English literature Archives - Page 41 of 44

Trilby

May 25, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, plot, and web links

Trilby was first published in serialised form in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in seven monthly instalments beginning January 1894. As was common practice at that time, each episodes carried illustrations featuring key figures and moments in the story. These were produced by the author himself, since George du Maurier was primarily a cartoonist and illustrator, even though he is best remembered today as the author of this novel, which he wrote at the suggestion of his friend Henry James.

The book was an immense international success when it appeared, and it led to a version as a play (by Paul Potter) to various spoofs and parodies, and of course to the popularity of the trilby hat, which was a feature of the theatrical production. There were several later film versions of the story produced between 1914 and 1954 – one of which is featured below. George du Maurier was the grandfather of the English romantic novelist Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989).

Trilby – critical commentary

Historical background

In 1848 Alexander Dumas published The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camelias) – a novel that established the fashion for stories set in the bohemian world of the demi-mondaine – a woman who trades her sexual favours in exchange for living in style. Dumas’s heroine has the additional interest that she is suffering from tuberculosis. The novel was immediately followed in 1852 by a very successful stage adaptation, and this in its turn was used as the basis for Giuseppi Verdi’s opera La Traviata.

Around the same time Henri Murger wrote his Scenes from Bohemian Life (Scenes de la vie de bohème) a loosely related collection of stories which originally appeared in the literary magazine Le Corsaire, all of them set in the Latin Quarter of Paris . They became known collectively under the title La Vie Bohème. These stories too gave rise to the romantic and sentimental plot for operas such as Puccini’s La bohème (1896) and various other adaptations for the stage and (later) the cinema.

Bohemia

“To be young, to be fond of pleasure, to care nothing for worldly prosperity, to scorn mere respectability, and to rebel against rigid rule – these are the qualities which alone may be regarded as essential to constitute the Bohemian.” That’s how the Westminster Review, a British journal, defined Bohemianism in 1862.

These literary predecessors to Trilby were second rate inventions, full of unrealistic cliches of artistic life – people with artistic aspirations living in cheerful poverty; whores with hearts of gold; sentimental love attachments, and eternal friendships sworn between men. George du Maurier featured all of these in Trilby, and added plenty more besides.

And yet the three principal males in Trilby – Taffy, the Laird, and Little Billee – are anything but genuine bohemians. They all have private incomes, they dine in the best restaurants, and they dress like City stockbrokers. They form a vaguely homo-erotic trio who accept Trilby on her boyish, de-sexualised arrival, but are scandalised (Billee in particular) when it is revealed that Trilby is working as an artist’s model, posing in the nude.

Du Maurier’s novel is an appalling production as a literary artefact. It is full of stock characters, poor construction, bad plotting, digressions and irrelevancies, and a laboured literary style that groans under the effort of fulfilling the demands of the monthly instalment.

But like other works in the genre of Gothic horror – Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Dracula (1897) du Maurier had a dramatic trump card that lifted a badly-written novel into the realms of the first modern best-sellers. That trump card was a psychological angle to the story that resonates beyond its historical milieu – the transformative power of hypnotism.

Hypnotism

Hypnosis derives from mesmerism, popularised by the German physician Franz Mesmer in the early nineteenth century. By the end of the century public demonstrations were commonly staged, and it is worth noting that some of the earliest researches into psycho-analysis (Freud and Charcot in 1885) used hypnosis as an attempt to access what we now call the unconscious mind.

The central character and villain Svengali uses hypnotic techniques, first of all to cure a painful condition of the eyes from which Trilby is suffering. At this point in the narrative she dislikes him intensely, and shortly afterwards she leaves Paris and the plot of the novel. In the five years that follow, she makes her way back to Paris and Svengali, where he hypnotises her again in order to teach her singing. At the same time he also makes her virtually his wife.

It is significant (for this novel) that an alternative name for mesmerism was ‘animal magnetism’. Trilby by the latter part of the novel has been living with Svengali in the intervening five years as his musical and life companion and is utterly devoted to him. The only logical explanation for this change in her attitude is that she is under his persuasive influence.

Svengali has hypnotised her into loving him – at the same time as teaching her to sing . He has done this with the use of his suggestively symbolic ‘little flexible flageolet’. Du Maurier seems to be unaware that a flageolet, apart from its metaphoric male counterpart, is anything but flexible.

The sexual element

Du Maurier also seems to be completely uncertain about his heroine – presenting her first as an androgynous boy-like figure, then as the whore with a heart of gold. In some passages Trilby is aware that her reputation is compromised, yet in others the narrative (which is firmly in the voice of its author) gives the impression that it is completely unblemished. However, it has to be said that given the social and literary conventions of the time, nobody would have published a novel that featured as its heroine a prostitute, heart of gold or not

And although it remains unacknowledged, that is what Trilby is. She is from a poor background with alcoholic parents, and she has been molested by an elderly friend of the family. She lives in the louche Latin Quarter of Paris, and poses in the nude as an ‘artists model’ and works occasionally a laundress. These are all what in the late nineteenth century were cyphers for prostitution.

She offers to live with Billee as his mistress because she loves him – but does not think she ought to marry him. She realises that her social reputation is tainted – and she feels shame about the ‘things’ she has done. She writes to Sandy:

And I have done dreadful things besides, as you must know, as all the Quartier knows. Baratier and Besson, but not Durian, though people think so. Nobody else I swear – except old Monsieur Penque at the beginning, who was mamma’s friend. It makes me almost die of shame and misery to think of it: for that’s not like sitting I knew how wrong it was all along – and there’s no excuse for me, none.

The implication is that she has had sexual relations with these artists, as well as posing nude for them. Later in the narrative she claims she ‘could never be fond of [Svengali] in the way he wished … I used to try and do all I could – be a daughter to him, as I couldn’t be anything else’.

Du Maurier is trying to redeem his heroine, but he seems to be struggling with his own ambivalences and contradictions, because in the same speech Trilby goes on to reveal ‘I always had the best of everything. He insisted on that … as soon as I felt uneasy about things … he would say “Dors, ma mignonne” and I would sleep at once – for hours, I think – and wake up, oh, so tired! and find him kneeling by me’.

The clear implication is that Svengali puts Trilby into a hypnotic trance and has sex with her – which accounts for her tiredness on waking. Yet du Maurier seems hardly aware of these inferences – because he no doubt wished to present his heroine as untainted.

Anti-semitism

Even the most enthusiastic reader will not fail to notice that the characterisation of Svengali is an almost grotesque example of anti-Semitism on du Maurier’s part. Svengali lives off the generosity of his relatives somewhere in Austria, and du Maurier describes him quite uncompromisingly (and redundantly) as an ‘Oriental Semite Hebrew Jew’. Svengali is physically filthy, with long hair, a big nose, and dirty fingernails. He borrows money that he does not repay, and he speaks in a (well-rendered) parody of Judeo-Teutonic speech. Unlike the three upright British heroes of the novel, he is licentious and deceitful too – since he has a wife and children whom he has abandoned. He has ‘special skills’ (his musical ability) as well as being a master of occult practices (hypnotism) that give him mastery over Anglo-Saxon maidens such as Trilby. He is also filled with malevolent intent towards all and sundry:

Svengali walking up and down the earth seeking whom he might cheat, betray, exploit, borrow money from, make brutal fun of, bully if he dare, cringe to if he must – man, woman, child or dog

As an intrusive and more-or-less first person narrator, du Maurier puts no distance between himself and the relentless prejudice manifest towards this character. And to underscore the fact that his attitude is racially motivated (rather than the criticism of an individual) he demonstrates the same attitude to the minor character of Mimi la Salope – Svengali’s earlier pupil, who is also Jewish:

she went to see him in his garret, and he played to her, and leered and ogled, and flashed his bold, black, beady Jew’s eyes into hers, and she straightaway mentally prostrated herself in reverence and adoration before this dazzling specimen of her race. So that her sordid, mercenary little gutter-draggled soul was filled with the sight and sound of him, as of a lordly, godlike, shawm-playing, cymbal-banging hero and prophet of the Lord God of Israel-David and Saul in one!

Trilby – study resources

Trilby – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Trilby – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Trilby and Other Works – Kindle – Amazon UK

Trilby and Other Works – Kindle – Amazon US

Trilby – film version

John Barrymore in 1931 film adaptation

Directed by Archie Mayo. Screenplay by J. Grubb Alexander. Starring John Barrymore (Svengali), Marian Marsh (Trilby O’Farrell), Donald Crisp (the Laird), Bramwell Fletcher (Little Billee), Louis Alberni (Gecko), Filmed at Warner Brothers Studios, California, USA.

Trilby – chapter summaries

Part First In a bohemian studio in Paris, the pianist Svengali meets artist’s model Trilby, who sings out of tune. Trilby is from drunken Irish-Scottish parents, but is a simple boyish soul who enjoys the company of English gentlemen.

Part Second The unscrupulous and dirty Svengali hypnotises Trilby to cure the pain in her eyes. Little Billee is teased by fellow students at Studio Carrel, but is a good artist. Trilby acts as a housekeeper and friend to three English friends. Svengali makes strenuous amorous advances to her.

Part Third Trilby poses in the nude at Carrel’s studio, which shocks Little Billee. She is upset and decides to give up modelling. Preparations are made for a Christmas feast. Little Billee feels self-righteous after tending a drunken fellow lodger.

Part Fourth A rowdy Christmas dinner takes place at the studio. Little Billee gets drunk and asks Trilby to marry him. In the new year Billee’s mother Mrs Bagot arrives to contest the engagement. Trilby agrees not to marry Billee and leaves Paris with her brother, who dies shortly afterwards. Billee falls ill with the disappointment. He goes back to live in England, and later finds fame as a painter, but he does not recover the power of feeling.

Part Fifth Taffy and the Laird leave Paris and wander around Europe. Five years later they meet Billee who has become successful, but has tired of being taken up by the rich and famous. Billee takes them to a house party where they overhear rapturous accounts of Trilby’s singing voice. Billee goes to Devon where he is smitten by his sister’s friend Alice. He confides his feelings to her pet dog, as well as explaining his anti-religious beliefs.

Part Sixth Taffy, the Laird, and Billee are back in Paris. They visit their old studio. They attend Trilby’s Paris debut, where she astonishes everyone with the artistry of her singing. Billee’s capacity for feeling is restored, but he is consumed by jealousy. Taffy reveals to him that he too once proposed to Trilby.

Part Seventh Next day the three friends see Trilby with Svengali passing in a carriage, but she ignores them all. Svengali assaults Billee, but when a duel is proposed he doesn’t respond. In London Svengali beats Trilby, quarrels with Gecko, and is stabbed by him. Trilby fails to sing at her London debut; Svengali has a heart attack; and Gecko is arrested. Trilby is ill; she denies ever singing; and she recounts her story of the ‘lost’ five years when Svengali rescued her.

Part Eighth Svengali dies, and Trilby goes into physical decline. Mrs Bagot forgives and befriends Trilby, who prepares for her death. On receiving a photograph of Svengali, Trilby goes into a trance and recovers her singing voice for the last time, then dies. Many years later, following Billee’s death, Taffy is in Paris on his honeymoon with Billee’s sister. He meets Gecko, who reveals how Svengali hypnotised Trilby into a creature acting under his own will.

Trilby – principal characters

Talbot Wynne (Taffy)	an ex-soldier and Yorkshireman
Alexander McAlister (Sandy, the Laird)	a Scot and student of painting
William Bagot (Little Billee)	a young English art student
Mrs Bagot	Billee’s mother
Svengali	a Jewish pianist and hypnotist
Gecko	a violin player (Polish?)
Trilby O’Ferrall	a tall artist’s model
Jeannot	Trilby’s little brother
Durian	a sculptor

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Two Countries

June 1, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Two Countries (also known as The Modern Warning) first appeared in magazine form in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in June 1888, alongside a story by James’s contemporary William Dean Howells and a poem by Wordsworth. It was then reprinted in book form amongst The Aspern Papers and Other Tales published in England and America by Macmillan later the same year.

Cadenabbia – Lago di Como

Two Countries – critical commentary

The international theme

The tale begins well enough with an exploration of one of Henry James’s favourite themes – the differences between America and Europe – specifically Britain. The two capital cities of London and New York are represented by Grice’s work as a lawyer and Sir Rufus Chasemore’s as a member of the English parliament – though the first part of the story is set on Lago di Como in Italy.

Macarthy Grice is a pompous and self-regarding ass – but he is proudly American. He represents the new American spirit of self-reliant republican independence – a society which had thrown off the shackles of an old conservative monarchism in a revolutionary war only a hundred years before. So – Macarthy regards his sister’s alliance with the arch-Tory Sir Rufus as an act of personal and socio-political betrayal.

Sir Rufus is the epitome of arrogant English sangfroid, who hides beneath a carapace of relentless ‘good manners’, refusing to be rattled or show any discomfiture even under the most severe provocation. It is significant that he become a diplomat during the course of the story. His is the lofty superiority of a class which believes it is ‘born to rule’.

But we are led to believe that Sir Rufus takes his revenge on American attitudes in the critical work The Modern Warning he produces following his tour of the North American continent. And the warning is to modernizers in Britain. It is not clear if the book will eventually be published or not – or even if the galley proofs still exist.

The ending

This is the principal weakness of the story. We might well tolerate the uncertainty over the publication of The Modern Warning and see the story as an exploration of Anglo-American relationships. Something might even have been made of Agatha’s divided loyalties to her husband and brother.

But there is no persuasive reason given for her suicide. And it is just not plausible that she would commit such an act out of a fear of being disloyal to Macarthy. The story takes a very abrupt turn into the melodramatic at that point, from which it does not recover.

Two Countries – study resources

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

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

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

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

Two Countries – read the original publication

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Two Countries – plot summary

Part I. Macarthy Grice, a pompous young American lawyer joins his mother and his attractive sister Agatha on holiday at Cadenabbia in the Italian lakes. He is annoyed to discover that they have befriended Sir Rufus Chasemore, a conservative English MP, with whom he spars verbally.

Part II. Next day his mother reveals that they know Sir Rufus quite well, and that there might be an ‘understanding’ between him and Agatha. Macarthy is angry at the idea and suggests that they leave immediately for Venice. He would prefer his sister not to marry at all, and would regard marriage to an Englishman as a form of betrayal. He reads something critical of Sir Rufus in a newspaper, and then is surprised when the Englishman seems quite unruffled by their sudden decision.

Part III. Agatha has agreed to the Venice move because she sees that encouraging Sir Rufus further would lead nowhere. Moreover, Sir Rufus does not like Americans in general. He pays court to her anew, and both reveal that they have Irish ancestors. Finally, he proposes to her, but she refuses on grounds that she must look after her mother, and not take her away from her bother. She also argues that he should visit America.

Part IV. Five years later Mrs Grice has dies, and Agatha is now Lady Chasemore and has been married for a year. She is returning to the USA on holiday for the first time. Her bother Macarthy is still unmarried and living alone. He disapproves of her marriage as an unpatriotic act. Sir Rufus has been promoted and she enjoys living in London. Sir Rufus behaves well (as a diplomat) on their visit, but privately does not like the USA.

Part V. Macarthy provides introductions for Sir Rufus, who examines American institutions, but the distance remains between the two men. When Sir Rufus makes a tour of the States and Canada alone, Agatha reconnects with New York and her brother. When Sir Rufus returns from his fact-finding tour, he declares that American women are ‘plain’ and the country as a whole is a ‘fraud’. He announces that he will write a book about America, based on his experiences. Macarthy Grice is sneeringly critical of the idea, and thinks that Britain is ‘finished’.

Part VI. A year later back in England, Agatha is horrified by the galley proofs of Sir Rufus’s book. He has produced a scathing critique of American ‘democracy’ as a warning to the British. This causes Agatha to defend America and what it stands for.

Part VII. When Sir Rufus returns the next day he cannot understand her objections. She knows that Macarthy will feel deeply wounded and betrayed. She argues with Sir Rufus late into the night, and appeals to him on the grounds of her Irish ancestry. Eventually he agrees not to publish The MOdern Warning, even though ‘his country’ would be the loser.

Following this Agatha admires her husband for the sacrifice he has made – and made with such good grace. However, she worries that she will never know his true thoughts and feelings, because they are eternally hidden behind his ‘good manners’. Then she begins to feel guilty for having robbed him of the opportunity to make a contribution to his country and for being the source of a disappointment to him.

Finally, she changes her mind completely and insists that he publish his book. Her brother Macarthy visits London on holiday, but is met with the news that she has committed suicide by taking poison. Sir Rufus accuses Macarthy of ‘killing’ her because she was so frightened by the prospect of facing him, but the two men are later reconciled in their common grief. Macarthy Grice goes to the continent for the remainder of his holiday, and the book may or may not be published.

Principal characters

Macarthy Grice	a young, pompous, and self-regarding American lawyer
Agatha Grice	his attractive younger sister
Mrs Grice	his mother
Sir Rufus Chasemore	a conservative English MP
Lady Bolitho	Chasemore’s sister

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

The 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.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
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What 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
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The 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
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.

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

More tales by James
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Two on a Tower

October 13, 2017 by Roy Johnson

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

Two on a Tower was first published by Sampson Low, London, in three volumes in 1882. it was written between two of Thomas Hardy’s major novels – The Return of the Native in 1878 and arguably his greatest work The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1886 – though it has to be said that he produced a number of other minor works around this time, such as The Trumpet Major (1880) and A Laodicean (1881). Hardy called the novel a ‘romance and a fantasy’, but there seem no valid reasons why it should not be judged by the same criteria as those used to assess his other works.

Two on a Tower – commentary

The sensation novel

The sensation novel was a literary genre developed in the mid nineteenth century by writers such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. They created plots that were designed to ‘jolt the reader’ (John Sutherland’s term) with elements of secret marriages, forged wills, bigamy, blackmail, murder, concealed identities, and other elements inherited from the late eighteenth-century Gothic – such as fraud, theft, kidnapping, and incarceration.

Thomas Hardy is not normally regarded as a novelist of the ‘sensationalist’ school, but there are certainly many elements of its literary devices in his work. Two on a Tower features several plot devices that span the melodrama and the sensation novel.

The relationship between the protagonist Swithin and Lady Viviette Constantine is presented as ‘peculiar’ because of the age difference and the apparent disparity in their status. Yet she is only eight years older than him; she has married into her position of Lady Constantine; and he is the son of a clergyman. They are not so far apart socially.

This age difference might seem inconsequential to readers today – but in the late nineteenth century it was considered somewhat risque to have a mature (and formerly married) woman making what are clearly sexual overtures to a young male.

The sudden arrival of unexpected news is also a favourite device of the sensation novel. On the very day that Swithin is setting off to secretly marry Viviette he receives an inheritance, but only on the condition that he remain single. On virtually the same day Viviette also receives a letter from her brother Louis Granville (who has not been mentioned in the novel up to that point) announcing his arrival to thwart her romance.

Bigamy

But the most glaring element of sensationalism is the fact that Swithin and Viviette enter into a secret marriage. The reasons for secrecy are bound up with the complex socio-economic issues arising from their perceived difference in status – which Hardy does not fully explain or justify. The secret provides a dramatic element to the events that follow – but the more significant issue is that the marriage remains unconsummated for quite some time.

Moreover, there are not just one but two instances of bigamy in the novel. When Swithin and Viviette get married in secret, they do so believing that Sir Boult Constantine is dead- from disease contracted during his African lion hunt. But the report is what we might currently call false news – so for quite some time Viviette is married to two men – Swithin and Sir Boult.

This is perhaps the main reason Hardy leaves her second marriage unconsummated for so long. Public moral attitudes might not (probably would not) have tolerated both technical bigamy and what would have been seen as sexual pluralism at that time. This voluntary state of chastity also stretches the reader’s credulity – almost to breaking point.

It subsequently turns out that Sir Blount has indeed died – but at a much later date than that reported. So the secret marriage between Swithin and Viviette remains invalid, because at the time of its being registered Viviette was not free to marry someone else.

But this revelation allows Hardy to introduce another sensationalist element into the plot. Sir Blount has not died of typhoid or any other tropical disease. He too has committed a form of bigamy by taking an African ‘wife’ whilst still married to Viviette – and then he has subsequently committed suicide in what we take to be a fit of existential despair.

Indeed, Viviette comes close to being a double bigamist – because she marries Swithin whilst her first husband is still alive. Later, having learned that her first husband is now dead, she consummates her marriage to Swithin, but then after he leaves for South Africa she marries the Bishop of Melchester – whilst she is pregnant with Swithin’s child.

The final twist

Close followers of Hardy’s psychology and his attitude to women and human relationships will notice a double twist at the end of the novel. Swithin returns from South Africa to be confronted by Viviette as the ‘older woman’. She is only in her early thirties, but is described as being in her ‘worn and faded aspect’. She has also had by this point two former husbands. Swithin realises with horror he no longer loves her – but out of a sense of loyalty he offers to marry her. She spares him the ordeal by dying on the spot

But his neighbour Tabitha Lark has meanwhile conveniently matured into ‘blushing womanhood’ and is not only a trained musician but someone ready to help him transpose his astronomical notes. In other words, she is a younger wife ready and in waiting.

So just as Angel Clare goes off with Tess d’Uurberville’s younger sister after his wife is hanged for the murder of Alec d’Urberville, Hardy has a ‘solution’ to the problem on hand that reveals a great deal about his own unconscious and not-so-unconscious wishes – and one which he was to act out in his own troubled life with such unhappy consequences.

Hardy had a largely unhappy marriage, but following the death of his first wife Emma, he married the much younger woman Florence Dugdale – who was forty years his junior. Unfortunately for him this marriage also turned out to be unsatisfactory, and Hardy spent the next sixteen years expressing his remorse in poems dedicated to his first wife.

Symbolism

It is possible to see Swithin’s interest in astronomy as a metaphor for intellectual ambition and his yearning for a world beyond everyday existence in a provincial backwater of south-west England. But a more obvious instance of symbolism is the Tower itself and the telescopes used in his observations.

Almost all the romance between Swithin and Viviette is conducted on the clearly phallic tower – which even acquires a ‘dome’ during the course of events. It is Viviette who supplies Swithin with an object lens for his telescope when he rather clumsily breaks the one he has just bought. She also supplies the ‘equatorial mount’ – a device for synchronising the telescope with the earth’s axis of rotation.

Given that Swithin and Viviette spend the greater part of the novel in an unconsummated ‘union’, the tower and the telescopes act as suggestive symbolic parallels to their relationship

A weakness?

Swithin St Cleve is devastated to find that someone has made the same astronomical discovery as himself and published a scholarly paper on the matter. He collapses during a rainstorm, catches a chill, and is thought to be near the point of death. However, his spirits rise and he recovers on hearing news of the arrival of a comet – which he observes through his new ‘equatorial’ telescope.

Now of all the people in a remote rural location who would know about the arrival dates and visibility of comets – it would be an astronomer. Yet we are led to believe that this occurrence is some form of therapeutic surprise to Swithin. In addition, the comet appears to be visible for not just a number of days, but for months – which is uncommon to the point of extreme improbability. It is not like Hardy to make mistakes of this magnitude in his work.

Geography

Almost all the events of the novel take place in an unspecified location in the south-west of England. But apart from mention of Bath, Southampton, and Melchester (Salisbury) there is very little attempt on Hardy’s part to integrate his narrative with the world of ‘Wessex’ that is built up so powerfully in his other novels.

In novels such as The Return of the Native (1876), The Woodlanders (1887), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) the landscape of Wessex is not only densely realised and vividly evoked; it becomes part of the narrative of events itself.

Egdon Heath presides over all the events of The Native with a brooding intensity. The woods, forests and coppices provide not only the background to events but the livelihoods of characters in The Woodlanders. And Tess is forced to work on the land as an agricultural labourer because of her tragic circumstances.

This sort of close relationship between the geography of the region and the events of the narrative simply do not exist in Two on a Tower. There is very little reason to believe that the events of the novel take place imaginatively within the boundaries of Hardy’s traditional ‘Wessex’.

Two on a Tower – study resources

Two on a Tower – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Two on a Tower – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Two on a Tower – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Two on a Tower – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Two on a Tower – plot synopsis

I. Lady Constantine explores the memorial tower on her husband’s estate She meets the beautiful young man Swithin St Cleve who is studying astronomy

II. Members of the local choir assemble for practice at Grandma Martin’s house. Tabitha Lark reports on Lady Constantine’s listlessness. Her husband Sir Blount Constantine is missing in Africa. Swithin hides upstairs in the house.

III. Lady Constantine asks parson Torkingham’s advice on her vow to remain socially secluded during her husband’s visit to Africa. She agrees to maintain her vow.

IV. Lady Constantine visits Swithin on the tower. He describes astronomy in emotive terms.. She asks him to check on Sir Blount who has been seen in London.

V. The person on London is not Sir Blount. Swithin breaks his new object lens, but Lady Constantine replaces it. She cuts off a lock of his hair whilst he is asleep.

VI. Swithin’s new telescope doesn’t work, but Lady Constantine agrees to buy him an ‘equatorial’ viewing instrument. The new project energises her.

VII. She decides to buy the new instrument for herself, and let him have use of it. But local gossip about their relationship begins, so she puts the whole project into his name.

VIII . She pays over the money for the instrument in secret then visits the new telescope at night with Swithin. She feels he is losing himself in the stars.

IX. Swithin makes a new astronomical discovery, but then finds that someone else has just published the same results. He falls ill, and when Lady Constantine goes to visit him he is thought to be dying.

X. Swithin’s spirits are revived by the arrival of a comet. Lady Constantine follows the news of his recovery at a distance.

XI. Lady Constantine feels guilty about her romantic yearning for Swithin, and she vows to both deny herself and find him a suitable wife. At this very point Torkinham reveals that her husband died some time ago in Africa.

XII. Sir Blount dies leaving his estate in debt. Much of his estate is sold off, and Lady Constantine is left in relative poverty. She goes to the tower and reveals her position to Swithin, wondering why he is so matter-of-fact in his response.

XIII. They try to leave the tower, but are obstructed by the arrival of the rustics, who discuss Lady Constantine, Swithin, and the possibilities of a marriage. Swithin is shocked by what he overhears.

XIV. The new knowledge inflames his passion, but when they meet she feels guilty at distracting him from his astronomy They think their relationship cannot succeed, and must be concealed from the general public.

XV. Three months later they meet on the tower again. . He proposes a secret marriage, which will only be revealed when he becomes ‘famous’. In the meantime, they will continue to live separately. She agrees to the proposal.

XVI. A sudden gale blows the protective dome off the tower and the gable end off his grandmother’s house. Plans are changed. She will go to Bath and arrange a marriage license. She gets a letter announcing the arrival of her brother from South America.

XVII. Lady Constantine goes to Bath and despite her fears and misgivings she arranges a marriage license – though she is two days short of qualification.

XVIII. Swithin sets out to join her in Bath, but the same morning he gets notice of an inheritance from his great-uncle. However, it stipulates that he must not marry before reaching twenty-five. He ignores the offer and sets off.

XIX . They meet in Bath and after delays are married. But Viviette’s face is cut by a horse whip at the station – brandished by her brother. Fearing they will be recognised and exposed, they hide out in the Tower hut.

XX. They observe the Aurora Borealis from the Tower, then the next day she goes back home.

XXI . Swithin visits Viviette secretly at her home. She shows him round the house, and persuades him to be confirmed in church.

XXII. Viviette’s brother Louis Glanville suddenly arrives at the house. Swithin hides, then leaves dressed in an old coat of Sir Blount’s. The rustics meet him on the way back and think they have seen a ghost.

XXIII. Winter comes and goes. Viviette refurbishes the house in preparation for the forthcoming confirmation ceremony.

XXIV. The confirmation ceremony takes place, during which Louis watches Swithin very closely.

XXV. The visiting bishop is an old friend of Swithin’s father. He takes a keen interest in Swithin at the luncheon celebration that follows. In the evening he is taken to see the Tower.

XXVI. Viviette. is at the Tower, but hides when the Bishop’s party arrives. Swithin shows them the observatory, but the Bishop appears to be suspicious of something.

XXVII. Next day the Bishop accuses Swithin of having a woman in his room, and produces a bracelet as evidence. Swithin assures him he has done nothing wrong.

XXVIII. Louis gives the bracelet to Tabitha and urges Viviette to encourage the Bishop. He tries to sow suspicion in his sister’s mind against Swithin.

XXIX. Viviette and Tabitha divide their bracelets into two – which thwarts Louis in his suspicions. But he vows to set a trap for Viviette and Swithin.

XXX. Louis invites Swithin to dinner, then insists that he stay over. When Swithin disappears during the night, Louis interrogates Viviette, who admits that she loves Swithin – who had merely gone back to the Tower to take a reading.

XXXI. Viviette receives a proposal of marriage from the Bishop. Louis urges her to accept it, but she refuses. He leaves the house in a rage.

XXXII. Viviette and Swithin decide to reveal their marriage to the Bishop and to Louis. Viviette’s solicitor sends word that Sir Blount died much later than was previously thought. Viviette realises that her current marriage to Swithin is therefore invalid.

XXXIII. Viviette sends a letter of refusal to the Bishop. Swithin tells her not to worry about the legalities, and they plan to marry a second time.

XXXIV. Viviette reads a letter from Swithin’s solicitor regarding his unclaimed inheritance. She fears that she is preventing him from advancing in his best interests. Swithin urges that they undertake a second marriage.

XXXV. Her fears are confirmed when she reads the original inheritance letter from Swithin’s great-uncle, warning him against marriage. She decides to sacrifice her own happiness in Swithin’s best social interests. Finally she proposes postponing the marriage until he is twenty-five.

XXXVII. Swithin sets off for the southern hemisphere, and his lodgings at the Tower are dismantled. Viviette has a vision of a golden-haired child, and decides she must follow Swithin.

XXXVIII. She goes to Southampton but his ship has just left. She returns to Grandma Martin and writes letters to Swithin telling him that he cannot claim his inheritance.

XXXIX. Louis goes to Melchester and tells the Bishop that Viviette is ready to marry him. The Bishop arrives next day, and Viviette accepts him, believing that it will leave Swithin free to claim his inheritance.

XL. Swithin goes to America on the expedition to study the transit of Venus, and then settles on the South African cape. He receives a letter from his grandmother announcing Viviette’s marriage to the Bishop, and another from Viviette justifying her decision and giving him news of their child.

XLI. Three years later a newspaper announces the death of the Bishop. Swithin’s researches are complete, so he goes home. He meets Viviette on the Tower and is horrified to find her aged and unattractive. Nevertheless, he offers to marry her, but she dies from the shock.

Two on a Tower – characters

Swithin St Cleve	a handsome young astronomer
Sir Bount Constantine	estate owner and African explorer
Lady Viviette Constantine	his attractive young wife
Louis Glanville	Viviette’s profligate brother
Dr Helmsdale	the Bishop of Melchester

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Typhoon

October 27, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Typhoon was written between September 1900 and January 1901. It was serialized in Pall Mall Magazine from January to March 1902, and first published in book form by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in New York in September 1902. Conrad repeatedly revised the text for its various English and American appearances. These revisions are a combination of minor matters of spelling and more important changes to the presentation of his two main characters, Jukes and MacWhirr.

Typhoon – critical commentary

The most obvious quality of this tale is the masterful account of the violent storm at sea. Conrad manages to evoke the ferocity and the terrible impact of the hurricane winds, the torrential rain, and the tempestuous seas with strings upon strings of atmospheric synonyms without repeating himself. The ship is convulsed, attacked, and almost destroyed – yet it survives.

The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens smashed—and two of the boats had gone already. They had gone unheard and unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock and smother of the wave.

The triumph of practicality

At the outset, MacWhirr’s stuffy and unimaginative conservatism and Jukes’ youthful enterprise and enthusiasm are posited as opposing characteristics. MacWhirr reads the maritime manuals on dealing with storms, but chooses to ignore them. Jukes is meanwhile dashing about the ship making sure everything is ready to survive the hurricane.

But as soon as the typhoon really strikes, Jukes thinks everything is lost and he despairs of surviving the experience; whereas MacWhirr simply sticks stubbornly to the ‘right thing’ and finds practical solutions to immediate problems. He does not allow himself to be deflected from the tasks required to maintain order.

When the fighting breaks out amongst the Chinese passengers, MacWhirr despatches Jukes to stop it. When he is attacked by the panicking second mate, he has no hesitation in slugging him. And when the problem of the coolies’ money could threaten their presence in port, he creates a just and simple solution to the problem by dividing the money equally amongst them.

MacWhirr is even cast in quasi-comic form at the outset of the tale – a short man who wears a brown bowler hat and carries an unfurled umbrella, no matter what the weather. But it is his calmness, his taciturn manner, and his meticulous attention to detail which in the end saves his ship, passengers, and crew.

The narrative

Unusually for Conrad, this is a tale cast in third person omniscient narrative mode. He is able to switch freely from one point of view to another as the principal characters move around the ship during the typhoon.

The most impressive piece of narrative manipulation comes in the penultimate section of the tale where, having reached a calm point in the eye of the hurricane, Conrad has the gruff and taciturn MacWhirr realise that having reached this point in the ‘revolving storm’, there is another period of the typhoon the ship has yet to pass through

Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr was moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: “I wouldn’t like to loose her. [the ship]”

He was spared that annoyance.

This is wonderfully ironic understatement and lofty wit – for Conrad does not actually describe the second half of the storm, but immediately pans forward to its aftermath, with the Nan-Shan safely moored in Fu-chau harbour. And there, by describing the uncomprehending responses of the Captain’s and the engineer’s wives to the letters they receive, the toughness and heroism of the mariners is emphasised – as well as by implication, the gulf of comprehension which exists between those who have lived suburban lives on land and those who have braved extreme situations at sea which their loved ones simply could not comprehend.

The form of the narrative

Some features of this work might seem to suggest that it could be regarded as a novella. After all, it has only a few named characters, the very central figure of captain MacWhirr, the action all takes place on board the Nan-Shan, and the storm itself acts as a strongly unifying feature.

But working against such a claim is the fact that there is no necessary connection between the typhoon itself and the skirmish amongst the Chinese workers who are being transported back to the mainland. They form an important but not an integral part of the story. Interestingly enough, it was the plight of these workers (who are referred to as ‘cargo’) which first aroused Conrad’s interest: the typhoon was a secondary issue.

In addition to this, there is no real development, lesson, or outcome in the events. MacWhirr is the same man when he reaches Fu-chau as he was at the beginning – and so is Jukes. So the narrative, for the purposes of classification, seems to me a tale, which can stand with distinction alongside the many others of its kind in Conrad’s oeuvre.

Meteorological note

A typhoon is a ‘severe tropical cyclone’ characterized by a low-pressure center, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain. When these occur in the Northwest Pacific Ocean they are called a typhoon. The same phenomenon occurring in the north Atlantic Ocean is called a hurricane.

Typhoon – study resources

Typhoon – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Typhoon – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Typhoon – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Typhoon – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Typhoon – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Typhoon – plot summary

Part I. Captain MacWhirr is in charge of a newly built steam ship the Nan Shan, which has been transferred from a British to a Siamese flag, with a mixed cargo of goods and two hundred Chinese workers as passengers. They are sailing in the Formosa Strait in the South China Sea bound for Fu-chau, and the barometer is falling.

Part II. MacWhirr is a practical, undemonstrative man of few words. He prepares for what he thinks of as ‘dirty weather’. As the storm gets worse, there is discord in the engine room. Jukes the realistic first mate suggests changing course to avoid the worst of the storm, but MacWhirr stubbornly rejects all known advice in order to avoid altering course (and the cost of the extra fuel it would consume).

Part III. Jukes does his best to prepare the ship for the worst, but when the full force of the hurricane strikes the ship it is so ferocious that he thinks all is lost. He and MacWhirr cling to each other whilst they are pounded by waves and hail. MacWhirr puts his faith in the sound construction of the ship.

Part IV. The bosun arrives with the news that fighting has broken out amongst the Chinese workers below decks. The storm has smashed some wooden sea chests, and dollar coins are spilling loose. He has also discovered that some of the ship’s crew have panicked and are hiding themselves away. MacWhirr despatches Jukes to investigate, which he does reluctantly. Meanwhile, the second mate loses his nerve and panics, forcing MacWhirr s to knock him out. First engineer Rout works heroically in the engine room, from where Jukes reports to the captain.

Part V. In the engine room Jukes is convinced that the ship cannot survive the storm, and the engineer orders him out as a hindrance to his work. Jukes and the bosun take crew members into the bunker where the coolies are trying to get out. The crew subdue the coolies, then lock them in below decks. There is a lull in the hurricane, but MacWhirr realises that being a ‘revolving storm’, there will be a second part to come which could be even worse than the first. He reassures Jukes that by staying attentive, they might come through it.

Part VI. The tale ends with the ship in port at Fu-chau, having survived the second part of the storm. The principal characters are writing back home. On receiving their letters Mrs MacWhirr hopes her husband will remain at sea, and Mrs Laut and her mother similarly have no concept of her husband’s character or heroism. Jukes explains in a letter to his friend how MacWhirr solved the coolie dispute by dividing the dollars equally between them all – so as to create a minimum of trouble.

Typhoon – principal characters

Captain MacWhirr	a practical man of few words
Jukes	his chief mate
Solomon Rout	the tall chief engineer
—	the ship’s boatswain (not named)

Joseph Conrad – video biography

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

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

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

Ultima Thule

April 9, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Ultima Thule was written in 1939/40 as the first chapter of a novel which was never finished – the second chapter being Solus Rex. It was one of the last pieces Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Russian before switching to write in English, which he continued to do for the next twenty years during his stay in America. It was first published in the emigré journal Novyy Zhornal in New York in 1942, and then appeared in English translation (by Dmitri and Vladimir Nabokov) in the New Yorker in 1973. It was then collected in the volume of stories A Russian Beauty and Other Stories published later the same year.

It is difficult to escape the suspicion that Nabokov embellished the story whilst engaged in the process of translation for the 1973 publication. The style of the piece has many of the features of his late, Rococo mannerism – the persistent use of alliteration, a straining for obscure vocabulary, and a wilful, almost irritating wordplay. There is certainly a case to be made for a scholarly comparison of the original 1942 Russian text with its revised counterpart of thirty years later.

Vladimir Nabokov

Ultima Thule – critical commentary

Nabokov published a number of ‘stories’ which were in fact chapters from longer works – such as his novels or his memoir Speak, Memory. This was common publishing practice at the time, and Nabokov was living a financially precarious life as an exile in an almost hand-to-mouth manner.

Ultima Thule is primarily a character study – and a protracted philosophic argument somewhat reminiscent of The Magic Mountain (a comparison which Nabokov would intensely dislike). It also contains fictional elements which are not developed – such as Sineusov’s relationship with his wife, a complex time sequence, and the ambiguous nature of Falter himself, who could be a charlatan or a gifted visionary.

These elements might have been taken up in later parts of the projected novel, and Nabokov comments on them in the introductory notes to A Russian Beauty and Other Stories in which the story appeared:

Perhaps, had I finished my book, readers would not have been left wondering about a few things: was Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom the narrator’s dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a phrase which her husband did or did not recognise?

These authorial observations are doubly significant. First, from the point of view of the story itself, they reinforce the idea that Falter is a deliberately ambiguous figure. Sineusov describes his former tutor as if he were some sort of preternatural genius – but Falter is a shabby, down at heel character who works in the wine trade and stays in seedy hotels. Following his ‘vision’ he claims to have some transcendental insight into the human condition, but chops logic with Sineusov and gives specious arguments for not revealing the nature of this Universal Truth.

But the remarks also reveal something interesting about Nabokov’s methods and practice as a writer. He is at great pains to claim elsewhere that he composed all his works completely, in his head, then on his famous index cards, before he started writing them.

Following the posthumous publication of The Original of Laura, we now know that this claim is not to be taken at face value. The index cards which were published along with that last unfinished novel reveal that he was making up the story as he went along. And these retrospective observations on Ultima Thule demonstrate the same thing. If Nabokov did not know the answers to those questions his readers might ask, then the story was not complete in his mind when he came to write it.

Ultima Thule – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

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

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

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ultima Thule – plot summary

The narrator, an artist Gospodin Sineusov is grief-stricken following the death of his wife. He addresses her as if she were alive and recounts their meeting with his former tutor Adam Falter.

Sineusov thinks that Falter is gifted with ‘volitional substance’ and claims that he is an exceptional individual. But some time later Sineusov hears that Falter has had a violent seizure in a hotel on the Riviera, then gone slightly mad. Falter is treated by an Italian psychologist Dr Bonomini, who questions him about the seizure. Falter claims that he revealed to Bonomini the solution to ‘the riddle of the universe’ – but the shock of this revelation killed him (though actually, it was a heart attack).

Whilst his wife is in hospital, Sineusov is commissioned to produce illustrations for a Nordic epic called Ultima Thule. When the epic’s author disappears and his wife dies, Sineusov nevertheless continues to work on the series of drawings as a distraction from his grief. He decides to return to Paris.

Before leaving he asks Falter to reveal what he told the Italian doctor. Falter refuses, and instead they have a cat and mouse philosophic debate about ‘essences’ and ‘being’. Falter insists that he has had a gigantic Truth revealed to him, and Sineusov enters into a guessing game, but Falter eludes all attempts to extract the secret from him.

Sineusov poses questions such as ‘Does God exist?’ and ‘Is there an afterlife?’ But Falter argues that the questions are falsely predicated and evades answering them. He then reflects on human beings and their fear of death – and finally leaves.

Sineusov later receives a bill for 100 francs for the consultation, and is left feeling that he must remain alive so as to preserve the memory of his dead wife.

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

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

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

Ulysses

January 31, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, study resources, video, textual history

Ulysses (1922) is probably the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and certainly Joyce’s finest work. Taking Homer’s Odyssey as a structural framework, Joyce builds on it a complex narrative of Dublin characters on one day – Thursday 16 June 1904. Each chapter features a different prose-style to match its theme or subject. One chapter is even written in a manner which traces the history of English prose, from the Renaissance to modern advertising jargon.

James Joyce

It also includes two versions of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This sought to reproduce the apparently chaotic manner in which our perceptions of the external world mingle themselves with ideas and memories in an undifferentiated and unstoppable river of thought. This includes the famous final chapter which is an unpunctuated eighty page soliloquy of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed at night, thinking over her life and the events of the previous day.

Rather like Picasso, Joyce had a multiplicity of styles, any one of which was enough to make lesser writers famous as they imitated him. Ulysses is a cornerstone of modern English Literature – written by an Irishman in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris.

Ulysses – plot summary

Ever since Stuart Gilbert published his explanation of the novel in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, it has been conventional to refer to the separate chapters of the book by the names of their originals in the Greek epic.

Telemachus
Stephen Dedalus spends the early morning hours of June 16, 1904, remaining aloof from his mocking friend, Buck Mulligan, and Buck’s English acquaintance, Haines. As Stephen leaves for work, Buck orders him to leave the house key and meet them at the pub at 12:30.

Nestor
Around 10:00 am, Stephen teaches a history lesson to his class at Garrett Deasy’s boys’ school. After class, Stephen meets with Deasy to receive his wages. The narrow-minded and prejudiced Deasy lectures Stephen on life. Stephen agrees to take Deasy’s editorial letter about cattle disease to acquaintances at the newspaper.

Proteus
Stephen spends the remainder of his morning walking alone on Sandymount Strand, thinking critically about his younger self and about perception. He composes a poem in his head and writes it down on a scrap torn from Deasy’s letter.

Calypso
At 8:00 am the same morning, Leopold Bloom fixes breakfast and brings his wife her mail and breakfast in bed. One of her letters is from Molly’s concert tour manager, Blazes Boylan. Bloom suspects he is also Molly’s lover. Bloom returns downstairs, reads a letter from their daughter, Milly, then goes to the outside lavatory.

The Lotus Eaters
At 10:00 am, Bloom picks up an amorous letter from the post office – he is corresponding with a woman named Martha Clifford under the pseudonym Henry Flower. He reads the tepid letter, ducks briefly into a church, then orders Molly’s lotion from the pharmacist. He runs into Bantam Lyons, who mistakenly gets the impression that Bloom is giving him a tip on the horse Throwaway in the afternoon’s Gold Cup race.

Hades
Around 11:00 am, Bloom rides with Simon Dedalus (Stephen’s father), Martin Cunningham, and Jack Power to the funeral of Paddy Dignam. The men treat Bloom as somewhat of an outsider. At the funeral, Bloom thinks about the deaths of his son and his father.

Aeolus
At noon, Bloom is at the offices of the Freeman newspaper, negotiating an advertisement for Keyes, a liquor merchant. Several idle men, including editor Myles Crawford, are hanging around in the office, discussing political speeches. Bloom leaves to secure the ad. Stephen arrives at the newspaper with Deasy’s letter. Stephen and the other men leave for the pub just as Bloom is returning.

Lestrygonians
At 1:00 pm, Bloom runs into Josie Breen, an old flame, and they discuss Mina Purefoy, who is in labour at the maternity hospital. Bloom stops in Burton’s restaurant, but he decides to move on to Davy Byrne’s for a light lunch. Bloom reminisces about an intimate afternoon with Molly on Howth. Bloom leaves and is walking toward the National Library when he spots Boylan on the street and ducks into the National Museum.

Scylla and Charybdis
At 2:00 pm Stephen is informally presenting his theory on Hamlet in the National Library to the poet AE and the librarians John Eglinton, Best, and Lyster. AE is dismissive of Stephen’s theory and leaves. Buck enters and jokingly scolds Stephen for failing to meet him and Haines at the pub. On the way out, Buck and Stephen pass Bloom, who has come to obtain a copy of Keyes’ ad.

The Wandering Rocks
This episode consists of nineteen short views of characters, major and minor, as they make their way around Dublin in the afternoon. Within each subsection, short, disjunctive paragraphs pop up that depict a simultaneous action in some other part of the city. It serves as an interlude between the first and last nine episodes.

Sirens
At 4:00 pm Simon Dedalus, Ben Dollard, Lenehan, and Blazes Boylan converge at the Ormond Hotel bar. Bloom notices Boylan’s car outside and decides to watch him. Boylan soon leaves for his appointment with Molly, and Bloom sits morosely in the Ormond restaurant – briefly mollified by Dedalus’s and Dollard’s singing. Bloom writes back to Martha, then leaves to post the letter.

Cyclops
At 5:00 pm Bloom arrives at Barney Kiernan’s pub to meet Martin Cunningham about the Dignam family finances, but Cunningham has not yet arrived. The citizen, a belligerent Irish nationalist, becomes increasingly drunk and begins attacking Bloom’s Jewishness. Bloom stands up to the citizen, speaking in favour of peace and love over xenophobic violence. Bloom and the citizen have an altercation on the street before Cunningham’s carriage carries Bloom away.

Nausicaa
Bloom relaxes on Sandymount Strand around sunset, after his visit to Mrs. Dignam’s house nearby. A young woman, Gerty MacDowell, notices Bloom watching her from across the beach. Gerty subtly reveals more and more of her legs while Bloom surreptitiously masturbates. Gerty leaves, and Bloom dozes.

Oxen of the Sun
At 10:00 pm Bloom wanders to the maternity hospital to check on Mina Purefoy. Also at the hospital are Stephen and several of his medical student friends, drinking and talking boisterously about subjects related to birth. Bloom agrees to join them, though he privately disapproves of their revelry in light of Mrs. Purefoy’s struggles upstairs. Buck arrives, and the men proceed to Burke’s pub. At closing time, Stephen convinces his friend Lynch to go to the brothel section of town and Bloom follows, feeling protective.

Circe
This episode takes the form of a play script with stage directions and descriptions. The majority of the action occurs only as drunken, subconscious, anxiety-ridden hallucinations. Bloom finally locates Stephen and Lynch at Bella Cohen’s brothel. Stephen is drunk and imagines that he sees the ghost of his mother – full of rage, he shatters a lamp with his walking stick. Bloom runs after Stephen and finds him in an argument with a British soldier who knocks him out.

Eumaeus
Bloom revives Stephen and takes him for coffee at a cabman’s shelter to sober up. They meet a sailor who regales them with traveller’s tales. There is also talk about Irish nationalism. Bloom invites Stephen back to his house.

Ithaca
Well after midnight, Stephen and Bloom arrive back at Bloom’s house. They drink cocoa and talk about their respective backgrounds. Bloom asks Stephen to stay the night. Stephen politely refuses. Bloom sees him out and comes back in to find evidence of Boylan’s visit. Still, Bloom is at peace with the world and he climbs into bed, tells Molly of his day and requests breakfast in bed.

Penelope
After Bloom falls asleep, Molly remains awake, surprised by Bloom’s request for breakfast in bed. Her mind wanders to her childhood in Gibraltar, her afternoon of sex with Boylan, her singing career, and Stephen Dedalus. Her thoughts of Bloom vary wildly over the course of the monologue, but it ends with a reminiscence of their intimate moment at Howth and a positive affirmation.

Sackville Street, Dublin

Study resources

Ulysses – Oxford University Press 1922 version – Amazon UK

Ulysses – Oxford University Press 1922 version – Amazon US

Ulysses – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Ulysses – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Ulysses – 1967 film version by Joseph Strick – Amazon UK

Ulysses – audio book (abridged) – Amazon UK

Ulysses – the Hans Gabler ‘corrected’ text edition – Amazon UK

Ulysses – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Ulysses – Annotated Notes edition – Amazon UK

Ulysses – audioBook version at LibriVox

James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ – an introduction and explanation – Amazon UK

The New Bloomsday Book – chapter-by-chapter guide

Ulysses – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

James Joyce: A Critical Guide – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce – Amazon UK

James Joyce: Texts and Contexts – Amazon UK

Ulysses – a video introduction

Principal characters

Leopold Bloom	a 38 year old Jewish Dublin newspaper advertising salesman
Marion (Molly) Bloom	his 33 year old adulterous wife
Millicent Bloom	their 15 year old daughter who does not appear in the novel
Rudy Bloom	their son, who died 11 years ago
Stephen Dedalus	aspiring poet in his early 20s
Simon Dedalus	Stephen’s father, a drinker and singer
Malachi (Buck) Mulligan	medical student and friend of Stephen’s
Hugh (Blazes) Boylan	concert manager and Molly’s lover
Martha Clifford	Bloom’s secret correspondent, a sexual tease
Bella Cohen	a brothel keeper
Garret Deasy	headmaster at school where Stephen teaches
Patrick Dignam	a friend of Bloom who has recently died
Joe Hynes	a reporter for Bloom’s newspaper
Minna Kennedy Lydia Douce	flirtatious barmaids at the Ormond hotel
Ned Lambert	a friend of Stephen Dedalus and others
Gerty MacDowell	lame girl who flashes for Bloom
Kitty Ricketts	prostitute working in Bella’s brothel
the citizen	a belligerent Irish nationalist

Ulysses – first edition

Ulysses – textual history

The writing and publication history of Ulysses is almost as complicated as the novel itself. Joyce composed the novel over a seven year period between 1914 and 1921. Extracts from it first began to appear in the American magazine The Little Review from 1918, but publication was halted when the Nausicaa episode led to prosecution. At a trial in 1921, the magazine was declared obscene and as a result Ulysses was banned in the United States.

The first publication in book form was in France in February 1922 where the American Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company had 1,000 copies printed. The novel quickly became notorious, and copies were smuggled across the Channel into England.

One factor which complicates the textual history of the novel is that Joyce continued working on it, even after it had been published. The printer in Dijon had made errors; Ezra Pound had made cuts and changes to the episodes in circulation via magazines, and Joyce revised multiple copies of his work which had been produced by non-professional typists from his near-illegible handwritten manuscripts.

Joyce had an English patroness Harriet Shaw Weaver who paid for the publication of an English edition by the Egoist Press in October 1922. This contained so many typographical errors that it was issued with an apology from the publisher. When 500 copies were sent to America they were seized by the government authorities, and when the publisher ordered replacements, these were impounded and burned by the customs office at Folkstone.

Such was the book’s notoriety that pirated editions began to appear. In America, publisher Samuel Roth reprinted fourteen bowdlerized episodes and issued them in two volumes, complete with his own preface. When this aroused a protest from writers and artists in America and the UK, he retorted by printing a photographic forgery of the Shakespeare and Company edition

The ban on Ulysses was finally lifted in the United States in December 1933, the same week as prohibition was repealed. Random House published the first American edition in 1934, but this was based upon a pirated earlier edition which contained lots of typographical errors. The first authorised English edition was published by Bodley Head in 1936.

Various new editions appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in the years that followed, but all of them were based on earlier, flawed versions. As the date for the expiry of Joyce’s copyright began to draw near (in 1992, fifty years after his death) a number of publishers rushed to issue new editions. What they hoped to do was compile a clean and error-free version which could be copyrighted as ‘the definitive’ edition, and thus secure for them a lucrative monopoly for the next fifty years.

The most spectacular of these attempts was that piloted by the German scholar Hans Walter Gabler, who proposed to ‘recover’ the original text by comparing surviving manuscripts, corrected proofs, and existing editions. He produced what was called a synoptic version, which was issued as Ulysses: The Corrected Text in 1986. This was designed to put an end to all uncertainties regarding the accuracy of the text.

But in 1988 an American scholar John Kidd published a blistering critique of Gabler and his work in The New York Review of Books. This pointed out flaws in Gabler’s methodology, listed weaknesses in his interpretation, and exposed new mistakes in the supposedly ‘corrected’ version. A huge academic argument ensued, conducted in the full light of public gaze. Scholarly opinion gradually turned against Gabler, and publishers in the UK and America have quietly withdrawn his edition.

In the meantime, the law on copyright has changed, the James Joyce estate has refused to authorise any further definitive editions, and various publishers have been issuing reprints of earlier editions, from that of 1922 onwards – so confusion continues to reign. As Joyce himself prophetically observed, “Ulysses [will] give Universities something to work on well into the next century.” Which is exactly the current state of affairs.

Dublin 1915

Other works by James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first complete novel – a largely autobiographical account of a young man’s struggle with Catholicism and his desire to forge himself as an artist. It features a prose style whose complexity develops in parallel with the growth of the hero, Stephen Dedalus. The early pages are written from a child’s point of view, but then they quickly become more sophisticated. As Stephen struggles with religious belief and the growth of his sexual feelings as a young adult, the prose become more complex and philosophical. In addition to the account of his personal life and a critique of Irish society at the beginning of the last century, it also incorporates the creation of an aesthetic philosophy which was unmistakably that of Joyce himself. The novel ends with Stephen quitting Ireland for good, just as Joyce himself was to do – never to return.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Ulysses (1922) is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and it is certainly Joyce’s most celebrated work. He takes Homer’s Odyssey as a structural framework and uses it as the base to create a complex story of characters moving around Dublin on a single day in June 1904. Each separate chapter is written in a different prose style to reflect its theme or subject. The novel also includes two forms of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This was Joyce’s attempt to reproduce the apparently random way in which our perceptions of the world are mixed with our conscious ideas and memories in an unstoppable flow of thought. There is a famous last chapter which is an eighty page unpunctuated soliloquy of a woman as she lies in bed at night, mulling over the events of her life and episodes from the previous day.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

James Joyce – web links

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

James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

A Bibliography of Scholarship and Criticism
Slightly dated but still useful web-based compilation of criticism and commentary – covers Joyce himself, plus the stories and novels.

More on James Joyce
Twentieth century literature
More on study skills

Unconditional Surrender

March 18, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

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

Unconditional Surrender – commentary

The principal themes

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

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

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

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

Guy Crouchback

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Unconditional Surrender – study resources

Unconditional Surrender – Penguin – Amazon UK

Unconditional Surrender – Penguin – Amazon US

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

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

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Unconditional Surrender – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unconditional Surrender – main characters

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

More on Evelyn Waugh
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Under the Greenwood Tree

October 11, 2017 by Roy Johnson

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

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

Under the Greenwood Tree – commentary

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

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

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

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

The historical theme

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

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

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

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

The romantic theme

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

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

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

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

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

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

Significance

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

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

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

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

Under the Greenwood Tree – resources

Under the Greenwood Tree – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Under the Greenwood Tree – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Under the Greenwood Tree – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Under the Greenwood Tree – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

A Laodicean

Under the Greenwood Tree – synopsis

Part the First – Winter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part the Second – Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part the Third – Summer

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

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

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

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

Part the Fourth – Autumn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part the Fifth – The Conclusion

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

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

Under the Greenwood Tree – characters

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

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Under Western Eyes

September 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

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

Joseph Conrad

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

Under Western Eyes – critical commentary

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

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

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

Irony

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

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

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

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

Narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genesis of the text

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

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

Dostoyevski

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

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

Under Western Eyes – study resources

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

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

Under Western Eyes – annotated Kindle eBook edition

Under Western Eyes – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Under Western Eyes – PDF version at RIA Press

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Under Western Eyes – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principal characters

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

Joseph Conrad – biography

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

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

Major novels by Joseph Conrad

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

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

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

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

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

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
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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
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Victory

September 28, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, further reading, and web links

Victory (1915) was first conceived by Conrad as a short story to be called The Dollars. But like many of his planned fictions it expanded as soon as he started writing, and went on to become one of his longest novels. The original manuscript was much longer than the final work, which was first published in serial form in Munsey’s Magazine (New York).

Joseph Conrad

Victory – critical commentary

Narrative

Part I of the novel is introduced by an un-named outer narrator who recounts events largely passed on to him by Captain Davidson from his travels and knowledge of the region in which the novel is set. This type of indirect narrative strategy will be familiar to anyone who has read Conrad’s other works, such as Lord Jim (1900), Falk: A Reminiscence (1903), and Under Western Eyes (1911). It supplies what might be called the ‘back story’ to the events which will follow in Parts II-IV.

Readers are forced to conceptualise the portrait of Axel Heyst through the double filter of Davidson’s and the narrator’s point of view – whilst keeping in mind that both of these are fictional constructs created by Conrad himself.

But from Part II onwards, the outer-narrator disappears, and events are presented in a third person omniscient narrative mode. It is as if Conrad has forgotten his own original narrative structure and has reverted to the more traditional and flexible mode of story-telling. Davidson makes a credulity-straining re-appearance like some deus-ex-machina in the final pages of the novel – but the outer-narrator never re-appears.

In fact the last few pages of the novel are an account written in third-person omniscient mode of Davidson’s interview with a government official – so in logical terms Conrad does not supply any credible means by which this information is reaching the reader.

Even if the reader accepts this blurring of distinctions between a first and third-person narrator, there remain problems with the narrative logic. In Part I of the story Davidson is puzzled and curious regarding Lena, and a great deal is made of the fact that he doesn’t know what she looks like.

But either a third-person omniscient narrator must know what she looks like, or the disappearance of the un-named outer narrator needs to be explained.

More seriously, there is no plausible route (other than via a third person omniscient narrator) for information regarding Heyst’s and Lena’s feelings about each other, and their anxieties during the dramatic finale – since they are both dead at of the end of the novel.

This is a problem of narrative logic which affects many of Conrad’s major novels. Similar issues affect Chance, Lord Jim, and Under Western Eyes. Readers and serious critics of his work seem to accept these compositional flaws in exchange for the dramatic intensity of his stories.

Doubles

The central drama of the novel is provided by the battle of wills and war of nerves as Mr Jones and Ricardo invade Heyst’s secure retreat and corner him in an attempt to steal his ‘treasure’. Jones wants Heyst’s money (which doesn’t really exist), and Ricardo wants to steal Lena from him.

Yet Jones and Heyst are curiously similar. Both of them have been restless wanderers, detatched from society, and both have adopted a negative attitude to the world. Heyst wishes to escape into solitude, and Jones spends most of his time alone, nursing his febrile state of being. Jones has murdered Antonio, Pedro’s brother, and Heyst is (falsely) accused of ‘murdering’ his business partner Morrison when he sends him back to England.

In another sense they are the opposite of each other. Heyst is a robust, masculine figure whose physical presence is repeatedly emphasised. Jones on the other hand is thin, etiolated and feminised. He has ‘long, feminine eyelashes’, ‘beautifully pencilled eyebrows’, and he last appears ‘tightly enfolded in an old but gorgeous blue silk dressing gown’.

Victory – study resources

Victory – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Victory – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Victory – Kindle eBook

Victory – DVD film adaptation at Amazon [Region 1]

Victory – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle £1.92

Victory – film details at International Movie Database

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Victory – plot summary

Part I

As a sudden gesture of generosity, the Swedish recluse Axel Heyst pays the shipping fine incurred by Morrison, an Englishman he has only just met. They then go into a business partnership trading in coal for the newly developed steamships. Morrison returns to England but dies there. Heyst is appointed general manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, and at first prospers. But the company goes into liquidation, and disillusioned with life in general Heyst becomes almost a hermit on the remote island of Samburan.

His colleague Captain Davidson passes on news of Heyst, then brings him in person to Schomberg’s hotel in Surabaya. When he returns to pick him up again, he learns from Mrs Schomberg that Heyst has run off with a young girl from a visiting all-female orchestra. When Davidson next visits Samburan, Heyst asks him to return Mrs Schomberg’s shawl with which she has aided their escape. Davidson returns the shawl but fails to learn anything further about the girl.

Part II

Heyst meets Lena playing in the orchestra at Schomberg’s hotel in Surabaya where she is being bullied by the leader’s wife and pursued by hotelier Schomberg. Heyst and Lena rendezvous in the garden at night where she pleads for his assistance and offers herself to him sexually. Schomberg is eaten up with jealousy regarding this liaison.

The two desperados Jones and Ricardo arrive at the hotel with their servant Pedro. They bully Schomberg into accepting their scheme for gambling on the premises. Ricardo eventually recounts their history to Schomberg – an account which involves deception, theft, and murder as the backdrop to their joint life as wandering gamblers. In order to get them out of his hotel, Schomberg tells them that Heyst has killed his business partner Morrison, stolen all his money, and is now a rich man living in vulnerable isolation on Samburan.

Part III

On Samburan Heyst recounts to Lena how he first set himself up on the island with his Chinese servant Wang. He also explains the powerful influence of his father, a writer-philosopher who has inculcated him with a defensive and rather negative attitude to life. When he also reveals to her his past business with Morrison, Lena tells him of the malicious lies Schomberg has been spreading amongst hotel guests. They discuss his pessimistic views and his inability to express the protective love he feels towards her.

Then Jones, Ricardo, and Pedro arrive at the island. Heyst gives them shelter, but immediately becomes apprehensive regarding their intrusion into his relationship with Lena. When his revolver disappears, he immediately suspects his servant Wang (which proves to be correct). Jones and Ricardo discuss the prospects for success in their venture to steal Heyst’s ‘treasure’.

Part IV

Ricardo sneaks around looking for Lena, then attacks her in the bungalow. She fights him off, then helps him to escape in order to protect Heyst. Meanwhile Wang, having witnessed the attack, announces to Heyst that he is leaving. Heyst holds inconclusive talks with Jones, who insists that Pedro become his servant. Heyst decides to look for Wang, whilst Jones plans to gamble with Heyst to secure all his money.

Heyst seeks Wang’s help, but it is refused. Heyst realises that he is powerless and is trapped. Ricardo arrives to invite Heyst to see Jones, who is feigning illness. Heyst urges Lena to escape to the other side of the island, then visits Jones, where he reveals the truth of their situation, including the presence of Lena. Since Jones is a profound misogynist, this turns him against Ricardo. When they return to Heyst’s bungalow, Jones shoots at Ricardo, but kills Lena who has remained to protect Heyst. At this very moment Davidson suddenly arrives. Jones tracks down Ricardo and kills him, then apparently commits suicide. Heyst creates a funeral pyre for himself and Lena by setting the bungalow on fire.

Principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator
Axel Heyst	a Swedish former manager of the Tropical Belt Coal company
Morrison	the English owner of trading ship Capricorn
Wilhelm Schomberg	a German hotel proprietor in Surabaya (45)
Mrs Schomberg	his ugly, wooden-like wife
Captain Davidson	captain of the merchant vessel, the Sissie
Julius Tesman	trading agent in Surabaya
Lena	a beautiful violin player (20) (also called Alma and Magdalena)
Sgr Zangiacomo	leader of the all-female orchestra
Sgra Zangiacomo	his obnoxious and bullying wife
Mr Jones	a gambler and murderer
Martin Ricardo	his ‘secretary’ – a desperado
Pedro	a Colombian alligator hunter, their servant
Antonio	Pedro’s brother, who is shot by Jones
Wang	Heyst’s Chinese servant

Biography

Setting

The first part of the novel is set in Surabaya, a provincial capital in East Java. The remainder and majority of the events take place on the ficticious island of Samburan, which is located somewhere in the Malaysian archipelago.

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

Other works by Joseph Conrad

Oxford World Classics offers the best editions of Conrad’s work. They are largely based on the most accurate versions of the texts; and they feature introductory essays, a biography, explanatory notes, textual variants, a bibliography of further reading, and in some cases missing or deleted chapters. They are also terrifically good value.

Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
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Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
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Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
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Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
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Works by Joseph Conrad
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Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
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More on Joseph Conrad
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Two Countries – critical commentary

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