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Prince Roman

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Prince Roman was written by Joseph Conrad in 1910 and first published in 1911 in The Oxford and Cambridge Review. It was posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, which was first published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1925. The tale is based on the real life story of Prince Roman Sanguszko of Poland (1800–81). The other tales in the collection are The Black Mate, The Warrior’s Soul, and The Tale

Prince Roman

Prince Sanguszko’s coat of arms

Prince Roman – critical commentary

Content

This is an unashamedly patriotic piece of writing on Conrad’s part. Prince Roman is a Pole who gives up his comfortable position in the aristocracy to fight as a (virtually) unknown soldier resisting Russian oppression. When captured, he has every opportunity to escape punishment, but declares himself unequivocally committed to Polish liberation. As a result he suffers a quarter of a century in the nineenth century Tsarist equivalent of the GULAG – the Siberian mines – before returning to live in humble circumstances on what should have been his own estate before devoting his life to helping other people. There is none of the ambiguity and complexity that is normally found in Conrad’s other works, nor any of the light ironic touches in his commentary within the narration.

History

The story is based on the real life history of Prince Roman Stanislaw Sanguszko (1800–1881) who was a Polish aristocrat, patriot, political and social activist. Conrad’s fictional account is remarkably faithful to the historical details of Sanguszko’s life – though in some regards the truth is even more remarkable than the fiction. For instance, part of the punishment for taking part in the insurrection was that he should walk in chains to his place of exile. This was a distance of 3,300 kilometres which took ten months to complete.

Narrative

The main problem with the tale, from a technical point of view, is that it mixes narrative modes in a way that reflects adversely on the overall artistic effect. The story begins in first person narrative mode: the un-named narrator recalls having seen as a child this fabled Polish patriot, when Roman was an old man. That is, the narrative starts at the end of its chronological events.

The narrator then fills in the details of Roman’s background – information of a biographical nature which could be publicly available. But gradually, the narrative slips into third person omniscient mode. We are presented with Roman’s thoughts and feelings whilst he is in the Polish army of resistance – information which would not be available to anyone but Roman himself.

Then at the end of the tale, Conrad returns to a first person narrative mode, with the un-named narrator rounding off the sad but heroic account of Prince Roman’s life story. Conrad makes these transitions quite smoothly, and most readers are unlikely to complain, but in terms of strict narrative credibility and logic they are illegitimate.

Prince Roman – study resources

Prince Roman Tales of Hearsay – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Prince Roman Tales of Hearsay – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

Prince Roman The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Prince Roman Prince Roman – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Prince Roman Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Prince Roman Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Prince Roman Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Prince Roman

Prince Roman – plot summary

An un-named narrator recalls as a child once meeting Prince Roman, who by that time was a bald and deaf old man. This reminiscence forms the springboard for a potted life history, which is the substance of the narrative. Roman comes from an aristocratic Polish family. His wife dies two years after the birth of their daughter, and Roman is badly affected by the loss. He finds solace by retreating into the countryside, and whilst there hears news of a successful patriotic uprising against the occupying Russians. Roman renounces his position as a military office in the Tsar’s army and announces his intention of joining the nationalist rebels. His father understands Roman’s patriotism, but thinks this is rather rash and impolitic.

Roman summons an old family servant and confides in him his intention of volunteering in the partisan army. He enlists under a false name (Sergeant Peter) and distinguishes himself for courage and valour. However, although unharmed, he is eventually taken prisoner by the Russians. There he is recognised by his captors. News of his arrest is sent to St Petersburg, where his family use their wealth and influence to plead for clemency.

The military commission that tries his case attempts to guide his responses to questioning to bring about an acquittal, but he states quite bluntly that he joined the rebellion from ‘political conviction’. He is condemned to the Siberian mines, which at that time was considered a living death. Because of his disgrace, his daughter inherits his estates, and lives abroad – in the South of France and Austria. Twenty-five years later, on his release, Roman goes to live in a modest house on one of the estates and dedicates himself to doing public good.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Joseph Conrad - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Red button Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Red button Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Red button Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Red button Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Red button Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Red button John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Red button Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Red button Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Red button Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Red button Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Red button Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Red button Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Red button Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Red button Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Red button George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Red button John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Red button James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Red button Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Red button Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Red button J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Red button John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Red button Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Red button Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Red button Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

Professor Fargo

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

Professor Fargo first appeared in The Galaxy magazine for August 1874. Its next appearance in book form was in the collection of stories Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919.

Professor Fargo

Phineas Taylor Barnum 1810-1891

Professor Fargo – critical commentary

The story seems to combine elements of comic burlesque with a savage criticism of the shabby fraudulence in the ‘spiritual’ showman – something which would surface again in the character of Selah Tarrant in The Bostonians (1886). Its subject appears to be aimed at the market for popular fiction for which James was writing around this time, but there are two issues worthy of note in artistic terms.

The first of these is that all three male characters in the story do the same thing: they attempt to persuade their audiences with the power of rhetoric. The narrator is a travelling salesman whose livelihood rests on persuading other people to purchase the goods he sells – which remain unspecified. The Colonel claims to have ‘inventions’ and mathematical formulae which he thinks will be of great benefit to society. Perhaps because he doesn’t follow the conventional method of writing down his ideas, he is forced to describe them orally. But nobody in the audiences can understand what he is talking about, and his ‘inventions’ have all failed – which has led him to be dependent upon the Professor.

The Professor himself is an out-and-out fraud. He claims he can communicate with people who are dead, and that he has special powers of ‘spiritual’ and personal ‘magnetism’ which he singularly fails to demonstrate during his performances. However, the second detail worthy of note is that the Professor does eventually wield some sort of personal persuasiveness on Miss Gifford – who abandons her own father and takes up with the florid mountebank Fargo.

This sudden reversal of allegiance is not unlike that demonstrated by the young girl in James’s story Adina written earlier in the same year. Adina is engaged to marry a somewhat unattractive classical scholar, but she suddenly elopes with a handsome young Italian man to whom she has hardly even spoken. The common element of lack of speech is perhaps telling. James obviously believed that some people were susceptible to being attracted by sheer animal magnetism, even if they did leave behind them a distinct trace of ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’.

Professor Fargo – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Professor Fargo

Professor Fargo – plot summary

Part I. An un-named narrator decides to wait for three days in a sleepy little American town for a business contact to return. In the town hall he encounters Professor Fargo, who is preparing the evening’s demonstration of spiritualism and mental magnetism. They exchange opinions regarding spiritualism – the narrator being firmly sceptical. Later the same day he sees the Professor again, engaged with a pretty deaf-mute girl in the public cemetery.

Part II. The narrator attends the evening show. The Professor’s performance is poor and without any results. Then his partner Colonel Gifford presents a new mathematical method, which nobody in the audience understands. Then his daughter the deaf-mute girl presents miracles of multiplication on a blackboard.

Next day the narrator meets all three performers at breakfast at the inn where they are all staying. He compliments the Colonel on his mathematical theories. The sombre Colonel reveals that he does not subscribe to the Professor’s quack claims. He himself has practical inventions which he hopes will benefit society; he has lost his wife; and he resents being dependent on the Professor, who he thinks a vulgar fraud. Because all the Colonel’s experiments have so far failed, the Professor has persuaded him to feature his gifted daughter in their act.

Later the same day, the Colonel unburdens himself further to the narrator. The Professor drinks heavily and treats visitors at the inn to his philosophy of ‘spiritual magnetism’. The Colonel then denounces these claims publicly, following which the Professor proposes to prove his powers with a practical demonstration.

Part III. Six weeks later the narrator sees another of their performances in New York. Their fortunes have sunk even lower than before. The Colonel has let the Professor off his challenge (because it was made whilst drunk). Whilst out walking with the narrator, the Colonel has a sudden inspiration for a major new idea. But when they arrive at the Colonel’s lodging they find the Professor is there: he offers the narrator a free ticket for the evening’s performance.

However, there is no audience at all, and when the manager demands rent for the hall, the Professor is unable to pay. The narrator offers to pay the Colonel’s half of the bill. The Professor proposes to form a new act featuring the girl – but the Colonel indignantly refuses. However, when faced by a choice of loyalties, the girl goes off with the Professor. The Colonel is completely crushed by this outcome, and is placed in an asylum, where he continues his meaningless mathematical ‘experiments’.

Principal characters
I the un-named narrator, a commercial traveller
Professor Fargo a fat and florid showman
Colonel Gifford a ‘mathematician and inventor, his partner
Miss Gifford a poor but pretty young deaf mute girl, his daughter

Professor Fargo - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man from the South to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

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Henry James What Masie KnewWhat Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Henry James The AmbassadorsThe Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

The 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.

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Put Out More Flags

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tutorial, study guide, web links, plot summary

Put Out More Flags (1942) is the sixth novel by Evelyn Waugh. It deals with British society at the outbreak of war in 1939 and features characters who first appeared in his earlier novels Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), and Black Mischief (1932). Most of the characters are drawn from upper-class society, but there are also satirical portraits from metropolitan Bohemia and the higher echelons of government and publishing. The story line is dominated by the outrageously unscrupulous character Basil Seal – a clever, womanising, ne’er-do-well.
Put Out More Flags

Put Out More Flags – commentary

This is something of a transitional work for Evelyn Waugh, containing much of the comic satire (and the characters) of his earlier novels, but at the same time it looks forward to the more serious elements of Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-1961).

Whilst being largely a farcical comedy, it also contains interesting elements of well-observed social history – particularly the decline of the English upper class, the institutions of government, and ideological movements of the period in what we would now call ‘culture wars’.

Social history

The novel opens with Basil Seal’s sister, Barbara, trying to maintain a sense of normality in her two-hundred-year old country manor house. The servant class, on which her family’s privileged comforts have depended for generations, is melting away in the face of better employment prospects elsewhere. “Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make aeroplanes”.

For servants, the pay would be better working in a manufacturing industry, but they would also have more personal liberty and be free of the patronising and authoritarian discipline imposed by traditional upper-class employers. They would be free of the stifling deference required by the landed gentry who for generations had regarded themselves as superior beings.

This well-observed social development is also accompanied by a movement in the opposite direction – the arrival of evacuees from the larger cities. To protect children from the threats of bombing which were expected, it was government policy for them to be sent into the countryside. This social experiment had mixed results. Not all of the evacuees wanted to be there, and not all were suited to rural living. Waugh makes comic plunder of these issues in the scenes where Basil Seal acts as a bogus billeting officer.

Fashionable art

One of Evelyn Waugh’s favourite targets for satire in his early novels was contemporary fashions in the arts. In Decline and Fall the society Margot Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Metroland) destroys a historic Tudor building to put in its place a monstrosity of plate glass, leather walls, and modernist furniture. In Put Out More Flags Waugh aims at the literary world. Much mention is made of the two proletarian poets Parsnip and Pimpernel.

They were great supporters of the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, but as soon as Britain was under threat they emigrated to the United States. This is a satirical dig at Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden who did exactly that in 1939.

Poppet Green is a feather-brained ‘artist’ who follows whatever the latest fad happens to be – which in 1939 was surrealism. Her subjects are:

bodiless heads, green horses, and violet grass, seaweed, shells, and fungi, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in the manner of Dali. Her work in progress on the easel was an overlarge, accurate but buttercup-coloured head of the Aphrodite of Melos, poised against a background of bull’s-eyes and barley sugar.

She is also a communist – of a particularly simple-minded type. When her friend Ambrose Silk goes to work in the Ministry of Information, she immediately labels him a ‘fascist’ – and even worse, a Trotskyist. She thinks in slogans and labels: this is an accurate account of left wing orthodoxy at the time.

Characterisation

Ambrose Silk is a more subtle and nuanced example of fashion. He is a dandy and an aesthete who has been a communist sympathiser – a fellow traveller in the jargon of the time. Waugh pokes fun at him on two fronts. He is terrified of what might happen to him if the Germans invade Britain – since he is aware that the Nazis have persecuted left sympathisers. And more comically, he is writing a memoir Monument to a Spartan which describes his love for Hans, a German brown shirt fascist youth.

Ambrose eventually morphs into a slightly tragic figure – exiled in Ireland – which rescues him from being a two-dimensional character. The same is true of Angela Lyne, Basil’s ‘so-called’ lover. She is estranged from her husband the dilettante architect Cedric, and at the outset of the novel she is returning from the south of France where she has been fruitlessly waiting for Basil.

She closes her grand London home and moves into a top floor flat in Grosvenor Square. There, she gradually becomes a sad and lonely alcoholic. She maintains a veneer of respectability on her rare appearances in public – only ever drinking Vichy water. Alone, she slumps into an oblivion of vodka and Calvados cocktails. There are some truly touching scenes as this rich and fashionable society woman slowly degenerates and loses touch with reality.

So, amidst all the absurdity and tomfoolery in the rest of the novel, Waugh displays a mature touch as a writer in creating characters who change in time, who are not two-dimensional or vehicles for fun. Another example is Alastair Digby-Vaine Trumpington. He first appeared in the very opening scene of Decline and Fall, a Hooray Henry at Oxford, and he has lived a very conventional upper-class life ever since. Very rich, slightly naive, yet maintaining a ‘schoolboy’ sense of honour:

For him there was no ‘they’. England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words

And true to his principles, whilst the other characters are all trying to scuttle into cosy government sinecures or soft commissions as officers, Alastair volunteers to join the ranks. He endures the miseries of basic training without complaint (although he makes sure his wife Sonia has booked a comfortable nearby hotel for weekends). And in the end he is volunteering for Special Services – though it does seem to be the Boy’s Own Adventure prospects which appeal to him. But he is a character who develops, and he obviously represents what Waugh sees as the remaining strand of decency in upper-class values.

Put Out More Flags – study resources

Put Out More Flags – Penguin – Amazon UK

Put Out More Flags – Penguin – Amazon US

Six novels by Evelyn Waugh – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: The Height of his Powers – essay

Books of the Times: Put Out More Flags – essay

Put Out More Flags

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Put Out More Flags – plot summary

Chapter I.   At the outbreak of the Second World War Barbara Sothill’s country manor at Malfrey loses staff who prefer to work in factories. The estate is surrounded by evacuees from Birmingham. Lady Cynthia Seal asks her friend Sir Joseph Mainwaring to find a position for her wayward son. Angela Lyne returns in disappointment from the south of France, having been let down by her lover Basil Seal. In Fitzrovia, mixing with arty bohemians, Basil is living in a dissolute manner, and he bungles the army interview that is arranged for him.

Ambrose Silk visits the Ministry of Information where memos are exchanged regulating the display of personal effects in government offices. As an aesthete and a well-known left-wing sympathiser, he is concerned about his safety in the event of a German invasion. Basil is in the same building, promoting the idea of annexing Liberia.

Chapter II.   Basil goes to stay with his sister at Malfrey, where three delinquent evacuee children are forced onto them. Basil pretends to be a billeting officer and dumps the children onto a retired couple in their beautiful old home. When a few days later they are at their wits end, Basil charges the couple money to take the children elsewhere.

Alastair Trumpington endures the petty bureaucracy of life in the ranks. Ambrose Silk is working at the Ministry of Information, worried that even fellow-travellers might be at risk. Angela Lyne has shut down her home and is enduring a lonely existence in a Grosvenor Square flat. Alastair Trumpington is involved in absurd training exercises.

Chapter III.   Basil sells the three delinquent evacuee children to an adjacent billeting officer and returns to London. He bluffs his way into the War Office and is taken on as an intelligence agent by an old acquaintance. Lord Peter Pastmaster is trying out a girl with a view to marriage. They meet a bemused and drunk Angela Lyne at a cinema. Basil consoles her.

Cedric Lyne goes to see his estranged wife before his departure for Norway. Basil plans to reveal Poppet and Ambrose as communist sympathisers. Cedric is met by a shambolic embarkation of troops at the port.

Ambrose writes about his lost love for Hans, a German brown shirt youth in Mr Bentleys new magazine The Ivory Tower. Basil persuades Ambrose to change his memoir, making it more pro-German. He then reports him to the War Office as a Nazi sympathiser.

When warrants are issued for arrests Basil helps Ambrose escape to Ireland and takes over his Bloomsbury flat – to which he invites Susie, secretary to his boss. The police are only able to arrest Mr Rampole, the magazine publisher. Cedric Lyne is in a disoriented state on the battlefield and is killed in an attack.

Epilogue

Sir Joseph Mainwaring believes all the myths and rumours circulating about the war. Alastair is posted to coastal defence and wishes for more excitement. Rampole reads ‘light fiction’ in prison, and Basil joins a special service unit.

Put Out More Flags – main characters
Basil Seal a disinherited playboy, womaniser, and confidence man
Lady Cynthia Seal his widowed mother
Sir Joseph Mainwaring a government minister and confidant to Lady Seal
Barbara Sothill Basil’s sister
Mrs Angela Lyne Basil’s lover, daughter of a millionaire
Cedric Lyne her estranged husband, a dilettante architect
Ambrose Silk left-wing gay Jewish aesthete
Alastair Trumpington an aristocratic bohemian
Sonia Trumpington his wife
Poppet Green a surrealist painter and ‘communist’

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Pygmalion

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, web links

Pygmalion was written in 1912 and first performed in England at His Majesty’s Theatre, London in April 1914, with Mrs Patrick Campbell in the lead role as Eliza Doolittle. She was a fifty year old grandmother at the time (‘with increasing girth’) but impressed audiences with her delivery of both Cockney and received pronunciation.

Pygmalion

Pygmalion and Galatea

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who hated women and vowed never to marry. However, when he carved a statue of a woman out of ivory (called Galatea) she was so beautiful he fell in love with his own work. At the festival of Aphrodite (goddess of love) he secretly made a wish for a bride who would be a living likeness. On arriving home he kissed the statue and found that its lips were warm. The goddess had granted his wish, the statue came to life, and he married her. They had a son called Paphos.

Pygmalion – critical commentary

Playtext and literary studies

As a subject of literary studies, the playtext of Pygmalion is a complex and problematic object. It is worth remembering that a playtext is only the intermediate vehicle of which a staged performance represents the ‘realisation’ of the text. Playtexts are only a recorded set of instructions to directors and actors – but in traditional literary studies (in Europe and America) they are treated as the equivalent of poetry and prose fiction.

Like many other plays, Pygmalion exists is a number of different versions. The controversial ending was changed on a number of occasions by theatrical producers and directors, and Shaw himself wrote supplementary materials which he added to the original play in an attempt to ‘explain its meaning.

The text itself is an almost bizarre mixture of literary modes. It begins with an essay on phonetics and a biographical sketch of the linguist Henry Sweet. The play itself is a combination of spoken dialogue and stage directions which vary from amazingly trivial details (‘on her daughter’s right’) to lengthy passages in prose fiction, fleshing out the mise en scene, and even intrusions by Shaw himself, passing comment on the events he is creating.

In its ‘complete’ form, the text also includes additional material for each Act which may or may not be performed and which were added for cinema adaptations. And the end of the play is now conventionally followed by a prose explanation of ‘what happened next’, written by Shaw four years after the first performance. This contains his justification for the absence of a conventional ‘happy ending’; generalisations about bachelors and marriage; and a development of the character of Clara Enysford Hill, someone who had barely figured at all in the previous five Acts.

Language

Modern readers may find the language used by the characters nothing remarkable, but it should be borne in mind that at the time of its first performances Shaw was challenging the orthodox notions of decency on stage.

Higgins uses expressions such as ‘Where the devil are my slippers’ – which although it seems quite innocuous in the twenty-first century, probably marked the limit of what was acceptable in the early twentieth, when society was still emerging from a long age of Victorian prudery. But Mrs Pearce warns him that he should not swear in front of Eliza:

there is a certain word I must ask you not to use … It begins with the same letter as bath … Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots, to the butter, and to the brown bread.

Higgins doesn’t use the word. It is saved up by Shaw for the coup de theatre in Act Three when Eliza, having succeeded in transforming her pronunciation, lets slip her lower class origins when she replies to Freddy’s suggestion that he walk with her across the Park. She exclaims – ‘Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.’ The use of this single word bloody was enough to cause a sensation on the Edwardian stage.

Shaw’s stage directions

In the early part of his literary career Shaw wrote five unsuccessful novels, and the instructions given to director and actors in Pygmalion suggest that he continued to think in the mode of someone writing prose fiction.

The stage directions range from issues of complete insignificance (slightly to her left) via what are authorial comments (hearing in it the voice of God, rebuking him for his Pharisaic want of charity to the poor girl) to the frankly absurd in terms of possible staging (Torrents of heavy summer rain).

Phonetics, shorthand, and spelling

In his preface to the play text, Shaw makes quite clear his interest in the subject of phonetics, as well as the origins of the Henry Higgins character in the figure of well-known Oxford philologist Henry Sweet.

Higgins claims he can pinpoint the origins of a London inhabitant to within a couple of streets by their pronunciation, and he is taking shorthand notes on Eliza’s speech at the beginning of the action.

Shorthand is a system of recording speech by symbols which represent sounds rather than the letters which are used for conventional writing. The best-known version of this system was devised by Sir Isaac Pitman in the middle of the nineteenth century, and became very popular in Britain and the United States.

There was a great deal of interest in these matters at the end of the nineteenth century, and Shaw put a great deal of time (and his own money) into a doomed experiment to reform English spelling. He and many others thought spelling in English could be simplified and regulated to iron out apparent difficulties. This approach did not sufficiently take into account the fact that speech and writing are two separate systems. The futility of these attempts were very pithily (and accurately) satirised by Mark Twain in his Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling.

It is worth noting that this same period also gave rise to another experiment in artificial language which was doomed to failure – the invention of Esperanto, a totally fabricated, so-called international language created by a Polish linguist Ludwik Zamenhof in 1887.

Esperanto was an amalgam of Latinate languages and it made sense to anyone who had studied French, Spanish, Italian and Latin. However, because of its artificiality and the fact that it did not therefore reflect a culture, it lacked life and remained a flat inanimate system of vocabulary and grammar.

Pygmalion – study resources

Pygmalion Pygmalion – Penguin edition – Amazon UK

Pygmalion Pygmalion – York Notes – Amazon UK

Pygmalion Pygmalion – 1938 film – Amazon UK

Pygmalion Pygmalion – Penguin edition – Amazon US

Pygmalion My Fair Lady – at Amazon US

Pygmalion Pygmalion – at Wikipedia

Daily Telegraph article
Mark Bostridge discusses the origins of the play, its sensational first night, and the problems of its controversial ending.

Pygmalion – plot summary

Act One

Mrs Eynsford-Hill with her daughter Clara and son Freddy are sheltering from the rain in Covent Garden after a concert with some others. When Freddy is despatched to find a cab he bumps into Eliza, a Cockney flower girl. She tries to sell her produce to a bystander Colonel Pickering, whilst nearby Professor Henry Higgins is taking notes on her pronunciation. Higgins then identifies everyone’s origins from their accents. It emerges that he and Pickering are both interested in phonetics and were on their way to meet each other. Higgins claims he can transform Eliza into a Duchess by changing her accent and speech. He gives her some loose change, which enables her to take a cab back home.

Act Two

Pickering is visiting Higgins in his ‘laboratory’ when Eliza turns up, offering to pay for elocution lessons. She wants to speak properly so that she can get a job working in a shop. Pickering challenges Higgins to make her socially acceptable, and offers to pay for the lessons. Higgins patronises Eliza, but offers to take her on permanently when she reveals that she has no family. The housekeeper Mrs Pearce offers common sense objections, but Higgins over-rules them. Pickering wonders about Higgins’ probity, but Higgins reveals that he distrusts women and is therefore a confirmed bachelor. Mrs Pearce reappears to ask Higgins to be more careful about his language and his table manners, and announces the arrival of Eliza’s father, Mr Doolittle. After verbal skirmishes with Higgins, Doolittle arranges to sell Eliza for five pounds. As he leaves, Eliza re-enters in clean new clothes.

Act Three

Some months later Higgins arrives at his mother’s house. She reproaches him for his lack of good manners and for still being a bachelor. He has invited Eliza to visit his mother on her ‘at-home’ day. The Enysford Hills and Pickering arrive, followed by Eliza, who speaks with exaggerated correctness. But during the ensuing conversation she lapses into topics from lower-class life and swears as she takes her leave. Higgins and Pickering congratulate themselves on the improvements they have brought about, but Mrs Higgins warns them that they have neglected to think about Eliza’s future.

Act Four

Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza arrive home at midnight following her successful debut in society. Higgins complains that he is tired of their experiment and now finds the whole thing a bore. Eliza explodes with anger at his self-centredness. She perceives that she has no future. He suggests that she marry someone. They argue about what belongs to her, and he accuses her of treating him badly. They part violently on bad terms.

Act Five

Next morning at Mrs Higgins’ house Higgins and Pickering arrive, worried that Eliza has disappeared. Mr Doolittle arrives, transformed into the appearance of a toff by the good fortune of an inheritance from an American benefactor. He complains that his newfound wealth has brought him nothing but problems. Mrs Higgins reveals that Eliza is upstairs and she hopes to reconcile her with her son. But when Eliza appears Higgins insults and patronises her again.

Eliza explains that she has learned to be a lady from the good example of politeness and respect presented to her by Pickering. Doolittle reveals that he is on his way to get married, and asks Pickering to help him through the ceremony. This leaves Higgins and Eliza to continue their argument. He claims that he cannot change and that he treats everybody in the same way. He continues to be arrogant and patronising, whilst inviting her back to live with him. She explains that a woman wants both respect and love, and that is what Freddy is offering her. When challenged by Higgins she claims she can even support herself by working in phonetics, something he has taught her so well. The play ends inconclusively.

Pygmalion – film version


1938 film version – Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller

Pygmalion – principal characters
Mrs Eynsford Hill fallen upper-class woman
Freddy her unemployed and talentless son
Clara her unmarried and snobbish daughter
Colonel Pickering a retired army officer
Henry Higgins an upper-class professor of phonetics
Mrs Pearce housekeeper to Higgins
Eliza Doolittle a Cockney flower-seller
Mr Alfred Doolittle her father, a dustman

Radical Larkin

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‘A Study of Reading [and Writing] Habits’

Radical Larkin, John Osborne’s second book on Philip Larkin is (like the first) polemical: ‘Larkin died in 1985. No-one now under 40 (and few enough aged 50) can really be said to have known the man. The future of his reputation is passing irrevocably out of the hands of those who knew him and into those who did not’. It also strikes postures: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, in place of the obdurately English poet of the critical consensus, I offer you Philip Larkin, master of deterritorialization’.

Radical LarkinThe pugilistic Osborne (a light heavy-weight) throws some below the belt punches at such distinguished Larkin commentators as Andrew Motion, who believes that the poems are autobiographical (‘as Larkin’s biographer he would say that, wouldn’t he?’), Trevor Tolley (‘A master of thinking inside the box’), Anthony Thwaite (who ‘twice recycled Larkin’s Betjeman review without referencing the source’), and James Booth (‘not because he is the worst exponent’ of ‘the conventional view of Philip Larkin as a lyric poet….but its best’.) David Timms and Richard Palmer stand jointly accused of having ‘converted [Larkin] from what he is, the greatest poet of doubt and ambiguity since Hardy, into a poet of certitude, often to the point of bigotry’. Even Archie Burnett, editor of Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012), to which Osborne declares himself greatly indebted, is taken to task for including ‘mere scraps of verse’ (Burnett’s own phrase) in his magisterial compilation.

Osborne’s reiterated contention is that Larkin’s poems are not autobiographical but rather the creations of ‘a professional intertextualist’ which require ‘a post-authocentric’ reading and analysis. He focuses on such seminal poems as An Arundel Tomb, The Whitsun Weddings, This Be the Verse and Aubade – as well as his second novel A Girl in Winter.

Warming to these themes, Osborne liberally sprinkles his text with such unattractive words and phrases as ‘Phonocentrism’, ‘Anti-Textualism’, ‘Radical Ekphrasis’, ‘Radical Deterritorialization’ and ‘Radical De-essentialism’. At one point his taste for neologisms leads him astray. He heads one section ‘A monstrance against the sexing of texts.’ The word monstrance either means ‘demonstration or proof’ in Middle English or ‘an open or transparent vessel in which the host is exposed’ in contemporary English. Osborne actually wants to launch ‘an assault’ upon ‘biographicalism’ and his choice of words is baffling.

Unlike Larkin’s, much of Osborne’s language is convoluted, and presumably directed at a ‘post-modernist’ readership. Summarising his contentions in Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence, Osborne reminds his readers that Larkin’s techniques ‘include ellipsis, a four-act structure with closing reversal, asymmetrical stanza lengths and rhyme schemes, plus a battery of disaggregative linguistic devices such as split similes, negative qualifiers, oxymora and rampant paronomasia’. In this new book, such doubtful coinages as ‘the sexing and racing of narrators or addressees’ do little to aid comprehension.

In his chapter on The Whitsun Weddings, Osborne triumphantly ‘proves’ – largely thanks to Burnett’s researches – that Larkin’s famous train journey (from Hull to King’s Cross) never took place, and cautions that most of his poems ‘tell one nothing about the gender, race, class or nationality of either their narrators or their addressees’. Yet Larkin’s champions and detractors ‘fill in the missing information by jumping to the conclusion that the protagonist is always and only a white, male, middle-class Englishman named Philip Larkin’. Osborne presses his ‘intertextual’ reinterpretation of The Whitsun Weddings to a ludicrous conclusion when he suggests that the line ‘Free at last!’ reflects not only the poet’s well-known passion for jazz and its roots in African-American spirituals and blues, but also echoes Martin Luther King’s famous peroration in his 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington, DC so ‘the reader has been licensed to speculate whether the narrator might be an American visitor to these shores, and not necessarily a white one’. These putative Americans (whatever their ‘racing’ or ‘sexing’) might well expostulate: ‘Pur-leeze!’

But Radical Larkin does contain original insights into some of the poet’s ‘greatest hits’. Four examples substantiate the point. As a poem, Vers de Société relates ‘the foibles of polite society. In Larkin this becomes something else: a meditation on the merits of social life, the life lived in company, versus those of the meditative life, the life of solitude’. Then, This Be The Verse, with its much-quoted opening lines

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.

is described as ‘a tweet-sized poem of atomic destructiveness detonated by laughter’. Larkin’s last great poem, Aubade, is ‘a masterpiece which affords a barometric reading of late millennial Western culture as encapsulated in its ideologies of death’. And finally, commenting on At Grass, Osborne shows that he is perfectly capable of writing clearly while offering a perceptive analysis:

…it surely offers as complex a statement as may be found in our literature of the mixed emotions with which we approach the constraints and the liberations of the later stages of life. This subsuming of the elegiac into a more nuanced address to the neglected subject of retirement is a good example of Larkin’s genius for involving poetic genres only to elude them…

Unfortunately, such astute judgements are few and far between in the densely-packed pages of Radical Larkin. Too much space is taken up by Osborne’s (generally informed) comments on Western art, sculpture and literature. And, unless one applauds his statements that ‘it would do no harm to Larkin studies if for the foreseeable future we desisted from visiting the (imaginary) certitudes of the life upon the work but rather visited the (real) polyvalency of the work upon the life’, or ‘not only do [Larkin’s] poems sabotage conventional pieties regarding church, state, nationality, marriage, gender, race and capital, but in the process they play a central role in the cultural transition to postmodern indeterminacy’, I can only recommend this book to those willing to struggle with the postmodern terminology.

© John White 2014

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John Osborne, Radical Larkin: Seven Types of Technical Mastery, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 292, ISBN: 0230348246

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Ravelstein

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Ravelstein (2000) was Saul Bellow’s last novel. It follows a pattern established by his earlier work, Humboldt’s Gift (1975) in being a fictional character sketch based on one of his real-life friends. In this case the novel is a homage to Allan Bloom, a philosopher and cultural theorist colleague with whom he collaborated at the University of Chicago.

Ravelstein

And like the earlier work it is also a double portrait, since we learn as much about the first-person narrator, his biographer ‘Chick’, as we do about the subject Ravelstein. There is every reason to believe that Chick is a fictionalised version of Saul Bellow – who like Chick is a distinguished intellectual beset by problems with women, old age, and money.

Ravelstein – critical comment

Biography

The novel raises interesting problems in the relationship between imaginative fiction and the lives of real historical human beings. Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow were colleagues at the University of Chicago, and like their fictional counterparts (Ravelstein and Chick) they ran joint seminars on political and social philosophy.

It is quite clear that, apart from changing a few names, Bellow makes little attempt to hide or blur the distinctions between fiction and reality. The novel becomes a sort of memoir-cum-documentary, and it should be said that it is very much a ‘campus novel’. Ravelstein might be a larger-than-life character – but the depiction of university life is perfectly credible. Ravelstein is hated by his colleagues because of his cleverness, and because he has produced a best-selling book.

Ravelstein promotes the interests of his favoured students, who remain faithful to him when they pass on to employment in the institutions of government and state. And both he and his friend Chick hold the rest of the staff in lofty disregard, honouring only a few eccentrics and originals.

Some of the more amusing excesses are clearly exaggerations of Allan Bloom’s personal idiosyncrasies. However, the difficulty for most readers is that the boundaries between literary invention and documentary memoir are quite blurred. Ravelstein is technically a fictional character, and should be interpreted as such – but the gravitational pull towards regarding the events and opinions of the novel as representing an accurate portrait of Allan Bloom are almost too strong to resist.

The novel was controversial when it was first published – largely because it presented a frank depiction of Allan Bloom’s homosexuality, which had not been widely recognised previously. Even more so, the novel presents an unsparing depiction of his death from HIV-AIDS, which many commentators felt was an unwarranted trespass upon his privacy.

Bellow’s defence is built in to the novel itself. Bloom (Ravelstein) had asked Bellow (‘Chick’) to write a memoir which was truthful and did not hold back on any unpleasant details. Both writers are now dead – so the debate on taste and accuracy can take place with time and distance from the historical events.

The subject

The novel is an amusing and very entertaining character study of the larger-than-life university professor Ravelstein. It is also a portrait of his friend ‘Chick’, the fellow academic who is composing the fictional memoir. Ravelstein is trying to keep alive classical erudition in the face of cultural vulgarity and what we now call ‘political correctness’.

Chick casts himself as a supportive colleague who appreciates Ravelstein’s ‘greatness of soul’ and who struggles in his own social wake of previous wives, financial problems, and worries about his own cultural identity. What they have in common, and what becomes the gradually emerging subject of the novel is their Jewishness. As Ravelstein approaches death he becomes more and more concerned with the standards against which he measures the people. He is particularly acute at spotting the faintest traces of anti-Semitism, and holds every suspect up against their record of political allegiance in the 1930s and the Second World War.

Chick is initially sceptical about Ravelstein’s demanding standards, but he too eventually reflects on the very big issues of Jewish identity in the twentieth century:

I’m thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labour camps. Why does the century—I don’t know how else to put it—underwrite so much destruction.

This is the real subject of the novel – and what makes it a powerful statement, almost a summation of Saul Bellow’s work over a quarter of a century. These are major world issues, and he does not shrink from including the Gulag with Auschwitz and Treblinka

In connection with the issue of race and American society, it might be worth mentioning that at no time does Bellow consider the subject of African-Americans who were also ‘immigrants’. They however were imported against their will into a protestant God-fearing society who exploited and persecuted them.

He was not obliged to cover every racial issue in the flux of American life in this one novel. But it is slightly surprising that the close parallels between European Jewish immigrants (fleeing from persecution) and Africans (imprisoned in a slave culture) did not occur to him as a fruitful point of comparison.

Structhure

The first three quarters of the novel are entirely homogeneous. The subject matter, tone, and location are skilfully integrated and fluently handled. But then following the death of Ravelstein there are switches in location and subject, which severely disrupt the unity of the novel’s effect.

At this point Ravelstein disappears as the central figure of interest, and the geographic location switches from Boston to the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. What was a study in intellectual history, a comic study of academic life, and a meditation on death becomes a satirical critique of shoddy popular tourism.

This part of the story leads to Chick’s gastric poisoning and his own confrontation with near-death. In this sense there is a continuity of the theme of ‘meditations on death’. But then the final scenes of the novel are packed with Chick’s hallucinatory fantasies which add very little to the novel’s central concerns.

Bellow describes Chick’s close encounter rather than lingering over the details of Ravelstein’s final days – and the parallels of the two acute medical experiences help to rescue the book’s structure in its final stages. But there is a very unnerving narrative wobble for fifty pages which almost ruins the book’s final effect.

Ravelstein – study resources

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon US

Ravelstein Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

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

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

Ravelstein Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Ravelstein

Ravelstein – plot synopsis

Abe Ravelstein and his colleague Chick are academics from Chicago staying at the Hotel Crillon in Paris. Ravelstein wants someone to write an account of his life before he dies. His older friend Chick reflects on the nature of biography. Ravelstein is rich, successful, and has connections in high places.

Ravelstein has very expensive tastes in food, clothes, and home decor. Previously he was in debt, but Chick persuaded him to write a popular book on political philosophy. It was a big success and made him wealthy – but he has remained unpopular with his colleagues. In Paris Ravelstein buys an expensive jacket, but then spills coffee on it.

Chick is tolerant of his foibles, because he feels that Ravelstein has important issues in view and is maintaining high standards in cultural values. At the same time however, Ravelstein throws pizza parties and invites his students to watch sport on television, meanwhile taking phone calls from state department insiders on the progress of the Gulf War.

Chick’s English colleague Battle thinks that Ravelstein is looking even more ill than normal. Chick reveals that Ravelstein had an attack of an unspecified disease (HIV-AIDS) whilst in Paris. He recovers slowly, continuing to smoke whilst in hospital.

Ravelstein buys an expensive BMW for his lover Nikki. Whilst waiting for his discharge from the clinic, Chick reads a biography of John Maynard Keynes, which is focussed on Jews present at the Armistice negotiations in 1919 and anti-Semitism amongst the participants. Chick also reveals being divorced by his previous wife Vela.

Ravelstein arrives back from the clinic in a hospital bed, severely disabled by AIDS. Chick reflects on his childhood and what he has learned from life. Ravelstein was critical and jealous of Chick’s earlier marriage to Vela. He also criticises Chick as a fellow Jew for escaping into what he regards as a phoney arcadia of New Hampshire. And he is scathing about Chick’s socialising with a Balkan charmer who was a pre-war Nazi sympathiser.

Both Chick’s brothers die, and Vela sues him for divorce. Ravelstein again asks Chick to write his memoir. Chick prectises by producing sketches of their colleagues Rackmiel Kogan and Morris Herbst. Battle and his wife visit Ravelstein for advice about their planned suicide pact. Chick and Ravelstein discuss the onset of death and what it means.

Six years later Ravelstein is dead. Chick has problems starting his memoir. Instead, he considers mass exterminations in Russia and Germany in the twentieth century. He recalls Ravelstein’s last days and their discussions of anti-Semitic writers Kipling and Céline.

As he approaches death, Ravelstein turns to his Judaism and urges Chick to do the same. Chick reflects on ‘the final solution’.

After Ravelstein’s death, Chick and Rosamund take a vacation in the Caribbean. It is supposed to be a paradise of relaxation, but Chick describes it as a ‘tropical slum’. He falls ill with an infection that becomes quite serious. They fly back to Boston where he is taken into intensive care with pneumonia. He becomes delirious and starts hallucinating and at one point is put into a strait-jacket. He almost dies, but revives with the help of doctors and his wife Rosamund. On recovery he realises that he owes it to Ravelstein to start work on the memoir.

Ravelstein – principal characters
Abe Ravelstein a professor of philosophy and classics at the University of Chicago
Tay Lang (“Nikki”) Ravelstein’s Malaysian gay lover
’Chick’ Ravelstein’s old friend at Chicago – the narrator
Vela Chick’s previous wife, a chaos theorist
Rosamund Chick’s current wife and former student
Radu Grielescu a Balkan charmer and former fascist

© Roy Johnson 2017

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Twentieth century literature

Revenge

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

Revenge was written in the early spring of 1924 and was published in
Russkoye Ekho in April 1924. In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed the story under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, and it was first included in Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1995.

Revenge

Vladimir Nabokov

Revenge – critical commentary

This is an early (and rather crude) example of Nabokov’s love of the grotesque, coupled with his penchant for narrative suspense and playfulness, as well as the use of irony and the dramatic twist.

The contents of the professor’s second suitcase are not revealed – but we know that fellow passengers on board the cross Channel ferry think it is something unusual. The professor has previously joked to a student trying to assist him that it is ‘Something everybody needs. Why, you travel with the same kind of thing yourself. Eh? Or perhaps you are a polyp?’

So – we know the professor wishes to murder his wife, but we do not know that the suitcase contains a skeleton. And the suspense generated by these two features of the narrative (and the connection between them) is not resolved until the final words of the story.

The principal irony is that the professor’s young wife actually loves him, even though he is an unattractive bully, and her note to ‘Jack’ is just a girlish piece of romantic nonsense written to an imaginary man who has appeared to her in a dream. But the professor wants her to die in the most excruciating way possible – something he actually fails to achieve, for we are led to believe that she has died of fright.

Nabokov also shows his early love of first person narrators and self-referentiality in fiction – that is, stories that comment upon themselves. In the opening of the narrative a student and his sister are discussing the professor’s appearance and his similarity to a comic actor:

‘He’s really enjoying the sea,’ the girl added sotto voce. Whereupon, I regret to say, she drops out of my story.

Narrators commenting on their own narratives became almost a hallmark of Nabokov’s later works as both a novelist and writer of short stories. It is also worth noting that his narrators sometimes became increasingly unreliable – reaching perhaps what is a highpoint in his novel Pale Fire where Charles Kinbote comments on and interprets another writer’s work – to create a narrative which is an elaborate, gigantic, and very amusing lie.

Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Revenge – study resources

Revenge The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Revenge Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

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

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

Revenge Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Revenge – plot summary

Part 1   A middle-aged biology professor is travelling back from a scientific congress in Berlin to his home in England. On the Ostend ferry he has two suitcases – one old and well-travelled, the other new and orange-coloured. He has hired a private detective to spy on his much younger wife and received evidence of a love note she has written to a man called Jack. He has therefore determined to murder his wife. At the customs inspection the contents of the orange suitcase amaze his fellow travellers.

Part 2   His young wife who believes in ghosts has written a note to Jack, a man who has appeared to her in a dream, but in fact she loves her husband the professor even though he is jealous of her and very temperamental.

When he arrives home he makes fun of her beliefs then tells her a macabre story about a woman whose body unravels until she is just a corpse. He then goes to bed and tells her to follow him. She prepares herself then joins him in the dark, snuggling up to him under the covers. But her husband has put into their bed the skeleton of a hunchback, and she dies of shock on making contact with it.

Revenge – further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

PninPnin 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.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Collected StoriesCollected 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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© Roy Johnson 2014

Ripley Under Ground

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

Ripley Under Ground (1977) is the second of Patricia Highsmith’s novels featuring her anti-hero Tom Ripley. He is a young and ambitious American from a poor background who has a taste for art, luxuries, and fine living. He is enterprising and imaginative, likes to takes chances, and is not averse to murdering anybody who gets in his way.

Ripley Under Ground

There is a series of five Ripley novels, which have become known collectively as The Ripliad. They are self-contained and can be enjoyed separately – but an acquaintance with their chronological development adds depth to their meaning – particularly the ironic contrasts between Ripley’s refined social tastes and his shocking exploits.

Ripley Under Ground – commentary

Background

Since the events of The Talented Mr Ripley (1970) Tom Ripley has ‘retired’ to live in France, and has married Heloise Plisson. He has three sources of income – all gained illegally. The first is Dickie Greenleaf’s inheritance, which he has appropriated by forging Dickie’s will. The second is a business centred on the creation of fake paintings by an artist Derwatt, who is now dead. The third is a courier service for illegal goods sent to him by an associate Reeves Minot from Hamburg.

Ripley has escaped detection for the murders of Dickie Greenleaf and Freddie Miles, and yet a certain opprobrium attaches itself to his name. He is also supported by regular maintenance payments his wife receives from her father, a millionaire pharmaceutical manufacturer who is sceptical about her marriage to Ripley.

Murder and morality

What makes this and the other Ripley novels interesting is the tension between Ripley as a character and what he does. We know that he is a confidence trickster who is living off other people’s money; that he is prepared to adopt another person’s identity; forge letters; lie to the police; and generally evade detection so that he can go on living a comfortable life.

That is Part One of the down side to his character. But he also has positive characteristics. He likes good food and wine; he takes an interest in art; he is considerate to friends and neighbours; and his taste in fine clothes and furniture is based on a genuine appreciation of their quality – not on any snobbish and nouveau-riche accumulation of status objects.

Part Two of his character however, is problematic. Not only does he break the law in matters of finance and irregular business practices – he actually murders people. This is more difficult to defend.

The only possible defence is aesthetic – an acceptance that Patricia Highsmith is offering an entertaining character study in radical existentialism. She makes her protagonist an intelligent and cultivated character who rationalises his crimes by only murdering ‘unsympathetic’ characters. It also has to be said that some of the murderous situations in which Ripley finds himself can be quite funny – in a macabre, black humour sort of way.

Ripley the Protean

We know from the first of the Ripley novels that he is very skillful at imitating the sound of other people’s voices. In Ripley Under Ground he goes one further and convincingly impersonates someone (Derwatt) who has died a few years previously. He transforms himself twice to pull off this trick – though it has to be said that none of the people before whom he puts on this performance would know what Derwatt originally looked like.

Ripley also identifies very intently with certain other people – usually the underdog. He understands why Bernard Tufts wishes to abandon his role as a Derwatt imitator and return to his own career as a painter. This will bring one element of Ripley’s profitable company Derwatt Ltd to a close, but he sympathises with Bernard’s plight – possibly as a fellow amateur painter himself.

Indeed, he carries this sympathy to extraordinary lengths, because Bernard blames Ripley for bringing him to a personal crisis of identity and twice tries to kill him. He even buries him alive (hence the book’s title) yet Ripley seemingly bears no grudge against him.

Ripley also has multiple identities. He lives an apparently blameless life in a quiet French village; yet he has a corrupt business network that stretches to Hamburg and London. He is quite happy to travel on a forged passport. He is a gentleman to his housekeeper, a devoted husband to his wife, and a secretive mystery to everyone else.

Ripley also flits quite easily between two languages – English and French. (We learn later that he also speaks Italian.) In fact he is something of an amateur linguaphile – and he often wonders what the word for an object is in a number of different languages.

The conclusion

Without doubting for a moment Patricia Highsmith’s skill at plotting, her attention to detail, and her knowledge of the technicalities of crime – the conclusion to Ripley Under Ground does seem to raise a few problems.

The novel ends with Bernard’s suicide and Tom’s cremation of the body. We learn in the next novel Ripley Under Ground that Tom returned to the scene of this gruesome bonfire with Inspector Webster, to be questioned closely about the incident – which the police mistakenly think is the death of Derwatt.

Ripley is able to talk his way out of things as usual. But surely there is something more fundamentally wrong here? It is difficult to believe that failing to report a death (Bernard’s suicidal fall over the cliff) would not be regarded as a crime in most European countries. Even more seriously – the private cremation of an unreported dead body would be a very serious crime indeed.

Ripley does his best to remove evidence for identifying the corpse by shattering the skull and detaching the lower jawbone. At that time (prior to DNA technology) recognition of unidentified bodies was often based on dental records, of which there are none for Derwatt. This is a typical and delicious double plot irony on Highsmith’s part, since it was not Derwatt’s corpse that was cremated, but Bernard’s.

But these macabre details apart, surely Inspector Webster or the Salzburg police would have arrested Ripley for the unofficial cremation of an unidentified corpse in a pubic place?

Highsmith was operating within a literary genre (the crime thriller) that often has less exacting standards of logic and credibility in its narratives than the traditional realist novel of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Yet such is the quality of her writing and the seriousness of her themes that she seems to invite comparisons with this tradition.

The giants of the realist novel didn’t always avoid technical errors in their work. From Wuthering Heights (1847) to Nostromo (1904) there are chronological infelicities and logical flaws in many classic narratives – but they tend to be of a minor nature and not crucial to the outcome of events.

Highsmith plays slightly fast and lose in this respect with the credibility of her narratives. For instance, Ripley’s often-absent wife Heloise, who comes from a very ‘respectable’ family, actually tolerates the fact that her husband is a murderer. She knows Ripley has killed Murchison in their wine cellar – but she remains unconcerned and as peripheral to the narrative as Highsmith requires for a tidy conclusion. This part of the story is simply not credible in realistic terms.

Ripley’s Game – study resources

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Under Ground – Penguin – Amazon UK

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Under Ground – Penguin – Amazon US

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Under Ground – Kindle – Amazon UK

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Under Ground – Kindle – Amazon US

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Complete – Box Set – Amazon UK

Ripley Under Ground

Patricia Highsmith

The complete Ripliad

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Ripley Under Ground (1970)

Ripley Under Ground (1974)

The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)

Ripley Under Water (1991)

Ripley Under Ground – plot summary

Tom Ripley is living in a large house called Belle Ombre with gardens outside Paris. He is married to Heloise and running a fraudulent art business in London dealing in faked paintings by Bernard Tufts in the style of an artist Derwatt who has died some years ago in Greece. Ripley also acts as an intermediary in shady business transactions with his associate Reeves Minot in Hamburg.

An exhibition of Dewatt’s work is due to open, and one customer is going to challenge the authenticity of a work he has bought. Tom proposes to act the part of Derwatt at the opening of the exhibition.

He dresses in disguise and answers questions from the press. Then the American collector Murchison claims that paintings are being faked. He wants an expert opinion and thinks the gallery’s records of sale should be inspected. Tom invites Murchison to Paris to compare Derwatt paintings.

They have dinner and discuss the pros and cons of forgery. Next day prior to his departure for London, Tom appeals to Murchison’s sporting sense on the issue of forgeries. When Murchison flatly refuses, Tom kills him in his wine cellar.

Tom drives to Orly airport, dumps Murchison’s suitcase and painting, then collects a courier from Reeves. He takes the courier back for dinner and extracts a microfilm hidden in a tube of toothpaste.

Next day he receives a letter announcing the arrival from California of Chris Greenleaf (Dickie’s younger cousin). The he starts burying Murchison’s body in some nearby woods. Next day Chris arrives and the police start asking questions about Murchison, all of which Ripley answers quite convincingly.

Bernard Tufts suddenly arrives and acts strangely. He wants to put an end to the Derwatt forgeries, and wishes to confess his part in the swindle – so as to reclaim his own identity and self-esteem as a serious painter.

Bernard helps Tom to dig up the body, which they dump in a river some distance away. A London police inspector Webster arrives. Tom appears to answer all his questions quite truthfully.

Bernard is depressed and suddenly disappears. Heloise arrives from Greece and discovers a body hanging in the cellar. It turns out to be a dummy, made by Bernard to represent the death of his old self.

Bernard turns up again and wants to stay. That night he tries to kill Tom, who he blames for all his problems. Next day he attacks Tom again and buries him in Murchison’s old grave. Tom manages to escape, but thinks it will be safer to act as if dead.

He orders new fake passports from Reeves in Hamburg, flies to the Greek islands in search of Bernard, but finds nothing. Back in London he makes a final appearance as Derwatt. He confronts Inspector Webster and Mrs Murchison, but answers their queries with half truths. But as Heloise becomes more suspicious he confesses to her that he has killed Murchison.

Tom flies to Salzburg where he spots Bernard in the Mozart museum. When they meet again in a restaurant, Bernard is clearly shocked to find Tom alive. Next day Tom pursues Bernard through the outskirts of town
until Bernard falls over a cliff and dies from the fall. Tom returns to the scene and very laboriously cremates the body.

Tom goes back home where Webster arrives next day. He questions Tom closely about the two (apparent) deaths in Salzburg. But Tom has all the necessary answers, and lives on to feature in two further volumes of The Ripliad.

Ripley Under Ground – characters
Tom Ripley a young American confidence man
Heloise Plisson his beautiful and wealthy wife
Bernard Tufts an amateur painter and forger
Jeff Constant a photographer and gallery owner
Edmund Banbury journalist and gallery owner
Thomas Murchison an American industrialist and art collector
Chris Greenleaf younger cousin of Dickie Greenleaf
Cynthia Gradnor Bernard’s disillusioned girlfriend

© Roy Johnson 2017

More Patricia Highsmith
Twentieth century literature
More on short stories

Ripley’s Game

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

Ripley’s Game (1974) is the third in a series of novels by Patricia Highsmith featuring her anti-hero Tom Ripley. He is an ambitious young American who has come from a poor background, but who has a taste for good quality living.

Ripley's Game

There are five novels in the series, which have become known collectively as The Ripliad. Each one is self-contained and can be enjoyed separately – but a knowledge of their chronological development adds a great deal of depth to their meaning – particularly the ironic contrasts between Ripley’s refined social tastes and his shocking exploits.

Ripley’s Game – commentary

Background

Ripley is living ‘retired’ in a quiet French village near Paris, married to Heloise Plisson. He has three sources of income – all gained illegally. The first is Dickie Greenleaf’s inheritance, which he has appropriated by forging Dickie’s will. The second is the remains of a business Derwatt Ltd centred on an artist Derwatt, who is now dead. The third is a courier service for illegal goods sent to him by an associate Reeves Minot from Hamburg.

He is also subsidised by a monthly allowance paid by Heloise’s millionaire father Ripley spends his time gardening and occasionally painting, studying languages, and enjoying the haut cuisine of his French housekeeper

The main theme

As in the two preceding Ripley novels, the main theme underlying the dramatic main events of the novel is a relationship between Ripley and another male – in this case the Englishman Jonathan Trevanny. Ripley introduces him to Reeves as a potential assassin for no more reason that he insulted him at a party. “Oh, we’ve heard about you” says Jonathan innocently.

Ripley knows that Jonathan has a serious illness, and he knows that he is vulnerable. He wonders prospectively, and correctly, if such a person would be tempted by the prospect of easy money to commit a crime. He is correct: Jonathan accepts the offer.

But having set the snare and inveigled Jonathan into a world of murder and deception, Ripley begins to feel responsible for him. He joins Jonathan on the Mozart Express out of Munich to execute the Mafia murders, and he later invites him to defend Belle Ombre against an attack by Mafia hit men.

The main theme is not simply crime and its non-detection – it is the psychological relationship between two men. They appear to be antagonists or in opposition to each other – but are drawn closer by a perverse sort of logic.

It is significant that Ripley’s wife Heloise is routinely absent when these developments are taking place. His primary attachments in the novels are to Dickie Greenleaf, Bernard Tufts, and Jonathan Trevanny – all men whose deaths he brings about.

Ripley is even correct about Jonathan’s wife Simone – who hates Ripley for the havoc he brings to her family. Simone disapproves of Jonathan’s association with Ripley, who she suspects of being a criminal (which he is). She thinks the money Jonathan gains is tainted with illegaility (which it is). And yet following Jonathan’s death at the end of the novel, she is left with a numbered Swiss bank account containing forty thousand Francs, and when she spits at Tom en passant in the street, he realises that she has decided to stay quiet:

But if Simone hadn’t decided to hang on to the money in Switzerland, she wouldn’t have bothered spitting and he himself would be in prison.

For all Simone’s strong Catholic morality Tom knows she has also bought a new house in Toulouse with this money, and is thus implicated in the overall crime..

Black humour

Many of the features of Ripley’s character and the grand guignol elements of the plot require both a strong stomach and a willingness to share Patricia Highsmith’s sense of black humour.

For instance, having implicated Jonathan Trevanny in the murder plot, Ripley is genuinely concerned about his ‘innocence’ and the delicacy of his sensibility. When the Mafiosa attack Belle Ombre, Ripley invites Jonathan to go into the kitchen so that he doesn’t have to witness his garrotting of the Mafiosi Lippi.

The ending

There is a slightly unsatisfactory dramatisation in the finale of the narrative – and what might be called a ‘false body count’. When four Mafia hit men arrive at Jonathan Trevanny’s house, Ripley kills the first two of them with hammer blows to the head. He then escapes the scene, and the two deaths are later reported in the newspapers as ‘two Italians, also shot’.

We know from the text that no shots were fired at the Mafiosi, so that account is not true. Now it is possible that Patricia Highsmith might be pointing to slipshod newspaper journalism here. But it is inconceivable that police would not know the difference between death by shooting and hammer blows. They would also want to know who had administered the blows – but the whole incident (three deaths in all) is glossed over and left unresolved.

Ripley’s Game – film adaptations

Italian director Liliana Cavani takes a few liberties with the events of the novel for her 2003 screen adaptation. The film opens with a sequence that features Ripley and Reeves defrauding art dealers in Berlin. This is clearly a nod back to the Derwatt episodes of the previous novel Ripley Under Ground (1970). Cavani also transforms Ripley’s house Belle Ombre into a much grander establishment than that described in the novel, and she relocates it to the Veneto region of Italy.

But apart from that the movie is faithful to the original. Film enthusiasts might wish to know that the Italian director left her entire film project unfinished. It was completed by its multi-talented star John Malkovich

Highsmith’s novel was also previously adapted in 1977 as The American Friend by German director Wim Wenders, starring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz.

Ripley’s Game – study resources

Ripley's Game Ripley’s Game – Penguin – Amazon UK

Ripley's Game Ripley’s Game – Penguin – Amazon US

Ripley's Game Ripley’s Game – Kindle – Amazon UK

Ripley's Game Ripley’s Game – Kindle – Amazon US

Ripley's Game Ripley’s Game – DVD film – Amazon UK

Ripley's Game Ripley’s Game – DVD film – Amazon US

Ripley's Game The American Friend – DVD film – Amazon UK

Ripley's Game The American Friend – DVD film – Amazon US

Ripley’s Game Ripley Complete – Box Set – Amazon UK

Ripley's Game

The complete Ripliad

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Ripley Under Ground (1970)

Ripley’s Game (1974)

The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)

Ripley Under Water (1991)

Ripley's Game

Patricia Highsmith

Ripley’s Game – plot summary

Gangster Reeves Minot wants Tom Ripley to supply an assassin who will rid him of unwanted Mafia competition in the German gambling business. Tom refuses the job but thinks an innocent neighbour with leukaemia might do it for the money.

Jonathan Trevanny visits his local doctor to check on a rumour that his blood cancer is getting worse. He is reassured, but art shop owner Gauthier will not reveal who gave him the information. We learn that this was Ripley.

Tom writes to Reeves recommending Jonathan as a potential victim. Reeves visits Jonathan and makes his proposition – a huge payout for one piece of work. Jonathan immediately requests further medical tests, which are delayed.

Reeves writes offering to pay full expenses for a specialist in Germany. Jonathan travels to Hamburg where Reeves briefs him on the assassination. Jonathan has the tests and Reeves lays on all the necessary arrangements.

Jonathan collects his results, which are not good. He then goes to the U-Bahn and shoots Bianca the Mafia button man. He is not paid as promised, but goes home relieved.

Reeves produces more money and a numbered Swiss bank account – but he wants another assassination, which Jonathan refuses. Tom visits Jonathan, then tells Reeves to ‘keep trying’.

Jonathan joins Reeves in Munich, has tests, then takes the Mozart Express for Paris. He is joined by Tom, who has begun to feel responsible for Jonathan. Tom uses a garrotte to murder the Mafia boss Marcangelo and one of his bodyguards. Then they throw the bodies off the train. Jonathan stops off in Strasbourg.

The bodyguard is not dead. Back in Villeperce, Tom reassures Jonathan. Reeves’ flat in Hamburg is bombed. Tom buys a harpsichord for Heloise, and Jonathan buys a Chesterfield for Simone., who begins to be suspicious about the money and the connection with Ripley. Then art dealer Gathier is killed in a hit and run accident.

Reeves changes his name and moves to Amsterdam. The Mafia bodyguard is reported dead Simone finds the Swiss bank account and is hostile to Jonathan. Tom receives anonymous phone calls. He fears the Mafia are going to attack him at home. He invites Jonathan to join him – along with a gun.

The Mafiosi arrive. Jonathan kills the first, then Tom interrogates the second before killing him with his own garrotte. Suddenly, Simone arrives, sees the corpses, and is then sent home.

Tom and Jonathan drive south through the night, then set fire to the two bodies in the car. Jonathan then goes into hospital for a blood transfusion, whilst Tom tries to ‘explain’ to a hostile Simone – without success

The two cremated bodies are found, and Simone continues hostilities towards Jonathan. When Tom takes Jonathan home, they are attacked by further Mafia hit men. Tom kills two of them with a hammer. But then two more in a car shoot Jonathan, who dies. Reeves has been tortured by the Mafia and led them to Jonathan’s house. Tom escapes with Reeves and despatches him to Zurich.

Ripley’s Game – characters
Tom Ripley an American bon viveur living near Paris
Heloise Plisson his rich young and attractive wife
Reeves Minot an American gangster based in Hamburg
Jonathan Trevanny an English picture-framer with leukaemia
Simone Trevanny his French wife
Vito Marcangelo a Mafia button man
Vincent Turoli his Mafia bodyguard

© Roy Johnson 2017

More Patricia Highsmith
Twentieth century literature
More on short stories

Roderick Hudson

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tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

Roderick Hudson (1875) was Henry James’s second novel, and the first to bring him a popular success. It initially appeared in twelve monthly issues of the Atlantic Monthly, for which he was paid $100 per instalment. Later in 1879 it was published in three volumes in the UK. This was a common format for full length novels at the time. His first novel had been Watch and Ward published as a serial in 1871, but James virtually disowned the book later in life, and it was not included in the New York edition of his collected works published in 1912.

Roderick Hudson

first three-volume edition

Roderick Hudson – critical commentary

Biography

Henry James’s grandfather was a relatively poor Irish immigrant who though sheer effort and economic enterprise became one of America’s first millionaires, second only to Jacob Astor. Henry James senior (his son) disdained commerce and became a religious philosopher, yet lived on the proceeds of his father’s labours.

This enabled Henry James senior and his family to live in relative luxury, oscillating between Europe and America. His own two sons William and Henry James were raised in a social expectation that they did not have to earn their livings, and both of them dabbled with the idea of becoming artists – before William eventually studied medicine and Henry began supplementing his private income by journalism and writing novels.

There is therefore a strong connection between Henry James’s own experience of a richly privileged lifestyle and that of his characters in Roderick Hudson who move around the European cities of the Grand Tour supported entirely by the wealth of Rowland Mallet, his principal character . Mallet has inherited his wealth from a puritan father, and he appears to be no worse off financially at the end of his two year experiment than he was at the beginning.

Mallet has no ambition at the outset of the novel other than to collect good quality paintings and donate them to an American museum – something for which he is criticised by his cousin Cecilia and by Mary Garland. He later changes this ambition to that of ‘cultivating’ the talent he sees in Roderick Hudson.

The artist

James makes very little attempt to give substance and credibility to Roderick’s efforts as a sculptor. There is no detail of what might be involved in manipulating clay or chiselling marble – and Roderick’s meteoric rise to success in such a short time puts a strain on the reader’s credulity.

We know that James studied painting, and that he spent time amongst expatriate American artists during the time he lived in Rome – but there is no convincing sense of the physical or practical issues involved in being a three dimensional artist, even though we are led to believe that Roderick produces two large-scale figures (Adam and Eve at almost his first attempt.

The significance of this weakness in characterisation is that it reinforces the notion that James was not genuinely interested in developing what might be called ‘a portrait of the artist’, whereas he did pursue his interest in the relationship between the two men to its bitter end.

Location

The geographic dislocations (particularly towards the end of this over-long novel) undermine its coherence. The narrative begins in America, then moves to Rome. But later the action switches from Rome to two locations in Florence, and then finally for no convincing reason to Switzerland.

Since the main focus of interest is on the psychological relationships between the principal characters (Rowland, Roderick, Mary, and Christina) there is no meaningful connection between the drama of their relationships and the locations in which they are acted out.

The key points of the drama are that Christina is threatened with the revelation that Giacosa is her natural father, as a result of which she reluctantly marries the Prince. Because of this, Rodericks’ romantic aspirations and artistic confidence are shattered. These events could take place anywhere, and the only justification for the climax occurring in Switzerland is to give Roderick a mountain cliff from which to fall to his death.

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is a term used to describe one text referring to or alluding to another. This can happen by allusion, pastiche, parody. or direct quotation. James creates a particularly interesting form of intertextuality in Roderick Hudson by creating characters who will appear in more than one of his future novels.

Christina Light first appears in Roderick Hudson as the beautiful but disillusioned offspring of a fairly unscrupulous mother who is trying to locate a rich husband for her daughter. But then she reappears as a major character in the later novel The Princess Casamassima (1885) performing a very different role.

Between the end of Roderick Hudson and the beginning of The Princess Casamassima Christina leaves her husband and takes up the cause of revolutionaries in London. She is accompanied by the same trusty advisor Madame Grandoni who continues to support her and acts as a link between Christina and the hero of the later novel, Hyacinth Robinson. Her husband the Prince Casamassima also reappears in the later novel – in hot pursuit of his wife, seeking a reconciliation – which she refuses to effect.

A smaller example is the character of Gloriani – the rather sceptical and pragmatic sculptor who creates works which will appeal to popular public taste rather than something of lasting value. Gloriani appears in Roderick Hudson as the embodiment of an alternative artistic value to Roderick himself, who wishes to be honest to a higher system of values.

Gloriani also appears in the later novel The Ambassadors (1903) filling a similar role – and commentators have observed that his character is based on the controversial American painter James McNeil Whistler.

Psycho-interpretation

Whilst the two principal male characters appear to be in parallel amorous relationships with the two principal females, Mary and Christina, most readers will have no difficulty in recognising that Roderick and Rowland spend the whole of the novel locked into a very emotional relationship – with each other.

Rowland is the older, more experienced figure, and Roderick being younger, is a character to whom Rowland is very attracted. His initial interest is triggered by the statuette of a young boy that Roderick creates – a youth drinking from a cup. Rowland then pays for Roderick’s two year experiences in Europe, and even gives financial support to his mother Mrs Hudson and her companion Mary Garland. He pays off Roderick’s debts, indulges his every whim, and stays loyal to him right through to the bitter and tragic end, despite the many emotional lover-like spats they generate between themselves.

It is often observed that when two men are in love with the same woman, this is a psychological clue that they are (perhaps unconsciously) attracted to each other. But in Roderick Hudson Rowland and Roderick are not just attracted to one woman, but to two.

At the start of the novel Rowland is intrigued by the plain but intelligent Mary Garland, but it is Roderick who has proposed marriage to her, and been accepted. In the two years of their sojourn in Europe, Rowland is increasingly attracted to the idea of Mary and he feels mildly annoyed with Roderick’s neglect of his duties towards his fianceé.

But when the beautiful and enigmatic Christina Light appears, Roderick’s affections switch completely from one woman to the other. Rowland thinks this might make Mary available, but by far the greater part of his emotional energy is devoted to his pursuit of Roderick.

The submerged theme of homosexuality was probably created unconsciously on Henry James’s part – just as his two fictional characters are not aware of it themselves. But it is a critical stance worth taking to the novel – because of its frequent recurrence in the rest of James’s oeuvre. There are countless other works (particularly the tales) that deal with this theme and its many variations – the fear of marriage (The Path of Duty) the threat of inheritance (Owen Wingrave) and the missed opportunity (The Beast in the Jungle).

The submerged theme could also have a bearing on the rather unsatisfactory conclusion to the novel. Roderick may well be disappointed by Christina’s choosing to marry the Prince [he does not know that her hand has been forced] but his death in what appears to be almost a suicide does not seem persuasive. However, it might be one or even the only way for James to draw to a close the relationship between the two men.

Roderick Hudson – study resources

Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson – Kindle edition

Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

Roderick Hudson The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Roderick Hudson The Essential Henry James Collection – Kindle edition (40 works)

Roderick Hudson The Prefaces of Henry James – Introductions to his tales and novels

Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson – Notes on editions (Library of America)

Roderick Hudson Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Roderick Hudson Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Roderick Hudson

Roderick Hudson – chapter summaries

I. Rowland Mallet is a rich young American bachelor who is preparing to go to Europe. He visits his cousin Cecilia who chides him about his lack of purpose and ambition. He claims he will collect paintings and donate them to a museum. Cecilia shows him an impressive statuette made by her friend Roderick Hudson.

II. Next day Rowland meets Roderick, who is a young and nervous Virginian. He is working with no enthusiasm in a law office. Rowland feels attracted to him and offers to take him to Rome to become a sculptor.

III. Roderick’s plan is resented by his mother, and Cecilia regrets his going to Rome. Rowland reassures Mrs Hudson of his good intentions and his belief in Roderick’s talent, but Mr Striker and Mary Garland remain sceptical.

IV. Rowland becomes more interested in Mary Garland. At a picnic she chides him for having no occupation.. When they set off for Europe, Roderick suddenly reveals to Rowland that he is engaged to Mary.

V. Three months later Roderick suddenly feels he is a changed man. He is spending money and absorbing impressions at a very fast rate. He is suddenly inspired after seeing a very attractive girl in a garden. He becomes an active participant in Rome’s social life; he completes a statue of Adam then three months later a complementaryEve.

VI. Rowland tries to overcome his feelings for Mary Garland by considering Augusta Blanchard. At a party, Roderick announces boastfully his intention to create great works of Art. The sceptic Gloriani thinks he will not sustain his early promise, and Madame Grandoni warns him against bohemianism. Shortly afterwards, Roderick runs out of inspiration. He stays alone in Switzerland and Germany for the summer, leaving Rowland to visit England.

VII. In England Rowland receives letters from Cecilia and Mary Garland, and from Roderick who is in Baden-Baden, losing money gambling. Rowland pays his debts and they meet in Geneva, where Roderick confesses that he is susceptible to attractive women. Back in Rome Roderick returns to work but feels that inspiration has deserted him. Their fellow American artist Sam Singleton has spent the entire summer in Italy improving his art, and is very happy.

VIII. Roderick and Rowland are visited by the eccentric Mrs Light and her daughter Christina, who is beautiful but disdainful. Roderick offers to make a sculpture of her. Rowland discovers from Madame Grandoni that Mrs Light is an adventuress with a chequered past who is searching for a rich husband for her daughter. When he goes to visit them, he discovers Roderick at work on the sculpture

IX. Roderick wishes to stay in Rome indefinitely, and thinks to send for Mary Garland and his mother to join him there. But meanwhile he is drawing closer to Christina Light. The completed bust of her is a big success. Rowland is sceptical about Christina, and is mildly envious of Roderick’s connection with Mary.

X. Augusta Blanchard introduces Roderick to Mr Leavenworth, a rich American businessman who wishes to commission a statue for his library. Christina complains that her mother is immoral and that she is disgusted by her conspicuous husband-hunting. She quizzes Rowland about Roderick, and he reveals to her that he is engaged to Mary Garland.

XI. Roderick is angry about this revelation and accuses Rowland of trying to control him. The two of them argue about Christina Light. Roderick falls into artistic doldrums and fears that his genius has left him. Rowland tries to encourage him, but to no avail.

XII. They are joined by Mrs Light, Christina, and Prince Casamassima. A picnic is arranged, after which Christina flirts with Roderick, which makes the Prince jealous, because he is in love with her. Giacosa reveals to Rowland that the Prince is very rich and very proud of his family’s name and his title. Mrs Light complains to Rowland about the sacrifices she has made in her ambition for Christina.

XIII. In the Colosseum Rowland overhears Christina reproaching Roderick for being weak and indecisive. Roderick proposes to show off by climbing dangerously to retrieve a flower for her, but is stopped by Rowland. Socially, Roderick makes few friends, he becomes more and more jaded, and slides into bohemian habits.

XIV. Rowland meets Christina in an old church. They discuss Roderick, and Rowland asks her to leave Roderick alone if she has no intention of marrying him. He appeals to her to make a sacrifice as a gesture of generosity and good will. A few days later she claims to have done so.

XV. Rowland writes to Cecilia in despair about the failure of his project with Roderick. He is exasperated by his friend’s mercurial temperament. Leavenworth breaks the news of Christina’s engagement to the Prince. Roderick refuses to complete his commission, and then argues with Rowland and will not accept his advice.

XVI. Rowland escapes alone to Florence, leaving Roderick still occupied with Christina. There he broods on Mary Garland and Roderick’s possible downfall. After a quasi-religious experience he returns to Rome and suggests that Mrs Hudson and Mary Garland should join them there. Roderick finally agrees – but he fails to meet them when they arrive.

XVII. Mary has matured in the two years they have been apart. There is tension between Roderick and his two guests. Next day they meet Christina in St Peter’s, where Roderick reveals that Christina may not be marrying Prince Casamassima after all.

XVIII. Mrs Hudson sits for a newly inspired Roderick in the mornings, leaving Rowland free to show Mary Garland around Rome. They challenge each other regarding art and nationalism, and she begins to take a serious interest in culture. Roderick and Rowland do not discuss the situation in which they find themselves.

XIX. Roderick finishes the sculpture (which is a success) but tells Rowland he is bored by the presence of his mother and Mary Garland. Rowland implores him to leave Rome with Mary at once and repair their relationship, but Roderick wishes to stay for Christina’s wedding. Gloriani thinks Roderick is truly talented. Christina arrives uninvited to Madame Grandoni’s party to inspect Mary Garland.

XX. Mary Garland does not like Christina and is suspicious of her motives. Giacosa pleads with Rowland to help Mrs Light, because Christina has suddenly called off her engagement to the Prince. Roderick has banished his mother and Mary for a week so that he can bask in the pleasure Christina’s news gives him. Mrs Light pleads with Rowland to remonstrate with Christina – but it is Giacosa’s additional supplication that moves him. He speaks to Christina, who tells him that she does not love the Prince..

XXI. Next day Rowland says goodbye to Sam Singleton who is returning to America, then he learns from Madame Gardoni that Christina married the Prince early that morning. They conclude that Giacosa is Christina’s true father, and her mother has used this information to force her hand. Roderick tells his mother and Mary that he is a failure. He also tells his mother about his infatuation with Christina and that he is bankrupt. Rowland arranges for them to leave Rome and stay at a villa in Florence.

XXII. At the villa in Florence the general mood of the party continues to be one of depression. Roderick does no work, and Mary is unhappy. Roderick says he might as well be a failure in America, but Rowland persuades him to stay in Europe for another year.

XXIII. The party leave Italy and travel to Switzerland. Roderick expresses his total despair to Rowland, who wonders if Mary will become available for him. Roderick claims he no longer cares for her, or for anyone else. Rowland makes subtle overtures to Mary, but she rebuffs him.

XXIV. Roderick feels bitter about Christina because he thinks she betrayed him. Sam Singleton turns up and is a model of artistic industry. Rowland meets Christina and the Prince on an excursion. She insists to him that she was sincere about her feelings for Roderick, but was forced into her marriage. She also says she is going to live recklessly.

XXV. Roderick asks Rowland to lend him money to go to Interlaken to meet Christina. She has fired up his desire and his will to live again. When Rowland is hesitant, he asks his mother and Mary, but they have no money. The two men argue about their behaviour and motivation, and Rowland reveals that he has been in love with Mary for two years.

XXVI. Roderick goes off alone into the mountains. There is a ferocious thunderstorm. Next day when he has still not returned, Rowland and Sam Singleton find his dead body at the bottom of a cliff from which he has fallen. The principals later return to America.

© Roy Johnson 2015

Roderick Hudson – principal characters
Rowland Mallet a rich New England bachelor
Cecilia his cousin, a young widow
Bessie her daughter
Roderick Hudson a young Virginian artist
Mrs Hudson Roderick’s widowed mother
Miss Mary Garland a distant cousin
Barnaby Striker Mrs Hudson’s lawyer
Stephen Hudson Roderick’s elder brother, killed in the Civil War
Gloriani a sceptical Franco-American sculptor (who also appears in The Ambassadors)
Sam Singleton modest young American painter
Miss Augusta Blanchard a rich and attractive American painter
Madame Grandoni ugly old German wise woman
Mrs Light an eccentric dowager American adventuress
Christina Light her very beautiful daughter (who also appears in The Princess Casamassima
Cavaliere Giuseppe Giacosa an Italian friend of Mrs Light and father of Christina
Prince Casamassima an ugly Neapolitan nobleman
Mr Leavenworth rich American industrialist
Assunta Christina’s maid

Roderick Hudson

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Roderick Hudson Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Roderick Hudson Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Roderick Hudson Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Roderick Hudson Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Roderick Hudson Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Roderick Hudson F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Roderick Hudson Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James, London: Macmillan, 1984.

Roderick Hudson Martha Banta (ed), New Essays on The American, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987

Roderick Hudson Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Roderick Hudson Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Roderick Hudson Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Roderick Hudson Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, London: Macmillan, 2010.

Roderick Hudson Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James, New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Roderick Hudson Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Roderick Hudson Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Roderick Hudson Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Roderick Hudson Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Roderick Hudson Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Roderick Hudson John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Roderick Hudson Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other work by Henry James

Roderick HudsonWashington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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Roderick HudsonThe 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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Roderick HudsonThe 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

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

Roderick Hudson 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.

Roderick Hudson 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.

Roderick Hudson 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roderick Hudson 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.

© Roy Johnson 2015

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