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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

Uncommon Arrangements

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

married life in London literary circles 1900-1939

Most people know about the strange personal relationships which existed amongst the Bloomsbury Group, of whom it was said that they were a “a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles.” But the truth is that many other people in the artistic and literary circles of the period 1910-1930 were making what might politely be called ‘experiments in living’, or less politely, ‘having your cake and halfpenny as well’. In Uncommon Arrangements Katy Roiphe takes six examples of marriages and partnerships which were tested almost to the limit. These people were consciously overthrowing the restraints they felt Victorian and Edwardian mores were placing upon personal liberty – particularly the right to have sex with whoever one chose.

Her examples include H.G.Wells whose wife Jane tolerated his long string of mistresses, including Rebecca West, the one featured here. Katherine Mansfield gave as good as she got from her faithless husband John Middleton Murry. The feisty Elizabeth von Armin (Katherine Mansfield’s cousin) clung masochistically to Earl Russell, even whilst he treated her with disdain and physical violence. Vanessa Bell lived with her lover Duncan Grant, who was a homosexual. Una Troubridge performed a slavish role as wife and helpmeet to her lesbian ‘husband’ Radcliffe Hall, whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year affair with a young Russian Evguenia Souline.

The examples might reflect only the author’s tastes and enthusiasms, but in all of them the men come out worst as monsters of egoism, opportunism, double standards, and worse.

H.G. Wells treated his wife like a doormat, pleading that she could not meet his sexual needs, and all the time protesting that he loved her dearly. John Middleton Murry left his wife Katherine Mansfield on her own when she was suffering a terminal illness, and wrote endless letters saying how much he missed her. And Earl Russell (Bertrand Russell’s brother) engaged not one mistress alongside his marriage, but two. The same was true of Philip Morrell, who announced to his wife Ottoline that both his mistresses were pregnant, in the hope she would help him out of an embarrassing scrape – which she did.

The one exception she explores is Vanessa Bell, who managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry co-existing as friends together under the same roof without any overt friction.

Katy Roiphe reveals the facts and recreates dramatic episodes of these people’s lives in a successful journalistic manner, but when it comes time to analyse contradictory behaviour she often retreats behind rhetorical questions. Why did X tolerate this? Why did Y never leave him/her?

Her evidence for these accounts comes from what they left behind in letters and diaries. This is a slightly risky procedure, because what they said needs to be placed in its context. The motivation for saying something needs to be taken into account, and contradictions with other evidence noted.

But there’s a more obvious and serious weakness in her approach: it’s that she fails to recognise the legal and economic basis of marriage, and (to quote Frederick Engels) its relationship to the family, private property, and the state. She is more interested in comparing these social pioneers with the plight of contemporary relationships. As she rightly observes

Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel that most of us are living in.

Of course, as Victoria Glendenning has observed, “physical fidelity was not greatly valued in the marriages of the British upper classes” – which is true, so long as the all-important conventions of inheritance are not disturbed. The niceties and social concerns of who couples with whom are something of a smokescreen; they are the superstructure of which concern for preserving inherited capital are the base. And as soon as we look at the economic foundations of these relationships, many of the mysteries evaporate immediately.

Jane Wells tolerated her husband’s flagrant infidelities because he was rich and kept her in economic security. Elizabeth von Armin kept the receipts for items she purchased for her own home, so as to be able to prove ownership in the event of a dispute with her husband Earl Russell – a dispute which did eventually take place in the courts of law.

Una Troubridge clung to her humiliating position as Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian ‘wife’ for nine years, and was rewarded by being made Solo Executrix to Hall’s will – whereupon she took economic revenge on her former rival.

In fact these cases of strange arrangements could have been made more acutely with other examples. She could have included Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West, as well as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, both of whose marriages tolerated sexual plurality (though Virginia’s tolerance was never tested) as well as the most extraordinary union between Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge, who lived together with the man they both loved, Lytton Strachey.

It might be that the solution found by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackvill-West was easier to tolerate. They both had lovers of the same sex. Does this leave people less existentially threatened? (to sound for a moment like Katie Roiphe). But when Vita ‘eloped’ with Violet Trefusis, Nicolson and Dennis Trefusis chartered an airplane and flew across the Channel to bring them back.

This book raises a number of contentious issues which are still of interest today. Ho does one reconcile the desire for sexual freedom with the comforts and protection of pair-bonded monogamy? Can women ever have the same sort of freedoms as men unless they have economic independence?

It’s a readable and very stimulating narrative, but it lacks a serious theoretical underpinning – though she does in the end show that many of her chosen examples, no matter how radical they appeared to be on the surface, were at a structural level clinging to the Victorian conventions they thought they were rebelling against. After all, the Bloomsbury radicals were still summoned to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner by bells rung by servants at fixed times throughout the day.

But readers who don’t already know the shenanigans and the apparently ‘curious arrangements’ of this sub-group will be very entertained. This book doesn’t pretend to answer any of these questions, but it presents examples of pioneers who thought the struggle worth fighting for.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Katie Roiphe, Uncommon Arrangements, London: Virago, 2008, pp. 343, ISBN 1844082725

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Unconditional Surrender

March 18, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Unconditional Surrender (1961 is the third and final volume in Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour following Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen. The events of the novel are very loosely based on Evelyn Waugh’s own experiences of his Second World War service between 1939 and 1945. For a detailed examination of the parallels and constructive differences, see the excellent introduction and explanatory notes to the Penguin edition of Sword of Honour edited by Angus Calder.

Unconditional Surrender – commentary

The principal themes

The final volume of the trilogy continues the main concerns of its two predecessors – the absurd bureaucracy and inefficiency of military organisation, and Guy Crouchback’s search for an honourable existence in a chivalric tradition which is collapsing all around him.

The contradictions of life in the armed services are all too obvious. There is snobbishness and petty discipline throughout the organisation, plus ridiculous distinctions in levels of superiority. Personnel are promoted for no reason other than administrative convenience, then just as arbitrarily demoted.

Supplies fail to arrive, then are delivered when there is no longer any need for them. Orders are issued, then cancelled with no explanation. Troops are put on alert for attacks which do not take place. Key roles are allocated to personnel with no appropriate skills or experience.

This is not merely Evelyn Waugh expressing some form of revenge criticism for the discomforts he may have suffered during his own military experience. Rather, he sees the whole officer class as blinded by its own ignorance and privilege. It is a patrician view of regret that some imaginary tradition of honourable conduct is coming to an end. And it is being replaced by a shabby and lacklustre modernity.

Guy Crouchback

The case of Guy Crouchback as an individual is very closely linked to that of official disarray and inefficiency in the officer class. Guy is trying to uphold the values and behaviours of an old chivalric tradition which is in terminal decline. In fact he is the last male member of the Crouchback family. His elder brother has been killed in the first world war (on his first day in combat) and his other brother has gone mad and died.

Guy has been married (to Virginia) but is now divorced and has no children. To emphasise the fact that he is the last chance for producing a hereditary heir to the Broome estate, his father dies during the course of Unconditional Surrender and Guy is described by a friend as fin de ligne.

All Guy’s attempts at making a positive contribution to the war effort come to nought – largely because of military incompetence, but also as a result of his ‘bad luck’ and outdated notions of honourable behaviour.

To emphasise Guy’s impotence, Waugh produces his final satirical piece of irony. Guy re-marries the feckless, selfish, and louche Virginia – a woman whom he desires but does not really love. And she is pregnant with someone else’s child. In fact Guy re-marries her because she is pregnant: he takes on the unborn child as a chivalrous gesture to help a woman in distress.

More than that, the ‘someone else’ is Trimmer McTavish, the lower-class opportunist and womaniser who is the moral epitome of everything Guy disdains and tries to rise above. So the Crouchback line and tradition appears to be continued as far as the public is concerned, but Guy knows that it is not. At the end of the novel, following the death of Virginia in a doodle bug raid, Guy gets married again to a younger woman – but they have no natural children between them.

And to further underscore this theme of decline in the upper-class and its traditions, there is a similar ‘end of the line’ conclusion in the other branch of the family. Guy’s sister Angela has a son, Tony, who joins the army at the same time as Guy. Tony is taken prisoner during the war, but at its end he takes up holy orders and enters a monastery. There is to be no continuity on that side of the Crouchback family either.

Conclusion

The novel ends with a series of misunderstandings and ironic reversals that accurately mirror those of its beginning. Guy befriends and tries to help a group of Jews who are being treated as ‘displaced persons’. As a parting gesture he gives one family his remaining rations and a pile of old American magazines. The family are arrested by partisans and tried as spies possessing ‘counter-revolutionary propaganda’. The implication is that they are executed. Guy’s act of good will brings about the death of people he has tried to help – just as his friendly bottle of whisky killed Apthorpe.

Ludovic the strange author of pensees is revealed as someone mentally unstable, a murderer, and a Communist. He also rather surprisingly turns out to be the best-selling author of The Death Wish which seems to be a bad romantic novel. His royalty proceeds are spent buying Guy’s family home in Italy.

Sir Ralph Brompton is almost like a character from the Cambridge Spy Ring: he co-ordinates the activities of the other communists and their sympathisers whilst appearing to be an unimpeachable member of English society.

After his escape to India to evade a court matial for cowardice in deserting his troops in Crete, Ivor Claire joins the Chindits in Burma and is awarded a Distinguished Service Order.

In other words, treachery and bungling incompetence are rewarded, whilst honourable, chivalrous behaviour results in ironic tragedy. It is not surprising that Guy Crouchback finally retreats into cultivating his garden.

Unconditional Surrender – study resources

Unconditional Surrender – Penguin – Amazon UK

Unconditional Surrender – Penguin – Amazon US

Sword of Honour – Paperback – Amazon UK
The full trilogy – with explanatory notes

Sword of Honour – DVD film – Amazon UK
Channel 4 TV series adaptation – with Daniel Craig

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Unconditional Surrender – plot summary

Eight weeks after leaving Alexandria Guy arrives back in London. Trimmer is touring northern England as a war hero accompanied by Virginia. No proper job can be found for Guy, and he is too old for active service. He is given an ill-defined job as a liaison officer, with very little to do.

Ludovic has had his pensees accepted for publication by a left-wing magazine. Virginia is divorced by her third husband Mr Troy. She is tired of Trimmer, pregnant with his child, and broke. When Ludovic meets Guy at a smart party in Chelsea, he is frightened that Guy will reveal the truth about what happened during the retreat from Crete. There is an implication that he was responsible for the deaths of Horn and the boat skipper.

Old Mr Crouchback dies, leaving Guy the last in his family’s line, but inheriting half of the money. Guy wonders if some task or duty will arise to assuage his sense of ennui and uselessness.

Virginia tries to locate an abortionist, without success. Ludovic is in charge of parachute training, to which Guy is sent prior to a posting in Italy. In fear of being recognised, Ludovic hides from everyone. Guy injures his knee on the practice jump and is hospitalised. Ludovic nevertheless recommends him for active service – in order to get rid of him.

Guy goes to stay with his bachelor uncle Peregrine. He is visited by Virginia, who flirts with Peregrine and wants to re-marry Guy. She tells him about her pregnancy, and he marries her because of it, out of a sense of chivalry and self-sacrifice.

Guy arrives in Bari in southern Italy and is briefed for a posting in Yugoslavia. He is put in charge of a supply airfield in Croatia and becomes caught up in problems dealing with a group of Jews who are being treated as displaced persons.

In London Virginia converts to Catholicism, has her baby, and then ignores it. Ludovic completes a long romantic novel. Guy is joined by his new commander Frank de Souza, and he learns of the death of Virginia and Peregrine in a flying bomb attack.

A bogus military operation is mounted for the sake of visiting dignitaries, including Ritchie-Hook who returns to the story. The aeroplane bringing them from Italy crashes on arrival, killing several of the crew. The staged attack on an enemy post is badly organised and executed, and Ritchie-Hook (acting alone) is killed.

Guy’s attempt to save a group of Jews fails, and he is recalled to Italy. He learns later that their leaders have been betrayed by information supplied by Communists from within his own ranks.

In 1951 after the war Guy marries the daughter of the woman who has raised Trimmer’s son, and he becomes a farmer in Somerset. Ludovic buys Guy’s family home in Italy on the strength of his royalties.

Unconditional Surrender – main characters

Guy Crouchback	an idealistic and honourable young officer
Ian Kilbannock	a former journalist
Tommy Blackhouse	Guy’s friend and Virginia’s second husband
Colonel Jumbo Trotter	an old Halberdier
Virginia Troy	ex-wife to Guy and Tommy
Corporal-Major Ludovic
Julia Stritch	glamorous wife of a diplomat in Alexandria
Trimmer McTavish	a womaniser, spiv, and former hairdresser
Sir Ralph Brompton	diplomatic ‘advisor’ and Communist spy
Everard Spruce	editor of Survival magazine
Lieutenant Padfield	American liaison officer, former lawyer
Peregrine Crouchback	Guy’s bachelor uncle, a bibliophile
Frank de Souza	Guy’s witty friend, a Jewish Communist
Virginia Troy	louche ex-wife to Guy and Tommy
Ivor Claire	a dandy, horseman, and coward

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Under the Greenwood Tree

October 11, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading, web links

Under the Greenwood Tree was Thomas Hardy’s second novel to be published. It appeared anonymously in 1872, and was the first in his great series of what came to be called the ‘Wessex’ novels. It is a light, pastoral comedy of manners that is quite unlike the dark and tragic novels of his later years for which he is well known. The sub-title suggests both the principal subject and the tone in which it should be considered: The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School.

Under the Greenwood Tree – commentary

Thomas Hardy was disappointed by the rejection of his first novel The Poor Man and the Lady at the hands of publishers Chapman and Hall. To offset this, for his second work, Desperate Remedies (1871), he chose a popular genre – the sensation novel – which full of dramatic plot devices designed to shock readers. When this too failed to meet his hopes of commercial success, he decided to turn to a subject that he knew intimately – the life and customs of ordinary working people from rural south-west England. For his third novel he created a fictional landscape called ‘Wessex’ and he made it entirely his own in the many novels that followed.

Because he chose rural settings for his work, Hardy was at first considered by many critics as merely a ‘regional novelist’ – a minor artist whose vision of life is limited by geographic boundaries. But this view has since been completely overturned, and Hardy is now seen as a major novelist of the late nineteenth century. Almost all his most important works are set in a fictional version of south-west England, but they encompass issues of social class, education, gender identity, industrialisation, and the psychology of individuals pitting themselves against society and even what is often seen as a cosmic destiny.

The geographic location of events in the Wessex novels is an interesting blend of real and fictional place names. Some towns are given their real names – such as Bristol, Bath, and Southampton. Others are given invented names – so Dorchester becomes ‘Casterbridge’, the Isle of Portand becomes ‘The Isle of Slingers’, and Dartmoor is re-named ‘Egdon Heath’.

It is generally accepted that the events of the Mellstock parish church and its choir (or ‘quire’) are based on the based on the church at Stinsford in Dorset, near to where Hardy grew up in Little Brockhampton.

The historical theme

Hardy was very conscious that during his own lifetime many rural occupations and much traditional behaviour were being swept away by the arrival of new forms of transport, production, and ownership. His novels create a record of these pastoral traditions as a form of social record, and he is particularly acute in registering the details of rural economy and its effects on a wide range of characters – from rural labourers, through craftsmen, to farmers, tradesmen, and local landowners.

For a work as gentle as Under the Greenwood Tree Hardy selects an appropriately minor feature of traditional social life – the musicians and singers of a parish choir. Its members are all tradesmen and workers who play a variety of stringed instruments – which they clannishly regard as the only appropriate accompaniment to both religious and secular performance. They particularly object to the introduction of clarinets – which became popular in the mid nineteenth century.

But they are threatened by vicar Maybold’s introduction of the organ or harmonium. It is significant that their provision of musical accompaniment involves the sympathetic co-operation of a group of musicians, whereas the organ is played by an individual. Socially cohesive practices from an earlier age are being replaced by individualism and a machine-age device.

It is worth noting how skilfully Hardy blends his two themes on this issue. Maybold could easily have been demonised as an enemy of the rustics, but in fact he compromises with them over the date of introducing the organ. But the person who will play it is Fancy Day – in whom he has a romantic interest.

The romantic theme

In his later, more mature novels Hardy explored all sorts of complex issues that arise between men and women in their emotional attachments to each other. In The Mayor of Casterbridge Michael Henchard actually sells a wife he no longer loves, then reaps the consequences when she comes back to him years later. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Tess murders the man who has seduced her so that she is psychologically free to run off with the man who is her lawful husband.

There are no such dark issues in Under the Greenwood Tree. In this novel Hardy explores a very innocent and simple romance between two characters who have very few psychological problems perplexing them. But their relationship does include issues that Hardy was to explore more fully in his later works – principally those of class and education.

Fancy’s father Geoffrey Fay objects to Dick Dewey as a suitor to his daughter on grounds of class expectations and education. Fancy is the daughter of Geoffrey’s first marriage to a well educated woman, and she has been sent to the best finishing schools – which is why she is qualified to be a schoolteacher. Moreover, Mr Day has lived at a modest level with his second wife in order to provide Fancy with a good dowry. He is hoping to attract a well-to-do middle class husband for his daughter. Dick Dewey is merely the son of a man with a horse and cart haulage business.

Geoffrey Day’s capitulation to Fancy’s self-starvation tactic is not altogether convincing, but it does introduce the element of folk superstitions (the ‘witch’ Elizabeth Endorfield) that Hardy was to include in many of his other novels as part of the traditional beliefs and behaviours he was documenting.

The romance between Dick and Fancy runs a predictable series of ups and downs – all congruent with the delicate and emotionally good-natured tenor of the plot. But the story does end on an interesting note that speaks volumes for what was to come in Hardy’s later work. In a moment of self-indulgent weakness, Fancy accepts Maybold’s proposal of marriage whilst she is still engaged to Dick Dewey. (Maybold is the sort of suitor of whom her father certainly would approve.) But then she rescinds the decision next day.

Maybold, a very honourable chap, accepts her reasons and recommends that she confess all to Dick Dewey, who he predicts will be forgiving. But she does not tell her husband about the incident – and so their marriage begins with a secret between them – ‘a secret she would never tell’.

Significance

Although Under the Greenwood Tree is obviously very light-hearted in tone and is generally classed amongst Hardy’s minor works, it has a far greater significance when viewed in the light of his later novels.

First, it establishes ‘Wessex’ as a fictional location which Hardy would make the setting for all his major works in the years that followed. Wessex is an area of south-west England bounded by Somerset in the north, Devon, Cornwall, and Hampshire and Dorsetshire in the south. His account of this locale, in all its topographical, geographical, architectural, and botanical detail is what gives his novels their compelling realism.

The issues he explores – such as the relationships between rustic country people and the content of their social and emotional lives – is something he would take to the level of high drama and even tragedy in his later works. Dick Dewey is the son of a carter (a ‘tranter’) but by the end of the novel he has had business cards printed with a view to becoming more successful and occupying a slightly higher social position. Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge is similarly ambitious, but after a spectacular rise he is eventually reduced to a form of self-destruction at the end of which he wishes to be remembered by nobody.

The rustics in Under the Greenwood Tree are a charming set of naive, friendly, and sympathetic characters variations of whom will recur in Hardy’s later novels. They are always depicted as simple, honest, folk embracing any number of folk memories, superstitions, and tolerance of each other’s foibles. They also embody the vehicle of everyday speech patterns, local dialect, slang, and regional pronunciation that Hardy was keen to record.

Under the Greenwood Tree – resources

Under the Greenwood Tree – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Under the Greenwood Tree – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Under the Greenwood Tree – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Under the Greenwood Tree – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

A Laodicean

Under the Greenwood Tree – synopsis

Part the First – Winter

I. Dick Dewy meets fellow members of the Mellstock parish choir after work on Christmas Eve.

II. They all go to his father’s cottage where Reuben Dewy clumsily taps a barrel of cider for consumption before their tour of the parish.

III. There is light-hearted banter about recognising someone from their footwear, and mention of new schoolmistress Fancy Day and her prettiness.

IV . The choir makes a procession round the hamlets, playing hymns and bemoaning the loss of musical traditions.

V. They serenade young schoolmistress Fancy Day, where Dick Dewy becomes entranced. Farmer Shiner is hostile to their serenade. They then move on to the new parson Mr Maybold, whose reception is lukewarm.

VI. On Christmas Day morning Dick is still in a romantic daze. The choir performs in church, but it is disrupted by loud singing from schoolgirls.

VII. At midnight on Christmas Day dancing begins at Reuben Dewy’s party. Dick feels pangs of jealousy when Fancy dances with rich farmer Mr Shiner..

VIII. The dancing gets faster. Heavy men remove their jackets. They sit to a late supper. Tales of old folk beliefs are related. Dick is rueful that Fancy is escorted home by Mr Shiner.

IX. Some days later Dick calls at the school to return Fancy’s handkerchief, but is too shy to take advantage of the situation.

Part the Second – Spring

I . Dick makes frequent visits past the schoolhouse in order to see Fancy.

II. The choir members are worried by what they see as Parson Maybold’s radical social changes.

II. I Maybold wants to use a new organ (played by Fancy Day) instead of the Mellstock choir. Reuben Dewy proposes a deputation of the choir to confront him.

IV. The choir visits the vicarage and deferentially asks for a delay in the proposed change. Maybold politely equivocates and in the end they compromise.

V. The choir congratulate themselves and discuss Fancy Day’s secretive father.

VI. Dick has dinner with Fancy at her father’s house, where there is provocative chat about marriage and Mr Shiner. The eccentric Mrs Day re-sets the table whilst they are all eating.

VII. Dick helps Fancy in her lodgings, but his pleasure is spoiled by the arrival of Maybold.

VIII. Dick meets his father and seeks his advice on romance and Fancy. Reuben is naive and sceptical. He suggests that Dick should remain a bachelor. Dick writes a letter to Fancy, but fails to deliver it, then writes another.

Part the Third – Summer

I. Dick meets Fancy in Budmouth-Regis. Driving her back to Mellstock, he insists that she admit that she has feelings for him – and she does.

II. On the way back they stop for tea. Fancy thinks it might seem improper, so Dick proposes marriage to overcome such objections – and she accepts.

III. Fancy recounts a story of Mr Shirer’s attentions to her to make Dick jealous. Dick sees through the ploy, but Shirer has Mr Day’s blessing as a suitor.

IV. Dick and Fancy decide to confront Mr Day about their engagement – but they spend all their time deciding how to dress for the occasion.

Part the Fourth – Autumn

I. Frustrated by Fancy’s attention to mending her dress, Dick goes nutting alone – after which they are reconciled.

II . Dick and Shiner compete with each other whilst the Day family are gathering honey. Mr Day then explains to Dick that Fancy is beyond his social reach because of her education and potential dowry.

III. The ‘witch’ Elizabeth Endorfield advises Fancy on overcoming her father’s objections to Dick as a suitor.

IV. Fancy starves herself. Her father becomes worried and removes his objections to Dick as a suitor..

V. Fancy dresses attractively for her church organ debut. Dick acts as pallbearer at a friend’s funeral, then walks back home in the rain.

VI . Maybold proposes to Fancy, and she accepts him, but is upset by doing so.

VII. Next day Maybold meets Dick, who reveals that he is engaged to Fancy. Maybold writes to Fancy, asking her to reconsider, but his letter crosses with one from her withdrawing her acceptance.

Part the Fifth – The Conclusion

I . Fancy prepares for the wedding amidst much teasing from older male visitors. Former wedding customs are recalled.

II. Celebrations conclude outdoors under a tree. Dick and Fancy drive off to his new cottage in Mellstock. Fancy has not told him about Maybold.

Under the Greenwood Tree – characters

Richard Dewey	a young apprentice carter
Reuben Dewey	his father, a porter/carter
Willian Dewey	his grandfather
Fred Shiner	a farmer and churchwarden
Geoffrey Day	an estate manager
Fancy Day	his daughter, an educated schoolmistress
Arthur Maybold	the new young vicar

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Under Western Eyes

September 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Under Western Eyes (1911) is one of the most political of all Conrad’s novels – even though a good deal of it takes place in drawing rooms in Geneva. It is simultaneously a critique of Russian absolutism and of its reactive counterpart, revolutionary terrorism. Conrad is essentially a political conservative, but his background as a Polish national, raised under Tsarist rule, with an international career as a seaman before adopting British nationality, gives him a healthy non-partisan view on the political systems he considers.

Joseph Conrad

Conrad is now well ensconced in the Pantheon of great modernists, and his novels Lord Jim and The Secret Agent are popular classics, along with impressive novellas such as The Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness which are even more celebrated in terms of the number of critical words written about them.

Under Western Eyes – critical commentary

Under Western Eyes, as its title suggests, is very much a depiction of Russia from the point of view of western liberal democracy. The narrator is an Englishman who was raised in Russia (‘a teacher of languages’) who reminds readers at regular intervals that many of the surprising details of the plot are products of a Slavic regime that will seem irrational to Europeans.

There is plenty of scope within the novel for Conrad to vent his antipathy to a regime that put his own father in jail and the entire Conrad family into a form of internal exile. But he does so in an even-handed sense. The government is shown as absolutist, despotic, riddled with police spies, and completely neglectful of its citizens, the majority of whom live in a state of abject squalor. But he is equally critical of the revolutionaries, who he depicts as a collection of misguided, self-serving bigots at best, and at worst as psychopaths, unprincipled anarchists, phony feminists, and murderous brutes.

It’s a triumph of Conrad’s skill that Haldin, a politically motivated revolutionary who assassinates not only a government official but several innocent bystanders, emerges as the novel progresses as an almost Christ-like figure. Similarly, the central figure Razumov, whose only clear behaviour for the majority of the novel is to betray a colleague to certain death and then act as a police informer, in the end undergoes a convincing transformation motivated by a sort of spiritual remorse.

Irony

Joseph Conrad is a master of sustained dramatic irony. It’s easy enough for any skilled writer to drop ironic statements into a narrative, but to maintain an ambiguous attitude to a subject or character throughout an entire narrative requires a very skillful form of deception. It can only be done by creating a narrative that reveals (or appears to reveal) one thing whilst other elements reveal something else. (Vladimir Nabokov is another writer who uses this technique.)

His central character Fazumov is a student of philosophy who thinks he is perceptive and clever. The other characters in the narrative reinforce this idea because they mistake his taciturn nature for ratiocinative profundity. They have confidence in him partly because of his good looks and because they assume he is acting on some high moral principle. But in fact for most of the narrative he is a mediocrity, an empty shell, and a coward.

Much of the tension in the plot is generated by the sustained dramatic irony of Razumov’s position in relation to the people he confronts. The revolutionaries mistakenly believe he has been part of the terrorist plot and in league with Haldin, its true perpetrator. He is forced to dissemble so as to conceal the fact that he in fact betrayed Haldin to the police. He is also forced to conceal from them (though this is an easier task) that he has become a police spy, tasked with reporting on terrorist plots back to the government in Russia.

Victor Haldin’s sister Natalia has learned in a letter from her brother that Razumov is a friend who can be trusted. She has every reason to believe that the two young men were friends and she hopes that Razumov can throw some light on her brother’s last hours before being arrested. Razumov is squirming with anguish in every conversation he has with her, his voice reduced to a low rasping noise as he is forced to conceal the fact that he betrayed Haldin and brought about his death. The entire novel is heavily indebted to Dostoyevski, and to Crime and Punishment in particular. Razumov like Raskolnikov spends much of his time in discussion with the police and the revolutionaries, always on the verge of confessing or giving himself away.

Narrative

As usual in his work written in his late period, Conrad adopts a complex and very oblique manner in delivering his story. His outer narrator (an English ‘teacher of languages’) recounts events he has learned from reading a journal written by the central character Razumov, some of it composed in retrospect and some contemporaneously (‘with dates’). But as in his other late novels such as Nostromo and Chance, Conrad from time to time appears to forget the narrative structure he has created for himself, and he lapses into a traditional third person omniscient narrative mode.

He recounts the thoughts, feelings, and inner motivations of minor characters – psychological motivations which could not be known to anybody else. These are figures who the narrator could only know about from having read of them as characters in Razumov’s journal, and whose inner life would therefore be hidden, certainly from a limited character such as Razumov and doubly so from another person reading about them in his reminiscences.

These flaws are not so severe that they destroy one’s faith in the novel as a whole, but they do undermine our confidence in a narrator who makes so many claims of moral discrimination – most of them on Conrad’s own behalf – despite his efforts to distance himself from the teacher of languages. They make us wonder why Conrad devises such a complex strategies when he both contravenes their logic and fails to keep accurate control of them.

The first part of the novel is relayed to us in first person narrative mode by the teacher of languages. He is reconstructing the story from a journal (‘a journal, a diary, yet not that exactly in its actual form’) kept by Razumov, that has come into his possession after the events of the novel have finished. This does not stop Conrad from drifting into third person omniscient narrative mode, speculating about issues that it is very unlikely anyone would record in a diary.

In the second part of the novel the teacher of languages talks to Haldin’s sister Natalia, who recounts her meeting with Razumov. But the events are once more delivered in third person omniscient mode:

The dame de compagnie, listening where now two voices were alternating with some animation, made no answer for a time. When the sounds of the discussion had sunk into an almost inaudible murmur, she turned to Miss Haldin.

This sort of focalisation is simply not consistent with a narrative which is supposed to originate with Miss Haldin and is being passed on to us by the teacher of languages. There are many such instances throughout the novel. Conrad also makes comments on events which are illogical or asynchronous. The teacher of languages, speaking of Haldin, observes: ‘I did not wish indeed to judge him, but the very fact that he did not escape … spoke to me in his favour’.

But he already knows why Haldin did not escape. In fact he knows the entire story before he delivers it as the novel readers hold in their hands. There are also instances where the teacher of languages invents scenes he has not witnessed and nobody has described to him. In the middle of recounting the story relayed to him by Miss Haldin, he speculates ‘I could depict to myself Peter Ivanovitch rushing busily out of the house again, bare-headed, perhaps, and on across the terrace with his swinging gait, the black skirts of the frock-coat floating clear of his stout, light-grey legs.’

For long stretches of the narrative Conrad has to pretend that the teacher of languages is unaware of the dramatic irony of presenting Razumov as a ‘friend’ of Haldin – when in fact at the very moment of starting the tale he has all the facts at his disposal. But because he takes part in the events as a fictional character, large sections of the book are related from his point of view as a spectator at the time of the events being described. This form of narration is an illusion, a conjuring trick on the author’s part. But it must be said that Conrad fails to keep the balls in the air some of the time. It’s difficult to escape the impression that Conrad was simply not paying sufficient attention to his work, although similar problems occur in other of his late novels.

Genesis of the text

These issues are further complicated by the very complex manner of Conrad’s process of composition. He wrote the novel over a two year period, breaking off at one point to produce his novella The Secret Sharer (which also deals with a character who shelters a murderer). Under Western Eyes was composed in longhand to produce a first draft, and these pages were then typed up to produce a version that Conrad corrected by hand. The result was then in turn typed into what approximated to a finished version. One problem is that all three of these stages were taking place at the same time, and another is that even when the process was complete Conrad made huge cuts and changes to the story for its publication both in serial and then in single volume form. On top of that there were also English and American editions of the novel that contain differences.

The best available version of the text is in Oxford Classics, which is based on the first English edition. But there are lots of problems in the text which need copious footnotes and extracts from other versions to explain. At one point Conrad even gets the full name of one of his important characters wrong.

Dostoyevski

Joseph Conrad claimed that he did not like the work of Fyodor Dostoyevski – an opinion perhaps fuelled by his anti-Russian feelings in general, having been exiled from his Russian-controlled Poland with the rest of his family early in life. But the parallels with Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment (1866) are unmistakable.

Both the protagonists – Razumov and Raskalnikov – are students. They both commit crimes and are subsequently haunted by a fear of being found out, whilst at the same time they both feel a passionate need to confess. Both men contemplate suicide as a relief from their anguish. Both these protagonists confess to a woman they love, and in a sense both are ultimately redeemed by this love.

Under Western Eyes – study resources

Under Western Eyes – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

Under Western Eyes – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

Under Western Eyes – annotated Kindle eBook edition

Under Western Eyes – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Under Western Eyes – PDF version at RIA Press

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

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

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Under Western Eyes – plot summary

The protagonist is a young Russian student of philosophy named Razumov, a conservative and career-motivated young man. He has never known his parents, but he is in fact the natural son of Prince K—, who pays for his education. One day he returns home to find a student acquaintance named Victor Haldin sheltering in his apartment. Haldin informs Razumov that he has just committed a political assassination. He has evaded the police and intends to escape. This news causes Razumov a great deal of unease, as he has no sympathy for Haldin’s actions and feels that he is in danger of being implicated in the crime. .

Haldin asks Razumov to contact a cab driver called Ziemanitch, who may be able to help Haldin escape successfully. Razumov fears that all he has worked for is slipping away, but after much soul-searching agrees to help Haldin – primarily with the intention of getting him out of his apartment as soon as possible. When Razumov finds Ziemanitch in a drunken stupor and unable to assist, he beats him unmercifully. Then, in a state of heightened outrage at being placed in such a difficult position, he decides to betray Haldin to the police.

Razumov goes to the one person that may be able to assist him – the official who arranges his sponsorship at the university. They go to the chief of police, General T – who agrees to keep Razumov’s name out of any official reports, because of his connection with Prince K—. Haldin is arrested, tried, and hanged. Razumov finds himself taking the first step to becoming a secret agent, although at this time he has no such intention.

The narrative then shifts to Geneva where Natalia and Mrs Haldin, the sister and mother of the executed revolutionary, have received the tragic news. In his last correspondence to his sister, Victor Haldin mentioned a certain serious young man named Razumov who was kind to him. Nathalie learns that Razumov is scheduled to arrive in Switzerland, and she impatiently awaits the arrival of her late brother’s final friend, hoping he might be able to shed light on Haldin’s last days.

In Geneva Razumov joins a group of exiled Russian revolutionaries who are planning an insurgency in the Baltic regions in an attempt to foment revolution in Russia. They regard Razumov as a hero, because they mistakenly think he was an associate of Haldin’s in the assassination plot. In fact he has gone to Geneva working as a spy for the Russian government.

All the publicly available evidence suggests that Razumov’s part in the arrest of Haldin can not become known. This is reinforced when news arrives that Ziemanitch has committed suicide. It is generally assumed that this was an act of remorse for betraying Haldin (which was not the case). But the strain of concealing his part in betraying Haldin causes Razumov a great deal of distress. This is compounded when he is forced to meet Nathalia and she asks him about the exact nature of his last contact with her brother.

This process of being interrogated is repeated with the key figures amongst the revolutionaries. At each stage Razumov is put under greater and greater psychological pressure and he feels more role strain and conflict of interests. He is being praised for a revolutionary act of terrorism that he did not commit, and his true political beliefs are deeply conservative.

However, powerfully affected by Natalia’s beauty and trustful nature, he finally breaks down and confesses to her. He then does the same thing with the revolutionaries, who punish him by bursting his ear drums. As a result of his deafness, he is run over by a street car and rendered a cripple. At the end of the novel, after her mother dies, Natalia goes back to Russia to do good works amongst poor people. Razumov has gone back too, but is not expected to live long.

Principal characters

I	The un-named outer narrator, ‘a teacher of languages’, who presents events and participates in the story.
Kyrilo Sidorovitch Razumov	A student of philosophy
Prince K—	Razumov’s protector, sponsor, and secret father
Victor Haldin	A student and revolutionary
Ziemianitch	A drunken cab driver
General T—	Government official to whom Razumov betrays Haldin
Kostia	A dissolute student with a rich father
Gregory Matvieitch Mikulin	Police investigator
Natalia Haldin	Victor Haldin’s sister
Mrs Haldin	Victor Haldin’s mother
Peter Ivanovitch	A revolutionary and feminist
Madame de S—	Russian society revolutionary sympathiser
Father Zosim	Priest and police informer
Tekla	Servant and former revolutionary
Sophia Antonovna	Revolutionary
Nikita Necator	Revolutionary assassin – and police spy
Julius Caspara	Magazine editor and anarchist

Joseph Conrad – biography

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.

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad is a good introduction to Conrad criticism. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the stories and novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early comments by his contemporaries to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Conrad journals. These guides are very popular. Recommended.

Major novels by Joseph Conrad

Nostromo (1904) is Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.
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The Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
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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
More on Joseph Conrad tales

Unforgiving Years

October 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

revolutionary hopes betrayed

Victor Serge is one of the most undeservedly neglected writers of the twentieth century. In his introduction to this recent translation of Unforgiving Years, Serge scholar Richard Greeman speculates that this might be because he cannot be easily categorised into any national literary tradition. Serge was born of Russian emigré parents in Brussels. He travelled widely throughout Russia and Europe as a revolutionary, and he wrote in French. Indeed, this linguistic fact may well have saved his life, because he was one of the few Oppositionists in Stalin’s reign of terror who was given permission to leave the Soviet Union – largely as a result of an international protest organised in France.

Unforgiving Years is one of his last great works, written in exile in Mexico around the same time as Memoirs of a Revolutionary and The Case of Comrade Tulayev. It covers the years 1939-1945 and is split into four distinct sections, each one of which illustrates a facet of ‘Midnight in the Twentieth Century’ as Europe was plunged into horrifying conflicts dominated (at first) by two conflicting forms of totalitarianism. The first section is set in Paris at an unspecified period just before the outbreak of war.

Two secret agents, Sasha and Nadine, decide they no longer believe in the infallibility of the Party and its policies, and they decide to escape – knowing that they will be hunted down and possibly assassinated by agents – as many people were at the time. Every move they make is fraught with danger, and they fear betrayal at every step – even from each other. The Spanish civil war has ended in defeat, the liberal democracies are capitulating before the threat of Nazism, and Stalin is purging everyone in his wake – even including leading intellectuals and his best military commanders, just when he will need them most.

In part two, one of their comrades is sent on a mission to a frozen Leningrad besieged by the Germans in 1941 – to endure unimaginable hardships in support of one corrupt regime resisting another. Although Serge’s sympathies are clearly with the Russian people and not with the Stalinist aparatchicks, he might not have known at the time of writing that Stalin turned out to be responsible for killing more Russians than Hitler.

Daria – the only character to appear in all four parts of the book – tries hard to be a loyal Party agent, but she cannot stop herself questioning the perverted logic of any means, no matter how corrupt, justifying some theoretical ends. She cannot rid herself of humane sympathies for the people she sees suffering around her. In a novelistic sense she stands in for Serge himself, desperately trying to locate a set of values which will accommodate both aspirations towards democratic socialism and a liberal humanism which she can hardly even admit to herself.

Part three takes place in a Berlin devastated by allied carpet bombing as the Reich nears its apocalyptic end. Daria has volunteered for a mission behind enemy lines, working as a nurse under an assumed identity. Serge’s skill in this section is to recount the events from the points of view of loyal (non-Nazi) Germans, their belief in the war almost at breaking point. All the official news is ridiculously optimistic propaganda, and the entire population is surrounded by officials with orders to root out and destroy the slightest signs of doubt in the Fuhrer’s omnipotent wisdom – just as was happening in the East.

Throughout all the horrendous conditions he describes, the Comrades all behave impeccably – with only their ideological doubts bringing them down to the level of normal human beings. Of course they reflect the intellectual journey which Serge had made himself. But it should be borne in mind that the saintly Daria/Erna, whilst sleeping with young men out of compassion and tending war-shattered enemies in her capacity as a spy behind the front line, is in fact reporting back to a regime which was systematically slaughtering its soldiers who had come back from fighting the Nazis because they might have been tainted with democratic ideas – and were actually accused of being German spies. The Comrades can be admired for their aspirations, but they clung on to their allegiances for too long – though of course it’s easy for us to say that now.

In part four Daria has finally broken ranks with the Party and escapes to the New World to start a new life. She eventually locates Sasha and Nadine, who have retired to run a plantation in rural Mexico – hidden away from everyone. Sasha has resolved his ideological dilemma by making a connection with the primitive forces of an almost prehistoric world, yet he still wonders ‘Where did we go wrong?’ Nadine has ‘retreated’ into a mild form of schizophrenia. But just as they have feared all along, the Party will not forgive recusants, and a visiting archeologist turns out to be a Stalinist agent. He infiltrates himself into their confidence, poisons Sasha and Daria, then moves on to his next assignment.

It’s possibly the bleakest of all Serge’s novels – and no wonder. He himself was still being pursued by Stalin’s agents when he died (of a heart attack) in Mexico in 1946. Anyone not used to his narrative techniques might find the story difficult to follow. He was trying to escape the form and the methods of the traditional bourgeois novel by downgrading the individual in favour of the mass – a theory he expounds in Literature and Revolution. Fortunately he never quite managed it, but since he also fused his narrative with a poetic lyricism, the results are magnificent.

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Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years, New York: New York Review Books, 2008, pp.341, ISBN 1590172477

More on Victor Serge
Twentieth century literature
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Ursule Mirouet

December 4, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

Ursule Mirouet was first published 1841, and forms part of Scenes of Provincial Life in the grand scheme of Balzac’s Comedie Humaine. The story is set in Nemours, just south of Paris in the years 1829-1837. As is common in many of the novels that make up Balzac’s gigantic picture of French society, it concentrates heavily on money, inheritance, property, and the fight between virtue and greed.

It’s worth noting that the story also includes elements of mystery and crime. In the years that followed Ursule Mirouet there was a vogue for such stories in the English literary world – known as ‘the sensation novel’. These were narratives featuring events designed to shock the reader. In this sense Balzac was the father to novelists such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and even later writers such as Thomas Hardy who included elements of mystery and crime in their work.

Ursule Mirouet – commentary

Choosing a text

During his short life Balzac wrote a prodigious amount – novels, stories, novellas, journalism, and even plays. His work appeared in newspapers, magazines, and as individual printed books. Because he is so famous as a classic novelist, his works have been translated many times, and they are available in any number of formats.

One thing is worth noting in making your choice of text. Balzac broke up the overflowing torrent of his original narratives into separate chapters with sub-titles. These individual headings were particularly suitable for newspapers and magazines, where unbroken blocks of text do not look attractive. But in various editions of his work produced later in book form, these sub-titles were sometimes omitted in order to save space.

This apparently innocent change can be a sad loss – for two reasons. The first is that the novels become more difficult to read without these chapter breaks. The second is that Balzac’s choice of sub-titles often present a form of satirical running commentary on the content of the events he describes. They are both an aid to interpretation and a source of amusement. They also reveal the structure of the work, which is not always apparent when the story is presented as one continuous block of text.

The Comedie Humaine

Balzac produced most of his works at fever pitch, racing to stay ahead of printing deadlines. This sort of compositional approach is not conducive to careful plotting and structure. His narratives are often erratic, backtracking chronologically on the story to fill in necessary details.

But at the same time Balzac certainly had in mind a grand design. There are in the whole Comedie Humaine more than two thousand named characters – and examples of two of them make brief appearances in Ursule Mirouet. Some have first been introduced in an earlier novel, others are due to become major figures in a later novel.

For instance the Abbe Chaperon’s frugal domestic household expenses are described as ‘more meticulous than Gobseck’s with his – if indeed that notorious Jew ever did employ a housemaid’. Gobseck is the central character in the 1830 novella that bears his name and is a notorious miser. Balzac throws in this allusion (plus a small instance of casual racism) as if confident that readers were familiar with his entire works.

Similarly, when Minoret wishes to develop Ursule’s skills ‘he now had an able music teacher coming down once a week from Paris, an old German named Schmucke’. This character Wilhelme Schmucke was to become one of the principals in Cousin Pons which was not published until five years later in 1846 – which indicates that Balzac certainly had this world of characters and events in mind.

In fact both Schmucke and the eponymous Cousin Pons are musicians in an orchestra at a theatre run by the impresario Felix Gaudissart, who was first introduced in a short story of 1833, The Illustrious Gaudissart.

When Savinien de Portedures is in Paris, his advising friends include Eugene de Rastignac, and Lucien de Rubempre – both of whom have appeared as major characters in earlier novels and would continue to rise socially in works that followed.

There is no need for a first-time reader to have knowledge of these secondary characters. Ursule Mouriet stands independently as a work in its own right – but a knowledge of their existence in other novels reinforces Balzac’s claim to be creating an in-depth world of French society. It might in the end be a work which he never managed to complete – but the attempt is impressive.

The Napoleonic Code

There is one feature in the background to events of this novel which may not be immediately apparent to readers unfamiliar with French society and its laws. Following the revolution of 1793 there was a radical overhauling of the legal system – which became known as the Napoleonic Code. This included a law specifying that property and capital must be inherited solely via family connections.

All real estate in France is governed by succession laws dating from 1804, which include compulsory inheritance provisions. Children are ‘protected heirs’ and cannot be disinherited. They receive a certain proportion of the estate, depending on their number and on the existence of a surviving spouse. It’s also worth noting that in the case of people who die without heirs, their property is swallowed up by the French government.

Today, if you are English with a million pounds in the bank, you can leave this money to whomever you wish by making a will. You can nominate as legatees your children, your friends, or even the Battersea Dogs Home. But in France, your money (and property) can only be willed to your family. This is an over-simplification of a very complex system.

Hence the significance of this law in the plot of Ursule Mirouet. Dr Minoret is a widower whose children have died in infancy. Ursule is his niece, but she is his illegitimate protected god-daughter – not a natural heir. His nearest legitimate relatives are remote members of extended family networks, whom he avoids socially. He has helped them all financially, but they are rapaciously anticipating his death and their inheritance of his wealth – to which they know they are entitled by law.

Much of the drama in the novel arises from their vulgar greediness, and their fear that Minoret might in some way outsmart them, depriving them of money they already think of as theirs, even before his demise. They are also frustrated by the fact that they do not know accurately the extent of his wealth – which they both over and under-estimate.

The weaknesses

There are three weaknesses in the plot of the novel which undermine its serious claims to greatness. The first is Balzac’s idiosyncratic belief in supernatural phenomena. He was well known for proselytising on behalf of the Catholic church and French royalty – but he also had a gullible streak which led him to give credence to mystic events.

The first instance of this ocurrs when the rational Encyclopedist Dr Minoret is suddenly converted to religious belief. He is persuaded by his old friend Bouvard’s demonstration of ‘Magnetism’ to overthrow the scientific basis of his beliefs in favour of an immediate conversion to Catholicism.

There is no demonstrated or argued connection between somebody’s apparently telepathic knowledge of events taking place elsewhere and a sudden religious conversion. Yet Balzac goes out of his way with a lengthy ‘digression’ to persuade us that this is reasonable. This interpolated lecture is itself something of an affront to literary cohesion and realistic credibility.

The use of supernatural-based plotting is then repeated when Ursule has nocturnal revelations of the exact circumstances of the theft of her guardian’s final will and instructions. These mystical plot devices are difficult to accept in the context of a narrative which is otherwise fundamentally based in social realism.

Balzac, as a former operative in a lawyer’s office, well knew the intricacies of law relating to wills, property, inheritance, and the Napoleonic Code that had sought to redress injustices perpetrated by aristocrats against the middle class. These form the legal niceties that make the novel a fascinating study in power, class, money, and legal rulings.

But the central dramatic incident of the novel is based upon a naive improbability. The sophisticated and intelligent doctor writes a will and last testament, making financial provision for both Ursule and her intended husband Savinien. This will is stolen and destroyed by the villainous heir Minoret.

In a novel bristling with lawyers, notaries, magistrates, and justices, it is virtually unthinkable that someone like Dr Minoret would not lodge a copy of such a will and statement of intentions with legal representatives. The idea of a single handwritten note tucked away in a bureau drawer is not really credible.

Not only that, but the details of the doctor’s government scrips are finally discovered in the most improbable manner. We are asked to believe that not only is the secret of the original theft revealed in a dream, but that the Abbe Chaperon then detects the imprint of three serial numbers that have been transferred to the pages of an old book. This permits both the money and its rightful destined owner to be traced via government records. We are offered plotting of a kind that belongs to the lower levels of serial narratives – or what we would now call ‘soap operas’.

There are similar weaknesses in the dramatic reversals of character that litter the final pages of the novel. For no persuasive reasons, some characters suddenly reform themselves. Minoret confesses his crime – and becomes a changed man. The snake-like Goupil who has spent the entire novel menacing Ursule suddenly repents of his crimes. Mme de Portenduere suddenly abandons her aristocratic disapproval when her son wishes to marry the daughter of an illegitimate band-master.

And if these improbable voltes face were not enough, there are also a couple of grand guinol flourishes to bring the narrative to its close. The unfortunate Desire Minoret, for no reason connected to the plot, is involved in a coaching accident, has both legs amputated, and dies as a result of the operation. Meanwhile his mother is so shocked by the event that she becomes deranged, it put into an insane asylum by her husband, where she dies shortly afterwards.

This is Balzac packing out La Comedie Humaine with ‘events’ at the expense of producing a well crafted novel. But it has to be said that his primary intent was the creation of a whole multi-faceted fictional world, and we are forced to accept his greatness where it emerged – along with these occasional blemishes.

Ursule Mirouet – study resouces

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Collected Works of Balzac – Kindle – Amazon UK

Collected Works of Balzac – Kindle – Amazon US

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

Ursule Miroet – plot synopsis

PART ONE

1. The Heirs are Alarmed

On a Sunday in Nemours in 1830, rich Dr Minoret goes to church – which is unusual. His relatives speculate about his intentions and worry about the possible effect on their inheritances.

2. The Uncle Worth a Fortune

Dr Minoret rises to fame during the revolution and then retires to Nemours. He moves into a refurbished house with Ursule, a baby girl. He acts with financial generosity towards his relatives, but keeps them at bay.

3. The Doctor’s Friends

The doctor befriends Abbe Chaperon, the virtuous and frugal parish priest and M. de Jordy an ex-army captain with a sad background. They form a quartet of friendship with the magistrate M. Bongrand. The doctor prefers their company to that of his relatives. His family regard him as a miser, and they speculate about the extent of his wealth.

4. Zelie

A relative Desire Minoret arrives by coach and notices Ursule as she emerges from church with her godfather the doctor. The relatives are surprised by his church attendance, and are obsessed by the potential repercussions on their inheritances.

5. Ursule

Dr Minoret becomes godfather to Ursule via a remote family connection. When his own children die, he raises Ursule as his own daughter. She is educated by his friends. When the captain dies he leaves her a small inheritance. She becomes a devout Catholic.

6. A Brief Digression on Magnetism

Dr Minoret is summoned to Paris by his old friend Bouvard to witness a demonstration of ‘magnetism’ given by a follower of Swedenborg. A hypnotised ‘medium’ provides a detailed account of Minoret’s house and Ursule’s growing love for a neighbour Savinien Portenduere.

7. The Double Conversion

Dr Minoret returns to Paris for further proof – and is given a detailed account of Ursule’s bedtime preparations. He drives back to Nemours and next day checks that they were indeed accurate. The whole of his scientific belief system is undermined; and he becomes a religious believer.

8. A Double Consultation

The notary Dionis explains to the family heirs that Ursule is the illegitimate niece of Dr Minoret and cannot inherit his money – unless he marries her. The heirs explore several self-interested alternatives. Dr Minoret and Bongrand discuss the same issue.

9. The First Confession of a Secret

Dionis visits Dr Minoret, who rejects the heirs’ plans. He then explains to Ursule why Savinien would not be a suitable match for her. Savinien is currently in a debtor’s prison. She has fallen in love with him at a distance.

10. The Portendueres

Savinien de Portendures goes to Paris, spends all his money in six months, and ends in a debtors’ prison. His friends advise him to return home and marry into money. His mother’s appeals for financial help are refused by her relatives. Abbe Chaperon advises her to make a request to her neighbour Dr Minoret.

11. Savinien is Rescued

Dr Minoret agrees to rescue Savinien from his debts and the prison. He goes to Paris with Ursule and raises the money. Savinien returns to Nemours and promises to reform himself

PART TWO

12. The Lovers Meet with Obstacles

Savinien’s mother snobbishly disapproves of Ursule, and resents having to borrow money from Dr Minoret, whom she regards as her social inferior. The doctor thinks it safer for the two families not to socialise under these circumstances.

13. A Betrothal of Hearts

Ursule and Savinien exchange letters and pledge their love. He joins the navy as the first step in his moral recovery. Ursule and the doctor travel to Toulon to see him embark for Algeria.

14. Ursule Becomes an Orphan Again

In 1830 the heirs gain more political power. The doctor spends money on luxuries for Ursule. Savinien distinguishes himself at the capture of Algiers. By 1834 the doctor is dying. The heirs express their greed openly by his bedside. He has prepared a will and a written statement of intent to protect Ursule, but the documents are stolen by his relative the postmaster

15. The Doctor’s Will

Dr Minoret left separate provisions fo both Ursule and Savinien, but the postmaster burns the documents. On the day of the doctor’s death the heirs immediately seize all the doctor’s property and expel Ursule from her home.

16. Two People at Loggerheads

Ursule is forced to buy a small house in Nemours. The heirs sue Mme de Portenduere for the money she owed to Dr Minouet. Postmaster Minoret buys and lives in the doctor’s old house. The heirs wonder where all the doctor’s money has gone. Minoret wants to drive Ursule out of Nemours to ease his conscience.

17. The Terribly Malicious Tricks that Can be Played in the Country

Goupil sends anonymous poisonous pen letters to Ursule and Savinien’s mother. Mme de Portenduere wants her son to marry a fellow aristocrat. Savinien refuses to marry anyone other than Ursule. Goupil threatens Ursule and arranges menacing recitals of music outside her house.

18. Two Acts of Revenge

Mme de Portenduere suddenly decides to forgive and accept Ursule, whilst Goupil just as unexpectedly confesses his persecution of Ursule. But he claims he was acting for Minoret. Savinien threatens Minoret and his son with a duel.

19. Ghostly Apparitions

Ursule has a dream which reveals all the details of Minoret’s theft. She reports this to the Abbe Chaperon, who then challenges Minoret with the details. Minoret denies everything. There is a second apparition, which has the same consequences

20. The Duel

Savinien arranges the duel with Desire Minoret, who confesses the theft of the doctor’s will to his mother, who tries to persuade Ursule to marry Desire.

21. How Difficult it is to Steal What Seems Easiest

Abbe Chaperon finds the imprints of the doctor’s government scrips in an old library book – and the theft is exposed. The money is restored and the duel called off. Minoret becomes a reformed man. Desire is in a coaching accident and has both legs amputated, then dies. Zelie Minoret goes mad and is placed in an asylum, where she dies. Ursule and Savinien are married then move to live in Paris.

Ursule Mirouet – characters

M. Minoret	postmaster at Nemours
Zélie	the postmaster’s acerbic wife
Desire Minoret	his self-indulgent son, a law graduate
Dr Denis Minoret	a rich retired former Encyclopedist
Goupil	a dissolute clerk, friend to Desire
Abbe Chaperon	parish priest, friend of Dr Minoret
Dionis	a local notary
Ursule Mirouet	niece and ward of Dr Minoret
Mme de Portenduere	a proud and aristocratic widow
Savinien de Portenduere	her son, a reformed rake

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Vanessa Bell a biography

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury painter, matriarch, and bohemian

Vanessa Bell is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf, but she was a distinguished artist in her own right, and her reputation has risen in recent years, along with other women artists such as Dora Carrington and Gwen John. Her father Leslie Stephen was a literary figure (editor of the Dictionary of National Biography but he encouraged Vanessa’s early enthusiasm for painting and drawing, and in 1901 she entered to study at the Royal Academy. Then following her father’s death she moved with her sister Virginia and their younger brother Adrian to live in Gordon Square.

When their elder brother Thoby brought home his friends Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner from Cambridge, it was there that the Bloomsbury Group began. She married Clive Bell in 1906 and achieved what seemed like immediate happiness with him – yet within two years she was completely taken up with her son Julian, and Clive had resumed an affair with his previous lover Mrs Craven-Hill.

As a biographer, Frances Spalding is frank and explicit regarding the behaviour of secondary characters, but she protects her principal subject behind a smokescreen of evasion and omission. Even though she documents the movements and actions of her characters on what is often a day-to-day basis, Vanessa has been engaged in a sexual relationship with Roger Fry for several months before it is even mentioned, and then obliquely, as if it is solely his decision:

Roger Fry was still legally married. Discretion necessarily surrounded his affair with Vanessa which at first was kept from Clive

She is on much stronger ground when discussing the development of Vanessa Bell’s painting. The influence of Roger Fry, the Post-Impressionists, and her exposure to French art (Gaugin, Derain, Picasso, Braque) are traced quite intelligently and linked well to the illustrations in the book which have been selected to represent some of her most important works.

Despite Frances Spalding’s efforts to turn her into a saint, Vanessa Bell emerges as a fairly scheming egoist – quite content to keep both the legal and sexual connection with her husband intact, whilst developing her affair with Roger Fry, then replacing him with Duncan Grant, and keeping all three in her orbit – which Spalding interprets as an example of generosity of spirit. On their part maybe, but on hers?

When Duncan Grant (who was a homosexual) makes her pregnant, the resulting child (Angelica) is passed off as Clive Bell’s for the sake of propriety and probably economics (given the amount of money which Bell’s family was pumping into hers). It was something which had fairly dire consequences for the girl, as she documents in her own version of events, Deceived with Kindness. But all this is passed over with very little comment.

Despite all the bohemianism, everything is based on a foundation of rock-solid middle-class economics: multiple property ownerships; a permanent retinue of servants (cook, housemaid, nurse, housekeeper); and stock-market investments carefully managed by John Maynard Keynes. Since he was at the time was an advisor to the Treasury, this is something we would today call insider trading. It’s is a world where bells (not Bells) rang at one for lunch, five for tea, and dinner at eight.

In the 1920s and 1930s Vanessa divided her time between Charleston (the much decorated house that she shared with Duncan Grant) and Cassis in France, where she helped to popularise the Cote d’Azur amongst artists. Her exhibitions were quite successful, and she had commissions for decorative work.

It’s often said that she retreated into a reclusive lifestyle at this time, but she flits from Paris to Rome, and back to London and Sussex at a dizzying rate, and Spalding’s pages are dense with the names of writers, artists, and upper-class socialites, plus Duncan Grant’s gay hangers-on (who presented a constant threat to their partnership).

Then there comes a period of personal loss: the death of Lytton Strachey, followed by Roger Fry, and most damaging of all her son Julian (killed in the Spanish Civil War) and her sister Virginia’s suicide. Further losses were sustained in the post-war years, but she continued to paint and complete decorative commissions.

But the later years of her life were dominated by her pleasure at being a grandparent [always much easier than being a parent] and though she became something of an establishment figure (sitting on artistic committees) her retreat in the last two decades of her life was into the pleasures of what was left of her family and friends.

Despite my reservations about the picture created here, this is a thorough and a scholarly biography, with all its sources fully documented. It’s simultaneously the complete account of a life, a rich documentary on the Bloomsbury Group, and a historical account which begins in the Victorian era and ends in modern post-war Britain.

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Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp.399, ISBN 0333372255

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Vanessa Bell biography

September 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

artist, lover, matriarch

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf – but in fact she was a talented artist in her own right. She was born in May 1879 at Hyde Park Gate, in central London, the eldest of four children of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian scholar and writer, and his second wife Julia Duckworth. Vanessa like her sister was largely educated at home, but they were both encouraged to develop their individual talents. Vanessa started having drawing lessons, and in 1899 she entered the Royal Academy.

Following her mother’s death in 1895, Vanessa took on the role of housekeeper for the family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was rather demanding, and Vanessa struggled to balance this domestic role with trying to develop her artistic interests. However, her father died in 1904, so she was released from this responsibility. The family home was sold and she moved with her sister and two brothers, Adrian and Thoby, to a start a new and emotionally more liberated life at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

The move to their new home enabled Vanessa and her sister and brothers to entertain their own friends. On Thursday nights Thoby invited his literary friends from Trinity College, Cambridge University to the house, and Vanessa started the ‘Friday Club’, a meeting for artists. The Bloomsbury Group grew out of these meetings of artists and writers.

Vanessa Bell, Frances Spalding’s excellent biography, records the effects of this liberating move. One of Thoby Stephen’s friends at university was Clive Bell. In 1905 he asked Vanessa to marry him, but she declined. She also rejected a second proposal from him a year later. (Virginia did the same with Leonard Woolf.) Her reasons were that although she valued his friendship, she did not want to be married.

However, after the sudden death of her brother Thoby from typhoid fever in 1907, she changed her mind and accepted him. They had two sons – Julian and Quentin – both of whom went on to become writers. Vanessa continued to paint, but her time was increasingly taken up with looking after the children. In 1910 they met Roger Fry when he came to speak at the ‘Friday Club’, and the following year they went on holiday with him to Greece and Turkey.

When she became ill on holiday, Fry nursed her through the illness, and they started an affair. She and Clive nevertheless remained friends, and Clive continued to support her financially, but he resumed a relationship with a previous mistress. Such is Bloomsbury, and there is more to come.

Another artist who joined the Bloomsbury Group was Duncan Grant. Vanessa admired his work and bought one of his paintings. The Art of Bloomsbury shows via beautiful colour reproductions how Bell, Fry, and Grant influenced each other. In time she became close to Grant, and despite the fact that he was a promiscuous homosexual, she started an affair with him. This displaced Roger Fry, who was miffed but remained friends and part of the Bloomsbury Group.

She and Duncan Grant were devoted to each other and lived together for the rest of her life. They had a daughter, Angelica, who they pretended was the daughter of Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell. This deceit was maintained until the girl was nineteen years old. She records her own account of this dubious episode in her memoir Deceived with Kindness.

During the First World War, Vanessa and Duncan Grant moved to the Sussex countryside, so he could avoid conscription. They rented Charleston Farmhouse, and moved there in October 1916 with Vanessa’s children and also the writer David Garnett, who was Duncan’s current lover.

Duncan and Vanessa chose rooms for their studios at Charleston and immediately started to decorate the house. The walls, fireplaces, door panels, and furniture were all decorated to harmonise with their paintings, and Omega fabrics and ceramics were incorporated into the overall décor.

Clive Bell came to visit his sons, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived only four miles away. Other guests included Maynard Keynes and his wife the Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova and Lytton Strachey and his sisters. Amateur dramatics were a popular form of entertainment at Charleston. There were a number of pageants and drama shows put on between the wars – what came to be called ‘The Long Weekend’. Virginia Woolf satirises a country house pageant in her last novel Between the Acts.

The thirties were a time of personal difficulty for Vanessa. Roger Fry, with whom Vanessa had remained close, died after a fall in 1934, and in 1937 her son Julian was killed while serving as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. More unhappiness followed with the suicide of her sister Virginia in 1941, and estrangement from her daughter Angelica in 1942. This was caused by a twist which illustrates the complex personal relationships amongst the Bloomsbury Group.

Angelica discovered the truth about the identity of her real father only when she was nineteen, and then much against her mother’s wishes, and in a manoeuvre which you do not need a brass plaque on your front door to understand, she married David Garnett, her father’s former lover, who was twenty-six years older than her.

Charleston became a full-time home again during the Second World War as it was safely out of reach of the bombs falling on London, and Vanessa continued to live there for part of each year until her death in 1961. Duncan kept the house on for a few years longer but it was too large for him and he eventually moved out. The house is now maintained by The Charleston Trust who have renovated and opened it to the public.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Vera Mrs Vladimir Nabokov

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a biography of the ultimate amanuensis

Russian literature is rich in examples of famous writers whose wives have acted as unpaid secretaries and copyists. Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, and (I suspect) Alexander Solzhenistyn. But Vera Slonim, who married Vladimir Nabokov, took the tradition to unprecedented extremes. They met as Russian exiles in Berlin in 1923 – both dispossessed of fortunes – and she gave up the rest of her life to acting as Nabokov’s secretary, typist, business manager, translator, research assistant, chauffeur, and even standing in for him as a lecturer. Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov is a biography of the wife, but it tells us a lot about the husband too.

His output as a writer was large – but as an author still given to writing in pencil on small index cards, then handing them over to her to copytype on an old portable, it’s inconceivable that he would have produced half as much without her self-sacrifice. And it’s a sacrifice she was very willing to make. She promoted and protected his literary reputation throughout his life – and after his death. She did this at the expense of losing friends and making enemies of family alike.

In fact the portrait Stacy Schiff creates is of a clever, proud, but ultimately rather cold and brittle woman who nursed grudges and ‘spoke her mind’ in a way which seemed to be a cover for rudeness and cruelty. If there’s a weakness in her approach as a biographer it’s that she often takes the evidence she gathered from the Nabokovs themselves at face value. She also assumes that scenes from Nabokov’s novels are accurate transcriptions of not only his own life, but even his wife’s life before they met. Both of these are serious methodological weakness.

However, given the unalloyed marital rapture in which they both claimed to live, I was glad to see that she did not skate over Nabokov’s seriously disturbing love-affair with Irina Guadanini – the one event which threatened the idyllic nature of the relationship. Yet in the course of tracing its dramatic denouement she casually reveals several earlier affairs – none of which she had mentioned at all. This is almost like applying the rules of fiction to the genre of biography, where they do not belong.

The big narrative is one of permanent exile – first from Russia to Berlin (the first centre of exile) then to Paris (the second) and finally to the USA, before the world fame of Lolita allowed them to return to Europe. It was eventually for tax reasons that they settled at the Montreux Palace Hotel. They needed a fixed address from which expenses could be claimed.

Throughout this Odyssey, Vera is depicted as a woman who is aristocratic in spirit (though not in fact) who was prepared to sacrifice herself entirely to the needs of her husband – even to the extent of protecting his social reputation when evidence of his sexual peccadilloes and predilections surfaced when teaching young women at Wellsley College. “He liked young girls. Not just little girls” observed one of his dalliances. Vera ended up sitting in on all his lectures, just to keep an eye on him.

She comes across as a curious mixture of hauteur and self-abasement, a Jewish immigrant who nevertheless supported McCarthy in the 1950’s show trials, and a rabid anti-communist who carried a gun in her handbag.

They were a tight-knit double act, who eventually hid behind each other. She wrote letters in his name and on his behalf. He replied to letters in a similar vein – pretending to be her. They had a joint dairy, and they edited their past to present each other in the best possible light. When discrepancies were brought to light, they simply denied them.

Lolita was the turning point in their lives. Nabokov gave up his teaching job, and they became financially comfortable for the first time in their adult lives. And yet in another sense, nothing changed at all. Vera carried on being his full time personal assistant, translating him to the world, and he carried on writing. When he wasn’t producing new novels, he was translating his back catalogue into English and other languages with the help of his wife and his son.

Nabokov was well known for his magisterial pronouncements and his seeming incapacity for the slightest self-doubt. But anyone who has read his work and pronouncements carefully will know that he was given to misleading his readers and omitting the truth (a characteristic Vera shared). In his introduction to Lolita he claims that the first idea for the novel came to him on seeing the painting of a chimpanzee in the Jardin des plantes – when in fact he had already written an entire novella on exactly the same theme in 1939 – The Enchanter. Once again it seems we should ‘trust the tale, not the teller.’

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Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, London: Macmillan, 1999, pp.456, ISBN: 0330376748

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Victor Serge a biography

November 9, 2013 by Roy Johnson

the life of a revolutionary and a great novelist

Victor Serge (1890—1947) was one of the most talented writers and intellectual historians of the early twentieth century, and yet his work still seems to be unknown outside a small group of left-wing enthusiasts. His output was colossal — novels, histories, biography, literary criticism, documentaries, journalism, poetry, and diaries — and yet he wrote under incredibly difficult conditions – often in exile or in jail, and most of the time poor and hungry. He was also an active revolutionary – which is possibly why he doesn’t sit easily within the western literary mainstream. His accounts of the reign of terror unleashed by Stalin in the 1930s anticipate later work such as Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) , and offer a far more insightful explanation of the forces that were at work.

So far the majority of the information we have about his life history comes from his own magnificent Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1941) written towards the end of his life when he was an exile in Mexico. This offers a breathtaking political journey through the first four decades of the twentieth century, with Serge active in many of its key events – except that he spent most of the first world war in a French jail. But immediately on release he joined forces with insurgents, first in Barcelona, then he travelled to his spiritual homeland of Russia to join the Bolshevik revolution. Although he had been born in Belgium, his father was a Russian left-wing exile. Serge was a talented writer, translator, editor, and activist. He joined forces with the Bolsheviks, and although he had no ambitions for personal advancement, he was given important roles in the new government which enabled him to witness the mechanisms of power close up, at first hand.

Although he arrived a year after the revolution had taken place, he quickly became engaged in its essential issues, and since he took a stance to the Left of the mainstream, he had to work a difficult path for himself. Disillusioned with official policy after the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, Serge accepted a posting to Berlin as an agent of the Comintern. When the Berlin revolution of 1923 was aborted – all wholly directed from Moscow – Serge moved on to Vienna and lived there for the next two years. During this period he turned his attention to literature, for as Susan Weissman observes in this huge and detailed examination of his political life, ‘Serge was first and foremost a political animal, and it was only when barred from political action that he turned to literary activity’.

In Vienna he began writing his first novel Men in Prison, which was based on his experiences of being jailed in France after being sentenced for his (tangential) part in the notorious anarchist Bonnot gang raids, and he also produced the series of articles later collected in Literature and Revolution which examined the relationship between culture and social class.

But in 1925, alarmed by the stranglehold Stalin was imposing on the Party, he returned to the Soviet Union to support the Left Opposition, which was headed by his friend Leon Trotsky. Serge could easily have stayed comfortably in western Europe, and his motives for returning to Russia – to support the revolution – were noble, but if ever there was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, this was it. As a result, he spent much of the following decade in exile and prison.

Stalin rose to power during this period, packing committees with his henchmen; falsifying reports; rigging elections; re-writing history; banning all forms of critical debate; and hiring other people to slander rivals. And he did all this claiming to have the highest possible ethical motives. But of course he also took this wholly illegal and paranoid policy to an extreme, and began murdering anyone who opposed him.

Serge helped Trotsky organise the Left Opposition, but by 1927 — the tenth anniversary of the revolution — they were all expelled from the Party. Having been removed from political life Serge once again returned to his role as author, writing articles on the Chinese revolution which were published in France – a factor which later helped to save his life. The appearance of this work abroad was used as the pretext for his first arrest in early 1928, from which he was released after protests from French intellectuals.

Having almost died whilst in prison he decided on release to devote himself to literature – specifically to record the revolution and its aftermath in a series of documentary novels, which turned out to be the double trilogy Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, Conquered City, Midnight in the Century, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years. There is also the very elusive The Long Dusk and other manuscripts which were confiscated by the secret police and have never been located since. Serge and his family were harassed by the GPU: his mail was opened and his conversations recorded. His wife suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered, dying in a mental institution in the south of France in 1984.

Serge was arrested in 1933, held in solitary confinement, and interrogated endlessly, accused of ‘crimes’ based on the confessions of others which the GPU had actually written. Refusing to co-operate with his captors, he was exiled to Orenberg on the borders of Kazakhstan. He lived there with his son Vlady for the next three years, cold, hungry, and under constant surveillance – but at least free to write. He produced Les Hommes perdus a novel about pre-war French anarchists, and La Tourmente, a sequel to Conquered City. He despatched several copies to Romain Rolland for publication in Paris, but they were ‘lost’ in the post. Ironically, the Post Office was obliged to compensate him for each loss, and he earned ‘as much as a well-paid technician’. He shared the money he earned and the support he received from western Europe with his fellow exiles – on one occasion dividing a single olive with his fellow inmates, who had never tasted one before.

Meanwhile, his supporters in France formed pressure groups to campaign for his release, and eventually Rolland petitioned Stalin in person. This was at the time of the 1936 international congress of writers, and Rolland argued that the continued detention of Serge was causing embarrassment within the congress. Miraculously, Stalin agreed to release him (though he almost immediately regretted his decision) and Serge was released in 1936. But the GPU confiscated his writings as he was crossing the border, bound for Europe.

He settled in Brussels, then Paris- though his papers were not in order, and his political status terribly uncertain. Wherever he went he was pursued by vilification from the orthodox Communists (whose orders were all dictated from Moscow) and by Stalin’s secret agents. He was sustained intellectually by his renewed correspondence with Trotsky, who was in exile in Norway at the time. It was the terrible year of 1936 which saw the Moscow show trials and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Serge wrote on both these topics, but the only outlets for his work were small left-wing journals and newspapers.

Unfortunately at this point in Susan Weissman’s narrative Serge disappears almost completely – to be replaced by detailed accounts of the spies and assassination squads Stalin despatched into Europe in his quest to eliminate all vestiges of the Old Guard. The network spread from the Balkans to the Atlantic, and even crossed into the USA. There is also a protracted account of the misunderstandings and the spat between Serge and Trotsky which makes them both seem like petulant sixth-formers arguing over the results of a cricket match – even though the issues of contention were the Fourth International and the prospects for the working class at a time of rising fascism, Stalinist totalitarianism, and the growing prospects of war.

The last part of Weissman’s account covers almost a decade and one of the most fertile periods of Serge’s career – and yet it’s over in what seem like a few pages. It begins with the fall of France in June 1940. Serge left on the very day that the Nazis entered Paris, fleeing along with thousands of others for the unoccupied South along with Vlady and Laurette Séjourné, who was twenty years younger than him and was to become his third wife. This defeat at the hands of ‘the twin totalitarianisms’ and the fight for survival were to be documented in his novel Les Derniers Temps (The Long Dusk in English translation). They arrived almost penniless in Marseilles, only to learn of the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico. Serge was one of the last Oppositionists left alive, and he knew his name would be on the GPU’s hit list.

Fortunately, they were rescued thanks to the efforts of Varian Fry and the American Relief Committee which helped to smuggle hundreds of refugees out of France under the very noses of the Gestapo. There was an amazingly idyllic period of a few month when Fry hosted a group of artists, intellectuals, and even surrealists at a large chateau on the outskirts of the city – but Serge was eventually asked to leave because his reputation as a Trotskyist was putting other people at risk. He finally got away from France in March 1941 on a ship bound for Mexico.

En route Serge was separated from his luggage, which had been labelled as destined for the USA, where his publisher Dwight Macdonald (editor of the Partisan Review) had offered him hospitality. The contents of the suitcases were confiscated and photographed by the FBI, which then translated all the manuscripts and compiled summaries which were sent for the personal attention of J. Edgar Hoover.

Serge was interned and interrogated in both Martinique (under French Vichy control) and the Dominican Republic, then put into a concentration camp in Cuba, finally arriving in Mexico in September 1941. The last years of his life were spent in poverty, ill-health, and what he felt as a terrible intellectual loneliness – but at least he could write. This was the period in which he produced his most mature work, the late masterpieces Memoirs of a Revolutionary, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years. There was also The Long Dusk, though he himself considered that something of a failure. He also continued his work on political, economic, and social theory – trying to make sense of a world which by the mid 1940s had seen tens of millions of people killed by both the Nazis and by Stalin.

His ending was as grim as his life had been – cut short by a heart attack after hailing a taxi in Mexico City, dressed in a threadbare suit and with holes in his shoes. His son Vlady suspected he had been poisoned, and even wondered if his stepmother might have been responsible. Serge’s marriage had not been a success, and shortly after Serge’s death Laurette Séjourné married a prominent Mexican Communist and even joined the Communist Party herself.

So – what is to be made of this monumental piece of scholarship? I was disappointed to realise that Susan Weissman’s account of Serge’s political ideas begins in 1917, as he made his way to Russia, which he regarded as his homeland, despite never having lived there. There is no account of the formation of his beliefs and his ‘education’ as a young man (he barely went to school at all, in the sense we know it) and his politicisation as the son of a Russian oppositionist, nor of his radicalisation whilst working as a a printer and a type-setter in Brussels. Neither is there any real attempt to look in detail at his years flirting with anarcho-syndicalists.

A consideration of these early years of Serge’s life are important because it was the skills he had acquired as a self-educated scholar, a linguist, a writer, a printer, and an editor which enabled him to take such an active part in the early days of the Russian revolution, where he worked as a political organiser, propagandist, author, editor, translator, secretary, and even secret agent. His knowledge of anarchism and syndicalism also had an effect on both his theoretical understanding of Marxism and his practice as a revolutionary.

Susan Weissman’s account also seeks to put Serge in the right at every step of his career – even though for a number of years he was working essentially as an agent for the Comintern. It’s true that he thought the formation of the Cheka (the Bolshevik’s secret police) was the first big mistake of the revolutionaries; but this opinion was only formed later. He suggested alternative strategies at the crisis of the Kronstadt rebellion, but ultimately sided with the Party in its tragic massacre of the sailors and workers. And he was amongst the first to identify totalitarian elements within Soviet society and the way it was being governed; but he remained loyal to the Party in what he later called ‘Party patriotism’ – that is, the Party can do no wrong.

This was the major weakness in their policy – Serge (and others) believed in the infallibility of the Party; they believed in their own slogans and rhetoric; and they were very slow to acknowledge the complete divide between aspirations, theory, and the reality of the world in which they lived. They clung to the completely deluded idea that the Party was right because it represented the will of the working class – neither of which suppositions were logically tenable or practically correct. Serge was fortunate enough to eventually reject this supposition – and it helped to save his life.

Susan Weissman rightly gives her account the sub-title ‘A Political Biography’ – because it is not anything like a biography in the conventional sense. There is no account of the first twenty-seven years of Serge’s life; hardly any details of his personal or family life (he was married three times); and no account of where and how he managed to live with apparently no regular source of income. What we get in abundance is a tracking of the debates which fuelled his confidence in the importance of the Russian revolution and his conviction that it should be rescued from the clutches of the Stalinist counter-revolution. There is impeccable scholarly referencing throughout, but very little of the fluency, the facts, the details, and the sap of real life.

In fact this is a biography Susan Weissman has been writing for more than two decades. She published Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope in 2001 with the same publisher – and my copy of the latest version still has this sub-title on the title page. although this version has been brought up to date with more recent research, there is very little acknowledgement of the fact in the text. The original publication was based on a 1991 PhD thesis entitled ‘Victor Serge: Political, social and literary critic of the USSR, 1917-1947; the reflections and activities of a Belgo-Russian Revolutionary caught in the orbit of Soviet political history’ — which would explain the first half of the unexamined lifespan, the plethora of historical and political detail, and the paucity of human interest. A review of the original publication by the Serge scholar Richard Greeman which makes similar points is available here.

Susan Weissman has devoted huge amounts of scholarly discipline to this enterprise – and has even made attempts to recover the ‘lost manuscripts’ of Serge’s work confiscated by the secret police. The publication carries an enormous record of Serge’s writings, a series of potted biographies, and a gigantic bibliography of sources which make this an unmissable publication for anybody interested in Serge’s life – but I think the definitive biography has still to be written.

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Susan Weissman. Victor Serge: A Political Biography, London and New York: Verso/New Left Books, 2013, pp.406, ISBN: 1844678873

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