Literary studies Archives - Page 49 of 77

The Bolted Door

August 10, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

The Bolted Door first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1908 and was later included in the collection Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910). Edith Wharton was a commercially successful writer of short stories at this period, even though she felt she didn’t reach true maturity as an artist until the production of her novella Ethan Frome written in 1911.

The Bolted Door – commentary

This is a story that suffers from several serious weaknesses, but has one redeeming and unusual feature. The weaknesses are that it is based on a rather unconvincing idea; it is annoyingly repetitive; the first part of the story has little to do with the second; and the issue in question is technically unresolved.

The idea that someone has committed a murder but is unable to persuade others of his guilt is mildly amusing, but it is never seriously examined or brought to closure. Hubert Granice tells his story to a lawyer, then to a newspaper editor, and finally to someone who purports to be a detective. His tale becomes more complex and fanciful at each telling. In this way, the reader is led to believe that the murder is a product of his imagination. But he never reports to the police, and his account of events is never held up for comparison with any details of the original crime.

The first sections of the story deal with Granice’s failure as a playwright. He has invested time and money in his ambition to become a successful writer for the stage. Despite exploring various dramatic modes – ‘comedy, tragedy, prose and verse’ – he has failed in all of them. We can be forgiven for thinking that his urge to commit suicide is associated with this failure.

But the narrative then changes to focus on his attempts to confess to the murder of his cousin Joseph Lenman – all of which efforts are thwarted. After this point any mention of his theatrical ambition is forgotten – so there is no persuasive or thematic connection between these two elements of the plot.

Instead, the narrative is taken up with a very repetitive and long-winded series of ‘explanations’ which fail to convince a succession of people of his guilt. These are spun out in exhaustive detail, until he is finally persuaded to enter what we take to be a lunatic asylum as someone who is clearly deluded.

At this point his final confessor, the detective McCarren, reveals that he has solved the mystery of the original crime. He claims that Granice really did murder his cousin Joseph Lenman. However, McCarren produces no evidence in support of this assertion. There is no explanation of how he has uncovered the truth, nor is there any confirmation of Granice’s own account of the murder.

The story therefore concludes with producing a sense of irresolution. It becomes a ‘reversal of expectation’ narrative for which there is no justification.

Existentialism

However, there is a very interesting passage in the story which occurrs when Granice’s frustration is at its most intense. He is unable to persuade other people of his account of the murder, and as a consequence he feels trapped within his own anguished consciousness.

Edith Wharton expresses this state of mind in terms very similar to those used by Jean-Paul Sartre in his writing on existentialism which came forty years later – particularly in Nausea (1938). The protagonist of Sartre’s novel, Antoine Roquentin, experiences his own state of being with a feeling of repulsion. Granice’s anguish is expressed in very similar terms:

He was chained to life—a ‘prisoner of consciousness’ … he was visited by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable selfness, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any other sensation he had ever known … Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat—and as his brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous substance.

In 1908 modern forms of existentialism were still some way off, so this counts as writing which was prescient, if not prophetic.

The Bolted Door – study resources

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

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

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

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Bolted Door – plot summary

I Hubert Granice is a failed playwright who entertains the idea of suicide because of his lack of success. He summons his friend the lawyer Ascham to whom he reveals that he committed a murder ten years previously.

II He reveals to Ascham the story of his rich elderly cousin Joseph Lenman whose hobby was growing melons. Granice poisoned Lenman by injecting cyanide into a melon, but Ascham does not believe his story.

III Granice repeats his story to Denver, the editor of a newspaper, with further details about how he arranged and carried out the murder. Denver challenges some of the details, and ultimately refuses to print the confession in his newspaper.

IV Granice takes his tale to Allonby the district attorney, who does nothing, but sends detective Hewson from his office to go over some of the details.

V Granice employs a reporter McCarren who checks on the car he claims to have used in the murder and a lock-up garage where it has been kept. However, all the evidence has disappeared in the ten years since the crime took place.

VI Granice discovers that detective Hewson is really a psychiatrist, who advises him to rest and give up smoking. In despair at his lack of progress, Granice decides to confide to a stranger, and on pestering a young girl in Washington Square, he is arrested by the police.

VII Granice is placed in what appears to be a mental asylum. He enjoys the peace and quiet, and begins writing long accounts of his ‘case’. When visited by McCarren and a friend, it is revealed that McCarren has discovered that Granice was telling the truth all along.

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

The Bostonians

September 22, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bostonians was first published as a serial in The Century Magazine in 1885-1886, then as a three volume novel in February 1886. It is generally regarded at the high point of what is called the ‘middle period’ of Henry James’ development as a novelist. He had re-visited America in the middle of the decade following the death of his parents; the novel is set in Boston and New York; and it clearly reflects some of his contemporary impressions on the nation, written as a native American. The novel as a matter of fact includes some rather touching reflections on the Civil War, which had only concluded twenty years before (and in which James had not participated). But its principal subject matter is ‘The Woman Question’ – that is, the conflict between traditional views of the role of women in society, and the views of suffragists and what today would be called supporters of women’s liberation.

Summer in New England – Frank W. Benson (1862-1951)

The Bostonians – critical commentary

Narrative

Henry James uses third person omniscient narrative mode for the majority of the novel. That is, he knows all the events that take place and he reveals the inner feelings and thoughts of his characters. But from time to time he slips into a first person narrative mode to pretend that he has only a partial view of events.

I know not what may have been the reality of Miss Chancellor’s other premonitions, but there is no doubt that in this respect she took Verena’s measure on the spot.

He also comments on the narrative itself, revealing himself as the author.

If we were at this moment to take, in a single glance, an inside view of Mrs Burrage (a liberty we have not yet ventured on), I suspect we should find that she was considerably exasperated by her visitor’s superior tone, at seeing herself regarded by this dry, shy, obstinate, provincial young woman as superficial.

Technically, this is a curious mixture of narrative modes – one moment claiming to know the innermost shifts in his characters’ feelings, and the next moment feigning ignorance. It perhaps reflects the ambiguity and uncertainty that he increasing explored into his novels from this period onwards.

It is a very typical James narrative in being composed of a series of rather static tableaux. The locations of the action shift between Boston and New York, but the drama unfolds through a series of meetings where the focus of attention is largely on the psychological state of the characters.

Feminist politics

When the novel first appeared it was criticised by much of its American audience, largely on the grounds that James had satirised some well known figures. More than one hundred years later, these issues have faded, and it is possible to take a more balanced view of the reform movement that he portrays.

It is quite clear that the most active and senior women in the suffrage movement – Olive Chancellor and Mrs Farrage – are depicted negatively as vicious harpies. They are both more concerned with social control mechanisms and feeding their own egos than genuine concern for women as individuals. Even their male counterpart Selah Tarrant is revealed as a tin pot shaman – a bogus snake-oil salesman who virtually sells his own daughter.

But this negative picture is balanced by the positive characterisation of Doctor Prance and Miss Birdseye. Doctor Prance is a professional young woman who puts her own ego to one side in pursuit of her interest in medicine and science. And Miss Birdseye has a life history of genuine devotion to the cause. She has campaigned in the South for the abolition of slavery, and has taught negroes (as James calls them in the language of the period) to read and write.

It is significant that both Miss Birdseye and Dr Prance have friendly relations with Basil Ransom, whereas Olive Chancellor immediately takes a visceral dislike to him.

The Boston marriage

The other major issue in the novel is the relationship between Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant – and by implication their separate relationships with Basil Ransom. The term Boston marriage is used to describe two women living together, independent of financial support of a man.

Olive Chancellor has inherited wealth, so she is able to pay off Mr and Mrs Tarrant to take control of Verena and bring her to live under the same roof. However, contemporary readers do not need brass plaques on their doors to recognise that what James depicts on Olive Chancellor’s part is a passionate lesbian desire for Verena.

Olive is totally possessive of Verena, and she has an equally passionate hatred of any potential rivals – particularly of men. She repeatedly admonishes Verena for not disliking men generically. Henry Burrage’s interest in Verena is abhorrent to Olive, but not nearly as much as that of Basil Ransom. Olive is a general man hater, but in particular she sees the tall Mississippian as an erotic rival.

In fact the whole of the novel is an account of the psychological war between Olive and Basil for possession of Verena. Despite Basil’s conservative (Neanderthal) views on the role of women, Verena is eventually attracted to him by what we might nowadays call his personal magnetism and his integrity. In the end she does submit to his wish for a woman who will give up her role in public life for an existence which is entirely domestic.

At the end of the novel she leaves with tears in her eyes which were ‘not the last she was destined to shed’. So James leaves the triangular struggle between these characters as a surprising triumph for Basil Ransom, a failure for Olive Chancellor, but a very ambiguous resolution for Verena Tarrant.

The Civil War

Basil Ransom is from Mississippi, and has fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederates – that is the slave-owning southern states. In fact his family has lost its property (and its slaves) because of the war – which is why Basil has taken up work in the legal profession and moved north to seek employment.

He clings to the aristocratic values of politeness, courtesy, and reactionary social values, and is clearly not suited to the world of commerce in which he finds himself. It is these views and attitudes which arouse the antagonism of (some of) the feminists, because their cause has its roots in the Abolitionist anti-slavery movement in which characters such as Miss Birdseye and Mrs Tarrant’s family have been active

In one of the pivotal meetings of the novel Verena Tarrant takes him to look round Harvard University in Cambridge, just outside Boston. There in the Memorial Hall he looks on the names of those who have died on the opposite side.

The effect of the place is singularly noble and solemn … It stands there for duty and honour, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen … For Ransom these things were not a challenge or a taunt; they touched him with respect, with the sentiment of beauty. He was capable of being a generous foeman, and he forgot, now, the whole question of sides and parties; the simple emotion of the old fighting-time came back to him, and the monument around him seemed an embodiment of that memory; it arched over his friends as well as enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph.

Henry James was himself from the northern states, and was eligible for conscription when the war began. But he rather conveniently developed a back problem (‘that obscure hurt’) when it was time to join the Unionist army.

The Bostonians – study resources

The Bostonians – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Bostonians – Everyman’s Library Classics – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – Modern Library – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – DVD film version – Amazon UK

The Bostonians – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Bostonians – CD audioBook version (unabridged) – Amazon UK

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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Bostonians – plot summary

In 1875 young Mississippian lawyer Basil Ransom is invited to visit his cousin Olive Chancellor in Boston. She is a feminist and radical social reformer, who takes him to one of their meetings where he encounter Verena Tarrant, an inspirational speaker. Olive immediately feels a passionate attachment to Verena. Basil likes her as an attractive young woman, but he thinks her ‘inspirations’ are dubious, and largely influenced by her father, who is a ‘mesmeric healer’ (and a complete fraud).

The relationship between Olive and Verena develops rapidly, encourages by Mrs Tarrant, who sees it as a source of social advantage. Mr (‘Dr’) Tarrant sees it as a potential source of income, which he conspicuously lacks. Olive is so possessive of Verena that she asks her to promise not to marry. Olive wants to control Verena for the cause of greater women’s suffrage, but it is clear that she also wishes to control her emotionally. The journalist Matthias Pardon proposes to ‘promote’ Verena as a money-making attraction, but Olive refuses to allow it. He then proposes marriage instead, but Verena turns down his offer.

Olive then pays the Tarrants (who she dislikes intensely) a large sum to take Verena to live with her, which she does willingly, embracing the suffrage ideology which Olive promotes. However, whereas Verena thinks some men might be acceptable, Olive thinks that all men are not. The two women embark together on a trip to Europe.

Meanwhile, Basil Ransom has not done well in his legal business in New York. He is tempted by what appears to be Adeline Luna’s hints of marriage. But when he hears that Verena has returned from Europe he goes to visit her in Boston.

She shows him around Harvard University, feeling that she is betraying the understanding she shares with Olive that men should be discouraged. Ransom patronises and insults her regarding woman’s suffrage issues, but it is quite clear that he is deeply attracted to her. A great deal turns on whether their meeting will be revealed to Olive or not.

Ransom is invited to Verena’s lecture at Mrs Burrage’s house in New York, where he continues to clash ideologically with Olive, is ambushed by Adelina, and realises that he has fallen in love with Verena.

There are repeated scenes of conflict between Ransom and Olive as he contrives to meet Verena privately. Olive interrogates Verena regarding how much contact she has had with Ransom. Verena tells her everything – except the day she spent alone with him in Boston.

Mrs Burrage then summons Olive and asks her to support her son Henry’s bid to marry Verena. Olive thinks that this might be less ‘dangerous’ (as she sees it) than an alliance with Basil Ransom.

Whilst Olive and Verena are in New York, Basil engineers a private meeting with Verena and persuades her to go for a walk in Central Park. There he reveals his literary ambitions to her, and despite their differences over the role of women in society, she becomes more sympathetic to him.

Some months later Basil goes to visit the two women whilst they are on summer holiday, preparing for a major public lecture by Verena. He reveals that he has had an article accepted, and proposes marriage to her.

Verena realises that she is in love with Basil, and is in great anguish regarding his offer, since it would involve her giving up her work as a public speaker. Olive is in even greater anguish, realising that she is in danger of losing Verena to ‘the enemy’.

Just as Basil realises he is having an effect on Verena, Olive thwarts him by spiriting her away in collusion with her parents. Basil searches, but cannot find her. But he appears in Boston on the occasion of her major public lecture. His appearance there unnerves her, the lecture does not take place, which causes a scandal, and Basil leaves with Verena in tears.

first edition published by Macmillan

The Bostonians – principal characters

Basil Ransom	a lawyer from Mississippi, working in New York
Olive Chancellor	a feminist and reformer, living in Boston – Ransom’s cousin
Mrs Adelina Luna	Olive’s younger sister
Newton	Mrs Luna’s son
Miss Birdseye	elderly supporter of women’s causes
Mrs Farringer	feminist and demagogue
Amariah Farrinder	her husband
Dr Mary J. Prance	young boyish physician, lodging in same house as Miss Birdseye
‘Dr’ Selah Tarrant	mesmeric healer and pious fraud
Mrs Tarrant	daughter of famous abolitionist
Verena Tarrant	their daughter – inspirational speaker – with bright red hair
Matthias Pardon	a young publicity-seeking journalist
Henry Burrage	art-collecting Harvard ‘student’ and admirer of Verena
Mrs Burrage	society woman – Henry’s mother
Miss Catching	a librarian at Harvard University
Mr Filer	Olive Chancellor’s lecture agent

The Bostonians – film adaptation

Directed by Merchant-Ivory (1984)

Starring Christopher Reeve and Vanessa Redgrave

Watch full length movie

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Brute

September 16, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Brute was written in early 1906, and published in The Daily Chronicle in December 1906. It was later collected in A Set of Six, published in 1908 (UK) and 1915 (US). The other stories in this collection of Joseph Conrad’s work were The Informer, An Anarchist, Gaspar Ruiz, The Duel, and Il Conde.

The Brute – critical commentary

Conrad’s own introduction to A Set of Six gives some idea of his methods of fictional composition and even a glimpse of what he thinks fiction ought to be. He mixes personal anecdote with what he sees as historical fact, and (quite reasonably) he also splices two separate incidents to make a single tale.

Perhaps the most interesting thing from the point of view of a modern reader is that he sees the necessity to provide some sort of verisimilitude – to claim that ‘this is really tue’ or ‘this really happened’ – as if a piece of fiction could not provide its own self-justification.

This is the tradition of realism in the novel (and tale) still in its strongest phase in the early twentieth century – for which we should be thankful. But it is worth noting, because so many other facets of Conrad’s writing contravene the rules of narrative logic and chronological coherence demanded by realism – even though he produced some stunning dramatic effects whilst doing so. See my various comments on both the Tales and the Novels for examples of these contraventions.

The Brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is … associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second Officer … In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence of the brute was a fact.

The end of the brute as related in the story is also a fact, well-known at the time though it really happened to another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless character, which certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously adapted it to the needs of my story thinking that I had there something in the nature of poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of tales.

The Brute – study resources

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

A Set of Six – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Brute – plot summary

The narrator Ned enters a pub where two seamen, Stoner and Jermyn are in conversation with a stranger. The stranger is expostulating about a ship that has a reputation for causing problems and even deaths. The ship has been built especially big and heavy by its owners, the Apse family – which is also the ship’s name. He claims that the ship behaves erratically, damages other ships, and is responsible for the death of at least one person every year.

He recounts joining the ship at fourteen and seeing a young sailor killed in a fall from a mast on his first day on board. He serves for three years then transfers to another ship. Later he returns to the Apse Family, serving under his brother Charley, who is first mate. They sail to Australia where Charley appears to become engaged to Maggie, a relative of the captain.

The journey home is uneventful, but on reaching port in Gravesend, there is a shipping accident and Maggie is caught up in the ship’s anchor and drowned. Charley and Ned go home, where Charley succumbs to a fever. The later history of the ship is that a sailor Wilmot neglects his watch because he is dallying with a woman passenger. As a result of this the Apse Family runs aground on some rocks and breaks up in a storm.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Brute – principal characters

Ned	the narrator, a sailor
Charley	his brother, a sailor
Mr Stoner	a senior Trinity pilot
Mr Jermyn	a North Sea pilot
Mr Colchester	captain of the Apse Family
Mrs Colchester	his wife
Maggie Colchester	Charley’s ‘intended’
Wilmot	a sailor who is susceptible to women

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

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

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

The Canary

December 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Canary was written on 7 July, 1922 at the Hotel Chateau Bellevue in Sierre, Switzerland as a gift for Dorothy Brett with whom Katherine Mansfield had lived briefly in Bloomsbury. It was her last completed story and was only published after her death in 1923. The original inspiration for the story came from her stay at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris, where she used to watch a woman across the street tending canaries in a cage.

The Canary – critical commentary

This is one of Mansfield’s essentially static and non-dramatic stories with very little sense of narrative development and a complete absence of dramatic events. It is more like a very light character sketch combined with an evocation of an emotional state of being – the sort of modernist experiment with the short story as a literary genre that Mansfield had been pursuing at the same time as her great contemporary (and friend) Virginia Woolf.

Like most of her best work, it relies on understatement and a delicate symbolism for its effect. An elderly woman finding comfort in a pet creature is a common enough phenomenon, and Mansfield creates a credible account of the pleasure and reassurance she gains from the bird’s song. But at the same time we are reminded of her half-formed yearnings which were previously attached to her waiting for the evening star – Venus.

Venus was the Roman goddess whose functions encompassed love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and desire – none of which seem to have featured largely in the woman’s life. This small piece of domestic sadness is reinforced by the fact that she is aware that the three male lodgers call her ‘the Scarecrow’, but reassures herself that ‘It doesn’t matter. Not in the least.’ Nevertheless, without the bird in its cage, she now feels an inchoate sense of loneliness and sadness which she can neither articulate nor explain to herself.

The old woman’s hesitancy and point of view are neatly reflected in Mansfield’s presentation of the first person narrative. Every paragraph begins with an ellipsis (…); the woman addresses an imaginary interlocutor – ‘You see that big nail on the right of the front door?’ – and she feels she must not ‘giv[e] way to — to memories and so on’.

The Canary – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Canary – plot summary

An elderly woman is recalling the pleasure she has derived from her pet canary, which is now dead. The bird had a particularly beautiful song.

In the past she had focused her spiritual yearnings on the nightly appearance of a star (Venus) but she has transferred these feelings onto the bird as soon as it was acquired.

She looks after three men as lodgers, and views the bird as a male companion. She is aware that the lodgers view her with disdain, but finds comfort in the presence of the bird.

Even when she feels existentially threatened by a bad dream and a dark night, she feels the bird’s chirping as a comforting presence.

Now that the bird has died she knows that she ought to get over the loss, but feels an emptiness and sadness in life that she cannot explain.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations
0415402395

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

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Twentieth century literature
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The Captain’s Death Bed

February 11, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

The Captain’s Death Bed (1950) is the third volume of collected reviews and essays to be published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press after the death of his wife Virginia Woolf in 1941. They represent her work as a journalist, book reviewer, lecturer, and essayist over the last twenty years of her life – a period which saw the production of her most famous experimental novels – Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.

first edition – design by Vanessa Bell

The Captain’s Death Bed – critical commentary

In his introductory editor’s note to this collection, Leonard Woolf suggests that these essays and reviews would have been rewritten and polished for republication by Virginia Woolf had she lived – as she had had been in the habit of doing with all of her work. This may well be true, but the advantage for the reader is that the essays are in the condition in which they were first released for publication, and we can trace the development of her style as the years progress. Not that there was a great deal of development: she was writing fluently and imaginatively from almost her earliest work. These pieces span the years 1924 to 1939.

As in many of her essays and reviews, she offers interesting reflections on keeping diaries, something she did herself to great effect. For instance, Parson Woodforde is a completely ordinary man, to whom nothing of any importance happens, but this gives her the launching pad for one of her favourite literary topics – the rhythms and content of everyday life in all its mundanity. This was a theme she was to explore again and again in her fiction – the fact that our lives are not composed of high dramas and spectacular conflicts, but of fleeting thoughts, shifts of mood, evanescent memories, and fragments of observation – what she called ‘life itself’.

In one sense this is something of a naturalistic approach when applied to the creation of fiction – but Woolf combines it with both a lyrical, quasi-poetical literary style and a philosophic meta-critique of the phenomena she is describing. If Mr Smith thinks of his wife whilst making his commute to the office, she generalises the nature of memory and the shifting significance of individuals in each other’s lives.

Similarly, the captain of the title piece is a seafarer (the novel-writing Captain Marryat, no less) whose works capture the everyday facts of life in a way that no later novelist can:

because no living writer can bring back the ordinary day. He sees it through a glass, sentimentally, romantically; it is either too pretty or too brutal; it lacks ordinariness.

She presents sympathetic portraits of writers as diverse as Goldsmith, Ruskin, and Turgenev, and even some whom she knew personally such as Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, both of whom were friends of her father Sir Leslie Stephen.

The most famous piece in the collection is the much quoted and reprinted lecture of 1924 on character in fiction, entitled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. This is a variation on a subject she had treated before, in her 1920 short story An Unwritten Novel – which describes the attempt of a narrator to explain the character of someone unknown occupying the same carriage on a railway journey.

In this piece she takes issue with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H.G. Wells as novelists who had failed to notice her famous claim that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’. She suggests that Wells would have put Mrs Brown in one of his impossible Utopias; Galsworthy would place her in an economic analysis of her class; and Bennett would offer a sociological sketch of her house and its surroundings. In other words none of them would capture the essence of her character as a credible human being.

But she asks herself what have later, Georgian writers to offer as alternatives? She identifies the work of Forster, Lawrence, Eliot, and Joyce as brave attempts at establishing new contracts between author and reader, but urges patience, giving them time to develop. We now know that they did develop – none more so than the one great writer she modestly leaves out of the list – which is herself.

In an article on book reviewing first published as a Hogarth Press pamphlet in 1939 she spells out the history and the condition of book reviewing as distinct from serious literary criticism. She suggests it is a difficult and an often-abused system, and so proposes an alternative whereby authors pay a certified reviewer a consultancy fee for an advisory interview conducted in private. Leonard Woolf, as her editor, adds a note which sums up In three pages the whole business and the economics of publishing book reviews.

There are also some delightful surprises – essays on what was then modern technology – for instance, the cinema and flying. She views the early movie classics and immediately perceives that cinema has at its disposal a ‘secret language’ of symbols and metaphors which make laboured explanations of what is happening on screen unnecessary.

For a strange thing has happened – while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say.

The most amazing piece is her account of Flying Over London in which the novelties and incongruities of solid human beings hurtling through the air are explored in a series of aerial metaphors and shifts in point of view. Given the danger of this enterprise, it is not surprising that before long images of death and extinction are mingled with impressions of floating through clouds and witnessing City traffic congestion like lines of crawling insects. But the real beauty of the essay comes from the fact that she never left the ground, and has not flown at all. It is a work of fancy and utterly convincing imagination.

The Captain’s Death Bed – study resources

The Captain’s Death Bed – Amazon UK
The Captain’s Death Bed – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Captain’s Death Bed – free eBook format – Gutenberg

The Captain#s Death Bed – complete contents

Oliver Goldsmith
White’s Selborne
Life Itself
Crabbe
Selina Trimmer
The Captain’s Death Bed
Ruskin
The Novels Of Turgenev
Half Of Thomas Hardy
Leslie Stephen
Mr. Conrad: A Conversation
The Cosmos
Walter Raleigh
Mr. Bennett And Mrs. Brown
All About Books
Reviewing
Modern Letters
Reading
The Cinema
Walter Sickert
Flying Over London
The Sun And The Fish
Gas
Thunder At Wembley
Memories Of A Working Women’s Guild

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

1925 – The Common Reader first series

1932 – The Common Reader second series

1942 – The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

1947 – The Moment and Other Essays

1950 – The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 – Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Case of Comrade Tulayev

August 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s

By the time he came to write The Case of Comrade Tulayev Victor Serge had miraculously escaped the worst of political persecution in Europe. He began the novel writing as an exile in Paris, continued it in Marseilles whilst waiting for an exit visa, wrote more in the Dominican Republic, and finished the book in Mexico where he spent the last seven years of his life. His living conditions were impoverished and austere – but it was as if he found the psychological space in which to develop his mature style. All his best work was produced in the last few years left to him, including his autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his two final novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years.

Comrade Tulayev has a fluency, a confidence, and a consistency of tone that far surpasses his earlier works. His narrative flows effortlessly from one character and one point of view to another. The most serious political issues are delivered alongside a sensitive apprehension of the everyday world. Tyrants and bullies have moments of doubt and sentimental attachment. Even the heroic figures have flaws and weaknesses, including the most tragic ideological weakness of all – believing that they are making sacrifices in a good cause.

There is also a powerful thematic unity to the novel. It reveals the deprivations suffered by millions in the world’s worst ‘planned economy’; it reveals the bureaucratic corruption that created the shortages, waste, and even famines; and it dramatises magnificently the ideological struggles between those old Bolsheviks who had sacrificed everything to create a better society, and the New Men who had taken over to betray their efforts.

At the height of the Stalinist terror in the late 1930s a petty clerk Kostia shoots Central Committee member Tulayev almost on a whim – just because he happens to have acquired a gun. This sets in motion a new wave of purges which percolate all the way through Soviet society. Government officials are arrested; oppositionists and critics of the Party are jailed; there are mass arrests of ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’. None of these people have done anything wrong: the paranoid madness of Stalinism merely requires guilty victims. All of these people realise that no matter how long their torment lasts, their future is either years in the GULAG or a bullet in the back of the head.

Serge’s great achievement is to show how people from the top to the bottom of Soviet society coped with the terror of the purges. But most especially, he is keen to reveal how former Bolshevik loyalists managed to persuade themselves, when charged with all sorts of crimes they did not commit, that they were agreeing to confess in order to serve a greater good. That is, they put the Party above everything. And the circular logic of the Party’s argument is brilliantly compressed into the expression “obey or betray”. It’s what we might now call a Catch-22 situation. You can help the Party achieve its ends by agreeing to your own guilt (and death) or you can resist, and die anyway. In the first case, your sacrifice will help us; in the second, you are besmirching everything you have worked for over the last twenty years.

The flaws in this argument are now well known. The Party was certainly not any guide to sensible policy: it was liquidating its best intellectuals, scientists, engineers, and even military leaders just when it needed them most. It did not represent the working class on whose behalf its claims were made, because it was a corrupt bureaucracy. And the democratic principles to which it appealed were a complete sham. The entire system of government in the Soviet system was based on lies, fabrications, corruption, injustice, falsified statistics, inefficiency, and terror (which is why it eventually collapsed in 1989). But at the time Serge was writing not many people were aware of the gigantic gulf between propaganda and reality. Many writers in the west swallowed the Soviet propaganda wholesale. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, (The Truth About Soviet Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization) are now risible museum pieces, though many at the time took them seriously.

Each of the principal characters in the novel is shown grappling with the central problem in his own way. Makayev a dull and brutish peasant rises through the ranks to become a local leader because of his willingness to do the party’s bidding; but he has no intellectual or moral reserves when he finds himself on the wrong side of the investigation. Even the investigators themselves fall under the wheels of the Juggernaut – because failing to deliver results is branded as counter-revolutionary and ‘sabotage’. Old Bolshevik Ryzhik is dragged back from an unimaginably severe and miserable life in exile beyond the Arctic Circle, and faced with the same accusations as everybody else. He chooses to thwart his captors by starving himself to death in jail.

Even foreign policy is affected. Kondratiev, a loyal Soviet agent working in Spain in the middle of the civil war is swept up into the madness. His job is to eliminate Stalin’s rivals whilst appearing to support the Republican movement. Recalled to Moscow and invited by Stalin himself to give a truthful report on events, he does so – and although branded as a Trotskyist sympathiser and expecting every moment to be jailed and shot, he is one of the rare examples of someone ‘spared’ because of his old links with Stalin. He is merely banished to a Siberian mine.

No such luck for Xenia, the daughter of prosecutor Popov who is on an official visit to Paris. On hearing that the incorruptible old Bolshevik Rublev has been accused, she makes a vain series of attempts to have messages of support sent back to Moscow. This alerts the secret service agents who are already spying on her activities, and she is taken back to Moscow under arrest. And because they are related, her father is arrested too.

The show trials take place, the accused are convicted, and the episode has what we now call closure. The three principals Erchov, Makeyev, and Rublev (who have absolutely nothing to do with each other) meet their death, and the corrupt system that has brought this about goes on. Even when the original assassin writes a letter to the prosecutor confessing his guilt, the letter is destroyed – because it compromises the Case, which has now been closed.

The novel is tragic in the very best sense. It shows enlightened and courageous individuals inspired by noble ideals who are brought to a pitiable end by ideological flaws in the system they embrace. It offers a first-hand account of the Soviet system written by somebody who was a high-ranking insider. And most important of all it reveals the secret mechanisms of the the Terror and the Show Trials which were at the time a baffling mystery to everyone. We have known the technical details for over seventy years now, but the artistic truth offered by a magnificent novel such as The Case of Comrade Tulayev lives on forever.

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Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, New York: New York Review Books, 2004, pp.362, ISBN: 1590170644

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The Castle

August 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Kafka’s last major work

The Castle was Kafka’s last novel, and like most of his others (except The Trial) it was never completed. Indeed, it ends abruptly, breaking off half way through a sentence. But it towers like some sort of an unfinished masterpiece over the rest of his work. Anthea Ball, the translator of this new edition from OUP, makes the case that The Castle is unlike The Trial because it is set in the countryside and it is mainly concerned with a village community. This is what might be called a ‘charitable’ interpretation.

Others are likely to note that it has a very similar protagonist, with the same initial name (K) who seeks acceptance into the village and is condemned to failure in his attempts to gain admission to the Castle. This building dominates the entire locality and houses swarms of unseen officials and various bureaucrats representing authority in the absence of its real owner, who never appears.

The castle is also likened to a church or cathedral – and the villagers do in fact pay it religious devotions. Visitors to Kafka’s home town of Prague do not have to look far to see the likely origin of this powerful symbol. Prague Castle towers above every possible view from the surrounding city.

The villagers live in a state of what Marx called ‘rural idiocy’ because of their reverence for this unseen authority. Kafka’s other works are mainly set in a city – and he himself rarely left Prague where he was born, went to school and university, and worked – until the very end of his short life. But The Castle is world of shabby, overworked and undernourished peasants who live in hovels and endure brutish behaviour from everyone above them in the pecking order.

K does his best to challenge in a rational manner the benighted obeisance in which the villagers are held because of their irrational respect for the Castle’s authority – especially in the form of Klamm, an official of such awesome power that people are even afraid to say his name or look at him. But K is met with ambiguity, contradiction, and absurdity at every attempt to deal with the strange world in which he finds himself.

There is also the usual sexual ambiguity one comes to expect in Kafka’s work. When K arrives in the village, Frieda the barmaid is Klamm’s mistress, but she gives him up in favour of the newcomer K. The two of them consummate their passion on the floor of the bar room amongst beer puddles, unknowingly observed by the comic twins Artur and Jeremiah. This experience transports K into ‘another land’ – and yet he quickly gets fed up with her and spends all his time thinking about gaining access to the Castle.

Any number of possible interpretations of the novel have been discussed at length in the critical writing on Kafka. It has often been seen as a novel-length version of his parable ‘Before the Law’ in which a man seeks entry to the Law but is denied by a gatekeeper. The man decides to wait and only when he is dying asks why no other people have ever sought entrance. The gatekeeper replies “This entrance was assigned only to you. And now I am going to close it”.

These new editions of Kafka’s main works from Oxford University Press offer fresh translations, and they come with extended introductory essays, full explanatory notes, a bibliography, and both a biographical preface on Kafka and a chronology of his life. They also explain the very complex provenance of the text.

The Castle is not for readers new to Kafka. Better to start with the short stories, such as Metamorphosis or his shorter novel The Trial. But for anything like a complete Kafka experience, this one is unmissable. It is also a surprisingly funny novel at times, despite its sombre overtones.

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Franz Kafka, The Castle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.279, ISBN 0199238286

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The Chaperon

October 28, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Chaperon first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November—December, 1891 then was later reprinted in The Real Thing and Other Tales published by Macmillan in London and New York, 1893. The other pieces in this collection of tales by Henry James were Nona Vincent, Greville Fane, and Sir Dominick Ferrand.

The Chaperon – critical commentary

The Chaperon [spelled without the normal ‘e’] contains many of the elements that characterise James’s other tales – society ladies jousting for social respectability, ambitious families wishing to marry their offspring for financial advantage, and various niceties of moral judgement being made amidst social infighting concealed beneath a cloak of respectability.

The principal irony encapsulated in the title is that the young daughter Rose Tramore acts as a chaperone to her mother – not the other way round. Rose protects her mother from the dangers and humiliations offered by polite society to a woman who has defied its conventions. Rose’s ambition is to rehabilitate her mother socially, and she refuses to accept invitations which are not offered in the formally correct manner: that is, made to the mother in the first instance, thereby acknowledging her status.

It is there that the main problem with the story lies – for we are given no persuasive reason to account for Rose’s motivation and behaviour. Rose’s loyalty to her mother is the driving force of the narrative – but we are not provided with any explanation for her reasons in being so doggedly loyal.

The other weakness in the story is that Bertram Jay is introduced (quite amusingly) as something of blockhead who a young woman with Rose’s intelligence and spirit would not for one moment consider as a good prospect for marriage. Yet by the end of the tale he has become a charming suitor who Rose is quite happy to accept. No reason for any change in his character is given.

The Chaperon – study resources

The Complete Tales of Henry James – Vol 8 – Digireads – Amazon UK

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

The Chaperon – free eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Chaperon – story synopsis

Part I. Mrs Tramore leaves her husband and children to live on the Mediterranean with another man. Mr Charles Tramore does not re-marry, and the children are brought up by their aunt Julia and their grandmother. When the ‘other man’ dies in a boating accident without having married Mrs Tramore, she returns to London but is shunned by polite society.

The Tramore family act as if Mrs Tramore no longer exists, but when her father dies, Rose Tramore decides to rehabilitate her mother socially. Despite the objections and threats of her aunt and grandmother, Rose decides she will go to live with her mother – as a result of which her grandmother bans her from the house for disobedience.

Rose is visited by her already-rejected admirer Captain Jay, who also pleads with her not to take up with her mother (possibly with an eye on the fact that the family might disinherit her). She rejects his offer of marriage again – more forcefully.

Part II. Rose lives in unoccupied seclusion with her mother, but she turns down invitations to socialize because they are addressed to her personally, not to her mother. She wishes to challenge society’s attitudes towards a woman who has incurred social disgrace. She also repulses the advances of the baby-like Guy Mangler, whose mother Lady Maresfield is trying to marry him off.

Finding no success with her strategies in London, Rose and her mother tour Europe as a relief from the tedium and the strain of not being ‘in society’. There they meet Captain Jay, who is very taken with Mrs Tramore – as a result of which Rose changes her attitude towards him to one of approval.

Whilst in Venice together, they also meet Guy Mangler and Lady Maresfield, and with a little more tolerance on each side, social relations are very delicately restored. When they all return to London, Rose and her mother find themselves accepted into society again almost as curios – examples of people who have miraculously recovered from former disgrace. Rose marries Captain Jay, and all is well.

The Chaperon – principal characters

Charles Tramore	Rose’s father
Mrs Tramore	his adulterous wife
Rose Tramore	their attractive eldest daughter (20)
Edith Tramore	their younger daughter
Eric Tramore	their eldest son
Miss Julia Tramore	Rose’s aunt in St Leonards
Captain Bertram Jay	suitor to Rose
Lady Maresfield	society lady
Guy Mangler	her son, who she wants to marry off
Mrs Bray	Lady Maresfield’s rich sister
Miss Hack	Rose’s former governess

Henry James’s study

Other work by Henry James

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

December 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Chase (El Acoso) was first published in 1956 whilst Alejo Carpentier was living in Venezuela, in self-imposed exile from what he regarded as his native Cuba, which was under the dictatorship of General Batista at the time. Although neither the fictional country nor the city is named in the novel, most commentators accept that he captures the spirit (and the terror) of Havana during a period of political persecution and social unrest.

Old Havana

The Chase – critical commentary

Literary style

Carpentier’s literary style is not dissimilar to that of two other modernists, Woolf and Joyce, in seeking to achieve a sense of temporal simultaneity in his prose. He writes about more than one subject and one period in the story at the same time, by switching from one topic or character to another, often within the same sentence.

It is significant that in general he makes very little use of the paragraph, and extensive use of the ellipsis (…) the semicolon, and the dash – as this passage describing the fugitive’s fear in the concert hall demonstrates:

It might be a Sign; my eyes will try to avoid it, looking above it, below it, finally making me dizzy; I must clench my teeth, clench my fists, calm my stomach—calm my stomach—I must stop that running sensation in my guts, that breakdown of my kidneys which sends sweat to my chest; one thrust and another, one jolt and another; I must tighten myself up, cover up the falling apart inside, cover up what’s flowing out of me, boiling out of me; piercing me; I must tighten myself up over the thing that’s drilling and burning, in this immobility to which I am condemned, here, where my head must remain at the same height as every other head.

Carpentier also narrates the fictional past and present simultaneously. The fugitive is trying to escape from his assailants from the very beginning of the novel, but mingled with his thoughts and fears, we are gradually given the account of his past.

He also mixes first and third person narrative modes – third person objective statements recounting the fugitive’s movements and descriptions of the city, and at the same time first-person accounts of his thoughts, fears, and memories.

Structure

Despite the complexities of the narrative and the manner in which the story is delivered, the structure of the novel is quite simple. In Part I, the un-named fugitive arrives at the concert hall, on the run from his assailants. He gives the student ticket seller a fake banknote, which the student then unsuccessfully tries to spend through buying a night with the prostitute Estrella.

The events of Part II take place before those of Part I, and reveal the desperate life of the fugitive as a political agent, an assassin, and a traitor up to that point. He too has been a client of Estrella’s, and is now in fear of his life after betraying his comrades.

Part III of the narrative goes back to the point at which it broke off in Part I, and the story concludes with the student returning from the prostitute, the end of the concert, and the shooting of the fugitive.

There are several neat structural links between the separate parts of the story. When the fugitive gives the fake (or out-of-date) banknote to the ticket seller, the student tries (unsuccessfully) to buy a night with the prostitute Estrella. But we learn later that the fugitive has also been a regular client of Estrella’s, and has had the banknote turned down by her for the same reason earlier on the same day.

Moreover, the ticket seller is a student of music, and the fugitive has previously been a student of architecture before his activities as a political undercover agent. Both music and architecture were favourite subjects of Carpentier himself. He wrote a study of Music in Cuba (1946).

There are other small details which tie the two parts of the story together. In Part I the ticket seller is fascinated by the erotic spectacle of the lady in the fox fur who has removed some undergarment because of the heat. And in Part III when the fugitive is hiding in the concert hall, he too notices the same woman who is a member of the audience.

Novel or novella?

The Chase is sometimes referred to as a novel or a short novel, but in fact it has all the characteristics of the novella in terms of unity of character, place, time, action, and theme.

The whole narrative is concerned with just one character – the un-named fugitive – with the ticket seller and Estrella acting as very incidental characters of secondary importance.

In terms of place, the entire narrative unfolds in the city (of Havana) with no extraneous locations or shifts of scene. And it can be argued that the time or action are even more concentrated. Although Part II of the narrative recounts the background to the fugitive’s desperate life, the real events of the story begin with his abrupt dash to hide in the auditorium (Part I) and end shortly afterwards when the concert ends and he is shot dead. This is a time span of less than the performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony which is being played.

This leaves us with the question of the theme.

What is the theme of the text?

There is normally an expectation that the central character in a novella will be tragic or at least admirable, but the fugitive in The Chase does not seem to qualify for either of these categories. He has been a student of the humanities, but has drifted into violent political activism as a member of the Communist Party. This might still be regarded as heroic in the tyranny of General Batista’s Cuban dictatorship which forms the backdrop to the story, except for two further issues.

The fugitive goes on to betray his colleagues when threatened with torture. This too might be seen as an understandable human weakness, but he also has another guilty secret. He appears to be working as a double agent – because he believes he has the protection of the ‘Exalted Personage’ – presumably a member of the government dictatorship against which the rebels are fighting. From this source he is hoping to obtain an exit visa and money to escape.

When this avenue of relief is closed with the destruction of the Personage’s villa, his personal drama reaches its climax in the cafe when he spots two men who are going to kill him. He believes that these assassins are acting for the rebels, seeking revenge for his betrayal, but they turn out to be police, acting for the government. If there is a tragedy here therefore, it is perhaps the tragedy of a society under the tyranny of a dictatorship, and the lengths to which some of its citizens are driven.

The Chase – study resources

The Chase – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

El Acoso – at Amazon UK – (text in Spanish)

The Chase ) – at Amazon US – (text in English

El Acoso – at Amazon US – (text in Spanish)

The Chase – plot summary

Part I

In an un-named Latin-American city (Havana), a young music student is working as a ticket-seller in a concert hall, meanwhile reading a biography of Beethoven. When a fugitive enters the hall pursued by two men, he leaves a large banknote at the ticket office.

The fugitive hides in the audience, consumed by a terror-stricken panic that he will be discovered. He feels oppressed by the music, and invokes his religious faith to support himself.

The music student is with the prostitute Estrella, who complains of an ‘Inquisition’ by the authorities. When he offers her the banknote, it turns out to be worthless, so she throws him out. He thinks back to a childhood sweetheart and feels humiliated by his lack of worldly success, finally returning to the concert hall just before the performance ends.

Part II

The fugitive is hiding out in an old house with a belvedere, protected by an old woman who was once his nurse. He is waiting for details of an ‘Arrangement’.

He has been a student of architecture and also a member of the Communist Party. He is now disciplining himself for some task that awaits him. He is trying desperately to battle against hunger.

He endures four days without eating, and fantasises about eating wood and boiled leather. But he remains in hiding, behind a barricaded door.

He finds logical reasons for justifying his intense religious beliefs, and hears music coming from an adjacent building, then discovers that the old woman has died. He is fearful of going back into society and being recognised.

He attends the wake of the old woman, then goes back fearfully into the streets, making his way to the house of Estrella the prostitute.

He spends the night with Estrella, but feels slighted by her. She in her turn, and despite a certain pride in herself, feels degraded by her profession.

He gives instructions to Estrella to collect information from an important person on the other side of the city. But she returns telling him that the banknote he has given her is a fake. When an argument develops outside, the fugitive escapes by a rear exit.

The fugitive makes his way in the shadows towards a house of rendezvous. He has assassinated a politician with an exploding book, and has recently been in prison where he has confessed and betrayed his accomplices. He wants his government contact to provide him with an exit visa and some money.

He thinks back to his desperate actions as a revolutionary, during which time he has taken part in a tribunal which resulted in a vote to execute one of his comrades.

He has participated as an under-cover agent and committed acts of political violence that have left him feeling ashamed. Arriving at the house of his high office protector, he finds it in ruins.

He has also been part of an assassination squad and graduated in the ‘bureaucracy of terror’. But after the exploding book incident claimed its two victims he has been arrested and threatened with torture – at which point he has capitulated and betrayed his colleagues.

He finds refuge in a church where a marriage is taking place, and hopes to find spiritual comfort by confessing his sins to a priest. But when the ceremony is over, the parish priest turns him out and tells him to come back next day.

Trying to return to the funeral wake as his only place of refuge, he is intercepted by two rabid student fans of violence. Then, as a storm begins, he spots two men with guns watching him, and narrowly escapes them into the concert hall.

Part III

He cowers in the hall, thinking that his former colleagues are waiting for him outside, ready to execute him for his betrayals. He finally decides that the safest thing will be to stay behind, hiding in the hall when the concert is over.

The student ticket collector is in the act of closing up when two policemen stay on after the performance and shoot the fugitive where he is hiding.

Alejo Carpentier – other works

The Kingdom of This World is a marvelously compressed account of the slave uprising and first revolution of the early nineteenth century in San Domingo – now Haiti. Carpentier uses ‘magical realism’, long before it became fashionable, to depict the contradictions between political reality and religious or mythical beliefs. The story passes rapidly in a series of vivid scenes from the early unsuccessful uprising led by Macandal, then Bouckman who led Haiti in its fight for independence from France, and finally to Henri Christophe the revolutionary leader who later became Emperor of Haiti, and who built Sans Souci and La Ferrière Citadel.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
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The Lost Steps (1953) is a story told twice. A disillusioned north-American musicologist flees his empty existence in New York City. He takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization – the upper reaches of a great South American river (which we take to be the Amazon). The novel describes his search, his adventures, the revival of his creative powers, and the remarkable decision he makes about his life in a village that seems to be truly outside history. This novel offers a wonderful evocations of Latin America from the founder of ‘Magical Realism’.
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Alejo Carpentier weblinks

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)

More on Alejo Carpentier
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Common Reader first series

October 12, 2015 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, authors, and cultural history

The Common Reader first series is a famous collection of essays by Virginia Woolf that explore the rich history of literature and English writing from the classical period to what was the present day of 1925 when the book was first published. The essays had appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Atheneum, the Nation, the New Statesman, the London Mercury, and in America in the Dial, and the New Republic. The publication proved so successful that it led to another collection (second series) in 1932.

first edition – design by Vanessa Bell

Virginia Woolf had been writing essays, occasional pieces, and book reviews ever since her earliest work had appeared in the Manchester Guardian in 1905, and this present compilation reflects both the depth and the wide range of her interests and her literary education. Although she never had what we would now call formal schooling, she had educated herself, via access to the private library of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, who was an eminent Victorian man of letters and the first general editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She had read the classics, the Elizabethans, novelists of the eighteenth century onwards, and was up to date with contemporary fiction. It perhaps helped that Thomas Hardy and Henry James were friends of the family.

She begins with a formidable piece on the Paston Letters and Chaucer, vividly re-imagining medieval English history in a manner she was later to make famous in her own novel of fictional biography Orlando (1927). ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ is not just an appreciation of classical literature, it is also a discussion of what distinguishes it from and defines the essence of post-Renaissance literature that is so much closer to us.

The essays are arranged in chronological order of subject – from medieval literature to Joseph Conrad – but there is no reason why they should be read in this order. They were written at widely different times and for a variety of audiences. But it has to be said that the spirit that pervades them all is remarkably consistent. Her writing is poised, fluent, humane, and distinctly non-academic. She takes her definition of the common reader from Samuel Johnson:

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinion of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he has come by, some kind of whole— a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.

A review of Hakluyt’s Voyages is the springboard for reflections on exploration which become an analysis of Elizabethan prose styles. And she is not over-reverential. She explains cogently why many minor Elizabethan plays are so bad and even boring – because their authors were operating in a different cultural medium than obtains in the modern world.

She repeatedly compares the way ‘we’ see things (writing in the early twentieth century) to the way writers have seen them in the past. Montaigne revelling in the diversity and contradictions of life; John Evelyn calmly recording the events in a torture chamber. She throws off perceptive remarks on nearly every page: ‘the late plays of Shakespeare … are better read than seen’ and ‘the second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces’.

Sometimes she takes creative liberties. An essay written to commemorate two-hundred years since the publication of Robinson Crusoe becomes a detailed examination of Moll Flanders and Defoe’s other novels, all of which she sees as the foundation of modern realism.

Similarly, a volume of Jane Austen’s juvenilia is the occasion for an appreciation in which she shows how a great novelist’s technique actually works:

she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings flat.

Woolf makes a spirited explanation of the essence of Russian literature – which had only recently been made available in English at the time of her writing. There is discussion of the apparently inconclusive endings of Chekhov’s stories; the restless and chaotic soul-searching of Dostoyevski; and the sharp-eyed observations of Tolstoy.

There is even an essay about the nature of essays themselves, which she insists should not be heavy, didactic, or composed of polysyllabic prose. This is a piece from which Max Beerbohm emerges triumphant: ‘the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style’.

A tribute to Joseph Conrad plays interestingly with the relationship between Conrad the author and Marlowe his regular first person narrator and it ends with the provocative notion that it is the early novels – Youth, Lord Jim, and Typhoon – that will survive as Conrad’s highest achievements, whilst the later works – Chance, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes – will be seen as curiosities. It might have seemed so in 1924 when this essays was written, but my guess is that most serious (if not common) readers of Conrad will today think just the opposite.

But she anticipates such arguments – acknowledging that each generation will make its own review of the literature handed down to it – and since this collection is almost a hundred years old, still in print, and still being discussed, we have every reason to say that it has assumed the status of a classic.

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Volume 1, London: Vintage Classics, 2003, pp.288, ISBN: 009944366X

The Common Reader first series – study resources

The Common Reader first series – Amazon UK
The Common Reader first series – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Common Reader first series – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Common Reader first series – complete contents

The Common Reader
The Pastons and Chaucer
On not knowing Greek
The Elizabethan Lumber Room
Notes on an Elizabethan Play
Montaigne
The Duchess of Newcastle
Rambling round Evelyn
Defoe
Addison
Lives of the Obscure–
1. Taylors and Edgeworths
2. Laetitia Pilkington
Jane Austen
Modern Fiction
“Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”
George Eliot
The Russian Point of View
Outlines–
1. Miss Mitford
2. Dr. Bentley
3. Lady Dorothy Nevill
4. Archbishop Thomson
The Patron and the Crocus
The Modern Essay
Joseph Conrad
How it strikes a Contemporary

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

1925 – The Common Reader first series

1932 – The Common Reader second series

1942 – The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

1947 – The Moment and Other Essays

1950 – The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 – Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

The Bolted Door – commentary

The Bolted Door – study resources

The Bolted Door – plot summary

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bostonians – critical commentary

The Bostonians – study resources

The Bostonians – plot summary

The Bostonians – principal characters

The Bostonians – film adaptation

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

The Brute – critical commentary

The Brute – study resources

The Brute – plot summary

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Brute – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Further reading

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

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

The Canary – critical commentary

The Canary – study resources

The Canary – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

The Captain’s Death Bed – critical commentary

The Captain’s Death Bed – study resources

The Captain#s Death Bed – complete contents

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s

Kafka’s last major work

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

The Chaperon – critical commentary

The Chaperon – study resources

The Chaperon – story synopsis

The Chaperon – principal characters

Further reading

Other work by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

The Chase – critical commentary

The Chase – study resources

The Chase – plot summary

Alejo Carpentier – other works

Alejo Carpentier weblinks

essays on literature, authors, and cultural history

The Common Reader first series – study resources

The Common Reader first series – complete contents

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

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