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The Bloomsbury Group memoirs and criticism

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

memoirs, commentary, and criticism

This is a collection of memoirs, commentary, and criticism – all of which relate to the Bloomsbury Group and its members – of whom it was said that they were ‘a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles’. Many of the materials are available elsewhere – people’s letters, diaries, and various published papers; but these are scattered sources, whereas here they are all shepherded into one single pen, with the title ‘Bloomsbury’ writ large at the entrance.

Characters reflect on each other – Virginia Woolf on her nephew Julian Bell, Duncan Grant on Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell on Roger Fry, David Garnett on E.M.Forster, and Leonard Woolf on Lytton Strachey.

Some of the materials are well known because they come from fairly accessible sources, such as Virginia Woolf’s diaries, or Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada (which contains the hilarious account of Lytton Strachey riding a donkey in the Alpujarras in southern Spain). But others are pieces you would not easily find elsewhere – such as essays from the Memoir Club.

There are also relatively scarce items, such as Adrian Stephen’s first-hand account of the Dreadnought Hoax, and Vanessa Bell’s memoir of Bloomsbury, as well better-known pieces as Maynard-Keynes‘ ‘My Early Beliefs’, which is an account of his youthful days at Cambridge with Bertrand Russell and Lytton Strachey, along with the Apostles under the influence of G.M. Moore.

Many of the longer pieces are written in defence of Bloomsbury, because (though it might seem odd now) it was under a considerable degree of negative criticism from the 1920s onwards. Some of that criticism is reproduced here, which makes the book all the richer for it. The objections of the Leavis camp have evaporated with the passage of time, but I think it’s worth recalling them for the sake of historical perspective.

As a repository of social history it relies very heavily on extracts from Leonard Woolf’s excellent Autobiography, but as a source for fans of Bloomsbury, this is a valuable resource.

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S.R. Rosenbaum (ed), The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism, Toronto: University of Toronto, 1975, pp.444, ISBN: 0802062687

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Twentieth century literature

The Bloomsbury Group portraits

August 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832—1904)

Julia Stephen (1846—1895)

Thoby Stephen (1880—1906)

Adrian Stephen (1883—1948)

Vanessa Bell (1879—1961)

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941)

Lytton Strachey (1880—1932)

John Maynard Keynes (1883—1946)

Leonard Woolf (1880—1969)

E.M. Forster (1879—1970)

Roger Fry (1866—1934)

Bertrand Russell (1872—1970)

T.S. Eliot (1888—1965)

Duncan Grant (1885—1978)

Clive Bell (1881—1964)

Vita Sackville-West (1892—1962)

Harold Nicolson (1886—1968)

Mark Gertler (1896—1939)

David Garnett (1892—1981)

Ottoline Morrell (1873—1938)

Gerald Brenan (1894—1987)

Dora Carrington (1893—1932)

Katherine Mansfield (1888—1923)

Rupert Brooke (1887—1915)

Desmond MacCarthy (1977-1952)

Saxon Sydney-Turner (1880-1962)

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The Bloomsbury Group: who were they?

August 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

modernist culture and arts 1900-1950

The Bloomsbury Group is a name given to a loose collection of writers, artists, and intellectuals who came together during the period 1905-06 at the home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. Following the death of their father, Sir Leslie Stephen, they set up home in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, in central London, close to the British Museum.

The group included Virginia Woolf (writer) and her husband-to-be Leonard Woolf (writer and later political figure); her sister Vanessa Bell (artist) and her husband Clive Bell; the artist and critic Roger Fry; the novelist E.M.Forster and poet T.S.Eliot; economist John Maynard Keynes and philosopher Bertrand Russell; the writers Gerald Brenan, Lytton Strachey, and Vita Sackville-West; artists Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington.

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book which explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism. It’s actually the illustrated catalogue of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

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Toby invited his friends to soirees, and Vanessa invited hers. The two groups met, networked, formed liaisons with each other (that’s putting it mildly) and created some of the central works of the modernist movement in Britain in the period 1905-1930.

They were in conscious revolt against the artistic, social, and sexual restrictions of the Victorian age. They were on the whole from an upper middle class intellectual elite, but it has to be said that in their personal lives they defied the status quo, and most of them were very productive.

In fact, the true centre of the group was Cambridge University, where their brother Toby had met a number of intellectuals who had come under the influence of G.M. Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) had made a serious impression on undergraduates who formed a group called the ‘Apostles’. He propounded a notion of ethics which rested on the pursuit of friendship, happiness, and the cultivation of the intellect.

Bloomsbury Recalled is written by Quentin Bell, one of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury circle. He offers a disarmingly candid portraits of his father, Clive Bell, who married the author’s mother, Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s sister). He 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, Angelica. 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.’ Acclaimed biographer of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, Bell here defends her as a feminist and pacifist. Along with chapters on John Maynard Keynes, Ottoline Morrell and art historian-spy Anthony Blunt, there are glimpses of Lytton Strachey, novelist David Garnett (Angelica’s husband) and Dame Ethel Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.
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Influenced by this notion of free-spirited friendship, intellectual liberty, and radical life-styles, many of the men were conscientious objectors during the First World War. They were liberals or socialists at a time when the English establishment was overwhelmingly conservative; and in their personal relationships they pushed back the boundaries of what could be done in a way which was not seen again until the 1960s.

Many of these people became sexually involved with each other in a way which even now seems quite bewildering. Married to one person, but in cahoots with someone else, often of the same sex. Some of them even lived with a person of the opposite sex yet shared the same lover.

It has to be remembered that at that time homosexuality was a criminal offence (though only for men) and many gay men got married as a legal cover and a smokescreen to provide social legitimacy.

There were also lots of minor figures who are counted amongst the Bloomsbury Group – people such as Harold Nicolson (diplomat and writer); Mark Gertler (painter); Desmond MacCarthy (literary critic); Saxon Sydney-Turner (civil servant); David Garnett and John Lehmann (writers); and Ottoline Morrell (social hostess).

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900—1930 was written by Virginia Nicholson, Quentin Bell’s daughter and grand-daughter of Vanessa Bell, who was Virginia Woolf’s sister. Bloomsbury lies at the heart of the book in its portraits of Ralph Partridge, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Katherine Mansfield, plus peripheral figures such as Arthur Ransome, Rupert Brooke, Augustus John, Nina Hamnett, and Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. Very amusing, well written, and every page dense with top class gossip and anecdotes. She looks at their tangled love lives naturally, but also their radical ideas on money (and poverty) food, dress, and even child-raising. Highly recommended.
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The intellectual connections between these people were amazing. For instance, the Woolfs established the Hogarth Press in their own home as a hobby-cum-therapy to help Virginia through her periods of depression and madness. The Press published not only her own works, but books by T.S.Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, and Christopher Isherwood. They even pioneered the work of Sigmund Freud, whose writing was translated by James Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother.

It also has to be said that many of the group were enormously productive and high-achievers. Despite her periods of mental illness, Virginia Woolf was a voluminous diarist and letter writer – as was her husband Leonard Woolf. Together they also ran the Hogarth Press. Economist John Maynard Keynes produced an almost unbroken stream of influential political studies and policy documents whilst working in a number of high-ranking government positions. And Vita Sackville-West was a best-selling novelist and award-winning poet who also wrote books on historic houses and gardens.

A Bloomsbury Canvas is a selection of essays on the Bloomsbury Group. Essayists include Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf; art historians Richard Shone and Frances Spalding; Nigel Nicolson, author of Portrait of a Marriage, a study of his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson; and the last survivors of those closely connected to the Bloomsbury Group – Frances Partridge, Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. The text is illustrated with many previously unpublished works.
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Twentieth century literature

The Bolted Door

August 10, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

The Bolted Door first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1908 and was later included in the collection Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910). Edith Wharton was a commercially successful writer of short stories at this period, even though she felt she didn’t reach true maturity as an artist until the production of her novella Ethan Frome written in 1911.

The Bolted Door – commentary

This is a story that suffers from several serious weaknesses, but has one redeeming and unusual feature. The weaknesses are that it is based on a rather unconvincing idea; it is annoyingly repetitive; the first part of the story has little to do with the second; and the issue in question is technically unresolved.

The idea that someone has committed a murder but is unable to persuade others of his guilt is mildly amusing, but it is never seriously examined or brought to closure. Hubert Granice tells his story to a lawyer, then to a newspaper editor, and finally to someone who purports to be a detective. His tale becomes more complex and fanciful at each telling. In this way, the reader is led to believe that the murder is a product of his imagination. But he never reports to the police, and his account of events is never held up for comparison with any details of the original crime.

The first sections of the story deal with Granice’s failure as a playwright. He has invested time and money in his ambition to become a successful writer for the stage. Despite exploring various dramatic modes – ‘comedy, tragedy, prose and verse’ – he has failed in all of them. We can be forgiven for thinking that his urge to commit suicide is associated with this failure.

But the narrative then changes to focus on his attempts to confess to the murder of his cousin Joseph Lenman – all of which efforts are thwarted. After this point any mention of his theatrical ambition is forgotten – so there is no persuasive or thematic connection between these two elements of the plot.

Instead, the narrative is taken up with a very repetitive and long-winded series of ‘explanations’ which fail to convince a succession of people of his guilt. These are spun out in exhaustive detail, until he is finally persuaded to enter what we take to be a lunatic asylum as someone who is clearly deluded.

At this point his final confessor, the detective McCarren, reveals that he has solved the mystery of the original crime. He claims that Granice really did murder his cousin Joseph Lenman. However, McCarren produces no evidence in support of this assertion. There is no explanation of how he has uncovered the truth, nor is there any confirmation of Granice’s own account of the murder.

The story therefore concludes with producing a sense of irresolution. It becomes a ‘reversal of expectation’ narrative for which there is no justification.

Existentialism

However, there is a very interesting passage in the story which occurrs when Granice’s frustration is at its most intense. He is unable to persuade other people of his account of the murder, and as a consequence he feels trapped within his own anguished consciousness.

Edith Wharton expresses this state of mind in terms very similar to those used by Jean-Paul Sartre in his writing on existentialism which came forty years later – particularly in Nausea (1938). The protagonist of Sartre’s novel, Antoine Roquentin, experiences his own state of being with a feeling of repulsion. Granice’s anguish is expressed in very similar terms:

He was chained to life—a ‘prisoner of consciousness’ … he was visited by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable selfness, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any other sensation he had ever known … Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat—and as his brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous substance.

In 1908 modern forms of existentialism were still some way off, so this counts as writing which was prescient, if not prophetic.

The Bolted Door – study resources

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

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

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

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Bolted Door – plot summary

I Hubert Granice is a failed playwright who entertains the idea of suicide because of his lack of success. He summons his friend the lawyer Ascham to whom he reveals that he committed a murder ten years previously.

II He reveals to Ascham the story of his rich elderly cousin Joseph Lenman whose hobby was growing melons. Granice poisoned Lenman by injecting cyanide into a melon, but Ascham does not believe his story.

III Granice repeats his story to Denver, the editor of a newspaper, with further details about how he arranged and carried out the murder. Denver challenges some of the details, and ultimately refuses to print the confession in his newspaper.

IV Granice takes his tale to Allonby the district attorney, who does nothing, but sends detective Hewson from his office to go over some of the details.

V Granice employs a reporter McCarren who checks on the car he claims to have used in the murder and a lock-up garage where it has been kept. However, all the evidence has disappeared in the ten years since the crime took place.

VI Granice discovers that detective Hewson is really a psychiatrist, who advises him to rest and give up smoking. In despair at his lack of progress, Granice decides to confide to a stranger, and on pestering a young girl in Washington Square, he is arrested by the police.

VII Granice is placed in what appears to be a mental asylum. He enjoys the peace and quiet, and begins writing long accounts of his ‘case’. When visited by McCarren and a friend, it is revealed that McCarren has discovered that Granice was telling the truth all along.

Edith Wharton – short stories
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The Bostonians

September 22, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bostonians was first published as a serial in The Century Magazine in 1885-1886, then as a three volume novel in February 1886. It is generally regarded at the high point of what is called the ‘middle period’ of Henry James’ development as a novelist. He had re-visited America in the middle of the decade following the death of his parents; the novel is set in Boston and New York; and it clearly reflects some of his contemporary impressions on the nation, written as a native American. The novel as a matter of fact includes some rather touching reflections on the Civil War, which had only concluded twenty years before (and in which James had not participated). But its principal subject matter is ‘The Woman Question’ – that is, the conflict between traditional views of the role of women in society, and the views of suffragists and what today would be called supporters of women’s liberation.

Summer in New England – Frank W. Benson (1862-1951)

The Bostonians – critical commentary

Narrative

Henry James uses third person omniscient narrative mode for the majority of the novel. That is, he knows all the events that take place and he reveals the inner feelings and thoughts of his characters. But from time to time he slips into a first person narrative mode to pretend that he has only a partial view of events.

I know not what may have been the reality of Miss Chancellor’s other premonitions, but there is no doubt that in this respect she took Verena’s measure on the spot.

He also comments on the narrative itself, revealing himself as the author.

If we were at this moment to take, in a single glance, an inside view of Mrs Burrage (a liberty we have not yet ventured on), I suspect we should find that she was considerably exasperated by her visitor’s superior tone, at seeing herself regarded by this dry, shy, obstinate, provincial young woman as superficial.

Technically, this is a curious mixture of narrative modes – one moment claiming to know the innermost shifts in his characters’ feelings, and the next moment feigning ignorance. It perhaps reflects the ambiguity and uncertainty that he increasing explored into his novels from this period onwards.

It is a very typical James narrative in being composed of a series of rather static tableaux. The locations of the action shift between Boston and New York, but the drama unfolds through a series of meetings where the focus of attention is largely on the psychological state of the characters.

Feminist politics

When the novel first appeared it was criticised by much of its American audience, largely on the grounds that James had satirised some well known figures. More than one hundred years later, these issues have faded, and it is possible to take a more balanced view of the reform movement that he portrays.

It is quite clear that the most active and senior women in the suffrage movement – Olive Chancellor and Mrs Farrage – are depicted negatively as vicious harpies. They are both more concerned with social control mechanisms and feeding their own egos than genuine concern for women as individuals. Even their male counterpart Selah Tarrant is revealed as a tin pot shaman – a bogus snake-oil salesman who virtually sells his own daughter.

But this negative picture is balanced by the positive characterisation of Doctor Prance and Miss Birdseye. Doctor Prance is a professional young woman who puts her own ego to one side in pursuit of her interest in medicine and science. And Miss Birdseye has a life history of genuine devotion to the cause. She has campaigned in the South for the abolition of slavery, and has taught negroes (as James calls them in the language of the period) to read and write.

It is significant that both Miss Birdseye and Dr Prance have friendly relations with Basil Ransom, whereas Olive Chancellor immediately takes a visceral dislike to him.

The Boston marriage

The other major issue in the novel is the relationship between Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant – and by implication their separate relationships with Basil Ransom. The term Boston marriage is used to describe two women living together, independent of financial support of a man.

Olive Chancellor has inherited wealth, so she is able to pay off Mr and Mrs Tarrant to take control of Verena and bring her to live under the same roof. However, contemporary readers do not need brass plaques on their doors to recognise that what James depicts on Olive Chancellor’s part is a passionate lesbian desire for Verena.

Olive is totally possessive of Verena, and she has an equally passionate hatred of any potential rivals – particularly of men. She repeatedly admonishes Verena for not disliking men generically. Henry Burrage’s interest in Verena is abhorrent to Olive, but not nearly as much as that of Basil Ransom. Olive is a general man hater, but in particular she sees the tall Mississippian as an erotic rival.

In fact the whole of the novel is an account of the psychological war between Olive and Basil for possession of Verena. Despite Basil’s conservative (Neanderthal) views on the role of women, Verena is eventually attracted to him by what we might nowadays call his personal magnetism and his integrity. In the end she does submit to his wish for a woman who will give up her role in public life for an existence which is entirely domestic.

At the end of the novel she leaves with tears in her eyes which were ‘not the last she was destined to shed’. So James leaves the triangular struggle between these characters as a surprising triumph for Basil Ransom, a failure for Olive Chancellor, but a very ambiguous resolution for Verena Tarrant.

The Civil War

Basil Ransom is from Mississippi, and has fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederates – that is the slave-owning southern states. In fact his family has lost its property (and its slaves) because of the war – which is why Basil has taken up work in the legal profession and moved north to seek employment.

He clings to the aristocratic values of politeness, courtesy, and reactionary social values, and is clearly not suited to the world of commerce in which he finds himself. It is these views and attitudes which arouse the antagonism of (some of) the feminists, because their cause has its roots in the Abolitionist anti-slavery movement in which characters such as Miss Birdseye and Mrs Tarrant’s family have been active

In one of the pivotal meetings of the novel Verena Tarrant takes him to look round Harvard University in Cambridge, just outside Boston. There in the Memorial Hall he looks on the names of those who have died on the opposite side.

The effect of the place is singularly noble and solemn … It stands there for duty and honour, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen … For Ransom these things were not a challenge or a taunt; they touched him with respect, with the sentiment of beauty. He was capable of being a generous foeman, and he forgot, now, the whole question of sides and parties; the simple emotion of the old fighting-time came back to him, and the monument around him seemed an embodiment of that memory; it arched over his friends as well as enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph.

Henry James was himself from the northern states, and was eligible for conscription when the war began. But he rather conveniently developed a back problem (‘that obscure hurt’) when it was time to join the Unionist army.

The Bostonians – study resources

The Bostonians – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Bostonians – Everyman’s Library Classics – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – Modern Library – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – DVD film version – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Bostonians – CD audioBook version (unabridged) – Amazon UK

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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Bostonians – plot summary

In 1875 young Mississippian lawyer Basil Ransom is invited to visit his cousin Olive Chancellor in Boston. She is a feminist and radical social reformer, who takes him to one of their meetings where he encounter Verena Tarrant, an inspirational speaker. Olive immediately feels a passionate attachment to Verena. Basil likes her as an attractive young woman, but he thinks her ‘inspirations’ are dubious, and largely influenced by her father, who is a ‘mesmeric healer’ (and a complete fraud).

The relationship between Olive and Verena develops rapidly, encourages by Mrs Tarrant, who sees it as a source of social advantage. Mr (‘Dr’) Tarrant sees it as a potential source of income, which he conspicuously lacks. Olive is so possessive of Verena that she asks her to promise not to marry. Olive wants to control Verena for the cause of greater women’s suffrage, but it is clear that she also wishes to control her emotionally. The journalist Matthias Pardon proposes to ‘promote’ Verena as a money-making attraction, but Olive refuses to allow it. He then proposes marriage instead, but Verena turns down his offer.

Olive then pays the Tarrants (who she dislikes intensely) a large sum to take Verena to live with her, which she does willingly, embracing the suffrage ideology which Olive promotes. However, whereas Verena thinks some men might be acceptable, Olive thinks that all men are not. The two women embark together on a trip to Europe.

Meanwhile, Basil Ransom has not done well in his legal business in New York. He is tempted by what appears to be Adeline Luna’s hints of marriage. But when he hears that Verena has returned from Europe he goes to visit her in Boston.

She shows him around Harvard University, feeling that she is betraying the understanding she shares with Olive that men should be discouraged. Ransom patronises and insults her regarding woman’s suffrage issues, but it is quite clear that he is deeply attracted to her. A great deal turns on whether their meeting will be revealed to Olive or not.

Ransom is invited to Verena’s lecture at Mrs Burrage’s house in New York, where he continues to clash ideologically with Olive, is ambushed by Adelina, and realises that he has fallen in love with Verena.

There are repeated scenes of conflict between Ransom and Olive as he contrives to meet Verena privately. Olive interrogates Verena regarding how much contact she has had with Ransom. Verena tells her everything – except the day she spent alone with him in Boston.

Mrs Burrage then summons Olive and asks her to support her son Henry’s bid to marry Verena. Olive thinks that this might be less ‘dangerous’ (as she sees it) than an alliance with Basil Ransom.

Whilst Olive and Verena are in New York, Basil engineers a private meeting with Verena and persuades her to go for a walk in Central Park. There he reveals his literary ambitions to her, and despite their differences over the role of women in society, she becomes more sympathetic to him.

Some months later Basil goes to visit the two women whilst they are on summer holiday, preparing for a major public lecture by Verena. He reveals that he has had an article accepted, and proposes marriage to her.

Verena realises that she is in love with Basil, and is in great anguish regarding his offer, since it would involve her giving up her work as a public speaker. Olive is in even greater anguish, realising that she is in danger of losing Verena to ‘the enemy’.

Just as Basil realises he is having an effect on Verena, Olive thwarts him by spiriting her away in collusion with her parents. Basil searches, but cannot find her. But he appears in Boston on the occasion of her major public lecture. His appearance there unnerves her, the lecture does not take place, which causes a scandal, and Basil leaves with Verena in tears.

first edition published by Macmillan

The Bostonians – principal characters

Basil Ransom	a lawyer from Mississippi, working in New York
Olive Chancellor	a feminist and reformer, living in Boston – Ransom’s cousin
Mrs Adelina Luna	Olive’s younger sister
Newton	Mrs Luna’s son
Miss Birdseye	elderly supporter of women’s causes
Mrs Farringer	feminist and demagogue
Amariah Farrinder	her husband
Dr Mary J. Prance	young boyish physician, lodging in same house as Miss Birdseye
‘Dr’ Selah Tarrant	mesmeric healer and pious fraud
Mrs Tarrant	daughter of famous abolitionist
Verena Tarrant	their daughter – inspirational speaker – with bright red hair
Matthias Pardon	a young publicity-seeking journalist
Henry Burrage	art-collecting Harvard ‘student’ and admirer of Verena
Mrs Burrage	society woman – Henry’s mother
Miss Catching	a librarian at Harvard University
Mr Filer	Olive Chancellor’s lecture agent

The Bostonians – film adaptation

Directed by Merchant-Ivory (1984)

Starring Christopher Reeve and Vanessa Redgrave

Watch full length movie

Other works by Henry James

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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Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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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.

More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
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The Brute

September 16, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Brute was written in early 1906, and published in The Daily Chronicle in December 1906. It was later collected in A Set of Six, published in 1908 (UK) and 1915 (US). The other stories in this collection of Joseph Conrad’s work were The Informer, An Anarchist, Gaspar Ruiz, The Duel, and Il Conde.

The Brute – critical commentary

Conrad’s own introduction to A Set of Six gives some idea of his methods of fictional composition and even a glimpse of what he thinks fiction ought to be. He mixes personal anecdote with what he sees as historical fact, and (quite reasonably) he also splices two separate incidents to make a single tale.

Perhaps the most interesting thing from the point of view of a modern reader is that he sees the necessity to provide some sort of verisimilitude – to claim that ‘this is really tue’ or ‘this really happened’ – as if a piece of fiction could not provide its own self-justification.

This is the tradition of realism in the novel (and tale) still in its strongest phase in the early twentieth century – for which we should be thankful. But it is worth noting, because so many other facets of Conrad’s writing contravene the rules of narrative logic and chronological coherence demanded by realism – even though he produced some stunning dramatic effects whilst doing so. See my various comments on both the Tales and the Novels for examples of these contraventions.

The Brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is … associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second Officer … In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence of the brute was a fact.

The end of the brute as related in the story is also a fact, well-known at the time though it really happened to another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless character, which certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously adapted it to the needs of my story thinking that I had there something in the nature of poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of tales.

The Brute – study resources

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

A Set of Six – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Brute – plot summary

The narrator Ned enters a pub where two seamen, Stoner and Jermyn are in conversation with a stranger. The stranger is expostulating about a ship that has a reputation for causing problems and even deaths. The ship has been built especially big and heavy by its owners, the Apse family – which is also the ship’s name. He claims that the ship behaves erratically, damages other ships, and is responsible for the death of at least one person every year.

He recounts joining the ship at fourteen and seeing a young sailor killed in a fall from a mast on his first day on board. He serves for three years then transfers to another ship. Later he returns to the Apse Family, serving under his brother Charley, who is first mate. They sail to Australia where Charley appears to become engaged to Maggie, a relative of the captain.

The journey home is uneventful, but on reaching port in Gravesend, there is a shipping accident and Maggie is caught up in the ship’s anchor and drowned. Charley and Ned go home, where Charley succumbs to a fever. The later history of the ship is that a sailor Wilmot neglects his watch because he is dallying with a woman passenger. As a result of this the Apse Family runs aground on some rocks and breaks up in a storm.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Brute – principal characters

Ned	the narrator, a sailor
Charley	his brother, a sailor
Mr Stoner	a senior Trinity pilot
Mr Jermyn	a North Sea pilot
Mr Colchester	captain of the Apse Family
Mrs Colchester	his wife
Maggie Colchester	Charley’s ‘intended’
Wilmot	a sailor who is susceptible to women

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
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Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

The Cambridge Apostles

February 2, 2016 by Roy Johnson

secrecy, intellectual elitism, and cultural history

The Cambridge Apostles was a quasi-secret discussion group (also known as The Cambridge Conversazione Society) that was established at Cambridge University in the nineteenth century, drawing its members largely from Christ’s, St John’s, Jesus, Trinity, and King’s Colleges. It was called The Apostles because there were originally twelve founder members, who met on Saturday night to discuss a given topic. Members were generally undergraduates, but post graduates and even teaching staff were permitted. Membership was strictly by invitation only, and former members of the group were called ‘angels’. The group met at midnight, drank coffee, and ate sardines on toast – which were called ‘Whales’.

Cambridge University – King’s College

The Cambridge Apostles – history

The group was founded in 1830 by George Tomlinson, who went on to become the Bishop of Gibraltar – a fact that reflects both the religious and the evangelical origins of the group. Most of its early members were destined to become clergymen of one kind or another. It began as a debating society which met each Saturday night, and the element of secrecy was such that no member even knew he had been proposed until he was elected.

The group had its own coded language. Someone being considered for membership was called an ’embryo’. All matters relating to the group were known as ‘reality’, whilst everything and all people outside it were referred to as ‘phenomena’. All records of membership and copies of delivered talks were kept in a wooden trunk called ‘the ark’.

Although the group was religious in origin and debated issues of conscience and belief, it gradually changed from an ideology of Toryism to a radical examination of general ethics. An early influence was Samuel Taylor Coleridge – not as a poet, but as a social philosopher who was renowned in his day both as a powerful intellectual and a great talker. He was also given to fuelling his tirades by doses of laudanum (opium).

Tennyson was an early member, but was fined five shillings and asked to resign for non-attendance. However, he was later re-admitted as an ‘angel’. The spirit of radicalism was in the group from its earliest days. They debated the possibility of admitting women (motion defeated) and gave assistance to the Spanish revolutionaries of 1850.

The group facilitated the establishment of lifelong friendships and in many cases established an Old Boys network which oiled the wheels of promotion in employment, be it in the university system, the Church, or in government. The close bonding also merged effortlessly into the homosexuality that easily took root in an all male environment in which females were generally regarded as lesser beings:

the theory that the love of a man for man was greater than that of a man for woman became an Apostolic tradition.

This tendency was fuelled intellectually later in the century by the pervasive influence of G.E. Moore who promoted a philosophy of close friendships and the pursuit of both pleasure and ‘the Good’ – without specifying what it was. In the early twentieth century this continued under the influence of Lytton Strachey (‘the arch bugger of Bloomsbury’) who controlled events and set the tone of the Apostles as its secretary and founded a powerful leadership with his fellow homosexual and one time lover, John Maynard Keynes.

John Maynard Keynes

The Bloomsbury Group

Without a doubt, the father of the Bloomsbury Group was the Victorian biographer and essayist, Sir Leslie Stephen. He attended Trinity Hall Cambridge and was elected a fellow – though not as an Apostle. However, his two sons Thoby and Adrian were also Cambridge undergraduates, where they became friends with Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and E.M. Forster, all of whom were Apostles.

These friendship networks were formed in the university, but then consolidated when individuals began to socialise at the soirees held by Thoby Stephen and his sisters, Vanessa (painter) and Virginia (writer) in their new home in Gordon Square, which at that time was considered a slightly bohemian district of London. Vanessa eventually married the apostle Clive Bell (art critic) and Virginia married the writer Leonard Woolf. There was therefore a considerable overlap between the Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group, which eventually included people such as Roger Fry (art critic and painter) and Desmond MacCarthay (journalist and editor) both of whom were Apostles.

Lytton Strachey

To be elected as an Apostle was generally regarded as a recognition of outstanding ability and talent, but some of the members of this elite group were quite unorthodox. The reclusive Saxon Sydney-Turner for instance, described by Leonard Woolf as ‘an absolute prodigy of learning’, attended meetings but hardly contributed a single word to discussion. When he returned from his holidays he showed photographs of rural Finnish railway stations and was considered a monumental bore. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was elected a member in 1912, but resigned almost immediately because he could not tolerate the atmosphere of levity and the style of humour prevalent amongst members.

Desmond MacCarthay on the other hand was a great talker and a writer considered to be of great promise. However, the promise never resulted in the production of the great novel he was always threatening to write. His gifts as a speaker are illustrated by a famous incident from a meeting of the Bloomsbury Memoir Club, at which attendees would give papers recalling past events and fellow members. E.M. Forster recalls:

he had a suit-case open before him. The lid of the case, which he propped up, would be useful to rest his manuscript upon, he told us. On he read, delighting us as usual, with his brilliancy, and humanity, and wisdom, until – owing to a slight wave of his hand – the suit-case unfortunately fell over. Nothing was inside it. There was no paper. He had been improvising.

It is interesting to note the subtle connections that allowed the Apostles to control much of the literary and intellectual life in its heyday in the early twentieth century. Leonard Woolf was in charge of the literary pages of The Nation, Desmond MacCarthy did the same at the New Statesman, and Lytton Strachey’s uncle was at the helm of The Spectator.

During the first world war the society was split between pacifists – Bertrand Russell, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner – and those who chose to fight – Ralph Wedgwood and Rupert Brooke – the ‘war poet’ who was never in the war and who died of an infected mosquito bite.

In the post-war period of the 1920s the society took a generally leftward direction and the first of the Marxists formed a sub-group, supporting the miners during the General Strike. The other momentous event in 1929 was the re-election of Ludwig Wittgenstein who was to dominate intellectual life at the university during the next ten years, although he did not get on well with the other influential figure of the 1930s, F.R. Leavis.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The next generation to join the Apostles included figures such as Julian Bell (son of apostle Clive Bell and his wife Vanessa) and the art historian Anthony Blunt. There was a generally sympathetic attitude taken towards the Soviet Union shared by many except those who had actually been there. The central event of this period was the Spanish Civil War when almost everyone supported the Republicans. But the same period also saw the establishment of what later became known as the Cambridge Spy Ring.

During the second world war Cambridge and its Apostles were all active in the fight against Nazism – some of them at Bletchley Park working on the Enigma decoding system under the direction of the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing – who was not elected an Apostle.

In the 1950s and 1960s the society included names which form a link to the modern world: Arnold Kettle, literary critic who became Professor at the Open University; Peter Shore, the Labour Party minister; the historian and unrepentant Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm; and polymath doctor and theatre director, Jonathan Miller. The society eventually decided to include women – though these remain few in number.

The Cambridge Spy Ring

In the 1930s the Apostles were largely sympathetic to left-wing causes and continued to generate personal links on the basis of their homosexual links. Both of these issues were at the root of the spy ring, which was formed between Anothony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and Donald MacLean. Various other contemporaries have been accused and investigated as spies, but without positive outcomes.

Anthony Blunt is possibly the most spectacular example of establishment deception, since he was a friend of the royal family, eventually became keeper of the Queen’s pictures, and was given a knighthood. But in 1953 the American writer Michael Straight, who was an apostle and publisher of The New Republic was uncovered as a Soviet spy and named Blunt in his confession. Blunt named others in his deposition, and was eventually stripped of his knighthood by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

In 1951 Burgess and MacLean both fled to Moscow when they came under suspicion of espionage. MacLean became a respected Soviet citizen, but Burgess never even bothered to learn Russian and lived in a seedy flat furnished with English memorabilia, became more or less an alcoholic, and died aged fifty-two.

The Cambridge Apostles – study resources

The Cambridge Apostles – Early Years – Amazon UK
The Cambridge Apostles – Early Years – Amazon US

The Cambridge Apostles – A History – Amazon UK
The Cambridge Apostles – A History – Amazon US

The Cambridge Apostles – 1820-1914 – Amazon UK
The Cambridge Apostles – 1820-1914 – Amazon US

G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles – Amazon UK
G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles – Amazon US

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature

The Canary

December 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Canary was written on 7 July, 1922 at the Hotel Chateau Bellevue in Sierre, Switzerland as a gift for Dorothy Brett with whom Katherine Mansfield had lived briefly in Bloomsbury. It was her last completed story and was only published after her death in 1923. The original inspiration for the story came from her stay at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris, where she used to watch a woman across the street tending canaries in a cage.

The Canary – critical commentary

This is one of Mansfield’s essentially static and non-dramatic stories with very little sense of narrative development and a complete absence of dramatic events. It is more like a very light character sketch combined with an evocation of an emotional state of being – the sort of modernist experiment with the short story as a literary genre that Mansfield had been pursuing at the same time as her great contemporary (and friend) Virginia Woolf.

Like most of her best work, it relies on understatement and a delicate symbolism for its effect. An elderly woman finding comfort in a pet creature is a common enough phenomenon, and Mansfield creates a credible account of the pleasure and reassurance she gains from the bird’s song. But at the same time we are reminded of her half-formed yearnings which were previously attached to her waiting for the evening star – Venus.

Venus was the Roman goddess whose functions encompassed love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and desire – none of which seem to have featured largely in the woman’s life. This small piece of domestic sadness is reinforced by the fact that she is aware that the three male lodgers call her ‘the Scarecrow’, but reassures herself that ‘It doesn’t matter. Not in the least.’ Nevertheless, without the bird in its cage, she now feels an inchoate sense of loneliness and sadness which she can neither articulate nor explain to herself.

The old woman’s hesitancy and point of view are neatly reflected in Mansfield’s presentation of the first person narrative. Every paragraph begins with an ellipsis (…); the woman addresses an imaginary interlocutor – ‘You see that big nail on the right of the front door?’ – and she feels she must not ‘giv[e] way to — to memories and so on’.

The Canary – study resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Canary – plot summary

An elderly woman is recalling the pleasure she has derived from her pet canary, which is now dead. The bird had a particularly beautiful song.

In the past she had focused her spiritual yearnings on the nightly appearance of a star (Venus) but she has transferred these feelings onto the bird as soon as it was acquired.

She looks after three men as lodgers, and views the bird as a male companion. She is aware that the lodgers view her with disdain, but finds comfort in the presence of the bird.

Even when she feels existentially threatened by a bad dream and a dark night, she feels the bird’s chirping as a comforting presence.

Now that the bird has died she knows that she ought to get over the loss, but feels an emptiness and sadness in life that she cannot explain.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

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

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations
0415402395

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Captain’s Death Bed

February 11, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

The Captain’s Death Bed (1950) is the third volume of collected reviews and essays to be published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press after the death of his wife Virginia Woolf in 1941. They represent her work as a journalist, book reviewer, lecturer, and essayist over the last twenty years of her life – a period which saw the production of her most famous experimental novels – Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.

first edition – design by Vanessa Bell

The Captain’s Death Bed – critical commentary

In his introductory editor’s note to this collection, Leonard Woolf suggests that these essays and reviews would have been rewritten and polished for republication by Virginia Woolf had she lived – as she had had been in the habit of doing with all of her work. This may well be true, but the advantage for the reader is that the essays are in the condition in which they were first released for publication, and we can trace the development of her style as the years progress. Not that there was a great deal of development: she was writing fluently and imaginatively from almost her earliest work. These pieces span the years 1924 to 1939.

As in many of her essays and reviews, she offers interesting reflections on keeping diaries, something she did herself to great effect. For instance, Parson Woodforde is a completely ordinary man, to whom nothing of any importance happens, but this gives her the launching pad for one of her favourite literary topics – the rhythms and content of everyday life in all its mundanity. This was a theme she was to explore again and again in her fiction – the fact that our lives are not composed of high dramas and spectacular conflicts, but of fleeting thoughts, shifts of mood, evanescent memories, and fragments of observation – what she called ‘life itself’.

In one sense this is something of a naturalistic approach when applied to the creation of fiction – but Woolf combines it with both a lyrical, quasi-poetical literary style and a philosophic meta-critique of the phenomena she is describing. If Mr Smith thinks of his wife whilst making his commute to the office, she generalises the nature of memory and the shifting significance of individuals in each other’s lives.

Similarly, the captain of the title piece is a seafarer (the novel-writing Captain Marryat, no less) whose works capture the everyday facts of life in a way that no later novelist can:

because no living writer can bring back the ordinary day. He sees it through a glass, sentimentally, romantically; it is either too pretty or too brutal; it lacks ordinariness.

She presents sympathetic portraits of writers as diverse as Goldsmith, Ruskin, and Turgenev, and even some whom she knew personally such as Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, both of whom were friends of her father Sir Leslie Stephen.

The most famous piece in the collection is the much quoted and reprinted lecture of 1924 on character in fiction, entitled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. This is a variation on a subject she had treated before, in her 1920 short story An Unwritten Novel – which describes the attempt of a narrator to explain the character of someone unknown occupying the same carriage on a railway journey.

In this piece she takes issue with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H.G. Wells as novelists who had failed to notice her famous claim that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’. She suggests that Wells would have put Mrs Brown in one of his impossible Utopias; Galsworthy would place her in an economic analysis of her class; and Bennett would offer a sociological sketch of her house and its surroundings. In other words none of them would capture the essence of her character as a credible human being.

But she asks herself what have later, Georgian writers to offer as alternatives? She identifies the work of Forster, Lawrence, Eliot, and Joyce as brave attempts at establishing new contracts between author and reader, but urges patience, giving them time to develop. We now know that they did develop – none more so than the one great writer she modestly leaves out of the list – which is herself.

In an article on book reviewing first published as a Hogarth Press pamphlet in 1939 she spells out the history and the condition of book reviewing as distinct from serious literary criticism. She suggests it is a difficult and an often-abused system, and so proposes an alternative whereby authors pay a certified reviewer a consultancy fee for an advisory interview conducted in private. Leonard Woolf, as her editor, adds a note which sums up In three pages the whole business and the economics of publishing book reviews.

There are also some delightful surprises – essays on what was then modern technology – for instance, the cinema and flying. She views the early movie classics and immediately perceives that cinema has at its disposal a ‘secret language’ of symbols and metaphors which make laboured explanations of what is happening on screen unnecessary.

For a strange thing has happened – while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say.

The most amazing piece is her account of Flying Over London in which the novelties and incongruities of solid human beings hurtling through the air are explored in a series of aerial metaphors and shifts in point of view. Given the danger of this enterprise, it is not surprising that before long images of death and extinction are mingled with impressions of floating through clouds and witnessing City traffic congestion like lines of crawling insects. But the real beauty of the essay comes from the fact that she never left the ground, and has not flown at all. It is a work of fancy and utterly convincing imagination.

The Captain’s Death Bed – study resources

The Captain’s Death Bed – Amazon UK
The Captain’s Death Bed – Amazon US

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

The Captain’s Death Bed – free eBook format – Gutenberg

The Captain#s Death Bed – complete contents

Oliver Goldsmith
White’s Selborne
Life Itself
Crabbe
Selina Trimmer
The Captain’s Death Bed
Ruskin
The Novels Of Turgenev
Half Of Thomas Hardy
Leslie Stephen
Mr. Conrad: A Conversation
The Cosmos
Walter Raleigh
Mr. Bennett And Mrs. Brown
All About Books
Reviewing
Modern Letters
Reading
The Cinema
Walter Sickert
Flying Over London
The Sun And The Fish
Gas
Thunder At Wembley
Memories Of A Working Women’s Guild

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

1925 – The Common Reader first series

1932 – The Common Reader second series

1942 – The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

1947 – The Moment and Other Essays

1950 – The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 – Granite and Rainbow

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

The Case of Comrade Tulayev

August 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s

By the time he came to write The Case of Comrade Tulayev Victor Serge had miraculously escaped the worst of political persecution in Europe. He began the novel writing as an exile in Paris, continued it in Marseilles whilst waiting for an exit visa, wrote more in the Dominican Republic, and finished the book in Mexico where he spent the last seven years of his life. His living conditions were impoverished and austere – but it was as if he found the psychological space in which to develop his mature style. All his best work was produced in the last few years left to him, including his autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his two final novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years.

Comrade Tulayev has a fluency, a confidence, and a consistency of tone that far surpasses his earlier works. His narrative flows effortlessly from one character and one point of view to another. The most serious political issues are delivered alongside a sensitive apprehension of the everyday world. Tyrants and bullies have moments of doubt and sentimental attachment. Even the heroic figures have flaws and weaknesses, including the most tragic ideological weakness of all – believing that they are making sacrifices in a good cause.

There is also a powerful thematic unity to the novel. It reveals the deprivations suffered by millions in the world’s worst ‘planned economy’; it reveals the bureaucratic corruption that created the shortages, waste, and even famines; and it dramatises magnificently the ideological struggles between those old Bolsheviks who had sacrificed everything to create a better society, and the New Men who had taken over to betray their efforts.

At the height of the Stalinist terror in the late 1930s a petty clerk Kostia shoots Central Committee member Tulayev almost on a whim – just because he happens to have acquired a gun. This sets in motion a new wave of purges which percolate all the way through Soviet society. Government officials are arrested; oppositionists and critics of the Party are jailed; there are mass arrests of ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’. None of these people have done anything wrong: the paranoid madness of Stalinism merely requires guilty victims. All of these people realise that no matter how long their torment lasts, their future is either years in the GULAG or a bullet in the back of the head.

Serge’s great achievement is to show how people from the top to the bottom of Soviet society coped with the terror of the purges. But most especially, he is keen to reveal how former Bolshevik loyalists managed to persuade themselves, when charged with all sorts of crimes they did not commit, that they were agreeing to confess in order to serve a greater good. That is, they put the Party above everything. And the circular logic of the Party’s argument is brilliantly compressed into the expression “obey or betray”. It’s what we might now call a Catch-22 situation. You can help the Party achieve its ends by agreeing to your own guilt (and death) or you can resist, and die anyway. In the first case, your sacrifice will help us; in the second, you are besmirching everything you have worked for over the last twenty years.

The flaws in this argument are now well known. The Party was certainly not any guide to sensible policy: it was liquidating its best intellectuals, scientists, engineers, and even military leaders just when it needed them most. It did not represent the working class on whose behalf its claims were made, because it was a corrupt bureaucracy. And the democratic principles to which it appealed were a complete sham. The entire system of government in the Soviet system was based on lies, fabrications, corruption, injustice, falsified statistics, inefficiency, and terror (which is why it eventually collapsed in 1989). But at the time Serge was writing not many people were aware of the gigantic gulf between propaganda and reality. Many writers in the west swallowed the Soviet propaganda wholesale. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, (The Truth About Soviet Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization) are now risible museum pieces, though many at the time took them seriously.

Each of the principal characters in the novel is shown grappling with the central problem in his own way. Makayev a dull and brutish peasant rises through the ranks to become a local leader because of his willingness to do the party’s bidding; but he has no intellectual or moral reserves when he finds himself on the wrong side of the investigation. Even the investigators themselves fall under the wheels of the Juggernaut – because failing to deliver results is branded as counter-revolutionary and ‘sabotage’. Old Bolshevik Ryzhik is dragged back from an unimaginably severe and miserable life in exile beyond the Arctic Circle, and faced with the same accusations as everybody else. He chooses to thwart his captors by starving himself to death in jail.

Even foreign policy is affected. Kondratiev, a loyal Soviet agent working in Spain in the middle of the civil war is swept up into the madness. His job is to eliminate Stalin’s rivals whilst appearing to support the Republican movement. Recalled to Moscow and invited by Stalin himself to give a truthful report on events, he does so – and although branded as a Trotskyist sympathiser and expecting every moment to be jailed and shot, he is one of the rare examples of someone ‘spared’ because of his old links with Stalin. He is merely banished to a Siberian mine.

No such luck for Xenia, the daughter of prosecutor Popov who is on an official visit to Paris. On hearing that the incorruptible old Bolshevik Rublev has been accused, she makes a vain series of attempts to have messages of support sent back to Moscow. This alerts the secret service agents who are already spying on her activities, and she is taken back to Moscow under arrest. And because they are related, her father is arrested too.

The show trials take place, the accused are convicted, and the episode has what we now call closure. The three principals Erchov, Makeyev, and Rublev (who have absolutely nothing to do with each other) meet their death, and the corrupt system that has brought this about goes on. Even when the original assassin writes a letter to the prosecutor confessing his guilt, the letter is destroyed – because it compromises the Case, which has now been closed.

The novel is tragic in the very best sense. It shows enlightened and courageous individuals inspired by noble ideals who are brought to a pitiable end by ideological flaws in the system they embrace. It offers a first-hand account of the Soviet system written by somebody who was a high-ranking insider. And most important of all it reveals the secret mechanisms of the the Terror and the Show Trials which were at the time a baffling mystery to everyone. We have known the technical details for over seventy years now, but the artistic truth offered by a magnificent novel such as The Case of Comrade Tulayev lives on forever.

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Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, New York: New York Review Books, 2004, pp.362, ISBN: 1590170644

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