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Together and Apart

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Together and Apart was probably written in early 1925. It 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 originally carried the (slightly ironic) title of The Conversation, and it was first published in A Haunted House (1944).

Together and Apart

Virginia Woolf

Together and Apart – commentary

In all these short sketches and stories based on figures circulating in Clarissa Dalloway’s drawing room, there is a common theme of a failure of communication. Occasions which are designed to offer social interaction to her guests are revealed as a series of communication breakdowns, gulfs of empathy, and studies in solipsism.

This story brings together two different forms of egoism which prevent any meaningful communication taking place. Roderick Serle is encased in a morbid form of self-congratulation and unwarranted self-esteem. He is also guilty of philosophic bad faith, blaming his lack of success on too intense an engagement with the world around him — ‘He had involved himself too deep in life’ — which is exactly the opposite of the case.

Ruth Anning on the other hand has retreated into a tiny world which excludes any dangers of engagement. She has few friends, and comforts herself with what appears to be a tightly circumscribed domestic life — ‘She had Sarah, Arthur, the cottage, the chow’. Despite this reserve she is on the verge of being touched by — ‘She could imagine something different, more like lightening, more intense. She could imagine some physical sensation. She could imagine —’ but at this very point she puts a stop to her own feelings.

Point of view

By 1925 Virginia Woolf was very much in control of the modernist technique of shifting point of view she had pioneered in earlier works such as Jacob’s Room. She combined this with a sense of fluidity or mosaic-like topic-shifting in her narratives to produce some extraordinarily long sentences:

‘Yes, I know Canterbury,’ he said reminiscently, sentimentally, inviting, Miss Anning felt, discreet questions, and that was what made him interesting to so many people, and it was this extraordinary facility and responsiveness to talk on his part that had been his undoing, so he thought, often, taking his studs out and putting his keys and small change on the dressing-table after one of these parties (and he went out sometimes almost every night in the season), and, going down to breakfast, becoming quite different, grumpy, unpleasant at breakfast to his wife, who was an invalid, and never went out, but had old friends to see her sometimes, women friends for the most part, interested in Indian philosophy and different cures and different doctors, which Roderick Serle snubbed off by some caustic remark too clever for her to meet, except by gentle expostulations and a tear or two — he had failed, he often thought, because he could not cut himself off utterly from the society of and the company of women, which was so necessary to him, and write.

The statement begins with his reported speech, but then in the two adverbs immediately following — ‘reminiscently, sentimentally’ — the first might represent Serle’s point of view, whereas the second suggests an authorial criticism. They are followed by the verb ‘inviting’, which leads directly into the narrative taking up Miss Anning’s point of view.

The following phrase whose subject is ‘this extraordinary facility’ appears to be ambiguously unattached to a point of view — until it is anchored to Serle again with ‘so he thought’, after which the narrative returns to a third person omniscient narrative mode, describing his unfeeling behaviour towards his wife, until it returns to his point of view as he reflects that it is his engagement with ‘life’ that has prevented him from writing.

So the single sentence includes three different points of view; three locations; and four identifiable subjects of interest, and apart from the curious hesitation of ‘sometimes almost’ runs fluently for almost two hundred words.

Together and Apart – study resources

Together and Apart The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Together and Apart The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Together and Apart The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Together and Apart The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Together and Apart Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Together and Apart Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Together and Apart Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

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

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

Together and Apart The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Together and Apart

Together and Apart – story synopsis

Two people are introduced to each other by Clarissa Dalloway at one of her parties in Westminster, London. Ruth Anning is a timid spinster of forty and Roderick Serle is a fifty year old would-be poet with an invalid wife. They make halting small talk which does not in an way reflect their interior thoughts.

She rationalises the fact that she hasn’t got many friends, whilst he hides behind a facade of conventionality. He feels as if he as not achieved as much as he should in life, but since Miss Anning is not aware of this shortcoming, he thinks that their meeting presents him with a new opportunity.

Serle rationalises his lack of success with the idea that he has been too engaged with ‘life’ – when all the evidence suggests that the opposite is likely to be the case. He regards himself as a poet and compares himself favourably with Wordsworth. Miss Anning is impressed by an image he uses to describe a fellow guest, but she is unable to understand the fluctuations in her own feelings towards him.

Their desultory conversation centres on the fact that she once visited Canterbury, the city where he grew up. Her thoughts about it are quite different to his, but a sudden congruence strikes them both and prompts her to wonder if marriage might have provided more excitement in her life. But she immediately closes down the topic in her mind, as she does not have the language to deal with it.

Both of them recognise that they have come to an impasse, so they revert to stock gestures and an embarrassed silence – from which they are rescued by the arrival of another guest at the party.

Further reading

Red button Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Red button Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Red button Nicholas Marsh. Virginia Woolf, the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Red button John Mepham, Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Red button Natalya Reinhold, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

Red button Michael Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. New York: Harvest Books, 2002.

Red button Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Jacob's RoomJacob’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.
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room Buy the book – Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room Buy the book – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf Mrs DallowayMrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of her great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features her rich expression of ‘interior monologue’ as a narrative technique, and it offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. This novel is now seen as a central text of English literary modernism.
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Buy the book – Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Buy the book – Amazon US

Kew GardensKew 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.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book – Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia 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..
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book – Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book – Amazon US

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.

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

Transparent Things

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tutorial, commentary, study resources web links

Transparent Things (1972) was the penultimate novel Vladimir Nabokov published in his own lifetime. It was superseded only by Look at the Harlequins in 1974 and his posthumous The Original of Laura which was published in 2009. It was his sixteenth novel, and the seventh he had written in English, which was his third language after Russian and French. It is written in a very oblique and mannered style which is typical of works from his late period.

Transparent Things

Transparent Things – critical commentary

The intrusive narrator

Nabokov was very keen on using first person narrators. These characters are often witty (Humbert Humbert) sometimes crazy (Charles Kinbote) and on occasions they deliberately set out to bamboozle the reader (Smurov, in The Eye). In Transparent Things the un-named narrator seems intent on making the sequence and the reader’s understanding of events as difficult as possible.

There is no reason to think of the narrator as other than male. Apart from half-formed philosophic observations on time and physical reality, he is presenting the story largely from Hugh Person’s point of view – but it is often difficult to know where one point of view ends and the other begins. The narrator becomes almost like an actor in his own narrative. He addresses his characters; he speaks to the reader; he invents interlocutors; he speaks on behalf of Hugh Person from time to time; and he even talks to himself, commenting on his own story.

This is intended to be playful and amusing, but his presence becomes over-intrusive without ever taking on the persona of a fully realised character. There is also no explanation offered for his relationship to Hugh Person. We are never told how he knows what Hugh is thinking and feeling . Like many of Nabokov’s other stylistic devices used in his later works, this intrusiveness becomes irritating

Nabokov and sexuality

There is now a well-established argument that Nabokov displayed a very questionable interest in sex with under-age girls throughout his career as a writer. Examples range from his earliest stories such as A Nursery Tale (1926), novels such as Laughter in the Dark (1932), his novella The Enchanter (1939), the famous case of Lolita (1955), through to late works such as Ada or Ardor (1969), Look at the Harlequins (1974), and even beyond to his unfinished The Original of Laura which was published in 2009 after his death.

This is a phenomenon that Martin Amis has described as something of an embarrassment in a writer otherwise so distinguished. But what is not so widely remarked is that at the same time as his interest in paedophilia (which he euphemised by substituting the term nympholepsy) his later works take on a distinct and unpleasant aura of smuttiness half hidden under his lexical virtuosity.

For instance the coquettish Armande has a disagreement with her three male friends that she unnecessarily explains to Hugh Person:

Facing him in the heavenly cable car she gave him a comparatively polite version of what she was to tell him a little later in disgustingly vivid detail. Jacques had demanded her presence at the onanistic sessions he held with the Blake twins at their chalet. Once already he had made Jack show her his implement but she had stamped her foot and made them behave themselves. Jacques had now presented her with an ultimatum – either she join them in their nasty games or he would cease being her lover.

Hugh Person speculates on the sexual relationship between the elderly author R and his stepdaughter Julia Moore – and the first possibilities that occur to him involve paedophilia. These are Hugh Person’s thoughts of course, not Nabokov’s, but the frequency with which the subject recurs throughout his work (and this work in particular) makes them attributable to Nabokov. After all, if this is not a topic in which he is interested, why does he keep on writing about it?

He also caught himself trying to establish … at what age, in what circumstances, the writer had begun to debauch Julia: had it been in her childhood – tickling her in her bath, kissing her wet shoulders, then one day carrying her wrapped in a big towel to his lair, as delectably described in the novel? Or did he flirt with her in her first college year

We have already been told (as has Hugh Person) that Julia ‘had been debauched at thirteen by R.’ The same sort of images and voyeuristic details are written into the chapter where Hugh Person visits Armande’s home and is given a collection of family photograph albums to peruse by her mother:

The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest . . . and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess.

Literary style

Nabokov is famous as a master of prose style. He is normally inventive, articulate, witty, and at his best produces marvellous images and turns of phrase. He can be serious and very funny at the same time; his construction of complex plots and unusual approaches to narrative are matchless; his range of language is dazzling; and yet towards the end of his creative life, these very strengths seem to become his weaknesses. The most obvious case is Ada or Ardor – his parallel to Finnegans Wake – a book stuffed so full of literary tricks and word games, it becomes unreadable.

Transparent Things is littered with annoying and childish alliteration – ‘as the pictured past and the perceived present possess’. Nabokov chooses provocatively silly (and alliterative) names – ‘Paul Plam’ – ‘Jack, Jake, and Jacques’ – ‘Tom Tam’. And worst of all he indulges his penchant for embarrassing schoolboy smut – ‘there’s many a mile between Condom in Gascogne and Pussy in Savoie’.

There are also too many bravura but irrelevant passages, long sequences of word-play in the (short) novel that are out of all proportion in their lack of significance. For instance, three pages are devoted to the manufacture of wooden pencils, and there is an equally lengthy description of a trick tennis shot that Hugh Person thinks he has invented. Neither of these has anything to do with the rest of the novel.

Quite apart from the issues discussed above, the principal weakness of the novel is that there is nothing holding its parts together – no unifying theme or subject. Hugh’s relationship with his father leads nowhere; the sections of the novel that are set in America are geographically unconvincing; the characters of R and his stepdaughter Julia add very little; Hugh’s somnambulism is a rather creaking plot device that allows Nabokov to create a protagonist who murders his wife; and Hugh’s death in the hotel fire is quite accidental, not in any way linked to what has preceded it in the narrative.

Transparent Things – study resources

Transparent Things – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Transparent Things – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, study guides

Transparent Things

Transparent Things

Transparent Things – chapter summaries

1   A narrator reflects on the relationship between the past and future, and on the nature of physical objects.

2   Hugh Person arrives at a Swiss hotel eight years after his previous visit.

3   He finds a pencil in his room. The process of manufacturing wooden pencils is described in detail.

4   He recalls an earlier visit to the hotel with his father, whose clumsiness irritates him.

5   He goes out shopping with his father, who dies in the fitting room whilst trying on some trousers.

6   With his father’s money, he treats himself to an expensive meal, hires a prostitute, then endures a sleepless night alone.

7   As a child then as a youth, he has suffered from somnambulism.

8   After leaving university, he works in publishing. He edits a badly written romance, then takes up work with R, who lives in Switzerland.

9   Travelling through Switzerland on a train, he meets Armande, whom he wishes to impress.

10   He meets the novelist R at the hotel to discuss business, but cannot stop thinking about Armande.

11   Hugh previously attended an avant-garde play in New York with Julia Moore, then had sex with her afterwards.

12   He visits Armande’s home, but she is not there. Her mother shows him photo albums featuring pictures of Armande as a nude young girl.

13   The next day he meets Armande and Julia Moore in a village coffee shop.

14   He meets Armande at a rendezvous, but finds her with three men. They all hike up a mountain, whilst Hugh is forced to turn back.

15   He watches Armande skiing, then unsuccessfully tries to make love to her on the way back home.

16   Hugh’s sleeping problems and his trick tennis shot which he rehearses mentally as a soporific. His horrible erotic dreams, plus flashes forward to his marriage and some sort of crime.

17   Hugh is besotted with Armande, but she is not a very satisfactory wife. She has slightly bizarre sexual preferences, and is unfaithful to him.

18   Hugh travels to Switzerland to persuade R to make changes to his latest book – which he refuses to do.

19   In New York Hugh corrects the proofs to R’s novel, which contains references to the seduction of his young stepdaughter.

20   Hugh is being interviewed by the police, because his wife has been strangled. He has a dream of killing a prostitute, and wakes up to find his wife dead on the floor.

21   R writes to his publisher Phil about his preparations for death following an unsuccessful operation.

22   Hugh buys a pair of walking boots and retraces his journey to Armande’s house.

23   He also retraces the mountain climb he made with Armande and her three men friends, but he fails to reach the cable car.

24   Hugh compiles a list of reflections on death whilst he is in various mental hospitals.

25   Eight years after murdering Armande he is visiting the Swiss hotels they stayed in. He claims that he deliberately arranged for solitary confinement whilst in the hospitals.

26   He transfers himself to the very room they shared, and he waits for Armande, but the hotel catches fire and he is killed in the blaze.

Transparent Things – principal characters
Hugh Person a 40 year old American publisher’s editor
Dr Person his father, a private school headmaster
I an un-named outer narrator
Armande Charmar a coquettish Swiss girl, who marries Hugh
Mrs Charmar Armande’s mother
R. a middle-aged writer living in Switzerland
Julia Moore R’s American stepdaughter

© Roy Johnson 2018

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Transparent ThingsPale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Travelling Companions

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

Travelling Companions first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly during November—December 1870. Its first presentation in book form was in the collection of stories Travelling Companions published by Boni and Liveright in New York, 1919.

Travelling Companions

Venice – St Mark’s Square

Travelling Companions – critical commentary

Convention

The crux of this story is a situation which has been used many times in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction. Indeed, James used it again in his tale The Solution (1888), and it forms the background to his famous novella Daisy Miller (1878).

The situation arises from the notion that the reputation of an unmarried woman will be sullied if she spends even a short amount of time unchaperoned by either a male relative or an older married woman or spinster. This notion rests on the retail value of the woman in terms of securing a favourable marriage. The notion originates in the upper class and the aristocracy who wished to form financially and politically advantageous liaisons strictly within their own class.

A young woman’s reputation had to be unimpeachable, because any previous liaisons she might have had could produce illegitimate children, who would have some claim on the family’s accumulated property and capital. And given the way that ideology works, this idea would percolate down in society, even to the lower classes who had no property or capital to conserve.

The further ramification of this convention is that any man responsible for putting a woman into a compromised position had a duty of honour to offer the woman marriage. Thus when Mr Brooke and Charlotte Evans innocently miss the last train back from Padua to Venice, they are forced to stay in a hotel overnight. This would be enough, under the prurient conventions of the time, to cast a shadow on Charlotte’s reputation.

It is noticeable that the incident is being talked about by people in the Venice hotel, and that Mr Evans on his return from Milan checks that Brooke has made a formal proposal of marriage to his daughter. Actually, Brooke has proposed before the incident, but Charlotte has refused him. She only accepts him later, following the death of her father.

Travelling companions – study resources

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

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

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

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

Travelling Companions Travelling Companions – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Travelling Companions

Travelling Companions – plot summary

Part I
Mr Brooke, an American, is making his first visit to Italy after years of living in Germany. In Milan cathedral whilst viewing Leonardo’s Last Supper he meets Charlotte Evans, a young American girl with her father. Later the same day he escorts Charlotte to view the marbles up on the cathedral roof. He is gushingly romantic in his appreciation of what he calls ‘Transalpine life’: she is more sceptical and reserved.

He then makes his way via Verona to Vicenza , where he meets a young painter who wants to sell him an old master sketch. The man’s family of aged mother and sickly young daughter spin him a tale of poverty and terminal illness. He buys the sketch, even though he knows it is not an old master, because the portrait reminds him of Charlotte.

On reaching Venice he meets Charlotte and her father again. He is very eager to be with her, but she suggests a three-day hiatus before continuing their relationship.

Part II
Mr Brooke and Charlotte go across to the Lido, where he decides to tell her about the painting and the fact that he is in love with her. She tells him that he is under the spell of Romanticism, and that she herself is in love with VeniceThey look at paintings together; he pays court to her; she keeps him at bay.

Then whilst her father is away in Milan, they go to Padua together. He speculates that the appreciation of art and churches might mean more to them if they were Catholics. They visit the Chapel of Giotto, then over ice creams she tells him that she lost her betrothed in the Civil War. They miss the last train and have to spend the night at an inn. He worries that her reputation might be compromised by this.

He begins to think that marriage would mean giving up the freedom to travel. Next day when they get back to Venice, Mr Evans wants an explanation for the overnight stay in Padua. Brooke proposes to Charlotte, but she refuses him again. Mr Evans double-checks that Brooke has made his daughter an offer of marriage.

Brooke goes on to Florence, Rome, and Naples. When he returns to Rome he meets Charlotte again, only to discover that her father has died rather suddenly. She now accepts Brook’s offer, and they are married.

Principal characters
Mr Brooke the narrator, an American art lover
Charlotte Evans a young American girl from New Jersey
Mr Mark Evans her father

Travelling Companions - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

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

Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Henry James What Masie KnewWhat 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.
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe 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.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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Trilby

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tutorial, study resources, plot, and web links

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

Trilby

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

Trilby – critical commentary

Historical background

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

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

Bohemia

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

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

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

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

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

Hypnotism

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

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

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

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

The sexual element

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-semitism

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

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

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

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

Trilby – study resources

Trilby Trilby – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Trilby Trilby – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Trilby Trilby and Other Works – Kindle – Amazon UK

Trilby Trilby and Other Works – Kindle – Amazon US

Trilby – film version

John Barrymore in 1931 film adaptation

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

Trilby – chapter summaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2016

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Twentieth Century – literary timeline – part 2

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a chronicle of events, literature, and politics

1920. League of Nations established; Oxford University admits women;
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Nobel prize – K. Hamsun (N).

1921. Irish Free State proclaimed; extreme inflation in Germany; Fatty Arbuckle scandal in US; Nobel prize – Anatole France (F).

1922. Fascists march on Rome under Mussolini; Kemel Ataturk founds modern Turkey; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land; James Joyce, Ulysses; Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; John Galsworthy, The Forsyth Saga; Nobel prize – J. Benavente (Sp).

1923. Charleston craze; BBC begins radio broadcasting in the UK; William Walton Facade; Nobel prize – W.B. Yeats (Ir).

1924. First UK Labour government formed under Ramsey MacDonald (lasts nine months); Deaths of Lenin, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Conrad; Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain; E.M. Forster, A Passage to India; Nobel prize – W. Raymont (P).

1925. John Logie Baird televises an image of a human face; Webern Wozzeck; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Nobel prize – George Bernard Shaw (UK).

1926. UK General Strike; first demonstration of television in UK; Fritz Lang, Metropolis; Nobel prize – G. Deledda (I).

1927. Lindbergh flies solo across Atlantic; first talkie film – Al Jolson in ‘The Jazz Singer’; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Nobel prize – Henri Bergson (Fr).

Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature - Click for details at AmazonOxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English is a new reference guide to English-language writers and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world – from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, James Joyce to Amy Tan. Includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,400 authors, plus a good introduction by John Sutherland.

1928. Women in UK get same voting rights as men; Death of Thomas Hardy; first Oxford English Dictionary published; penicillin discovered;
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall; Nobel prize – S. Undset (N).

1929. Slump in US, followed by collapse of New York Stock Exchange; Start of world economic depression; Second UK Labour government under MacDonald;
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; first experimental television broadcast; Kurt Weil The Threepenny Opera; Nobel prize – Thomas Mann (G).

1930. Mass unemployment in UK; Death of D.H. Lawrence.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Nobel prize – Sinclair Lewis (US).

1931. Resignation of UK Labour government, followed by formation of national coalition government; Empire State building completed in New York; Virginia Woolf, The Waves; Nobel prize – R.A. Karfeldt (S).

1932. Hunger marches start in UK; scientists split the atom; air conditioning invented; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Nobel prize – John Galsworthy (UK).

1933. Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany; first Nazi concentration camps; prohibition ends in US; Radio Luxembourg begins commercial broadcasts to UK; George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London;Jean Vigo, L’Atalante; Nobel prize – Ivan Bunin (USSR).

1934. Hitler becomes Dictator; Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust; Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks; Nobel prize – Luigi Pirandello (I).

1935. Germany re-arms; Italians invade Abyssinia (Ethiopia); Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1936. Death of George V in UK, followed by Edward VIII, who is forced to abdicate; Stalinist show trials in USSR; Civil War in Spain begins; Germany re-occupies the Rheinland; BBC begins television transmissions; Aaron Copland El Salon Mexico; Nobel prize – Eugene O’Neil (USA).

1937. Neville Chamberlain UK prime minister; Destruction of Guernica;
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier; Nobel prize – Roger Martin du Gard (Fr).

Twentieth Century Britain - Click for details at AmazonTwentieth-century Britain is an account of political, industrial, commercial, and cultural development in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. It’s particularly strong on the changing face of government, and it also relates issues of the day to the great writers and artists of the period. This ‘very short introduction’ series offers a potted account of the subject in handy pocket-book format, with plenty of suggestions for further reading.

1938. Germans occupy Austria; Chamberlain meets Hitler to make infamous Munich ‘agreement’ to prevent war; Samuel Beckett, Murphy; John Dos Passos, USA; Nobel prize – Pearl S. Buck (USA).

1939. Fascists win Civil War in Spain; Stalin makes pact with Hitler; Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war on Germany; helicopter invented;
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; Nobel prize – F.E. Silanpaa (Fi).

1940. Germany invades north-west Europe; Fall of France; British troops evacuated from Dunkirk; Battle of Britain; Start of ‘Blitz’ bombing raids over London; Churchill heads national coalition government; assassination of Trotsky; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1941. Germany invades USSR; Japanese destroy US fleet at Pearl Harbour; USA enters the war; siege of Leningrad; Deaths of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; Orson Wells, Citizen Kane; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1942. Battle of Stalingrad; Battle of Midway; Beveridge report establishes basis of modern Welfare State; T-shirt invented; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1943. Anglo-American armies invade Italy; Warsaw uprising; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1944. D-Day invasion of France; ball-point pens go on sale; German V1 and V2 rockets fired; R.A. Butler’s Education Act; Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring; Nobel prize – J.V. Jensen (Da).

1945. End of war in Europe; Atomic bombs dropped on Japan; first computer built; microwave oven invented; United Nations founded; huge Labour victory in UK general election; Atlee becomes prime minister, George Orwell, Animal Farm; Nobel prize – G. Mistral (Ch).

1946. Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech; Nuremberg war trials; bikinis introduced; United Nations opens in New York; Nobel prize – Herman Hesse (Sw)

1947. Marshall Plan of aid to Europe; Jewish refugees turned away by UK; Polaroid camera invented; coal and other industries nationalised in UK; transfer of power to independent India, Pakistan, and Burma. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus; Nobel prize – A. Gide (Fr)

1948. Berlin airlift; state of Israel founded; Railways and electricity nationalised in UK; Bevan launches National Health Service in UK. Nobel prize – T.S. Eliot (UK)

1949. East Germany created; Mao Tse Tung declares Republic of China; NATO founded; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four; Nobel prize – W. Faulkner (USA)

The Twentieth Centurynext

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Twentieth Century – literary timeline – part 3

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a chronicle of events, literature, and politics

1950. India declares itself a republic; UK and USA attack Korea; first credit cards; first organ transplant; Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard; Nobel prize – Bertrand Russell (UK)

1951. Festival of Britain; first colour TV; Conservatives defeat Labour in UK general election; Churchill becomes prime minister; UK troops seize Suez Canal zone; Benjamin Britten Billy Budd; Samuel Beckett, Malloy; Nobel prize – P. Lagerkvist (S)

1952. Death of George V. Accession of Queen Elizabeth II at 25;
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Nobel prize – F. Mauriac (Fr)

1953. DNA discovered; conquest of Everest; Death of Stalin – and Prokofiev on same day; Nobel prize – Winston Churchill (UK)

1954. British troops withdrawn from Egypt; Four-minute mile broken; Nobel prize – E. Hemingway (USA)

1955. European Union created; Warsaw Pact founded; V. Nabokov, Lolita; Patrick White, The Tree of Man; Nobel prize – H. Laxness (Ic)

1956. Khruschchev denounces Stalin at Communist Party Conference; Anglo-French invasion of Suez, followed by withdrawal; Hungarian uprising crushed by Soviets; Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies; Nobel prize – J. Ramon Jiminez (Sp)

Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature - Click for details at AmazonOxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English is a new reference guide to English-language writers and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world – from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, James Joyce to Amy Tan. Includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,400 authors, plus a good introduction by John Sutherland.

 

1957. European Economic Community established; Homosexuality decriminalised in UK; Patrick White, Voss; Nobel prize – A. Camus (Fr)

1958. Orson Wells, Touch of Evil; Nobel prize – B. Pasternak (USSR) [forced to refuse it]

1959. Castro overthrows Batista regime in Cuba; first motorway opened in UK; Nobel prize – S. Quasimodo (I)

1960. Sharpville massacres in S Africa; new republics declared in Africa; Lady Chatterley’s Lover cleared of charges of obscenity in UK; J.F. Kennedy elected US president; Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho; Nobel prize – A. St. Leger (Fr)

1961. Adolf Eichman on trial for role in Holocaust; USSR makes first manned space flight; USA-backed Bay of Pigs attack in Cuba fails; Berlin Wall erected; Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot; Samuel Beckett, Happy Days; Nobel prize – L. Andric (Y)

1962. US sends troops to Vietnam; Cuban missile crisis; Nelson Mandela jailed; Please Please Me first Beatles hit; Nobel prize – J. Steinbeck (USA)

1963. French veto Britain’s application to join European Common Market; Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech; Profumo scandal in UK; Kennedy assassination in USA; Nobel prize – G. Seferis (Gr)

1964. Khruschchev deposed by Breshnev in USSR; Vietnam attacks US destroyer in Gulf of Tonkin; Labour party gains power in UK under Harold Wilson; Saul Bellow, Herzog. Nobel prize – J-P. Sartre (Fr) [prize not accepted]

1965. Malcolm X assassinated; India invades Pakistan; US air raids in Vietnam; anti-war protests in US and Europe; Harold Pinter, The Homecoming; Nobel prize – M. Sholokov (USSR) [authorship subsequently disputed]

1966. Black Panthers established in US; Cultural revolution under Mao in China; Britain wins Wold Cup in football; Nobel prize – Samuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs (Il)

1967. Israel seizes land in 6 day war; first heart transplant; first colour TV transmissions in UK; Stalin’s daughter defects to west; ‘Summer of Love’ hippy demonstrations in San Francisco; decriminalisation of homosexuality in UK; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Nobel prize – Miguel Angel Asturias (Gu)

1968. Martin Luther King assassinated; student protests in Paris; USSR invades Czechoslovakia; theatre censorship abolished in UK after 23 years; Tet offensive in Vietnam; Nobel prize – Yasunari Kawabata (Jp)

1969. UK troops sent into N Ireland; US puts first men on the moon; death penalty abolished in UK; precursor of the Internet, ARPANET created; Woodstock music festival; Monty Python’s Flying Circus first broadcast; Nobel prize – Samuel Beckett (Ire)

1970. My Lai massacre; Rubber bullets used in N Ireland; Allende elected socialist president in Chile; anti-government demonstrations in Poland; age of majority lowered to 18 in UK; invention of computer floppy disks; Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch; Patrick White, The Vivesector; Nobel prize – Alexander Solzhenitsyn (USSR)

1971. Open University begins in UK; internment without trial in N Ireland; China joins UN; Nixon resumes bombing of Vietnam; video recorders introduced; Britain negotiates entry into EU; Nobel prize – Pablo Neruda (Ch)

1972. Miners strike in UK; Bloody Sunday in N Ireland; Watergate scandal begins in US; Nobel prize – Heinrich Böll (Gr)

1973. Allende government overthrown by Pinochet in Chile; industrial strikes in UK; Arab-Israeli war; abortion legalised in US; US pulls out of Vietnam; Britain enters the European Common Market; Nobel prize – Patrick White (Aus)

1974. Miners strike in UK; Impeachment and resignation of president Nixon in US; Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist; Nobel prize – Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson (Sw)

1975. Margaret Thatcher elected leader of Tories in UK; Vietnam war ends with hasty retreat of US troops; first elections in Portugal for 50 years; Microsoft founded; Nobel prize – Eugenio Montale (It)

1976. Jeremy Thorpe resigns as UK liberal leader following sex scandal; Britain found guilty of torture in N Ireland; Jimmy Carter elected president in US; Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves; Nobel prize – Saul Bellow (USA)

1977. First democratic elections in Spain since 1936; student activist Steve Biko tortured to death in S Africa; Punk rock fashionable; Nobel prize – Vicente Aleixandre (Sp)

1978. World’s first test tube baby; Nobel prize – Isaac Bashevis Singer (USA)

1979. Shah leaves Iran; Ayatollah Khomeni returns from exile in Paris; Islamic republic declared; Margaret Thatcher elected first woman PM in UK; first heart transplant; Pol Pot convicted of murdering 3 million in Cambodia; Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now; Nobel prize – Odysseus Elytis (Gk)

Twentieth Century Britain - Click for details at AmazonTwentieth-century Britain is an account of political, industrial, commercial, and cultural development in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. It’s particularly strong on the changing face of government, and it also relates issues of the day to the great writers and artists of the period. This ‘very short introduction’ series offers a potted account of the subject in handy pocket-book format, with plenty of suggestions for further reading.

1980. USSR Nobel peace prizewinner Sakharov sent into internal exile; Mugabe’s establishes one-party ZANU(PF) state in Zimbabwe; outbreak of Iran-Iraq war; Solidarity trade union recognised by Polish government; Ronald Regan elected US president; John Lennon shot in New York; Nobel prize – Czeslaw Milosz (Po)

1981. Greece joins EEC; Social Democrats launched in UK – merges with Liberals; Peter Sutcliffe convicted of Yorkshire Ripper murders; Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer; first reports of AIDS; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Nobel prize – Elias Canetti (UK!)

1982. Argentina invades Malvinas (Falklands); UK re-takes islands; General Galtieri resigns; Polish government abolishes Solidarity; death of Breshnev; Nobel prize – Gabriel García Márquez (Co)

1983. Demonstrations in 20 Polish cities; IRA prisoners escape from Maze prison; US-backed invasion of Grenada; Cruise missiles installed in UK; Nobel prize – William Golding (UK)

1984. UK miners strike against pit closures; USSR boycotts Olympics in LA; Mrs Gandhi assassinated; Nobel prize – Jaroslav Seifert (Cz)

1985. USSR reforms of Glasnost and Perestroika called for by Gorbachev; Greenpeace ship sunk by French agents in NZ; Nobel prize – Claude Simon (Fr)

1986. Westland scandal in UK government; press disputes lead to move from Fleet Street to Wapping in UK; legal independence for Australia; US bomb Benghazi and Tripoli; Chernobyl nuclear disaster; 180-day detention without trial in S Africa; US and Commonwealth impose sanctions on South Africa; Nobel prize – Wole Soyinka (Ni)

1987. Gorbachev begins critique of Breshnev in USSR; white-only elections in S Africa; Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie guilty of crimes against humanity; Iran attacks US tanker in Persian Gulf; DNA first used to convict criminals; Nobel prize – Joseph Brodsky (USA)

1988. IRA members shot by UK in Gibraltar; first Gulf war begins; Gorbachev proposes democratic reforms in USSR; George Bush Snr president in US; Nobel prize – Naguib Mahfouz (Eg)

1989. Khomeini issues fatwa on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses; Tiananamen Square massacre; elections, protests, and shakeups in Communist block; E Germany closes borders after demonstrations for reform; Iron Curtain begins to be removed; Romanian leader Ceausescu executed; playwright Vaclav Havel becomes Czech president; Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web; Nobel prize – Camilo José Cela (Sp)

1990. Lech Walesa becomes first president of Poland; Nelson Mandela freed after 27 years in jail; John Major replaces Margaret Thatcher as UK prime minister; Derek Walcott, Omeros; Nobel prize – Octavio Paz (Mx)

1991. Collapse of the Soviet Union; Apartheid laws repealed in S Africa; Iraq invades Kuwait; first Gulf war begins with Operation desert Storm; Satellite-based communications become established for TV and Internet; Nobel prize – Nadine Gordimer (SA)

1992. Official end of Cold War; Nobel prize – Derek Walcott (SL)

1993. Bosnian civil war; Use of the Internet grows exponentially; Nobel prize – Toni Morrison (USA)

1994. Channel tunnel opens in UK; Mandela elected president of S Africa; Rawandan genocide; Nobel prize – Kenzaburo Oe (Jp)

1995. Nobel prize – Seamus Heaney (Ire)

1996. Prince Charles divorces Princess Diana in UK; Mad cow disease hits UK; Nobel prize – Wislawa Szymborska (Po)

1997. Hong Kong returns to China; Princess Diana dies in car crash in Paris; Tony Blair wins landslide victory in UK with New Labour Party; Nobel prize – Dario Fo (It)

1998. India and Pakistan test nuclear weapons; US President Clinton in sex scandal; use of mobile phones and Internet becomes commonplace; digital technology widely introduced into broadcast media; Nobel prize – José Saramago (Pt)

1999. New Euro currency introduced; NATO forces in Serbia; hereditary peers abolished in UK House of Lords; Nobel prize – Gunter Grass (Gr)

2000. First elected Mayor of London in UK; Legal age for consensual gay sex reduced to 16;Nobel prize – Gao Xingjian (Fr)

2001. Labour Party re-elected with huge majority; Twin Towers attacked and destroyed in New York; Britain joins US in Afghanistan war; Nobel prize – V.S. Naipaul (UK)

2002. Nobel prize – Imre Kertész (Hu)

2003. Nobel prize – J.M.Coetzee (SA)

2004. Nobel prize – Elfriede Jelinek (Au)

2005. Nobel prize – Harold Pinter (UK)

2006. Nobel prize – Orhan Pamuk (Tk)

2007. Nobel prize – Doris Lessing (UK)

2008. Nobel prize – J.M.G Le Clezio (Fr)

2009. Nobel prize – Herta Mueller (Gr)

2010. Nobel Prize – Mario Vargas Llosa (Pe)

2011. Nobel Prize – Thomas Transtroemer (Sw)

2012. Nobel Prize – Mo Yan (Cn)

2013. Nobel Prize – Alice Munro (Ca)

2014. Nobel Prize – Patrick Modiano (Fr)

2015. Nobel Prize – Svetlana Alexievich (By)

2016. Nobel Prize – Bob Dylan (USA)

2017. Nobel Prize – Kasuo Ishiguro (UK)

2018. Nobel Prize – not awarded

The Twentieth Century

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Twentieth Century Neglected Classics

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recommended lesser-known novels

This is a selection of neglected classics – lesser-known novels from the twentieth century. Great writers such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and D.H.Lawrence are covered elsewhere on this site. Here you might find some pleasant surprises.

Neglected classics - Le Grand MeaulnesLe Grand Meaulnes (1913) Alain Fournier’s semi-autobiographical gem (usually translated into English as The Lost Domain) is an idyllic evocation of boyhood and adolescence. It’s a novel of teenage self-discovery and enormous charm. Two schoolboys stumble upon a semi-mythical realm set deep in the French countryside and fall in love with a girl who they can never later re-trace. This is a lyrical and atmospheric novel which evokes a fin de siécle innocence and romanticism which would be wiped out by the first world war – which was hovering just around the corner and cost Fournier his life fighting on the Meuse in 1914.
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Neglected classics - We - ZamyatinWe (1920) Yevgeny Zamyatin’s tale is a very original and futuristic dystopia which prophesies Stalinism and the failure of the revolution to be truly revolutionary. It is set in a totally regulated society where people are known by numbers, and in which two lovers embody irrational urges towards which the state is hostile. It’s written in a dazzlingly poetic and experimental style, influenced by the early developments of Russian modernism. The novel was reviewed by George Orwell and heavily ‘influenced’ his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is the original, and you”ll be pleased to discover that it’s far superior.
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Neglected classics - Manhattan TransferManhattan Transfer (1925) John dos Passos is an unjustly neglected master of American experimental realism from the modernist period. He writes in a manner which combines multiple characters and perspectives, fragmented narratives running in parallel, stream-of-consciousness passages, the insertion of contemporary newspaper reports, potted biographies, popular songs, flash-backs and flash-forwards. The result is an expressionistic mosaic which captures the speed and chaos of modern life. His story is always one of ordinary working people struggling to make a living and a life in the modern city, which is under the control of monopoly capitalists. And his setting is almost always the city – New York City. Start with Manhattan Transfer, which is less demanding and more coherent. If you like that, move on to his chef d’oeuvre USA, which is three novels rolled into one.
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Neglected classics - Auto da FeAuto da Fe (1935) Elias Canetti’s only novel is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished scholar and obsessive bibliophile who ends up setting fire to his own library. The novel was inspired by the burning of the Palace of Justice in Vienna in 1927, and is partly a parable of Nazi book burning. The figure of Kien is loosely based on Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who was famous for his invariable habits. Kien deviates from his own spartan routines with disastrous results. Canetti wrote the novel when he was only twenty-five, and wrote little else except memoirs until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981.
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Neglected classics - Nathaniel West's novels Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) Nathaniel West’s novel concerns a newspaper columnist who deals with the problem letters from readers – most of them bordering on the humanly tragic. He innocently and for the best motives begins to take them seriously, and tries to help the people who send them. He is destroyed as a result. West is a much underrated master of black comedy. The Day of the Locust (1939) is his greatest novel – a searing critique of the movie business in which West briefly worked. It focuses on the lonely misfits and cranks drawn by Hollywood and the American Dream, and ends in an apocalyptic frenzy of hatred, self-destruction, and the burning of Los Angeles. Both novels, plus A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell in one volume.
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Neglected classics - Darkness at NoonDarkness at Noon (1940) Arthur Koestler’s novel is one of the classics capturing all the madness and tyranny of the Stalinist purges in the 1930s. Comrade Rubashov, an old Bolshevik, is accused of betraying the State he helped to create. The novel follows his physical and psychological torture until he finally agrees to make a false confession against himself, and following a completely corrupt show trial he is executed as a traitor. Grim; not for the faint-hearted; and politically spot-on in the light of everything we have learned since. It profits from being dramatically concentrated in time and place on Rubashov in his prison cell, but for a more wide-ranging novel which shows the madness of stalinism in a much wider social perspective, try Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev.
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Neglected classics - The Master and MargaritaThe Master and Margarita (1940/1973) Mikhail Bulgakov’s greatest novel is a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy which offers a satirical view of communist Russia. The story involves the arrival of the Devil into Moscow, causing all sort of comic mischief. This story is interspersed with chapters dealing with Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, plus other sections related to an artist and his relationships with his art and his lover. All three layers of the story are blended into one with spellbinding imaginative force. Bulgakov burnt the manuscript of his book in despair when being persecuted under the Stalinist tyranny. Fortunately, he lived just long enough to re-write it.
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Neglected classics - Invisible ManInvisible Man (1952) Ralph Ellison’s powerful novel is the search of an unnamed black American man for his own identity in a society which denies it to him at every turn. It is told with a combination of deadly seriousness and great comic panache. The hero is presented with or stumbles into a range of roles – from Uncle Tom, through political activist, to Superstud and Black Muslim. He uncovers the racism and existential inauthenticity in all of them, and in the end ‘goes Underground’ as a form of escape. This novel is profound, beautifully written, and very funny. It’s a great shame Ralph Ellison wrote so little else.
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Neglected classics - The Lost StepsThe Lost Steps (1953) Alejo Carpentier’s novel is a story told twice. A disillusioned north-American musicologist flees his empty existence in New York City. He takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization – the upper reaches of a great South American river. The novel describes his search, his adventures, the revival of his creative powers, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that seems to be truly outside history. Wonderful evocations of Latin America from the writer who founded the idea of ‘Magical Realism’.
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Neglected classics - The Tin DrumThe Tin Drum (1956) This was Günter Grass’s first novel, and it is still probably his best. In it, he makes a brave and imaginative attempt to come to terms with the German experience between 1930 and 1950. Set in Danzig where Grass grew up, it starts with the rise of fascism, goes through the horrors of WWII, and ends just after the dubious Economic Miracle of the post-war years. The ambiguous hero is a dwarf who is pathologically attached to his toy drum, who wills himself not to grow, and whose voice can shatter glass. This is a comic yet disturbing fantasy which combines elements of Grass’s own biography with notions of collective and individual responsibility for German war guilt. Despite his later fame and productivity (plus the Nobel Prize in 1999) this novel will be due for renewed critical examination, following Grass’s recent confession that he enlisted in the Waffen-SS during the war.
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Neglected classics - Doctor ZhivagoDr Zhivago (1957) Boris Pasternak’s novel is a sprawling epic of the Russian revolution, a passionate love story, and a memorable portrait of a doctor-poet caught up in the merciless wheels of history. Zhivago seeks to do good and live with simple dignity, but his efforts are thwarted by war, a revolution in which he is forced to participate, and his love affair with Lara, who is married to a Bolshevik general. Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for this novel in 1958, but was forced to refuse it by the Soviet authorities at the time. Some commentators have criticised the novel for being rather traditional in its used of drama and suspense – but these features are precisely what gives it such appeal for general readers.
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Neglected classics - Wide Sargasso SeaWide Sargasso Sea (1966)
Jean Rhys’ novel is a rare case of a ‘prequel’ which is as interesting, well written, and as original as the work to which it refers. This is the story of Mr Rochester’s first wife (before Jane Eyre) and how he came to bring her from the West Indies. It’s a vivid evocation of the Caribbean; a psychologically convincing portrait of a woman’s identity under threat from the twin forces of male dominance and enforced deracination; and a wonderfully lyrical narrative, full of poetic imagery and brooding force. This book re-established Jean Rhys’s reputation after decades of neglect.
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Neglected classics - One Hundred Years of SolitudeOne Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the novelist who really put ‘magical realism’ on the world literary map. This is a sprawling epic which conveys the essence of Latin America via the saga of the Buendia family that mirrors the history of Colombia. Like many of his works, it is set in the fictional town of Macondo, a place much like García Márquez’s native Aracataca. Mixing realism and fantasy, the novel is both the story of the decay of the town and an ironic epic of human experience. Readers should expect levitating priests, time which goes backwards, and plagues of flowers and civic forgetfulness. Marquez has gone on to write many more novels, but this one remains his greatest.
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Neglected classics - Lost Honour of Katarina BlumThe Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1969) This work by Heinrich Böll is a short, dramatic novel loosely based on the Baader-Meinhof affair. It is Böll’s scathing critique of tabloid journalism at its worst and Germany’s panic-driven anti-terrorist laws. A young woman is arrested for harbouring her lover, a suspected terrorist, who is in fact an army deserter. She is harassed by the police and a particularly obnoxious reporter. When he confronts her at her mother’s funeral she agrees to give him her story; but when they meet up and he suggests they have sex, she shoots him instead. Böll is a left-wing Catholic in the mould of Graham Greene. This is an intelligent and sensitive response to the moral outcry over European ‘terrorism’ which began in the late 1960s.
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Neglected classics - The Golden GateThe Golden Gate (1989) Vikram Seth’s is a novel of modern life, written in verse , and set in California. It’s very charming, yet deals with important the fundamentals of life such as birth, friendship, love, and death. It was inspired by Pushkin’s novel in sonnet form, Eugene Onegin, and it contains some wonderfully poetic images and stunning rhymes. It’s a celebration of everyday existence, with strong ecological sympathies and an amazing variety of domestic pets. Guaranteed to please. Don’t let the idea of a novel in verse put you off: it’s a gem, and a linguistic treat. The text is presented, like Pushkin’s masterpiece, as one sonnet on each page. Every one is a self-contained work of art
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Neglected classics - The ConservationistThe Conservationist (1990) Nadine Gordimer has had a long and distinguished career as a novelist, but this has possibly emerged as her greatest work. A white South-African businessman keeps a farm in the country which he visits at weekends. He tries to do The Right Thing ecologically but cannot, because he does not truly live there. The Africans who work for him eventually emerge as the true inheritors of the earth. Gordimer charts the problems of a society divided by racism, colonialism, class, and political history. She expresses very eloquently the relationship between people and land. Fluent writing, great style, and lots of political commitment, but wrapped up in a non-judgemental way.
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© Roy Johnson 2009

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Twentieth Century Russian Novels

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Russian novels - St Petersburgrecommended classic reading

St Petersburg (1916) Andrei Biely (pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) is a much-neglected figure from the period of modernist experimentation. He was a novelist, a poet, a theorist, and literary critic. His major work is a novel with a ticking bomb (concealed in a sardine can) at its centre – a sort of meditation on violence. It’s the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a never-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official — his own father. Nikolai is pursued through the impenetrable Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great. It is not unlike James Joyce’s Ulysses in its literary experimentation, and in being concerned with the events one day in one city. But the experimentation is of a different kind. Biely was a symbolist and a mystic. He uses his poetic style in this novel to bring the city to life as if it were a living, breathing being.
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Russian novels - We - ZamyatinWe (1921) Yevgeny Zamyatin is also an unjustly neglected master of the school of experimental modernism which flourished in Russia until the early 1920s. His one novel is a very original science-fiction dystopia, and a satirical critique of the Russian revolution (which he had supported) as he saw it being betrayed by the forces of totalitarianism. It is a novel which deserves to be much better known. In a totally regulated society where people are known by numbers, two lovers embody irrational urges towards which the state is hostile. The novel was tragically prophetic of the Stalinism which was to come. It is written in a dazzlingly poetic and experimental style, and it was quite clearly the model for both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Both of these writers had read the novel: this, the original, is far superior. Do yourself a favour: add this to your reading list.
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Russian novels - Nabokov - MaryMary (1923) Vladimir Nabokov is a great Russian writer, even though he left the country in flight from the revolution in his youth, and spent the rest of his life in exile, living in Germany, America, and Switzerland. In fact he wrote half of his huge output in English. He represents the playful, experimental side of modernism which the Stalinists did their best to stamp out. His writing is amazingly stylish – rich in imagery, erudite, stuffed full of verbal tricks and special effects.

Of course he is best known for Lolita, which he wrote in English whilst living in America. But he wrote novels in Russian during the 1920s and 1930s whilst living in Germany. He can be very lyrical as he is in his early novels Mary and Glory (1932) where he evokes the raptures of youthful pleasures, and the discovery of passion and loss. His lyrical prose records a young Russian exile’s recollections of his first love affair. But the woman in question clearly symbolises his relationship with Russia. He is also good at a creating a marvellous sense of awe in contemplating the quiet aesthetic pleasures in everyday events and special moments of being.

Russian novels - King,Queen,KnaveOther novels such as King, Queen, Knave show a much darker side to his nature, with its focus on adultery, deception, and cruelty. These traits are taken to an uncomfortable extreme in Laughter in the Dark (1932) which plots the downfall of a man who runs off with a young girl who, when he is rendered blind in a car accident, secretly moves her lover in to live under the same roof. The sleazy pair of them torment the protagonist in a particularly gruesome fashion. This theme of the older man driven to self-destruction by desire for a younger woman was something Nabokov explored again in The Enchanter which he wrote in Paris in 1939, and twenty years later in Lolita which he wrote in English whilst teaching in an American college.
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Russian novels - The Gift - NabokovThe Gift (1936) is generally held to be the greatest of Nabokov’s Russian novels. It deals with the ironies and agonies of exile. It’s also the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It’s also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative, and it also has at its centre a critique of Chernyshevsky. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write – a book very much like The Gift. The novel plays the most pleasurable kind of havoc with conventional notions of narrative structure and linguistic protocol. It also includes a deeply felt fictionalisation of the murder of Nabokov’s own father in 1922 whilst he was attempting to stop a political assassination.
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Russian novels - The Master and MargaritaThe Master and Margarita (1940) Mikhail Bulgakov was originally a doctor. His early works The Diary of a Country Doctor and The White Guard are written in a lucid, plain style not unlike Chekhov (who was of course also a doctor). In the 1920s and 1930s Bulgakov turned to the theatre, and despite conflicts with the Stalinists at the height of their purges, he managed to survive just long enough to complete his masterpiece. The Master and Margarita is a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy which offers a satirical view of communist Russia. The story involves the arrival of the Devil into Moscow, causing all sort of mischief and disruption. This is interspersed with chapters re-telling the story of Pontius Pilate and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, plus other sections related to an artist and his relationships with his art and his lover. All three layers of the story are blended with spellbinding imaginative force.
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Russian novels - Doctor ZhivagoDr Zhivago (1957) Boris Pasternak is principally a poet so far as Russian literature is concerned, but it is his novel by which he is best known to the general reading public in the West. He was awarded the Nobel prize for it, but forced to turn it down by the Soviet authorities. This is a sprawling epic of the Russian revolution, a passionate love story, and a memorable portrait of a doctor-poet caught up in the wheels of history. Zhivago seeks to do good and live with simple dignity, but his efforts are thwarted by war, revolution, and his love affair with Lara, who is married to a Bolshevik general. Critical opinion has been somewhat divided over this work, with some readers seeing it as no more than a nineteenth century novel in disguise. With the general reading public however, it has never lost its appeal.
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Russian novels - One Day in the Life of Ivan DenisovichOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) This is the short novel that made Alexander Solzhenitsyn famous overnight. It recounts a typical day’s work, deprivation, and suffering of a prisoner in one of Stalin’s labour camps. Publication was ‘allowed’ as part of Krushchev’s post 1956 attack on Stalin and his legacy. The facts of the story were deliberately understated to meet the censor’s requirements at the time. It catapulted Solzhenitsyn to fame, and yet within a couple of years his work was banned again.

Solzhenitsyn writes in a simple, restrained style in which ornamentation is stripped away in favour of moral purpose. The results celebrate a stoical, almost puritan heroism in the face of all that the Russian people have had to endure – government-constructed poverty, war, political corruption, censorship, and totalitarian repression.

Russian novels - The First CircleThe First Circle (1968) This novel is set in a special research-cum-detention centre reserved for mathematicians and scientists who are nevertheless political prisoners. This is what might be called a novel of ideas, as the characters discuss the political and historical forces which have brought them to their present unjust imprisonment. Of the main characters, one is eventually released, another is sent off to a much harsher regime, and the third remains where he is. It is based very closely on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences of his first period of imprisonment by the Stalinist regime.
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Russian novels - August 1914August 1914 (1984) This is the first part of a multi-volume epic, a historical novel on a grand scale about the origins of the Soviet Union and how communism came to take root there. Solzhenitsyn sees the Battle of Tannenberg at the start of the First World War as the first major turning point in this process. Using a range of modernist-cum-experimental techniques, he sets in motion a huge cast of characters against the backdrop of this decisive battle. The whole enterprise was called The Red Wheel. There were further volumes in the cycle published, but towards the end of his life Solzhenitsyn transferred most of his energy into books arguing for social and political reform – rather in the same manner as Tolstoy.
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Russian novels - Lenin in ZurichLenin in Zurich (1976) This is a short novel composed of some separate chapters from The Red Wheel. It focuses largely on Lenin in exile, immediately prior to his triumphant return in a sealed train to St Petersburg’s Finland Station. It’s a very interesting study, because Solzhenitsyn is clearly critical of Lenin as one of the central architects of communism – yet he narrates the story largely from Lenin’s point of view. Steeped in history, this is a major attempt at a political and psychological portrait of a historical figure.
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© Roy Johnson 2009

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Twentieth-century Britain: an introduction

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Politics. history, and society in 20th C Britain

This introductory history comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Kenneth Morgan’s account of Twentieth-century Britain begins with great éclat at the First World War. This was a politically much more complex issue than we are normally led to believe, and he reminds us of the contemporary political contradictions which are now often forgotten.

Twentieth-century Britain: a short introductionThen he goes on to the General Strike of 1926; the artistic influence of the Bloomsbury Group; the depressions of the 1930s; and Britain’s attempts to stay out of war until it was finally dragged into 1939 and its aftermath. It’s a slightly strange experience to read the social history of a century, much of which one has lived through oneself. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that the inevitable generalisations of a brief survey often fail to capture the depths and complexities of ‘what it was really like’.

I could hardly believe my eyes when he described the 1960s as ‘that miserable decade’ . Economically turbulent it might have been, but socially and culturally it was the most liberating, creative, and dynamic period I can ever remember.

He’s on much firmer ground when he deals with the social unrest of the 1970s and 1980s, with their strikes, high unemployment, inner city riots, and falling production.

However, the long view does have some advantages, such as helping to keep events in perspective. The Falklands/Malvinas war for example:

it seemed improbable that a war to retain these distant and almost valueless outposts, scarcely known to British people before the fighting began other than from postage stamps, would encourage a revived mystique of imperial grandeur … But the jingoism of the Falklands [triumph] petered out almost as soon as it began.

Yet I still question his overview from time to time. It seems unwise to the point of ill-judged to conclude his upbeat account of the end of the century with the image of the Millennium Dome – surely the most potent symbol of government vainglory and financial mismanagement imaginable.

But for those who want an overview, or those who would like the major themes revealed, this approach is speedy and efficient. This is a very interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Kenneth O. Morgan, Twentieth Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.128, ISBN: 019285397X

Two Countries

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

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

Cadenabbia Lake Como

Cadenabbia – Lago di Como

Two Countries – critical commentary

The international theme

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

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

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

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

The ending

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

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

Two Countries – study resources

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

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

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

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

Two Countries Two Countries – read the original publication

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Two Countries

Two Countries – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Countries - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe 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.

Two Countries Buy the book at Amazon UK
Two Countries Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat 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.
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe 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.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James web links 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.

© Roy Johnson 2013

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