Modernism Archives - Page 7 of 15

Katherine Mansfield – life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1888. Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was born into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a banker, who went on to become chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. She was first cousin of Elizabeth Beauchamp, who married into German aristocracy to become Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. She had a somewhat insecure childhood. Her mother left her when she was only one year old to go on a trip to England. She was raised largely by her grandmother, who features in some of the stories as ‘Mrs Fairfield’.

1895. She attended Karori State School with her sisters, and proved to be gifted at writing, even though her spelling was poor.

1898. Attended Wellington Girls’ High School. Some of her earliest sketches appeared in the school magazine, and she won a composition prize for ‘A Sea Voyage’.

1901. She attended a private finishing school, showed a somewhat precocious interest in notions of ‘free love’, and continued writing stories. It is obvious even at this early stage that she was interested in creating a good prose style. The following was written when she was fifteen:

This evening I have sat in my chair with my reading lamp turned low, and given myself up to thoughts of the years that have passed. Like a strain of minor music they have surged across my heart, and the memory of them, sweet and fragrant as the perfume of my flowers, has sent a strange thrill of comfort through my tired brain.

1902. She becomes very passionate about writing and music, and is greatly influenced by Chekhov and Oscar Wilde, whose notoriety at that time was still at its height. She falls in love with Arnold Trowell, the son of her cello teacher.

1903. The family travel to London, and KM attends Queen’s College in Harley Street which had been founded by Charles Kingsley to prepare young women for higher education. On her first day there she meets Ida Baker, who was to become a central figure in the rest of her life. Five of her sketches appear in Queen’s College Magazine.

1906. She gives herself up to a rather bohemian lifestyle, and has affairs with both men and women. Because of this, her parents take her back home to New Zealand against her wishes.

1907. Three sketches and a poem published in the Melbourne Native Companion.

1907. Love affairs with two girls. Her family send her on a tour of New Zealand’s northern island. Love affair with a Maori girl.

1908. Her family give up in the fight against her rebellious nature, and she is allowed to go back to London with an allowance of £100 per year from her father. She lodges in Little Venice, and is in love with Garnet Trowell (Arnold’s twin brother).

1909. Pregnant by Garnet Trowell, she marries singing teacher George Bowden and leaves him the same evening (without consummating the marriage) to join a travelling light opera company in Glasgow. Her mother travels from New Zealand to restore order, and takes KM to Bavaria for what she describes as a ‘cold water cure’. She has a miscarriage.

1910. Returns to London, where she is hospitalised for gonorrhoea. She then goes back to live with her husband. Some of her stories are published in the New Age, alongside writers such as H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Hilare Belloc. At this stage she begins to suffer from severe bouts of illness.

1911. She has an abortion, then travels to Bruges and Geneva. In a German Pension published in the autumn.

1912. Meets John Middleton Murry and becomes with him the editor of a magazine which causes something of a scandal by its title alone – Rhythm. They live together, moving from England to France and back again, sometimes living together with her most devoted ex-lover, Ida Baker, who KM sometimes calls her ‘wife’.

1913. Friendships and fallings-out with both Henri and Sophia Gaudier-Brzeska, and Frieda and D.H.Lawrence. Last issue of Rhythm. Four stories published in the Blue Review, which then failed. Works as a film extra.

1914. Murry declared bankrupt: he leaves London to live in the country. KM ill: she writes love letters to fellow Rhythm contributor Francis Carco in France.

1915. Her brother Leslie Beauchamp visits her in London on his way to join regiment. KM leaves Murry and travels to Paris to live with Francis Carco. She is then reconciled with Murry, then goes back to Carco in France. Begins to write The Aloe (which becomes Prelude). Three stories published in Signature, which then folds. Brother killed in war. Moves to live in Bandol, France.

1916. Moves to Zennor, Cornwall with the Lawrences, who have violent rows and fights. Finally ‘leaves’ Murry. Visits Ottoline Morell’s home at Garsington, Oxfordshire.

1917. Moves to live in Chelsea, and begins to write ‘narratorless’ stories. Meetings with Virginia Woolf. Both of them realise that they are making similar experiments in prose fiction, and feel a combination of rivalry and friendship.

1918. Moves back to live in Bandol. Tuberculosis diagnosed. Returns to London and divorces George Bowden. Marries John Middleton Murry (wearing Frieda Lawrence’s wedding ring). They live together in a house in Hampstead – together with Ida Baker. Prelude published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

1919. Regular contact with Virginia Woolf. Writes reviews for the Athenaeum (edited by Murry). Moves to San Remo Italy with Ida Baker. Murry visits occasionally.

1920. Moves to live in Menton, France. Murry begins to dally with other women. KM returns to London. Bliss and Other Stories published by Constable. Returns to France.

1921. Returns to London to scare off Princess Bibesco, who has been dallying with Murry. Moves to live in Switzerland, where her neighbour Rainer Maria Rilke is writing the Duino Elegies. Intense creative bursts between bouts of severe illness.

1922. Moves to Paris for radium treatment for her TB. Moves back to Switzerland. Murry leaves KM, who prepares her will, making Murry her literary executor. Returns to France to join in the mystic ‘treatment’ which was then fashionable at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainbebleau, France.

1923. Murry arrives in Fontainebleau on the day that KM dies – 9 January 1923, aged just thirty-five.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Katherine Mansfield critical essays

August 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

modernism, psychoanalysis, and autobiography

Katherine Mansfield – Critical Essays is a collection of conference papers given to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Katherine Mansfield’s arrival in London from New Zealand in 1908, and the start of her career as a writer. They are arranged in groups dealing with biographical readings, modernism, psychoanalytic interpretations, and autobiography. Biographist Vincent O’Sullivan attempts to explain why Mansfield was so impressed by the mystics Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and so influenced by Lewis Wallace’s Cosmic Anatomy – but his comments tell us more about the details of her last years than they do about the nature or the quality of her writing. Another essay does something similar by tracing her relationship with John Middleton Murry and the use they made of fragments of biography in the fictions they both produced.

Some essays go into endless detail blurring the boundaries between biography and fiction, ignoring the distinctions which should be made between the two. On the whole, they end up by saying very little of value about either. Considering that most of the authors are senior academics, it’s amazing that so little effort is made to be rigorous about these matters – though I suppose it proves the powerful attraction that biographical ‘evidence’ still exerts on critics, even though they might profess themselves post-modern.

Sarah Sandley is on much firmer grounds looking at Mansfield’s fondness for the cinema, and even tracing the films she was likely to have seen. She then offers fairly clear evidence from the texts to argue that she used filmic techniques in her approach to narrative.

As an aside, it is interesting to note how many of these essays revert to consideration of the same story – ‘Je ne parle pas francais’ – which anybody embarking on this volume would do well to re-read before looking at the separate studies.

There’s a brave contribution that tries to establish links between Mansfield’s writing and her interest in music. She was an accomplished cellist, and it’s true that her compositions often have a conscious structure which can be likened to a musical form. But the convincing evidence is never produced. Mansfield writes about music and has characters who are musicians – but that’s all. It’s only possible to say that one artistic form may be likened to another. Any more than that is rather like Goethe saying ‘Architecture is frozen music’: it’s a striking phrase, but it doesn’t yield analytic insights or go anywhere.

A section of psychoanalytic readings is the signal for an intensification of theoretical jargon and fashionable name-dropping – but most of the contributions remain unconvincing.

Fortunately, the last group of essays dealing with the relationship between autobiography and fiction are on much stronger ground. Mansfield left a substantial account of her life and feelings behind in her journals, letters, and notebooks, never concealing the fact that many of her stories were based on episodes from her own life.

Janet Wilson has an interesting piece which looks at Mansfield’s conflicted feelings over her status as a colonial settler and the sympathies for natives she felt – particularly in her erotic relationship with her friend, the half-Maori girl Martha Grace Mahupuku.

Angela Smith makes an insightful and largely persuasive case for Mansfield’s appreciation of Charles Dickens – a taste she held at a time when Dickens was considered passé in most literary circles.

There’s an article by Anna Jackson on the ‘poetics’ of the notebooks and letters, and the collection ends with an essay by the Mansfield scholar and novelist C.K. Stead recounting the difficulty of establishing properly edited texts of her work.

These later pieces seem to rescue the collection from the blight of literary criticism in its current manifestation as a mechanism for generating career-enhancing fodder for the next round of the Research Assessment Exercise.

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Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp.241, ISBN: 023027773X

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Kew Gardens

March 26, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Kew Gardens was written in 1917 and first appeared in a handbound edition of twenty-four pages Virginia Woolf published herself at the Hogarth Press. Her partner in this kitchen table enterprise, husband Leonard Woolf, describes the genesis of the edition.

In 1918 we printed two small books: Poems by T.S. Eliot and Kew Gardens by Virginia. Of Kew Gardens we printed about 170 copies (the total sold of the first edition was 148). We published it on 12 May 1919 at 2s. When we started printing and publishing with our Publication No. 1, we did not send out any review copies, but in the case of Prelude [by Katherine Mansfield], Tom’s Poems, and Kew Gardens we sent review copies to The Times Literary Supplement. By 31 May we had sold forty-nine copies of Kew Gardens. On Tuesday 27 May, we went to Asham and stayed there for a week, returning to Richmond on 3 June. In the previous week a review of Kew Gardens had appeared in the Literary Supplement giving it tremendous praise. When we opened the door of Hogarth House, we found the hall covered with envelopes and postcards containing orders from booksellers all over the country. It was impossible for us to start printing enough copies to meet these orders, so we went to a printer, Richard Madely, and got him to print a second edition of 500 copies, which cost us £8 9s. 6d. It was sold by the end of 1920 and we did not reprint.

It was the Woolf’s first artistic and commercial success as publishers, and gave them the confidence to back their own literary judgement(s) in the stream of publications which followed. The story was eventually collected with her other experimental short prose pieces written between 1917 and 1925, available as The Haunted House. The first edition of Kew Gardens had text only on the right-hand pages, which were hand trimmed by Virginia Woolf herself with a pen knife. Surviving copies of this first edition now trade at £2,000 or more.

Kew Gardens – a flower bed

Kew Gardens – critical commentary

Meaning

One of the features of literary modernism embraced by Virginia Woolf was that of the author’s absence from the text. What this means is that along with writers such as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and others she believed that authors should not intrude into their own work, advising and guiding the reader, but should stay outside it, letting the story speak for itself. Thus, we are not given any obvious clues about what to think of the characters or the events, but must make up our own minds about what they ‘mean’. This idea goes back to the French novelist Flaubert.

This absence of authorial guidance is one factor which makes for difficulty of interpretation. Another in this case is that we are only presented with fragments or snatches of events upon which to base our judgement. We do not have time to get to know the characters (certainly not in this story) before they move off out of it again.

Woolf is also one of many modernist writers who took an interest in revealing how people deceive themselves and act in what is called bad faith – that is, not admitting the truth about themselves or their relationship with others. But this issue, combined with the lack of authorial comment, means that we may only have the character’s word to go by, and that character may not be a reliable witness or commentator.

Understanding

All four couples mentioned in the story seem lacking in purpose or objective, and this casts them in a somewhat negative light. This is particularly so when contrasted with the almost heroic manner in which the movements of the snail are described.

Simon and his wife Eleanor are introduced by pointing to a physical gap (of about ‘six inches’) between them. He is ‘strolling carelessly’ whilst she is walking ‘with greater purpose’, which draws attention to the differences in their attitudes. Eleanor is also the one keeping an eye on their children. The point thatWoolf seems to be making here is that they are not in harmony with each other – as the subsequent narrative confirms.

In fact the very next sentence reinforces the idea that he is excluding himself from their joint enterprise. He keeps his distance in front of her ‘purposely’ even if he is unconscious of doing so. That is, he is not aware of the consequences of his own actions.

We are then presented with his reverie concerning a similarly hot summer day fifteen years earlier on which he ‘begged’ Lily to marry him. He focuses his attention on a dragonfly whose irregular movements echo those of the butterflies with which the people in the Gardens have just been compared and those at the end of the story which are likened to a ‘shattered marble column’. These subtle repetitions of image are the sort of poetic devices Woolf introduced into prose as a substitute for conventional linearity of plot or story.

Simon also focuses on Lily’s shoe buckle, and we note that she moves her foot ‘impatiently’. Woolf does not tell us what Lily is thinking: the narrative is related from Simon’s point of view. But we guess from this that she is not comfortable with his solicitations. She is another woman with whom Simon is not in harmony.

He then transfers his hopes onto the dragonfly alighting on a red flower, which in its turn echoes the flowers which have been described at the beginning of the story. Simon even thinks ‘there, on that leaf’ in the present time of the narrative, and which will be mentioned again at tits end.

But the dragonfly does not alight, Lily refuses him, and he reflects that this is a good thing (‘happily not’) because otherwise he would not be with his wife and children now. This is a rationalisation, or worse, bad faith. And just in case we are in any doubt, his subsequent actions are confirmation.

First of all he informs his wife that he has just been thinking about another woman – which is either gauche or completely tactless, Certainly Eleanor greets his announcement with silence, from which it is reasonable to assume that she is offended. Then he makes matters worse by referring to her as ‘the woman I might have married’. The term might is ambiguous here, but it seems that he means the woman he could have married – when in fact we know that she turned him down. Simon is creating a lie.

Woolf is offering this character sketch as an example of the sort of selfishness and self-deception she often perceives in people, especially in men. It is also telling that Simon’s memory of the past is contrasted by Eleanor’s – which turns out to be a kiss on the back of the neck – given her by ‘an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses, all my life’.

Woolf is pointing to the distance between the two people in this particular couple – which is paralleled by similar failures in communication between the two old men, the two women, and the young couple who are the last to walk by the flower bed.

Structure

Virginia Woolf minimises the elements of plot or narrative in this story, but she strengthens other elements by way of compensation. In Kew Gardens there is a very strong element of pattern, repetition, and shape which strengthen the aesthetic harmony of the piece.

The four couples who pass by the flower bed constitute a pattern. They are different in kind (a married pair, a young and old man, two elderly ladies, and a courting couple) yet they all share the same characteristic – a failure of communication.

Simon and Eleanor’s thoughts are pointed in completely opposite directions; the older man is deranged and cannot communicate sensibly with his escort William; the two women talk streams of rubbish, and one of them even stops listening to the other; and the young couple are too immersed by their ‘courtship’ of each other to communicate freely. Thus the underlying theme of communication breakdown reinforces the structure of the composition.

In addition, the subject of the story oscillates between the flower bed and the people walking past, and in each case there is a small transitional link carrying the narrative from one to the other. There is also a marked contrast between the two subjects. The human beings are fairly desultory and without purpose, but the snail is described in terms which stress its purposefulness. ‘It appears to have a definite goal’ and it ‘considers every possible method of reaching its goal’.

Finally, the story begins and ends with a description of the flowers and their petals. The first paragraph ends: ‘Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above’ whilst the final paragraph of the story concludes ‘and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air’.

Literary impressionism

Virginia Woolf was very interested in painting (her sister Vanessa Bell designed the covers for her publications) and in her writing she often attempts to capture the sense of life through atmosphere, light, and shade. For that reason her work is often compared to that of the Impressionist school of painters such as Monet, Pissaro, and Renoir.

It is fairly obvious in Kew Gardens that she is trying to create the ambiance of a hot day in summer by describing both the vegetation in the Gardens and the people strolling through them. In fact at one point she even depicts the dappled effects of light and shade which was a favourite technique of the Impressionists. As Eleanor and Simon walk away from the flower bed with their children, they

looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

This effect reinforces the very transitory nature of the visitations made by the four pairs of people – the married couple, the two men, two elderly women, and the courting couple. They walk past the flower bed just for a moment, and then pass onIf Kew Gardens has a story in the conventional sense, then that is all it is – four couple walk past a flower bed one summer afternoon.

But in fact that is only one half of the story. The other half is what goes on in the flower bed itself. And you might notice that the insect and plant life is described both in scrupulous detail and in a manner which is in some senses sharply contrasted with the human life in the story.

Kew Gardens – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories – Kindle edition

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories – Hogarth reprint – AMazon UK

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

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

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

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Kew Gardens – an alternative reading

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens – story synopsis

The story opens with a description of an oval flower bed in Kew Gardens on a hot day during July. The colourful flowers and vegetation are evoked in very fine detail.

A man and his wife walk past the flower bed with their children. Each of them is lost in reveries about the past. He thinks about a woman he might have married: she remembers being kissed by an old lady.

The story returns to ground level, where amidst the plants a snail is making slow progress in its movements through the vegetation.

A young man appears escorting an elderly man who is talking incessantly and walking with disturbed, uneasy movements. He is clearly deranged,

They are followed by two elderly women who are gossiping meaninglessly to each other, one of them not listening to the other, and then they move on.

Meanwhile the snail is making some progress in its journey through the undergrowth, all of which is seen from the snail’s point of view.

The last people to pass by the flower bed are a courting couple who are flirting with each other, and preparing to have tea together, vaguely conscious of immanence in life.

Finally the narrative returns to the flower bed, which is visited by a bird and then a swarm of butterflies, and the point of view gradually rises to evoke the busy life of London as a whole.

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Principal characters

—	a snail
Simon	Eleanor’s husband
Eleanor	Simon’s wife
William	a young man
—	a demented elderly man
—	two elderly women
—	a youth in his prime
Trissie	his girl friend

first edition 1917

Other works by Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le Corbusier

August 29, 2018 by Roy Johnson

his life, loves, and works

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Edward Jeanneret in 1887 in the Swiss Alps into a modest middle-class family with a culture of hard work, music, and exploration of the countryside at weekends. Although he was not as academically talented as his older brother Albert, he rapidly developed skills in drawing and painting.

He enrolled at the Ecole d’Art and then, without any formal training, began to practise architecture, designing his first house at the age of seventeen. Influenced by his reading of Ruskin, he travelled to Italy, where he was inspired by the cathedrals of Milan, Pisa, and Florence. His trip ended in Vienna, where he hoped to find work. All of these destinations at the time were within the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Vienna was a disappointment: ‘if it weren’t for the music, one would commit suicide’. Despite protests from his family and teacher, he then moved to Paris in 1908. There he encountered something that was to change his life – reinforced concrete. He worked in an architect’s office in the afternoon and continued his own self-generated curriculum of study in the museums and art galleries each morning.

Despite this early success he suddenly decided to go to Germany. There he had the good fortune to be commissioned to write a study on contemporary design developments. This resulted in travel to Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Weimar, and the publication of two reports. He also managed to talk his way into an internship with the Peter Behrens practice.

This was followed by a period of acute Weltschmerz from which he emerged with a desire for further travel. He sailed from Vienna down the Danube with a friend to Constantinople, then journeyed on to the monasteries of Mount Athos, which had an inspirational effect on him. As did the Parthenon, which he visited every day for almost a fortnight. He was recalled from this orgy of Mediterraneanism by the offer of a job back home.

Feeling depressed at returning to what he regarded as a provincial backwater, he nevertheless threw himself into teaching theoretical and practical design at the Ecole d’Art. This was something like a precursor to the Bauhaus. He also opened an official office as a practising architect, even though he was completely without professional qualifications.

La Maison Blanche 1912

His first major project was the design and construction of a palatial villa for his parents. The house was a triumph of modernist design, even though he almost ruined the family financially by a budget overspend. A few years later the house had to be sold off at a huge loss, which wiped out his parents’ savings.

During the First World War he designed a cheap and modular system of building to re-house homeless people. He travelled to France and met the artist Maillol, who at that time was considered the world’s leading sculptor. He continued to work on small design projects, but as the war ended he decided to make a new beginning for his life. He moved to live in Paris.

He set himself up in a studio apartment in the rue Jacob, visited prostitutes, and was at the notorious first night performance of Parade in 1917. He also entered his first major architectural competition, which was to design a large scale industrial slaughterhouse for Nevers in central France.

At a social level he befriended his neighbour, the artist Amedee Ozenfant. He also rather bizarrley established a business for the manufacture of reinforced concrete bricks. He and Ozenfant collaborated on the publication of their artistic manifesto – After Cubism – and they exhibited paintings together. At this time he regarded his commercial enterprises and design work as merely sources of income to support his ambition to be a painter.

In 1920 he changed his name from Charles-Edouard Jenneret to Le Corbusier, and together with Ozenfant launched the avant gard magazine L’Esprit Nouveau. He designed another form of modular shoebox-shaped housing called Citrohan, using concrete, steel, and glass. His objective was to make buildings of Spartan simplicity that were filled with light.

Villa Guiette 1927

He met and began to live with Yvonne Gallis, an earthy Mediterranean-style woman whom he kept more or less secret from his family. (There are unconfirmed rumours that they met in a brothel.). He built a modernist palace for the banker and art collector Raoul La Roche and in 1923 published a major series of theoretical essays as Towards a New Architecture.

A partnership with his younger cousin Pierre Jenneret flourished and they were forced to employ more and more assistants. Le Corbusier still spent his mornings painting, but from this point onwards kept this side of his life almost secret, so that it didn’t dilute his growing reputation as an architect. He complained about being exhausted by the demands of his profession, but in fact his office hours were in the afternoons between 2.00 and 5.00 pm.

His ideas were mocked by critics and the general public because his designs put functionality before all else. The house of the future was given features we now take for granted: built-in wardrobes and storage, open plan rooms, plain walls, large industrial-sized windows, and furniture which he chose from the manufacturers of hospital equipment. Yet despite the criticisms he was becoming a celebrity architect, with requests from Princess de Polignac and the writer Colette. He also designed a very successful villa for Michael Stein, the brother of the American writer Gertrude Stein.

Corbusier engaged with design at all levels of scope and size. For interiors he designed arm chairs and occasional tables; for social housing he created multi-storey residential blocks; and at city level he wanted to re-shape urban areas – to admit light and space where once there had been narrow, crowded streets. For these ambitions, and because he theorised about them, he was widely (but incorrectly) regarded as a communist.

Nevertheless he did visit Moscow in 1926, where he won a commission to design new offices for the Centrosoyuz. He felt his visit was a big success, though some of his ideas were criticised (quite intelligently) by El Lissitsky. He was also invited to South America, where he lectured on urban planning and designed a house for Victoria Ocampo – a friend of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

He prepared his lectures in advance, then delivered them without notes, illustrating his arguments with fluidly produced diagrams and sketches whilst speaking. On the lecture tour he met the singer Josephine Baker, for whom he was to design a house in Paris. He also took the opportunity to have an affair with her during their ten day transatlantic journey back to France.

Villa Savoye 1928

In 1930 he made two decisive steps in his public life: he took out French citizenship, and he married Yvonne. Two years later he submitted his plans for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, confident that his ideas would be accepted by a regime that had earlier produced the forward-thinking designs of the Constructivists. What he didn’t realise was that Joseph Stalin (like other dictators) had already decreed that all architecture for the proletariat must be Greco-Roman in style. He had more success a year later with the Cite de Refuge – a purpose-built hostel for children and the homeless he built for the Salvation Army in Paris.

When he visited America for a further lecture tour he felt that the skyscrapers were too small and too close together, but he did find a new client – the socialite divorcee Tjader Harris, who also became his lover. However, he was disappointed that no grand schemes in urban projects resulted from his contact with the New World.

When war broke out in Europe he was recruited as advisor to the war ministry (with the rank of colonel). He worked on designing a modular munitions factory, but when the Germans invaded and occupied Paris he fled to Petain’s headquarters in Vichy. It was at this point that his ideas concerning ‘modernity’. ‘The machine age’, and urban planning meshed all too easily with fascist ideology, and he collaborated with people who eventually deported eighty thousand Jews from France to the death camps.

His participation with the regime was in no way passive or accidental. He actively sought the support of Petain himself, and was eventually rewarded with a post on the committee for ‘Habitation and Urbanism’ of Paris. Here he worked alongside racists, eugenicists,and people who advocated euthanasia for ‘cleansing’ the capital’s population. Plagued by bureaucratic indecision and in-fighting, the committee never achieved anything, and Corbusier ended back in Paris running a sort of private college of architecture.

When France was liberated by the Allies in 1944 (and ten thousand collaborators had been executed) Corbusier merely made himself available to the De Gaul government and ever after whitewashed his collaborationist record of the war years. He was given a dream project – to construct a huge modernist apartment block in Marseille..

L’Unite d’Habitation – roof terrace 1952

He was working on several projects simultaneously when invited to join the scheme for a new United Nations headquarters in New York. He jumped at the chance, assuming that he would be its lead architect, even though he did suggest that Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe should join the team. The American venture boosted his already supercharged reputation – and ego. It enabled him to re-establish contact with his lover Tjader Harris; and it left his wife back home sinking deeper and deeper into alcoholism.

From time to time he flew back to check on the Marseille project which was coming under criticism from local bureaucrats for what they considered its outlandish design. They objected to kitchens in the same space as dining areas – something considered revolutionary at the time. As soon as he was absent in France, other people took over his design for the UN building, which was eventually attributed to the American architect Wallace K. Harrison.

But Corbusier had compensations – notably a commission to design a new mini-city in the Colombian capital, Bogota, and a new lover in the shape of journalist Hedwig Lauber. There was also an offer to design a new government headquarters in Chandigarh, India, a project personally endorsed by its leader, Pandit Nehru. This was his dream of total urbanisation come true. He was in his element, travelling first class between three continents.

Le Cabanon 1951

Whilst he was building a city for a government, he constructed for himself a holiday home in the south of France. It was a simple and box-shaped structure that on the outside looked like a log cabin. But the interior was lined with coloured plywood, which created a modernist statement. The single room construction was even made contiguous with the local restaurant whose owner he had befriended. This provided Yvonne with company during his many absences.

His national masterpiece, L’Unite d’Habitation was finished and opened in 1952. It housed three hundred families, had built-in shops and recreational areas, and a roof garden with nursery and swimming pool. A Second version was commissioned for Nantes, and he began work on what was to become one of his signature buildings – the chapel at Ronchamps.

This was a project designed to replace a simple church that had been destroyed by German bombs during the very last days of the war. It has become famous for its stark simplicity and its bizarre roof that has been described as ‘ a mix of partially crushed sombrero, a ram’s horn, and a bell-clapper’.

Notre Dame du Haut 1955

His wife continued to neglect her health, continued drinking, and eventually died in 1957. Shortly afterward Corbusier developed a multi-media installation for the Universal Exhibition at Brussels. This involved projected films and avant gard musical scores by Edward Varese and Iannis Xenakis, who at that time was working in Corbusier’s practice as an architect.

When his mother died at the age of ninety-nine, Corbusier had lost the two women underpinning his emotional life. He soldiered on alone, supported by a plethora of public accolades. He was showered with so many honorary degrees, he started turning them down.

Yet there continued to be professional frustrations and setbacks. Two major developments in Paris and New York came to nothing. In the face of these setbacks he fought back even more cantankerously than he had done before – until he eventually died doing what he had done all his adult life – swimming in the sea at his beloved gite at Roquebrune-cap-Martin.

Since then his longer term reputation as an architectural genius has been somewhat mixed. Open any architectural or interior design magazine today and you will see that his visual style is ubiquitous. The new norm is for minimalist decoration and open plan living. But some of his ideas on urbanisation now seem to smack dangerously of social engineering – and just as a by-the-way, the roofs on many of his buildings leaked.

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Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier: A Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, pp.848, ISBN: 0375410430

Leonora Carrington

October 8, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a surrealist painter and writer whose life spanned two centuries and two continents. She was born in Chorley, Lancashire to wealthy parents in textile manufacturing.
Educated by private tutors and nuns, she was a rebellious and disobedient child who was expelled from more than one school. Her father disapproved of her interest in art, but her mother encouraged her cultural ambitions.

As the daughter of an upper-class family she was expected to be a debutante, and was actually presented formally at the court of King George V. But when she continued to rebel, she was sent to study art in Florence, where she was impressed by medieval painting and architecture. On return to London she was enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and then at the academy run by expatriate cubist painter Amedee Ozenfant.

The year 1936 was something of an annus mirabilis for the nineteen year old student. She attended the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the New Burlington Galleries, and she read Herbert Read’s influential book Surrealism. She was attracted to the blend of realism and fantasy that the new artistic movement promoted. It also allowed her to blend the human with the animal world which is one of the striking features of her work.

Shortly afterwards she met Max Ernst, the German-born leader of both the Dadaism and Surrealism movements. He was forty-seven and married, she was twenty and single. They fell in love immediately, and the following year he dissolved his marriage and took her to Paris. He introduced her to other surrealist artists such as Joan Miro and Andre Breton. Their shared interests were reflected by the presence of birds and animals in their work.

Self-portrait 1936

Following this they moved to a small town in the Ardeche region of southern France, where they supported each other in painting and sculpture. She also experimented with automatic writing, which at that time was an integral part of surrealism. It was thought possible to tap into the unconscious mind by removing the critical, censoring element from the process of composition.

However, tragedy struck their idyll with the outbreak of war. Ernst was arrested by the French government for being a ‘hostile alien’. He was later released following the intercession of friends. But when the Germans occupied France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo who had him on their list of ‘degenerate artists’. He managed to escape to America with the help of Varian Fry and Peggy Guggenheim, whom he later married.

Leonora was devastated by the separation. She was forced to sell everything in France and escaped to Spain, where she suffered from paralysing anxiety attacks and delusional episodes. She was eventually hospitalised and subjected to the barbaric ‘convulsive therapy’ and anti-psychotic drug treatment that was thought necessary at that time for people with mental disorders. She was traumatised by this experience, and eventually sought refuge in the Mexican embassy in Lisbon. The whole of this ghastly period is recorded in her memoir Down Below.

She made the experience of all this distress the source of inspiration for many of her works – both in fiction and graphic art. This was not unlike her contemporary the artist Frieda Kahlo. In 1941 she married the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc whom she had met at the embassy. Like many marriages contracted around that time, it was one of convenience, enabling them to escape Europe. They went to New York, travelled down to Mexico, and divorced two years later. She remained in Mexico City for the rest of her life.

Her life was one of domestic seclusion – although she did become something of a cultural celebrity in the capital city. She met the Franco-Russian writer Victor Serge who was also living there in exile at the time. Later she married the Hungarian photographer Emeric Weisz with whom she had two sons, Pablo and Gabriel.

In the 1940s and 1950s her work became an interesting blend of her own fantasy and surrealism, Mexican folk lore and myth, and a growing sense of what we would now call ‘women’s liberation’. She wanted to explore the relationship of women’s bodies and sexuality with their psychological experiences of erotic life, of motherhood, and of domesticity.

She was completely unknown in Europe at that time, and remained so until she was ‘discovered’ in the early twenty-first century. But she exhibited in Mexico and had a certain following in New York. She had a close relationship with the Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo, who also lived in Mexican exile in the same neighbourhood. They even wrote collaboratively and attended meetings held by the Russian occultists Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

In the 1960s she collaborated with other members of the Latin-American avant-garde such as the writer Octavio Paz and the film maker Luis Bunuel. She was also honoured with a major retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. During the latter decades of her life she turned increasingly to three-dimensional works, producing bronze sculptures of humans and animals, as well as figures that combined both. She died in Mexico City in 2011 at the age of ninety-four. Her house in the Roma district has since been turned into a museum.

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington – biography – Amazon UK
The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington – biography – Amazon US

Down Below – Memoir – Amazon UK
Down Below – Memoir – Amazon US

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington – Amazon UK
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington – Amazon US

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Literature and the Great War

June 9, 2013 by Roy Johnson

conflict, culture, language, and literature 1914-1918

Literature and the Great War is a study of the relationship between language, literature, and the events of the conflicts that took place between 1914 and 1918. It also addresses the fact that quite a lot of what we call ‘war poetry’ and ‘first world war memoirs’ was not produced during that period, but many years later – for very good reasons.

With the exception of poetry, which can quickly capture impressions and emotions on the fly, most writing about major events in other genres such as stories, novels, documentaries, histories, and autobiographies require a period of reflection and digestion before they can be properly expressed. This is especially true of events as cataclysmically disruptive as the first world war – which turned the whole world’s view of itself upside down.

There were memorable and enduring works written during the conflict — Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916) and the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas. However, the majority of works which seem to encapsulate both the horrors of the war and the almost universal sense of disillusionment which followed were produced almost a decade later — Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929), Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929), Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (1929), Siegfried Sassoon Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), R.C. Sheriff Journey’s End (1929), Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

There are a number of explanations for this delay. Many people felt that the horrors of the war were almost too shocking to write about at the time – especially when official propaganda and the newspapers were telling everybody about ‘heroic’ victories and not mentioning the vast number of men slaughtered (the hundreds of thousands killed were described as ‘wastage’).

After the war very few combatants wanted to talk about their experiences, and those who had survived understandably wanted to simply get back to normal life, often feeling guilty about those they had left behind on the Somme, Passchendale, and Gallipoli.

Because everyone had been persuaded that it had been a ‘war to end all wars’ there was a general sense that optimism would prevail. But then in the 1920s came a period of economic collapse, austerity, and poverty throughout most of Europe. Instead of having fought a war to achieve a better world, it appeared that nothing had been achieved at all, and the huge sacrifice of lost lives had been wasted. .It was the period from late 1920s onward when the spate of angry, critical, and anti-establishment narratives concerning 1914—1918 were produced

Nor should it be thought that during the war itself the public were eager for critical accounts of the carnage, the gassings, and the colossal numbers of people killed. Some of the most popular publications at the time were patriotic and religious works speaking to ‘heroism’, ‘sacrifice’. and ‘victory’.

Stevenson’s (persuasive) argument is that society in the post-war period felt saturated by this sort of language, and writers purged their vocabularies of these now-corrupted abstract generalisations. They used instead a language of concrete nouns, in which only that-which-can-be-known was named. Hence the rise in popularity in the 1920s of writers such as Ernest Hemingway, whose terse and pared-down literary prose style had been shaped by his experience of the first world war:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain … I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago …. Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) were enormously popular at the time, and went on to influence two or three generations of writers (particularly writers of thrillers and crime fiction) until the fashion for this sort of writing faded (following Hemingway’s suicide) in the 1960s.

Stevenson argues that the war produced a fracturing of time and language. Events began to be described as ‘pre-war’ and post-war’; double summer-time was introduced; and ordinary men and women were plunged into a linguistic vortex in which official language in no way reflected the reality they faced every day in the trenches.

An interesting point he makes about the language of the war is that many of the volunteers and conscripts who took part from the early days of 1914 onwards would be young men (almost boys) who at that time had probably never travelled more than a few miles beyond their own towns and villages. Consequently, since there was at that time, no national broadcasting system, they would never have heard speech other than their own regional accents.

In addition to this, they were plunged into Picardy, where the vast majority of them had never heard the French language spoken before. It is not surprising that towns such as Ypres and Auchonvillers were translated into ‘Wipers and ‘Ocean Villas’ and indeed the satirical newspaper produced by the troops was called the Wipers Times. Newly conscipted men also had to grapple with enormous amounts of army slang and jargon – some of it remnants of the imperial past. Words such as cushy, blighty, and dekko were Hindi or Urdu in origin.

The latter part of the book is devoted largely to the reception and evaluation of poetry produced during the war and in the years since, reminding us that at the time religious and patriotic poetry was far more highly regarded, whereas the critical reputation of writers such as Owen, Thomas, and Sassoon has taken much longer to establish

I was glad to see that he put the reputation of Rupert Brooke into perspective. Brooke had glorified a jingoistic sense of Englishness and war prior to 1914 but didn’t actually have any first-hand experience of combat – dying of a rather inglorious flea bite before he reached Gallipoli.

Stevenson does his best to be fair to modernists such as T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf, but he misses the opportunity to note that almost the whole of the Bloomsbury Group and its adherents were pacifists during 1914-1918. And this was not based simply on an unwillingness to fight, but on a genuine sense of internationalism and the belief that the war was a huge mistake which need not have taken place. Indeed, before the war had even ended Leonard Woolf helped set up the League of Nations (which went on to become the United Nations) with the sole aim of preventing any further conflicts of its size and kind between nations.

This was an extremely unpopular view to hold at the time – though it has become increasingly sane with hindsight. People were jailed for ‘conscientious objection’ and of course this is a period when young men were executed and crucified in no-man’s-land for crimes of ‘cowardice’ and falling asleep on duty. The only other people to oppose the war on internationalist grounds were figures such as Trotsky and Lenin.

Stevenson’s final chapter considers revisionist histories of the war which have been produced in recent years. He gives their defence of the blundering generals and the gigantic carnage a fair hearing, but eventually undermines their arguments with a few well chosen quotations that emphasise his concluding argument – that we need to read closely and not be swayed by rhetoric and false metaphors.

Revisionist history cannot be accused of ignoring the war’s loss and mutilation. [Gary Sheffield’s] Forgotten Victory is regularly attentive to the ‘callous arithmetic of battle’ and the ‘butcher’s bill’ that resulted. Yet Sheffield also suggests that at one stage that the Canadians’ capture of Vimy Ridge in 1917 was achieved ‘with relatively little difficulty, although at the cost of 11,000 casualties’. Such remarks cast doubt on his promise of ‘analysis based on firm grasp of the facts’. Avoidance of difficulty, even relatively, at the cost of 11,000 casualties, is not fact but interpretation, the kind of interpretation the generals were apt to make themselves.

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Randall Stevenson, Literature and the Great War 1914-1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp.262, ISBN: 019959645X

Ludwig Wittgenstein

May 8, 2015 by Roy Johnson

portrait of the tortured Anglo-Austrian ‘genius’

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was born into an aristocratic and fabulously wealthy family in Vienna at a time when it was the epicentre of the Hapsburg empire. The family was Jewish, but had largely converted to Christianity. It provided a very rich cultural and intellectual environment – Brahms, Mahler, Klimt and Schiele were family friends. Ludwig was the youngest of eight very talented children but was regarded in comparison as not very bright. He studied at the same secondary school in Linz as Adolf Hitler, did poorly in most subjects, lost any scraps of religious belief. and came under the influence of Schopenhauer, Karl Kraus, and the anti-Semitic misogynist work Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, a homosexual and Jew who became a cult figure following his suicide at the age of twenty-three.

Even though Wittgenstein’s first thoughts about philosophy began in his late teenage years he continued his studies in engineering (under his father’s influence) and in 1908 went to Manchester to study the very young discipline of aeronautics. He invented an early form of jet engine and even patented the design for a propeller – but his real interest had been piqued by reading Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics. In 1911 he introduced himself to Russell at Trinity College Cambridge – a meeting which was to be decisive for both of them. He gave up engineering and the following year became Russell’s student.

Bertrand Russell

The relationship between them was complex and emotional. Russell regarded Wittgenstein as his intellectual successor in the study of philosophy, but quickly tired of his self-obsessed rantings and his neurotic behaviour. As a recognised ‘genius’ ( though still only twenty-four and an undergraduate student) Wittgenstein was immediately proposed as an Apostle – but he resigned the honour just as immediately, despite the support and continued sponsorship of the prestigious John Maynard Keynes.

Wittgenstein formed a close bond with fellow student David Pinsent – and given what we know of his later homosexuality it is difficult to escape the suggestion that a great deal of his lacerating self-criticism and worries about ‘sin’ and ‘one great flaw’ are attributable to repressed homo-eroticism. They took a holiday together in Norway which was full of emotional scenes, fallings-out, and reconciliations.

Meanwhile, Russell’s work on the fundamentals of logic was abandoned because of Wittgenstein’s criticisms. Russell handed over the baton to his student, his own confidence completely shattered. Wittgenstein developed the neurotic idea that he was shortly going to die, and that in order to complete his great work he must cut himself off from society and live alone like a hermit. This also included leaving Cambridge, so he went to live in a remote Norwegian village for a year, submerged himself in logic, put his relationship with Russell on a cooler footing, and immediately started paying court to G.E. Moore, who was a central figure at Cambridge following the success of his Principia Ethica in 1903.

However, when he discovered that his work on logic could not be submitted for his B.A. degree (because it entirely lacked a preface, structure, examples, and critical aparatus) he took out his anger on the unsuspecting Moore, and the two of them did not speak again for fifteen years. Following this disappointment he returned home to Vienna and gave large sums from his personal fortune to literary artists and painters whose work he did not know at all.

The soldier

At the outbreak of war in 1914 he immediately enlisted in the army but since Austria was at war with Britain he found himself on the opposite side to all his friends. He served in a variety of menial roles for a year before he was granted his fervent wish – to go to the front and face death. He did face it – and behaved with conspicuous bravery. It is amazing to note that despite his active military service, he continued to work on what became his magnum opus, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But he also changed its original purpose: the final work on symbolic logic was blended with reflections on religious mysticism, which is one of the reasons why the work is still so difficult to understand. But his death wish was denied him. He was taken prisoner by the Italians at Monte Cassino and was not released until August 1919.

After the war, he was a changed man. He continued to wear his army uniform (of a state that no longer existed) ; he gave away all his money to his brothers and sisters (who were already enormously wealthy); and he enrolled to train as an infant school teacher. He could not get his book published (or understood) and he was beset by repeated thoughts of suicide as he grappled with his inner daemons . (It’s worth noting that three of his brothers had previously committed suicide.) His experiences as a village schoolmaster were at first a relief from his Weltschmerz, but within a couple of terms he had concluded that the local villagers were ‘loathsome worms’.

Then in 1922 his luck changed: his book was published in both Britain and Germany – though because of the work’s inherent unreadability he didn’t receive any royalty from sales. He continued working hard but unhappily in rural schools until his penchant for corporal punishment got the better of him, and when a young boy collapsed after a beating around the head. Wittgenstein disappeared the same day.

The architect

Following this crisis Wittgenstein tried to become a monk, but was rejected by the monastery because of his ‘unsound motives’, so he took work as a gardener, then threw himself into work on the design of a house for his sister Gretl. He also became mildly enamoured of a Viennese woman Marguerite Respinger, but his idea of love was of a sexless, platonic kind. Then gradually, via meetings with other Viennese philosophers, his original interests resurfaced, and he felt the need to return to Cambridge.

In 1919 he was forgiven and re-admitted as an Apostle; he registered as a PhD student, and worked with a supervisor who was seventeen years younger than him. He made new acquaintances (including the literary critic F.R. Leavis) continued ‘research’ which consisted largely of challenging his own previous ideas, and enjoyed watching westerns at the cinema with his non-philosophic friend Gilbert Pattisson. He was awarded a doctorate for his Tractatus, after a farcical viva in which he forgave his supervisors (Russell and Moore) for their inability to understand his work.

In 1930 he was awarded a five year fellowship on the strength of what was published after his death as Philosophic Remarks. This cleared him to abandon philosophic theory and start to concentrate on language. Many of his approaches and attitudes at this period chimed in rather unfortunately with the reactionary notions popularised by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the Westwhich was influential around this time. This makes it less surprising that his next development was to look into the subject of magic and Frazer’s The Golden Bough (which T.S. Eliot had done some years previously) and it is even less surprising to realise that this led in its turn into outright anti-Semitism.

The apostate

Wittgenstein was very ambivalent about his racial heritage. His family were Jews who had largely converted to Christianity (Catholicism) but it was fairly clear that part of his anguished self-criticism sprung from an unwillingness to confront the truth of his origins (as in the case of his wealth and privilege) and the consequence of the self-hating and anti-Semitic Jew corresponds directly with the influence of Otto Weininger, whose reactionary opinions seem to run through Wittgenstein’s life like letters through a stick of rock.

Meanwhile he invited Marguerite, the woman he thought he was going to marry, for a three week holiday in Norway. He hardly saw her at all during that time, having also invited his friend Gilbert Pattisson. Not surprisingly, she decided he was not the marrying kind and left for Rome after two weeks. During this period Wittgenstein’s intellectual work proceeded in two directions: one was to undermine current notions of the philosophy of mathematics (he regarded maths as merely a technique for measurement) and the other was looking more and more closely into the roots of grammar, inventing for himself what he called ‘language games’.

At a personal level he became very close friends and eventually the lover of another young, clever, and very handsome undergraduate, Francis Skinner, someone who despite all his brilliance and promise, Wittgenstein eventually persuaded to give up academic life to work as a factory mechanic, which resulted in him becoming profoundly unhappy. Wittgenstein repeatedly urged the virtue of manual labour onto his students, whilst retaining his own position as a professional academic philosopher.

His teaching methods around this time were distinctly unorthodox. He gave up delivering lectures because they had become so popular. Instead, he dictated his ideas to a small group of favoured students, then let them circulate their notes amongst other students. This is the origin of what became known as The Blue and Brown Notebooks.

As his fellowship at Cambridge came towards its close, he faced another period of self-doubt and uncertainty. For a while there was a hare-brained scheme of going to work as a manual labourer in the Soviet Union – but that came to nothing, even after letters of introduction from the Russian ambassador in London. Instead, he retreated once again to living alone in Norway.

The confessions

However, from there he paid visits back home to Vienna and Cambridge to deliver a Tolstoyan ‘Confessions’ of his sins to friends and relatives. These turned out to be embarrassing revelations of trivial peccadillos and omissions of truthfulness which left most of his listeners mystified. What he doesn’t seem to have included is any mention of his homosexuality, which was subsumed under the heading of ‘sensuality’ in his diaries, along with detailed reports of his feelings of shame at masturbating.

In 1937, amidst Hitler’s manoeuvres to annex Austria, he was back in Vienna, missing Skinner but feeling at the same time that he should steer clear of ‘sensual temptations’. Instead he went to Dublin to investigate the possibility of a career in medicine. But following the Anschluss and his reclassification as a German Jew, he followed the advice of his friend and fellow philosopher Sraffa and obtained a job as research assistant at Cambridge and applied for British citizenship, which was granted in June 1939.

He moved in with Skinner and they lived together as a couple for the next two years. Wittgenstein was elected Professor of Philosophy and continued his lectures criticising what he saw as ‘scientific idol worship’. One of the students in his select audience who dared to take an opposing view was the young Alan Turing, who went on to develop his own philosophy of mathematics (in Manchester) to establish the foundations of modern computing.

When the war got under way two further events changed the direction of his life. First the sudden death of his lover Francis Skinner, and second his decision that he must give up teaching and take up some form of manual labour. He became a hospital porter at Guy’s Hospital in London. However, when his talents (and identity) were recognised, he was invited to join a medical research team based in Newcastle.

His next move was to Swansea where he had been given permission to continue his work in private. He continued with the philosophy of mathematics as his main concern, but began to include reflections on Freudian psychology and what he called ‘private language’. He arrived back in Cambridge in 1946 at the same time as his old tutor Bertrand Russell, who had been in America during the war. Both of them though the recent work of the other was worthless.

The living death

Following the end of the war, he was severely critical of the British government and its punitive attitude towards Germany, and he became rather sympathetic to the Left, though from a deeply conservative and an anti-science point of view. His antipathy to professional philosophy also deepened, and he regarded his own professorship as ‘an absurd …kind of living death’.

But as he wrestled with his pessimism and his plans to abandon philosophy (especially Cambridge) a glimmer of light came into his life. He fell in love with Ben Richards, a medical undergraduate almost forty years his junior. But to his existential worries was now added the issue raised by all such relationships – would it last? He answered this question for himself in characteristically perverse fashion by resigning from his post and going to live alone in a remote part of Ireland for the next year.

Once there, he thought he was losing the ability to do any constructive work, and the locals all thought he was mad. His only form of entertainment continued to be detective magazines and American ‘hard-boiled’ fiction. After a holiday in Vienna and Cambridge, he went to live in a hotel in Dublin, where he became a member of the Zoological Gardens in Phoenix Park. At first his work went well, but then he became ill and depressed, and despite uplifting visits from Ben Richards he began to feel that the end was drawing nearer.

In fact he had two years left to live, and he spent them living with friends in New York, Cambridge, and Oxford. He participated in philosophy seminars at Cornell University, but then became ill and felt he must return to Europe to die. Back in Cambridge he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He returned to live in the family palace in Vienna (where his sister was also dying) taking a great deal of trouble to conceal the nature of his disease from his relatives.

When the hormone treatment for his cancer brought about improvement, he moved back to Cambridge, despite all his continuing claims that he was disgusted by English culture. He undertook another holiday trip to Norway with Ben Richards, but his illness forced him back, where he moved into his doctor’s appropriately named house, ‘Storeys End’. The hormone treatment was stopped; he realised he was soon to die; and he put in a final creative burst for the last two months of his life, then died in April 1951 at the age of sixty-two.

*****

Wittgenstein spent a great deal of his adult life in states of anguish, anxiety, and despair, even though he was very successful and became internationally famous. In this sense he was not unlike his fellow genius of the Hapsburg Empire and near contemporary, Franz Kafka, of whose works Wittgenstein remarked – ‘That man gives himself a great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble’ (though he could almost be speaking about himself). This apparent contradiction and perversity in Wittgenstein’s nature can perhaps be illuminated if not fully explained by a comparison with Leo Tolstoy.

Both Wittgenstein and Tolstoy came from extremely wealthy families with estates and retinues of servants; both felt guilty about the social privilege they enjoyed, and both ended up giving away their fortunes. Both of them adopted puritanical and Spartan lifestyles and became more or less vegetarian. Both of them felt driven by but enormously guilty about their sexual urges. In addition to this Wittgenstein was also homosexual, about which he would be forced to be secretive during the period he lived.

Both of them were obsessed with a religious belief in fundamental Christianity whose policies and practices they could not possibly maintain. Wittgenstein also knew that he was fundamentally Jewish, but tried to evade the fact. They were both intellectuals who railed against the intellectual establishment and preached the values of ‘the simple life’ and the moral dignity of manual labour – whilst keeping servants or being looked after by friends.

Both professed to yearn for a life in close proximity to simple peasants, but were appalled by the reality when they tried it. Both of them were misogynists; both of them affected workmen’s clothes; both were sceptical about scientific development, and both of them ended by repudiating their earlier works – Wittgenstein for intellectual reasons, Tolstoy for moral. This may not be a full explanation for his neuroses, but it suggests that they were not unique. Ray Monks’ magnificent biography is evasive on the issue of Wittgenstein’s homosexuality and it downplays the damaging effect of his peronality on the people who were attracted to him, but he presents a sufficiently comprehensive account of the life to enable us to make our own judgements on this very complex character.

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Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London: Vintage Books, 1991, pp.654, ISBN: 0099883708

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Malte Laurids Brigge

May 25, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorials, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) is a ‘work’ in prose written by the Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It is commonly regarded as a novel, but as a work of radical modernism it breaks all the rules commonly underpinning a sustained work of fiction. It pre-dates other major works of modernism by more than a decade, but has never become as well known as novels such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) or D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1924). The reasons for this may become apparent from the critical comments that follow.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – commentary

Modernism

The most striking feature of Malte Laurids Brigge is that it marks a radical departure in terms of the presentation of fictional narrative. It also embraces just about every characteristic of what became known as literary modernism. The dates of the book’s composition (1906-1910) coincide with the development of modernism in general.

Although the subject is largely a young man’s recollections of his childhood, there is a complete fragmentation of the narrative, with no attempt at chronological progression. There is very little indication of a sequence of events or any indication of the relationship of one notebook entry to another. The result is a mosaic of episodes, held together only by the personality of the narrator.

The same radical departure is true of the other main feature of traditional fiction – characterisation. There are thumbnail sketches of characters known to Malte – his relatives or people who feature in his anecdotes. But none of them are developed, and people he sees in the street (or doesn’t see in the next room) are given just as much importance as close relatives

There is no sense of dramatic tension in the narrative at all – no story, plot, or psychological development to engage a reader’s interest in the manner of conventional fiction.

The subject matter and the form of the individual notebook entries are radically heterogeneous. They begin with anguished accounts of living in reduced circumstances in Paris. They pass on to childhood memories of life in Denmark. They include quasi-philosophic reflections on sometimes bizarre topics – such as feeding pigeons and the noise made by the lid from a tin can. There are impressionistic accounts of paintings and some tapestries. And one entry is a critical essay on the works of Henrik Ibsen.

The main themes

Despite the varied nature of the notebook entries, there is a general theme that emerges from them. They have in common the decline of the aristocracy, the collapse of an empire, and the narrator’s regret for the passing of a grand way of life. Malte’s first-person account of his childhood reveals a family background of a rich, land-owning aristocracy.

His memories revolve around two grand estates at Ulsgaard and Urnekloster, the family seats of the Brigges and Brahes in Denmark. He takes a lofty pride in describing his ancestral homes, with their portrait galleries, the number and size of their rooms, and the long and distinguished history of their land-owning families.

His re-telling of historical events and the details of his personal reading all feature aristocratic dignitaries, plus their levels of rank and social status. He deals with kings, knights and people who died either in battle or in gruesome circumstances. His anecdotes are littered with images of crowns, swords, flags, and the paraphernalia of the ruling class – all presented sympathetically, with profound regret for the passing of their influence.

It is significant that in the narrative present of the notebook entries, the protagonist Malte’s inherited furniture is in storage, and he is living in temporary accommodation in Paris. He is clearly unable to cope psychologically with the change in his circumstances.

The book is rather like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) in plotting the decline of a way of life which was to be swept away forever by the events of the first world war which took place only a few years later. The whole of the Hapsburg empire which then encompassed Austro-Hungary and beyond was in a morbid bureaucratic decline which 1914-18 put an end to forever.

Kafka and Wittgenstein

There are amazing similarities between Rilke and two other writers with Hapsburg origins. Like Rilke, Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, wrote in German, and died within two years of his fellow countryman. Although Kafka is known as a novelist, the vast majority of his work consists of fragmentary writings in notebooks and diaries – very similar to Malte’s notebook entries. His subject matter, like Rilke’s, is expressed in the study of very unusual states of being, psychological tension, and neurotic attention to the trivial detail of everyday life.

There is very little dramatic tension in Kafka’s writings, which are sometimes philosophic meditations on everyday topics, sometimes elaborate metaphors spun out of a startling image, and often quasi-mystic or semi-religious beliefs stated in gnomic aphorisms or ambiguous mantras.

The other writer with whom Rilke has distinct similarities is Ludwig Wittgenstein – who was also a product of the fin-de-siecle Hapsburg Empire. Wittgenstein was from Vienna, and was born into a rich aristocratic family in 1889. He too was riven by self doubt (like Malte and all Kafka’s protagonists) and like Rilke he wrote his ideas in the form of numbered paragraphs in notebooks. He also expressed himself in the form of philosophic reflections and quasi-religious meditations.

Is it a novel?

Rilke himself never referred to Malte Laurids Brigge as a novel: he used the terms ‘book’ or ‘work’ – and the bulk of Rilke’s writing was poetry. Nevertheless, the book is commonly discussed as if it were a novel, and in the one hundred years since its publication readers have become accustomed to all sorts of experimental prose fictions.

But it certainly does not tell a story, and it does not have memorable characters or show anybody’s psychological development. Its parts or episodes are not coherently linked; there is no dramatic tension at all; and the un-coordinated switching from one topic to another makes it very difficult to read. The critic and novelist A.N. Wilson captured some of this problem in his review of the book – which he admits took him a month to read:

It is, in fact, barely 200 pages long, but it is, among other things, an autobiography, a travelogue (Russia, Venice, Paris, Denmark), a fantasy about the twilight of the old European aristocracy, a series of historical sketches, with vignettes as various as those of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Ivan the Terrible and Eleanora Duse, and a poet’s notebook, attempting to come to grips with such everlasting questions as the nature of consciousness, our need for love, and whether or not we could ever love God.

Rilke delivers re-imagined historical scenes from the lives of fourteenth and fifteenth century French kings – but does not identify who they are. These passages would be incomprehensible without the addition of explanatory footnotes and endnotes supplied by the editor. And even with the glossary material it is very difficult to see their relevance to the rest of the narrative – except to reinforce the impression that Malte is obsessed with royalty, aristocratic status, inheritance, and death – either by disease, regicide, or battlefield slaughter.

He also recounts in minute detail the lives of people he has never met or even seen. There is a lengthy account of a poor news vendor in Paris during which Malte speculates about the man’s state of mind from his shabby appearance. Having done that he then confesses that his account is invalid:

I knew at once that my mental image of him was worthless. The abjectness of his misery, not mitigated by any wariness or pretence, was beyond anything I might be able to convey. I had grasped neither the angle of his posture nor the horror with which the inside of his eyelids seemed continually to imbue him.

It is bad enough that two pages of detailed description are suddenly declared ‘worthless’. If that is the case, why retain them as part of the narrative? But to then pretend knowledge of the psychological effect produced by the inside of a stranger’s eyelids is nothing short of ridiculous. The only possible justification for such statements is that they reveal Malte’s deranged state of mind – a topic which is not consistently addressed.

In the first of the notebook entries, when Malte describes his life in Paris, he is mentally unhinged and paranoid. But as further entries are added, this presentation of madness recedes, and there is every reason to believe that the content of the memoirs and anecdotes should be taken seriously, at face value.

There is therefore a difficulty presented to the reader – reconciling these disparate states of mind and perception within one consciousness. But this fracturing of subject and point of view is all part of what makes the Notebooks an essentially modernist work. It is rather like a prose equivalent of Eliot’s The Waste Land, though it should be noted that it precedes it by more than a decade.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – resources

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – OUP – Amazon UK

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – OUP – Amazon US

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Penguin – Amazon US

Malte Lurids Brigge

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – synopsis

Following the death of his parents a Danish aristocrat Malte Laurids Brigge is living in reduced circumstances in Paris. He is in a neurotic state of mind and appears to be suffering from paranoia. In a series of fragmentary notebook entries he recaptures his past and makes observations on life.

Metaphysical reflections on dying and death – including the idea that people have ‘ownership ‘ of their own death.

Childhood memories of living in a castle amongst eccentric and aristocratic relatives.

A detailed account of a visit in the dining room from the beautiful Cristina Brigge – who has been dead for some time.

Malte hides from his poverty by reading poetry in the Biblioteque Nationale – but is still possessed by paranoid fears.

He pays a visit to a psychiatric hospital, but his neurotic childhood fears return to haunt him.

He describes in great detail his attempts to help a man suffering from St Vitus’ Dance, then writes an oblique appreciation of the works of Henrick Ibsen

Childhood memories of illness and isolation, including the uncanny incident of meeting a disembodied hand under a table.

He becomes seriously ill with a fever, and is nursed by his mother, with whom he has an especially close bond.

Exploring the castle as a child, he dresses up in carnival costume, feels that he loses his own identity, and faints with fear.

He inspects the portraits of aristocratic relatives in the castle, then recalls the cold and remote behaviour of his relatives, even at the family dinner table.

He finds his aunt Abelone very attractive and describes to her in detail a series of heraldic tapestries.

He visits a neighbouring estate where the grand house has burned down and family are forced to live in in a few remaining rooms.

He recalls the death of his father and the medical ritual of piercing the heart as a precaution against premature burial.

Following the death of his father, he prepares to leave Copenhagen. He contemplates various examples of dying, then the story of a neighbour who thinks he can accumulate saved time like money deposited in a bank account.

He describes the activity of his next-door neighbour in Paris – without any evidence that what he is saying is true. This is followed by philosophic reflections on the ‘life’ of material objects, including the lid from a tin can.

He recalls books he has read and treasured, and goes on to re-tell the story of the death of Dmitry I, the false Tsar.

He presents his theory of the Duke of Burgundy’s blood and a detailed account of his death in battle.

He describes the genesis of his attitudes to reading, and then delivers a psychological critique of Goethe’s letters to young Bettina von Arnim.

He gives a detailed account of a news vendor in Paris, including the inside of his eyelids – and then reveals that his account is flawed.

He re-tells the personal history of a nineteenth-century French king who went mad, and describes yet another scene of slaughter on a battlefield.

Trivial episodes from his own childhood suddenly become further episodes in the lives of French kings and the Pope at Avignon.

A visit to the Roman amphitheatre in Orange leads to a meditation on drama and the acting career of Eleanora Duse.

He posits an elderly man reading poetry alone late at night. He believes that because the work is ancient it can express a state of completeness.

In Venice he encounters an attractive Danish girl who sings very beautifully.

He offers a meditation on the parable of the prodigal son, and wonders how it might be possible to draw nearer to God.

Marcel Proust translations

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a comparison of the three generally available versions

Most English-speaking readers will choose to read Marcel Proust in translation. And his literary style is quite demanding. His sentences are long, the paragraphs are huge, and his great novel is one of the longest ever – at a million and a half words. But the effort is worthwhile – and the benefits are enormous. Proust offers gems of psychological perception on every page, and his characters come alive in a way which makes you feel they become your personal friends. There is very little in the way of plot, suspense, or even story in a conventional sense. This modern classic is one which depicts an entire world of upper-class fin de siècle French characters circling round each other before and shortly after the First World War.

The greatest depths of insight he offers are in the form of profound reflections on some of the most important issues any novelist can approach – love, desire, memory, time, and death. These are presented in the form of extended aphorisms, embedded as part of his narrative in such a way that you will hardly be aware where one ends and the other begins.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

Eventually, it comes down to which translation should you read – and in English there are three options currently in print. My favourite is the oldest by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. It was first to appear as the original volumes were published, and it even had Proust’s own blessing. Although it is based on a version of the French original which was not complete, it has a charm all of its own. There may be technical errors here and there, but it will take a long time for any of the subsequent translations to supersede its elegance and the powerful influence it has had. It is still held in high regard as a work of literary interpretation.

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The second option is an edition which is based on the Scott Moncrieff original translation, but which was revised and re-translated by Terrence Kilmartin in the 1990s. This version is also informed by updated versions of the original text in French, including new material which has come to light since the author’s death. Kilmartin’s work was then itself edited by D.J.Enright. So this version comes to us with a guarantee of completeness and accuracy, but with the traces of three different translators’ hands since the original work. Each volume contains its own notes, addenda, and a synopsis, so readers new to Proust can feel supported by this additional material.

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This same tanslation by Kilmartin and Enright is now also available in Everyman’s Library Classics edition. It’s available in both hardback and paperback versions, and they have the advantage of being presented in just four volumes, which keeps down the cost of the complete work.

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The most recent version was produced by seven different translators. This has the advantage of being the most up to date. It is based on the latest version of a text with a very tangled provenance, and each translator writes a preface on the problems of translation. This version got a mixed reception when it first appeared. Some people argue that it removes a certain prissiness which had clung to the English version of Proust since Scott Moncrieff’s translation. Others have claimed that it introduces new problems and lacks a unifying voice. Perhaps the best reason for choosing it is that it’s now generally available at a cut-down price in a handy boxed set.

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The Cambridge Companion to Proust provides essays on the major features of Marcel Proust’s great work. These investigate such essential areas as the composition of the novel, its social dimension, the language in which it is couched, its intellectual parameters, its humour, its analytical profundity and its wide appeal and influence. This is suitable for those who want to study Proust in depth. The discussion is illustrated by textual quotation (in both French and English) and close analysis. This is the only volume of its kind on Proust currently available. It contains a detailed chronology and bibliography.

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Marcel Proust is the definitive biography, by George Painter. This study has become famous in its own right, because it combines deep insights with scholarly rigour – and it is also written in a very stylish manner. Painter sketches in the background to Parisian society, which provides a historical context for what follows. He then traces Proust’s singular life (the neurasthenia, the ‘job’ he kept for one day, the cork-lined bedroom) up to his death in 1922 – where he was still revising his masterpiece in bed, which is where he had written most of it. This is regarded as a classic of modern biography, and in 1965 it was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.

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Marcel Proust – web links

Marcel Proust at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guide to ‘In Search of Lost Time’. comparison of the English translations, book reviews, web links, study resources.

Marcel Proust at Project Gutenberg
A collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats, mainly in French.

Marcel Proust at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, early works, bibliography, further reading, and web links.

Marcel Proust at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus production notes, box office, trivia and quiz.

Temps Perdu.com
Translations, collector’s editions, Proust chronology, characters in the novel, film audio and music, online version of the novel, and discussion groups.

The Kolb-Proust Archive
An online searchable database of Proust’s correspondence in French and English, plus further study resources and related web sites. – located at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Picture gallery, bibliography, who’s who, video and audio files, and web links.

Marcel Proust – Ephemera Site
Juvenilia, articles, pastiches, poetry, letters – materials unavailable elsewhere.

More on Marcel Proust
Twentieth century literature
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Marcel Proust web links

December 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Marcel Proust web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

Marcel Proust – web links

Marcel Proust at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guide to ‘In Search of Lost Time’. comparison of the English translations, book reviews, web links, study resources.

Marcel Proust at Project Gutenberg
A collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats, mainly in French.

Marcel Proust at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, early works, bibliography, further reading, and web links.

Temps Perdu.com
Translations, collector’s editions, Proust chronology, characters in the novel, film audio and music, online version of the novel, and discussion groups.

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Picture gallery, bibliography, who’s who, video and audio files, and web links.

Marcel Proust – Ephemera Site
Juvenilia, articles, pastiches, poetry, letters – materials unavailable elsewhere.

WRITING – I

Mont Blanc – Marcel Proust special edition

Don’t let this glamorous fountain pen deceive you. Marcel Proust’s writing instruments and his notebooks were quite humble. He used Sergent-Major nibs and pen holder which were the cheapest of their kind. For paper, he used the common French school children’s exercise notebooks which he purchased in bulk.

The Cambridge Companion to Proust
This compilation provides essays on the major features of Marcel Proust’s great work. These investigate such essential areas as the composition of the novel, its social dimension, the language in which it is couched, its intellectual parameters, its humour, its analytical profundity and its wide appeal and influence. This is suitable for those who want to study Proust in depth. The discussion is illustrated by textual quotation (in both French and English) and close analysis. This is the only volume of its kind on Proust currently available. It contains a detailed chronology and bibliography.

More on Marcel Proust
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

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Kew Gardens – critical commentary

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Virginia Woolf podcast

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his life, loves, and works

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conflict, culture, language, and literature 1914-1918

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Malte Laurids Brigge

tutorials, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – commentary

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – resources

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – synopsis

Marcel Proust translations

a comparison of the three generally available versions

Marcel Proust – web links

Marcel Proust web links

a selection of web-based archives and resources

Marcel Proust – web links

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