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Seize the Day

June 22, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and plot summary,

Seize the Day was first published in 1956 along with three short stories and a one act play in the USA by Viking. But such is the critical reputation it has developed in the intervening years that it is now published separately as a novella (or a short novel) of outstanding importance. It was Saul Bellow’s fourth major work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the same year – 1976.

Seize the Day – critical comment

The American Dream

The American Dream is a a set of ideals that has its origin in the American Declaration of Independence (1776), which proclaims that “all men are created equal” with the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Dream embraces a notion that regardless of social class or circumstances of birth, everyone has the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers.

This is a somewhat utopian idea which has historically ignored the fact that America was a society founded on the near-extermination of native Americans, on the racist enslavement of African-Americans, and on a free market capitalist economy that drove millions of people into poverty.

Many artists and writers have criticised this Dream and its shortcomings, and Seize the Day is a very good example of an almost dystopian view of America in the mid twentieth century. Tommy Wilhelm is presented as an Average Man – but his life and the Dream he yearns for are in ruins.

He was employed as a travelling salesman (selling junk toys for children) but he has been forced out of his job by a combination of competition and nepotism on the part of his employers, who have appointed a relative to take over his sales patch. The ‘free’ market has impoverished him. He has a wife and two children, but his marriage has soured (for reasons unknown) and it has become nothing but a financial burden to him, which has led to his being insolvent.

Another feature of the American Dream is the idea that not only does everyone have the ability to be successful, but they can also become famous as well. Tommy was lured by an unscrupulous ‘talent scout’ into abandoning his college studies for the lure of a Hollywood ‘screen test’. His career in the cinema amounted to nothing more than a humiliating scene playing bagpipes:in an unknown movie: even the sound was dubbed in afterwards.

He lives in squalor; he is in bad health; and he clutches at every flimsy hope of the no-hoper – such as the idea that he could invent something: “Everybody wants to make something. Any American does.” But the central plank of the American Dream to which he clings like a man in a shipwreck is the idea that he can become rich by investing on the stock exchange. Tamkin lures him with stories of easy wealth, and over the course of the day his investment (in lard) is wiped out by falling prices.

In almost every aspect of the Dream, Tommy is a failure. He is even downwardly socially mobile – an unemployed commercial traveller (as they used to be called) in children’s toys, whereas his father has a far higher status as a successful doctor. Tommy’s life is an illustration of the fact that the American Dream remains a myth.

Mephistopholes

Mephistopheles (or the Devil) is a common figure in European literature, associated with the Faust legend. He appears in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s Faust, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Common features of his presentation are that he is clever, witty, and offers temptations to those before whom he appears. He also comes and goes suddenly, and in some cases changes his outer appearance.

Dr Tamkin is very much the Mephistophelean figure. He winds himself around Tommy like a snake, feeding him with dreams of easy wealth, a successful life, and rationalisations for taking the short route to success. He even gives the novel it’s title, with his injunctions to live in the moment, in the here and now, and to ‘Seize the Day’ (Carpe Diem). His anecdotes, flights of fancy, and tales of his own exploits are marvellously entertaining, and (almost) persuasive – but we are reminded by Dr Adler’s cautions and Tommy’s own doubts, that Tamkin is a fraud.

Tamkin takes Tommy into the central Hell of the stock exchange, where he disattends to Tommy’s concerns and pursues his own ends. Indeed he has fraudulently cheated Tommy, with whom he is supposed to be in a business partnership, and enriched himself at Tommy’s expense. And like Mephistopheles, he comes and goes at will, disappearing just when Tommy has hit rock bottom and needs him most.

A Freudian reading

The novella also invites yet another interpretation – a reading based on the classical Freudian trinity of the Ego, the Super-Ego, and the Id as the structure of human consciousness itself. It is certainly not difficult to see that the three characters namely Doctor Adler, Tommy, and Tamkin as corresponding closely to the three Freudian categories.

Freud’s theory posits the Ego, the Super-ego, and the Id as the three parts of the human psyche. They are in potential or actual conflict with each other, fighting for control of the individual. The Ego represents the conscious and realistic of the psyche which must deal with the challenges of life and must mediate between the competing demands of the Super-ego and the Id. It includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. The Super-ego represents the critical and moralising set of social values and cultural rules which are embodied in the Law and authority figures. The Id represents the amoral and instinctive desires It is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. The id contains the libido, which acts according to the ‘pleasure principle’.

Freud’s basic notion is that these three components of consciousness represent different types of morality which are in potential conflict with each other:

From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral and then become as cruel as only the id can be.
The Ego and the Id

It is not at all difficult to see the three principal characters in these terms. Tommy is the Ego writ large. He is struggling to solve the many problems in his crumbling life, and he is being pulled apart by the conflicting demands of ‘Dr’ Tamkin and his father. Doctor Adler is a perfect example of an authority figure. He is Tommy’s father, with whom Tommy is in very Oedipal competition. He is successful; he has economic and social power; and all the advice he gives to his son is sensible, moral, and socially correct. But he is pitiless in his attitude to Tommy.

‘Dr’ Tamkin on the other hand is nothing but a temptation figure goading Tommy towards the pleasure principle – of easy money, instant gratification; sexual freedom, and rationalized explanations for any actions he wishes to take. Tommy knows that his father represents what is morally right – but he craves mercy or at least sympathy from him, but Doctor Adler shows none. Similarly, Tommy feels that the temptations offered by Tamkin are probably too good to be true: he doubts his veracity and thinks he might be a fraud, yet he has cast in his lot with him.

Narrative

The narrative is a wonderful mix of third person and first person narrative modes, switching fluently between an authorial account of Tommy’s movements throughout the day, into his thoughts about the plight in which he finds himself, and back out again. In all this Bellow combines the language of ‘literature’ with that of the street – a masterly feature which was to become one of his hallmarks in later novels

It made Wilhelm profoundly bitter that his father should speak to him with such detachment about his welfare. Dr. Adler liked to appear affable. Affable! His own son, his one and only son, could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him. I wouldn’t turn to Tamkin, he thought, if I could turn to him. At least Tamkin sympathises with me and tries to give me a hand, whereas Dad doesn’t want to be disturbed.

Novel or Novella?

The work is less than 40,000 words long – so it could be considered a long short story. Many of Henry James’s tales are similar in length. Or it could be seen as a rather short novel. But there are very good reasons for regarding it as an outstandingly good example of a novella.

The strongest reason is the amazing< em>unity of time, place, action, and character. The events of the narrative take place on a single day, in a single place (New York City); the action is continuous; and everything is centred on the figure of Tommy Wilhelm. In fact the action forms a downward spiral in his fate. He begins the day in a desperate state but hopes the events of his day will improve matters. The reverse happens, and things go from bad to worse. The events are also punctuated symbolically by what seem like the signs of incipient heart attacks as the disappointments pile up to invade his failing health.

It could also be said that the narrative ends on a tragic note, with Tommy sucked into the funeral of a complete stranger – who might almost be regarded as another version of himself, just when he has reached the rock bottom of his hopes. Yet this negative denouement is tempered by the crisis in Tommy’s feelings as he feels a kinship with the dead man.

It is the compression of these fictional elements that characterise the novella and give it a concentrated unity of purpose and design. The events of the narrative may appear fairly trivial (an unemployed middle-aged man who has a problematic wife) but they represent something larger than themselves. Tommy Wilhelm is not simply Doctor Adler’s son – he is Mr Middle America – in the same way as Willy Loman can be seen in Arthur Miller’s drama Death of a Salesman

Seize the Day – study resources

Seize the Day – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon UK

Seize the Day – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon US

Seize the Day – Library of America – Amazon UK

Seize the Day – Library of America – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

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

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

Seize the Day – plot summary

Part I. Tommy Wilhelm is a young middle-aged travelling salesman who feels an Oedipal resentment towards his successful father Doctor Adler, who is comfortably retired. They both live in apartments in the same hotel in New York City. Tommy quit college when a bogus talent scout (who turned out to be a pimp) offered him a screen test. Tommy failed in his quest for stardom in Hollywood, he has lost his job as a salesman, he is separated from his wife and children, and he is losing money on stock market investments recommended by a fellow resident at the hotel, ‘Dr’ Tamkin. He feels guilty about having changed his name, and he realises he cannot really change the person he is – or what he has inherited from his forebears.

Part II. On collecting his mail in the hotel lobby he is confronted by bills from his wife which he cannot afford to pay. At breakfast in the dining room he meets his father talking to a fellow guest and feels annoyed
because his father talks up his son and daughter, neither of whom is successful. Tommy smokes heavily, takes pills, lives in squalor, drives an untidy car, and drinks Coca-Cola for breakfast. He feels guilty and annoyed having to explain away the loss of his job to his father’s breakfast friend. Doctor Adler thinks that Tamkin might be a fraud, yet Tommy has given him his last $700 to invest.

Part III. His father advises him to stop drinking and taking pills, recommending instead water therapy and exercise – all of which Tommy sees as mean-spirited and showing a lack of understanding. Tommy complains about his wife, and how she demands more and more from him – especially money. He feels as if she is trying to kill him with her demands. They discuss the failure of his marriage: his father remains implacably critical and unsympathetic. Doctor Adler accuses him of having been fired from his job, and possibly being in trouble with some other woman. He even reproaches him for having joined the armed forces during the Second World War. He refuses to give him (or his sister) any money, and they part in anger.

Part IV. In the hotel lobby he meets ‘Dr’ Tamkin who reveals the embarrassing details of their very unequal speculative investment in lard on the stock exchange. Tommy tells him about the argument with his father, and Tamkin spins him some rather improbable ‘case histories’ concerning his patients. He then boasts about his own accomplishments, his social connections, and his travels. Tommy continues to wonder if Tamkin is a fraud, but Tamkin persuades him with a theory of Twin Souls within one person.

Part V. Tommy and Tamkin go to the stock exchange. Tommy feels overwhelmed by the city but recalls a transcendent feeling of love for humankind. Tamkin continues to expound his philosophy of the Here and Now and living for the moment, whilst watching his own investments rise.

Part VI. Over lunch Tamkin continues to offer Tommy theories and rationalisations connected with money, father-son conflicts, and how to deal with ex-wives – all illustrated with barely credible stories from his own experience. Tommy takes elderly Mr Rappaport to buy some cigars. When he gets back to the exchange his share prices have dropped, wiping out all his investment, and Tamkin has disappeared.

Part VII. Tommy goes back to the hotel in search of Tamkin, but cannot find him. He goes down into the bath house in the basement, where his father refuses to pay his hotel bill. Tommy phones his wife, who complains about a post-dated cheque he has given her. They argue: she refuses to work. He feels she is killing him with her demands for money. On Broadway he gets caught up in the funeral of a stranger, and the sight of the dead man causes him to break down in tears.

Seize the Day – principal characters

Tommy Wilhelm	an unemployed commercial salesman
Doctor Adler	his father, a successful retired doctor
‘Dr’ Tamkin	claims to be a psychiatrist
Maurice Venice	a pimp, claims to be a talent scout
Margaret	Tommy’s demanding wife
Catharine	Tommy’s sister, a would-be painter
Mr Perl	German fellow hotel resident
Olive	Tommy’s Catholic woman friend in Roxbury
Mr Rappaport	almost blind stocks trader and bigamist

Other works by Saul Bellow

Herzog (1964) became highly regarded and a classic almost as soon as it was published. It centres intensely on the life of Moses Herzog, a Jewish intellectual who is driven close to the verge of breakdown by the adultery of his second wife with his close friend. He writes letters to famous people, both living and dead – Spinoza, Nietzsche, Winston Churchill, and the President of the USA – giving them a piece of his mind and asking their advice about how to live. The novel begins with a statement which sets the tone for everything that follows: “If I am going out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog”.
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Humboldt’s Gift (1974) traces the life and memories of writer Charlie Citrine as he reflects on the influence of his boyhood friend and mentor, Humboldt. This character is based loosely upon Delmore Schwartz, the Jewish poet and short story writer whose early promise was never fulfilled. He descended into alcoholism and poverty, and died in a cheap hotel room, creating the modern version of the myth of the ‘doomed poet’. The novel deals with the ‘gift’ for aesthetic appreciation he passes on to his close friend Charlie, the narrator of the novel.
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Ravelstein (2000) is something of a double portrait. Abe Ravelstein, a mega-successful Jewish academic realises that he might be dying. He invites his friend Chick to write an biographical study of him. What we get is a not-so-thinly disguised portrait of the critic Allan Bloom written by a character who has had all the brushes with life which Bellow experienced in his own: near-death illness, late-life divorce, and happiness with a new wife.

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Sigmund Freud – The Ego and the Id

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1927) The International Psycho-Analytic Library, No.12

“From 1922 to 1939 the International Psycho-Analytic Library offered nine of Freud’s books and two Epitomes. Joan Riviere translated two of the nine books, James Strachey two books (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922, and An Autobiographical Study, 1935), and Alix Strachey one book (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 1936). Only four other translators were entrusted with translating Freud’s books in the series: C.M.J. Hubback (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1922), W.D Robson-Scott (The Future of an Illusion, 1928). W.J.H. Sprott (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1933), and Katherine Jones (Moses and Monotheism, 1939).”

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

It was James Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother, who arranged to have the Hogarth Press become the publisher for the books of the International Psycho-Analytic Library in 1924. The Press bought the rights to the previously published titles in the ILP series, inheriting the already printed volumes (bearing the International Psycho-Analytic Press imprint) along with the rights to Freud’s Collected Papers for £800. Thus the Hogarth Press became the publisher of Freud in English, making a major contribution to twentieth-century thought and increasing the international importance of the Press. Freud’s Collected Papers also became one of the Press’s most successful publications. Freud’s reputation grew tremendously in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ego and the Id, along with other works by Freud, were an important part of the Press list for decades.

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

Hogarth Press studies

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.

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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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Singled Out

April 7, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how two million women survived without men after the first world war

Before the First World War a single woman was expected to have one aim in life – to get married. But three-quarters of a million British soldiers were killed in that war, leaving not enough men to go round for a generation of what became known as ‘Surplus Women’. Virginia Nicholson is the author of the widely acclaimed Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939. Her latest book Singled Out is a study which explores the extraordinary lives these ‘left-over’ women made for themselves. It tells how they challenged conventions, how they campaigned to better their lot, how they often coped with poverty, childlessness, and frustration. Above all, it shows how women proved that there is more to life than finding Mr Right.

It’s a work that skillfully combines real-life biographical studies, their reflection in imaginative fiction, plus a mercifully light dusting of historical and sociological statistics. Nicholson has selected her illustrative examples from as wide a social range as possible, but those which stand out are inevitably the middle and upper class women who have left a written record of their experiences.

The most memorable are Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, and novelists Rosamund Lehmann, Phyllis Bentley, and Christina Stead. But she has gone to a great deal of trouble to represent a wide spectrum of life stories, digging out working and service class biographies, and interviewing rare survivors of the period and its difficulties.

There are lots of inspiring stories – such as the skill and determination which took Beatrice Gordon Holmes from humble beginnings, via office accounts, to control of a senior company on the Stock Exchange.

The imbalance between available men and women persisted into the 1920s, and at some points the situation was regarded as so desperate that women were encouraged to emigrate to find husbands. After all, the colonies had not lost such a large proportion of its young men in the war. Young ‘gels’ were encouraged to join the ‘fishing fleet’ and trawl for a suitable huband abroad.

Women were caught in all sorts of double binds regarding their life chances. They were expected to have but one goal in life – marriage. But when most of the men went off to be slaughtered in the ‘Great War’ women were simultaneously expected to replace them in their jobs as laborourers, drivers, and munition workers, yet were looked down on (often by their married sisters) for ‘going out to work’. Then when the war ended they were criticised for occupying jobs meant for men. If they went into the only career paths open to women – nursing and teaching – they were expected to leave if they got married.

The unequal pay levels were the product of an ironic kind of double-think by the powers that be. Men must be paid more in order to support their families, ran the argument, and a single woman has only herself to support, but at the same time women must be deterred from breaking free of motherhood and the home. High remuneration would encourage the bachelor girl to escape her destiny as breeder of the race, so the differentials must be maintained in the interests of demographic stability.

If a single woman followed all these restrictive practices forced on her by the tradition of social prejudice, she could also end up being an unpaid carer to aged parents. Nicholson documents several heart-breaking instances cases of young women whose aspirations are totally crushed by demanding and self-centred mothers. Their stories, culled in old age from interviews conducted in nursing homes, read like the plots of Anita Brookner novels.

In focussing so intently on questions of personal fulfillment, it’s impossible for Nicholson to escape the issue of sex in a spinster’s life – but she skates across it as rapidly as possible, pausing only to include mention that some women did actually admit to having ‘urges’.

Fortunately she does much better in covering the topic of lesbianism – which was euphemistically known in the inter-war years as ‘Uranism’ (a term coined by Edward Carpenter). Radclyffe Hall is the stand-out figure here, partly because of her flamboyant appearance and behaviour, and partly because of the scandalous Well of Loneliness trial. But Nicholson also adds many other examples of lifelong happiness found in women’s same-sex partnerships – by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Renault, and Angela du Maurier (Daphne’s elder sister).

She finishes with a clutch of biographical sketches illustrating the extraordinary achievements amongst this generation of women who fell out of the marriage market following the husband shortage caused by the carnage of the First World War. Some went on to be qualified engineers, university teachers, leaders of political movements, aviators, doctors, archeologists, members of parliament, and even in one case the curator of London Zoo.

Miss Eve Balfour … discovered that eating compost-grown vegetables cured her rheumatism [and] began her experiments with organic cultivation. Her book The Living Soil (1943) was the influential text behind the formation of the Soil Association, which she co-founded in 1946. Not content with her role in this (literally) ground-breaking project, Lady Eve played saxophone in her own dance band, passed her pilot’s licence in 1931, crewed sailing ships and wrote successful detective novels. ‘I am just surprised to see that what I stood for all my life is no longer derided but more or less accepted’, she remarked at the age of ninety.

Nicholson argues very persuasively that these women paved the way for the radical feminists of the last few decades. But unlike their sisters of the contemporary world, their achievements were solidly founded on the fact that they never married. This is a splendid piece of documentary writing and social history which provides sympathetic insights into the difficulties and the triumphs experienced by young women as they dealt with the war and its tragic consequences.

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Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.312, ISBN: 0141020628

More on lifestyle
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Sir Edmund Orme

December 29, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Sir Edmund Orme (1891) is one of James’s ghost stories, a literary genre which was very popular towards the end of the nineteenth century. It first appeared in the Christmas edition of the magazine Black and White and features a variation of the supernatural tale in which the ‘ghost’ is only visible to certain people. And although the story contains a suicide and two sudden deaths, the ghost actually appears to have a benign, protective purpose. It is presented as almost a ‘friendly’ ghost.

Brighton – 19th century

Sir Edmund Orme – critical commentary

The framed narrative

The story is presented to us by an un-named outer narrator who has come across a written account of events. These have been written by the inner narrator who is also the principal male figure in the story, and is also un-named.

This is a device James used a number of times – most notably in The Turn of the Screw, and like that more famous novella, the story in not in fact fully ‘framed’. That is, we are given an account of the origin of a text, but the story finishes at the end of that text. We do not go back to rejoin the introduction in any meaningful way.

The outer narrator also admits that he has no proof that the events described actually took place. The author of the text, which has been kept in a locked drawer, has written the account for his own purposes. This leaves scope for ambiguities within the tale – as well as for a variety of possible interpretations.

The ghostly element

We normally expect ghosts to be sinister and threatening. They usually appear at night, dawn, or dusk, and have a disreputable appearance and a malevolent purpose. But Sir Edmund Orme appears in broad daylight, in very public places (Brighton seafront, Tranton church) and he is well dressed and behaves with impeccable reserve.

In fact we learn, first from Mr Marden and then from the narrator’s surmise, that Sir Edmund has a protective function. He appears to Mrs Marden as an uncomfortable reminder of her previous cruelty in jilting Sir Edmund in favour of Captain Marden, but he is acting to prevent any repetition of such behaviour by her daughter. The narrator’s analysis is based on the egotistical supposition that he is being protected:

It was a case of retributive justice … The wretched mother was to pay, in suffering, for the suffering she had inflicted, and as the disposition to trifle with an honest man’s just expectations might crop up again, to my detriment, in the child, the latter young person was to be studied and watched, so that she might be made to suffer should she do an equal wrong.

However, it is open for us to observe that the net result of the narrative is the death of two women. First the fifty-five year old Mrs Marden dies on the occasion of the ghost’s last appearance, and second her daughter is dead within a year of marrying the narrator.

This reading of the text is informed by the observation that many of James’s fictions have a fear of women and marriage deeply buried within their concerns. The inner narrator befriends both Mrs Marden and her daughter, but he immediately observes that “One often hears mature mothers spoken of as warnings—sign-posts, more or less discouraging, of the way daughters may go.” And this is followed by a view of himself as a potential target for husband seekers, even though it is expressed as a negative:

I never suspected her of the vulgar purpose of ‘making up’ to me—a suspicion of course unduly frequent in conceited young men. It never struck me that she wanted me for her daughter, nor yet, like some unnatural mammas, for herself.

In other words, women are seen as threats to a bachelor’s independence and freedom from any emotional claims, and ultimately, despite any sympthy their creators show for their female concerns, they will be punished – in the same way as Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The phenomenon was not new, even at the end of the nineteenth century.

Sir Edmund Orme – 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

Sir Edmund Orme – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

Sir Edmund Orme – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

Sir Edmund Orme – Kindle edition

The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edition

Sir Edmund Orme – read the book on line

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Late Victorian Gothic Tales – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Sir Edmund Orme – plot summary

An un-named narrator is friendly with a widow Mrs Marden and her attractive daughter in Brighton. When he begins to sense the power of his attraction to the younger woman, her mother starts to behave in an erratic manner. She wishes to promote her daughter’s relationship with the narrator, but cannot conceal her unease – and for reasons which remain mysterious.

When they meet again at a country house, the narrator accompanies Charlotte to church, where they are joined by a young man who does not speak, and who Charlotte does not even seem to notice. Mrs Marden reveals that the man is Sir Edmund Orme, who she once jilted and who subsequently committed suicide. He has been re-appearing to her intermittently ever since, as a sort of punishment and to check that Charlotte does not behave in the same way as her mother. The narrator proposes to Charlotte, but he is turned down.

Some months later they meet again at a musical party in Brighton. The narrator proposes again to Charlotte, and at the same time Sir Edmund appears. Mrs Marden faints and has to be taken home. Next day the narrator visits them and can see ‘the shadow of death’ on Mrs Marden’s face. She urges her daughter to accept the narrator’s offer of marriage, and as Charlotte does so the figure of Sir Edmund reappears in the room for what turns out to be the last time, but Mrs Marden is dead.

Principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator who presents the written account
I	the un-named inner narrator who has written the account
Captain Teddy Bostock	a friend of the inner narrator
Miss Charlotte Marden	a pretty woman of 22
Mrs Marden	her mother, a wealthy widow of fifty-five
Captain Marden	the man she married instead of Edmund Orme
Sir Edmund Orme	the young man who Mrs Marden jilted
Brighton	real seaside resort in southern England
Tranton	fictional country town in Sussex

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

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.
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Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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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.

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

Solid Objects

April 2, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Solid Objects was written in 1918 and first published in The Athenaeum in October 1920. It was reprinted in A Haunted House in 1944.

Virginia Woolf

Solid Objects – critical commentary

The two men at first appear to be presented in a positive manner, with ‘unmistakable vitality’, though they are almost caricatures of masculinity, with their ‘moustaches, tweed caps, rough boots, shooting coats, and check stockings’. This positive impression appears to be underlined by authorial endorsement: ‘nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and virile’.

But this turns out to be a form of ironic overstatement, for as soon as they come to rest they lapse into infantile behaviour: Charles skims stones across the water, and John digs a hole in the sand like a child playing sandcastles. As soon as he digs up the piece of glass out of the sand, the remainder of the story plots his steady decline into obsessive monomania and a retreat from the real world.

First of all he attaches all sorts of wonderful characteristics to what is merely a fragment of glass, then he is attracted to bric-a-brac, but this quickly descends into a fascination with bits of rubbish with no value whatsoever.

He neglects and then abandons altogether his parliamentary ambitions, and despite all evidence to the contrary goes on believing that his searches amongst rubbish heaps and back alleys will somehow bear miraculous fruit. His monomania cuts him off from society in general, and in the end he is abandoned by his oldest friend.

Solid Objects – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth Press – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth Press – Amazon US

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

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

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Solid Objects – story synopsis

Two young men, Charles and John, are walking on a beach. When they sit down for a while Charles skims pieces of slate across the sea and John digs up a piece of glass out of the sand, marvelling at its possible provenance.

The piece of glass becomes a paperweight on his mantelpiece where he keeps papers relating to his parliamentary ambitions, and he begins to look out for more objects of its kind.

One day he discovers a star shaped fragment of china and misses an important appointment whilst retrieving it from behind some railings.

He begins to frequent rubbish dumps and plots of waste ground in his pursuit of objects trouvé, and in doing so neglects all his professional duties.

He suffers disappointments and derision, but is sustained by the belief that his searches will one day be rewarded. He grows older and retreats from society in general.

His old friend Charles visits him and realises that John has lost touch with reality and leaves him – for ever.

Monday or Tuesday – first edition

Cover design by Vanessa Bell

Other works by Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solus Rex

April 9, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Solus Rex is the second chapter of an unfinished novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote around 1939/40. (The first chapter was Ultima Thule.) The chapter was first published in Paris as Sovremennyya Zapiski in 1940, then in the collection A Russian Beauty and Other Stories in 1973. It represents a brief transition phase in Nabokov’s writing. When he arrived in Paris to begin the second phase of his exile (the first having been in Berlin) he had toyed initially with the idea of writing and publishing in French. But he quickly switched to his third language and from 1940/41 onwards wrote in English when he emigrated to America to begin the third phase of his exile.

In this story, as with its counterpart, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that Nabokov embellished the prose style of the text whilst engaged in the process of translation. 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 1940 Russian text with its revised counterpart of thirty years later. That would make an interesting research project for someone in comparative literary studies.

Vladimir Nabokov

Solus Rex – critical commentary

There are some very faint traces of a connection between Solus Rex and its companion piece in the abandoned novel, the ‘story’ Ultima Thule. It is just possible that the events of Solus Rex, which take place in a country called Ultima Thule, are the story which Gosopin Sineusov, the protagonist of the first chapter, has been asked to illustrate. He is mentioned in the second chapter of the novel – although he is given a different Christian name and patronymic.

These connections are also pre-echoes of later fiction by Nabokov – particularly Pale Fire (1962), which also features the relationship between one level of fictionality and another, plus a similar fantasy-land called Zembla (‘a distant northern land’). The difference between them however is that Zembla is the invention of a madman, the novel’s narrator, Charles Kinbote. There is no comparable distancing device in the case of Ultima Thule.

It also has to be said that whereas Pale Fire is inventive and amusing, Solus Rex is amazingly below par by Nabokov’s usual standards. The literary style is annoyingly mannered, cluttered with over-long sentences stuffed with chained clauses, unnecessary parentheses, and contorted syntax. The events of the narrative are unfocussed, at a schoolboy level of invention, and not the slightest bit funny.

As in the case of Ultima Thule, Nabokov left behind his comments on the unfinished status of the ‘story’, and confirmation that the narrative had not been planned in detail before it was written.

Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S.P. Diaghilev (1872-1929), remains one of my favourite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises. I do not remember the details of poor Adulf’s death, except that he was despatched, in some horrible, clumsy manner, by Sien and his companions, exactly five years before the inauguration of the Egel bridge.

Solus Rex – 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.

Solus Rex – plot summary

Ultima Thule is a fairy tale island in the far north where it rains for 306 days in every year. It is ruled by a king called K who has taken over after the thirty-seven year reign of his predecessor and uncle, King Gafon. The narrative is a retrospective account of K’s earlier life centred on a bizarre power struggle between K and Prince Adulf (the heir apparent).

K has greasy hair, doesn’t wash, and wears foppish clothes. In his student days he meets Prince Adulf (also known derisively as Prince Fig) who is King Gafon’s degenerate son. Adulf believes that the history and traditions of this Nordic realm are founded on a hidden system of magic and sorcery. K agrees with him, but does not know why.

The two cousins go horse-riding, where the Prince seems to be planning something with K in mind. A few days later he invites K to a gathering of his reputedly self-indulgent friends. The company seems strangely heterogeneous but harmless enough. But when Adulf publicly performs a sex act on a pretty young man, K leaves in disgust.

When K reports the incident, his guardian the Count excuses the incident as ‘hygienic’ and passes K on to an economist called Gumm. In the two years that follow K learns that old King Gafon has excused the behaviour of his licentious son Adulf. K wonders why there isn’t public resentment, but the lower classes actually enjoy the spectacle of Adulf’s behaviour, which is widely reported in the press.

However, there is criticism and opposition to Prince Fig amongst the intelligentsia, but they are afraid to act because of a fear of the possible consequences. Eventually, a philosopher Dr Onze volunteers to spearhead a prosecution of Prince Fig. A trial reveals all sorts of pornographic iniquities committed by Fig, the details of which fill the newspapers and further enhance his reputation as a popular royal ‘rogue’. When the trial ends, the jury finds the prosecutor Dr Onze guilty and sentences him to eleven years hard labour. But then King Gafon pardons him.

Two years later K is still studying and is invited to a meeting of the opposition to the royal family. When he gets there he realises from the silences and the signals in the room that they are plotting to assassinate Fig. He feels uncomfortable and asks to leave.

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

Some People (Harold Nicolson)

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

amusing character sketches, fictions, and memoirs

Harold Nicolson was a career diplomat, best known for the fact that he was married to Vita Sackville-West, who had a love affair with Virginia Woolf (and other women) and that despite his own homosexuality they kept going a marriage whose apparent success was recorded in their son’s account, Portrait of a Marriage. Nicolson blew this way and that in both literary and sexual terms, but in 1927 he produced a wonderful collection of portraits, Some People, which is part documentary and part fiction.

They are based on his experiences of public school and the diplomatic service. The idea he explained to a friend ‘was to put real people into imaginary situations, and imaginary people into real situations’. You can view this as a new literary form, alongside such works as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or just a personal whim, but the result is surprisingly polished and amusing. The sketches are based upon just the sort of upper-class privileged life Nicolson had led – scenes of a childhood spent in foreign legations supervised by a governess; life as a boarder at Wellington College; and early postings amongst similar toffs at the Foreign Office.

In one story Nicolson accompanies Lord Curzon on a diplomatic peace mission to Lausanne where he is due to negotiate with Poincaré and Mussolini – but the whole of the tale is focused on the Dickensian figure of Lord Curzon’s valet who drinks too much and disgraces himself in comic fashion at a high-ranking gala.

The stories are written in the first person – and for someone who had the opinions for which Nicolson became infamous, they are refreshingly self-deprecating. The narrator is more often than not the character in the wrong, the person who has a lesson to learn from others or from life itself. Real people such as Nicolson himself, Marcel Proust, Princess Bibesco, and Winston Churchill flit amongst fictional constructions in a perfectly natural and convincing manner.

The world of public school and Oxbridge run straight through seamlessly into that of the diplomatic service, and even though Nicolson’s conclusions are that its stiff conventions should be challenged and even broken, his stories rest heavily on the shared values of the Old School Tie, letters of introduction, and the right accent.

They reminded me of no less than the early stories of Vladimir Nabokov (written around the same time) which similarly combine autobiographical memoirs with fictional inventions. And the style is similar – supple, fast-moving sentences, a fascination with foreign words and places, and the phenomena of everyday life pinned down with well-observed details.

There was a lake in front of the hotel, cupped among descending pines, and in the middle of the lake a little naked island, naked but for a tin pagoda, with two blue boats attached to a landing-stage of which the handrail was of brown wood and the supports of pink.

It was this that made me think again of Jeanne de Hénaut.

It is writing which is very sophisticated, and which ultimately flatters the reader – it draws you seductively into this world of privilege, clubishness, and money. And yet if he had written more, I should certainly want to read them.

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Harold Nicolson, Some People, London: Constable, 1996, pp.184, ISBN: 094765901

More on Harold Nicolson
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Twentieth century literature
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Something to Remember Me By

August 11, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, further reading

Something to Remember Me By (1990) first appeared in Esquire magazine. It then became the title story in a collection of three novellas published in 1992. The two other stories in the collection are The Bellarosa Connection and A Theft.

Something to Remember Me By – commentary

The main theme

At a superficial level this story could easily be perceived as a comic farce. An adolescent boy is duped by an unscrupulous prostitute who steals his clothes. He is forced to return home dressed as a woman. But when the elements of the story are viewed differently, it can be seen as almost a Biblical parable of descent into shame and personal humiliation. Beneath the comic-grotesque surface there is a deadly serious purpose.

The story is set during the Depression; young Louie’s mother is dying of cancer, and Chicago is in the grip of midwinter ice and snow. He is not particularly successful at school; and he is forced to miss the Discussion Club meeting to do his after-school job as a delivery boy. He sets out on his journey in a bleak mood and hostile weather.

His assignment takes him straight to a house of mourning where he is confronted by a dead young girl in her open coffin. Then the friendly relative he hopes to meet is not in his office, but Louie is confronted instead by another female lying down, but this time completely naked. Her appearance is disturbing to Louie, but she appears to hold out some sort of sexual promise.

He is taken to a sleazy boarding house and a featureless room where his expectations are quickly shattered. She not only tricks him by reneging on her erotic signals; she steals all his clothes and money, leaving him as naked as the condition in which he found her. He is then forced to dress in women’s clothes to make his way home.

As he descends into what he calls at the outset of the story as ‘a whirlpool, a vortex’, his principal fear is the wrath of his father:

If I were to turn up in this filthy dress, the old man, breaking under his burdens, would come down on me in a blind, Old Testament rage.

The drugstore attendant takes him for a female, and Louie begins to feel that he is losing his identity. At this point he is referred to a destination even lower down the social scale – an illegal drinking den or speakeasy. The bartender points out the errors in Louie’s behaviour: “In short, you got mixed up with a whore and she gave you the works”. But the bartender is prepared to help him, by giving him a further degrading task – carrying home the habitual drunk McKern.

When Louie reaches yet another sordid boarding house, he is confronted by two further sources of humiliation in the form of two young girls – McKern’s daughters. The younger girl follows him into the bathroom and sits on the edge of the bath, watching him whilst he lifts up his dress to pee into the toilet. Then the elder girl invites him to join the meal of three pork chops he has cooked for them – which as an orthodox Jew he finds nauseating:

All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping.

So he has been cheated, robbed, degraded, shamed, and humiliated at a personal, social, and even a religious level. And when he finally arrives back home his father greets him with a blow to the head – which Louie receives with gratitude, because it suggests his mother has not died during the day.

The novella

This story appears in a collection whose sub-title is ‘Three Tales by Saul Bellow’. At just over 10,000 words in length it might well be considered as a long short story. Certainly there are many stories and tales of this length, and many are longer. But it has all the structural and the thematic density of a novella and has a good claim to be regarded as such.

What are the defining factors of the novella? How does it differ from the long short story or even the short novel? The critical consensus seems to be loosely based on the Aristotelian notion of the unity of elements in a single work. That is, the character, the events, their duration, the location, and the main theme or issue should be as tightly concentrated as possible.

The events of the story are concentrated on a single character – the younger Louie. The incidents take place over a single day – starting from his breakfast and ending back home in the early evening. The drama takes place in a single location – Chicago. Even the tone of the story is remarkably consistent – its atmosphere dominated by the bleak winter weather and the ice-bound streets of the city.

The central metaphors of the story are sex and death, which the elder Louie flags up at the beginning of his narrative:

In my time my parents didn’t hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was sex. We’ve got it the other way round.

The young Louie has a girlfriend (Stephanie) whose body he fondles under her raccoon-skin coat, and he is powerfully excited by the sight of the whore’s naked body on the gynaecologist’s examination table. We are also given to understand that the prostitute has been used in some sort of sexual experiment: Louie’s brother-in-law tells him about the doctor:

“He takes people from the street, he hooks them up and pretends he’s collecting graphs. This is for kicks, the science part is horseshit.”

But the very sight of the woman’s breast only serves to remind the young Louie of his mother’s mastectomy – and she is dying of the cancer that was its cause. Moreover the very purpose of his after-school errand is to deliver flowers to a family whose young daughter has died – a daughter who he sees, lying in her coffin.

Death even hovers over the composition and purpose of the narrative itself. The elder Louie, at the age of a ‘grandfather’ and prior to his own death, is passing on the story to his only son as a supplement to a reduced inheritance:

Well, they’re all gone now, and I have made my preparations. I haven’t left a large estate, and that is why I have written this memoir, a sort of addition to your legacy.

The story acts as a very dark and negative sort of ‘coming of age’ parable, an initiation into the basic facts of life (sex and death) for young Louie. The older man has decided to pass on the episode to his own son – though given that the older Louie is now the age of a ‘grandfather’ it might come as a warning too late.

Aristotle also believed that one of the most important elements of tragic drama was that the action of the story should be continuous. That is – a unity of time and events. Louie’s experiences unfold in one continuous movement – from his home, to the other side of the city, and then back home again. There are no digressions or interruptions, no temporal shifts or extraneous elements in the action. The story forms, as one critic claims (echoing the American dramatist Eugene O’Neil) one Short Day’s Journey into Night.

The symbolic significance of these events and the successful unity of their design outweigh the brevity of the narrative to make this a powerful candidate for a remarkably short novella

Kafka

There are distinct similarities between Louie and any number of Kafka’s protagonists, and many of the issues in the story (and the themes in Bellow’s other works) explore elements of the Jewish experience.

Louie is something of the Holy Fool figure. He is well intentioned, but he keeps making matters worse for himself. He prepares an explanation for turning up to his brother-in-law’s dental surgery, then asks himself:

Why did I need to account for my innocent behaviour when it was innocent? Perhaps because I was always contemplating illicit things Because I was always being accused.

Later, carrying the drunk McKern in a fireman’s lift on his shoulders, he thinks of ‘This disgrace, you see, whilst my mother was surrendering to death’. Finally, when summarising his experiences, he reflects in similarly telling language: ‘The facts of life were having their turn. Their first effect was ridicule … [then] I could have a full hour of shame on the streetcar’.

This combination of the grotesque with self-criticism and an acute sense of embarrassment is very similar to the scenes which are abundant in Kafka’s work. Indeed they seem to reflect a particularly Jewish experience and perception of the world – and they are also present in the work of writers such as (Polish) Bruno Schultz and (Italian) Italo Svevo – real name Aron Ettore Schmitz.

Something to Remember Me By – resources

Something to Remember Me By – Penguin – Amazon UK

Something to Remember Me By – Penguin – Amazon US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin – Amazon US

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

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

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Something to Remember Me By – summary

As an old man Louie is recalling an incident from his youth, offering the account to his only son as an ‘addition’ to a meagre legacy.

He remembers being a seventeen year old boy, going to school on a freezing day in a Chicago winter when his mother is dying. He is an indifferent scholar, but an avid reader. After school he has a part-time job making deliveries for a local florist.

He travels across town with a bunch of lilies for what turns out to be the funeral of a young girl, who he sees lying in her coffin. Afterwards he calls at the practice of his brother-in-law Philip, a dentist.

Philip is not there, but next door in the office of a gynaecologist he encounters a naked woman on an examination table. He is excited by the incident, especially when she then invites him back to her apartment.

In a sleazy boarding house she asks him to take off his clothes and get into bed. But then she throws his clothes out of the window to an accomplice in the alley and runs off, leaving Louie naked.

He finds a woman’s dress and a bed jacket in the wardrobe, puts them on, and goes to the local drugstore in search of Philip. The druggist treats him sardonically and recommends a nearby illegal bar.

At the speakeasy its bartender correctly guesses that Louie’s problems arise from his naive lack of experience. He predicts there will be trouble when he gets back to his family. But he offers him clothes from a rubbish pile in exchange for taking home a regular customer who is drunk.

At another run-down rooming-house, Louie is met by the man’s two young children. One girl follows him into the lavatory, then her sister asks him to cook their meal – which turns out to be pork chops.

Louie is late getting home, feels guilty and anxious about his mother, and is in fear of his father. He tries to regain the house undetected, but his father appears and immediately begins to beat him. Louie is relieved, because this suggests his mother is still alive.

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

Souls Belated

February 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Souls Belated was first published in the collection of stories The Greater Inclination (1899). It was one of the first of many stories Edith Wharton wrote on the subject of divorce. She did not dissolve her own marriage to her husband Edward (‘Teddy’) Wharton until much later in 1912, but the subject was very much a live social issue at that time. Indeed she wrote a comic version of divorce and its consequences in another story The Other Two published in 1904.

Souls Belated – critical commentary

The principal irony in Souls Belated is that an American man and his married but not-yet-divorced lover are travelling in Europe where they meet an English couple who are doing the same thing. Not a great deal is made of this parallel except that it emphasises how those people who flout the conventions of upper-class society are forced to move outside it. Both couples are hiding from the censure of their social group in a country where they are not so well known.

Lydia is escaping from the stifling conventions of upper-class New York (which models itself on traditional English snobberies and social distinctions). She thinks these restrictions destroy an individual’s possibility of intimacy with another person. Later, in an apparent volte face, she comes to think that ironically upper-class marriage actually helps people to stay emotionally apart from each other because of the social obligations it entails – ‘children, duties, visits, bores, relations’.

She knows that conventional upper-class marriage is stifling; she wishes to live freely with the man she loves; but she can only do so by staying outside polite society, or by being married to him – because that society will not tolerate any other form of arrangement between individuals. She is unable to find a solution to her dilemma, and that is possibly why the story ends with her problem and her relationship with Ralph Garrett unresolved.

Souls Belated – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Souls Belated – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Souls Belated – AudioBook format at Gutenberg

Souls Belated – paperback edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Souls Belated – plot summary

Part I Lydia Tillotson has been oppressed and bored by her marriage to a very conventional New York businessman, who still lives with his controlling mother. She has fallen in love with Ralph Garrett and left her marriage to live freely with him, away from American society. Whilst in Italy she receives notice that her husband has filed for divorce. Garrett thinks they should follow society’s conventions and get married. She argues that they should preserve the purity of their relationship by remaining single.

Part II They stay in a hotel in the Italian lakes where social life is very strictly controlled by snobbish upper-class English visitors, notably Lady Susan Condit. The social group within the hotel have already ostracised a newly arrived couple, the Lintons.

Part III Lydia is approached privately by Mrs Linton, who reveals that she is in fact Mrs Lodge, travelling incognito and carrying on an intrigue with Lord Trevanna. She has guessed that Lydia is in a similar position and threatens to reveal the fact unless she helps her.

Part IV When Lydia reveals this to Ralph, he informs her that Mrs Cope has just received a message containing what is presumed to be her divorce, and has left the hotel precipitately. Lydia reverses her views and thinks that marriage is a good institution, but only for keeping people apart – because it forces them to busy themselves with social duties. She also argues to Ralph that because she loves him, she needs to leave him.

Part V Next day she leaves the hotel early in the morning and goes down to the lakeside steamer. Ralph watches her from his room – but she turns back and doesn’t leave.

Principal characters

Lydia Tillotson	a married American woman
Ralph Gannett	her lover, an American would-be writer
Mr Linton	an English guest at the hotel – actually Lord Travenna (22)
Mrs Linton	an English grande dame guest at the hotel – actually Mrs Cope
Lady Susan Condit	an English social arbiter at the hotel

first edition – cover design by Berkeley Updike

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Strangers on a Train

May 25, 2010 by Roy Johnson

psychology, mystery, and murder

Strangers on a Train was Patricia Highsmith’s first novel. Published in 1950, it was quickly made into a film the following year by Alfred Hitchcock. The film become a classic, and it is this version which has become better known. Unless you are only twelve years old or have been living on Mars for the last few decades, you’ll already know the basic plot outline. Two men meet on a train. Guy has an estranged wife standing in the way of his romance with a wealthy socialite, whilst Bruno has a rich father whom he hates because he refuses to give him an allowance.

Bruno suggests to Guy that they ‘exchange murders’ – removing their respective obstacles to happiness. He argues that nobody will be able to assign motive, because the assailants are unknown to the victims, and nobody will have any reason to think that the two plotters knew each other, because they have never met before. At first the two men appear to be polar opposites. Bruno is a spoiled emotional child, a psychopath, a drunk, and a failure. Guy on the other hand is a cultivated professional, a successful architect with a promising future. But as the novel progresses they slowly become more like each other. Both of them have mother fixations, and both possess a gun. Guy reads Plato and Bruno carries poetry around in his wallet. In fact the whole plot is driven by a series of parallel events, repetitions, and echoes which link the two men.

Bruno is infatuated with Guy, and murders his troublesome estranged wife in an effort to please him. Despite being oppressed by Bruno’s attentions, Guy eventually murders Bruno’s father in an effort to put the ‘pact’ between them at an end. But in fact this draws them even closer to each other.

Those who have seen the film will have to put Hitchcock’s plot (written by Raymond Chandler and Ben Hecht) out of their minds. The original novel (quite apart from the twin murders) has more subtlety and depth, and is also a much darker piece of work. It’s also a curious blending of literary genres. Superficially, it is a crime thriller, but it has rich seams of psychological analysis running through it, as well as meditations on existential philosophy (which was popular at the time the novel was written).

Farley Granger and Robert Walker

Bruno takes a Nietzchean view of the world, seeing himself as some supra-moral being who can float above the pettiness of everyday human beings. Guy on the other hand is racked with guilt and despair, and despite the fact that they appear to go undetected in their plans, Guy in the end feels driven to make a Raskolnikov-like confession of the diabolical plot into which he has allowed himself to be drawn.

The outcome is disastrous for both of them, but the novel offers no comforting moral reassurance. The world it creates is one of ethical ambiguity and free-floating malevolence.

Highsmith is an interesting literary stylist. She has an attractive habit of what might be called narrative ellipsis – leaving out parts of the story for the reader to supply. She is obviously attracted to violence, sexual ambiguity, and the perverse in life. She deliberately courts the grotesque and shocking, and of course she was originally from the American South, famous for its Gothic.

Her characters drink and smoke to excess (as she did) and they are drawn into forming destructive and humiliating relationships (as she was) of a kind we normally associate with Dostoyevski (who was one of her favourite writers). See Hitchcock’s film version of Strangers on a Train by all means: it’s one of his class acts, with lots of witty touches. But for the real thing, do yourself a favour and read Patricia Highsmith’s original novel. It’s a disturbing, often uncomfortable experience – but not one you will easily forget.

Alfred Hitchcock film 1951

Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, London: Penguin, 1999, pp.256, ISBN 0140037969

Strangers on a Train – study resources

Strangers on a Train – paperback novel – Amazon UK

Strangers on a Train – paperback novel – Amazon US

Strangers on a Train – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Strangers on a Train – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Strangers on a Train – Hitchcock film (DVD) – Amazon UK

Strangers on a Train – Hitchcock film (DVD) – Amazon US

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psychology, mystery, and murder

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