Literary studies Archives - Page 55 of 77

The Lesson of the Master

January 3, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Lesson of the Master was first published in The Universal Review for July-August 1888. It later appeared in the collection of stories which included The Marriages, The Pupil, Brooksmith, The Solution, and Sir Edmund Orme published in New York and London by Macmillan in 1892.

Lake Geneva

The Lesson of the Master – critical commentary

This is one of a number of tales which James wrote exploring the competing claims of devotion to the literary life and what would be required for marriage and family life. It should be no surprise to anybody who has read The Path of Duty, Crapy Cornelia, The Wheel of Time and A Landscape Painter that the conclusion inevitably turns out to be to remain single.

Henry St George is a successful novelist – but one who has not written anything of note for quite some time. Paul Overt, as his enthusiastic younger admirer, is hoping to learn something from him of a literary nature – but the lesson turns out to be one in life, not art.

St George warns Overt quite explicitly that marriage and the responsibilities it entails will hamper his efforts to achieve something of great artistic value. He even argues that he himself has fallen foul of the trap of worldly success. ‘I’ve had everything. In other words, I’ve missed everything.’ From a psychological point of view it is worth noting that even though his family life has been ostensibly successful, his wife prevents him from smoking and drinking.

Of course the major irony of the tale is that St George does not follow his own advice. When his wife dies, he rapidly snatches at the chance of marrying attractive and aesthetically inclined Marian Fancourt. But following the logic of his own arguments, he does not return to the altar of high art.

The second irony is that Paul Overt is deeply wounded at losing the woman he loved to the man he most admired. But he is compensated by what appears to be literary success. By choosing to remain single and exiling himself for two years’ productive work (on the shores of Lake Geneva) he thereby triumphs with a creative success.

It would therefore appear that the tale illustrates the validity of St George’s argument that the artist must sacrifice normal human relations for the sake of artistic success – as Henry James was to do himself. The artist must forego the

full, rich, masculine, human, general life, with all its responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys – all the domestic and social initiations

At times in the story it is difficult to escape the feeling that James is talking to himself about these conflicts of interest which he explored in so many of his tales. But the weakness in the position St George takes is that his concepts of artistic success are wrapped up in so many abstract and metaphysical notions and expressed in large scale over-generalisations. He complains that he has done everything in life except

The great thing … the sense of having done the best — the sense, which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t — and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of. And precisely those who really know don’t speak of him. He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of Fame.

Now the tale might be offered in a light-hearted spirit of fun (Leon Edel says the subject is ‘treated largely as a joke’) but it isn’t really possible to take entirely seriously an argument which is based on such ethereal suppositions. James is performing the literary equivalent of sleight of hand by appealing to this level of artistic achievement without making any effort to demonstrate its substance.

The Lesson of the Master – 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

Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions

The Lesson of the Master – Hesperus Classics

The Lesson of the Master – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Lesson of the Master – story synopsis

Part I Young author Paul Overt arrives at a country house weekend summer party hoping to meet the celebrated writer Henry St George. He is slightly shocked by his wife Mrs St George, who announces that she once made her husband burn a ‘bad’ book. Overt believes he can recognise literary and artistic ‘types’, and is surprised that St George looks so conventional. St George has also not written anything of merit for quite some time.

Part II At lunch Overt sits opposite St George, who appears to be flirting with pretty young Marian Fancourt, to whom Overt is afterwards introduced by her father. She tells him how much she admires his books and reveals that St George is critical of his own work and wishes to meet Overt whose writing he has read. They meet St George in the house, where Overt continues to persuade himself of the older man’s virtues, despite the fact that it is clear he has not read Overt’s work. There is then a walk in the park, where Overt accompanies Mrs St George, who he later learns is not in good health.

Part III After dinner Overt is joined in the smoking room by St George, who praises Overt’s writing, confesses his own declining powers, and recommends not having children. He reveals that his wife forbids him to smoke and drink. St George invites Overt to dinner at his own country house, and then they share their enthusiasm for Marian Fancourt, who St George urges him to pursue.

Part IV Overt meets Marian Fancourt at an art exhibition in London. They make further arrangements to meet, and are joined by St George, who has invited here there. St George takes her away to drive through Hyde Park, leaving Overt puzzled and a little envious. Nevertheless, next Sunday he visits Marian at home in Manchester Square , where they compare notes on St George, and Overt is so impressed by her artistic and literary appreciation that he falls in love with her. As he is leaving Manchester Square he sees St George arriving at the house. When Overt visits her again the following Sunday she tells him that St George will not be seeing her again.

Part V Overt eventually goes to dinner at St George’s house in Ennismore Gardens, after which he is invited to stay for conversation in the windowless library and study. St George once again claims that he has prostituted his own talent for financial gain, and that his wife and children are an impediment to his reaching an artistic high point. He claims that material and domestic success has prevented him from achieving his true potential. When the subject of Miss Fancourt crops up, St George argues that Overt must give her up if he wishes to be a successful writer. Overt claims that such is his wish.

Part VI Fired with enthusiasm, Overt leaves England and goes to stay on Lake Geneva to work on his next book. On receiving news of the death of Mrs St George, he is puzzled by her husband’s appreciative catalogue of her qualities and good offices. Overt thinks of returning, but stays away for two years to finish his novel. When he returns to London however, he learns that Miss Fancourt is due to marry St George. Overt feels he has been duped by both of them, but when he visits a party at Manchester Square St George claims that he has been entirely consistent in his views – and has given up writing. Overt goes home to an uncertain future, but when his book appears in the autumn it is a success.

The Lesson of the Master – characters

I	the occasional outer narrator
Paul Overt	young author of Ginistrella
Henry St George	celebrated author of Shadowmere
Mrs St George	his wife
General Fancourt	ex India army officer
Marian Fancourt	his intelligent and attractive daughter

Henry James’s study

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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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More tales by James
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The Letters of Leonard Woolf

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature – 1900 to 1969

Leonard Woolf was one of the longest living (1880-1976) and the most distinguished members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a writer, a publisher, a political activist, a proto environmentalist and animal lover, a loyal friend, cantankerous employer, and a devoted husband. What’s not so well known about him is that in fact he had two ‘wives’ – the second technically married to somebody else – who happened to be his business partner. The Letters of Leonard Woolf is a definitive selection from his voluminous correspondence, which begins at Cambridge, with letters to his lifelong friend Lytton Strachey, and fellow apostles G.E.Moore and Saxon Sydney-Turner.

The manner of these early writings is surprisingly arch, full of classical references and undergraduate Weltschmerz – though no doubt this reflects the turn-of-the-century social mood amongst such a privileged elite. All of this was to change very suddenly when after doing badly in the Civil Service exams, he went to work as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka – then called Ceylon. There he plunged into the practical affairs of running the Empire – and making a big personal success of it. It’s interesting to note that the florid rhetoric of the earlier letters is replaced by a straightforward reporting of events, and a frank expression of his feelings. His fellow Brits began to seem like something out of a bad novel:

The ‘society’ of the place is absolutely inconceivable; it exists only upon the tennis-court & in the G.A.’s house; the women are all whores or hags or missionaries or all three; & the men are … sunk.The G.A.’s wife has the vulgarity of a tenth rate pantomime actress; her idea of liveliness is to kick up her legs & to scream the dullest of dull schoolboy ‘smut’ across the tennis court or the dinner table,

There are many interesting disclosures as he reveals himself to Lytton Strachey, his only confidant, who was 9,000 miles away. Woolf though that sexual desire was a ‘degradation’ – an attitude which casts light on his two later sex-free relationships. “I am really in love with someone who is in love with me. It is not however pleasant because it is pretty degrading, I suppose, to be in love with practically a schoolgirl”.

He’s also fairly unsparing in his comments on people who were later to become his famous fellow Bloomsburyites – though it has to be remembered that he had known them since they were all undergraduates together. On reading E.M.Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread he thinks ‘It’s …a mere formless meandering. The fact is I don’t think he knows what reality is, & as for experience the poor man does not realise that practically it does not exist’.

I detest Keynes, don’t you? Looking back on him from 4 years I can see he is fundamentally evil if ever anyone was.

When he arrived back in England on leave in 1911, is was with the vague notion of marrying Virginia Stephen, an idea that Lytton Strachey had put into his head. And marry her he did – even though Virginia refused to allow his family to the wedding and made it quite clear that she felt no physical attraction to him.

The letters are presented in separate themes which correspond to successive periods in his life – Cambridge, Ceylon, marriage to Virginia, manager of the Hogarth Press. It also has to be said that this is a rigorously scholarly production. Each section of his life has an essay-length introduction; there’s a family tree, chronological notes; biographical sketches of the principal characters, explanatory footnotes, photographs, and a huge index.

Writing as a publisher, there are some wonderfully humane letters to his actual and would-be authors, explaining the iniquities of the book trade. He was of course sealing with writers of the stature of Freud and T.S.Eliot. There’s also an extended letter to one of his best-selling authors, Vita Sackville-West (his wife’s one-time lover) which should be required reading for anyone who wants to know how the world of selling books works – even today.

He also had his finger on the pulse of the BBC and its patronising attitude to the public in a way that still rings true:

That the BBC should be so reactionary and politically and intellectually dishonest is what one would expect and forgive, knowing the kind of people who always get in control of those kind of machines, but what makes them so contemptible is that, even according to their own servants’ hall standards, they habitually choose the tenth rate in everything, from their music hall programmes and social lickspittlers and royal bumsuckers right down their scale to the singers of Schubert songs, the conductors of their classical concerts and the writers of their reviews.

Politically, he was spot on throughout all the tensions and ambiguities of the inter-war years. Anti-Imperialist, Ant-Fascist, and supportive of the Russian revolution whilst critical of the Stalinism which caused its corruption.

One of the most interesting features of his later life is that he spent more than thirty years of it in love with another man’s wife. She lived with Leonard during the week and went back to her husband at the weekend. The husband even became Leonard’s business partner.

This is somewhat brushed under the carpet by the editor. He chooses fairly anodyne letters to Trekkie Parsons, and you would need information from other sources such as their collected correspondence (Love Letters) to realise how serious the relationship was.

It was serious enough that Leonard made Trekkie his executor and legatee in a will which was disputed by the Woolf family after his death. It was in court that the revelation (or claim) was made that they were never more than good friends.

One wonders, and boggles. But the fact is that Leonard Woolf was a great letter writer – though always seeming to be writing with the public looking over his shoulder. His correspondence should be read alongside the magnificent Autobiography, but even then you need to realise that there’s more to the story of a person’s life than the tale told by its protagonist.

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Frederic Spotts (ed), The Letters of Leonard Woolf, London: Bloomsbury, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1992, pp.616, ISBN: 0747511535

More on Leonard Woolf
Twentieth century literature
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The Letters of Lytton Strachey

July 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

life, loves, letters, plus Bloomsbury gossip

Lytton Strachey, like his close friend Virginia Woolf (strongly featured here) was a prolific letter writer. Theirs was an age which largely preceded the telephone, and in early twentieth-century England there could be up to three postal deliveries per day. This selection from The Letters of Lytton Strachey covers the whole of his adult life – from meeting Leonard Woolf as Apostles at Trinity College Cambridge in 1899 to his premature death in 1932.

The letters reveal him as an even more complex character than that which emerges from the majority of Bloomsbury memoirs and biographies. He was, as Paul Levy succinctly puts it in his introduction, “a political radical who was born into the ruling class, a member of the intellectual aristocracy who cherished his contacts with the aristocracy of blood, a democrat who did not always trust the people, and one of the original champagne socialists.”

Most of the early letters are to his lifelong friend Leonard Woolf, with whom he kept up a regular correspondence all the time Woolf was working as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). We see the formation of the Bloomsbury Group when “The Goth [Adrian Stephen] is ‘at home’ on Thursday evenings”, and there are some slightly unexpected appearances and connections – such as his brother James Strachey’s affair with Rupert Brooke, and Lytton Strachey’s flirtation with the explorer George Mallory, who was to disappear on Everest in 1924.

He is certainly a mass of contradictions in his private life: one minute fluttering like an elderly aunt about a minor ailment or swooning with rapture over a young messenger boy, then next minute talking about ‘raping’ one of his friends or discussing the techniques of coprologists with his brother James in stomach-churning detail.

He’s also two-faced to an extraordinary degree – writing scathing critiques of John Maynard Keynes and Rupert Brooke in letters to third parties, then toadying up to them directly and even asking them to come on holiday with him.

His correspondence during the war years reveals him as far more politically radical than he is usually given credit for. He was not only a conscientious objector on principle, but he even wrote pamphlets critical of the way the government was handling the war.

The letters are presented and annotated in the most scholarly fashion – with full biographical notes on all the people mentioned, and all nicknames and obscure allusions spelled out. Indeed, the notes are occasionally longer than the letters they seek to explain.

Suddenly in mid volume the correspondence takes on an amazing animation and inventiveness when he meets Dora Carrington, who was to become the central figure in the rest of his life. First (and very briefly) she was his lover, and then they set up their famous menage a trois when Strachey fell in love with Ralph Partridge – and Carrington married him, whilst remaining in love with Strachey.

Whenever separated from Carrington, he wrote her long letters describing the various weekend house parties he attended. The portraits of Ottoline Morrell and Margot Asquith and their like are mischievous and bitchy, and although he censors himself on personal matters, he is not averse to pungent comment on others:

everything is at sixes and sevens – ladies in love with buggers and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up too. Where will it all end?

There are all sorts of interesting details: Strachey’s sharp eye and collector’s nose for modern painting (Derain and Modigliani); Maynard Keynes altering the clocks to one hour ahead of summer time; Strachey’s strong opinions that Queen Victoria was ‘a martyr to analeroticism’ and Bernard Berenson ‘has accumulated his wealth from being a New York guttersnipe’.

However, he seems at his most comfortable when in the midst of his Bloomsbury contemporaries, as a letter written from Vanessa Bell’s house at Charleston suggests:

the company in this house is its sempiternal self. Duncan and Vanessa painting all day in each other’s arms. Pozzo [Keynes] writing on Probability, on the History of Currency, controlling the business of King’s , and editing the Economic Journal. Clive pretending to read Stendhal. Mary writing letters on blue note-paper, the children screaming and falling into the pond.

The final bunch of letters, to his last lover, Roger Senhouse, reveal his taste for sado-masochism (crucifixion, blood-letting) but also his extraordinary generosity towards friends. His late financial success led to some self-indulgence, but he seems to have spent far more on other people than on himself. Though not for long. A falsely diagnosed stomach cancer cut him down at the age of fifty-two. His soul-mate Dora Carrington committed suicide a few weeks later.

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Paul Levy, The Letters of Lytton Strachey, London: Penguin Books, 2006, pp.698, ISBN 0141014733

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Twentieth century literature
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The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

love, literature, and friendship Bloomsbury-style

The title of this book is letters to Virginia Woolf – but this is so misleading, that I have changed it for the title of this review. This is a fully reciprocated exchange between these two writers – both of letters and affection. And as in many love affairs the power passes from one to the other and back again. Their relationship began in 1923 around the time that Hogarth Press was publishing Vita Sackville-West’s improbably titled novel, Seducers in Ecuador.

Their early letters are friendly and flattering, with just a touch of flirtation which gives a hint of Things to Come. But once the deed is done, the flattery is replaced by practical arrangements for meeting up, plus a fear that their secret might have been uncovered by Clive Bell. The amazing thing is that for all the sexual pluralism and bisexuality of the Bloomsbury group, they went to a lot of trouble to preserve the semblance of respectability.

The second phase of the affaire is largely Vita’s travelogue as she journeys to join her husband Harold Nicolson in Tehran where he had been posted to the British Legation by the Foreign Office.

When she gets back to the UK, it’s a good thing we have editorial commentary, because you would not guess from the content of the letters that she had transferred her romantic affection to Dorothy Wellesley, just as later, whilst protesting in every letter how much she missed and was very much in love with Virginia, she was also in love with Mary, wife of South-African poet Roy Campbell – an affair which in true Bloomsbury style, she eventually tells Virginia all about.

There’s no detail of what or how much went on in physical terms between them, but to make up for this there is plenty of intelligent comment on the profession of literature passing between these two women who were after all both commercially successful authors. Virginia asks Vita about the difference between poetry and prose:

I don’t believe there is any, with all due respect to Coleridge … All too often the distinction leads people to think they may mumble inanities which would make them blush if written in good common English, but which they think fit to print if spilt up into lines.

In addition, we get all sorts of quaint period details: Hillaire Belloc buying 2,000 bottles of wine at twopence halfpenny a bottle [for younger readers, that’s one penny in today’s money]; six-day cycle racing in Berlin; Vita cutting down an oak tree for fuel during the General Strike; buying an island in the South Seas for five pounds; and Virginia engaged in the joys of early motoring:

Off for our first drive in the Singer: the bloody thing wouldn’t start. The accelerator died like a duck – starter jammed … At last we had to bicycle in and fetch a man from Lewes. He said it was the magnetos – would you have known that?…

Vita’s letters from Tehran are rich and entertaining, and she is much given to Proustian ‘reflections’:

I have come to the conclusion that solitude is the last refuge of civilised people. It is much more civilised than social intercourse, really, although at first sight the reverse might appear to be the case. Social relations are just the descendants of the primitive tribal need to get together for purposes of defence; a gathering of bushmen or pygmies…

In the middle of all this, both women were writing and publishing at a prodigious rate: Vita’s long award-winning poem The Land and her two travel books, Passenger to Tehran and Twelve Days: Virginia’s Mrs Dalloway, The Common Reader, and To the Lighthouse.

The publication of Orlando made them both famous (“The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you”). Yet despite this, you can sense Virginia’s gradual withdrawal, hurt by Vita’s repeated ‘infidelities’ with other women. In the end, the older, less sexually experienced, and more talented woman retreated into her safer world of the intellect.

They continued to meet and correspond through the 1930s, but the sparkle had gone out of things. Vita moved on to relationships with BBC radio producer Hilda Matheson and others, and Virginia became the love object of pipe-smoking lesbian composer Ethel Smyth.

Despite Vita’s snobbery, her emotional cruelty and hauteur (“the BBC – which I look on as my pocket borough”) in the end I warmed to her sheer exuberance, her energy and inventiveness, her intelligence and creative impulse. This is a wonderfully stimulating record of exchanges between oustanding personalities which has quite rightly become a classic of its kind.

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Louise de Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp.473, ISBN 1853815055

More on Virginia Woolf
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The Long Run

June 14, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Long Run first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly number 109 for February 1912. It was included in Xingu and Other Stories published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1916. It is one of the many stories Edith Wharton wrote on the subject of passion across the boundaries of marriage and the long term consequences of social choices.

The Long Run – critical commentary

Morals

This is a very successful study in bad faith, self-deception, and lost opportunities. Merrick’s account of falling in love with Paulina Trant is both dramatically convincing and thematically persuasive. He has within himself the potential to expand beyond the confines of polite New York society, and perceives a similar potential within her. Even his first person account of the episode is expressed in charged and lyrically expressive terms:

Love is deeper than friendship, but friendship is a good deal wider. The beauty of our relation was that it included both dimensions. Our thoughts met as naturally as our eyes; it was almost as if we loved each other because we liked each other The quality of a love may be tested by the amount of friendship it contains, and in our case there was no dividing line between loving and liking, no disproportion between them, no barrier against which desire beat in vain or from which thought fell back unsatisfied. Ours was a robust passion that could give an open-eyed account of itself, and not a beautiful madness shrinking away from the proof.

But when he is put to the test by her offer to throw her lot in with his, he retreats into a cowardly and self-justifying moral panic. He claims that he is protecting her honour by not agreeing to a socially rash act, and he retreats into a deeply conservative attitude by pretending that their future will be compromised if they defy social conventions.

She offers a radical and open-hearted alternative which might even release him to develop his full intellectual and spiritual potential – but he persuades himself that he is acting in her best interests by declining the offer. In other words he is a moral coward who hides behind a screen of conventionality – a fundamental weakness which is doubly underscored when he thinks that the sudden death of her husband leaves the coast clear for their marriage.

Narrative

This bad faith and failure in ambition is highlighted by the structure of the narrative. Merrick’s account of events is largely a first-person monologue, but it is preceded by the narrator’s framing of the story by his enthusiastic account of Merrick’s positive qualities in earlier life. But then the narrator is returning to New York after an absence of twelve years, and is shocked to find that Merrick, whilst the same in outward appearance, has changed for the worse.

There was something more fundamental the matter with Merrick, something dreadful, unforeseen, unaccountable; Merrick had grown conventional and dull.

Not only is Merrick changed, so is Paulina – so much so that the narrator does not recognise her. In the final brief episode of the story Merrick sums up what has become of them both – he is a dull and conventional bachelor, she is equally dull and unfulfilled wife. This framing of the essential story intensifies the sense of pathetic loss it enshrines.

The Long Run – study resources

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Long Run – plot summary

Part I. An un-named narrator returns to New York after twelve years absence and meets his old friend Halston Merrick. He is surprised to find that the previously talented and adventurous Merrick has become rather conventional and dull, having inherited his father’s iron foundry. The narrator is also attracted to Mrs Reardon, a woman of middle years who appears to have been ‘worn down’ by experience.

Part II. Next weekend the narrator visits Merrick at his country house. The host gives him a volume of volume of writing to examine, but the narrator finds little of merit in his friend’s writing. He thinks Merrick ought to have married, but Merrick explains that he passed up the chance.

Part III. Merrick gives an extended account of his recent past. He wanted to sell the iron foundry, but didn’t; then he fell passionately in love with Paulina Trant. She has married for convenience, but has retained her brilliance despite her husband’s dullness and conventionality. She and Merrick share a profound friendship and understanding, and a mutual passion. But just at the point he thinks their relationship might be consummated, Mr Trant decides to travel abroad for his health.

Part IV. Shortly before she is due to leave, Paulina visits Merrick in his house in the country where he has been waiting impatiently for news of her. When she explains that she has come to stay he takes fright and explains that he wishes to protect her virtuous reputation. She is prepared to give up everything: she even explains the advantages of going against social norms in his own case – selling his business, travelling, and being more creative. He argues that it is his duty to protect her against such recklessness, and he urges her to consider what their future would be. She claims that they can invent their own destiny. But he insists that it is his duty not to make such an important decision impulsively, and she realises that he is too weak to take a chance – so she leaves.

Part V. From this point onwards Merrick plunges into conformity. He doesn’t sell the business, and he has a brief affair with a married woman. Then he convinces himself that Paulina made the reckless offer of herself quite deliberately, so that he could refuse it.

The Trants stay away for two years, and a year later Philip Trant is killed in a railway accident. Merrick thinks he has saved Paulina’s honour and can now claim his reward by marrying her. But when he sets out to make his proposal, he realises the shallowness of his attitude and the bad faith of such a proposal.

Part VI. Paulina goes on to marry Reardon, and Merrick meets her and her husband as friends – and can measure what has happened in the long term, because he is unhappily single whilst she has settled for a conventional and dull marriage.

Principal characters

I	an un-named narrator in his 50s
Halston Merrick	his old university friend who inherits an iron foundry
Paulina Reardon	formerly Mrs Trant
Philip Trant	her first husband

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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

The Lost Steps

April 22, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Lost Steps was first published as Los pasos perdidos in Mexico in 1953. It was written whilst Alejo Carpentier was living in Caracas, Venezuela, an exile from his native Cuba which at that time was under the dictator Batista. The novel appeared in English translation (by Harriet de Onis) in 1956, published by Victor Gollancz in London.

The Lost Steps – critical commentary

Geography

The novel; begins in what seems to be New York City. It is never named as such, but in the early chapters Carpentier satirises a cultural Bohemia which is reminiscent of Greenwich Village. The protagonist works as a musical composer in conjunction with film studios, and characters later circulate in ‘Central Park’.

He then moves to Latin-America – at first to what appears to be Caracas in Venezuela. His journey then takes him through what is a geographic composite of South America, initially across the Andes mountains, then into the great plains, and finally into the most impenetrable parts of the jungle.

This journey also includes a historical element – and one which involves travelling backwards in time (a favourite trope of Carpentier’s). The protagonist progresses from the contemporary metropolital city to what are essentially farmlands, then to a primitive village, and finally to encampments where people live in an almost stone-age elementalism.

Geography is centrally important to the novel, because its principal theme is the tension between European-based and Latin-American culture. Carpentier was born in Switzerland, his parents were French and Russian, and he was educated in Europe. He later became a citizen of Cuba, but following the political disruptions of the 1920s he moved to Paris and became an active participant in the Surrealist movement.

The essential tension in Carpentier’s world view is therefore one between European language, literature, and culture in general – and the desire to give voice to less well-known cultural ‘experience’ of Latin America. His novels – including The Lost Steps – are packed with the concrete nouns of indigenous cultural phenomena – the geography, the architecture, the plant life, music, food, and social customs of Southern America (and the Caribbean). This is now a well-observed feature of modern Latin-American writing – as if its authors were trying to give authenticity to their culture by naming its parts.

The main character

We are not told the protagonist and narrator’s name, nor are his origins made clear. But on arriving in Latin America he feels re-united with his native language, which is Spanish. So we take it that he is a Latin-American who has been living in a commercialised and somewhat ‘decadent’ western culture, and who feels rejuvenated by his exposure to the older culture of the jungle and the native tribes.

It is very difficult to ignore the fact that there are unmistakable similarities between Carpentier’s own biography and that of his protagonist. Carpentier worked for a while in an advertising agency; he had studied music; and whilst living in Latin-America he had made a number of excursions into jungle regions as part of musicological research. He eventually produced a study of La musica en Cuba which was published in 1946. So – at a thematic if not a biographical level, it seems safe to assume that the protagonist is exploring issues in which Carpentier himself had a profound interest.

The narrator makes a very convincing case for the lives of the natives he encounters being no less sophisticated, because their skills exactly meet their needs, and they live in harmony with their environment. He gives a reasonably persuasive account of being enthusiastic about this travelling backwards into native primitivism. He has shed a legitimate wife in New York, taken with him on the journey his Bohemian mistress, then ditched her in favour of a native replacement because she could not adapt to conditions on the expedition.

But it is hard to escape the feeling that there is also a sort of cultural wish-fulfilment on Carpentier’s part here. His protagonist feels the experience of his journey into the ‘heart of darkness’ as a form of spiritual re-birth. He is connecting with native life forces and experiencing ‘real’ Latin-American culture in a manner which is almost unthinkable to someone from a Western European culture. He swaps his ‘western’ lover Mouche (and his wife, who is on tour) for an un-named native woman who he takes as a more satisfying physical and spiritual soul-mate. This part of the novel makes uncomfortable reading in the light of ‘machismo’ Latin culture.

But Carpentier finally rescues himself from crude caricature. The narrator thinks he can go back to complete the task of academic research he has undertaken (as a matter of honour) then return to the native experience he has discovered. But he discovers that he can’t – because his route is obscured by the very forces he has celebrated (the rains, the jungle) and the fact that native life has continued to meet its own needs, leaving him exposed as an outsider. He cannot integrate ‘here’ (amongst native life) because he belongs ‘back there’ (in the metropolitan city).

Cultural complexities

Carpentier obviously felt a great deal of tension between his European education and cultural heritage, and his Latin-American sympathies – but he turned this tension to creative account by fusing the two.

His major works deal with the impact of European ideas in the Latin-American region – The Kingdom of This World (1949) covers the first successful slave revolution in San Domingo (Haiti) and El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral) (1962) deals with the consequences of the French Revolution in the Caribbean and South America.

He also drenches his works in references to the two academic disciplines in which he was formally educated – architecture and music – as well as the general embedding of events into their historical and political context.

He was the first to use the techniques of ‘magical realism’ (and he coined the term, lo real maravilloso) in which the concrete, real world becomes suffused with fantasy elements, myths, dreams, and a fractured sense of time and logic .

The Lost Steps – study resources

The Lost Steps – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

Los pasos perdidos – at Amazon UK – (text in Spanish)

The Lost Steps – at Amazon US – (text in English)

Los pasos perdidos – at Amazon US – (text in Spanish)

The Lost Steps – chapter summaries

Chapter One A jaded and un-named musicologist is living in what seems like New York City, partly estranged from his actress wife, who is on tour. His friend, a museum curator offer to send him on an expedition to recover primitive musical instruments in South America. Together with his mistress Mouche and friends he watches a showing of a commercially sponsored film for which he has composed the soundtrack.. Mouche wants to go with him on the expedition and proposes buying fraudulent antiques.

Chapter Two He arrives in a coastal Latin-American city whose fabric is vulnerable to the vigorous natural elements of the region. He feels reunited with his native language and his sympathetic responses to the unsophisticated local culture leads to friction with Mouche. Whilst he is searching for antique shops, a revolution breaks out. He is besieged in the hotel, which is invaded by insects. The revolution ends, but snipers hold him down in a grocer’s shop.

He and Mouche escape to the villa of a Canadian painter friend in a nearby town. He becomes irrationally jealous of the friendship between the two women. He is also critical of the Paris-centred enthusiasms of three lkocal artists and vows to continue his expedition and assignment.

Chapter Three They make a bus journey across the Andes, collecting en route an Indian woman who he sees as the embodiment of native culture. A radio broadcast of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony leads him to recall his family’s musical heritage and his own connections with Europe, from which he has been forced to flee by the horrors of the Second World War. They befriend Rosario the native woman and arrive at an oilfield town, where prostitutes ‘entertain’ the local miners. He begins to criticise Mouche for her lack of sensitivity and admire Rosario for her composure. They reach horse-rearing lands, and then visit the City of Ruins.

They reach Puerto Anunciacion on the edge of the jungle where he argues violently with Mouche, then meets Adelantado, who recounts tales of semi-secret life in the jungle. Rosario’s father dies, followed by ritualistic funeral rites and a swarm of butterflies. There os an excursion to an abandoned mission on an island, where they meet a crazy herbalist and there are tales of El Dorado and ancient mythologies.

Mouche makes a sexual approach to Rosario, who responds by beating her. Mouche develops malaria, during which period Rosario and the narrator become lovers. Mouche is sent. Back to Puerto Anunciacion, and he congratulates himself on his relationship with Rosario. A small party continues up river in canoes.

Chapter Four They locate the hidden entrance to a tributary that leads into the heart of the jungle. The narrator is intimidated by the tropical atmosphere, and feels as if he is undergoing some sort of trial. The plant and animal life of the jungle. Imitate each other. There is a thunderstorm that threatens to capsize the canoes. The party finally reach a native village where the narrator gets the musical instruments he has been commissioned to find. Surrounded by primitive life and customs, he feels as if he has travelled back in time to the medieval age. They move on and encounter even more primitive tribes where he witnesses ‘the birth of music’ in a ritual funereal celebration.

Chapter Five The party arrive at Santta Monica de las Venados, a ‘city’ village established almost from nothing by Adelantado. The narrator decides to stay in the village and live the simple life, but he also feels an obligation to deliver the collection of primitive musical instruments. He visits the ‘devil’s cauldron’ of voracious prehistoric plants.

Inundated with days of ceaseless rain, he conceives a new type of musical composition, and uses a copy of The Odyssey for his text, but he quickly runs out of paper and ink. Pressure is put on him to marry Rosario, but when he asks her she refuses. Then one day an aeroplane arrives, in search of the lost explorer. He is divided in his allegiances, but decides to go back, stock up on essential supplies (paper and ink) then return to live in the village.

Chapter Six The narrator flies back home and is received as a celebrity and a hero. His wife Ruth is pregnant. He sells his story (which he describes as ‘a pack of lies’) to a newspaper. But Mouche sells her version of events to a scandal sheet, which arouses Ruth’s anger. The narrator then tells Ruth about Rosario, and that he wants a divorce, which she refuses to accept.

He finds the culture of New York frivolous and decadent. The divorce drags on; he runs out of money and is reduced to living in student accommodation.. He meets Mouche, spends the night with her, and feels full of self-disgust afterwards.

Finally he sells a film score and returns to Puerto Anunciacion. But he fails to find the entrance to the hidden tributary because it is submerged in the flooded river. He meets Yannes who tells him that Rosario has married Marcos and is pregnant. The narrator realises that he is unable to retrace his steps and his previous experience.

The Lost Steps – principal characters

—	the un-named protagonist and narrator, a musical composer
Ruth	his wife, an actress, who doesn’t feature in the novel
Mouche	an astrologist, his Bohemian mistress from New York
Rosario	his native mistress in the jungle

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.

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The Chase is set in Havana of 1956 where Batista’s tyrannical rule serves as the backdrop for the story of two young men whose lives become intertwined with the prostitute, Estrella. An anonymous man flees a team of shadowy, relentless political assassins, and ultimately takes refuge in a public auditorium during a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. This novella is particularly interesting because of the multiple, disjointed narrations and its polyphonic structure.

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Alejo Carpentier web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Madonna of the Future

June 19, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Madonna of the Future first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for March 1873. It was reprinted two years later as part of James’s first book, The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales, published by Osgood in Boston, 1875. It became a very popular tale and was frequently reprinted in collections of James’s stories.

Raphael – The Madonna of the Chair (1513-1514)

The Madonna of the Future – critical commentary

James wrote a number of stories about art, artists, their achievements, and their reputations – both whilst alive and after their death. The Madonna of the Future is about a would be artist. Theobald has an enormous reverence for the world of Art, and Italian Renaissance painters in particular. He is well informed about the history and the technical details of what they have produced.

He takes what we would now call a high romantic view of art – that an appreciation of its values offers entrance into a quasi-religious and transcendental realm which can sustain the individual even whilst they might live in reduced circumstances or even poverty. This is a view of art which John Carey discusses at some length in his study What Good are the Arts?

Theobald has worshipped at this shrine of art for years and years – and he gives a very persuasive account of his enthusiasms in the face of the narrator’s more sceptical, materialist view of art appreciation. But there are two problems with Theobald’s position. The first is that he has no real creative life force, and the second is that he has been living ‘in denial’ with his plan for the ultimate art work.

His idea for the ideal Madonna has been gestating for two decades, but no fruit has been borne. And this is reflected in his relationship to Serafina. She might have been a virgin-like Madonna (with child) when he first met her, but now she is an old woman. She clearly gets by via her association with ‘visiting gentlemen’ – which is perhaps as close as James could come in the 1870s to implying that she was a prostitute.

What makes the story admirable is the well-sustained pathos of Theobald’s characterisation, and his ultimate tragedy in defeat of an unrealised dream. There is no bitterness or schadenfreude in the story. Mrs Coventry is quite right: Theobald has been telling everybody about his grand scheme, but has produced nothing.

Yet the fact that the narrator follows him into his dream and into his poverty lends a sympathetic pathos to this character sketch of a clearly deluded man. James wrote about artists who could not paint, authors who could not write, great thinkers who could only talk – and yet he was enormously productive himself, for the whole of his fifty year creative life span.

The Madonna of the Future – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Madonna of the Future – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Madonna of the Future – plot summary

An un-named outer-narrator relays the account of an inner-narrator (H—) in which he describes a youthful visit to Florence. When viewing the sculptures in the Palazzo Vecchio, he is accosted by Mr Theobald, a man who enthuses about the spirit of the place and its general artistic heritage. He is an American and claims to be an artist with standards so fastidious that he has not sold or kept a single picture.

Next day the narrator meets him again in the Uffizi gallery. Theobald continues to rhapsodise about Art, and when they proceed to the Pitti Palace the narrator himself is full of enthusiasm for Raphael’s picture The Madonna of the Chair. Theobald takes an idealist, almost metaphysical view of art criticism, whereas the narrator offers a more materialist interpretation of the picture – that pretty young women were fashionable at the time the portrait was painted. Theobald’s reply to this becomes a prescription for what could be done in the present historical phase. The narrator guesses that he is in fact describing his own aspirations.

The two men meet every day for the next fortnight, and the narrator continues to be astonished by Theobald’s enthusiasm, his knowledge, and his commitment to the world of high Art.

However, Mrs Coventry, a long-time American resident and patronne in Florence informs the narrator that Theobald is a talentless dreamer in whom people have given up believing. He claims to be painting a Madonna which will be a composite of all previous masterpieces of the Italian school.

The narrator invites Theobald to an opera, but he refuses and instead invites the narrator to meet Serafina, the most beautiful woman in Italy, who acts as his model. The narrator is disconcerted to find that she turns out to be an unexceptional and rather stout woman who is no longer young. Theobald reveals that she was an unmarried mother who he rescued and has maintained ever since, following the death of her child. He is also shown Theobald’s portrait sketch of the child, which he admires.

When Theobald asks the narrator his opinion of Serafina, he tells him quite honestly that she is old. This stark honesty shocks Theobald, who realises that he has spent years deceiving himself. The narrator feels slightly guilty for bringing him to this realisation, and encourages him to finish the long-awaited portrait of Serafina as Madonna. Theobald is crestfallen, but vows to finish it in a fortnight.

Theobald then disappears, so the narrator goes back to Serafina’s apartment in order to locate him. She is entertaining another man – who is a vulgar and pretentious artist of trashy objects. Serafina defends Theobald as an honourable friend of twenty years standing, and gives the narrator his address. The other visitor tries to sell the narrator the tasteless statuettes he makes.

When the narrator visits Theobald, he finds him in miserably poor conditions, He is also paralysed with inactivity in front of an empty canvas. He realises that for all his theorising, he has no creative power whatever. The narrator looks after him, but he collapses in a brain fever and dies. After the funeral, the narrator meets Serafina in a church, where she implicitly reveals to him that she is a prostitute.

Principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator
H—	the inner-narrator
Mr Theobald	an American art enthusiast
Mrs Coventry	an American patroness of art in Florence
Serafina	Theobald’s ideal woman
—	an ‘artist’ of kitsch rubbish statuettes

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

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

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

The Man who Disappeared (Amerika)

May 8, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, commentary, study notes, reading

The Man who Disappeared (1913) (also known as Amerika) was Kafka’s first attempt at a novel, and like most of his others, with the exception of The Trial, it was left unfinished. He began writing it (for the second time) in 1912, then broke off to compose Metamorphosis and apart from producing a couple of subsequent fragments he never returned to it. Only the much anthologised first chapter, The Stoker was published in Kafka’s lifetime, in a collection of modernist texts edited by Kurt Wolf in 1913.

Readers expecting the usual Kafkaesque elements of existential terror and bureaucratic nightmares will be surprised and maybe delighted to discover that the story is a light-hearted and at times quite amusing fantasy of a young German boy at large in the USA.

Needless to say, Kafka had never been anywhere near America, and his account of it is entirely constructed from clichés of the New World – skyscrapers, non-stop traffic, and at times some Keystone Cops chase scenes.

The Man who Disappeared – commentary

The novel is an ironic reversal of the rags to riches story that is normally attached to immigration from the Old World to the New. Karl Rossman manages to go from riches to rags. He starts off with a wealthy and powerful uncle who showers him with luxury, but by the end of the narrative he has nothing, he is searching for work, and he is mixing with criminals and a prostitute. It is worth noting that Karl is not exactly an innocent abroad. He has been expelled from his family home following a sexual dalliance with an older servant woman that resulted in her bearing a child. So although he is only seventeen (or even fifteen) years old, Karl is in fact himself a father.

Authority figures

The authority figures in each chapter appear in pairs. When Karl becomes involved in the defence of the stoker and his claims of ill-treatment, it is to the ship’s Captain and the ship’s Purser that he is answerable and who challenge his actions and question his motivation.

His uncle Edward’s business associates are Mr Pollunder and Mr Green, both of whom have power over Karl. It is the invitation from Pollunder which displeases Karl’s uncle, and Mr Green who carries the letter which contains the orders of dismissal that expel Karl from his newfound paradise in New York.

He immediately falls into the hands of Robinson and Delamarche, who take advantage of his naivete and bully him into becoming virtually their servant. Interesting to note also that these authority figures are usually slightly different – of what we might now call the ‘good cop, bad cop’ kind. One of them will pretend to befriend Karl, the other will resort to naked threats. Karl tries to resist them both, but fails.

When he is disciplined for a minor infraction of discipline at the Hotel Occidental, it is the Head Waiter and Head Porter who perform this same dual function

Women

The women in the story are either all-embracing mother figures, sexual predators, or vulnerable waifs.

Grete Mitzelbach offers Karl somewhere to sleep when he is in need; she secures him a job; and she offers her support when he is being threatened with dismissal at the hotel. In fact she also recommends him to another employer.

On the other hand Johanna Brummer, the thirty-five year old servant woman who seduces the fifteen (or seventeen) year old Karl does so in a comically grotesque manner – but one which Karl finds ‘disgusting’. Klara, Mr Pullender’s daughter, appears to be a a more sympathetic figure, but she ends up attacking Karl physically, then invites him to her room – but only to reveal her sexual connection with Mr Mack, the millionaire’s son.

Delamarche’s mistress Brunelda is almost a grotesque parody of a sluttish courtesan:

Her red dress was rucked up at the front and a long stretch of it hung down to the floor, her legs were visible almost to the knees, she was wearing thick white woollen stockings, and had no shoes on.’How hot it is, Delamarche,’ she said, turning her face from the wall and holding her hand negligently in front of Delamarche, who seized and kissed it.

Terese and Fanny are waif figures, with Terese offering a particularly poignant version of the emigrant’s story, searching for work with her mother, who is eventually killed in an accident on a building site.

Visions of America

Following the Second World War, images of America were widely manifest in Europe and the rest of the world via radio, newspapers, and cinema – but at the time that Kafka was writing in 1912 it would be literally Another Country to him, an unknown and exotic place (even though it was a place to which many Europeans were emigrating). Given this, and the fact that he had obviously never been there, it is surprising that he captures so much of its essence in images of very tall buildings (skyscrapers), the grid system of straight roads, of people living in tenement blocks, and the non-stop traffic.

There is also a passage describing a mechanical desk in Uncle Edward’s office which is strangely prophetic:

On its top part, for example, it had a hundred drawers of various sizes, and even the President of the Union could have found a suitable place for every one of his files, but in addition it had a regulator at the side, and by turning the handle one could rearrange and reorganize the drawers in a great variety of ways according to one’s wishes and needs. Thin side partitions slowly descended and formed the base or the top of new drawers that rose up, a single turn of the handle gave the top a quite different appearance, and everything happened slowly or with wild rapidity, depending on how you turned the handle. It was a brand new invention …

This is amazingly prescient of the Memex machine that Vanevar Bush described in imagining computers and hypertext in his 1945 article As We May Think:

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications … Most of the contents are purchased on microfilm, ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place.

If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions … Any given book from his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf.

Study resources

The Man who Disappeared – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Man who Disappeared – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Amerika: The Man who Disappeared – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Amerika: The Man who Disappeared – Schocken Books – Amazon UK

Kafka: A Very Short Introduction – OUP’s mini series

The Stoker – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg (in German)

The Complete Novels of Kafka – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon UK

Principal characters

Karl Rossmann	a seventeen or fifteen year-old German boy from Prague
Johanna Brummer	thirty-five year-old servant who seduces Karl
Jakob	Karl and Johanna’s son
Butterbaum	Karl’s fellow traveller on the ship
—	The ship’s stoker
—	The ship’s captain
Schumbal	the Romanian chief engineer
—	The ship’s chief purser
Senator Edward Jakob	Karl’s uncle, a rich businessman
Mr Pollunder	a banker and business associate of Karl’s uncle
Klara Pollunder	his daughter
Mr Mack Jnr	son of a millionaire, fiancé to Klara
Mr Mack Snr	millionaire head of a large building firm
Mr Green	gross, bachelor business associate of Karl’s uncle
Robinson	an Irish hypochondriac
Delamarche	a French bully
Grete Mitzelbach	Head Cook at the Hotel Occidental (50)
Terese Berchtold	secretary to the Head Cook (18)
Giacomo	lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Rennel	lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Bess	chief lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Isbary	head waiter at the Hotel Occidental
Feodor	head porter at the Hotel Occidental
Brunelda	Delamarche’s mistress, a fat ex-singer
Joseph Mendel	a student in Delamarche’s apartment block
Fanny	Karl’s trumpet-playing friend

Photomontage

Kafka, family photos, and old Prague

The Man who Disappeared – plot summary

Karl Rossman arrives in New York, having been sent abroad by his parents following an incident with an older servant that resulted in the birth of a son. Karl goes back into the ship to retrieve his umbrella and meets the ship’s stoker, who complains about his treatment on board. Karl accompanies him to plead his case with the ship’s captain. There he meets his uncle Edward Jakob, who is now a rich businessman and a Senator.

Karl lives with his uncle for two months, takes English and riding lessons, and is provided with a piano. He meets a millionaire’s son, Mr Mack, and is invited to the home of banker Mr Pollunder, although his uncle disapproves of the visit.

At Mr Pollunder’s country house Karl is oppressed by the behaviour of his business associate Mr Green, and then is subject to a physical attack by Klara, Mr Pollunder’s daughter.. When he decides to return to his uncle’s house, many obstacles are put in his way to delay his return. It is revealed that Mr Mack is Klara’s fiancé. Finally, Mr Green presents Karl with a letter from his uncle disowning him for going against his wishes. Mr Green gives Karl a train ticket to San Francisco (which he never uses).

Karl meets two unsavoury characters Robinson and Delamarche who take advantage of him. They set off in search of work, eat at his expense, and steal his belongings. Karl escapes from them, and arrives at the Hotel Occidental, where he is befriended by Grete Mitzelbach the head cook and invited to stay for the night.

The cook arranges for Karl to be a lift boy at the hotel. He works twelve hour shifts and sleep in a dormitory filled with smoke, noise, and lift boys boxing and wrestling. Karl befriends Terese, the cook’s secretary, who recounts her difficult life and her mother’s death as poor emigrants.

Robinson reappears at the hotel drunk, and vomits into the stair well. Karl offers him money to leave and puts him into his own bed to sober up. But this briefly takes Karl away from his post on the lifts, for which misdemeanour he is interviewed by the head waiter and head porter, then sacked, despite pleas from his friend the head cook. Karl is physically bullied by the head porter, but finally manages to escape from the hotel – only to find Robinson waiting for him again.

Karl and Robinson are driven to a tenement building where Delamarche is living. There is an altercation involving the police, from which Karl escapes again, only to be rescued by Delamarche and taken back to a squalid and cramped apartment where he lives with Brunelda, a fat ex-singer. Robinson complains about the skivvy work he does for Delamarche and Brunelda, and reveals that they plan to make Karl their servant. They all watch a political rally and procession from the balcony of the apartment. Karl then makes another attempt to escape, which ends up in a fight. He then has a conversation with a student on an adjacent balcony, who advises him to stay with Delamarche.

Novel fragments

Robinson and Karl prepare breakfast for Delamarche and Brunelda in the late afternoon, amidst the squalor of the apartment.

Karl departs with Brunelda, who is hidden under a blanket on a cart.

Karl enrolls in the Theatre of Oklahoma where he meets an old friend Fanny who is playing a trumpet to welcome newcomers. He goes through a complex and bureaucratic recruitment process and is taken on as a technician. At a feast for new recruits he meets his fellow lift boy Giacomo from the Hotel Occidental. They travel by train for two days towards Oklahoma.

Kafka’s writing

a page of Kafka’s manuscript

Franz Kafka: Illustrated Life This is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle in old Prague – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. This is an excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.

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Other works by Franz Kafka

Metamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.

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The Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules, striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism. Read the stories and The Trial as a start and a minimum.
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Franz Kafka – web links

Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

More on Franz Kafka
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Man who Loved his Kind

December 23, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Man who Loved his Kind is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). The story was first published in A Haunted House (1944) and then later reprinted with the collection of stories and sketches Mrs Dalloway’s Party published by the Hogarth Press in London in 1973.

Queen Anne’s Gate – Westminster

The Man who Loved his Kind – critical commentary

This is one of a number of stories featuring social embarrassment, abject failures in communication, and crass egotism, bad faith, and self-absorption at the Dalloways’ party. Other stories in this category include The Introduction, Happiness, and The New Dress.

Prickett Ellis turns his own social unease and ill feelings to others into a cascade of bad faith and he descends into a vortex of maudlin self-regard.

Richard Dalloway, as a more urbane and sophisticated person that his old school friend, tries to oil the social wheels by introducing him to Miss O’Keefe. But unfortunately she is as rampantly insensitive and self-obsessed as Prickett Ellis himself – so it is no surprise that Dalloway’s encouraging gesture comes to nought.

In fact the story was originally entitled Lovers of their Kind, the plural form emphasising the symmetry of social failure on both Prickett Ellis’s and Miss O’Keefe’s part.

The Man who Loved his Kind – story synopsis

Prickett Ellis, a middle-aged solicitor, is invited to a party by his old school friend Richard Dalloway. He doesn’t really like parties, and has to borrow a dress suit to attend. He knows nobody at the party and feels a hostile resentment towards the other guests. He comforts himself with the memory that earlier in the day two of his clients have presented him with a clock. He compliments himself on being a plain, hardworking man of the people; he feels that he cannot afford luxuries; and he despises the people in the room who are able to do so. He feels choked by a sense of his own ‘goodness’ because he is not able to make other people aware of it.

The host Richard Dalloway then introduces him to Miss O’Keefe, who is rather haughty and full of her own sense of unspecific anger against the world. Ellis tells her why he disapproves of such events, and he wants to tell her about the clock, but she prevents this by attempting to engage him in cultural conversation. When this exchange fails miserably, she appeals to his appreciating the sense of beauty in the summer evening. He rejects the very idea of beauty, and instead tells her his story of the clock. She is shocked by his self-centredness. When he self-righteously claims that he loves ‘his own kind’, she claims the same thing. This contretemps makes both of them feel worse than ever – so they leave the party.

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 reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – 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

The Man who Loved his Kind – characters

Richard Dalloway	Clarissa Dalloway’s husband, an MP
Prickett Ellis	a middle-aged bachelor and solicitor
Miss O’Keefe	a spinster

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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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

The Mark on the Wall

April 1, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Mark on the Wall appeared in July 1917 as part of the very first publication of the Hogarth Press. It was printed in Two Stories, accompanied by the story Three Jews written by Leonard Woolf. The hand-produced ‘volume’ (of only thirty-four pages) was illustrated with woodcuts by Dora Carrington.

Virginia Woolf

The Mark on the Wall – critical commentary

Biography

In many of the experimental and quasi-philosophic narratives of her early modernist phase, Woolf uses an un-named and disembodied first person narrator as a vehicle to spin out the text. It is perfectly natural to think of this narrator as being Woolf herself. After all, she embeds the materials of her own life into her prose – the London scenes, the house in Sussex, her smoking cigarettes, reading and writing – and she includes many of the themes she would go on to develop in her later work.

In The Mark on the Wall she raises the issues of male authority and the construction of social hierarchies she ridicules in her discussion of Whitaker’s Table of Precedence. Both of these she developed in the years that followed until they reached their devastating climax in her fully developed attack on patriarchy in Three Guineas.

She also raises the issue of how novelists give an account of ‘reality’ in literary fiction – something that will be a preoccupation for the next twenty years of her life as a writer

Even Homer nods

Sometimes even the most celebrated and talented writers make mistakes – and Virginia Woolf is no exception. In a well-known passage from this story she evokes the uncertainty and precariousness of life.

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour — landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office!

This term shoot of course should be chute, though it is understandable why mention of ‘Tube’ and ‘Shot’, plus images of propulsion should put the term ‘shoot’ into her mind. It’s strange however that nobody in the hundred years (almost) since the story first appeared has though to correct the slip.

The Mark on the Wall – 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 reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – 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 Mark on the Wall – an alternative reading

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – story synopsis

An un-named first person narrator, observing a mark on the wall of a sitting room, uses the image as the starting point for a series of reflections, imaginary pictures, and observations about the nature of reality and what can and cannot be known. Topics include the previous occupants of the house, and the range of objects which are lost during the course of everyday life

The narrative then becomes self-referential and reflects upon the very activity of following trains of thought. It passes on to includes how the Self is made up of the reflections of other people, and how future novelists might take this into account in their depictions of reality.

This leads to a critique of generalisations and certainties about the existing order of things, and how the act of challenging them can produce a state of ‘illegitimate freedom’.

The mark is compared to a burial tumulous on the Sussex Downs, which leads on to a character sketch of an amateur archeologist and remnants of history in a local museum. And yet none of these objects guarrantee any sense of ‘knowledge’, and even the very notion of knowledge itself is questioned.

Whitaker’s Table of Precedence is used as a symbol of what society thinks of as fixed certainties, and encouragement to action is seen as a way of avoiding painful or disturbing thoughts.

The concrete objects of the external world offer a sense of what is real, and the example of a wooden chest of drawers is traced back to its origin as a tree, which goes on living in the objects that can be made from it.

The subjects over which these thoughts have ranged are then recalled, and the reverie is interrupted by the arrival of a second figure, who reveals that the mark on the wall is in fact a snail.

The Mark on the Wall – first appearance

Cover design by Leonard and Virginia Woolf

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Jacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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