the net result of the narrative is the death of two women. First the fifty-five year old Mrs Marden dies on the occasion of the ghost’s last appearance, and second her daughter is dead within a year of marrying the narrator.

This reading of the text is informed by the observation that many of James’s fictions have a fear of women and marriage deeply buried within their concerns. The inner narrator befriends both Mrs Marden and her daughter, but he immediately observes that “One often hears mature mothers spoken of as warnings—sign-posts, more or less discouraging, of the way daughters may go.” And this is followed by a view of himself as a potential target for husband seekers, even though it is expressed as a negative:

I never suspected her of the vulgar purpose of ‘making up’ to me—a suspicion of course unduly frequent in conceited young men. It never struck me that she wanted me for her daughter, nor yet, like some unnatural mammas, for herself.

In other words, women are seen as threats to a bachelor’s independence and freedom from any emotional claims, and ultimately, despite any sympthy their creators show for their female concerns, they will be punished – in the same way as Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The phenomenon was not new, even at the end of the nineteenth century.

Sir Edmund Orme – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

Sir Edmund Orme – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

Sir Edmund Orme – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

Sir Edmund Orme – Kindle edition

The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edition

Sir Edmund Orme – read the book on line

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Late Victorian Gothic Tales – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Sir Edmund Orme – plot summary

An un-named narrator is friendly with a widow Mrs Marden and her attractive daughter in Brighton. When he begins to sense the power of his attraction to the younger woman, her mother starts to behave in an erratic manner. She wishes to promote her daughter’s relationship with the narrator, but cannot conceal her unease – and for reasons which remain mysterious.

When they meet again at a country house, the narrator accompanies Charlotte to church, where they are joined by a young man who does not speak, and who Charlotte does not even seem to notice. Mrs Marden reveals that the man is Sir Edmund Orme, who she once jilted and who subsequently committed suicide. He has been re-appearing to her intermittently ever since, as a sort of punishment and to check that Charlotte does not behave in the same way as her mother. The narrator proposes to Charlotte, but he is turned down.

Some months later they meet again at a musical party in Brighton. The narrator proposes again to Charlotte, and at the same time Sir Edmund appears. Mrs Marden faints and has to be taken home. Next day the narrator visits them and can see ‘the shadow of death’ on Mrs Marden’s face. She urges her daughter to accept the narrator’s offer of marriage, and as Charlotte does so the figure of Sir Edmund reappears in the room for what turns out to be the last time, but Mrs Marden is dead.

Principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator who presents the written account
I	the un-named inner narrator who has written the account
Captain Teddy Bostock	a friend of the inner narrator
Miss Charlotte Marden	a pretty woman of 22
Mrs Marden	her mother, a wealthy widow of fifty-five
Captain Marden	the man she married instead of Edmund Orme
Sir Edmund Orme	the young man who Mrs Marden jilted
Brighton	real seaside resort in southern England
Tranton	fictional country town in Sussex

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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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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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.

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Seize the Day – study resources

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Sir Edmund Orme – critical commentary

Sir Edmund Orme – study resources

Sir Edmund Orme – plot summary

Ghost stories by Henry James

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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