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Ravelstein

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

Ravelstein

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

Ravelstein – critical comment

Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

The subject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Structhure

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

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

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

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

Ravelstein – study resources

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon US

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

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

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

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

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Ravelstein

Ravelstein – plot synopsis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
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Twentieth century literature

Reading a Balzac Novel

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If you read any of Balzac’s famous novels – say Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, or Old Goriot – you will probably have in your hands a paperback or an old hardback single volume that offers you all the elements of a traditional novel. It will have memorable characters, a complex plot, and a detailed insight into the workings of French society.

Reading a Balzac Novel

It will also be self-contained. The narrative it presents will be complete, and all the information you need to understand the story will be contained in the one volume you hold in your hands. And yet that sense of completeness will be slightly deceptive – because the world Balzac created in his fiction actually expands beyond the confines of any single novel. What he created was an entire world documenting French society between (roughly) 1800 and 1840.

La Comedie Humaine

Balzac began publishing fiction in 1820s, but from 1834 onward he conceived of his novels and stories as free-standing but interlocking elements in a huge study of French society to which he gave the general title of La Comedie Humaine. (This is a nod towards Dante’s The Divine Comedy.)

He used the device of recurring characters and overlapping events to produce a sort of three-dimensional literary portrait of post-revolutionary France. This grand scheme includes (as he categorized them) Scenes of Provincial Life, Scenes of Parisian Life, Scenes of Military and Political Life, and what he called Philosophic Studies.

Between 1820 and 1848 Balzac produced a total of over ninety finished novels, short stories, and novellas, plus enormous amounts of journalism and theatrical endeavours, the latter of which are largely forgotten today. He was astonishingly productive, and in any given year he might be working on not one but two or three novels at the same time – novels which are now regarded as masterpieces of European literature.

Characters

He was so absorbed in the fictional world of his own creation, he eventually came to regard it as real. This is rather like contemporary fiction in serial form such as the radio programme “The Archers”. Listeners commonly discuss the Ambridge characters as if they were real people.

In his late novel Ursule Mirouet (1841) Balzac introduces a character, the abstemious and entirely virtuous clergyman Abbe Chaperon:

Abbe Chaperon’s arguments with his maid about household expenses were more meticulous than Gobseck’s with his – if indeed that notorious Jew ever did employ a housemaid.

The Abbe is being compared with a character Gobseck (a rapacious money-lender) who is the central figure in the novella, Gobseck (1830). He also crops up in a number of the other works as a minor character – in Old Goriot (1834), Cesar Birotteau (1837), and The Unconscious Comedians (1846). But Balzac makes this comparison as if his readers will be fully conscious of who is being discussed – as indeed they might have been at the time.

Similarly, a mysterious character called Vautrin appears in Old Goriot. He seems to know everybody’s business; he has very cynical views about society; and it turns out that his real name is Jacques Collin. He reappears in a later novel, Lost Illusions (1837-1843), but this time masquerading as Abbé Carlos Herrera, a Spanish diplomat. He is in fact a French master criminal who has escaped from prison and is leading the life of an adventurer, attracted mainly to handsome young men.

After taking his young protégé Lucien Rubempré to Paris he sets him up in stylish quarters with a lover Esther Gobseck (daughter of the above-mentioned money lender). This forms the main plot of A Harlot High and Low (1838-1847). Subsequently Vautrin is arrested and goes back to prison, but he manages to secure his release and later joins the police force as an informer.

This complex literary technique has two important outcomes. First, it allows Balzac to create a three-dimensional account of society. A fictional character might have a very small role to play in one novel, yet that same person might be the entire subject of a major drama in another work. Second, the reader is offered what might be called a ‘stereoscopic’ reading experience.

For instance, in those scenes set in middle and upper-class Paris, any visit to the theatre or the opera is likely to include mention of Eugene de Rastignac, Lucien Rubempre, Horace Brianchon, and Daniel D’Arthez. These are young men about town who know each other and form a fashionable entourage or backdrop to the events of the story. Yet each of these characters has a complex personal history which forms the substance of the other novels in La Comedie Humaine.

Rastignac is a former law student who rises in society, marries into the rich Nuncingen family, and eventually becomes a peer of the realm. Rubempré (born Lucien Chardon) has talent but lacks principles, and ends up hanging himself in prison. D’Arthez is a writer with talent and principles who resists the lure of journalism and produces work of outstanding quality. Bianchon is a humble and self-sacrificing doctor who acts honourably whatever the circumstances, and is admired at all levels of society.

La Comedie Humaine contains over two thousand named characters, of which five hundred appear in several different novels and stories. The introduction of these overlapping and reappearing characters is designed to generate the sense of a real, knowable world in all its complexity. But as the literary critic David Bellos points out, it also produces the opposite effect, which is nevertheless life-like:

The paradox is that a device designed to give solidity to a vast panorama of social life actually gives it what is perhaps its most life-like feature—inexhaustible fragmentariness. Balzac’s world opens on to infinity through the central device that first appeared as a means of closing it off.

If you wish to track any of the characters and their appearances in Balzac’s whole oeuvre, you will find a huge list on line with detailed biographies at – The Repertory of the Comedy Humaine

Choosing a text

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

Reading a Balzac Novel

1905 edition in sixteen volumes

There are modern translations, older versions from the nineteenth century, ‘collected works’, and all sorts of eBook compilations which probably don’t even mention the name of a translator.

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

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

The best current editions of the major novels are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a chronology of Honore de Balzac, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Balzac – selected reading

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Reading a Balzac Novel

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Reasons of State

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot summary

Reasons of State (1974) first published as El recurso del metodo has a curious history. It was written as the result of a bet between Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel Garcia Marquez – both of them Nobel prizewinners. Marquez produced The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Carpentier wrote Reasons of State. Both novels deal with an issue which still blights Latin-America today – political stranglehold by dictatorships. As literary works they owe a great deal to El senor presidente (1946) which was the first novel to deal with this issue, written by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Asturias, an equally distinguished predecessor . The English translation is by Francis Partridge, one of the last survivors of the Bloomsbury Group.

Reasons of State

Reasons of State – commentary

Magical realism

Carpentier is one of the many Latin-American writers who have employed the technique of ‘magical realism’ – a term that he coined himself. This is an approach to fictional narratives that combines traditional realism with elements of fantasy, exaggeration, and the supernatural.

In Reasons of State for instance, the president from his Parisian embassy socialises with other fictional characters such as the distinguished academician, his daughter and his secretary, Peralta. Combined with this fictional world, he is also acquainted with real historical figures such as the Italian fascist and poet Gabriele D’Dannunzio (1863-1938).

There is therefore a close mixture of the fictional with the ‘real’, historical worlds. But he is also connected in the narrative with people such as Elstir (a painter), Vinteuil (a composer), Morel (a violinist) who are fictional characters from Marcel Proust’s great novel Remembrance of Things Past. This brings a second level of fictionality to the narrative – with the subject of one fictional text appearing in another. This is sometimes known as ‘intertextuality’.

For good measure, the president is also personally acquainted with Reynaldo Hahn, the Venezuelan composer who was a close friend of Proust. The narrative therefore switches between a fictional realism of its own making, references to real historical events and people, and the inclusion of elements from a parallel world of cultural aesthetics and history.

Narrative mode

It should be clear from the outset that the narrative is delivered in a mixture of first-person and third-person narrative modes. The novel begins with the president’s thoughts and feelings as his day begins in the Parisian embassy:

I’ve never been able to sleep in a rigid bed with a mattress and bolster. I have to curl up inside a rocking hammock, to be cradled in its corded network. Another swing and a yawn, and with another swing I get my legs out and hunt about with my feet for my slippers which I have lost in the pattern of the Persian carpet.

But gradually this first-person account becomes a third-person presentation of events delivered in conventional manner, as if by an anonymous omniscient narrator. These events are largely concerned with revealing the President’s scandalous and hypocritical behaviour:

“The cunt! The son of a bitch!” yelled the Head of State hurling the cables to the ground. “I’ve not finished reading it,” said the Cholo Mendoza, picking up the papers. The movement had spread to three provinces of the North and threatened the Pacific zone.

Carpentier manages these transitions very skilfully, but this technique does pose some aesthetic problems. There is a blurring and eventually very little distinction between the two modes. The result is that many lengthy passages of narrative, packed with literary, historical, cultural, and philosophical references, have the appearance of representing the president’s point of view.

We now know that many dictators can be culturally sophisticated at the same time as being social barbarians who countenance torture and the savage repression of all criticism. But somehow the range and depth of cultural references attributed to the president never seem persuasive.

There is also the problem (shared with Carpentier’s other novels) of a disruptive volume of material concerned with music and architecture. These are both subjects Carpentier studied as an undergraduate and has written on extensively, but their appearance in Reasons of State constitute what elsewhere would be considered digressions. They are not fundamentally linked to the main themes of the novel.

The main theme

The principal subject of the novel is obviously the life, thought processes, and behaviour of a dictator. The novel traces his desperate attempts the cling to power, his decline, exile, and death. In this sense it follows the tradition established by Miguel Asturias with Mister President (1946) and is similar to The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes. All of them have catalogued the disruptive and tyrannical effects of Central American regimes lacking democracy – in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Mexico – though all of them have chosen to write about fictional, imaginary, and un-named countries.

However the underlying theme of Carpentier’s novel (as in many of his other works) is the tension and contradictions between native Latin-American history and the traditional western culture that has arisen out of Europe. Carpentier was born in Switzerland and educated largely in Paris, where he began his literary career in the 1920s. But his family also spent a lot of time in Havana, and he was a founding member of the Cuban Communist Party in 1921.

This is not to suggest that he suffered from ‘divided loyalties’ but to point out his abiding attempts to fuse the two very different cultures he had absorbed. His 1953 novel The Lost Steps deals very explicitly with this theme.

Reasons of State is interesting because he attributes a great deal of this interest in European culture to the President himself. This presents the reader with a certain problem of fictional credibility. We are asked to believe that this cruel and vulgar man is also a connoisseur of fine art, poetry, and opera. He abuses women, he is an alcoholic, an embezzler, and he rules by torture and executions; but we are expected to accept that he is also an enthusiast for classical music, painting and poetry, and a close friend of Reynaldo Hahn.

Readers will make up their own minds if he is a coherent and credible character or not. But there are two further points which might be made about this contradiction or imbalance. First, it might be said that Carpentier is forcing his own cultural enthusiasms into the novel – at all costs. Second, it could be said that despite the president’s unpleasant behaviour, Carpentier is in an an odd sense writing about himself.

It is in this sense that the contradiction between political mis-rule and cultural sophistication (the Latin-America/European divide) is the theme of the novel, as distinct from its overt subject, which is the decline and fall of a dictator.

Reasons of State – study resources

Reasons of State (2013) – Amazon UK

El recurso del metodo (2009) – Amazon UK

Reasons of State (2013) – Amazon US

El recurso del metodo (2009) – Amazon US

Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (2014) – Kindle

Reasons of State – plot summary

ONE

The president of an un-named Latin-American country wakes up in his Paris residence recalling a visit to a high-class brothel the previous night. He also reflects on his friendship with Gabriele D’Annunzio. There is a visit by a right-wing French academician, offering the president’s daughter Ofelia an introduction to Cosima Wagner. The academician sponges on the president by selling him some ‘rare’ manuscripts. Suddenly an ambassador arrives with news of a military uprising back home. There is an immediate council of war.

TWO

Arms are purchased in the USA with money from concessions ceded to the United Fruit Company. The president and his entourage sail to Havana incognito. Arriving in the home country, the president cracks down on protesting students and workers.

After a day’s military action the president and his entourage shelter from tropical storms in a cave, where they discover pre-Colombian embalmed bodies in urns. Next day they cross the Rio Verde, but the enemy has retreated. The rebel general Galvan is pursued, cornered, and executed.

In Nueva Cordoba the president and his men lay siege to a town which at first capitulates, but when resistance begins the president’s army slaughter the population. He then returns to the capital where a rigged election reaffirms his position. However, he is suffering from a frozen right arm and returns to France for treatment.

THREE

On arrival in Paris he is shunned by all his old contacts. The French press has reported all the atrocities in Nueva Cordoba. Only the reactionary academician shows any sympathy and excuses his ‘excesses’. In exchange for bribes the academician arranges for a press campaign flattering to the President. In the midst of ensuing confusion, the First World War breaks out.

In the lull before fighting begins, the president looks down on Europe and bolsters his flagging confidence with reflections on the profusion of religious Virgin saints in Latin-America. Then news arrives of a treacherous revolt by his minister of war, General Hoffman.

The President prepares for departure with a visit to a brothel. He realises he will have no convincing arguments to offer back home. He decides to attack German culture and promote Latinism in an attempt to curry popular support. His secretary tries to tempt him to remain in Paris, but he has grandiose notions of ‘Destiny’.

FOUR

General Hoffman is deserted by his troops and dies falling into a swamp. The president then goes on holiday to his seaside retreat. News of German atrocities in the war begin to appear, which the president cannot reconcile with the peaceful German colony living in the capital.

The European war brings prosperity to the country. The president decides to establish a national capitol, and architectural contests are held. A huge naked female statue is commissioned, but it turns out to be too big for its setting.

When the Germans torpedo an American ship, it brings the USA into the war. Amidst ridiculous propaganda about the comforts of the trenches, the president despatches troops. The capitol is completed and inaugurated with a lavish banquet, but the celebrations are followed by a bomb attack on the palace. The president immediately orders repressive measures against the university, teachers, students, bookshops, and the working public. The common element is identified as communism, which the president does not understand. But suddenly the European war ends.

There is an elaborate opera season which ends with another bomb attack. A model prison is built. The price of sugar collapses. Banks close. A period of celebratory carnival merges into armed revolt – which is put down with extreme repression, torture, and executions.

FIVE

North American influence grows and Europe is seen as chaotic and backwards. When the New York Times publishes a scathing critique of the country the national press merely responds with tabloid reports of sensational domestic crimes. Holy week is replaced by Santa Claus and a commercial Christmas.

Strikes begin, followed by the appearance of a radical bulletin Liberation. A spate of public misinformation ensues. Everything is blamed on a single trouble-maker – The Student. Someone is arrested and interrogated personally by the president, who cajoles then threatens him. The interview is cut short by an explosion.

The economy collapses and the city deteriorates. Strikes continue in the provinces. The presence of the USA grows. There is a general strike, to which the president responds by machine-gunning closed shops. There is public demand for the abdication of the president. A rumour is spread that the president is dead. People emerge to celebrate, and are slaughtered by troops.

SIX

The following day order collapses completely. US marines land in the North and the president escapes in an ambulance, disguised as a patient. He is given shelter by the provincial US consul. The secretary Peralta deserts to the rebels.
The president waits anxiously to be smuggled away by speedboat to a US ship.

SEVEN

The president arrives back in Paris to find his residence full of modern art and his louche daughter partying. Former contacts are unavailable or dead. He laments the changes in modern life and finds solace only in the brothel.

The Mayorala buys exotic fruits and cooks native dishes in the house, which the president and even Ofelia enjoy. Meanwhile Dr Martinez assumes power back home and promises reforms. The Student meets delegates to an international socialist conference in Paris.

The president grows thinner, time goes by, and he lives in the past, recalling how he cheated the country economically. He begins to confuse past and present, loses the use of his legs, and eventually dies.

Reasons of State – characters
— the President, head of state, dictator of a central American country
Dr Peralta his secretary
Ofelia his spoiled self-indulgent daughter
Ariel his son, ambassador to the US
Mayorala Elmira his housekeeper
General Ataulfo Galvan a rebel leader
Dr Martinez a professor of philosophy and rebel leader
Colonel Walter Hoffman the minister for war
Enoch Crowder the US ambassador
The Student a figure representing all youthful resistance

© Roy Johnson 2018

More on Alejo Carpentier
More on the novella
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Rebecca West – A Letter to a Grandfather

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

A Letter to a Grandfather - first edition

Rebecca West, A Letter to a Grandfather (1933) Hogarth Letters, Number 7. Cover design by John Banting.

“In spite of his financially cautious recruitment of Margaret West for Hogarth manager in February 1933 and his by-now-familiar claim that he did not want to publish books merely because they might be profitable, Leonard Woolf did not neglect to pump up the press income when he could. In that very month he tried to rescue the Hogarth Letters series after twelve titles by binding together eleven of the letters into a single volume with a new title page as The Hogarth Letters. The effort was not successful, and he terminated the series after publishing the last one in March, Rebecca West’s Letter to a Grandfather.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

Research Methods for English Studies

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new approaches to literary studies for post-graduates

Research Methods for English Studies is a collection of essays on the subject of research skills, methods, and methodology in the field of literary studies. The essays betray a profound unease which has (quite rightly) begun to infect this branch of academic activity. For they are in a sense answers to questions which are rarely if ever asked in this section of the humanities. Questions such as ‘What exactly is research in literary studies? What methods are used? What validity do the results have? Indeed, compared to other subjects such as biology, history, physics, astronomy, and sociology, what is literary studies about?

Research Methods for English StudiesSome practitioners can answer these questions by taking fast hold of a vaguely related discipline and writing about the biography of an author, the genesis and publication history of a text, or the nature of its reception by the reading public. But the vast majority of what is called literary studies (and not just ‘English’) is nothing more than one person’s opinions about a text or a body opf work. Even worse, it may be opinions about opinions, or opinions about theories. There will be no declaration of critical method attached to works submitted for assessment or publication, no theory to be tested or conditions which can be reproduced – only a long bibliography of works consulted, packed out with the names and works of currently fashionable critics.

This is the state off affairs that has obtained for a long time in institutions of higher education, and in the prevailing climate it is likely to be coming to an end. These essays, whilst betraying unease, are also in a sense offering a lifeline to those who wish to find a niche for themselves in departments of literature or humanities. They are saying ‘Look! Here’s a new angle, so that you can retain tenure’.

Carolyn Steedman (a historian) for instance offers a chapter on the romance of working in archives, though she has no specific advice on what you might do when you get to it. Mary Evans promotes ‘auto/biography’ as a new approach – but this misses the fact that writing accounts of authors’ personal lives is a form of history, not literary studies. The activity of considering a number of biographies of Sylvia Plath amounts to not much more than a higher form of weekend supplement celebrity gossip, which says nothing about her poetry.

Next comes oral reminiscence. The argument here is that this enables a recovery of lost or forgotten history. All well and good, but there is no explanation of how this applies to literary studies. The example discussed merely compares the memories of a Home Guard volunteer with the accuracy or otherwise of Dad’s Army.

A chapter on visual methodologies carries with it similar problems. It is quite true that pictures can be analysed and interpreted, but since the vast majority of literary texts have no illustrations at all, it is difficult to to imagine how such an approach would help us to understand An Essay on Criticism or King Lear.

Discourse analysis looks more promising, because it focusses its attention on language, but an analysis of the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice stretches for a whole page without mentioning the term irony, though it does have space to complain about the text’s ‘focus on heteronormativity’. But at least Gabrielle Griffin goes on to explain how computer programs can be used to analyse texts – an activity which might keep somebody in post via a research grant whilst legitimately claiming to be literary studies.

Ethnographic studies at first seems a possibility, but studies of how readers consume texts, why they choose one book rather than another, and what the significance of their activity might be – all are ultimately sociological questions or matters of private biography. They do not contribute to literary understanding or interpretation.

Catherine Belsey appears to be on much firmer ground with ‘textual analysis’. Indeed, she even offers a practical exercise to demonstrate its efficacy. But her exercise has problems right from the outset. First of all she analyses a painting (Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia) and then she does nothing but raise questions about its meaning, based on nothing more than you could gain from a few minutes in front of the object, with an encyclopedia or Google search open by your side.

With much invoking of Roland Barthes, she argues that meanings in a text are ‘ultimately undecidable’, which she sees as good news for researchers, because it will keep them in business for ever. This is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy that today’s crop of post-graduates would do well to treat with extreme caution when applying for grants funded by tax-payers’ money.

There’s a whole chapter on interviewing authors (more celebrity gossip) and even creative writing as ‘research’ before the collection ends with the most sensible chapter of all – the use of computational technology as an aid to research. This includes the digitisation of primary sources, computer-aided textual analysis, the creation of electronic texts, and the establishment of multi-featured hypertext editions. All of these approaches are of use to other scholars, and they tend to be free of the ‘Look at me’ attitudes which infest much of what passes for contemporary criticism. It’s significant that this chapter has by far the largest and most useful supplement of suggested further reading and follow-up web sites.

So – this rabbit is finally pulled out of the hat at the very end – but anyone following the general advice in this book should be warned. In the current economic climate many of these self-indulgent approaches to ‘research’ are likely to be doomed. Some of the contributors to this volume are likely to be listed for early retirement by the time you come to read what they have written.

Research Methods for English Studies   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Research Methods for English Studies   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010

Gabrielle Griffin (ed), Research Methods for English Studies Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp.248, ISBN: 0748621555

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Revenge

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

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

Revenge

Vladimir Nabokov

Revenge – critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revenge – study resources

Revenge The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Revenge Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

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

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

Revenge Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Revenge – plot summary

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

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

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

Revenge – further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

PninPnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected StoriesCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

Right of Sanctuary

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

Right of Sanctuary (El derecho de asilo) has a rather strange publishing history. Its first appearance was in the collection of stories Guerre de temps published in France (Paris: Gaillmard, 1967). Next it appeared in English, published by Victor Gollancz in 1970 and translated by the Bloomsbury Group diarist Frances Partridge. Only in 1972 did it appear in Spanish, published by Editorial Lumen, in Barcelona. The collection The War of Time contains a group of stories all told in radically different styles, but with a recurrent theme of exploring various notions of time and chronology.

Right of Sanctuary

Right of Sanctuary – critical commentary

The most unusual feature of this story is the fact that Carpentier uses all three possible narrative modes to deliver the sequence of events. The story begins in a conventional third person omniscient mode. That is, an unspecified narrator reveals information about the Secretary, his actions, and (some of) his feelings, referring to him using the third person pronoun ‘he’:

Going into his office, which was decorated in the Pompeian style, the Secretary found several dossiers that could quickly be dealt with, waiting for him beside an inkpot surmounted by a Napoleonic eagle. This task over, he passed the time until Sergeant Raton should serve his luncheon [by] walking through the Palace.

But from the next section of the story onwards, he uses a combination of first and second person narrative modes – and switches in and out of all three modes for the remainder of the story. The first person narrative mode will be familiar to most readers – a sequences of events related from the point of view of a specific character – in this case the Secretary himself, who refers to himself as ‘I’:

I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m bored. And I’m surrounded by things that contribute some new elements to my boredom.

But the second person narrative mode is likely to be less familiar. This takes the form of ‘you’ being used as the form of address – and that ‘you’ can be thought of as singular or plural. It can be the individual ‘I’ of the first person narrative mode, speaking about himself; or it can be either the first person narrator or the author addressing the reader – as if saying ‘this is what you would do in these circumstances’:

You take advantage of the momentary respite to leave the bar and hurry off to the offices of the National City Bank of New York, which is crowded with people quite unaware of what is going on fifty yards away. You take the next street and plunge into the old part of town, where you know no one.

This mixture of narrative modes seems to create a distance between the author and his work. The reader is being invited to contemplate a series of tableaux vivants rather than become engaged psychologically and emotionally with the characters and their predicaments. But this is entirely consistent with Carpentier’s general approach to fiction, which does not follow the norms of traditional European literature

The story is a slightly improbable jeu d’esprit, but strangely enough it has a close link to historical reality – because Alejo Carpentier, having been a political exile from Cuba during the Batista regime, was actually made Cuban ambassador to France in 1966 by Fidel Castro. It is worth noting that this is only twelve months before the story was first published. Carpentier even draws attention to this strange phenomenon during the course of the story:

the Consul told me that in his country—’our’ country—the position of Ambassador was not generally given to a professional diplomat, but to brilliant or able men: writers, financiers, men of the world, journalists. Moreover, it was an American tradition to appoint men from other nations of the continent to diplomatic and educational posts

This might even be considered Alejo Carpentier obliquely patting himself on the back, or it could alternatively be seen as the ‘real’ part in ‘lo real maravilloso’ – a term he coined to describe the type of literature which emerged from Latin-America in the wake of the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

The story also embraces one of Carpentier’s favourite conceits – the idea of circularity, or things returning to their original state – but maybe in a changed form. At the beginning of the story, the Secretary (whose name is Ricardo – which is only mentioned once) is working for the Ambassador of an un-named country. The embassy is located in what seems like a Latin-American state which is in the grip of a military coup. To escape danger, the Secretary seeks asylum in the embassy of another small Latin-American country. As a result of his knowledge of the country’s history he is appointed its Ambassador – replacing the diplomatic incumbent, who is incompetent.

This neat irony is underscored when he goes to present his credentials to General Mabillan, who knows who he is, appreciates the ironic political twist, and shields him from possible negative publicity. As the story closes, the Secretary returns to more or less the same work (but in a different Embassy) and he returns to a normal sense of time, having been ‘outside’ it during his period of refuge.

Right of Sanctuary – study resources

Right to Sanctuary is one of five stories contained in the collection The War of Time. The other four stories are Journey Back to the Source (1944), The Road to Santiago (1948), Like the Night (1947), and The Wise Men (1967).

Right of Sanctuary Right to Sanctuary – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

Right of Sanctuary El derecho de asilo – at Amazon UK – (Text in Spanish)

Right of Sanctuary Right to Sanctuary – at Amazon US – (Text in English)

Right of Sanctuary El derecho de asilo – at Amazon US – (Text in Spanish)

Right of Sanctuary – plot summary

Part 1.   On a Sunday some time in the early 1940s, in the lavish and empty rooms of a government Palace, the Secretary to the President hears rumours of a possible military coup d’etat . He shares the news with Sergeant Raton, a mild-mannered adjutant who is a fan of Clausewitz and his theory of Total War. The country is in a border dispute with an adjacent state.

Part 2.   Next day the Secretary arrives at the Palace to find government ministers being arrested. When the President himself arrives for a cabinet meeting there is an exchange of gunshots. The Secretary escapes from the building and takes refuge in the embassy of a small Latin-American country. The foreign Ambassador is reluctant to have him, but his wife is more hospitable. The rebel General Mabillan makes a patriotic broadcast, but the Secretary foresees nothing but potential corruption in all his declared new public works.

Part 3.   Some days later the Secretary has become bored, cooped up in a small spare bedroom in the foreign embassy. He passes time itemising the contents of a hardware store in the street outside his window.

Part 4.   The frontier dispute intensifies, and General Mabillan makes further patriotic broadcasts on radio and television. He organises a display of anti-aircraft defence forces which does nothing but injure his own population. The Secretary studies the history of the Frontier Country in its post-Colombian development, and comes up with an ambiguous compromise solution to the border dispute

Part 5.   After some months the Secretary more or less takes over the business of the foreign Embassy, enhances its trade in folkloric merchandise, and becomes the lover of the Ambassador’s wife, Cecilia.

Part 6.   The Secretary loses track of time, whilst in the streets below riots erupt against General Mabillan. Meanwhile, he and Cecilia plan to poison the Ambassador.

Part 7.   The Secretary is eventually granted nationality by his host country, and because of his efficiency he is made Ambassador by the visiting Consul, to replace his incompetent host, who has been recalled and posted to Gothenburg. The Secretary presents himself formally to General Mabillan, who is aware of the diplomatic trick. Next day the Secretary, now Ambassador, returns to work and resumes a normal relationship with time.

Right to Sanctuary

Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier web links

Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

The Kingdom of this World
Lecture by Rod Marsh – University of Cambridge

Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

© Roy Johnson 2015

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Ripley Under Ground

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

Ripley Under Ground

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

Ripley Under Ground – commentary

Background

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

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

Murder and morality

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

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

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

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

Ripley the Protean

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

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

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

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

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

The conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ripley’s Game – study resources

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Under Ground – Penguin – Amazon UK

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Under Ground – Penguin – Amazon US

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Under Ground – Kindle – Amazon UK

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Under Ground – Kindle – Amazon US

Ripley Under Ground Ripley Complete – Box Set – Amazon UK

Ripley Under Ground

Patricia Highsmith

The complete Ripliad

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Ripley Under Ground (1970)

Ripley Under Ground (1974)

The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)

Ripley Under Water (1991)

Ripley Under Ground – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2017

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Ripley’s Game

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

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

Ripley's Game

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

Ripley’s Game – commentary

Background

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

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

The main theme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black humour

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

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

The ending

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

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

Ripley’s Game – film adaptations

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

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

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

Ripley’s Game – study resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ripley's Game

The complete Ripliad

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Ripley Under Ground (1970)

Ripley’s Game (1974)

The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)

Ripley Under Water (1991)

Ripley's Game

Patricia Highsmith

Ripley’s Game – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2017

More Patricia Highsmith
Twentieth century literature
More on short stories

Robert Graves – The Feather Bed

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

The Feather Bed - first edition

 
Robert Graves, The Feather Bed (1923)

Cover design by William Nicholson. Number 210 of 250 copies signed by the author.

“As the books and pamphlets on political subjects grew in number and importance, the Woolfs continued to publish more volumes of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism in 1926 than in any other areas. A significant event was the publication of another book in 1926 by Robert Graves. He published a pamphlet on poetry and brought with him Laura Riding. Graves met Laura Riding Gottschalk in 1926 after he had published his first Hogarth Press essay on modern poetry.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

The Hogarth Press published a total of seven works by Graves, the first of which was The Feather Bed. This book consists of an “Introductory Letter” to John Crowe Ransom (his name misspelled “Ransome”) and an unconventional poem: a young man’s monologue that focussed on “internal debate about the nature of love, sexuality, and the religious calling of nuns and priests”. The book generated interest and sold quite well, though no subsequent edition of the poem was issued. The painter William Nicholson, Graves’s father-in-law, provided the cover for the book.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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© Roy Johnson 2005

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