The Short Story Archives - Page 25 of 31

The Planter of Malata

August 24, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Planter of Malata was written in 1914, and first appeared as part of the collection Within the Tides published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1915. The other stories in the volume were The Partner, The Inn of the Two Witches, and Because of the Dollars.

The Planter of Malata – critical commentary

Mystery and suspense

Most first-time readers will have little difficulty working out the mystery of the assistant’s identity. That’s largely because all the communication links between the island, the imperial city, and the correspondent in England are spelled out in a way that draws attention to them. It’s also because the very existence of the assistant acts as a form of what is known as ‘Chekhov’s gun’. This is a dramatic principle established by the Russian dramatist and short story writer that everything in a narrative should be necessary and anything unnecessary should be removed.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

After all, Renouard wants to live alone; he does not need an assistant; and he rather uncharacteristically takes him on without knowing anything about him. If the assistant did not have any significance for the narrative, there would be no requirement for his existence in it.

Vigilant readers will suspect this plot development in advance, but Conrad adds a very dramatic twist with the news that the assistant is in fact dead. This is cheating slightly in the compact between author and reader, because we have no way of knowing or even suspecting this in advance. Renouard knows that his assistant is dead, but in the early part of the tale he does not necessarily know that this is the man the Moorsom’s are looking for – because of the confusion in names. They are searching for ‘Arthur’: he only knows that his assistant was called ‘A.Walter’.

Theme

If there is a submerged theme it is that of ‘disappearance’. Renouard wishes to disappear from society in general – which is why he has established himself on the remote island of Malata in the first place. He is drawn back into the gravitational field of society by the powerful sexual attraction he feels for Felicia when he meets her. It might even be argued that this leads to his downfall,

‘Master Arthur’ wishes to disappear because of the financial disgrace in which he has been (falsely) implicated. He escapes to a remote island at the other side of the world and disappears into a life of drugs which leads to his death.

And Renouard too finally disappears. Conrad uses the age-old device of his clothes left on the sea shore. He may have commited a suicide of sorts, or he may have simply removed all traces of his existence and moved on somewhere else. Either way – he has disappeared from the narrative.

The Planter of Malata – study resources

The Planter of Malata – CreateSpace – Amazon UK

The Planter of Malata – CreateSpace – Amazon US

The Planter of Malata – Kindle eBook

The Planter of Malata – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Planter of Malata – plot summary

Part I. After five years of exploration and adventure Jeffrey Renouard has settled in seclusion on the island of Malata with an assistant, and has recently been granted the silk farming concession. In conversation with his friend a newspaper editor in the colonial city (Singapore?) Renouard reports having been invited to a dinner party, where he met Felicia Moorsom and was very struck by her attractiveness and her interest in his own background. Renouard lives in isolation and is not used to socialising.

Part II. The editor reveals to Renouard that the Moorsoms are staying in the city incognito. He advises him to let Professor Moorsom into the profitable silk farming business. The Moorsoms have come in search of a man who was engaged to Felicia for a year, but who became involved in a financial scandal and pulled out of the engagement. A subsequent but separate scandal has however revealed his innocence. Felicia wishes to reclaim him, but he cannot be found anywhere. The editor has been asked to join in the search. Renouard goes back to his ship and realises that he has been powerfully affected by the girl.

Part III. Next day the editor reports to Renouard that he has met the Moorsoms at dinner, and that the search for the missing fiancé ‘Master Arthur’ has begun in earnest. That afternoon Renouard visits the Moorsoms and once again is stongly affected by Felicia. He hopes the search for Arthur will last a long time.

Part IV. That night Renouard has a vivid dream of searching in palaces and finding a marble bust which turns out to be Felicia’s head. He then interprets his own dream, after which he becomes a regular visitor to the Moorsoms. He admits to himself that he is desperately in love with a woman who is searching for another man. He has to exercise great self-control to conceal his passionate feelings for her.

Part V. Professor Moorsom reveals to Renouard his strong reservations about Arthur, and his wish to move on to pursue his business engagements. He even doubts his own daughter and her judgements. He asks Renouard to help him by pouring cold water on her plans, and he invites him back to dinner that night.

Part VI. Although he contemplates running away, Renouard attends the dinner. Professor Moorsom again asks him to discourage Felicia in her quest. Renouard makes a very feeble attempt, but she proves immovable in her resolve. She also confirms that no messages have arrived in England from the colonial city.

Part VII. Suddenly the editor arrives with the news that Arthur has been found. A message from England reveals that all correspondence has been with a Mr Walter: he is Renouard’s assistant Walter on the island. Renouard rushes back to his ship and destroys a letter addressed to Mr A Walter he has had in his possession. It is then revealed that the assistant is in fact dead on the island. Renouard knows that the Moorsoms will leave if he tells them, and he feels that he can now somehow replace Arthur.

Part VIII. The whole party sail for Malata, where Renouard stays outside the reef overnight, before embarkation. During the night he swims ashore and instructs his servants to say that Arthur has gone off on a trip round the islands.

Part IX. The party wait for Arthur to return. Renouard is nervous: he discusses ghosts with Professor Moorsom’s elderly siister Emma, and his servant Luiz is asked when Arthur is returning.

Part X. Professor Moorsom hears that some plantation workers have seen ghosts: he wants to investigate the phenomenon further. Renouard goes on a walk onto the headland with Felicia. There she reveals her suspicions and challenges him directly about Arthur. He reveals that Arthur was a drug addict for whom he felt sorry, and who died by falling into a ravine. Felicia claims it was her ambition or her destiny to redeem him. Renouard makes a speech which is part homage, part criticism of her – then makes a feeble lunge at her, before declaring his abject love for her.

Part XI. Renouard realises he has gone as far as possible. The party leave the island next day – the Professor grateful to Renouard, and Felicia critical of him. Renouard threatens to ‘haunt’ her ever afterwards. He then pays off his workers and sends them home.

Part XII. A month later the editor is not satisfied with the explanatory stories that reach his office about Malata, so he takes a ship to visit the island in person. He discovers Renouard’s clothes on a beach, but no body is ever found.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Planter of Malata – main characters

Geoffry Renouard	the reclusive planter of Malata
—	his friend, the newspaper editor
Professor Moorsom	a physicist and philosopher
Felicia Moorsom	his attractive daughter
Emma Moorsom	his elderly sister
Master Arthur	Felicia’s fiancé
Luiz	Renouard’s half-caste manservant

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

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

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

The Point of View

January 16, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Point of View is rather unusual in Henry James’s oeuvre, in that it was first produced by Macmillan in London as a privately printed edition in 1882 for which James himself paid. He did this in order to protect his copyright to the text at a time before the introduction of international agreements between America and the United Kingdom, which did not come into force until the 1890s. The story first appeared in The Century Magazine in December 1882, then in single volume collections of his tales in 1883, followed by a Tauschnitz ‘European’ edition the following year.

Northumberland Hotel – Washington

The Point of View – critical commentary

Context

The Point of View is at face value nothing more than a collection of satirical sketches poking fun at various character types – the enthusiastic young woman (Aurora), the snobbish over-protective mother (Mrs Church), the jaded aesthete (Louis Leverett), the upper-class English bore (Mr Antrobus) – and so on. And their views of society on reaching America obviously reflect in exaggerated form some of James’s own ambiguous feelings about his native land and his ever-active interest in the relationship between Europe and America. But if the story is viewed in the context of the two tales that precede it – The Pension Beaurepas (1879) and A Bundle of Letters (1879) – it takes on a deeper set of meanings.

We know for instance from The Pension Beaurepas story that Aurora Church was feeling oppressed by the European conventions regarding young women in which her mother has held her trapped for most of her young life. She has been educated – in terms of art galleries and museums – but has never been allowed out alone even though she is of an age to marry.

She therefore sees America as the land of democratic freedom which will permit her to mix with whoever she wishes, and possibly find her own husband. The fact that she has failed to do so at the end of The Point of View does not invalidate the positive gesture in favour of the human spirit that her ‘escape’ from Europe represents.

Similarly, Louis Leverett, the over-developed art lover from the earlier story A Bundle of Letters expresses an almost hysterical hatred for the Boston hotel in which he finds himself. But we know from his appearance in A Bundle of Letters to be an over-refined name-dropping poseur – so his criticisms should not be taken at face value. In fact his characterisation seems to represent almost a satirical portrait of James himself – the American viewing his homeland after many years living in Europe.

But it is the sane and sober observations of the fifty year old Miss Sturdy which are probably a closer match to James’ own true views. In fact James also includes a cameo satirical portrait of himself in the letter of the french critic Gustave LeJaune reporting on the absence of American culture to a colleague back in Paris:

They have a novelist with pretensions to literature, who writes about the chase for the husband and the adventures of the rich Americans in our corrupt old Europe, where their primeval candour puts the Europeans to shame. C’est proprement écrit; but it’s terribly pale.

America – and Europe

And if you wish to see Henry James as a social and political prophet, you need look no further than these lines, penned by Marcellus Cockerel, a pro-Yankee character, tired of world travel, and glad to be back home:

Our salvation is here [in America], if we have eyes to see it, and the salvation of Europe into the bargain; that is, if Europe is to be saved, which I rather doubt.

Once one feels, over here, that the great questions of the future are social questions, that a mighty tide is sweeping the world to democracy, and that this country is the biggest stage on which the drama can be enacted, the fashionable European topics seem petty and parochial.

In England they were talking about the Hares and Rabbits Bill, about the extension of the County Franchise, about the Dissenters’ Burials, about the Deceased Wife’s Sister, about the abolition of the House of Lords, about heaven knows what ridiculous measure for the propping-up of their ridiculous little country. And they call us provincial!

Those words come from a story written one hundred and twenty seven years ago, but they might have been written last week.

[I have artificially created the three separate paragraphs in the quotation above for the sake of clarity. In the printed text there are no paragraphs. Each correspondent’s letter is a continuous block of text, with no paragraphs.]

The Point of View – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions

The Point of View – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Point of View – story synopsis

Part I. Aurora Church, a young American woman, is on a transatlantic liner, returning to the USA after an extended stay in Europe with her mother. She writes to a friend in Paris about her liberating sense of excitement of returning home, and the people she has met during the voyage. As a Europhile, her mother is not looking forward to the experience, and she has failed to find a husband for Aurora because she has no dowry. Aurora recounts how she has been pursued on board by Louis Leverett, a pretentious Bostonian would-be belle-lettrist and Mr Cockerel, an American lawyer who is resolutely pro-USA.

Part II. Having arrived in New York, Mrs Church writes to her Calvinist friend Madame Galopin in Geneva. She complains about the country in general and her lodgings in particular. She bemoans the lack of social distinctions and the fact that she cannot ascertain the incomes of the young men who are paying court to Aurora. She has agreed to let her daughter live by American standards for a test period of three months. Mrs Church’s manner is comically snobbish, convoluted, and self-regarding.

Part III. Miss Study, at Newport, writes to an American friend back in Florence. She sees the positives and the improvements in American life, and recounts her inviting the Englishman Mr Antrobus to stay at Newport. She is alert to the changes in American-English language, and she feels the predominance of American youth to be an overwhelming feature of modern life, and their propensity to talk a great deal, without being able to talk properly.

She notes that American girls are permitted social freedoms which would be denied to them in old Europe – and that society is the better for it. She admires the democratic spirit of her homeland, even though she admits it brings people to a less variegated common level than in Europe.

Part IV. Mr Antrobus writes from Boston to his wife back in England in a pompous and didactic manner, giving her a sociological account of his impressions. He is visiting schools and colleges, and even though he is supposed to be a radical (a liberal) he regrets that America does not have a class of aristocracy. He also travels with his own tin bath tub. He goes into comically excruciating detail about what might or could have been the case on every topic he discusses.

Part V. Louis Leverett, the Boston aesthete, writes to his friend back in Paris complaining bitterly about the conditions in his hotel and the absence of European sophistication that he has left behind. He argues that the democratic spirit of the USA reduces everything and everybody to an undistinguished mediocrity.

Part VI. The French critic Gustave LeJaune writes from Washington to his friend in Paris complaining about the size of the USA and the lack of manners in the general public. He is writing an official study of America as (the most important visitor since de Tocqueville). He complains about the lack of culture, the size and content of the newspapers, and the lack of social markers of distinction which permits a social free-for-all.

Part VII. The American Marcellus Cockerel returns after three years of touring the world and writes to his sister in California saying how pleased he is to be back in the USA, even if it is a vulgar society. He gives a jaundiced account of how much he hated being in Paris in particular, and vows that he will never return to Europe again. He excoriates the traditional pageantry and rituals of old Europe and argues that America is better off without them, no matter how much they are revered.

Part VIII. Aurora writes that she has come to the end of her three months of freedom, and has failed to meet anyone she would wish to marry. However, her mother has decided that they ought to move out to the West where is will be cheaper to live – and Aurora wonders if she might meet a rich Pioneer.

The Point of View – characters

Mrs Church	an American expatriate who has been living in Europe
Aurora Church	her daughter, a spirited young American woman
Miss Sturdy	a stout, single American spinster (50)
The Honorable Edward Antrobus MP	an English traditionalist and bore
Louis Leverett	a small Boston aesthete
M. Gustave LeJaune	a French social citic
Marcellus Cockerel	a patriotic Yankee

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Portrait

June 28, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Portrait first appeared in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The Greater Inclination and Other Stories published by Charles Scribner’s in 1899. It is one of a numbers of stories Edith Wharton wrote on the relationship between art and life. She published a similar story The Verdict only a few years later.

Leon Riesener – Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)

The Portrait – critical comments

The story is not so much about painting as about Lillo’s empathetic wish to protect Miss Vand’s feelings. He knows he can capture Vand’s villainous character but delays completing the face in the portrait. When confronted by Miss Vand and the incomplete work, he realises that she understands why it has not been finished – because Lillo does not want to reveal to her the corrupt side of a father on whom she dotes.

So he produces an uncritical and lifeless piece of work instead. This explains the mystery raised in the first part of the story – how could a talented painter produce such an unsuccessful piece of work?

In fact the story is split exactly into two in terms of structure. In part one the narrator presents the puzzle of Lillo’s ‘failed’ portrait; then part two is a monologue in which Lillo (acting as a second narrator) reveals the reasons for his having deliberately created a bad painting, which he calls a ‘lucid failure’.

The Portrait – study resources

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Greater Inclination and Other Stories -Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Portrait – story synopsis

Opinions are divided on the merits of fashionable portrait painter George Lillo: some think he is too negative, others think he is searchingly realistic. His portrait of the notorious Alonzo Vard is considered a puzzling failure. Lillo invites the narrator to dinner, where he explains the provenance of this work.

Lillo has come from Paris to New York in the hope of doing something ‘big’ to establish a critical success. He is impressed by Vard°s dramatic appearance and his scandalous reputation as a powerful man of public affairs. He approaches Vard’s daughter, who worships her father and claims that all his finest qualities are only shown to her at home.

But when Lillo begins the portrait he realises that Vard is in fact shallow and vulgar, with no intellectual substance at all. He begins the portrait but is hesitant to present the truth because he doesn’t want to offend the doting daughter, who protectively attends all her father’s sittings.

Meanwhile Vard is involved in a political scandal which is reported by all the newspapers. On the day the news breaks, the sitting is interrupted by Vard’s secretary, who has arranged for his escape via a back door. Vard refuses to take it and walks out with his daughter on his arm.

There is a trial, and Vard is exonerated. Miss Vard visits the studio and sees the unfinished portrait. Lillo realises that she knows why it is incomplete. Later he feels obliged to finish off the painting in an anodyne manner so as not to offend her. This explains how and why he came to produce such a bad portrait.

Principal characters

George Lillo	a fashionable portrait painter
I	an un-named narrator – a friend of George Lillo
Alonzo Vard	a dubious businessman
Miss Vard	his devoted daughter

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.

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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.

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Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pretext

July 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Pretext first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine number 44 for August 1908. It was then reprinted in a collection of Edith Wharton’s stories The Hermit and the Wild Woman which was published by Charles Scribner’s later the same year.

cover design by Parish Maxfield

The Pretext – critical commentary

This is a rather sad, bitter-sweet tale of lost hopes and unfulfilled dreams in which a middle-aged woman is caught up in a doomed romantic liaison with a much younger man. The principal points of interest are the poignant manner in which Margaret Ransom examines her own fading appearance in the light of her awakening passion for Guy Dawnish. She has lived so long in the stiflingly conformist atmosphere of her university town and its conventions that she can hardly believe either in the romantic sensations she is feeling or the very idea that she might be the love object of a much younger man.

When it is time for him to return to England she forestalls any overt declaration of love so as to preserve all its unspoken potential to savour after he has gone. She suspects, and we as readers are given every reason to believe, that he has an undeclared ‘attachment’ back in England. This turns out to be true – but is only confirmed when he breaks off this ‘engagement’ because of the reported ‘significant attachment’ which has occurred during his study visit in America.

The story is given its first ironic twist when his aunt arrives in search of the person who has caused such social havoc by distracting him from his social path – that person being Margaret herself. The aunt simply cannot believe that a middle-aged woman can be the object of her young nephew’s affections.

The story teeters very close to farce as the aunt invents more and more explanations to account for her bewilderment – all resting on mistaken identity. But finally, when Margaret reveals that she is the woman the aunt is looking for, she comes up with the explanation that gives the story it’s name – that Margaret has been used as a pretext to cover Guy’s real love interest.

And this finally is where the story is given its second and most heart-wrenching twist. Margaret is so under-confident that she herself accepts this explanation, not daring to believe that the romantic episode was a reciprocated experience. The story ends with the prospect of her dull suburban life stretching into an indefinite future.

The Pretext – study resources

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Greater Inclination and Other Stories -Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Pretext – story synopsis

Part I. Margaret Ransom is the middle-aged wife of a lawyer in a New England university town. She has become romantically excited during the previous two years by her contact with Guy Dawnish, a young visiting Englishman, but she feels the pressure to conform to the Puritan traditions of the town and it’s social norms.

Part II. Guy Dawnish has left her some personal photographs which emphasise his richly privileged English background. Margaret finds this romantic and fascinating. Dawnish is shortly due to return to England-and they are both invited to a university event where her husband will be speaking.

Part III. Feeling oppressed by her husband’s speech, she leaves the hall with Guy, and they confront each other romantically in a secluded spot by the river. Not knowing how to deal with the possibilities between them, she urges him not to name or reveal his feelings, but to preserve their unspoken understanding of each other as a potential to help her face the future.

Part IV. Guy goes back to England and writes polite letters. Margaret lives on her memories of their moments together. Then she hears from a friend visiting England that Guy has broken off a previous ‘understanding’ with an heiress because of an ‘unfortunate attachment’ he has formed during his American sojourn. Margaret regrets that she didn’t catch hold of her chance of happiness when it was presented to her.

Part V. Margaret tries to busy herself in university social life, but then she is visited by Guy’s forceful aunt Lady Caroline Duckett who has come to America to investigate the person who has caused Guy to give up his engagement and caused such social disruption within his family. The aunt cannot believe that Margaret (as a middle-aged woman) is the person responsible and eventually presumes that Guy has used Margaret’s name as a cover for an attachment to someone else. Margaret is so lacking in self esteem that she accepts this idea herself, and prepares herself for a life with all her romantic hopes extinguished.

Principal characters

Robert Ransom	university tutor in law
Margaret Ransom	his romantic wife
Guy Dawnish	young English academic visitor
Gwendolen Matcher	Guy’s ‘intended’ in England
Lady Caroline Duckett	Guy’s aunt from England

first English edition – Macmillan 1908

Other works by Edith Wharton

Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Private Life

July 27, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Private Life was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1892. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection The Private Life, published in London by Osgood, McIlvaine and in New York by Harper in 1893. It is one of a number of tales of James’s late period in which he explored the relationship between writers, their work, and their personal lives.

The Swiss Alps

The Private Life – critical commentary

We know that the origins of this tale lie in Henry James having admired then met Robert Browning (1812-1889) only to find that the celebrated poet, famous for his dense, complex, and highly intellectualised works, was something of a washout as a conversationalist. In other words, his talent went into his work – not into his public persona. James responded to this phenomenon by thinking of the public and private personae as two different people:.

This explained to the imagination the mystery: our delightful inconceivable celebrity was double, constructed in two quite distinct and ‘water-tight’ compartments – one of these figured by the gentleman who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wrote admirably deep and brave and intricate things; while the gentleman who regularly came forth to sit at a quite different table and substantially and promiscuously and multitudinously dine stood for its companion. They had nothing to do, the so dissimilar twins, with each other; the diner could exist but by the cessation of the writer, whose emergence, on his side, depended on his – and our! – ignoring the diner.

The Lord Mellifont character is almost the opposite. He is the public performer – ‘the man whose whole personality goes forth so in representation and aspect and sonority and phraseology and accomplishment and frontage’. He is urbane and controlling; he sets the tone for everyone else and orchestrates their conversations and social interchanges. But he has no individual substance. He is an empty shell – so much so that when left alone he ‘disappears’ – literally, in Blanche Adney’s experience on their excursion.

The weakness of these two similar conceits is that in neither case are the characteristics dramatised – despite James’s urgings to himself in the notebooks “Dramatise it, dramatise it!” We are told (by the narrator) about Clare Vawdrey’s greatness but not shown any evidence of it. We are told in the same way about Lord Mellifont’s urbane and sophisticated public persona – but not given any dramatised evidence of it.

The ghost story

This tale is often classified as one of James’s ghost stories. But its dramatic weakness also contributes to making the ‘two’ Clare Vawdreys and the ‘disappearing’ Mellifont both unconvincing, and actually unnecessary. It would be perfectly reasonable and persuasive to have a talented writer who does not shine socially, and the sort of pompous stuffed shirt we take Mellifont to be who is reduced to nothing when he is alone. James pulled off something of this sort in The Coxon Fund which he completed two years later.

The Private Life – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Private Life – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Private Life – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Private Life – plot summary

An un-named narrator recounts the annual holiday of a group of socialite London friends in Switzerland. He describes the celebrated novelist (and talker) Clarence (‘Clare’) Vawdrey, who takes a neutral attitude to all conversational topicsLady Mellifont is worried that her husband is missing with the slightly raffish actress Blanche Adney. However, Blanche eventually returns, hinting that something happened on their walk, whilst Lord Mellifont goes to dress for dinner.

Lord Mellifont is a host who sets and controls the tone of dinner and its conversations. Blanche |Adney hopes that Clare Vawdrey will write a play in which she will star as a tragic heroine. Vawdrey claims that he has written a ‘magnificent passage’ and the company clamour for him to read it after dinner. But when the performance is organised he can’t remember a word, and even admits that there is no manuscript.

However, Blanche wants the narrator to search for anything that Vawdrey has written, and she takes the author onto the terrace, leaving the narrator free to search his hotel room. But when the narrator goes into Vawdrey’s room the author is already there, writing in the dark., and he makes no response to the narrator’s interruption.

Next day the narrator goes out walking, but after dinner he tells Blanche about his mysterious experience. She confirms that she was with Vawdrey on the terrace at the time the narrator saw him in his room. The narrator concludes that there are two Vawdreys – an empty public version, and a substantial private one.

Blanche also reveals that Lord Mellifont is the opposite – a man who has no substance when alone, only in his public persona. The narrator and Blanche then compare their theories. Blanche claims she is ‘in love’ with the real Clare Vawdrey, and she recounts how Lord Mellifont ‘disappeared’ when she was not there to create an audience for him on their recent excursion.

They meet Lord Mellifont who is out doing some watercolour painting. He presents a picture to Blanche. The narrator and Blanche plot to ‘find’ Mellifont and Vawdrey alone to test their theories. The narrator takes the painting for Lord Mellifont to sign, but he is intercepted by Lady Mellifont, who says she will arrange the signature for him – which he takes as a sign of her embarrassment on her husband’s behalf.

He then goes off to take Vawdrey an umbrella. They shelter from a thunderstorm, and the narrator is very disappointed by the banal nature of Vawdrey’s conversation. When they return to the hotel Blanche tells the narrator that she has been with the ‘real’ Vawdrey and has told him that she loves him. She also claims to have possession of the great part he has written for her – but when the party returns to London this doesn’t appear to be the case.

The Private Life – principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, a writer
Lord Mellifont	a charming socialite
Lady Mellifont	his timorous wife
Clarence (‘Clare’) Vawdrey	a celebrated writer
Blanche Adney	a comedy actress
Vincent Adney	her husband, a composer and violinist

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Other works by Henry James

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pupil

July 8, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Pupil first appeared in Longman’s Magazine for March—April 1891. It next appeared in the collection The Lesson of the Master published in New York and London by Macmillan in 1919.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Pupil – critical commentary

Towards the end of the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) Henry James wrote a number of works whose subjects were dysfunctional families and the neglect of children. One thinks of What Masie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899) but the most obvious dramatic parallel is with The Turn of the Screw (1898). In that tale a governess looking after two young children frightens one of them to death by confronting him with what she thinks is the ghost of a former servant Peter Quint.

In The Pupil Pemberton is presented with the avaricious and socially demanding notion of the Moreens that he is now responsible for their son Morgan’s welfare. We know that Pemberton has sacrificed time, money, and intellectual energy on the boy’s upbringing – but to be confronted with a quasi-formal suggestion that he assume full responsibility for his charge causes him to hesitate. It is that hesitation which causes the boy to lose faith in his protector, and we are led to believe that the emotional strain precipitates his heart failure.

The homo-erotic theme

It is impossible to read the tale without noticing the very strong element of homo-erotic attachment between the teacher and his pupil. And the attraction appears to be mutual. Quite apart from the touching and glances that are exchanged between the pair, Morgan buys Pemberton a tie in Paris, and Pemberton later reveals that he has kept a lock of the boy’s hair as a souvenir.

I don’t think this has any particular bearing upon the meaning of the story as a whole, but it does show that from an early point in his writing career, James was giving expression to emotional relationships between men (as he was to do later between women in texts such as The Bostonians).

The Pupil – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Pupil – plot summary

Part I. Pemberton, a young graduate of Oxford and Yale University, has spent all his inheritance on a European tour and is forced to seek employment as a private tutor to Morgan Moreen, the precocious younger son of a rich American family living in Nice. He is anxious about his salary and the boy in his charge.

Part II. Pemberton discovers that the family are polyglot bohemians in an unusual manner and that the boy is supernaturally clever in a way that makes them want to keep a distance from their own son.

Part III. Pemberton forms a very intimate understanding with Morgan which centres on judgements of the boy’s parents (and which also contains homo-erotic undertones).

Part IV. After a year the family move to live in Paris, where Pemberton begins to notice that the family neglect their son, whose clothes become old and shabby. Pemberton and Morgan become flaneurs and share a degree of poverty. The Moran family fail to pay Pemberton any salary. He threatens to leave, but has no money to return to England. When they do pay him, he realises that he cannot make the break. He begins to see that the Moreens are ‘adventurers who don’t pay their debts. He also perceives that they are toadies and snobs.

Part V. Pemberton feels that it would be improper to criticise his parents to the boy, but Morgan himself tells Pemberton that he ought to take flight from their negligence. Pemberton threatens that he will reveal their misdeeds to the boy, and Mrs Mooreen gives him fifty Francs and tells him he ought to be grateful to work for nothing.. They argue about responsibility for the boy, and he refuses the money.

Part VI. Morgan tells him that a former nurse had left the family for similar reasons: they would not pay her. They discuss the idea of running away together. Morgan knows that his parents are lying and cheating, and wonders what resources they have to survive. They agree that Pemberton should leave at the first opportunity of locating alternative employment, and they feel better now that all the facts of the situation have been revealed and shared.

Part VII. Morgan wonders why his parents are such louche arrivistes and wishes he could feel less shame on their behalf.The family moves to Venice. Morgan is now fifteen and taller. He feels more prepared to meet the world and thinks to attend Pemberton’s old college at Oxford. Mrs Moreen asks Pemberton to lend her money. When an offer of another tutoring post in England comes up, Pemberton leaves the Moreens.

Part VIII. Pemberton takes up his post tutoring an ‘opulent youth’ and (rather improbably) sends money to Mrs Moreen. She replies telling him that Morgan is desperately ill. But when Pemberton travels to Paris he discovers that Morgan is not ill at all, and that Mrs Moreen has withheld his letters to Morgan and tricked him into returning. She accuses Pemberton of taking their son away from them, and that he now has full responsibility for staying with them. Morgan meanwhile wants to be taken away from his parents, who he regards as frauds.

Pemberton senses that the family fortunes are about to crash, and he resurrects the idea of running away with Morgan. He uses up all his savings, and the Moreens move to a cheap hotel. When the family crash does occur, they ask him to take charge of Morgan. But the emotional stress of the scene is too much for Morgan, and he dies on the spot.

Principal characters

Pemberton	a young tutor, ex Oxford and Yale
The Moreens	Americans living in Europe
Morgan Moreen	their precociously talented but sickly son
Ulrich Moreen	Morgan’s older brother (20)
Paula Moreen	Morgan’s sister
Amy Moreen	Morgan’s sister

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Purloined Letter

July 22, 2017 by Roy Johnson

The Purloined Letter (1844) marks the third and final appearance of Edgar Allan Poe’s master-detective, the Parisian‘ gentleman’ Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. He first appeared in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and then again in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842). He is also quite clearly the original inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Edgar Allan Poe

The story first appeared in the Christmas literary annual The Gift published in Philadelphia in December 1845. Poe received a payment of only $12.00 for its first printing, but the story was reprinted in many newspapers and magazines in the years that followed.

The Purloined Letter – critical comment

The short story

Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories are generally collected under the title of Tales of Mystery and Imagination. In them, Poe explored a wide range of topics and themes. He is most famous for his tales of Gothic horror – such as The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, and Ligeia. But he also invented the detective story; he wrote tales of science fiction (The Balloon Hoax); spoofs and satires (The Man Who was Used Up); and puzzles or cryptograms such as The Gold Bug.

He wrote prolifically for newspapers and magazines. As a result of his engagement with the shorter literary forms he developed a theory of short stories which is still relevant today. He claimed that a successful short story should follow a set of rules.

It should be read at one sitting
It should create a ‘unity of effect’
It should contain nothing superfluous
It should strike its note in the first sentence
It should be imaginative and original

The Purloined Letter is successful because it meets all these requirements. The mystery is focussed on one topic – the missing letter. There are no digressions. All parts of the tale relate to its discovery, and the story begins and ends ‘on topic’ – with the loss of the letter and its discovery.

The story has a perfectly reasonable premise. A potentially compromising letter has been stolen and cannot be located by the police. The problems this raises are then explored, and the letter is located by Dupin. The story ends with an explanation of how he found it.

Its aesthetic superiority is evident when compared with the other two Dupin stories. The Murders in the Rue Morgue depends upon a rather improbable premise – an escaped Orang-Outang armed with a cut-throat razor. The Mystery of Marie Roget offers an exhaustive analysis of evidence for a puzzling murder, but it is technically unresolved. The Purloined Letter has neither of these weaknesses.

Structure

The success of this story is principally explained by its sound structure. The narrative is in three distinct parts:

the problem and how it came about
the efforts that were made to solve it
Dupin’s explanation of his strategic success

The story also has an interesting structural feature. The missing letter does not suddenly appear at the end of the story as a coup de theatre, thus providing a resolution to the tale. It is unexpectedly produced half way through the story, when Dupin raffishly claims the 50,000 Francs reward for its discovery. This is a mark of Poe’s genius as a story teller.

The essence of the story is not about the social value of the letter to its addressee (the Queen) or someone else who might read it (the King). There is a suggestion that the compromising contents of the letter will reveal the fact that the Queen has been sexually unfaithful to the King. But Poe’s principal interest is about how the letter is discovered.

The ‘twist’ in the tale is that the letter was in full view of the police all the time. It was not, as the police suspected, concealed in any secret drawer, in the stuffing of a chair seat, or behind the wallpaper of D—’s room. It was fully on view – but it had been disguised as a letter of no importance addressed to someone else.

The French connection

Poe’s literary reputation has always been high in France, and there has been a great deal of literary analysis of The Purloined Letter by modernist critics of the 1960s and 1970s. This debate is summarised in the story’s Wikipedia entry.

This debate mainly centres on the symbolic significance of the letter in relation to the Queen who has received it and her husband the King who apparently is being deceived. However, this discussion ignores the fact that Poe is quite clearly more interested in how Dupin discovers the letter than in the social ramifications of its contents – which are not known anyway.

These approaches to literary of analysis flow from the various schools of criticism which were fashionable in France around that time. These took a stance that literary texts could have more or less any meaning that could be read into them, irrespective of the author’s intention or even an intelligent reader’s understanding of ‘the story’.

The two best known of these theories – structuralism and deconstruction – were popular and influential in Europe and America until the end of the twentieth century. But in recent years they have fallen out of favour, largely because they are now considered elitist and woefully obscure. They also have the weakness that they frequently lack common sense.

The Purloined Letter – study resources

Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon UK

Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon US

Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin classics – Amazon UK

Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin classics – Amazon US

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – illustrated – Amazon UK

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – illustrated – Amazon US

The Purloined Letter – story synopsis

Auguste Dupin and the narrator are joined by G— the chief of the Prefecture of the Paris Police. He reports the theft of a compromising letter by the minister D— in full view of its royal recipient and her husband.

D— has not yet acted on the content of the letter but the police chief has failed in all his attempts to recover it. He has even taken apart the furniture in D—’s rooms and searched adjacent houses. Dupin advises him to look more carefully.

A month later G— returns, still unsuccessful. A reward for the recovery of the letter has been doubled to 50,000 Francs. Dupin asks for a cheque to that amount, and in exchange he hands over the letter.

When G-— has gone, Dupin explains to the narrator that G—’s methods are indeed very thorough, but they are limited because he fails to put himself into the mindset of his antagonist. Dupin criticises mathematical logic because it is a self-enclosed system which cannot be applied in the moral universe.

He then describes his visit to minister D— in his office where he spots the letter, distressed, torn, and disguised, in a letter rack on the mantelpiece. Dupin deliberately leaves a snuff box behind, and returns next day to collect it. Whilst D—’s attention is distracted he takes the letter and replaces it with a dummy copy he has made.

More on Edgar Allan Poe
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Quicksand

August 3, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial. study guide, interpretations, further reading

The Quicksand first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in the issue for June 1902. It was collected in The Descent of Man (1904) and currently forms part of the publication The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

The Metropolitan Museum – Frank Waller (1842-1923)

The Quicksand – commentary

Structure

The story is essentially a tale of reversed expectations – but one with a very subtle construction and some interesting ironic effects. At the outset readers are given every reason to notice the relationship between Mrs Quentin and her son Alan. They are very close to each other emotionally – even to the point of ‘excessive intimacy’.

Everything in the narrative suggests Mrs Quentin’s taking her son’s side when he is refused by a potential fiancée, Hope Feddo, because of his ownership of the muck-raking newspaper the Radiator. There is even a hint of maternal jealousy and rivalry in the remark, ‘Mrs Quentin at first was kept silent by the mother’s instinctive anger that the girl she had not wanted for her son should have dared to refuse him.’

This suggestion of positive prejudice is reinforced by Mrs Quentin’s reaction during their discussion of what to do. She is relieved to observe: ‘He was with her against the girl then!’

At this point it is natural to suppose that the story is one of a woman’s loyalties being tested. She wants the best for her beloved son, but she has reservations about his choice of fiancée. Nevertheless, she agrees to speak to the girl on his behalf.

Mrs Quentin’s scepticism about Hope then seems to be confirmed by the drab furniture amongst which she finds her living, and which is even translated metaphorically into her state of mind:

The girl’s mind was like a large light empty place, scantily furnished with a few massive prejudices, not designed to add to anyone’s comfort but too ponderous to be easily moved.

Mrs Quentin argues that Hope should not prejudge the future, but give life a chance. She raises the problem they both face – but in a brief and ambiguous manner.

Six months later Alan is still pained by the rebuff, and Mrs Quentin’s relations with her son have cooled. She feels a vague discomfort that we might be forgiven for thinking is a sense of guilt at not trying harder to argue Alan’s case.

But when she meets Hope in the Metropolitan Museum the girl reveals that she too has been unhappy. She now feels that she made a mistake in rejecting Alan’s proposal, even accusing herself of self-righteousness and vanity in her former attitude.

She has come to feel that her love for Alan can be put to use in helping him. At the same time she has realised from Mrs Quentin’s example that it is possible to disattend to the nature of the Radiator.

It is at this point that the reversal of expectations is presented. Mrs Quentin reveals that it is precisely because she can see Hope is a person with intelligence and integrity that she doesn’t want her to face the same difficulties she herself has had as a young woman.

Mrs Quentin married Alan’s father, the owner of the Radiator. When she realised it was a gutter press publication she asked him to sell the newspaper. He agreed, but wanted to first build its circulation to make it a saleable proposition.

Time passed, the paper was not sold, and they became locked in a vicious circle. When Alan was born she needed the money to keep him in luxury to which both he and his mother became accustomed.

When Alan inherited the Radiator she hoped he would sell it – but he didn’t. Mrs Quentin feels that she became locked into a dishonourable bond with the son she loved. She hoped he would marry a simple and unquestioning girl – but having met a woman with ideas, Mrs Quentin fears that Hope will be dragged down into a similar dishonourable compact. For this reason, she is presenting a warning message. It is a dramatic and very convincing revelation – from which young Hope flees in shock.

An alternative reading

There is another way of interpreting the details of the story, which is to look at what results from the actions of the participants. This also involves speculating on psychological motivation which might be hidden even from the characters themselves.

Mrs Quentin has a very deep emotional bond with her son Alan. She has raised him with devoted concern for his ‘delicate’ nature. They have travelled abroad together, in warm climates during the winter and cruising aboard a yacht in summer. So Alan has certainly been kept away from the masculine influence of his father.

Mother and son have become like lovers to each other – and they address each other in the language of lovers (Dear’ and ‘dear mother’). You do not need to be a qualified psychoanalyst to realise that a mother with an almost incestuous relationship to her son will not welcome the attentions of a rival in the form of a potential daughter-in-law.

Mrs Quentin therefore is very reluctant to act as her son’s emissary to the obdurate Hope Fenno. When she does make the visit she views Hope in a hostile manner (‘The girl’s mind was like a large light empty place’) and puts forward a largely unconvincing argument in favour of her accepting Alan. The argument is unconvincing because secretly she doesn’t want Hope to be persuaded.

When some time later Hope changes her mind, Mrs Quentin is forced to deploy a more powerful set of reasons why the young couple should not be united. She presents Alan as a driven work-obsessive who will never change, and she delivers her own biography as a combination of addiction to luxury and tragic failure in the fight against muck-raking journalism.

These arguments are delivered (she claims) with the aim of ‘saving’ Hope Fenno from a similar fate – but unconsciously she has the ambition of driving the girl away from her much-beloved son – and she succeeds. In this reading the story is one of sexual rivalry between a possessive mother and her prospective daughter-in-law.

The Quicksand – study resources

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

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

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

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Quicksand – story synopsis

I Young Alan Quentin’s proposal of marriage has been rejected by Hope Fenno because she disapproves of the muckraking newspaper the Radiator he has inherited from his father. His mother Mrs Quentin consoles him and promises to plead his case with the young woman.

II Mrs Quentin interviews Hope and argues that her objections to the newspaper might dissolve with the passage of time. Hope remains unconvinced.

III Six months later the two women meet again. Hope has changed her mind and wishes to ‘support’ Alan, as Mrs Quentin did when her husband was alive. However, Mrs Quentin reveals that she wanted to be rid of the newspaper, but became enmeshed in a lifelong betrayal of her own values because of the luxury its income provided. She wishes Hope to be spared a similar destiny. This information scares Hope away.

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

The Razor

April 10, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Razor first appeared in September 1926 in the Russian emigré newspaper Rul’ published in Berlin. The paper had been established by Vladimir Nabokov’s father in 1921.

In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed The Razor under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, but it seems to me no less worthy than many of the other shorter and lighter pieces from the early period of his output as a writer. His first novel, Mary was published the same year.

Vladimir Nabokov

The Razor – critical commentary

This is a short and relatively lightweight story – but it pursues its central conceit with admirable restraint and brevity. Every element in the dramatic situation raises the expectation that Ivanov will exact revenge. He has his adversary completely at his mercy. He is on his own, unobserved in the shop. The customer has put him through an ‘interrogation’ which he must have expected to lead to Ivanov’s death.

The artistic success of the tale lies not in the generation of tension – ‘don’t move please, or I might cut you prematurely’ – but in the fact that the customer never speaks. We can only imagine his terror. Even the details of the ‘interrogation’ are not dramatised – so we are spared any gruesome details, but by default encouraged to guess what they might be.

And in the end Ivanov does nothing, but simply dismisses his former tormentor. He triumphs over any desire for revenge. Technically, this is an anti-climax in the narrative, but in fact it is a very satisfying resolution.

Moreover, although the dramatic tension might seem rather artificial, the situation in the story is perfectly realistic. Berlin was the ‘first centre’ of emigration for Russians of both colours – Red and White – fleeing from the consequences of the 1917-1918 revolutions. Former aristocrats (like Nabokov himself) were forced to earn a living by doing menial jobs.

The Razor – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of phtographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

The Razor – plot summary

Ivanov is a White Russian emigré working in a barber shop in Berlin. His nickname as a military Captain had been ‘Razor’ because of his sharp features.

One quiet summer morning whilst the other staff are absent, a man comes into the shop for a shave. Ivanov recognises him as someone who has previously interrogated and (by implication) tortured him.

He shaves the man and menaces him by reminding him that a single slip of his razor would produce a lot of blood. He then proceeds to recount the events of his interrogation, all the while shaving his victim.

Ivanov reminds the man that both corpses and people sentenced to death are shaved, and asks him if he can guess what is going to happen next.

The man is clearly terrified, He keeps his eyes tightly shut and doesn’t utter a word. But Ivanov finally whisks the cloth from around his neck and bundles him out of the shop.

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
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Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
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More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

The Real Right Thing

April 15, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Real Right Thing first appeared in Collier’s Weekly for December 1899 at a time when Henry James was producing a number of his famous ghost stories. Its first publication in book form was in The Soft Side in 1900, alongside tales such as The Third Person, The Tree of Knowledge, John Delavoy, The Great Condition, and Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie.

The Real Right Thing – critical commentary

This tale is something of a curiosity. It is one of the shortest of all James’s tales – less than 5,000 words – and has a number of elements that suggest that he might have been in two minds regarding the inner purpose of the narrative.

Biography

With regard to the overt subject matter – the biography of a writer – there is certainly no doubt that James was very conscious of matters regarding privacy, indiscretions, revelations, and the dangers of the exposure of a writer’s life to public scrutiny. He made a ‘bonfire’ of his own personal papers, and wrote a number of other stories on this theme which essentially support the idea that writers are entitled to their privacy, even after death. The most famous example is The Aspern Papers.

Withermore becomes gradually conscious that Ashton Doyne might not wish to have his ‘life’ exposed to the public, and coupled with the ‘ghost story’ element of the narrative, the biographical project is abandoned. In this sense, the story is a triumph for the dead writer, and possibly even a wish-fulfilment on James’s part, since he certainly had things to conceal from the public in his own life.

Mrs Doyne

But there are other curiosities. Mrs Doyne is introduced as a Dickensian harpy , an almost grotesque figure: ‘her big black eyes, he big black wig, her big black fan and gloves, her general gaunt, ugly, tragic … presence’. She also has a curious habit of speaking from behind the fan, which she holds up to conceal her face.

She is also presented as a rather ambiguous figure, with two implications that there was something seriously amiss in her relationship with her husband:

Doyne’s relationships with his wife had been, to Withermore’s knowledge, a very special chapter — which would present itself, by the way, as a very delicate one for the biographer … She had not taken Doyne seriously enough in life, but the biography should be a solid reply to every imputation on herself.

But having set up these tantalising hints, James makes nothing more of this issue in the rest of the story, which then becomes another variation of the ‘ghostly tale’.

The ghost story

James was a great devotee of the ghost story – and he prided himself in avoiding the contemporary clichés of the genre. His greatest work of this type is of course his macabre and chilling The Turn of the Screw, but he also produced variations such as the comic ghost story The Third Person and a tale which actually contains a benevolent ghost in Sir Edmund Orme.

James is very good at creating the elements of suspense and mystery associated with ghost stories – which were very popular at the end of the nineteenth century. The year before (1898) he had successfully summoned up the images of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in The Turn of the Screw without ever describing them. His method (or literary conjurer’s trick) is to have his protagonists imagine the ghosts – and readers are invited to share this vision.

The governess in The Turn of the Screw never actually sees Peter Quint or Miss Jessel: she imagines she has seen them, and wishes them into being. And here in The Real right Thing Withermore (and Mrs Doyne) feel the presence of Ashton Doyne’s spirit. James does not resort to any hackneyed spectral presences, no ectoplasms, or shadows behind the curtain. Withermore invokes the spirit of Ashton Doyne because he is writing in his room; he is surrounded by his furniture, and his personal effects. He is also delving into his private life to create the biography.

So James has him sense the presence of the dead Ashton Doyne, guarding his own work and reputation. It is almost as if the ghost is a transferred embodiment of Withermore’s guilty conscience. He wonders about the desirability of creating a biography the moment he sets to work on it.

But in The Real Right Thing there is neither innovation nor explanation. Withermore begins to feel empathetically close to Doyne because he is working in the author’s study, and at first he feels his biographical research is being assisted by the spirit of the ‘great’ man. But then for no particular reason that is given to us, the influence turns negative, and Withermore begins to have doubts.. Then he feels that the spirit of Doyne is positively blocking his efforts and finally even access to the study. When Mrs Doyne urges him to continue with his efforts, even she is unable to gain access to the room, which we are led to believe is being ‘guarded’ by Doyne’s spirit.

This is not very persuasive, and the tale comes to a rather abrupt end with the abandonment of the projected biography. All in all, the tale does not hang together very well to compare with the best that James wrote on the same theme.

Structural weakness

At around 5,000 words this is certainly the shortest of James’s tales, but also probably one of the least successful. It deals with a subject very close to James’s own heart in the later phase of his life – a fear that inquisitive biographers might spoil the carefully cultivated public image of the successful auteur.

James protected his own reputation by burning all his private papers and writing his own biography. He promoted the idea that a writer’s standing should be based on his work, and should not be sullied by any unsavoury details from his private life. As it is expressed in this tale ‘The artist was what he did – he was nothing else’. And confirmed bachelor Henry James also had (as we now know) something to hide, as he gave way to the homo-erotic impulses he increasingly felt.

The story begins well enough with all the ingredients of a potentially complex narrative: an inexperienced biographer with doubts regarding his task; access to all the great writer’s papers; and a widow with ambiguous motives. Similar ingredients had produced the masterpiece The Aspern Papers ten years previously.

Mrs Doyne is a figure almost out of Grand Guignol: Withermore is struck by ‘her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves’. And she is later described as a figure like ‘some ‘decadent’ coloured print, some poster of the newest school’. She speaks from behind her fan, covering her lower face. There is every reason to believe (at first) that she might be secretly controlling the ‘special box or drawers’ and the ‘opening of an old journal at the very date he wanted’ which guide Withermore’s efforts. But nothing is made of this dramatic character. She is at first ambiguous, but then she simply colludes with Withermore in his supposition that the spirit of Doyne is guarding his reputation.

This dramatic weakness reinforces the more important structural flaw in the story – that having first ‘encouraged’ Withermore’s efforts in Part II, the spirit then turns against him to deter his efforts in Part III. No reason is provided for this change. Withermore is simply enthusiastic one moment, then despondent the next. The only logical explanation for the differences between Parts II and III is inconsistency or a change of mind on Withermore’s part. And the fact that the entire project of the biography is abandoned amplifies the sense of bathos. Nothing is achieved.

The Real Right Thing – study resources

The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edn – Amazon UK

The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edn – Amazon US

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

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

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Real Right Thing – Gutenberg Consortia eBook

The Real Right Thing – plot summary

Part I. On the death of the writer Ashton Doyne, his widow commissions his younger colleague George Withermore to write a biography. She gives Withermore free access to all Doyne’s papers and invites him to use Doyne’s former study as a place of work. Withermore realises that writing a biography will bring him into intimate contact with his former colleague, more so than when he was alive.

Part II. Withermore feels that Mrs Doyne is watching him, but they agree that the ‘spirit’ of Doyne they both feel present will help them in the enterprise and should be encouraged. As he reads more of Doyne’s private papers Withermore feels himself more closely connected with his subject, and he feels that Doyne is almost present in the room, helping him in his researches and composition.

Part II. Withermore is distressed to realise that he is disconcerted when the presence of Doyne’s spirit is not available to him. On one such occasion he compares notes with Mrs Doyne and they feel that Doyne’s spirit somehow passes between them. Withermore begins to feel that he is delving too deeply into Doyne’s life, and when the spirit reappears it is a warning against such intrusion. He fears that if he continues to work on the biography it will invoke Doyne’s disapproval. He finally tests this notion by approaching the study, only to find Doyne’s spirit forbidding entry. Mrs Doyne checks and finds the same – so they agree to abandon the projected biography.

Principal characters

Ashton Doyne	a ‘great’ writer, recently deceased
Mrs Doyne	his ugly widow, who wears a black wig and speaks from behind a black fan
George Withermore	a young and inexperienced newspaper journalist

Henry James’s study

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More tales by James
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More on the novella
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The Razor – study resources

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The Real Right Thing – critical commentary

The Real Right Thing – study resources

The Real Right Thing – plot summary

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Ghost stories by Henry James

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