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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

The Partner

October 13, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Partner was written in 1911 and first published by J.M.Dent & Sons in the collection Within the Tides (1915). The other stories in this volume were The Planter of Malata, The Inn of the Two Witches, and Because of the Dollars.

The Partner – critical commentary

The narrative

It is worth stressing that the tale has two narrators – an un-named outer narrator who is a writer of some kind, and the inner narrator who at the start of the tale mentions going to London on business, but at the end is referred to as a ‘stevedore’.

The principal conceit of the tale is that during their ‘conversation’ the inner narrator is delivering the events of the narrative as the raw materials for a story he suggests the outer narrator can convert into a written account. The inner narrator also stresses that it is is a true story, rather than something that has been invented. Conrad (writing tongue in cheek as it were) has his outer narrator observe: “It’s said that truth is stranger than fiction.”

But an even greater irony of fictional construction is that the inner-narrator’s monologue is exactly what constitutes the story entitled The Partner. At the end of the tale the outer narrator claims that the incident was unsuitable for turning into fiction:

The story to be acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South Seas. But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the consumption of magazine readers. So here it is raw, so to speak — just as it was told to me — but unfortunately robbed of the striking effect of the narrator;

This is rather typical of Conrad’s dry and lofty sense of humour – almost at his own expense – because in fact he successfully creates an impassioned narrator who delivers his tale in an authentically oral manner, with a great deal of the characteristics of casual saloon bar conversation, including a fractured chronology of events; a narrative almost indistinguishable from interpolated comment and reported speech; delivered in incomplete sentences; and with frequent use of the vivid present tense:

George had no children. Married a couple of years; looked forward to a kid or two very much. Feels more upset than ever. Talks about an honest man for a father and so on. Cloete grins: You be quick before they come, and they’ll have a rich man for a father, and no one the worse for it. That’s the beauty of the thing.

Narrative logic

The Partner is one of a number of Conrad’s tales (and novels) in which one character relates to another a series of events which involve a third character. One thinks of the sequence of information links in a novel such as Lord Jim for instance, where an un-named outer narrator relays a story told to him by the inner narrator Marlow, concerning events in the life of the eponymous Jim – some of which come from yet another source (Gentleman Brown). This is an extremely complex and often risky strategy which sometimes leads Conrad to the outer reaches of credibility and beyond – for instance in the case of Chance and Nostromo.

Fortunately in The Partner the logic of the information sources is kept just within the boundary of credibility. The outer narrator presents us with the extended monologue of the inner narrator, who knows the principal characters in the story. His main source of information is Cloete, who is present at almost all the events of the drama, and who has relayed the story to the inner narrator prior to his return to America.

The only crucial scene at which Cloete is not present is Stafford’s moral panic when he is locked in the captain’s cabin on the sinking Sagamore. This sequence of events (which Conrad presents as the climax of the tale) is revealed in Stafford’s dying confession to a dockyard priest – who in his turn relates it to the inner narrator (presumably violating any vows of confidentiality by doing so).

The Partner – study resources

The Partner – CreateSpace edn – Amazon UK

The Partner – CreateSpace edn – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Partner – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Partner – plot summary

An un-named narrator (‘a writer of stories’) is engaged in conversation with a somewhat desperate man of in the smoking room of a hotel at Westport on the English Channel. The writer sees the coastline and rocks outside in a romantic, painterly manner – but the man insists that the truth is quite otherwise. He then recounts in a fragmentary and telegraphic manner a tale which culminates with a shipwreck on the same rocks.

Two brothers, George and Harry Dunbar, are in a business partnership. They have bought the sailing ship Sagamore from its previous owners. Harry Dunbar is captain of the ship and George runs an import and export office in London . When a persuasive salesman called Cloete arrives from America with a few hundred pounds to invest, they make him a partner.

George has a young wife with expensive tastes. When his part of the business hits a period of recession, Cloete tries to persuade him to invest in a patent medicine venture. He first suggests selling the Sagamore, and then proposes deliberately wrecking it to claim the insurance money. George is indignant at this suggestion, but Cloete is persistent, and plays on George’s weakness.

Cloete has meanwhile located Stafford, a disgraced down-and-out seaman, who he persuades to take on the task of wrecking the ship in exchange for five hundred pounds. George claims that Harry will be going back to sea on the next voyage, and Cloete arranges for Stafford to join the ship as chief mate. On doing so, Stafford immediately tampers with the anchor cables.

Ten days later there are reports that the Sagamore has run aground on the rocks in a storm just outside Westport where the story began. Lifeboats have taken some people ashore, but captain Harry is still on board. Cloete thinks his scheme of wrecking the ship has been achieved providentially. He joins Harry and his skeleton crew on board the stricken ship, where the captain asks his ‘partner’ to recover a bag of golden sovereigns and some important papers from his cabin.

When Cloete goes below he is joined by Stafford, who now demands a thousand pounds for his work, otherwise he will disclose the plan of deliberate sabotage to the ship’s insurers. In response, Cloete knocks him down and locks him in the cabin of the sinking ship.

Returning empty-handed, Cloete gets into the lifeboat, so captain Harry goes to retrieve the papers and money himself. Amidst the confusion and the storm, Stafford suddenly appears alongside Cloete in the lifeboat. The coxswain of the lifeboat, sensing that something is wrong, goes back on board with Cloete to look for the captain. They find him dead from a gunshot wound in his cabin, surrounded by the ship’s papers which have been set alight.

When they return to shore Cloete billets Stafford in a nearby hotel and breaks the news to George Dunbar and Harry’s wife. George thinks they can now invest money in the patent medicine scheme, and Harry’s wife goes mad with grief. When Cloete goes back to the hotel, Stafford demands even more money and threatens to report Cloete for attempted murder. He relates how he shot captain Harry, thinking it was Cloete. But in response Cloete counter-threatens him, saying he will report him for murder during a robbery on board.

In the aftermath of the affair, there is not enough money to buy into Cloete’s patent medicine scheme, so other investors are found – and they make a fortune out of ‘Parker’s Lively Lumbago Pills’. Cloete is disillusioned and returns to America, and Stafford dies in an East End hospital.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Partner – principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator
—	the un-named inner narrator
George Dunbar	import-export businessman
Harry Dunbar	his brother, captain of the Sagamore
Mr Stafford	a disgraced ex-mariner

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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Joseph Conrad web 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 Patagonia

November 4, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Patagonia (1888) like many of James’s other stories, has its origins in an anecdote relayed to him over the dinner table – a story which he elaborated and refined. It is also his ‘response’ to a very similar tale by Anthony Trollope called The Journey to Panama which also features a young woman on a long sea voyage going to meet the man to whom she is betrothed. It’s also another variation on his Daisy Miller theme – the ‘new type’ of woman or the ‘self-made girl’ who pushes against the boundaries of social convention – at a cost to herself.

nineteenth century transatlantic steamer

The Patagonia – critical commentary

Class and behaviour

This story, like James’s other stories Daisy Miller and Pandora features a young woman of a ‘new type’ who flouts the conventions of socially acceptable behaviour established by members of the upper class. Grace Mavis is from a family in business class who live in a suburb of Boston for people who are socially aspirant. In fact her father has lost his ‘position’ and has become an invalid. Her mother seeks the social protection of Mrs Nettlepoint during the voyage from Boston to Liverpool – and can only do so with the recommendation of a mutual (and upper-class) friend Mrs Allen. Mrs Nettlepoint therefore feels she has a social obligation to protect Grace’s reputation whilst she is in transit to her husband-to-be.

But as the voyage begins, Grace feels free to behave as she wishes, and we ultimately learn that faced with the prospect of a marriage which she fears, she is affected by the romantic prospects that Jasper Nettlepoint appears to be offering her. She defies the conventions of restriction placed on an unmarried woman spending a significant amount of time in public with a single man. This at the time would be seen as behaviour compromising her reputation.

Grace as victim

It’s possible to argue that Grace is a victim of New England rectitude, the viciousness of social gossip, and the shortsighted meddling interference of the narrator. As a middle-class girl she has few prospects of marriage other than the one offered to her when she was twenty. Because of her father’s redundancy and illness, the family’s fortunes have slid further downhill. She is on her way to the one poor prospect still open to her – marriage to the feckless David Porterfield.

In the spiritually liberating ambiance of a cross-Atlantic voyage, she is swept off her feet by the attentions of a rich and handsome younger man. But she is surrounded by gossip and intrigue. Mrs Nettlepoint wishes to protect her son from what she sees as a socially improper alliance (to a lower class woman). The narrator wishes to fend off Jasper’s attentions, unless he is prepared to accept the consequences – which would be to protect Grace’s reputation by marrying her. Meanwhile characters such as Mrs Peck fuel the dining room with minute by minute reports on Grace’s movements.

Grace has a passionate interview with Mrs Nettlepoint, defending her actions. But she is a single spirit battling against a much stronger social current. She realises that her temporary happiness will be taken from her, and she feels that what lies ahead will be like a living death (despite her protestations to the contrary). So she takes what she sees as the only way out – and jumps ship.

Symmetries

The Patagonia sails from Boston at the start of the story and arrives in Liverpool at the end – which neatly ties together the New World with the Old (America and Europe) which James was so fond of exploring in his tales and novels.

The Patagonia – 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

The Patagonia – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Patagonia – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions

The Patagonia – Kindle annotated eBook edition

The Patagonia – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Patagonia – plot summary

Part I. An unnamed middle-aged narrator calls on his friend Mrs Nettlepoint the day before they are due to sail from Boston to Liverpool on The Patagonia. Her son Jasper is not sure if he will accompany them or not. But when they are joined by the attractive Grace Mavis, who will also be on the voyage, Jasper suddenly decides to go with them. Grace, who is thirty, has been engaged for ten years to David Porterfield, a student of architecture in Paris, and she is going there to marry him – apparently with little enthusiasm.

Part II. On board, Jasper is very attentive to Grace, so much so that passengers begin to gossip about them. Mrs Nettlepoint even suspects that Grace might have designs on her son. All available evidence suggests that some sort of romantic relationship is developing between the two of them. The narrator and Mrs Nettlepoint are alarmed at this development. She feels maternally protective towards her son, and the narrator thinks that Grace’s reputation is being compromised. They feel that they should warn and reprimand the two younger characters.

Part III. Mrs Nettlepoint challenges Grace, who defends herself by saying that she is doing nothing wrong. When the narrator points out to Jasper that his behaviour is putting Grace in a socially invidious position, he is told virtually to mind his own business.

Part IV. Gossip about the affair continues, Jasper’s and Grace’s behaviour becomes erratic, but there is no resolution, until finally Grace jumps overboard in the middle of the night. The narrator is then faced with the difficulty of breaking the news to her fiancé who meets the ship as it docks at Liverpool.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Principal characters

I	an unnamed middle-aged narrator
Mrs Nettlepoint	an upper-class Bostonian lady – friend of the narrator
Jasper Nettlepoint	her handsome and well-travelled son
Mrs Allen	friend of Mrs Nettlepoint who ‘recommends’ Mrs Mavis
Mrs Mavis	middle-class lady from less prosperous part of Boston
Mr Mavis	an invalid who has lost his job
Grace Mavis	their spirited thirty year old daughter
David Porterfield	a student of architecture living in Paris
Mrs Peck	a passenger and neighbour of the Mavis family

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Path of Duty

May 9, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Path of Duty first appeared in magazine form in The English Illustrated Magazine in December 1884, which had been established the year previously by Macmillan to create a publication with high production values and illustrations appealing to the artistic market. The story was later reprinted in a three volume collection of James’s stories in 1885.

The Path of Duty – critical commentary

The burden of inheritance

This story is a variation on the theme of fear of marriage or burden of inheritance – both of which are very deeply buried seams in the sub-stratum of homo-eroticism which runs through much of James’s work. He would explore these issues in more direct form in the later tale Owen Wingrave (1892) in which the burden of responsibility and fear of reproduction goes as far as a sort of willed death. The theme normally depicts women as predators, marriage as a social expectation which is experienced as a threat, and various strategies or plot twists to avoid the requirement of producing children.

Ambrose Tester is not only due to inherit his family title; he has the additional burden, placed upon him by his own father, of the demand that he produce an offspring. Not only that, but he must do so as quickly as possible. His father wants to see the continuity of the Tester family before he dies. The title of the story reinforces this notion of an unpleasant responsibility.

The burden of inheritance is also intensified because Ambrose had an elder brother, who would normally have borne the responsibility of producing an heir for his father and continuing the family line. But Francis was profligate, and has died. Meanwhile, Ambrose has chosen as the object of his affections a married woman – a sure way to avoid the possibility of marriage.

This interpretation of the story is ultimately a psycho-analytic reading which rests on the notion that Henry James was exploring psychological conflicts of his own via fictional projections. We know that James wrestled with the question of marriage in his private life – and always came down in favour of remaining a bachelor. We also know that rather late in life he gave way to the homo-erotic impulses which also surface more and more frequently in his work.

He destroyed all his private papers in an effort to preserve control of what would be known about him by his contemporaries – and posterity. But the theme is explored again and again in his creative work, over which he had no such control.

The Narrator

James has very few stories with female narrators, and this one, un-named like so many others, seems to have a somewhat hermaphroditic personality. ‘She’ claims that she wishes to marry off her women friends, but to prevent the marriage of her men friends. Is this the voice of James himself, hiding behind the not very plausible skirts of his narrator?

Certainly when Ambrose does finally settle for Jocelind, the anti-marriage rhetoric is unleashed in no uncertain terms. The narrator reports that ‘the day of his execution was fixed’ and then ‘he was going to be beheaded’. The supposed female narrator seems to be speaking from a very masculine point of view at this point.

The happy ending

Unlike other explorations of the ‘fear of marriage’ theme, this story does have an ostensibly happy ending. Ambrose marries Jocelind, and they have two children. He has renounced Lady Vandeleur, and has accepted his lot. The problem appears to have been resolved.

But is everybody happy? Certainly not Jocelind, and maybe not the reader – because this ending does not seem very satisfactory, for the simple reason that no plausible explanation has been given for the radical change of mind on Ambrose’s part.

One minute he is in love with the vibrant Lady Vandeleur, who is fully realised as a character in the story. The next, he accepts marriage to Jocelind, who is an un-dramatised cipher. It is possible that James was unable to provide a convincing resolution to the initial problem the story explores – precisely because he didn’t really believe in the outcome he created.

The Path of Duty – 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

The Path of Duty – Kindle edition

The Path of Duty – eBook versions at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Path of Duty – plot summary

The story is narrated by an un-named American woman who is married to an Englishman. She is writing the account for a ‘compatriot’ American, but appears to be ambivalent about revealing the story. The recipient is addressed directly in the text, but the narrator says she will not release the final product.

Part I. Young Ambrose Tester inherits a title and an estate. He confides in the narrator, has a seat in parliament to represent Dorset, and is much admired in society.

Part II. Ambrose’s father has pressured him to get married. Ambrose procrastinates, then agrees to marry within a year. He is very friendly with Lady Vandeleur, but she is married to a boring husband. But after six moths he is engaged to Jocelind Bernardstone.

Part III. The match is considered a great social success, but the narrator notes Ambrose’s lack of enthusiasm and thinks he is doing it to please his father. He is marrying out of a sense of duty, and the narrator thinks he would do better to marry a plain or stupid woman who would accept his lack of interest (and by implication, tolerate his continued interest in Lady Vandeleur).

Part IV. Ambrose visits the narrator with the news that Lord Vandeleur is very ill. The implication is that if he dies, Ambrose will be free to marry Lady Vandeleur. The narrator knows that this will hurt Jocelind, and gives him no encouragement. Lord Vandeleur does die, and Ambrose goes to visit his own father, who is also ill.

Part V. Ambrose visits the narrator and appeals for her help. He wishes to break off his engagement and marry Lady Vandeleur. The narrator refuses to help him. Ambrose continues to be ‘kind’ to Jocelind, who suspects nothing. The narrator argues that he should honour his promises and marry a woman he does not truly love. Amongst his friends, opinion is divided. Suddenly Jocelind’s father General Bernardstone dies, and the marriage is postponed. Jocelind and her mother go to stay with Sir Edmund Tester.

Part VI. When Ambrose next meets the narrator, he reveals that he has not actually asked Lady Vandeleur to marry him, and he has not told her about Jocelind. He wants the narrator to visit Lady Vandeleur on his behalf, but she refuses. He claims he is trying to break off with Lady Vandeleur, and she agrees to help him if he will fulfil his promise to Jocelind.

Part VII. The narrator visits Lady Vandeleur and finds her in something of a pitiable state. She wonders why Ambrose should wish to marry her, and obviously still does not know about Jocelind. The narrator reveals all, and tells her that Jocelind will surely die if she is jilted. Lady Vandeleur replies that she has no intention of marrying Ambrose, and that if he does anything to hurt Jocelind, she will never speak to him again.

Part VIII. Plans for the wedding go ahead, and Lady Vandeleur writes to Ambrose that she cannot possibly profit from someone else’s distress. The narrator worries that Ambrose is making a heroic renunciation, but is still secretly clinging to his feelings for Lady Vandeleur, The marriage to Jocelind goes ahead, and subsequently, Ambrose and Lady Vandeleur become famous in society for the sacrifice they have made – but Jocelind is not so happy.

Principal characters

I	the outer narrator, a married American woman
You	the American ‘compatriot’ to whom the work is addressed
Sir Edmund Tester	father to Ambrose
Francis Tester	his eldest son, a waster who dies
Ambrose Tester	his younger son, who inherits the title, an MP with a golden moustache
Lady Margaret Vandeleur	a sophisticated society lady, with whom Ambrose is enamoured
Lord Vandeleur	her boring husband
Jocelind Bernardstone	fiancée to Ambrose

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

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.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pension Beaurepas

January 13, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Pension Beaurepas was first published in the Atlantic Monthly for April 1879. It was later reprinted in book form, along with Washington Square, and A Bundle of Letters by Macmillan in London, 1881.

The Pension Beaurepas – critical commentary

The international element

This is another of James’s tales based on his favourite ‘international theme’ – that is the relationship between America and Europe. It is also concerned with a topic he was making his own around this time following the success of Daisy Miller the year before – the new American woman. The novelty here is that he presents not one but two American families – the Churches and the Rucks, who characterise two different aspects of Americans in Europe.

Mrs Church has exiled herself permanently to Europe – largely for financial reasons. She claims that she does not have enough money to return to the USA. But she is also culturally voracious, and wishes to enjoy the best of everything – a fact comically represented by her demanding higher and higher material standards at the pension Beaurepas, without paying any extra on her weekly rent.

This state of permanent exile is frustrating to her daughter Aurora, because she feels stifled by the social conventions which obtain in Europe. It is regarded dangerously improper for her to be in the English Garden with her temporary friend Sophy Ruck, because neither of them would be considered properly chaperoned. Worse than that, they join the company of two men – the narrator and Monsieur Pigeonneau – and rather innocently enjoy an ice cream together. Mrs Church disapproves so strongly that she intervenes and takes her daughter back home in a closed cab.

But Aurora is intelligent and well-informed enough to know that she would enjoy more personal liberty if she were to live in America. She is forthright, outspoken, and quite witty – but as a woman with a profession or money of her own, she must accept the social protection of her mother. However, she does have sufficient spirit to think of contacting the American consulate to help her get back home.

The Ruck mother and daughter on the other hand are simply examples of vulgar consumerism. Their only thought is to spend Mr Ruck’s money on jewellery and fripperies – at a point when the narrator believes he is in danger of becoming bankrupt because of the bad commercial climate back in the United States.

It is of interest to note that this tale is closely related to two others that James wrote around the same time – A Bundle of Letters (1879) and The Point of View (1882). They even have some characters in common. They also share a gently satirical tone and an episodic, unstructured composition.

There is almost no attempt to create any plot or even dramatic tension in The Pension Beaurepas. The narrator arrives at the Swiss pension and after describing the people he encounters, he departs for England unchanged. The two American families, the Churches and the Rucks, arrive, there is limited social interaction, and then the Churches leave for Dresden whilst the Rucks might – or might not – be on the point of returning to the USA. The tale is a lightweight and quite amusing study in manners, but lacks the density of a fully constructed narrative.

However, the tale takes on an extra layer of significance when it is read alongside its companion piece, The Point of View (1882). For in the later tale we learn that Aurora does in fact manage to travel back to America with her mother, and she knows that the search for a husband has failed because she has no dowry. Moreover, in her letter to a friend in Paris she reports that the Rucks (who are also on board) are now confirmed as bankrupt.

There were two literary experiments going on here at the same time. These are the only instances of James linking characters and story development between separate tales in this way, exploring the possibilities of a shifting point of view. And the two stories A Bundle of Letters and The Point of View are the only instances of his adopting the epistolary form of narrative.

The Pension Beaurepas – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle – Amazon US

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

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

Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions

The Pension Beaurepas – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Pension Beaurepas – story synopsis

Part I. A young and un-named American narrator with literary aspirations goes to live in a Geneva boarding house in order to see ‘life’ and gather experience of society whilst at the same time practising his French.

Part II. He is joined at the pension by Mr Ruck, an American businessman who has been ordered to take a holiday by his doctor, even though he would prefer to be back home, attending to his commercial interests in timber.

Part III. Mr Ruck’s wife and daughter Sophy deeply regret having left the glamour of staying in Paris, and they are intent on shopping for jewellery whilst in Geneva.

Part IV. They are joined at the pension by fellow Americans Mrs Church and her daughter Aurora who live in Europe permanently because they cannot afford to go home. Aurora yearns for her homeland, which she left as a child.

Part V. The narrator is interrogated by Mrs Church on the state of American youth and its ideals. He suggests letting Aurora return to America, but Mrs Church argues that they are very comfortable in Europe.

Part VI. Madame Beaurepas thinks that Mrs Church is parading her daughter around Europe in search of a bourgeois husband. The narrator talks to Mr Ruck about business back in America, which is not good, whilst Mrs Church and Sophy are shopping.

Part VII. The narrator and ageing womaniser M. Pigeonneau walk in the English Garden and eat ice cream with Sophy and Aurora. Their discussion is about correct behaviour for young women. Aurora is witty, but she feels restricted by social conventions and longs for the freedoms which living in America would afford her. Mrs Church arrives and immediately breaks up the gathering, with the implication that it is not proper.

Part VIII. The narrator and Mrs Church discuss the Rucks and their lack of sophistication. The narrator thinks that the wife and daughter are spending too much and that Mr Ruck is in danger of bankruptcy. It is also thought by both of them that Sophy is a bad influence on Aurora. Mrs Church tries to encourage Mr Ruck to leave the pension and go on to Chamonix

Part IX. Mrs Church tries, without success, to persuade Madame Beaurepas to evict the Rucks. Aurora and her mother leave the pension. The narrator and Mr Ruck encounter Mrs Ruck and Sophy in a jewellery shop, where they insist they want an expensive bracelet. But Mr Ruck announces that they are going back to New York. The narrator leaves the pension and goes to join his brother in London.

The Pension Beaurepas – characters

—	the un-named narrator, a young American
Madame Beaurepas	the proprietor of the pension (73)
Monsieu Pigeonneau	an ageing French womaniser and gallant
Mr Ruck	an American businessman
Mrs Ruck	his wife
Sophy Ruck	their pretty daughter (21)
Mrs Church	an American expatriate living in Europe
Aurora Church	her clever but homesick daughter

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Piazza Tales

August 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

classic short stories, tales, and novellas

Piazza Tales is a collection of herman Melville’s shorter fiction. He started writing short stories as a desperate commercial venture to provide for his family, following the disastrous reception of Moby Dick on its first publication in 1851. His career as a writer had been in something of a steady decline from the start, and yet as he became less and less successful, he produced the works for which he is now held in the very highest regard – as a great artist who could tap into the fundamentals of the American nineteenth century psyche.

His stories are clouded in ambiguity and steeped in multiple levels of complexity. They have narrators whose intentions are not clear.They are often stories with very little narrative in the normal sense of that term. ‘A Paradise of Bachelors’ is little more than an account of a lavish dinner party in London’s Inns of court related in mock-heroic terms. Its companion piece ‘The Tartarus of Maids’ is the report of a visit to a paper mill.

The narrator of ‘Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!’ is shaken out of a misanthropic mood by the cheerful crowing of a neighbour’s cockerel. But when he eventually decides to buy the bird for its life-affirming powers, its owner dies – and so does the bird.

‘Bartelby the Scrivener’, one of his most famous stories, is startling in its simplicity. An elderly Wall Street solicitor employs a younger man as a clerk to copy legal documents. Bartelby works in complete isolation, and lives on nothing but ginger biscuits, sleeping in the office. But then he stops working, meeting every request to do so with the mantra “I prefer not to”. The solicitor is driven to good-natured despair, and finally has to move office in order to be rid of him. Bartelby is eventually placed in prison where he starves himself – and dies.

Melville’s prose is so allusive, so embedded with metaphors and symbols that it often seems that whilst writing about one thing he is actually talking about another. In ‘I and My Chimney’ for instance a man has a house with an enormous chimney. He takes laboured and curmudgeonly pride in the way it dominates the architecture of the entire building. But his wife, who restlessly devises new schemes for ‘improvement’, wants it pulled down. A struggle takes place between them, which he wins by stubbornly refusing to change his views.

It’s impossible to escape the interpretation that the chimney (and the house itself) represents the narrator’s (and the author’s) psyche, over which he wishes to assert his autonomy. And you don’t need a brass plaque on your front door to realise that it is also a commanding phallic symbol.

This collection includes two of Melville’s most accessible masterpieces. Benito Cereno is his re-telling of a historical incident involving a revolt on board a Spanish slave ship. The tale (a novella) is a study in sustained irony of the most chilling kind. Melville tells the story backwards by describing events as perceived by one ship’s captain when he goes to help the other. Everything he sees is menacing and inexplicable. Only when a disaster is narrowly averted is the reason for and the true horror of these mysterious conditions revealed.

The second novella is Billy Budd another apparently simple story with a naval setting. Billy Budd is a popular young sailor who is impressed into service on a British warship. His good looks and his naivety become the focus of malevolent attention from the ship’s master-at-arms, who falsely reports him to the captain for plotting a mutiny.

When confronted with this accusation, Billy becomes tongue-tied and strikes the master-at-arms with a blow that kills him. The captain is very sympathetic to Billy, but feels compelled to uphold the absolute code of military discipline. Billy is condemned to death and hanged the next morning.

This is a tale that has been interpreted in many ways – the most popular of which is Billy as Adam, fallen from paradise and grace into a cruel world. Claggart, the master-at-arms is seen as the devil or serpent – the embodiment of evil. And the ship’s captain, Vere, as a God-like figure, torn between paternal love and the need to exert justice.

Three of these stories have become landmarks of nineteenth century American literature. All of them are worth reading – and there is an added bonus, Melville has an amazingly rich prose style which combines a rich vocabulary, a slightly archaic form of syntax, and an amazingly flexible narrative voice in which he thinks out loud, talks to his characters, asks himself questions, and speculates freely about the very stories he is telling.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.410, ISBN: 0199538913

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

April 1, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Oscar Wilde’s version of the Gothic horror story, has entered popular consciousness even amongst people who have not actually read the novel. His central image of a secret ‘portrait in the attic’ is frequently used as a metaphor in cases where people seem to be rather unnaturally preserving their youthful looks.

The novel is also packed full of witty epigrams and paradoxes (usually expressed by the character Lord Henry Wotton) which Wilde re-used in the stage plays that made him famous. Within twelve months of publishing Dorian Gray he was at the height of his fame as a writer, a wit, and a dandy. And within another three years he was in jail – convicted of having commited acts of ‘gross indecency’ with other men in private – providing a wonderful example of the claim made in his essay The Decay of Lying (1891), that “Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life”.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first serialised in Lipincott’s Monthly Magazine (Philadelphia) starting in the issue for July 1990. But this version was Bowdlerised by the magazine editors without Wilde’s knowledge. He subsequently revised the text for its publication as a one-volume novel by Ward, Locke and Company in 1891.

The Picture of Dorian Gray – critical commentary

The Double

The ‘double’ theme gets an interesting twist here. Instead of two human beings we have a human and a painting – a work of art. They start out looking identical. The portrait is an accurate record of Dorian’s beauty as an eighteen year old young man. But as time passes, Dorian remains the same, whilst the portrait ages and acts as a reflector of the sins that Dorian commits.

In most instances of the double, one character acts as the alter-ego of the other or commits acts on behalf of the other. But in Dorian’s case, he actually commits the acts himself, whilst the portrait internalises their effects. (It is also interesting that so few of his debaucheries are recorded.)

Structure

The narrative was first published in thirteen chapters as a serial in Lippincott’s monthly magazine, and later as twenty chapters in one volume. The additional matter for the first book publication does not add anything substantial.

The narrative essentially falls into two parts, with a two chapter bridge between them. Part one establishes Dorian’s desire for eternal youth, his relationship with Sibyl which turns out badly, the mysterious changes to the portrait, and his decision to lock it away in the attic.

The bridging section in which almost twenty years pass is filled with an account of Dorian’s cultural tastes for decadent writers and his passion for collecting ornate embroidery and obscure musical instruments. During this period he establishes a social reputation for debauchery.

Part three deals with his downfall. First he commits murder, blackmails his friend, and then is pursued by Sibyl Vane’s brother – but appears to escape justice. But suffering both from a sense of guilt and horror at what his life has become, he decides to rid himself of the the thing that acts as a constant reminder – the portrait.

The title

It is interesting to note that whilst the title of the novel is The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is almost universally referred to amongst the general public as The Portrait of Dorian Gray – and with some justification. Because the painting is a portrait. The term picture is more ambiguous: it could mean ‘the impression created by Dorian Gray’ or ‘the picture owned by Dorian Gray’. Whereas the whole shocking effect of the story is that the portrait ages horribly in the attic whilst Dorian in person retains his youthful good looks.

The Picture of Dorian Gray – study resources

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Penguin CLassics – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Penguin CLassics – Amazon US

The Picture of Dorian Gray – York Notes (study aids) – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Norton Critical edition – Amazon US

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Cliffs Notes (study aids) – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – BBC full-cast 2CD audio – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – BBC unabridged audio book – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – eBook versions at Gutenberg

The Picture of Dorian Gray – 2009 DVD film (Colin Firth) – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – BBC Oscar Wilde 3 DVDs – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – 1945 DVD (George Sanders) – Amazon UK

The Picture of Dorian Gray – plot summary

Lord Henry Wotton meets Dorian Gray in Basil Hallward’s studio where he is having his portrait painted. He is struck by Dorian’s youthful beauty, and preaches to him a philosophy of self-realisation (and self-indulgence) before Time ages him and his appetites wane. Dorian takes up these ideas enthusiastically, and wishes to remain as youthful as he appears in the very successful portrait, which he is given as a gift.

As a result of his desire to live life more fully, Dorian meets and falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a young actress. Her mother encourages the connection, but her brother is jealous of Sibyl’s reputation and suspicious of Dorian’s motives, because he comes from the upper class. However, it is revealed that Sibyl’s father was ‘a gentleman’.

Dorian wishes to show off Sibyl to his friends, but when they visit the theatre her acting is disastrously bad. She now believes that love for Dorian is her true vocation in life. Dorian feels humiliated by the episode and brusquely rejects her. He returns home to find that his portrait has changed for the worse.

Next day Lord Henry reports that Sibyl has committed suicide, and persuades Dorian that he can not be considered responsible for her death. Dorian hides the portrait in his attic and will not let Basil see his own work, knowing that the portrait will age whilst he continues to look young.

Dorian gives himself up to a life of self-gratification and debauchery, based on his reading of the Decadent writers and Lord Henry’s philosophies. As the years go by he develops a scandalous reputation, whilst retaining his youthful looks. His friend Basil implores him to reform before it is too late – whereupon Dorian confronts him with the portrait, then kills him.

Dorian then blackmails an old college friend Alan Campbell to dispose of the evidence, which is successful. He feels free of any suspicion, until James Vane re-appears and threatens to kill him because of Sibyl’s death. Vane pursues Dorian to his country estate, but he is shot by accident during a hunting party.

It is then revealed that Campbell has committed suicide – presumably to avoid some sort of scandal. Dorian feels relieved that he has completely escaped detection, and although other people’s lives have been ruined, he is glad to look as youthful as ever.

Nevertheless he feels oppressed by feelings of guilt and wishes to reform. Feeling that the portrait has somehow cheated or deceived him, he resolves to destroy it – but destroys himself instead. In the final scene the painting has become young again, whilst Dorian is dead with a knife in his heart – a wrinkled, withered, and age-ravaged old man.

Mont Blanc – special Oscar Wilde edition

Principal characters

Lord Henry Wotton	aesthete and wit
Basil Hallward	painter
Dorian Gray	wealthy and good-looking young man
Lady Agatha	Lord Henry’s aunt
Lord George Fermor	Lord Henry’s uncle
Margaret Devereux	Dorian Gray’s attractive mother
Victoria	Lord Henry’s wife
Sibyl Vane	a young actress
Mr Isaacs	Jewish impressario
James Vane	Sibyl’s younger brother
Lord Radley	Dorian Gray’s guardian
Lady Gwendolen	Lord Henry’s sister
Victor	Dorian Gray’s servant
Mrs Leaf	Dorian Gray’s housekeeper
Alan Campbell	chemist friend of Dorian’s
Lady Narborough	society hostess

Film version

1976 TV version – Jeremy Brett and Sir John Gielgud

Film version

1945 Original movie trailer – George Sanders

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The Planter of Malata

August 24, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Planter of Malata was written in 1914, and first appeared as part of the collection Within the Tides published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1915. The other stories in the volume were The Partner, The Inn of the Two Witches, and Because of the Dollars.

The Planter of Malata – critical commentary

Mystery and suspense

Most first-time readers will have little difficulty working out the mystery of the assistant’s identity. That’s largely because all the communication links between the island, the imperial city, and the correspondent in England are spelled out in a way that draws attention to them. It’s also because the very existence of the assistant acts as a form of what is known as ‘Chekhov’s gun’. This is a dramatic principle established by the Russian dramatist and short story writer that everything in a narrative should be necessary and anything unnecessary should be removed.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

After all, Renouard wants to live alone; he does not need an assistant; and he rather uncharacteristically takes him on without knowing anything about him. If the assistant did not have any significance for the narrative, there would be no requirement for his existence in it.

Vigilant readers will suspect this plot development in advance, but Conrad adds a very dramatic twist with the news that the assistant is in fact dead. This is cheating slightly in the compact between author and reader, because we have no way of knowing or even suspecting this in advance. Renouard knows that his assistant is dead, but in the early part of the tale he does not necessarily know that this is the man the Moorsom’s are looking for – because of the confusion in names. They are searching for ‘Arthur’: he only knows that his assistant was called ‘A.Walter’.

Theme

If there is a submerged theme it is that of ‘disappearance’. Renouard wishes to disappear from society in general – which is why he has established himself on the remote island of Malata in the first place. He is drawn back into the gravitational field of society by the powerful sexual attraction he feels for Felicia when he meets her. It might even be argued that this leads to his downfall,

‘Master Arthur’ wishes to disappear because of the financial disgrace in which he has been (falsely) implicated. He escapes to a remote island at the other side of the world and disappears into a life of drugs which leads to his death.

And Renouard too finally disappears. Conrad uses the age-old device of his clothes left on the sea shore. He may have commited a suicide of sorts, or he may have simply removed all traces of his existence and moved on somewhere else. Either way – he has disappeared from the narrative.

The Planter of Malata – study resources

The Planter of Malata – CreateSpace – Amazon UK

The Planter of Malata – CreateSpace – Amazon US

The Planter of Malata – Kindle eBook

The Planter of Malata – 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 Planter of Malata – plot summary

Part I. After five years of exploration and adventure Jeffrey Renouard has settled in seclusion on the island of Malata with an assistant, and has recently been granted the silk farming concession. In conversation with his friend a newspaper editor in the colonial city (Singapore?) Renouard reports having been invited to a dinner party, where he met Felicia Moorsom and was very struck by her attractiveness and her interest in his own background. Renouard lives in isolation and is not used to socialising.

Part II. The editor reveals to Renouard that the Moorsoms are staying in the city incognito. He advises him to let Professor Moorsom into the profitable silk farming business. The Moorsoms have come in search of a man who was engaged to Felicia for a year, but who became involved in a financial scandal and pulled out of the engagement. A subsequent but separate scandal has however revealed his innocence. Felicia wishes to reclaim him, but he cannot be found anywhere. The editor has been asked to join in the search. Renouard goes back to his ship and realises that he has been powerfully affected by the girl.

Part III. Next day the editor reports to Renouard that he has met the Moorsoms at dinner, and that the search for the missing fiancé ‘Master Arthur’ has begun in earnest. That afternoon Renouard visits the Moorsoms and once again is stongly affected by Felicia. He hopes the search for Arthur will last a long time.

Part IV. That night Renouard has a vivid dream of searching in palaces and finding a marble bust which turns out to be Felicia’s head. He then interprets his own dream, after which he becomes a regular visitor to the Moorsoms. He admits to himself that he is desperately in love with a woman who is searching for another man. He has to exercise great self-control to conceal his passionate feelings for her.

Part V. Professor Moorsom reveals to Renouard his strong reservations about Arthur, and his wish to move on to pursue his business engagements. He even doubts his own daughter and her judgements. He asks Renouard to help him by pouring cold water on her plans, and he invites him back to dinner that night.

Part VI. Although he contemplates running away, Renouard attends the dinner. Professor Moorsom again asks him to discourage Felicia in her quest. Renouard makes a very feeble attempt, but she proves immovable in her resolve. She also confirms that no messages have arrived in England from the colonial city.

Part VII. Suddenly the editor arrives with the news that Arthur has been found. A message from England reveals that all correspondence has been with a Mr Walter: he is Renouard’s assistant Walter on the island. Renouard rushes back to his ship and destroys a letter addressed to Mr A Walter he has had in his possession. It is then revealed that the assistant is in fact dead on the island. Renouard knows that the Moorsoms will leave if he tells them, and he feels that he can now somehow replace Arthur.

Part VIII. The whole party sail for Malata, where Renouard stays outside the reef overnight, before embarkation. During the night he swims ashore and instructs his servants to say that Arthur has gone off on a trip round the islands.

Part IX. The party wait for Arthur to return. Renouard is nervous: he discusses ghosts with Professor Moorsom’s elderly siister Emma, and his servant Luiz is asked when Arthur is returning.

Part X. Professor Moorsom hears that some plantation workers have seen ghosts: he wants to investigate the phenomenon further. Renouard goes on a walk onto the headland with Felicia. There she reveals her suspicions and challenges him directly about Arthur. He reveals that Arthur was a drug addict for whom he felt sorry, and who died by falling into a ravine. Felicia claims it was her ambition or her destiny to redeem him. Renouard makes a speech which is part homage, part criticism of her – then makes a feeble lunge at her, before declaring his abject love for her.

Part XI. Renouard realises he has gone as far as possible. The party leave the island next day – the Professor grateful to Renouard, and Felicia critical of him. Renouard threatens to ‘haunt’ her ever afterwards. He then pays off his workers and sends them home.

Part XII. A month later the editor is not satisfied with the explanatory stories that reach his office about Malata, so he takes a ship to visit the island in person. He discovers Renouard’s clothes on a beach, but no body is ever found.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Planter of Malata – main characters

Geoffry Renouard	the reclusive planter of Malata
—	his friend, the newspaper editor
Professor Moorsom	a physicist and philosopher
Felicia Moorsom	his attractive daughter
Emma Moorsom	his elderly sister
Master Arthur	Felicia’s fiancé
Luiz	Renouard’s half-caste manservant

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad web 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.

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.

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Twentieth century literature
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The Platform of Time

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs of Family and Friends

This is a new collection of largely unfamiliar memoirs, edited by the Bloomsbury scholar S.R.Rosenbaum (who also edited The Bloomsbury Group). It includes the first ever publication of Woolf’s long sought-after and newly recovered talk on her role in the famous (and infamously silly) Dreadnought Hoax which she delivered to Rodmell Women’s Institute in 19940. The Platform of Time collection also includes the complete version of her memoir of her nephew Julian Bell, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

The Bloomsbury Group were very fond of writing memoirs. They even had a Memoir Club where members read out their compositions for each others’ amusement. And Virginia Woolf’s family was also much given to written records of their relationships. Her own father Sir Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph albumn and wrote an epistolary memoir to commemorate the death of his wife Julia in 1895. It’s now available as The Mausoleum Book.

The Bloomsberries also wrote sketches of their relatives and friends, on some occasions to reinforce the friendship network, and on others to provide an obituary for the Times. There are examples of both in this collection: two very warm sketches Woolf wrote in memory of her father, recounting the cheerful way he read to his children, taught them each morning, and played with them sailing toy boats in Kensington Gardens. These recollections counteract the rather severe portraits of Leslie Stephen given elsewhere

Many of Woolf’s memoirs ooze with the sort of confident generalisations of the post-Victorian era celebrating itself in the coterie of what they would call the national press, but which was in fact a tiny minority, talking to itself. Speaking of her aunt, the famous Victorian photographer Julia Cameron, Woolf writes:

Mrs Cameron had a gift for ardent speech and picturesque behaviour which has impressed itself on the calm pages of Victorian biography. But it was from her mother, presumably, that she inherited her love of beauty and her distaste for the cold and formal conventions of English society.

There is quite a sympathetic portrait of Ottoline Morell, who during her own lifetime had to endure the affront of writers who accepted her generous hospitality at Garsington and Bedford Square, then went home to write spitefully satirical accounts of her.

The collection also includes what are called ‘fantasy memoirs’ – fanciful inventions based loosely on the lives of Saxon Sydney Turner and John Maynard Keynes. These are witty, allusive sketches which explore the outer limits of biography – something she was to bring to a stunning climax in Orlando, her meditation the life of her then lover Vita Sackville West.

In fact many of the sketches reveal more about the author than they do about their ostensible subject. For instance, you would never guess from her encomium to the celebrated war poet and ‘hero’ Rupert Brooke that he in fact never saw military action, and died of a mosquito bite.

One of the longest pieces is her account of attending a meeting of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, along with her husband Leonard Woolf. Life as We Have Known It is a thoughtful and reflective meditation on the women of the co-operative movement in the 1930’s, a very practical piece of feminist sympathising, and a paean for social-democratic values which foreshadows the arguments she was to develop in Three Guineas a few years later.

This is a useful collection from the Hesperus Press, which produces reprints and updated compilations which are given a scholarly editing and are elegantly designed and printed. If you don’t have these pieces in other forms, this is an excellent edition.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Virginia Woolf, The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, London: Hesperus, 2008, pp.262, ISBN: 1843917114

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The Play of the Eyes

July 5, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Vienna – Strasbourg – Paris – Prague

The Play of the Eyes is the third volume of the memoirs of Elias Canetti, a trilogy which I have read with a growing sense of frustration. He was an amazingly clever, talented, and well-connected writer who at only twenty-six produced what has become a European modernist classic novel (Auto-da-Fé) he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981, and he was personally acquainted with some of the most prestigious artists of the modernist period of the early twentieth century – Karl Kraus, Bethold Brecht, Georg Groz, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Alban Berg – and yet he tells you almost nothing about them. Every attempt at a character sketch or an artistic evaluation is shrouded by either abstract generalizations, his own egoism – or both.

When Hermann Broch is given a chapter of his own we are presented with nothing except Canetti’s own reactions to him, including the quite ridiculous notion that Canetti was able to detect Broch’s secret method for penetrating insights into other people through his manner of breathing. When introducing the conductor Hermann Scherchen he ends up talking about his own play The Wedding, how powerfully moving it is, and how talented must be the writer who can create such moving effects. It is not surprising that he is somewhat unloved by most commentators.

He moves on to describe Alma Mahler (the composer’s widow) and falls in love with her daughter Anna, a sculptor, through whom he meets her tutor Fritz Wotruba, who was considered one of the more avant-gard artists of the Vienna Sezession movement. He doesn’t bother explaining what his wife Veza thought about his affairs with other women.

In fact there is very little by way of personal revelation of the kind you might normally expect in someone’s memoirs. He makes no mention of his emotional life, which was very complex; there’s nothing about his family, which was very important in the first volume, The Tongue Set Free; and it’s not at all clear how he earned his living – or even if he earned it at all.

The most moving chapter is a description of the funeral of Manon, Alma Mahler’s daughter from her second marriage to the architect Walter Gropius. Manon died of polio at the age of only eighteen, and the occasion was immortalized in the violin concerto Alban Berg wrote and dedicated ‘To the memory of an angel’. Canetti manages to combine a heartfelt tribute to the girl with a fulsome picture of her grieving mother which is tinged with satire (Alma Mahler was well known for very theatrical public displays).

Even after his marriage and the publication of Auto-da-Fé in 1935, the long-running conflict with his mother continues just as intensely as it is described in the first two volumes. On a visit to her in Paris she predicts what will happen to him with amazing critical zeal and foresight:

She saw me surrounded by women, who would worship me for the ‘misogyny’ of Auto-da-Fé and long to let me chastise them for being women. She saw a fast-moving procession of bewitching beauties at my home in Grinzing, and in the end she saw Veza [his wife] banished and forgotten in a tiny apartment just like her own in Paris.

And sure enough, the very next chapter is a self-indulgent description of a nineteen year old girl fan throwing herself at him in a night club.

The general picture he creates of Viennese artistic circles is one of snobbery, one-upmanship, rivalries, and undisguised private enmities. This is mixed in his own case with a marked degree of self-loathing that seems to be endemic in Austrian culture (one thinks of the extreme case of Thomas Benhard).

He makes a laughing stock out of the biographer Emil Ludwig. Robert Musil cuts him dead for daring to mention the very name of Thomas Mann. Heimito von Doderer is reduced to a vain fool. No doubt all these people had character flaws: writers are not renowned for being models of virtue – but Canetti seems to relish negativity, just as he elevates his personal heroes into saints.

The book ends with his mother’s death in 1937 – which is another quite moving chapter. Two years later he moved to live in Hampstead, London, a story which is taken up in the continuation to this grizzly but fascinating memoir, Party in the Blitz

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, London: Granta Publications, 2011, pp.329, ISBN: 1847083552

Volume One of the memoirs — The Tongue Set Free

Volume Two of the memoirs — The Torch in My Ear

Volume Three of the memoirs — The Play of the Eyes

Volume Four of the memoirs — Party in the Blitz

Twentieth century literature
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The Point of View

January 16, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Point of View is rather unusual in Henry James’s oeuvre, in that it was first produced by Macmillan in London as a privately printed edition in 1882 for which James himself paid. He did this in order to protect his copyright to the text at a time before the introduction of international agreements between America and the United Kingdom, which did not come into force until the 1890s. The story first appeared in The Century Magazine in December 1882, then in single volume collections of his tales in 1883, followed by a Tauschnitz ‘European’ edition the following year.

Northumberland Hotel – Washington

The Point of View – critical commentary

Context

The Point of View is at face value nothing more than a collection of satirical sketches poking fun at various character types – the enthusiastic young woman (Aurora), the snobbish over-protective mother (Mrs Church), the jaded aesthete (Louis Leverett), the upper-class English bore (Mr Antrobus) – and so on. And their views of society on reaching America obviously reflect in exaggerated form some of James’s own ambiguous feelings about his native land and his ever-active interest in the relationship between Europe and America. But if the story is viewed in the context of the two tales that precede it – The Pension Beaurepas (1879) and A Bundle of Letters (1879) – it takes on a deeper set of meanings.

We know for instance from The Pension Beaurepas story that Aurora Church was feeling oppressed by the European conventions regarding young women in which her mother has held her trapped for most of her young life. She has been educated – in terms of art galleries and museums – but has never been allowed out alone even though she is of an age to marry.

She therefore sees America as the land of democratic freedom which will permit her to mix with whoever she wishes, and possibly find her own husband. The fact that she has failed to do so at the end of The Point of View does not invalidate the positive gesture in favour of the human spirit that her ‘escape’ from Europe represents.

Similarly, Louis Leverett, the over-developed art lover from the earlier story A Bundle of Letters expresses an almost hysterical hatred for the Boston hotel in which he finds himself. But we know from his appearance in A Bundle of Letters to be an over-refined name-dropping poseur – so his criticisms should not be taken at face value. In fact his characterisation seems to represent almost a satirical portrait of James himself – the American viewing his homeland after many years living in Europe.

But it is the sane and sober observations of the fifty year old Miss Sturdy which are probably a closer match to James’ own true views. In fact James also includes a cameo satirical portrait of himself in the letter of the french critic Gustave LeJaune reporting on the absence of American culture to a colleague back in Paris:

They have a novelist with pretensions to literature, who writes about the chase for the husband and the adventures of the rich Americans in our corrupt old Europe, where their primeval candour puts the Europeans to shame. C’est proprement écrit; but it’s terribly pale.

America – and Europe

And if you wish to see Henry James as a social and political prophet, you need look no further than these lines, penned by Marcellus Cockerel, a pro-Yankee character, tired of world travel, and glad to be back home:

Our salvation is here [in America], if we have eyes to see it, and the salvation of Europe into the bargain; that is, if Europe is to be saved, which I rather doubt.

Once one feels, over here, that the great questions of the future are social questions, that a mighty tide is sweeping the world to democracy, and that this country is the biggest stage on which the drama can be enacted, the fashionable European topics seem petty and parochial.

In England they were talking about the Hares and Rabbits Bill, about the extension of the County Franchise, about the Dissenters’ Burials, about the Deceased Wife’s Sister, about the abolition of the House of Lords, about heaven knows what ridiculous measure for the propping-up of their ridiculous little country. And they call us provincial!

Those words come from a story written one hundred and twenty seven years ago, but they might have been written last week.

[I have artificially created the three separate paragraphs in the quotation above for the sake of clarity. In the printed text there are no paragraphs. Each correspondent’s letter is a continuous block of text, with no paragraphs.]

The Point of View – study resources

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

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

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

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

Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions

The Point of View – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Point of View – story synopsis

Part I. Aurora Church, a young American woman, is on a transatlantic liner, returning to the USA after an extended stay in Europe with her mother. She writes to a friend in Paris about her liberating sense of excitement of returning home, and the people she has met during the voyage. As a Europhile, her mother is not looking forward to the experience, and she has failed to find a husband for Aurora because she has no dowry. Aurora recounts how she has been pursued on board by Louis Leverett, a pretentious Bostonian would-be belle-lettrist and Mr Cockerel, an American lawyer who is resolutely pro-USA.

Part II. Having arrived in New York, Mrs Church writes to her Calvinist friend Madame Galopin in Geneva. She complains about the country in general and her lodgings in particular. She bemoans the lack of social distinctions and the fact that she cannot ascertain the incomes of the young men who are paying court to Aurora. She has agreed to let her daughter live by American standards for a test period of three months. Mrs Church’s manner is comically snobbish, convoluted, and self-regarding.

Part III. Miss Study, at Newport, writes to an American friend back in Florence. She sees the positives and the improvements in American life, and recounts her inviting the Englishman Mr Antrobus to stay at Newport. She is alert to the changes in American-English language, and she feels the predominance of American youth to be an overwhelming feature of modern life, and their propensity to talk a great deal, without being able to talk properly.

She notes that American girls are permitted social freedoms which would be denied to them in old Europe – and that society is the better for it. She admires the democratic spirit of her homeland, even though she admits it brings people to a less variegated common level than in Europe.

Part IV. Mr Antrobus writes from Boston to his wife back in England in a pompous and didactic manner, giving her a sociological account of his impressions. He is visiting schools and colleges, and even though he is supposed to be a radical (a liberal) he regrets that America does not have a class of aristocracy. He also travels with his own tin bath tub. He goes into comically excruciating detail about what might or could have been the case on every topic he discusses.

Part V. Louis Leverett, the Boston aesthete, writes to his friend back in Paris complaining bitterly about the conditions in his hotel and the absence of European sophistication that he has left behind. He argues that the democratic spirit of the USA reduces everything and everybody to an undistinguished mediocrity.

Part VI. The French critic Gustave LeJaune writes from Washington to his friend in Paris complaining about the size of the USA and the lack of manners in the general public. He is writing an official study of America as (the most important visitor since de Tocqueville). He complains about the lack of culture, the size and content of the newspapers, and the lack of social markers of distinction which permits a social free-for-all.

Part VII. The American Marcellus Cockerel returns after three years of touring the world and writes to his sister in California saying how pleased he is to be back in the USA, even if it is a vulgar society. He gives a jaundiced account of how much he hated being in Paris in particular, and vows that he will never return to Europe again. He excoriates the traditional pageantry and rituals of old Europe and argues that America is better off without them, no matter how much they are revered.

Part VIII. Aurora writes that she has come to the end of her three months of freedom, and has failed to meet anyone she would wish to marry. However, her mother has decided that they ought to move out to the West where is will be cheaper to live – and Aurora wonders if she might meet a rich Pioneer.

The Point of View – characters

Mrs Church	an American expatriate who has been living in Europe
Aurora Church	her daughter, a spirited young American woman
Miss Sturdy	a stout, single American spinster (50)
The Honorable Edward Antrobus MP	an English traditionalist and bore
Louis Leverett	a small Boston aesthete
M. Gustave LeJaune	a French social citic
Marcellus Cockerel	a patriotic Yankee

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Point of View – study resources

The Point of View – story synopsis

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Further reading

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