English literature Archives - Page 16 of 44

Kew Gardens

March 26, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Kew Gardens was written in 1917 and first appeared in a handbound edition of twenty-four pages Virginia Woolf published herself at the Hogarth Press. Her partner in this kitchen table enterprise, husband Leonard Woolf, describes the genesis of the edition.

In 1918 we printed two small books: Poems by T.S. Eliot and Kew Gardens by Virginia. Of Kew Gardens we printed about 170 copies (the total sold of the first edition was 148). We published it on 12 May 1919 at 2s. When we started printing and publishing with our Publication No. 1, we did not send out any review copies, but in the case of Prelude [by Katherine Mansfield], Tom’s Poems, and Kew Gardens we sent review copies to The Times Literary Supplement. By 31 May we had sold forty-nine copies of Kew Gardens. On Tuesday 27 May, we went to Asham and stayed there for a week, returning to Richmond on 3 June. In the previous week a review of Kew Gardens had appeared in the Literary Supplement giving it tremendous praise. When we opened the door of Hogarth House, we found the hall covered with envelopes and postcards containing orders from booksellers all over the country. It was impossible for us to start printing enough copies to meet these orders, so we went to a printer, Richard Madely, and got him to print a second edition of 500 copies, which cost us £8 9s. 6d. It was sold by the end of 1920 and we did not reprint.

It was the Woolf’s first artistic and commercial success as publishers, and gave them the confidence to back their own literary judgement(s) in the stream of publications which followed. The story was eventually collected with her other experimental short prose pieces written between 1917 and 1925, available as The Haunted House. The first edition of Kew Gardens had text only on the right-hand pages, which were hand trimmed by Virginia Woolf herself with a pen knife. Surviving copies of this first edition now trade at £2,000 or more.

Kew Gardens – a flower bed

Kew Gardens – critical commentary

Meaning

One of the features of literary modernism embraced by Virginia Woolf was that of the author’s absence from the text. What this means is that along with writers such as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and others she believed that authors should not intrude into their own work, advising and guiding the reader, but should stay outside it, letting the story speak for itself. Thus, we are not given any obvious clues about what to think of the characters or the events, but must make up our own minds about what they ‘mean’. This idea goes back to the French novelist Flaubert.

This absence of authorial guidance is one factor which makes for difficulty of interpretation. Another in this case is that we are only presented with fragments or snatches of events upon which to base our judgement. We do not have time to get to know the characters (certainly not in this story) before they move off out of it again.

Woolf is also one of many modernist writers who took an interest in revealing how people deceive themselves and act in what is called bad faith – that is, not admitting the truth about themselves or their relationship with others. But this issue, combined with the lack of authorial comment, means that we may only have the character’s word to go by, and that character may not be a reliable witness or commentator.

Understanding

All four couples mentioned in the story seem lacking in purpose or objective, and this casts them in a somewhat negative light. This is particularly so when contrasted with the almost heroic manner in which the movements of the snail are described.

Simon and his wife Eleanor are introduced by pointing to a physical gap (of about ‘six inches’) between them. He is ‘strolling carelessly’ whilst she is walking ‘with greater purpose’, which draws attention to the differences in their attitudes. Eleanor is also the one keeping an eye on their children. The point thatWoolf seems to be making here is that they are not in harmony with each other – as the subsequent narrative confirms.

In fact the very next sentence reinforces the idea that he is excluding himself from their joint enterprise. He keeps his distance in front of her ‘purposely’ even if he is unconscious of doing so. That is, he is not aware of the consequences of his own actions.

We are then presented with his reverie concerning a similarly hot summer day fifteen years earlier on which he ‘begged’ Lily to marry him. He focuses his attention on a dragonfly whose irregular movements echo those of the butterflies with which the people in the Gardens have just been compared and those at the end of the story which are likened to a ‘shattered marble column’. These subtle repetitions of image are the sort of poetic devices Woolf introduced into prose as a substitute for conventional linearity of plot or story.

Simon also focuses on Lily’s shoe buckle, and we note that she moves her foot ‘impatiently’. Woolf does not tell us what Lily is thinking: the narrative is related from Simon’s point of view. But we guess from this that she is not comfortable with his solicitations. She is another woman with whom Simon is not in harmony.

He then transfers his hopes onto the dragonfly alighting on a red flower, which in its turn echoes the flowers which have been described at the beginning of the story. Simon even thinks ‘there, on that leaf’ in the present time of the narrative, and which will be mentioned again at tits end.

But the dragonfly does not alight, Lily refuses him, and he reflects that this is a good thing (‘happily not’) because otherwise he would not be with his wife and children now. This is a rationalisation, or worse, bad faith. And just in case we are in any doubt, his subsequent actions are confirmation.

First of all he informs his wife that he has just been thinking about another woman – which is either gauche or completely tactless, Certainly Eleanor greets his announcement with silence, from which it is reasonable to assume that she is offended. Then he makes matters worse by referring to her as ‘the woman I might have married’. The term might is ambiguous here, but it seems that he means the woman he could have married – when in fact we know that she turned him down. Simon is creating a lie.

Woolf is offering this character sketch as an example of the sort of selfishness and self-deception she often perceives in people, especially in men. It is also telling that Simon’s memory of the past is contrasted by Eleanor’s – which turns out to be a kiss on the back of the neck – given her by ‘an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses, all my life’.

Woolf is pointing to the distance between the two people in this particular couple – which is paralleled by similar failures in communication between the two old men, the two women, and the young couple who are the last to walk by the flower bed.

Structure

Virginia Woolf minimises the elements of plot or narrative in this story, but she strengthens other elements by way of compensation. In Kew Gardens there is a very strong element of pattern, repetition, and shape which strengthen the aesthetic harmony of the piece.

The four couples who pass by the flower bed constitute a pattern. They are different in kind (a married pair, a young and old man, two elderly ladies, and a courting couple) yet they all share the same characteristic – a failure of communication.

Simon and Eleanor’s thoughts are pointed in completely opposite directions; the older man is deranged and cannot communicate sensibly with his escort William; the two women talk streams of rubbish, and one of them even stops listening to the other; and the young couple are too immersed by their ‘courtship’ of each other to communicate freely. Thus the underlying theme of communication breakdown reinforces the structure of the composition.

In addition, the subject of the story oscillates between the flower bed and the people walking past, and in each case there is a small transitional link carrying the narrative from one to the other. There is also a marked contrast between the two subjects. The human beings are fairly desultory and without purpose, but the snail is described in terms which stress its purposefulness. ‘It appears to have a definite goal’ and it ‘considers every possible method of reaching its goal’.

Finally, the story begins and ends with a description of the flowers and their petals. The first paragraph ends: ‘Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above’ whilst the final paragraph of the story concludes ‘and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air’.

Literary impressionism

Virginia Woolf was very interested in painting (her sister Vanessa Bell designed the covers for her publications) and in her writing she often attempts to capture the sense of life through atmosphere, light, and shade. For that reason her work is often compared to that of the Impressionist school of painters such as Monet, Pissaro, and Renoir.

It is fairly obvious in Kew Gardens that she is trying to create the ambiance of a hot day in summer by describing both the vegetation in the Gardens and the people strolling through them. In fact at one point she even depicts the dappled effects of light and shade which was a favourite technique of the Impressionists. As Eleanor and Simon walk away from the flower bed with their children, they

looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

This effect reinforces the very transitory nature of the visitations made by the four pairs of people – the married couple, the two men, two elderly women, and the courting couple. They walk past the flower bed just for a moment, and then pass onIf Kew Gardens has a story in the conventional sense, then that is all it is – four couple walk past a flower bed one summer afternoon.

But in fact that is only one half of the story. The other half is what goes on in the flower bed itself. And you might notice that the insect and plant life is described both in scrupulous detail and in a manner which is in some senses sharply contrasted with the human life in the story.

Kew Gardens – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories – Kindle edition

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories – Hogarth reprint – AMazon UK

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Kew Gardens – an alternative reading

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens – story synopsis

The story opens with a description of an oval flower bed in Kew Gardens on a hot day during July. The colourful flowers and vegetation are evoked in very fine detail.

A man and his wife walk past the flower bed with their children. Each of them is lost in reveries about the past. He thinks about a woman he might have married: she remembers being kissed by an old lady.

The story returns to ground level, where amidst the plants a snail is making slow progress in its movements through the vegetation.

A young man appears escorting an elderly man who is talking incessantly and walking with disturbed, uneasy movements. He is clearly deranged,

They are followed by two elderly women who are gossiping meaninglessly to each other, one of them not listening to the other, and then they move on.

Meanwhile the snail is making some progress in its journey through the undergrowth, all of which is seen from the snail’s point of view.

The last people to pass by the flower bed are a courting couple who are flirting with each other, and preparing to have tea together, vaguely conscious of immanence in life.

Finally the narrative returns to the flower bed, which is visited by a bird and then a swarm of butterflies, and the point of view gradually rises to evoke the busy life of London as a whole.

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Principal characters

—	a snail
Simon	Eleanor’s husband
Eleanor	Simon’s wife
William	a young man
—	a demented elderly man
—	two elderly women
—	a youth in his prime
Trissie	his girl friend

first edition 1917

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
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The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

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

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

King, Queen, Knave

February 29, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

King, Queen, Knave was first published in Berlin in 1928 under the title Korol, Dama, Valet. It was Vladimir Nabokov’s second novel, written in his native Russian, and appeared under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin, which he had adopted earlier to distinguish himself from his father (also called Vladimir Nabokov) who was a writer and a politician. The novel was much later translated into English by Nabokov and his son Dmitri, and published in London in 1968.

King, Queen, Knave – critical commentary

Characters

There are really only three characters of any importance in the novel – Kurt Dreyer, his wife Martha, and his young nephew Franz. Because there are only three characters, the motivation for their behaviour becomes an important factor in the logic and development of the narrative.

Dreyer is almost a parody of the rich and bountiful uncle. He is affable and generous towards his nephew, and he is amazingly tolerant towards his cold and unresponsive wife, though we do learn that he has liaisons with two of his former secretaries (‘stenographists’). We are given no information that explains his indulgent attitude to Franz, and he passes the whole narrative apparently sublimely ignorant of his wife’s infidelity and her plans to kill him.

Martha is a cold and scheming manipulator who is obnoxious to her husband and nasty to everybody else except Franz. She even mistreats her own pet dog, and eventually arranges for it to be put down. Her physical attractiveness is seen largely from Franz’s point of view. The main problem with her characterisation is that it is very unlikely that a woman of her type would forge such an important alliance with an inexperienced and penniless young man from the countryside who was fifteen years younger, and her protestations of love for Franz do not seem psychologically convincing.

Franz is the archetypal naive young man from a small country town sent into the big metropolitan city to make good. He is treated generously by his rich and indulgent uncle, and then seduced by his scheming aunt and led into the realms of plots to murder his own benefactor. As this process deepens, he does become quite convincingly distanced from Martha and oppressed by the illicit relationship he has forged with her.

Translation

Nabokov wrote his earliest novels and stories in Russian, but when he emigrated to the United states in 1940, he switched to writing in English – the ‘third’ language of the Russian aristocracy (French being second). For the next twenty years he worked as a college and university teacher, then following the worldwide success of his novel Lolita in 1959, he moved to Switzerland and began translating his earlier works into English – for understandable commercial reasons.

It is almost certain that he ‘improved’ these earlier productions during this process. In his author’s foreword to the English edition he admits to not only making ‘little changes’ but to having ‘mercilessly struck out and rewritten many lame odds and ends’ as well as making changes to the plot.

The little changes show up nowhere more obviously than in his choice of vocabulary. Nabokov was much given to stylistic quirks such as the use of mixed registers, alliteration, and obscure terminology – but some of the language he uses in King, Queen, Knave gives the impression of having been excavated from a very large dictionary and shoehorned into the narrative. He uses terms such as nacrine, chelonians, cerevis, chorea, pygal, karakul and even words he makes up, such as avunculicide.

It is not just that the terms are obscure, but they do not sit easily with the prose in which they are embedded. They create a distinct impression of an author showing off – something about which Nabokov’s detractors have often complained.

There are also instances of irregular translation and non-standard English. Dreyer at one point is described as a ‘saloonkeeper’ which he certainly is not, and at another point Martha finds ‘an old little album of faded snapshots’ – which any native speaker would render as ‘a little old album’.

There is no cultural law against an author ‘improving’ his own work. This process commonly takes place in early drafts and revisions of a work in galley proof. In the nineteenth century it also took place when a work made its first appearance in serial magazine format and then was re-edited by the author before its publication as an independent volume as a book. But these were normally minor revisions of spelling and punctuation – what are known as ‘accidentals’ in editing parlance.

Substantial changes and re-workings on the other hand amount to a new version of the text, and changes to the plot make it virtually a new work altogether. This is quite a contentious issue, and there is a whole academic project waiting for someone with the language skills to make a comparison of Nabokov’s early works in Russian with his later translations into English which were made by Nabokov himself, often in collaboration with his wife and son.

Reader expectation

Nabokov is particularly fond of teasing his readers and thwarting their expectations by ironic plot reversals or false signals woven into his narratives. Early in King, Queen, Knave there are a number of motoring problems, all of which seem like pre-figurations of disaster – particularly for Dreyer. First his car (the symbolically named ‘Icarus’) is involved in an accident, which makes him suspect that his driver has been drinking. But when the foreshadowed accident actually does occur, it is the driver who is killed, not Dreyer.

Franz never reveals the address of his seedy apartment which acts as a trysting spot for his meetings with Martha. But when Dreyer meets Franz in the street and asks to see the apartment, neither of them know what we the readers know – that Martha has also gone out for a walk and is likely to be in the room. So the scene is set for a classical farce-type exposure and denouement. But the adultery is not revealed, because the landlord actually announces to Franz (and Dreyer) that ‘Your girl is in there’. Dreyer assumes Franz has a secret girlfriend, and tactfully withdraws, not realising that the clandestine lover is his own wife.

Similarly, the holiday plan to murder Dreyer by throwing him out of a boat is very carefully orchestrated and is surrounded by lots of small setbacks which heighten the dramatic tension. Dreyer at first doesn’t want to get into the boat, then when he does the ‘arrangements’ are thwarted, and finally Dreyer reveals that he is on the point of securing a business deal that will make him even richer. Martha’s ambition to be a wealthy widow leads her to call off the murder, she catches cold in the rain, and with a final dramatic plot twist, it is she who dies from pneumonia shortly afterwards.

King, Queen, Knave – study resources

King, Queen, Knave – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

King, Queen, Knave – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Korol, Dama, Valet – Russian original – Amazon UK

Korl, Dama, Valet – Russian original – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

King, Queen, Knave

King, Queen, Knave – chapter summaries

1. Young dreamer Franz transfers from his third class carriage to second class on a train to Berlin. There he silently shares a compartment with Dreyer and his wife Martha, to whom Franz is attracted. There appears to be mild domestic tension between the couple.

2. Next day Franz breaks his spectacles, then takes a bus to his uncle’s house on the outskirts of the city. The uncle turns out to be Dreyer, who generously lavishes food and drink on him over lunch. Afterwards, Martha argues with her husband about his behaviour.

3. Next day Franz gets new glasses and goes hunting for a room. Martha helps him to find one, then reflects on the men she has attracted. Franz goes out every day exploring Berlin, until he is suddenly summoned to the house by Dreyer.

4. Dreyer takes Franz to his department store at night and gives him lessons in sales technique. Franz takes up his role of shop assistant but feels distant from it in the sportswear department. He visits the Dreyer house frequently and is obsessed with Martha’s physical attractiveness. Martha secretly wants a lover, and thinks Franz will do. He is too timid to act.

5. Dreyer is approached by the inventor of some synthetic material in search of funding. Franz is writing a letter to his mother one Sunday when he is visited by Martha in his room. They become lovers, and she visits him on a regular basis. Franz subsequently feels uncomfortable in Dreyer’s presence. Dreyer summons the inventor to another interview, but his intentions remain obscure.

6. Martha is in a rapture over Franz. She thinks about how much money she has for the future. Dreyer, Martha, and Franz go to a variety show. When Dreyer doesn’t show up as expected, Franz and Martha have dinner alone. She becomes agitated when Dreyer is very late. Eventually he arrives, having been in a car crash which has killed his driver.

7. Franz and Martha fantasise about marriage and begin to consider ‘removing’ Dreyer. There is a Xmas party where Dreyer frightens the guests and Franz is sick. Next day Dreyer announces that he is leaving for three weeks’ skiing in Davos.

8. Martha teaches Franz to dance. After two weeks Dreyer decides to go back home. Martha and Franz are playing at being married, and they narrowly miss being caught out when Dreyer returns. They start to consider various ways of poisoning him.

9. Dreyer meets Erica, his former lover, who correctly guesses that his wife is unfaithful to him. Franz and Martha rehearse plans to kill Dreyer by shooting him. Martha locates a revolver in her husband’s desk. They all go off to play tennis, at which Franz is quite hopeless. Martha explains to Franz a new (and quite impractical) plan for the shooting.

10. Dreyer’s inventor acquaintance produces an automated mannequin. The men’s outfitting business starts to lose money. The gun turns out to be a cigar lighter. Martha and Franz begin to despair. Dreyer visits an exhibition of crime at police headquarters.

11. Dreyer and Martha go for separate walks. Dreyer bumps into Franz and they go to visit his apartment, not knowing that Martha is already there. She is saved from discovery by Dreyer’s misunderstanding of the landlord’s warning. Preparations are made for a holiday at the seaside, where Martha has a plan to kill Dreyer by drowning..

12. Dreyer, Martha, and Franz are on holiday at a Baltic seaside resort. Martha and Franz plan to throw Dreyer (who cannot swim) out of their rowing boat. But Dreyer reveals that he is selling his secret product and will make a lot of money next day. The murder is postponed and Martha becomes ill.

13. Dreyer returns to Berlin and puts on a display of the automated mannequins for his prospective customer – but it does not seem successful. He is recalled to the seaside hotel, because Martha has been taken to hospital in a nearby town. Franz is oppressed by the whole intrigue, but is asked to bring Martha’s earrings to the hospital. But the request turns out to be a linguistic error – and when he arrives there, she is dead.

King, Queen, Knave

first edition 1928

King, Queen, Knave – principal characters

Franz Bubendorf	a myopic 20 year old
Kurt Dreyer	his uncle, a rich and expansive owner of Dandy, a men’s clothing business
Martha	his attractive and manipulative wife (34)
Enricht	Franz’s seedy landlord
Piffke	a store manager at Dandy
Willy Wald	a friend of Dreyer
Elsa Wald	his wife

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

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

La Veneziana

July 18, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

La Veneziana (1924) is a wry variation on the type of story made popular by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Theophile Gautier, in which the distinctions between fantasy and reality become blurred. Nabokov had already used this strategy earlier the same year in The Thunderstorm and he would use it again in his 1938 story The Visit to the Museum. He never seems completely at ease in this literary genre, but La Veneziana is rescued by having a credible (and amusing) realistic basis on which the smaller element of fantasy is based.

The story was written in September 1924, and remained unpublished and untranslated during Nabokov’s lifetime. It was eventually translated by the author’s son Dmitri Nabokov for the collection Collected Stories Vladimir Nabokov published in New York by Alfred A, Knopf in 1995.

La Veneziana – critical commentary

Translation

The story was written in 1924, but was never published in Nabokov’s own lifetime. It first appeared in 1995 as part of the collection The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf in a translation by Dmitri Nabokov. However, it is difficult to believe that the translation is one that Nabokov would have entirely approved.

The prose style is far too florid, over-developed, and encrusted with the sort of baroque vocabulary (olivaster, umbral, levigate) that only emerged in his later works. It also has the occasional lapse into cliché (“coming apart at the seams”) and clumsy un-idiomatic English (“goggled his eyes”) which spoil the fluidity of his otherwise supple prose style.

Since so much tampering and polishing to improve effects went on with texts in the Nabokov family (by father, mother, and son) one can only suspect that Dmitri embellished his father’s work prior to its first publication. Without access to the original manuscript (and a knowledge of Russian) it is difficult to prove, but it seems to me that the current text does not genuinely represent Nabokov’s literary style of the early 1920s when he was first establishing himself as a writer of short stories for newspapers and magazines.

Narrative

There are nevertheless some fine touches in the story. It captures flawlessly the enervating tedium and conventionality of the English country house weekend, with its rituals of fixed meal times, tennis games on the lawn, and reading twenty year old copies of the Vetinary Herald on a wet afternoon.

There are also some early twists of narrative strategy which are unlikely to be later additions by an over-enthusiastic filial hand. Nabokov addresses his readers directly, and even includes teasing comments about their interpretive abilities.

He also comments with authorial hauteur on his own rhetorical devices – setting up in mid-story a night watchman who sees a light on in the castle after midnight. Every convention in fictional narrative suggests that he will therefore uncover what is going on and reveal the culprit. But Nabokov has him not only ignore the anomaly, but go back to bed and miss the exit of the family Rolls Royce motor car, which is also being appropriated for Frank’s elopement.

Thus the pleasant, innocuous old fellow, like some guardian angel, momentarily traverses this narrative and rapidly vanishes into the misty domains whence he was evoked by a whim of the pen.

The painting in the story is clearly modelled on the portrait of Dorotea by Sebastiano del Piombo. Simpson’s contemplation of the portrait is an accurate description of the original:

Her dark eyes gazed into his without the sparkle, the rosy fabric of her blouse set off with an unhabitual warmth the dark-hued beauty of her neck and the delicate creases under her ear. A gently mocking smile was frozen at the right corner of her expectantly joined lips. Her long fingers, spread in twos, stretched towards her shoulder, from which the fur and velvet were about to fall.

Nabokov draws three levels of suggestive parallels between Maureen and the portrait. The reason for the similarity between them is that Frank has painted the fake and is enamoured of the picture restorer’s wife.

Maureen’s gestures repeatedly echo those in the painting: “Maureen gave a sidelong smile as she adjusted the strap on her bared shoulder”. And Nabokov draws our attention to the clearly erotic symbolism of Dorotea’s gesture: “her long fingers paused on their way to her fur wrap, to the slipping crimson folds”. You do not need a brass plaque on your door to appreciate the significance of splayed fingers, fur, and ‘crimson folds’.

Fantasy

The playful fantasy of stepping into a painting is maintained cleverly throughout. Simpson is a naive visionary, given to ‘auditory hallucinations’ and clearly out of his depth in the milieu of the story. He is deeply enamoured of Maureen, but she is beyond his reach socially and emotionally, so he is forced to pursue her image into the painting rather than in the castle grounds.

Having ‘entered’ the painting, he feels that he becomes trapped there: “he gave a jerk and got stuck, feeling his blood and flesh and clothing turning into paint, growing into the varnish, drying on the canvas”.

Next morning, when McGore restores the canvas, he tosses the old rags (soaked with the paint of Simpson’s image) into the garden – which is rather neatly where Simpson awakens. Switching back into realism rather than fantasy, the story reveals that Simpson had fallen asleep in the garden the night before.

The end of the story offers a completely rational explanation of how the events came about – with the exception of the lemon – “Thus the dry, wrinkled fruit the gardener happened to find remains the only riddle of this whole tale” – which is Nabokov’s playful manner of tying the story back to its literary origins.

La Veneziana – plot synopsis

A group of five people are assembled at an English country estate for a weekend party. The Colonel its owner is an art collector; Frank is his talented and glamorous son; Mr McGore is an art connoisseur accompanied by his attractive and much younger wife Maureen; and Simpson is a gauche but visionary young university friend of Frank’s. They play tennis; Frank flirts with Maureen, and the Colonel admires his recently acquired Venetian masterpiece by Sebastiano del Piombo.

Simpson is deeply attracted to Maureen, and struck by her similarity to the woman Dorotea in the painting. McGore explains to him that it is possible, with sufficient empathy and effort of will, to temporarily enter the world of a painting.

The Colonel reproaches his son for the dalliance with Maureen, which makes Frank believe that Simpson has betrayed him. Simpson is upset by the coldness that develops between them, but late at night he makes the imaginative effort required to enter the painting and join Dorothea, who gives him a lemon from her basket.

Next morning the Colonel discovers that Simpson’s figure has mysteriously appeared in the painting – the explanation for which is that Frank has painted it there, and indeed has produced the entire painting itself as a fake, the sale proceeds from which he has shared with McGore, giving him enough to run off with Maureen. Simpson is found asleep in the garden – but he does have with him a lemon.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Lady Audley’s Secret

July 31, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, and chapter summaries

Lady Audley’s Secret was one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century – outselling even Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and other popular writers of the period. It belongs to a literary genre known as the ‘sensation novel’ which preceded (and overlapped with) the vogue for Gothic horror stories that became popular later in the century.

Indeed Braddon produced her own version of a vampire novel The Good Lady Ducayne in 1896 – which was her sixty-ninth novel. She was known as the ‘queen of the circulating libraries’ because of her enormous productivity and her ability to supply the popular demand for dramatic fiction. She is now mainly remembered for this one novel – and it has to be said that whatever its shortcomings, it is a novel which once read, will not easily be forgotten.

Lady Audley’s Secret – a note on the text

Lady Audley’s Secret first appeared. as weekly instalments in the magazine Robin Goodfellow, running from July to Septermber 1861. It was then serialized as monthly instalments in the Sixpenny Magazine between January and December 1862. The first three-volume book edition was published by Tinsley Brothers in October 1862. Elizabeth Braddon made substantial additions (and some deletions) as the novel passed through new editions. For a detailed account of these changes see the Oxford University World’s Classics edition.

This publishing history emphasises Braddon’s completely professional approach to writing novels as a career and a source of income. Each of these commercial formats (magazines and books) were aimed at slightly different readers, and she maximised her financial success by exploiting both popular and intellectual readerships. Braddon made a lot of money from the sales of this one novel – enough for her to remain financially independent for the rest of her life. Her publisher William Tinsley also made enough to build a villa on the Thames at Barnes, which he called very appropriately ‘Audley Lodge’.

Lady Audley’s Secret – critical commentary

This murder-mystery novel was very successful when it first appeared, and Lady Audley’s Secret remains an excellent example of its kind – to remind us that the serialized narrative with multiple plot lines was a staple of the Victorian circulating libraries – and that it remains a strand of popular culture today in its contemporary forms of the soap opera and the multi-part television series.

Despite its suspense, mystery, multiple plot lines, and the intriguing relationships of its characters, Lady Audley’s Secret is founded upon a rather weak proposition. The novel is based on the idea that a rich aristocrat would marry an unknown person without making any enquiry into her family background or social provenance. Sir Michael Audley is a peer of the realm, and no matter how he might be enchanted by a pretty face and golden curls, it is almost unthinkable that such a man would marry someone who came from what turns out to be a dubious background. She has a father who is a drunk and a mother who is mad, and she herself is already married.

This would be statistically unlikely, since the aristocracy traditionally guarded its priviledges and power largely on the basis of inherited wealth and would not wish to dilute any of that power by marriage and association with a lower class. However, it has to be said that Lady Audley’s Secret is based upon the real life scandal and mystery of 1860 in which Constance Kent was convicted of murder based on the fact that her father had married a second time

Braddon also takes some liberties with the presentation of her anti-heroine Lady Audley – whose real name is initially Helen Maldon. She then becomes Helen Talboys on her marriage to George Talboys, and finally adopts the name Lucy Graham before marrying Sir Michael Audley. She is also given the fictitious name of Mrs Taylor when she is sent into the Belgian ‘madhouse’. The liberty Braddon takes is primarily that she presents Lucy for the first two thirds of the novel as an unblemished beauty with no social baggage or moral weak points – though she does betray some unexplained reservations when accepting Sir Michael’s proposal of marriage.

We are given clues that all might not be as it seems in the first two volumes of the novel. Her former maid Phoebe Marks obviously has compromising information about her in the form of the child’s slipper and lock of hair. Later in the novel, Robert Audley and George Talboys see a portrait which reveals something sinister beneath her attractive outward appearance.

Most of the narrative is relayed from Robert Audley’s point of view, as he tries to solve the problem of the sudden disappearance of his friend George Talboys. But then at the end of Volume II the point of view suddenly switches to the so-called Lucy Graham herself, as she reflects on her former ‘wickedness’ – without at this stage revealing specifically what she has done. She is suddenly presented as a scheming and ruthless woman. This rather gives the game away (unnecessarily) and reveals that Robert’s suspicions are well founded – though the clinching fact of George Talboy’s fate is still witheld.

Robert Audley also gives up on his search for George Talboys in the last Volume of the novel. Since this had been the main focus of his efforts in the first two volumes, it becomes clear that Braddon is merely dragging out the revelation of Lady Audley’s murderous attack until the final chapters. The fact that George’s ‘death’ is mentioned so often also arouses suspicions in the attentive reader that he will in the end still be alive – which turns out to be the case. His barely credible account of escaping from the bottom of the well is delayed until the final pages of the novel This is giving precedence to suspense over narrative logic – which is one of the factors that makes the novel a second rather than a first rate classic.

The sensation novel

In the middle of the nineteenth century there was a vogue for what was called the ‘sensation novel’. This was a variation of the Gothic horror story and normally featured plot elements of murder, disguise, bigamy, madness, blackmail, fraud, theft, kidnapping, incarceration, or disputed wills. Mary Elizabeth Braddon distinguishes herself by including several of these elements in one novel.

Lady Audley’s Secret is all the more effective because it appears to start out as a conventional novel of polite society. A rich widowed landowner with a country estate marries a beautiful young woman who is popular with everyone in his circle. Some members of his family become involved in amorous relationships and vaguely mysterious searches for information. The novel could in its early stages be a production out of the Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, or George Eliot tradition.

But as the story unfolds it gets darker and darker in tone. First, suspicion falls on Lady Audley herself. How could such an attractive and popular young woman be involved in issues of duplicity, disappearance, and identity theft? The answer turns out to be even worse than the question. The literary critic Elaine Showalter summarises the plot of Lady Audley’s Secret as follows: “Braddon’s bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband number one down a well, thinks about poisoning husband number two and sets fire to a hotel in which her other male acquaintances are residing”.

We know from the title of the novel that Lady Audley has a secret, but at first we are not sure what it is. Braddon plays fair by scattering clues throughout the narrative. Lucy has kept mementoes of what appears to be a child, and when Robert Audley begins to dig into her past life we suspect her of bigamy. But this thread of the story is overlaid with the disappearance of George Talboys. This muddies the picture for some time, and Robert Audley’s suspicion that Lady Audley has murdered George occupies the central sections of the novel. The reader appears to be dealing with a murder mystery.

But the story is more complex than that. Lady Audley in fact has multiple secrets. She is from a very poor background. She has already married George Talboys. She has then abandoned their child to the care of her drunken father. She has changed her name not once but twice – from Helen Maldon to Helen Talboys on marrying George, and then (to erase her past) to Lucy Graham – prior to marrying Sir Michael Audley to become Lady Lucy Audley.

Her other secrets, not revealed until much later in the novel, are that she tried to murder her first husband George when he re-appeared from Australia. In addition, when her wrongdoing is in danger of being exposed by Robert Audley (and her former maid Phoebe and husband Luke) she tries to kill them all of them by setting fire to the Castle Inn.

Helen Maldon-Lucy Graham is first presented as an attractive, golden-haired heroine by whom everyone is enchanted, but she turns out to be an unscrupulous psychopath. This is one very strong reason why the novel could also be considered a Gothic tale, and Lucy certainly ends up in Gothic circumstances – incarcerated in a Belgian maison de santé where she later dies, leaving the heroes and heroine of the novel to live on in bliss in their rustic fairy-tale cottage on the Thames.

It is worth noting that this element of sensationalism was still prevalent towards the end of the century in the work of writers such as Henry James and Thomas Hardy. James’s late novel The Other House (1896) is a mystery thriller involving the murder of a child, and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) involves a cast-off wife who returns unexpectedly.to cause problems for her bigamous husband. Hardy was also toying with bigamy and technically illegal sexual relationships as late as his last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895).

Lady Audley’s secret – study resources

Lady Audley’s Secret – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Audley’s Secret – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Lady Audley’s Secret – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Audley’s Secret – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Lady Audley’s Secret – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Audley’s Secret – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Amazon UK

Mary Braddon: A Study of her Life and Work – Amazon UK

first edition 1862

Lady Audley’s Secret – chapter summaries

Volume I

I Rich widower Sir Michael Audley falls in love with young governess Lucy Graham. She harbours some secret reservations, but accepts his proposal of marriage.

II George Talboys and Miss Morley compare their apprehensions on returning from Australia. She has been away eduring fifteen years of hardship, and is hoping her fiance will still want her. He has been away for three and a half years after deserting his wife and child, and after much privation has struck gold.

III Lady Audley and her maid Phoebe Marks have returned from a European tour. Phoebe shows her cousin and lover Luke Marks around Audley Court and its lavish furnishings. They discover a baby’s shoe and some hair in a secret drawer – which Phoebe keeps.

IV Playboy barrister Robert Audley meets fellow old Etonian George Talboys in the city. Talboys banks his money, then reads in the Times that his wife has just died.

V Robert and George travel to Ventnor on the Isle of White where Helen Talboys has died. They confirm her identity and locate her grave.

VI Talboys arranges the financial support for his son by his father-in-law Captain Maldon, then plans to travel to St Petersburg with Robert Audley.

VII A year later Robert and George go to Audley village, where Lady Audley avoids meeting them. She sends Phoebe Marks to London on a secret errand. A telegram arrives calling Lucy to London, where .

VIII George and Robert continue their visit Audley Court and inspect Lucy’s private chambers via a secret passageway. They see a portrait of her which looks rather sinister.

IX Talboys and Lady Audley are both frightened by thunder and lightning during a storm in the night. George has dropped his glove in Lady Audley’s room.

X Whilst George and Robert are fishing, Robert falls asleep and wakes to find George missing. He searches the estate for him, without success.

XI Robert dines at Audley Court, where Lucy reports on her fruitless trip to London.. Robert notices bruises on Lucy’s arm, and he vows to find his friend George.

XII Robert goes to London in search of George, then on to Southampton, where he is told that George visited his son the day before, prior to leaving for Australia.

XIII Robert goes to Liverpool, but finds no signs of George. On returning to London he draws up a list of all essential facts surrounding the disappearance of his friend. He begins to think in legal terms.

XIV Alicia and Lady Audley agree to disagree. Lady Audley makes an offer to help Phoebe’s fiance Luke- but he asks for more, with a veiled threat that he has information about her.

XV Luke and Phoebe get married and take on the Castle Inn nearby. Robert Audley discusses his theories about George Talboys with Lucy, who faints as a result.

XVI Alicia refuses an offer of marriage from a rich landowner. Robert (with whom she is in love) advises her to be patient. Robert is asked to leave by his uncle as a matter of good form: Robert takes lodgings at the Castle Inn.

XVII Robert quizzes Phoebe and Luke. He suspects that they have compromising information about Lady Audley.

XVIII Lady Audley visits Robert at the Castle Inn. They discuss Talboys and his disappearance. When Robert reveals he has letters written to Talboys by his wife, Lucy takes the next train to London. Robert follows her immediately.

XIX In London he meets Lucy going back to Colchester, and wonders what she has been doing. Returning to his chambers he discovers that a locksmith has been summoned, but when he checks with the man he is told there was a mistake.

Volume II

I Robert discovers that George’s wife’s letters are missing from his effects., but when he inspects. George’s books he finds an inscription in Helen Maldon’s handwriting which he seems to recognise.

II Robert goes to Southhampton where young Georgey is living with his drunken grandfather, supervised by the dubious Mrs Plowson. It seems they are in someone’s pay.

III Georgey tells Robert about ‘the pretty lady’. Robert wishes to take Georgey away and tells and tells Maldon that he thinks George Talboys is dead. Georgey turns out to have very adult tastes in food and drink.

IV Robert visits Harcourt Talboys, George’s stern and uncompromising father in Dorset. He thinks George’s disappearance has been staged to influence him. Robert spells out his fears, but Mr Talboys refuses to believe him or to alter his attitude.

V Clara Talboys wishes to avenge her brother’s death: she has two of her brother’s letters which she promises to send to Robert.

VI Robert returns to London, reflecting on the changeable nature of his quest, and the fact that he has become entangled particularly by so many <em.women in the case.

VII Sir Michael Audley is ill. Robert visits him and quizzes surgeon friend Mr Dawson, Lucy’s previous employer, who refers him to Lucy’s earlier employed Mrs Vincent.

VIII Robert traces Mrs Vincent in London. He establishes that the telegram sent to Lucy was a lie, that Lucy’s family came from ‘the seaside’ and that she has travelled abroad. He removes an incriminating address label from her hat box.

IX Robert travels to north Yorkshire where he discovers the history of Helen Talboys and her relationship to Lucy Graham, and her bankrupt father Captain Maldon. He wonders therefore who is buried in the grave at Ventnor.

X Robert returns to. Audley where he hears Clara Talboys playing the organ in church. . She quizzes him about his quest for news of her missing brother, and what he knows about Lucy.

XI Robert forces Lady Audley to listen to his evidence about the disappearance of George, most of which suggests that she is guilty. But she refuses to accept or explain the evidence and accuses Robert of being mad.

XII Lucy reports Robert’s accusations to her husband (without giving any specific examples). Phoebe Marks arrives blackmailing Lucy for more money, and she brings a letter from Robert threatening further exposure.

Volume III

I Lucy agrees to pay the money, but insists on doing so in person. She goes back with Phoebe in the middle of the night to the Castle Inn (where Robert is staying) and after locking him in his bedroom, sets fire to the building.

II The next day Lucy is anxiously awaiting news of the fire to reach Audley Court – but it doesn’t. Robert Audley realises Alicia is in love with him, but he has been enchanted by Clara, George’s sister. Eventually, to Lucy’s astonishment, Robert arrives at Audley.

III Lucy is cornered by Robert’s circumstantial evidence, and agrees to tell her true story. This includes her mother’s madness, her poverty, marrying George Talboys, their separation, farming out her son’s upbringing to her drunken father, and using Matilda to fake her own death.

IV In order to avoid scandal, Robert asks Alicia to accompany her father in his exit from Audley Court to London and onwards. Robert telegraphs for details of a psychiatric physician.

V Doctor Mosgrave arrives next day and listens to Robert’s account of events and of Lucy’s life, and he pronounces her not mad, but dangerous. He also spots that her account of events omits any details of George Talboys. He interviews Lucy then writes a letter of recommendation to a maison de santé in Belgium.

VI Robert escorts Lucy to the maison fermée, where in an angry outburst she finally reveals that she murdered George Talboys and threw his body into the garden well at Audley.

VII Robert is conflicted regarding how much of Lucy’s misdeeds he should reveal, since he wishes to protect the family’ name and honour. Sir Michael Audley and Alicia go to Germany. Robert gets a letter from Clara saying that the dying Luke Marks= wants to see him. He is troubled by thoughts of the ‘ghost’ of George Talboys.

VIII Marks reveals that he has had a secret – which is that he rescued George after Lucy’s murderous attack. George gave him two letters for Robert and Lucy – but they were never delivered. Phoebe witnessed Lucy’s attack on George, but kept the secret together with Luke, who dies the day after his revelation.

IX Robert visits Harcourt Talboys and wonders how they can contact George in Australia. Robert is in love with Clara, and declares himself to her, but when he returns to London to begin the search, George is there waiting for him, having been in America.

X Robert marries Clara and lives in an idyllic cottage in Teddington on the Thames, working as a lawyer. Lucy dies in the Belgian sanctuary.

Lady Audley’s Secret – principal characters

Sir Michael Audley	a wealthy baronet and estate owner (56)
Alicia Audley	his spirited daughter by his first wife
Robert Audley	his nephew (and heir) who is studying law (27)
Lucy Graham	Sir Michael’s second wife – an ex-governess
George Talboys	an ex-Etonian friend of Robert (25)
Harcourt Talboys	George’s strict and puritannical father
Clara Talboys	George’s beautiful sister
Phoebe Marks	maid to Lady Audley
Luke Marks	cousin and lover of Phoebe
Mr Dowson	the parish surgeon, Lucy’s previous employer
Mrs Vincent	private school head (in debt) Lucy’s referee
Captain Maldon	Lucy’s drunken father in Portsmouth

Lady Audley’s Secret – further reading

Richard D. Altick Victorian Studies in Scarlet, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Jennifer Carnell, The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work, UK: Sensation Press, 2000.

Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

P.D. Edwards, Some Mid-Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation Novel, Its Friends and Its Foes, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1971.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London: Routledge, 2013.

Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1988.

Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, New York: Garland Publishers, 1979.

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Lady Barbarina

March 16, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Lady Barbarina was written in Boston in 1883 and first appeared in Century Magazine in May—July 1884. The original publication of this story has the title as Lady Barberina, but when James came to discuss the story in his famous prefaces for the New York edition of his collected works, it became Lady Barbarina. Its first appearance in book form was in the collection of stories Tales of Three Cities published in Boston by Osgood and in London by Macmillan in 1884.

Rotten Row – Hyde Park – 19th century

Lady Barbarina – critical commentary

Theme

This is one in a long line of James’s ‘International’ stories – tales which are based on the differences between American and European cultures. In many of them an attractive American woman will arrive in Europe and captivate an Italian prince (The Golden Bowl) or an English gentleman (The Wings of the Dove). But this tale reverses the pattern: a rich and successful American man in London is captivated by the sheer ‘Englishness’ of an aristocratic woman who has very little to commend her except her good looks and her heritage.

That is Jackson Lemon’s tragedy. He is blinded by his own Anglomania, and ends up hopelessly uprooted from his native America, saddled with a bloodless wife who doesn’t really love him, and supporting his feckless brother-in-law – a rogue fellow American whose only positive feature is a fine moustache.

Jackson Lemon even has a noble profession. He has trained and practised as a doctor – but he has also inherited his father’s wealth (gained via manufacture). The English aristocrats however even look down on this activity – as if it is demeaning to have any profession at all. Yet they are greedy enough for his wealth to insist on a settlement for their daughter – a guaranteed source of income in the event of any problems, which underlines the financial basis of marriage in the upper class as a means of consolidating wealth.

Yet it has to be said that James treats this subject quite lightly. Jackson Lemon’s open and slightly naive attitude to the English aristocracy is mildly satirised, and the horrendously snobbish, cold, and imperious attitudes of the Cantervilles are illustrated but in the end prevail. They are the ones short of money, and yet Lemon finishes up subsidising them by maintaining their two daughters and son-in-law.

Structure.

The most striking feature of this tale is its amazingly rushed ending. The story begins at a remarkably leisurely pace – with detailed conversations and atmospheric mise en scenes stretching out page after page. Inconsequential characters such as the Freers occupy much of the dramatic interest, and Lemon’s hesitations and advances are tracked minutely as he pays court to Lady Barbarina

There is a hiatus at the centre of the story during which the first six months of Jackson’s marriage to Lady Barbarina are omitted from the narrative – but this serves to reinforce the dramatic impact of its disappointing outcome.

The second part of the story begins by documenting Lady Barbarina’s dissatisfactions with America, and opens up the sub-plot of Lady Agatha’s enthusiastic embracing of American freedoms. But then no sooner has she eloped with Longstraw than the story is wrapped up as if James had lost interest in his characters and story – or maybe reached the number of words required by the publisher.

Literally within the last page of the story the Jackson Lemons return to London, Lady Barbarina has a little girl, Jackson starts travelling across to the continent to escape his unsatisfactory marriage, and Lady Agatha returns from California with her husband who is a great social success. This is all too much narrative weight for the story to bear.

Lady Barberina – study resources

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

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

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

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

Lady Barbarina – CreateSpace edition

Lady Barbarina – Kindle edition

Lady Barbarina – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Lady Barbarina – plot summary

Elderly Americans Dexter Freer and his wife sit in Hyde Park, discussing the marriage prospects of their fellow countryman Jackson Lemon with a young doctor Sydney Feeder. Jackson Lemon is a very rich non-practising doctor who has been courting Lady Barbarina, the second eldest daughter of an English Marquis. It is thought that despite Lemon’s wealth, his status as a professional will count against him with the aristocracy, even though they themselves are thought not to be particularly wealthy.

Jackson is questioned by Lady Lucretia Beauchemin about his intentions regarding her younger sister Barbarina. She is seeking clarity: he remains non-commital. He realises that English society expects him to reveal his intentions or to desist in his attentions towards Barbarina – but he values his freedom as a democratic American to act as he wishes.

He finds Barbarina physically attractive, but wonders if she will fit in with New York City life. He goes to a late night society dance and discusses American and English marriage customs with Barbarina. He is frustrated by English conventions on social contact, but eventually openly declares his love for her.

Next day he asks her father for permission to marry her, revealing both his wealth and his origins. Lord Canterville asks his wife’s opinions on the matter. She is concerned that her daughter would live in America. There is conflict between Jackson’s open, independent, and free approach to social conventions, and Lady Canterville’s old-fashioned and snobbish conventions.

The Canterville’s accept Jackson’s proposal, but they demand via solicitors that he make a ‘settlement’ (an income) on her – a suggestion that offends him. When he refuses they restrict access to his bride-to-be. They also object to the fact that his wealth is new money, and therefore in their eyes unstable.

When he discusses the matter with his American friend Mrs Freer, she advises him to get out of the engagement because Lady Barbarina’s aristocratic attitudes will never be compatible with life in New York City. Dexter Freer on the other hand encourages him to defy convention. Following this, Jackson decides to give in to the demands of the Cantervilles, because he thinks that making settlements is beneath his dignity.

Six months later the marriage is already in trouble. Lady Barbarina is bored in New York and wishes she were back in England. Her sister Agatha however, who has been sent to accompany her by the Cantervilles, perceives all the advantages of life in America. She forms an attachment to Mrs Lemon and has an admirer in the Californian Hermann Longstraw – of whom Jackson Lemon disapproves. Mrs Lemon is very concerned about her son’s marriage.

Lemon wants his wife to establish a European-style salon in New York, but quite apart from her natural idleness Lady Barbarina thinks that her social rival Mrs Vanderdecken will usurp her. Lady Agatha meanwhile continues to enjoy her newfound freedom and independence. But when Longstraw asks to marry Agatha, Lady Barbarina seizes this as an excuse and insists that she must immediately take her sister back to England.

But Agatha precipitates matters by eloping to California with Longstraw. The scandal of this reckless marriage reaches all the newspapers and the news is relayed to England. At this, Lady Canterville demands that Barbarina return home. Lemon is forced to return to live in England, where he ends up with his cold and unimaginative wife and supporting his improvident brother and sister-in-law.

Principal characters

Dexter Freer	elderly American socialite visiting London
Mrs Freer	his wife
Marquis of Canterville	an impoverished English aristocrat
Lady Barbarina	his younger daughter
Lady Agatha	younger sister to Lady Barbarina
Lady Lucretia Beauchemin	his eldest daughter
Pasterns	‘the seat of the Cantervilles’
Dr Sydney Feeder	an American medic from Cincinnati
Dr Jackson Lemon	a small, rich, New York non-practising medic who has inherited
Lady Marmaduke	social godmother to Jackson Lemon, a friend of Lady Beauchemin
Herman Longstraw	a Californian with an impressive moustache
Mrs Vanderdecken	a New York social hostess and rival to Lady Barbarina
Mrs Chew	a friend of Mrs Vanderdecken

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover

March 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, textual history, study resources, and web links

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) is Lawrence’s most controversial novel, and perhaps the first serious work of literature to explore human sexuality in explicit detail. It features some of his most lyrical and poetic prose style alongside the theme of class conflict – acted out between the aristocratic Constance Chatterley, and her gamekeeper-lover Mellors. Some feminist critics now claim the novel to be deeply misogynistic, because part of its argument is that women will reach true fulfillment only by submitting themselves to men. Lawrence wrote the novel three times, and it made important historical impacts twice over: one when it was first published in 1928, and the second in the famous obscenity trial in 1960.

D.H.Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence is a writer who excites great passions in his readers – which is entirely appropriate, since that is how he wrote. He is the first really great writer to come from the (more or less) working class, and much of his work deals with issues of class, as well as other fundamentals such as the relationships between men, women, and the natural world.

At times he becomes mystic and visionary, and his prose style can be poetic, didactic, symbolic, and bombastic all within the space of a few pages. He also deals with issues of sexuality and politics in a manner which is often controversial.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – textual history

There were in fact three different versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The first, written in 1926, is now known as The First Lady Chatterley. Its main focus is on social and political aspects of a mining community, and it has none of the explicit sex scenes or the frank language for which the third version became famous. The first version was not published until 1944.

The second version was called, rather coyly, John Thomas and Lady Jane. The relationship between Constance Chatterley and her gamekeeper (then called Oliver Parkin) is treated in a more gentle manner. Indeed, Lawrence had Tenderness as an alternative title. It was first published in an Italian translation by Mondadori in 1954.

When he finished the third version in 1928 Lawrence encountered immediate opposition to its publication – both by his agents and his publishers. Nobody would touch the book unless he made substantial cuts – which he refused to make. Lawrence was a veteran of battles with publishers and censors, but he believed very passionately that writers should be free to express themselves openly about matters which they believed to be important and true.

He reverted to an old-fashioned strategy for publication and raised money by subscriptions, comissioning a Florentine bookseller named Guiseppe Orioli to print the book in his Tipografia Giuntina using Lawrence’s own capital. The 1,000 copies of this first edition printed in July 1928 were sold through Lawrence’s close personal friends. At only two pounds, the book sold quickly, so that by December, this first version was completely sold out. In November, he published another cheaper edition of 200 copies which sold just as quickly as the first.

The novel quickly developed a scandalous reputation, both because of its explicit sexual scenes and because of Lawrence’s (very occasional) use of words such as cunt and fuck which were regarded as completely taboo terms at the time. Lawrence did indeed make money out of the venture, which he shrewdly put into successful investments on the New York Stock Exchange. But two things conspired against him making even more.

Because the book had been privately published, it was not formally copyrighted, and because of its reputation many other printers and publishers issued pirated copies, which sold well and made them, but not Lawrence, healthy profits. The book was pirated on both sides of the Atlantic.

In response to this, Lawrence put forth a second edition in November 1928, again from the tiny Florentine print shop, and then a cheap edition in May 1929 of 3,000 copies in Paris. This edition sold out by August at sixty francs and was the first to include his prefatory essay entitled ‘My Skirmish with Jolly Roger’. This was a defense, explication, and history of the novel that was published posthumously as A Propos of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

Lawrence became extremely ill in late 1929 and moved to the Swiss Alps and then to the South of France, where he died in 1930. With the death of Lawrence, publishers felt at liberty to expurgate the novel at will. Without a copyright, a publisher who could come up with a clean version had the promise of the novel’s preceding reputation to back up its success.

In 1932, two expurgated versions were published, 2,000 copies in America and 3,440 copies in England. The publishers of this version euphemistically referred to it as an `abridged’ edition. Whole pages were left out with nothing but confusing asterisks left to mark their omissions. There was no consistency in the use of these astriks; some deleted pages were not even mentioned. Every description of the act of sex and all four-letter words which could have been remotely objectional were left out.

The National Union Catalog records fifteen different printings of expurgated versions between the years 1932 and 1943 in America, England, and Paris. A considerable number of these novels were sold, and the black market still carried a full line of assorted unexpurgated copies. The novel continued to have an underground existence and a high reputation as a banned or forbidden work in the post-war years.

When the full unexpurgated edition was published in Britain in 1960, the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act, introduced by Roy Jenkins, had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was for the frequent use of the word ‘fuck’ and its derivatives.

Various academic critics, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner and Raymond Williams, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on November 2, 1960, was not guilty. This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the UK. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it was the kind of book ‘you would wish your wife or servants to read’.

[With thanks to Randall Martin.]

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – study resources

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – annotated Kindle eBook edition

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Signet Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Signet Classics – Amazon US

The First Lady Chatterley’s Lover – first version – Amazon UK

The Second Lady Chatterley’s Lover – second version – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – plain text edition at Project Gutenberg

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – audioBook on CD – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Cambridge scholarly edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK

The Complete Short Novels of D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – plot summary

Connie Reid is raised as a cultured bohemian of the upper-middle class, and is introduced to love affairs – intellectual and sexual liaisons – as a teenager. In 1917, at 23, she marries Clifford Chatterley, the scion of an aristocratic line. After a month’s honeymoon, he is sent to war, and returns impotent, paralyzed from the waist down.

After the war, Clifford becomes a successful writer, and many intellectuals flock to the Chatterley mansion at Wragby Hall. Connie feels isolated; the intellectuals she meets prove empty and bloodless, and she resorts to a brief and dissatisfying affair with a visiting playwright, Michaelis.

Connie longs for real human contact, and falls into despair, as all men seem scared of true feelings and true passion. There is a growing distance between Connie and Clifford, who has retreated into the meaningless pursuit of success in his writing and in his obsession with coal-mining, and towards whom Connie feels a deep physical aversion. A nurse, Mrs. Bolton, is hired to take care of the handicapped Clifford so that Connie can be more independent, and Clifford falls into a deep dependence on the nurse, his manhood fading into an infantile reliance on her services.

Into the void of Connie’s life comes Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on Clifford’s estate, newly returned from serving in the army. Mellors is aloof and derisive, and yet Connie feels curiously drawn to him by his innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his undercurrents of natural sensuality.

After several chance meetings in which Mellors keeps her at arm’s length, reminding her of the class distance between them, they meet by chance at a hut in the forest, where they have sex. This happens on several occasions, but still Connie feels a distance between them, remaining profoundly separate from him despite their physical closeness.

One day, Connie and Mellors meet by coincidence in the woods, and they have sex on the forest floor. This time, they experience simultaneous orgasms. This is a revelatory and profoundly moving experience for Connie; she begins to adore Mellors, feeling that they have connected on some deep sensual level. She is proud to believe that she is pregnant with Mellors’ child. He is a real, ‘living’ man, as opposed to the emotionally dead intellectuals and the dehumanized industrial workers. They grow progressively closer, connecting on a primordial physical level, as woman and man rather than as two minds or intellects.

Connie goes away to Venice for a vacation. While she is gone, Mellors’ old wife returns, causing a scandal. Connie returns to find that Mellors has been fired as a result of the negative rumors spread about him by his resentful wife, against whom he has initiated divorce proceedings. Connie admits to Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors’ baby, but Clifford refuses to give her a divorce. The novel ends with Mellors working on a farm, waiting for his divorce, and Connie living with her sister, also waiting.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – principal characters

Clifford Chatterley	landowner, disabled WW1 veteran, and businessman
Constance Chatterley	his wife, an intellectual and social progressive
Oliver Mellors	ex-soldier, ex-blacksmith, intellectual, and the gamekeeper at Wragby Hall
Mrs (Ivy) Bolton	Clifford’s devoted housekeeper
Michaelis	successful Irish playwright
Sir Macolm Reid	Connie’s father, a painter
Hilda Reid	Connie’s sister
Tommy Dukes	an intellectual friend of Clifford’s
Duncan Forbes	an artist friend of Connie and Hilda
Bertha Coutts	Mellor’s wife – who does no appear in the novel

Film version

2007 French adaptation of the second version of the novel

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Background reading

Mary Freeman, D.H.Lawrence A Basic Study of His Ideas, Grosset and Dunlap, 1955.

F.R.Leavis, D.H.Lawrence: Novelist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1955.

Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D.H.Lawrence, Dobson, 1955.

Graham Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Capricorn Books, 1956.

Eliseo Vivas, D.H.Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art, General Books 1960.

Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity: D.H.Lawrence’s Shorter Fiction, University of Washington Press, 1962.

Eugene Goodheart, The Utopian Vision of D.H.Lawrence, Transaction Publishers, 1963.

Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D.H.Lawrence, Oxford University Press, 1963.

George Panichas, Adventure in Consciousness: Lawrence’s Religious Quest, Folcroft Library Editions, 1964.

Helen Corke, D.H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years, Austin (Tex): University of Texas Press, 1965.

George Ford, Double Measure; A Study of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Holt Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

H M Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D.H.Lawrence, Evanston (Ill): Northwestern University Press, 1965.

Keith Sagar, The Art of D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 1966.

David Cavitch, D.H.Lawrence and the New World, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D.H.Lawrence and English Romanticism, London: Routledge, 1969.

Baruch Hochman, Another Ego: Self and Society in D.H.Lawrence, University of South Carolina Press, 1970.

Keith Aldritt, The Visual Imagination of D.H.Lawrence, Hodder and Stoughton, 1971.

R E Pritchard, D.H.Lawrence: Body of Darkness, Hutchinson, 1971.

John E Stoll, The Novels of D.H.Lawrence: A Search for Integration, University of Missouri Press, 1971.

Frank Kermode, D.H. Lawrence, London: Fontana, 1973.

Scott Sanders, D.H.Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels, Vision Press, 1973.

F.R.Leavis, Thought, Words, and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence, Chatto and Windus, 1976.

Marguerite Beede Howe, The Art of the Self in D.H.Lawrence, Ohio University Press, 1977.

Alastair Niven, D.H.Lawrence: The Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Anne Smith, Lawrence and Women, London: Vision Press, 1978.

R.P. Draper (ed), D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979.

John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, London: Macmillan, 1979.

Aidan Burns, Nature and Culture in D.H.Lawrence, London: Macmillan, 1980.

L D Clark, The Minoan Distance: Symbolism of Travel in D.H.Lawrence, University of Arizona Press, 1980.

Roger Ebbatson, D.H.Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A Theme in English Fiction 1859-1914, Humanities Oress, 1980.

Alastair Niven, D.H.Lawrence: The Writer and His Work, New York: Scribner, 1980.

Philip Hobsbaum, A Reader’s Guide to D.H.Lawrence, Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Kim A.Herzinger , D.H.Lawrence in His Time: 1908-1915, Bucknell University Press, 1982.

Graham Holderness, D.H.Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1982.

Hilary Simpson, D.H.Lawrence and Feminism, London: Croom Helm, 1982.

Gamini Salgado, A Preface to D.H. Lawrence, London: Longman, 1983.

Judith Ruderman, D.H.Lawrence and the Devouring Mother, Duke University Press, 1984.

Anthony Burgess, Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H.Lawrence, London: Heinemann, 1985.

Sheila McLeod, Lawrence’s Men and Women, London: Heinemann, 1985.

Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, London: Calder Publications, [1930] 1985.

Keith Sagar, D.H.Lawrence: Life Into Art, London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Mara Kalnins (ed), D.H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, Bristol: Classical Press, 1986.

Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 1986

Peter Scheckner, Class, Politics, and the Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D.H.Lawrence, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.

Cornelia Nixon, D.H.Lawrence’s Leadership Novels and the Turn Against Women, University of California Press, 1986.

Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence, Mercat Press, 1988.

Peter Balbert, D.H.Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Wayne Templeton, States of Estrangement: the Novels of D.H.Lawrence 1912-17, Whiston Publishing, 1989.

Janet Barron, D.H.Lawrence: (Feminist Readings), Prentice Hall, 1990.

Keith Brown (ed), Rethinking Lawrence, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990.

James C Cowan, D.H.Lawrence and the Trembling Balance, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

John B Humma, Metaphor and Meaning in D.H.Lawrence’s Later Novels, University of Missouri Press 1990.

G M Hyde, D.H.Lawrence (Modern Novelists), London: Macmillan, 1990.

Allan Ingram, The Language of D.H. Lawrence, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Nancy Kushigian, Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the Pre-War Novels of D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1990.

Tony Pinkney, Lawrence (New Readings), Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Weatsheaf, 1990.

Leo J.Dorisach, Sexually Balanced Relationships in the Novels of D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.

Nigel Kelsey, D.H.Lawrence: Sexual Crisis (Studies in 20th Century Literature), London: Macmillan, 1991.

Barbara Mensch, D.H.Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality, London: Macmillan, 1991.

John Worthen, D H Lawrence (Modern Fiction), London: Arnold, 1991.

Michael Bell, D.H.Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Virginia Hyde, The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

James B.Sipple, Passionate Form: life process as artistic paradigm in D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1992.

Kingsley Widmer, Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D.H.Lawrence, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

Anne Fernihough, D.H.Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, Clarendon Press, 1993.

Linda R Williams, Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D.H.Lawrence, Prentice Hall, 1993.

Katherine Waltenscheid, The Resurrection of the Body: Touch in D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1993.

Robert E.Montgomery, The Visionary D.H.Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Leo Hamalian, D.H.Lawrence and Nine Women Writers, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D.H.Lawrence, London: Routledge, 2002.

James C Cowan, D.H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality, Ohio State University Press, 2003.

John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, London: Penguin, 2006.

David Ellis (ed), D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Other work by D.H.Lawrence

Sons and Lovers This is Lawrence’s first great novel. It’s a quasi-autobiographical account of a young man’s coming of age in the early years of the twentieth century. The setting is working class Nottinghamshire, and the story it focuses on class conflicts and gender issues as young Paul Morrell is torn between a passionate relationship with his mother and his attraction to other women. He is also locked insomething of an Oedipal struggle with his coal-miner father. If you are new to Lawrence and his work, this is a good place to start.
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Women in Love begins where his previous big novel The Rainbow leaves off and features the Brangwen sisters as they try to forge new types of liberated personal relationships. The men they choose are trying to do the same thing – and the results are problematic and often disturbing for all concerned. Many regard this as his finest novel, where his ideas are matched with passages of superb writing. The locations combine urban Bohemia with a symbolic climax which takes place in the icy snow caps of the Alps.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
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D.H.Lawrence – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a case of wrongful critical conviction

During his lifetime, Philip Larkin, the self-effacing ‘Hermit of Hull’ (where he was the University Librarian), was held in public affection as an ‘accessible’ poet, minor novelist, and quirky jazz critic. His death in 1985 was mourned as the passing of – in W. H. Auden’s phrase – ‘a master of the English language’. But with the publication of his Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite (1992), and Andrew Motion’s biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), the tide began to turn.

Germaine Greer characterised Larkin’s verse as ‘anti-intellectual, racist, sexist, and rotten with class-consciousness’ while Tom Paulin condemned the Letters as a ‘revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals the sewer under the national monument that Larkin became’.

What Paulin and other commentators failed to understand was the fundamental distinction between private and public correspondence. Unless one is a compiler of the dreadful and usually seasonal round robin to friends and acquaintances, letters are written to individuals, and take into account their sensibilities. Larkin certainly knew this, yet a recent eBay auction listed Motion’s biography under the key words: ‘Homosexual Pornography Poet PHILIP LARKIN Nazi’.

John Osborne’s purpose in this adversarial and provocative polemic is to rescue Larkin from both his disciples and his detractors, who have combined and conflated the man with his work. As Osborne cautions, ‘a narrator of invented experiences is not to be confused with an actual author and real ones’.

Read correctly, neither Larkin’s poems nor his prose reveal an ‘anti-Modernist’, Little Englander, blinkered jazz lover, homophobe or racist bigot. On the contrary, he emerges as a magisterially informed, radical and subversive writer, fully conversant with and sympathetic to the plight of oppressed minorities – including African-Americans, immigrants and the white working classes.

In an excellent chapter on ‘Larkin and Modernism: Jazz’, Osborne contends that from its beginnings jazz, with its stylistic and creative innovations, was ‘Modernist music par excellence’ and was seen as such. But Larkin, because of his famous/notorious anti-modernist stance (‘Parker, Pound and Picasso’), liked to pretend that jazz stopped being ‘jazz’ with the bebop revolution of the 1940s. It didn’t, and he knew it.

Osborne also offers a brilliant (and persuasive) interpretation of the poem ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and also notes that Larkin’s other jazz hero was Louis Armstrong who, he suggested, was ‘certainly quite comparable’ in cultural stature with Pablo Picasso. So much for Larkin the private racist and public ‘anti-Modernist’.

Where the ‘pink professoriate’ and ‘self-appointed guardians of public morality’ – including Terry Eagleton, Lisa Jardine – have castigated Larkin as a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative, Osborne reminds us that the only poem he was commissioned to write by the Tory party (‘Going, Going’) was ‘so little to their liking that they brutally censored it before publication’.

Again, far from being unaware of working-class culture, Larkin identified (even if he did not identify with) its consumer novelties: ‘split-level shopping, transistors, deodorants, the Pill, Bri-Nylon, Baby-Doll nighties, the Beatles’ first LP’. In poems like ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, Osborne suggests, Larkin deconstructs the ‘discourse of modern advertising’ as profoundly as does the work of pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol.

Despite his myopic scholarly detractors, Larkin’s influence and reputation have been recognised by musicians, artists and creative writers. Leonard Bernstein nominated Larkin as the twentieth century’s greatest poet (Osborne views him as ‘the greatest poet of doubt since [Thomas] Hardy’). The paintings in Damien Hirst’s latest exhibition are all titled after a Larkin poem, while Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Julian Barnes have acknowledged his ‘liberating role’ in their work.

Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence deserves a wide readership. It sheds fresh light on his oeuvre and its sources, and, most importantly, sends one back to the poems (and prose) with sharpened perceptions.

Academic students of literature will also welcome the two chapters on ‘Larkin and Philosophy’. Only occasionally does Osborne lapse into the arcane jargon of the new literary criticism, as in his endorsement of Barbara Everett’s recognition of Larkin’s indebtedness to T.S. Eliot. She, we are informed,

appreciates that this Eliotic citationality desiderates a text-centred rather then an author-centred methodology, the incorporation of elements by other hands generating a problematic of multiplicity, heterogeneity and exteriority that challenges the author’s sovereignty.

Larkin’s response to this intelligence might well have been: ‘In a pig’s arse, friend’. But he would surely have welcomed the aside that ‘The worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment in contemporary cinema or television (let alone the internet).’

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John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 304, ISBN: 1403937060

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Laughter in the Dark

April 24, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Laughter in the Dark (1933) is often regarded as one of the most cruel of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels. He is famous for dealing with challenging subjects and using black comedy in his work. This novel tells the story of a well-intentioned family man with a weakness for young girls who is drawn into a complex web of desire, deceit, and revenge which has disastrous consequences. It is also a story told with all Nabokov’s usual subtle twists and verbal panache. It has become much discussed in recent years because it clearly prefigures the more famous Lolita he wrote more than twenty years later.

Laughter in the Dark – a note on the text

Laughter in the Dark (1933) is the sixth novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It was first serialised in the Russian language journal Sovremennye Zapiski (Contemporary Annals) in 1932. It was then published in Berlin the following year with the title Camera Obskura in the name of V. Sirin. Nabokov used this nom de plume in his early works to avoid confusion with his father, a writer and politician who was also called Vladimir Nabokov.

It was the first work by Nabokov to appear in English, published in London by John Long in a translation by Winifred Roy. Nabokov disliked this version so much that he made his own translation for its publication in America by Bobbs-Merrill in 1938.

In the Russian original, the protagonist Albert Albinus had the name Bruno Krechmar, and his rival Axel Rex was called Robert Gorn, whilst Margot was called Magda. Nabokov rarely missed an opportunity to ‘improve’ or update his texts.

Following Nabokov’s huge international success with Lolita in 1955, many of his earlier novels were re-translated and re-issued in English. It is possible that Laughter in the Dark was translated again in 1965, since in that year Nabokov renewed his copyright to the title.

Laughter in the Dark – commentary

Narrative strategies

Nabokov is famous for the inventive and playful manner in which he delivers his stories. Sometimes he teases his readers by planting clues in a game of literary hide and seek, and at others he introduces unusual variations on the conventions of story-telling. Laughter in the Dark begins with two very good examples of this inventiveness.

The first instance is a particularly daring narrative venture: he reveals the plot of his novel in advance. The opening paragraph is presented in mock fairy tale mode:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

That is the plot of Laughter in the Dark summed up in two sentences. As readers we know what is going to happen. The more important issues are how it is going to happen, and how will the tale be told?

The second example of narrative inventiveness comes shortly afterwards, and in terms of story-telling strategy it is the exact opposite. He includes cleverly concealed details which do not become significant until much later in the novel. When Albinus enters the cinema where he meets Margot:

He had come in at the end of a film: a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun. There was no interest whatever in watching happenings which he could not understand since he had not yet seen their beginning.

Albinus might well have paid more attention to the film – because what he is witnessing (and what Nabokov is foretelling) is how the novel will end. This is a version of the final scene of the story when Albinus goes to shoot Margot. He is not ‘masked’ but blind – and it is she who ends by shooting him. [For those interested, the technical term for this literary device is ‘prolepsis’.]

In 1932 Nabokov was at an early stage of his development as a novelist and in particular his manipulation of narratives – though he had at that time produced the masterly novella The Eye (1930). This is a story in which a first person narrator both tells lies about himself and commits ‘suicide’ half way through the story he is relating.

Nabokov and paedophilia

Nabokov had been writing about older men yearning for and having sexual encounters with young girls ever since his earliest works. The English novelist Martin Amis (a great Nabokov enthusiast) calls this an ‘embarrassment’ in assessing Nabokov’s achievement as a writer.

In A Nursey Tale (1926) an elderly man strolls through the story with a girl whom the protagonist will choose as his erotic object. She is described as ‘a child [my emphasis] of fourteen or so in a low-cut party dress … mincing at the old poet’s side … her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly’.

In Laughter in the Dark Margot is slightly older, though it should be noted that although Albinus thinks she might be eighteen, her brother Otto confirms that she is in fact sixteen and has been virtually a prostitute up to the point when Albinus meets her.

Moreover, Nabokov later wrote a whole novella based on the same theme, The Enchanter (1939) then found fame with an entire novel devoted to the seduction, abduction, and abuse of an under-age girl in Lolita (1955). He was still including scenes of paedophilia in works as late as Ada or Ardor (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins (1974).

In his posthumous and unfinished The Original of Laura (2009) the girl in question is twelve years old and is pursued lecherously by an ageing roué called (believe it or not) Hubert H. Hubert.

The purpose of pointing to the recurrence of this topic in his work is to emphasise that paedophilia is not an accidental subject in his novels, but a theme deeply rooted in his consciousness. Nabokov tried to sidestep any accusations of impropriety by re-naming his obsession as nympholepsy and frequently attributing its origin to the loss of an ideal love during childhood. His verbal flim-flam might have been an understandable form of self-defense in the middle of the twentieth century, but now in the twenty-first it can be seen for what it is – a loquacious and over-elaborated form of self-justification.

It is interesting that these narratives often end with the death of the paedophile. The unnamed protagonist of The Enchanter dies under the wheels of the passing truck after giving way to his impulse to molest the girl he has abducted. Humbert murders his rival and fellow paedophile Quilty, then dies in prison whilst awaiting trial. The blind Albinus sets out to shoot Margot because of her treacherous deception of him with Axel Rex, but is shot by her instead.

The relationships between Albinus, Margot, and Alex Rex are clearly a precursor to Humbert, Lolita, and Quilty in Lolita. One middle-aged man is obsessed with a young girl, but is being cruelly deceived by her engagement with a fellow paedophile.

In works such as Laughter in the Dark Nabokov was publishing under the moral constraints of the early twentieth century. Those who transgressed society’s norms must be punished. But following the turning point of Lolita, which appeared around the same time as the famous legal controversies surrounding The Naked Lunch (1959), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960), and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), Nabokov gradually lowered the age of his ‘nymphets’ in his later works until it stabilised around twelve.

This takes the question of aesthetic judgements into very murky waters. Most critics of Nabokov ignore this aspect of his work, concentrating instead on his verbal dexterity, his wit, and the gymnastic stunts he brings to the arrangement of his narratives. But the inescapable fact is that it is a subject he returned to again, again, and again.

The double

Axel Rex and Albert Albinus mirror or ‘double’ each other throughout the novel. Albinus is a wealthy art critic, and Rex is a cartoonist whom he first contacts with a view to their producing animations of classical paintings. Rex buys Margot from the procuress Frau Levandovsky and puts her into an apartment for his own use. When Rex disappears, Albinus does exactly the same thing: his first act is to install Margot in a flat as his sexual plaything.

When Alex reappears later in the story Albinus is quite friendly towards him. The two men socialise with each other, and whilst Margot is deceiving Albinus behind his back, they even go on holiday together. In the end, they are not only sharing Margot’s sexual favours but (thanks to Axel’s unscrupulous venality) Albinus’s money.

In their final scene together both men are in a state of undress. Axel is completely naked and Albinus is wearing a dressing gown. Axel caresses Albinus with a blade of grass he had just been sucking. It is also significant that whenever Albinus fears he is being deceived or when he actually discovers her betrayal, it is Margot who he seeks to kill, not his rival Axel Rex.

What does this tell us about the novel? It is often observed that when two men desire(or share) the same woman, this tells us more about their unconscious attraction to each other than to the woman herself. This might be regarded as accidental or a coincidence – except for the fact that exactly the same senario is acted out in Lolita, written almost a quarter of a century later.

Laughter in the Dark – study resources

Laughter in the Dark – Penguin – Amazon UK

Laughter in the Dark – Penguin – Amazon US

Lolita – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Martin Amis – The Problem with Nabokov

Laughter in the Dark – plot summary

Albert Albinus is a wealthy art critic who has the idea of animating famous paintings, and he seeks someone who might help him technically. He is married to the placid Elizabeth, but has hankerings after young girls, including Margot Peters, an usherette whom he meets in a cinema. Margot dreams of being a film star, but she works as an artists’ model. She is procured by a man called Axel Miller who keeps her in a flat for a month then disappears. She subsequently resorts to prostitution then meets Albinus.

He rapidly becomes obsessed with her. She flirts and torments him, even provocatively visiting his house to check that he is wealthy. Albinus sets Margot up in a flat. When she writes to tell him the address, his wife Elizabeth intercepts the letter then leaves home with their daughter. Albinus moves in with Margot, who is menaced by her thuggish brother Otto with demands for money.

Albinus takes Margot to the Adriatric on holiday, but when they return to Berlin she objects to being hidden from public view. They move into his old apartment where he tries to disguise the fact that they are living together. He finds her a part in a low-budget film which he finances. To alleviate her boredom they throw a party – at which another guest is Axel Rex (previously Axel Miller). Margot regards him as her first true love – but she demands that Albinus seek a divorce.

The cruel and cynical Rex is down on his luck. He befriends Albinus as a ruse to regain Margot, who at first rejects Axel’s advances because he has no money. Albinus’s daughter contracts pneumonia and when she is dying Margot tries to prevent Albinus going to see her. Rex takes advantage of his absence to seduce Margot.

After a year Albinus resolves to return to his former life – but fails to do so. At a private showing of the film Margot is revealed as hopelessly incompetent. Albinus takes her on a motoring holiday as a compensation, together with Axel, who is pretending to be a homosexual. They drive to the south of France, where Margot continues to deceive Albinus with Rex.

Albinus meets an old friend Udo Conrad who naively reveals that he has overheard Axel and Margot discussing their love affair. Albinus confronts Margot with a gun, but she denies wrongdoing. They depart immediately, leaving Rex behind. Albinus crashes the car on a mountain road and recovers in hospital to discover that he has gone blind.

Rex writes to say that he is going back to New York, but in fact he takes over Albinus’s money and secretly moves with Margot and Albinus into a Swiss chalet. Rex and Margot torment the blind Albinus by flirting with each other in his presence. They plan to take over his property assets then leave him.

Elizabeth’s brother Paul is suspicious of the large cash withdrawals that Albinus appears to be making from his bank. He goes to Switzerland where he catches Rex and reveals the deception. Albinus wants to stay and kill Margot, but Paul takes him back to Elizabeth. A few days later, learning that Margot has returned to Berlin, Albinus takes a taxi to their old apartment where he tries to shoot her. But in the struggle it is she who shoots him dead.

Laughter in the Dark – main characters

Albert Albinus	a wealthy German art critic
Elizabeth	his placid wife
Axel Rex	an unscupulous cartoonist and gambler
Margot Peters	a lower-class teenage waif
Otto Peters	her thuggish brother
Paul Hochenwart	Elizabeth’s loyal brother
Dorianna Karenina	a fashionable Berlin actress

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Letters to Monica

March 4, 2015 by Roy Johnson

poetry, academic gossip, sex, equivocation, and death

Philip Larkin first met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in the autumn of 1946 when they were both twenty-four. He was the newly appointed Assistant Librarian and she was a Lecturer in English. In 1950 he moved to Belfast, and then on to Hull, while she remained at Leicester. She started as a correspondent and friend, became his lover and confidante, and spent forty ears as his sometime muse and psychic nursemaid until his sudden death in 1985.

This is a selection from the almost two thousand letters he wrote to her – though he wrote double that number to his mother. Unfortunately, her side of the correspondence is embargoed in the Bodleian Library until 2035.

They were rather an oddly matched couple. He was shy, reserved, and socially very conservative. She was a flamboyant blonde who was given to wearing short skirts, fishnet tights (sometimes with holes) and high-heeled shoes. He was assiduous in his attitude to work (even though he didn’t like it): she on the other hand never published a word in her whole career as a university lecturer

The letters begin as Larkin, newly appointed as assistant librarian at Queens University Belfast, is seeking estimates for a privately printed edition of his poems. Given his later fame, this is a salutary lesson for any would-be writers. He also begins what was to become a long series of equivocations when setting up meetings with Monica.

They tested the temperature of the other’s enthusiasm from the tone and content of their letters. Yet his hesitation and contradictions regarding their planned assignations are amusingly reminiscent of Kafka. Timetables, routes, hotels, and dates are discussed in excruciating detail, potential excuses for a no-show are set up in advance, and penny-pinching attention to the cost are flagged up in a clear display of his ambivalence about the relationship.

Larkin’s complex romantic life is now quite well known, but what the letters reveal is very much a meeting of minds. They had similar literary tastes and similar isolationist tendencies – though the editor of this volume Anthony Thwaite puts it differently, saying that “e;they fed each other’s misery”e;.

Larkin comes across as breathtakingly pompous and arrogant when lecturing Monica on how she should modify her style of conversation – though it should be said that first-hand accounts report her as hectoring people in general, and paying no attention to what they said in reply – which were precisely his criticisms.

There are persistent complaints and self-criticism about his lack of productivity, and yet sadly thirty volumes of his personal diaries were destroyed after his death. The request was his own; it was enacted by Monica as his literary executor; and the journals were shredded in Hull library by his secretary.

There is an enormous amount of moaning, complaints about illnesses (real and imaginary), disgust at his own ineffectuality, and endless reasons for not getting married, which Monica was clearly expecting him to propose. Indecision and a stolid bachelor inertia dogged his every step. In one single letter he goes into a rage about the noise from a neighbour’s radio, then turns down the opportunity of renting a spacious flat because it would be too big and ‘No sound would ever have penetrated its walls’.

The year 1955 should have been a high point in his life: he had secured the job at Hull on a good salary (£1,500 pa) and the first volume of his poems was being published to some acclaim. Yet his letters are full of self-loathing and despair:

I do feel absolutely sick at heart, my blankness has been goaded into revulsion & I am up in arms again, sufficiently fed up to start moving [address] again, back at the point when not moving is worse than moving. And I can’t do anything, not now: I must endure the weekend, & all next week, & … This state of mind is different than my earlier howls: this is a kind of nausea, as if life were some milk-skin clinging to my lip. I don’t, at the moment, see how I am going to endure it, it’s all so frightful

This is the sort of volitional paralysis and neurasthenia (to say nothing of the hypochondria) which reinforces the comparison with Kafka – another literary bachelor who was riven by contradictions, moved from one set of rented lodgings to another, and agonized endlessly about his fear of marriage.

What makes the letters bearable and very entertaining amidst all the misery is their fluidity and inventiveness, his gossipy wit, adoption of comic personae, abrupt variations in register, his heterogeneous topics, and his cultivated intelligence.

Larkin is voracious in his reading and not at all snobbish in taste – everything from renaissance poetry to contemporary fiction. He championed Barbara Pym and helped to restore her reputation. His essential favourites are classics, and his enthusiastic notes on Bleak Housemake you feel like reading it again, as do his observations and deep feelings for Hardy’s poetry.

It’s easy to see why Monica was so exasperated by his failure to ‘commit’. When he was taken into hospital following a collapse, she rushed from Leicester to his bedside, yet he wouldn’t let her stay in his (empty) flat in case she read his diaries. And when she raised the question of money and inheritance, he claimed to have a phobia about making a will.

He makes hardly any effort to visit her – even though she lived only a few miles from his mother, who he visited regularly. Or he would ‘call in’ for just an hour on his way back from London. Even when he had two sabbatical terms as a fellow at All Souls Oxford, he found all sorts of reasons not to make the make the short journey up to Leicester, including not wishing to drive at night.

There is quite an excruciating series of letters in 1964 and 1965 where he tries to wish away her wounded feelings when she found out about his parallel affair with Maeve Brennan, a colleague in the Library at Hull. He admits his culpability, but doesn’t feel he can do anything about it, and admits he would be ‘shattered’ if she were to do the same from her independent base in Leicester. It’s perhaps as well that Monica never seems to have realised at the time that there was a ‘third woman’ with whom he shared sexual comforts – his matronly secretary Betty Mackereth.

Later in their tortured lives, the tensions between them were eased somewhat by the arrival of ill health. Monica fell downstairs, then afterwards developed shingles. Larkin took her into his house and looked after her, finally acknowledging that they were a ‘couple’. He made her his literary executor, then following his own sudden demise, Monica stayed living in the house until her own death in 2001.

He was an amazingly acute observer and a sound judge of character. One of Monica’s favourite students (and would-be swain) went on to become a lecturer at Manchester University, where he was renowned for his idleness. Larkin pins him down in a single sentence: “e;[he] will will get on up to a point – the point at which has to do some work”e;. This makes his sketch of F.R.Leavis (then at the height of his fame) all the more amusing:

Well, Leavis … what a ghastly little man! … one of the bores of the century, I’d say — and really a typical Oxbridge don, cocky, smart, full of petty cattiness. Oh dear. And what a bore. ‘I live on my nerves’, he told me .. I don’t wonder that Cambridge, or Downing, can’t stand him at any price … I’ve never met a man so full of himself. Stupid little sod, the ideas rattling in him like peas. No, a typical don, one who likes being a don … I’ve not met a sillier man for many a long day … I’m awfully glad to reflect that I don’t possess a single book by him. Not a single book.

These are a very welcome addition to the successful volume Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, and they seem to cry out for a future collection in which Larkin’s letters are placed alongside those written in reply by Monica Jones. But we will have to be very patient: her correspondence is locked in the Bodleian Library for the next twenty years.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Letters to Monica, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 475, ISBN: 0571239102

Literary Criticism – a new history

September 7, 2010 by Roy Johnson

aesthetic theory from the classical period to the present

Gary Day’s main argument in his impressive study Literary Criticism – a new history is that literary criticism is like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards in different historical epochs. At one moment it emphasizes the text, and at the next its effect upon the reader. He traces all the main schools of literary criticism, starting with classical Greek and Roman writing on aesthetics, and he shows that many of the notions people imagine to be new have actually been around for two thousand years or more. This makes his book a good antidote to the mistaken idea that literary criticism began in the 1970s with the discovery of French structuralism.

He takes the history of both literature and literary criticism through the distinct phases of its historical development, starting with the classics, then looking successively at Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, and Modern phases. His emphasis on the whole is on English criticism, though it does not preclude an occasional consideration of other cultures.

His examination of criticism relating to the earlier periods has the instructive effect of condensing their ideas and ‘theory’ into digestible chunks. He points out that in the medieval period for instance there was no concept of either literature or criticism as we know them – only ‘commentary’ on sacred texts. The Greco-Roman classics for instance were interpreted as guides to (Christian) moral behaviour. The medieval period also gave rise to the concept of the auctor (author). It also saw, towards its end, the rise of the written vernacular. Latin was the language of learning, but as trade between nations increased there was more reason than ever for people to use and learn each other’s native language.

In the Renaissance period Day argues that a crucial issue was the Protestant-inspired translation of the Bible into English. This gave the common man both access to divine scripture and the right to its interpretation – previously only in the remit of the church itself. The introduction of printing and the establishment of a vernacular English that pushed out Latin and French as the lingua francas of official discourse led to the publication of books for readers’ pleasure. This in turn gave rise to a literature of the popular marketplace and a need to make distinctions between such products and a canon of revered classics. It is easy to see the point that Gary Day makes several times throughout this study – that many of the critical issues debated with such recent ferocity were evident in literary history centuries ago.

His chapter on the English Enlightenment draws interesting parallels between criticism and finance. If the intrinsic value of a paper five pound note was certainly not five pounds, because there was not a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, so the value of a work of literature could not be determined by the accuracy of its correspondence with some value in the real world.

There is a strong period of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century that Day attributes to a desire for order, proportion, and rule-based authority after the uncertainties created by the Civil War. However, he argues that it failed to take permanent root and only sprang back into life now and again during politically reactionary phases.

In his chapter on the Romantic period he argues that the cult of individualism, ‘sensibility’, and nature was a reaction to the industrial revolution which reduced man to a mere part in the economy of mass production. Thus the literary criticism that emerged emphasized the possibilities of individual response to and interpretation of a text. This tendency reached its apogee in the art for art’s sake movement at the end of the nineteenth century when all connections between art and moral improvement were finally denied completely.

When it comes to the twentieth century he understandably sees Freud, Max Plank and Picasso as exemplars of revolutionary thinking, though the literary critics he first considers are the very unfashionable Walter Orage and G.K. Chesterton. But in fact the main focus of interest in his final chapter is the establishment of English Studies in the UK university system – a surprising phenomenon both in its recency and the controversy that surrounded it.

Fortunately, he does finish by looking at three major figures critics who were influential from the mid-century onwards – I.A.Richards, William Empson, and F.R.Leavis. He explains their critical methods and their significance, and finally lets himself off the leash to take a few well-aimed swipes at Catherine Belsey, who is obviously his bete noir.

This is not simply gratuitous rival-bashing however, for one of Day’s habits that I found quite entertaining was his demonstrating links between debates held centuries ago with those of the last two or three decades – to show that there is very little that is totally new under the sun. And he is also much given to taking pot shots at the current academic culture of ‘skills’ and ‘performance indicators’ that have come to replace a serious interest in the subject of literature and literary criticism.

He has very little to say about contemporary forms of literary criticism which range from feminism, postcolonialism, post-Modernism, and queer theory – except to conclude somewhat radically that

the sheer variety should not distract us from one fundamental truth: that the demands of bodies like the Quality Assurance Agency are making the study of literature ever more prescriptive for students while the Research Assessment Exercise has distorted it for academics. Criticism is better off outside the academy.

This sort of writing could signal the beginnings of a long overdue and very welcome change in the practice of academic literary criticism.

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Gary Day, Literary Criticism: a new history, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.344, ISBN: 0748641424

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poetry, academic gossip, sex, equivocation, and death

aesthetic theory from the classical period to the present

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