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Hedging in Kingsley Amis

Introduction to hedging

Having read nearly all of Kingsley Amis’s novels, I have become increasingly interested in his peculiar ways with the English language. Many of his sentences and paragraphs feel long-winded – simultaneously over-embroiled and disconcertingly vague and gaseous. Only recently have I realised that the techniques he deploys so heavily have a formal name in linguistics, which is ‘hedging’.

‘Hedges’ are used to soften the impact of what we say or write. They are a feature of polite conversation in English i.e. conversation which is considerate of the other person. Hedges make what we say less direct, less confrontational. According to the Cambridge Online Dictionaries article on the subject, the most common forms of hedging include:

the tense and aspect of verbs
the use of modal expressions including modal verbs and adverbs
the use of vague language such as ‘sort of’ and ‘kind of’
use of the passive voice

Credit

To be clear, my understanding of ‘Hedges’ is taken from the article on ‘Hedges’ on the Cambridge Dictionaries Online English Grammar Today website. I then illustrate the types of hedges it lists with examples from Kingsley Amis’s 1992 novel, The Russian Girl.

Aspects of hedging

Tense and aspect

It is polite to add conditional verbs to verbs to wish/want/desire. For example, ‘I wondered if I could have a word with you?’ (less direct and more polite than ‘Could I have a word with you?’).

Both of these examples are in the past tense because it is also a feature of English to put verbs of wishing/wanting/desiring into the past, to soften them.

‘I wondered if I could have a word with you?’ is less direct and more polite than ‘Could I have a word with you?’ but both of them are notably softer than the same sentiment a) without the conditional verb b) in the present tense — ‘Can I have a word with you?’

Modal expressions

‘Modality’ refers to verbs or adverbs which help express a speaker’s or writer’s attitude towards the world. Modal words express certainty, possibility, willingness, obligation, necessity and ability – or, as in Kingsley Amis, their opposite. For example: The problem could be that there’s no petrol in the car. [Less direct than ‘There’s no petrol in the ****** car’]

Vague language

English is full of possibilities to use vague and diffuse language. Especially when speaking, people often add unnecessary tags, such as ‘about, kind of, sort of, and that kind of thing’. The most obvious reason to use them is when you’re not sure what to call something or how to refer to it; alternatively, you might want to be deliberately vague about a feeling or intention: ‘He sort of meant it.’

The most basic sort of vague language is created by adding any of a large number of logically unnecessary tags, such as ‘about, kind of, sort of, and that kind of thing’.

Her response told him beyond doubt there was something that interested her more than anything to do with class systems or drink, for the moment at any rate… Unlike others Richard could have named, she evidently sensed this or something of the kind. (p.120)

‘Er, excuse me,’ she sort of called as if accosting a stranger in some public place. (p.129)

Well, it’s not my kind of thing, in a sense… (p.90)

‘And you want to give her a hand with her petition and scheme and what-not?’ (p.91)

‘I hope at least you’ll agree to see her, Crispin.’ (p.92)

The following example demonstrates plain confusion and bewilderment, so often the mood of an Amis protagonist, in this case forty-something, married professor of Russian literature, Richard Vaisey:

He hurried towards the exit, or entrance, distracted only when he passed a stray group of four or five presumably horsy people drinking what was surely champagne. (p.193)

Firstly, Richard doesn’t know whether it’s the entrance or exit. Then he is distracted. The group of people is ‘stray’ i.e. connected to the main party but in an unclear way. Does it consist of four or five people? It would only take a moment to determine but Amis deliberately doesn’t. Then ‘presumably’ and ‘surely’. That’s six hedges or indeterminables in just one sentence, six out of 27 words.

Vague language reflects vague and blurred perceptions. In the thriller writing tradition, especially the American one, the protagonist always knows the brand and make of everything from cars to guns to jewellery. Amis is the extreme opposite, never knowing any brand or make, barely able to manage colours, pointing in the general direction and saying sort of, and suchlike and what-have-you.

She was wearing a long-sleeved orange-yellow garment with a loose belt of the same material and all told no general description or certain provenance. (p.99)

Verbs

Some verbs (such as feel, suppose, reckon) can be used to hedge personal statements, that is, to make personal statements less direct: ‘We feel he should let them decide whether to buy the flat’ is less direct than ‘He should let them decide…’

Stance adverbs

Stance adverbs express opinions (perhaps, apparently, maybe), evaluations (sadly, unfortunately, happily) or the circumstances under which a clause is being spoken or written (frankly, briefly, confidentially). The stance adverb is a loosely-related, add-on comment about the content of the entire clause. Amis is particularly fond of conditional stance adverbs: ‘Perhaps’, ‘maybe’, ‘possibly’, ‘probably’, which all help to diffuse sentences, increase uncertainty. Example sentences from Amis:

Cordelia replaced her telephone, which perhaps recalled a model of 1950… Indeed she was perhaps lucky to have caught him… (p.114)
She had spoken with more animation than just now and he began to wonder if she had perhaps taken a quick nip or so… (p.119)
So perhaps on the whole not. (p.141)
She was sitting up in bed wearing a woolly garment that was probably a bed-jacket. (p.140)

Fine discriminations

It is at first sight a paradox that someone so addicted to vagueness as Amis is, spends so much time making fine discriminations between things, but less so on examination. It is an upper-class English trait to say something is ‘just a bit too…’, or ‘a little under…’, ‘just a fraction more…’, or ‘a shade under…’ These posh phrases which demonstrate how knowledgeable you are and what fine judgement you have, especially on the ever-boring but ever-snobbish subject of food and drink.

Like Anna, Richard chose the lemonade, which was slightly undersweetened in a refined way.’ (p.170)

This sentence is designed to tell you lots about the host, Russian émigré Kotolynov, but also about Richard, whose consciousness we are sort of sharing, showing that he appreciates the subtlety and fineness of the home-made lemonade. And tell you about the author, who spends so much effort defining these precise discriminations. And, at the end of the chain, says something about us readers, who for a few seconds are flattered into thinking that we also share the same super-civilised palate.

‘I’ve booked you in for one o’clock. Avoid the house claret, but the red burgundy is really quite good.’ (p.172)

Not good. Not quite good. Really quite good. The speaker is saying, See how civilised I am! In the event:

The set lunch at the Cor Anglais turned out to be rather better than passable. (p.174)

These apparently fine distinctions don’t contradict the earlier statement about vagueness because they are in fact meaningless. They are discriminations which are invisible to anybody else. They are to all intents and purposes made up. You can say of any drink whatsoever that ‘It is a shade less unappealing than I feared it might possibly be’ and sound frightfully knowledgeable. But the same person, when called on to name the colour of a dress or the make of phone, something real in the objective real world, turns out to be hopelessly at sea. Like Amis’s characters. Like Amis’s prose.

Unnecessary distinctions

Then or later, but mostly later, Richard read [the introduction to the book]. (p.172)

‘Don’t you actually like any of it?’ Richard had asked then or later. (p.94)

No sentence, no phrase is too short for Amis not to squeeze in some unnecessary distinction, to distinguish between two scintillas of meaning. Sometimes they actually mean something and suggest a real, if marginal, differentiation – but sometimes they feel like he’s done it because, well, it’s what he does, because it has become a mannerism.

Talking made Richard feel drunk again, or perhaps more precisely, for the first time. (p.190)

‘Yes, negative reasons chiefly, or entirely really.’ (p.191)

Kotolynov was… asking Anna rather less than inquisitively. (p.164)… said Kotloynov, bringing out a nearly fresh packet of camels… (p.165) But the glance he sent Richard, furtive and humorous, suggested that his last statement, at least, was not quite true. (p.170)

[Anna was wearing] a dark high-necked jacket that only just possibly might have come from the market near Professor Léon’s house. (p.258)

Maybe in Amis’s early novels, this mannerism had been comic, a form of comic exaggeration. Maybe some readers still find it comic. Maybe I’m missing the point, the intention.

When Anna reappeared she was looking much better and smelling like a not very distant pine-forest. (p.258)

Ors

Fine, almost invisible and often unnecessary, distinctions overlap with the related strategy of giving up and just plonking down a bunch of alternatives next to each other and letting the reader choose. Or decide. Or make their mind up. Or something.

‘How would it be if we went and picked her up from her hotel or safe house or whatever it is?’ (p.93)

‘Well you’ve earned a drink. Or ought to have one. Or you need one.’ (p.192)

Richard prepared himself for the odd remark about how similar or dissimilar this or that was to one Russian matter or another. (p.259)

It’s not just the narrator: all the characters without exception also use these multiple ‘ors’ whenever they can. It isn’t a calculated tactic, it is a basic way Amis thinks and writes.

‘I was afraid of what I might say to make your situation bad or worse than it was or need have been.’ (p.259)

Conclusions

Kingsley Amis was a champion hedger. It is a rare Amis sentence which doesn’t contain at least one hedge, generally more. Why?

Is hedging used to be polite… or rude?

The Cambridge article on ‘Hedging’ emphasises that hedging is generally used out of politeness, to soften communication between civilised people, to make human interaction gentler and more humane. In some situations, Amis’s characters do use hedging language for this purpose, and the novels record upper-middle-class English good manners. But routinely this shades off into subtler purposes: sometimes hedging language is used to imply the opposite, that a character is being rude beneath multiple layers of ostensible politeness. Or, further beyond this, that hedging is obviously going on, but it is unclear exactly what its purpose is.

Subtle discriminations… or no discriminations

Another definable purpose of Amis’s hedging language is to suggest a sort of fine discrimination, acute observation of what is taking place. In some sentences he displays very close observation of his characters’ gestures, tones of voice, mannerisms, tweaks and twitches. Hedging can be used to add to this effect, to augment it, giving you the impression the author is alert to even the tiniest disparities, the finest discriminations, noticing the precise type of this, that or the other behaviour.

And yet, paradoxically, such extensive hedging can also suggest the precise opposite: a bloody-minded ‘so what’, ‘who cares’ attitude, an attitude the narrator conveys throughout, of being at odds with the modern world, modern life, London, women, music, art ‘and all the rest of it’.

Amis novels, and most of his characters, are full of this dismissive attitude, they use hedging language because they can’t be bothered to be precise about things which are so obviously beneath their notice, so obviously unworthy of attention in the first place, so obviously crappy.

Does hedging suggest inebriation?

Another interpretation arises naturally from the scene two-thirds of the way through The Russian Girl where the protagonist, Richard Vaizey, gets very drunk. One of the ways we know this is because the hedges, the pointless alternatives, the vagueness of phraseology, all increase sharply.

This passage suggests that hedging is associated with being drunk. In which case, does the ubiquity of hedging throughout Amis’s works reflect the permanent light-headed detachment from reality of an alcoholic? Perceiving some things with preternatural clarity, other things a complete blur. And if so, could this be taken to reflect Amis’s own, permanently slightly pissed take on the world?

Or is it pure mannerism?

Finally, heading is so ubiquitous throughout Amis’s texts, both in the dialogue of the characters and the voice of the narrator, that sometimes it seems to have no purpose at all, but to have become a mannerism. He adds ‘perhaps’ to a sentence because it makes it more interesting, because it forces the reader to pause an extra second trying to decide if it adds any extra information, if this one quaver in the music changes its meaning. And when it happens at least once in paragraph after paragraph, you’d be forgiven for beginning to feel the entire text has a provisional, slightly arbitrary feel.

And is this the real, deep meaning of all the hedging: that Amis himself feels novels, writing, fiction are themselves not entirely serious – to quote his lifelong buddy, Philip Larkin, that ‘Books are a load of crap.’

Is all the hedging not only the narrator distancing himself from his characters and situations but Amis distancing himself from the entire activity of being a writer?

‘Here’s another novel, chaps, see what you make of it, quite a funny one this time, should earn me a few shekels, who’s for a top-up?’

Credit

The Russian Girl by Kingsley Amis was published by Hutchinson in 1992. Page references are to the 1993 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

Kingsley Amis reviews

Kingsley Amis reviews

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by Simon on April 8, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Literary criticism, Novel

Tagged Hedging in Kingsley Amis, Kingsley Amis, literary criticism, style, vague

Posted by Simon on April 8, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/04/08/hedging-in-kingsley-amis/

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford (2006)

‘I should like to have been born a pig’ – Paul Gauguin

‘One cannot forgo a woman for too long with impunity’ – Vincent van Gogh

‘Calm down, eat well, fuck well, work well and you will die happy’ – Paul Gauguin

‘We painters must get our orgasms from the eye’ – Vincent van Gogh

‘… an art that offers consolation for the broken-hearted’ – Vincent van Gogh

Executive summary

From October to December 1888 two great artistic innovators, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, lived and worked, ate and collaborated and argued, in a small house in Arles in the south of France. It was a period of intense inventiveness and productivity – in the month from late November to late December van Gogh painted no fewer than 35 paintings! But as Christmas approached, Vincent’s mood became more troubled and his behaviour more difficult until finally, on 23 December, Gauguin announced he was leaving, prompting van Gogh to carry out the inexplicable atrocity of cutting off his own left ear.

This book, by long-established art critic Martin Gayford, is a fairly long (356 pages), detailed but very readable account of those torrid two months, shedding light on the two men’s careers up to the fateful stay, painting a picture of the networks of experimental and avant-garde artists they operated within, shedding light on aspects of contemporary French society and artistic practice, but mostly concentrating on the day-to-day nuts and bolts of their lives together – who did the cooking, which locals they got on with and painted, locations they chose as subjects of their paintings, letters to and from Vincent’s brother Theo, fellow artist Emile Bernard, and so on.

Longer synopsis

On 20 February 1888, Vincent van Gogh arrived in Arles in the South of France, after having lived and painted in Paris for two years. He had only started painting in 1880, at the age of 27 (born March 1853) but had developed a quirky and unique style, of composition, colour and technique.

Now 35, after staying in various rented rooms, in May 1888 Van Gogh rented what became known as ‘the yellow house’, at Number 2 Place Lamartine, for 15 francs per month. Here he lived and set up his studio. He hoped it would form the nexus of a community of artists, a commune, almost a monastery of ascetics devoted to ‘the new art’, and had reached out to several of his peers.

The Yellow House by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

Early on the morning of 23 October the most talented of these friends, Paul Gauguin, having received many invitations, finally arrived in Arles and took the bedroom next to Vincent’s.

For the next two months the two artists lived and painted together, in intense camaraderie, but it was a fractious difficult relationship, Gauguin finding it hard to live with the increasingly unstable Vincent. He threatened to move out several times and the whole thing climaxed on the notorious evening of 23 December 1888 when, after Gauguin announced that he was moving out, van Gogh sliced off pretty much his entire left ear with a razor.

Gauguin went ahead and moved out but van Gogh stayed on in the Yellow House until February of the next year, when he checked himself into a hospital. He continued to work in Arles for a few more months but had himself interned voluntarily in the asylum in Saint-Rémy on 8 May 1889.

The totality of his time in Arles, from February 1888 to May 1889, was a period of intense artistic productivity during which he created over 300 works, including masterpieces like ‘Sunflowers’, ‘The Starry Night Over the Rhône’, ‘The Bedroom’ and ‘The Night Café’.

This book by English art critic Martin Gayford (b. 1952 and so 72 years old) is a retelling of this well-worn story. Does his retelling justify the cost of admission? Well, there are already 1) umpteen editions of Vincent’s letters, which any chronicler of the period has to quote and 2) umpteen other accounts of this famous period, including exhibitions devoted to it and accompanied by scholarly catalogues.

Gayford adds lots of details and spin-off facts, the banalities of life such as how, on the night of Saturday 13 October, Vincent slept for 16 hours straight. He has the letters and memoirs to go on, and so is able to produce a pretty much day-by-day account.

Notable factoids

Neither Gauguin nor van Gogh were leading figures in the art world of the time. That was probably 29-year-old Georges Seurat who had invented an entirely new way of painting (with dots – pointillisme) that had seduced some of the older generation of impressionists. Gauguin loathed it as the peak of rationality, the opposite of the dreamy symbolism he aspired to (p.124-5).

But lots of it is more along the lines of how on 29 September, van Gogh bought two beds for the house, at a cost of 150 francs. He spent more money having gas lighting installed.

Vincent’s drinking was sometimes ‘out of control’. When he was depressed he drank to liven himself up. When he was troubled by anguished thoughts he drank to stupor himself. So whatever mood, drink was the answer. He often stayed late drinking at the Café de la Gare, and spent three evenings making his famous painting of it.

The Night Café by Vincent van Gogh (September 1888) Yale University Art Gallery

Gauguin, by contrast, drank little or nothing, making a small glass last all night, mainly for appearance’ sake. After a couple of months Gauguin thought Vincent was an alcoholic.

That said, Vincent was ‘addicted’ to coffee and one of the first things he did after moving into the yellow House was buy coffee-making apparatus.

Both Gauguin and Vincent smoked pipes, the pipe prolétarienne, the Bohemian alternative to cigars.

They were both frank about visiting one of Arles’s six brothels or maisons de tolerances, agreeing that sex was good for the health. About once a fortnight, though a local later remembered that Vincent was always ‘hanging round’ the brothels.

Prostitution was part of Vincent’s life and long had been. The only women he ever went with, he remarked rather bitterly to Theo, were whores at 2 francs intended for Zouaves. At one time Vincent had lived with a reformed prostitute; now in Arles his only sexual relations were bought with small sums of money. (p.119)

(In fact van Gogh had lived for 21 months with a prostitute, from January 1882 to September 1883 – Cristina or Sien Hoornick in the Hague. She had a four-year-old daughter and during their time together gave birth to a son by another man. Van Gogh declared he wanted to marry her until his scandalised family stepped in and threatened to suspend his financial support. Regretfully Vincent left her, moving away, but was haunted by a sense of loss which informs some of his greatest paintings – pages 228 to 231.)

Prostitution, Vincent felt, would have been bad if society were ‘pure and well-regulated’. As it was, materialism and sanctimonious morality ruled; prostitutes seemed more like ‘sisters of mercy’ to an outcast such as Vincent. He felt no scruple about associating with them; he liked their company. There was something ‘human’ about them. (p.230)

The rent for the Yellow House was paid to Bernard Soulé, manager of the hotel on the Avenue Montmajour.

Vincent liked creating gangs, introducing his friends to each other, choreographing their relationships, trying and continually failing to create a community of artists.

Someone who lives in Arles is a called an Arlésien, or Arlésienne for a woman. The Arlésiens spoke a dialect of French known as Provencal or Occitan, which was closer to Catalan than French. Neither Vincent nor Gauguin could understand them. In any case, Vincent spoke French more purely than Gauguin who had been born and raised abroad.

Paul Cézanne (born 1839), the prototypical painter of the French south, was a god to Gauguin but van Gogh disliked him, thinking his work to finicky and controlled. On the one occasion when Vincent showed the older man his work, Cézanne told him he was a madman.

Gauguin was a keen fencer and brought his foil, gloves and mask with him from Brittany. He also liked boxing. He played board games. He could also play the piano, badly. Vincent could do none of these things.

Gauguin was a detached, rational almost scientific painter, making painstaking preparations. He believed art was an intellectual activity and involved generating abstract patterns from what was in front of you.

‘Do not paint too much from nature. Art is an abstraction; extract it from nature, while dreaming in front of it.’ (quoted on page 69)

‘Abstract’ was a favourite word of Gauguin’s (p.101).

Van Gogh was the direct opposite, working feverishly, impetuously, long splashes of paint worked into swirls and whorls resonating with his passion – ‘very rapidly in one exhilarating rush’.

Which is why van Gogh produced in a working career of just under ten years more paintings than Gauguin produced in 30 (p.113).

Van Gogh wanted to paint what was in front of him but in a feverishly stylised way, especially the heightened colouring. Gauguin didn’t give a damn what was in front of him but wanted to extract the essence of the dream. Which is why he was soon to be invited into Symbolist circle of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé (p.101).

When van Gogh lost his religious faith he discovered a fervent belief in contemporary literature (p.145). Vincent loved the writings of Émile Zola and read his realistic novels avidly. He was reading Zola’s latest novel, The Dream. Gauguin disliked Zola, thinking his style false. Vincent also liked Guy de Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet and the popular novelist Pierre Loti.

The best art quote is from Gauguin and not about life in the South but in the Brittany he’d just come from, and is a good insight into his painting.

I love Brittany. I find here the savage and the primitive. When my clogs clang on this granite earth, I hear the dull, muffled tone, flat and powerful, that I try to achieve in painting.
(quoted page 58)

Gauguin was designated the cook of the household, he had a feel for good food. Van Gogh on the other hand, had a functional attitude: food was fuel which kept going his intense mind and perceptions. Plus he had a long history of stomach problems, exacerbated by long spells of poverty and/or religious zeal in which he deliberately starved himself. (Both men took a similarly functional attitude towards sex; it was a healthy release from what really mattered, which was painting.) Disappointingly, neither of them left any record of what Gauguin cooked.

Gauguin had attended Roman Catholic school and been drilled in his catechism. Van Gogh was the son of a Protestant pastor. In England he got work as a teaching assistant in a Protestant school and gave sermons (the first, on the subject of pilgrimage, at the Wesleyan chapel in Richmond, p.106). By the time they were at the Yellow House, both men had lost their faiths but Vincent never lost his northern, Protestant earnestness.

Van Gogh wrote repeatedly about wanting to paint the ordinary men and women of his time with the intensity the olden artists reserved for Christian saints. A noble wish but Gayford thinks he was crippled by his Protestant honesty, his dogged commitment to the truth in front of him, ‘too truthful, too wedded to the facts, too Dutch’ (p.250).

Gauguin, with his background in a Catholic seminary, found it much easier to create paintings with a Christian resonance and later would paint works with explicitly religious imagery, invoking Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Fall, the Crucifixion and much more (p.248).

Both van Gogh and Gauguin were essentially self-taught, picking up tips and ideas from everywhere and their contemporaries.

They had picked it up from other artists and, in Vincent’s case, from life classes at which he tended to clash angrily with the teachers. Essentially, they were self-taught, and that made them more open to innovations of every kind: stylistic, spiritual, technical. (p.71)

This was one of the great objections made by academic artists and critics to the impressionists and the wave of artists who followed them – that they went through none of the careful preparation for a painting enjoined on students, but used their own slapdash methods. (Gayford explains the correct academic stages for creating a painting – consisting of: preliminary sketch; sketch; study; then final tableau – page 104.)

Van Gogh was very messy; he never put the lids back on the paint tubes which were always oozing paint all over the place, which drove Gauguin nuts. And he wasn’t the only one. Half a century later the daughter of a local shopkeeper remembered van Gogh as ‘very ugly, ungracious, impolite, crazy and bad-smelling’ (p.73).

They walked and moved differently. Plenty of eye witnesses testified to van Gogh’s ‘short, quick, irregular’ steps which were echoed by his whole bodily movement which was jerky and ungainly (p.289). All this contrasted with Gauguin who cultivated a calm and stately air, sober gestures and dignity which could come across as aloofness (p.114).

Van Gogh was intolerably prolix. Once started, he tried to persuade everyone he was talking to of his views, yoking in examples from art, music, philosophy, literature and his experiences. His friend, the young painter Emile Bernard, remembered him as ‘vehement in discourse, interminably explaining and developing his ideas’ (p.162). This came over in his letters, which sometimes ran to 16 pages of rambling argumentation. Just one of the things that wore Gauguin down.

Gauguin heard a great deal of Vincent’s views about portraiture, as about everything else. (p.241)

Gauguin was very excited when he learned that Edgar Degas liked his latest paintings. Degas (born 1834) was from the generation above Vincent and Gauguin. According to Gayford he was a ‘crabby and caustic man, known for displays of acerbic wit at Parisian dinner parties’ (p.222).

Gauguin humorously signed his many letters PGo, which could be pronounced as ‘pego’ which, apparently, is French slang for penis.

Les Alyscamps

In the first weeks of the joint stay, Gauguin and van Gogh spent days in Arles’ ancient cemetery, Les Alyscamps, which dated back to Roman times, still very atmospheric despite being encroached on by a big factory and cut across by a modern railways line.

Their different approaches to the purpose of art, their styles and techniques are vividly distinguished in the paintings they made. Gauguin extracted from the scene an abstract view of mysterious figures in a portentous landscape, coloured with rich and unnaturalistic colours.

‘Les Alyscamps or the three graces at the temple of Venus’ by Paul Gauguin (1888) Musée d’Orsay

Van Gogh used colours intensely but a) left in all the modern details, included the factory with smoke coming from its chimneys and b) his people are almost accidental details, giving a sense of the everyday and contingent but made feverishly intense. You can see how messily – and incompletely – the paint has been applied in the foreground.

‘Les Alyscamps, Avenue in Arles’ by Vincent van Gogh (October 1888) Source/Photographer: Goulandris Foundation

Two portraits of Mrs Roulin

Showing just how different two portraits of the same person can be, when executed by two such very different sensibilities. Augustine-Alix Roulin, born in 1851 and so 37, was the wife of a local postal official, Joseph Roulin. In December 1888, Vincent persuaded the entire family to sit for their portraits, including the children and the little baby Marcelle.

On the first occasion, Vincent and Gauguin both painted Madame Roulin at the same sitting, sitting in the same chair, wearing the same clothes, against the same background. The resulting portraits not only show the two artists’ contrasting styles but are a revelation of how utterly differently two people can see exactly the same thing. In fact van Gogh is quoted saying as much, saying of portraits that ‘one and the same person may furnish motifs for very different portraits’ (p.239).

Here’s Vincent’s rendering.

‘Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin’ by Vincent van Gogh (November to December 1888) Winterthur: Oskar Reinhart Collection

And Gauguin’s. They could barely be more unalike in composition but also the handling of the paint.

‘Madame Roulin’ by Paul Gauguin (1888)

Gayford tells us it was by his portraits that van Gogh wished to be judged whereas Gauguin wasn’t much of a portraitist, except of himself (p.254).

Comments

Gayford’s book is enjoyable partly because it has a great subject and that subject is absolutely awash with sources to draw on. Van Gogh’s paintings, his letters (‘Few people have left a fuller self-portrait in words than Vincent did, p.315); Gauguin’s letters, his later memoirs; the memoirs of their correspondents (notably brother Theo van Gogh and the young painter Emile Bernard); and memories of inhabitants of Arles – there is a wealth of information, before you even start on the secondary material, namely loads of biographies of both men, thousands of essays by art critics and scholars, the catalogues of countless exhibitions, and so on.

Gayford synthesises all this into a competent, interesting and – in the final scenes around the notorious ear-cutting incident – quite gripping narrative. It is told in a straightforward, magazine style, with fairly interesting inserts about Zola or the academic process for creating a painting, the merits of jute versus canvas as a support for an oil painting, a light summary of van Gogh’s rather incoherent colour theory, and so on and so on.

But for such an eminent art writer, and a man who loses no opportunity to remind us how he’s good friends with contemporary artists such as David Hockney and Lucien Freud, Gayford’s commentary is often surprisingly banal.

When he tells us that in the late nineteenth century a lot of people lost their Christian faith and goes on to quote Matthew Arnold’s super famous poem, Dover Beach, as proof, I felt the heavy thump of banality and obviousness. This is A-level standard, if not GCSE English level.

Same with his page and a half explaining Zola’s sequence of Les Rougon-Macquart novels (pages 212 to 213), or telling us that Wagner was a revolutionary composer. GCSE level. Everywhere you look, Gayford states the fairly obvious in an amiably anodyne style. The first page of Sue Prideaux’s epic biography of Gauguin is more arresting and insightful than anything in Gayford.

It’s a good enough book but nowhere does Gayford rise to the eloquence you feel is really required to do justice to van Gogh’s extraordinary genius and the astonishingly creative symbiotic relationship between him and Gauguin. It has puffs on the back from the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. Well, quite. Sunday supplement stuff. Intelligent, thorough, competent, but lacking any fire.

Oh yes, the illustrations The paper quality is poor, cardboardy and the illustrations are in poor quality black and white and small. I had to look all the paintings up online in order to appreciate them. Since this is a book about artists who were revolutionaries in the use of colour, giving the paintings themselves as tiny, poor quality black and white reproductions is so poor as to be absurd.

All in all, it demonstrates Simon’s Law of Books which is: the more you pay for a book, the more you’re likely to be disappointed.

Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence by Martin Bailey

In the Royal Academy shop I just saw a copy of this book, ‘Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence’ by Martin Bailey. This looks like it’s a different league from the Gayford. It’s not only more recent (2021 compared to 2006), but it’s a bigger format book with lovely shiny paper and lavish full colour illustrations. I haven’t read the text but for the illustrations alone, I’d ignore the Gayford and go with Bailey.

Lautrec’s van Gogh

One of the best things I learned from Gayford’s book was the existence of a portrait of van Gogh done by fellow Bohemian Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, before Vincent left Paris in early 1888. Lautrec was just 23. Genius, isn’t it? And for all its brash technique and colour palette, figuratively accurate in a way nothing by Vincent or Gauguin is.

Vincent van Gogh by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1887) Pastel on cardboard

Credit

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford was first published by Fig Tree books in 2006. I read the 2024 revised Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

Kiefer / Van Gogh @ the Royal Academy (September 2025)
Van Gogh: Lovers and Poets @ the National Gallery (September 2024)
Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain (May 2019)
The Post-Impressionists by Belinda Thompson (1990)

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by Simon on October 6, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Biography, Books

Tagged alcoholism, Alphonse Daudet, Arlésien, Arlésienne, Arles, art book, art history, asylum, Augustine-Alix Roulin, Émile Bernard, Bernard Soulé, Biography, book, Brittany, brothel, Catalan, Cezanne, David Hockney, Dover Beach, Edgar Degas, Emile Zola, fancing, Georges Seurat, Goncourts, Guy de Maupassant, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Joseph Roulin, Les Alyscamps, Les Rougon-Macquart novels, Lucien Freud, madness, maison de tolerances, Martin Bailey, Martin Gayford, Matthew Arnold, modern art, modern painting, Mrs Roulin, Occitan, Painting, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, PGo, Pierre Loti, pipe prolétarienne, Place Lamartine, pointillisme, prostitution, Provencal, Saint-Rémy, sex, Sien Hoornick, South of France, Stéphane Mallarmé, Sue Prideaux, sunflowers, Symbolism, The Bedroom, The Hague, The Night Café, The Starry Night Over the Rhône, The Yellow House, Vincent van Gogh, Wagner, Zouaves

Posted by Simon on October 6, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/the-yellow-house-van-gogh-gauguin-martin-gayford/

Collected Short Stories by E.M. Forster

I thought E.M. Forster was the poet laureate of a certain kind of Edwardian middle-class gentility, all vicars’ tea parties and maiden aunts traipsing off to Italy to appreciate Renaissance art, as captured best in his 1908 novel, A Room With A View – so Forster’s collected short stories come as a real surprise and almost a shock. I had no idea they would be so weird, really weird, fantastical and almost incomprehensibly strange, some of them.

Forster published two collections of short stories in his lifetime, The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911) and The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928). All the stories from both volumes were then brought together into the current collection in 1947. Forster’s brief introduction explains that all of them were written before the Great War.

The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911)

The Story of a Panic
The Other Side of the Hedge
The Celestial Omnibus
Other Kingdom
The Curate’s Friend
The Road from Colonus

The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928)

The Machine Stops
The Point of It
Mr Andrews
Co-ordination
The Story of the Siren
The Eternal Moment

1. The Story of a Panic (25 pages)

A miscellaneous group of Edwardian middle-class ladies and gentlemen, including the pompous narrator, his wife and his two children, Mr Sanbach the curate, Mr Leyland the artists, the two Miss Robinsons and their spoilt nephew Eustace, are staying at a discreet hotel in Ravello. One afternoon they go for a walk up into the surrounding hills. A conversation about the view leads the artist in the group (there’s always an artist) to go on about how the ancient gods are all vanished from the disenchanted landscape, not least the great god Pan. But mention of the god’s name brings a brief shiver to the narrator who notices a cat’s paw of ripples passing over the fields opposite. Suddenly it becomes ominously silent. And then with no explanation, all the adults in the group experience the same hysteria, at the same moment and, without knowing how it happened, find themselves running down the hillside.

When they come back to their senses they realise they’ve left Eustace behind. Reluctantly they return to the clearing to find their picnic things scattered and Eustace lying unconscious. When they wake him he is a changed boy, become more and more frolicsome, skipping through the woods on the way back, gathering wild flowers and mouthing strange hymns to nature, ‘attempting to tackle themes which the greatest poets have found almost beyond their power’. In brief: he has been possessed by the spirit of the god Pan.

That night Eustace wakes them all by cavorting around the hotel garden, giving more vent to hymns to the sky and stars etc and letting out howls. The pompous narrator and Leyland, with the reluctant help of the hotel’s slovenly waiter, Gennaro, who has some kind of deep understanding of what Eustace’s going through, grab the boy and lock him up in his room, despite his protestations that his room looks out on the opposite wall, is small like a cell and will crush his spirit.

Gennaro warns the others that Eustace will die there, tonight, which the others take to be hysterical Italian hyperbole, but next thing they know, he unlocks Eustace’s door and frees him to escape through the pompous narrator’s bedroom, leaping from the balcony into the garden and then into the olive groves beneath, running off shouting and laughing as his helped, Gennaro, incongruously, falls dead at their feet.

Comments

You’d have thought this was a florid story for the period, but then again this was the decade of Saki with his outrageous animal stories. The story announces the fundamental dichotomy which runs through all Forster’s work: between the buttoned-down, stifled conventionality of the respectable English middle class and something wild and primal. There are the similar primal moments in ‘Howards End’ (the fantastical description of the Beethoven concert) and in ‘Passage To India’ (in the famous opening scene at the Marabar caves where Miss Quested has her vision of sensuality), and the Italian novels are built on the same basic binary: buttoned-down Britishers encountering the spirit of life and sensuality in hot Italy.

In a way, the most striking character in the story isn’t the possessed boy but the pompous narrator himself whose voice the story’s told in. Mr Tytler is the kind of person that thinks that every remark he doesn’t like is impertinence and whose self-satisfied pomposity emerges in a series of carefully planted comments and asides.

I always make a point of behaving pleasantly to Italians, however little they may deserve it…

Taking Miss Robinson aside, I asked her permission to speak seriously to Eustace on the subject of intercourse with social inferiors.

It is no good speaking delicately to persons of that class. Unless you put things plainly, they take a vicious pleasure in misunderstanding you.

And so on. Tytler’s character is every bit as important to the story (and enjoyable) as the actual narrative.

2. The Other Side of the Hedge (7 pages)

A short, powerfully strange fable. The unnamed narrator is struggling along an endless dusty track between high prickly hedges on what initially appears to be a particularly arduous country walk. But the weird reference to his pedometer in the opening words indicates something is very amiss which is quickly confirmed by other details. He has in fact been trudging along this track for his entire life which, his pedometer tells him, is 25 years, focusing solely on the struggle to forge ahead, to pass others and not be passed by too many. The ruthlessness of this quest is suggested by the casual remark that he left his brother back behind at some bend two years earlier.

Anyway, he stops to rest at a milestone and sees a glimpse of light through the thick hedge and, on an impulse, forces his way through, quite an effort as it is so thick.

Emerging on the other side he tumbles into a moat and is pulled out by someone who says ‘Another!’ Briefly, he finds himself in a landscape unlike anything he’s known before.

‘All kinds come through the hedge, and come at all times—when they are drawing ahead in the race, when they are lagging behind, when they are left for dead. I often stand near the boundary listening to the sounds of the road—you know what they are—and wonder if anyone will turn aside. It is my great happiness to help someone out of the moat, as I helped you. For our country fills up slowly, though it was meant for all mankind.’

The man who’s caught him, 50 or 60, then proceeds to show him round this strange new world. He sees a man who runs across to a lake, strips off and jumps in to swim, later a woman singing from some long grass. Where are the others, he asks, because he can only conceive of life as a competition. There are no others, the man explains: here people express themselves and take pleasure for its own sake.

The host explains that this place is intended to fill up, slowly but steadily, with all mankind. The hedge racer just can’t understand, because for him there is only the race and the competition. His credo is:

‘Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!’

He is shown a gate of ivory and a gate of horn, which are conscious echoes of the same gates in classical mythology. As the sun starts to set people lie around on the grass to go to sleep, in a relaxed easy-going way the narrator can’t understand. An older man passes carrying a scythe and a billycan of drink and the narrator attacks him, grabs the can, and drinks it thirstily, but the other simply remarks:

‘This is where your road ends, and through this gate humanity—all that is left of it—will come in to us.’

What does that mean? In the last few paragraphs the narrator becomes drowsy and the man whose drink he stole gently lays him down. With his last flickers of consciousness the narrator recognises him as the brother who he told us he left behind so many years ago.

Thoughts

See what I mean by strange and fantastical? Quite clearly it’s a fable with just enough detail to tease our minds but not too many to make it too specific. Surfing the internet I’ve come across two distinct interpretations of it, one specifically Christian, the other more generally secular. The Christian interpretation is that the narrator is a human soul trudging through the vale of sorrow which is this life, who goes through the momentarily painful experience of death (the thorny hedge) to emerge into Paradise. Here, instead of a narrow arid existence, everyone fulfils themselves, singing or swimming for the sheer joy of it.

The more secular one is that it is a warning against the arid, driven barrenness of what a later generation would call the Rat Race. Abandon endless striving and competition for a world where people simply are and enjoy pleasures for their own sake. The drawback with this simpler interpretation is the parts where the guide or the other man make great generalisations about all of humanity being destined to arrive in the garden, which push the Christian, or religious, interpretation.

3. The Celestial Omnibus (18 pages)

A delightful children’s story. The unnamed little boy narrator lives in boring Surbiton. He is talked down to by his mother and father and even their nice friend, Mr Bons (pompous President of the Surbiton Literary Society), gently patronises the little boy.

Nonetheless, the boy is intrigued by the lane opposite his suburban home where someone long ago stuck up a tatty notice reading ‘To heaven’. One day he is brave enough to go a bit further into the lane to discover it is a blind alley, but there is a piece of paper stuck to the wall giving details of what appears to be a bus service, apologising for interruptions to the service but saying that sunset and sunrise buses will still be working. Puzzled, he exits the lane only to run into the arms of his father who asks what he was doing down there, and when the boy tells him about the sign, falls about laughing, as does his mother when they get home. They are avatars of those stock characters, the unsympathetic and disbelieving parents.

Next morning he wakes up before dawn, still mortified by his parent’s ridicule, then remembers that the announcement promised a dawn service, so sneaks out of the house in the foggy dawn, across the road, up the little lane and discovers…

The Celestial Omnibus, drawn by two horses steered by a coachman wearing a cape, lit by two lamps which shine the light of fairyland over the bleak little cul de sac. He has barely climbed aboard before it starts moving? But how, and where? The lane ends in a brick wall! But it keeps on moving.

The sign above the driver says his name is Browne and when he speaks in a very ornate baroque old-fashioned style any bookish author starts to suspect what is soon confirmed, which is that he is Sir Thomas Browne, famous to literary types as the author of 17th century classics ‘Religio Medici’ (1643), ‘Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial’ (1658) and ‘The Garden of Cyrus’ (1658). Which explains why he speaks like this:

‘Tickets on this line,’ said the driver, ‘whether single or return, can be purchased by coinage from no terrene mint. And a chronometer, though it had solaced the vigils of Charlemagne, or measured the slumbers of Laura, can acquire by no mutation the double-cake that charms the fangless Cerberus of Heaven!’

As you might expect the omnibus clops on, surrounded by fog, which prevents the boy seeing where they’re going. There are cracks of thunder, the mist clears and the boy is amazed to see rainbows spreading out from under the horses’ hooves, and then a gorge stretching down to a river in which three maidens are frolicking. When the narrator says they are playing with something that looks like a ring, the educated reader of 1910 would realise in a flash this is a reference to the first of Wagner’s mighty Ring series of operas, The Rhinegold, in which three mermaids frolic in the Rhine.

So it’s a fantasy, seen through the eyes of a child, but whose elements (Browne, Wagner) are very much targeted at an adult, literate audience.

Anyway, the story suddenly cuts to the boy back at home, in disgrace, having told his parents a cock and bull story about a magical omnibus and rainbow horses and the rest of it, and been caned by his father for his trouble and locked in his room. He’s allowed out later to see friend of the family Mr Bons. It’s a sort of joke that the boy is given poetry to memorise as a punishment, and Mr Bons is to test him. (The poem he has to memorise is To Homer by Keats.) To his disappointment, Mr Bons also disbelieves him, but then delights him by agreeing to accompany him that evening at dusk, just to show him there is no such thing as a magic bus.

Except there is. The boy and Mr Bons arrive in the alleyway to see a new, different magic omnibus, pulled by three horses and the coachman ‘ a sallow man with terrifying jaws and sunken eyes.’ It is Dante. At this point it becomes clear that the point of the story is to humiliate the pompous Mr Bons. As the boy reels off the names of the people he met on his previous trip (Achilles, Shakespeare) Mr Bons tells him off for not making the most of talking to these Immortals and tells him to behave, keep silent, and leave everything to him!

But instead, when the omnibus reaches the ravine and rainbows spread from the horses’ hooves across it to form a rainbow bridge, Mr Bons sees nothing, denies these exist. When the boy calls out the voices of literary figures call back in celebration. When they reach the other side of the ravine, he sees the great Achilles who invites him to leap up onto his marvellous shield.

Yet all through this Mr Bons hears nothing and sees nothing. So only the young and pure in heart can see the world’s wonder and beauty. And, in a very Bloomsbury message, even art and literature are secondary to the ultimate aesthetic value, which is to live and love and experience the world directly and passionately, unblinkered by pompous conventions.

Mr Bons crawls from the omnibus in distress and fells through the rocks and disappears even as the boy is apotheosised, a laurel wreath placed on his brow. A cheesy postscript purports to be a quote from the Kingston Gazette noting that the body of Mr Septimus Bons has been found in a shocking state, as if fallen from a great height, near Bermondsey gasworks.

When I mentioned reading it, a friend said it was a childhood favourite of theirs and wondered whether J.K. Rowling got the idea from it for her Knight Bus in the Harry Potter books. Unlikely. a) Certain fantasy tropes tend to recur across different stories because they are based on common aspects of life, such as magic buses (or Hagrid’s flying motorbike or the Hogwarts Express). b) Rowling’s aim was to entertain, whereas this is a very didactic story.

In fact all the stories, fantasies though they are, point a moral, albeit a sometimes muted or obscure moral.

4. Other Kingdom (27 pages)

Part 1

Opens with a blizzard of dialogue from people who are undescribed and unexplained. It takes a few pages before we get it clear that Mr Inskip is the narrator and he is a young tutor teaching Latin to nubile young Miss Evelyn Beaumont, older Mrs Worters and Mr Jack Ford, a boy who is being coached to pass his public school entrance exam (so 12 or 13 years old). They are at the house of Harcourt Worters who is Mrs Worter’s son, the guardian of young Ford and fiancé to Miss Beaumont and the man who hired and is paying Inskip.

(Worters is pronounced ‘waters’.)

This slow revealing of details is an interesting play with the power of a text, the conventions of narrative. Because it’s only on the fourth page that Mr Worter, entering on the lesson, reveals that it’s not taking place in a room (as you’d assumed, lacking any definite description), but outdoors on the lawn. This deliberate slow revealing is a playing with, a toying with the magic of stories.

It is significant that they are, at that moment, parsing a line from one of Virgil’s Eclogues, ‘Quem fugis ab demens habitarunt di quoque silvas’, ‘From whom do you flee, O you madman? Gods have also lived in the woods’ (Eclogue 2, line 60). The bucolic note echoes the Panic story and all the other rural themes.

So young Mr Worters arrives on the lawn at the jolly little Latin lesson being given by Mr Inskip and announces to his mother, younger brother and fiancée that he has just purchased a bit of woodland abutting his estate named Other Kingdom Copse. Spot the heavy symbolism of the name? And then, in a gracious gesture, he presents it to his fiancée as a second engagement present. There is a little quibbling about the fact that the lease for it last ‘only’ 99 years, then these privileged people go inside where the servants have prepared tea.

Part 2

In part 2 of the story Miss Beaumont leads this entourage plus a few other posh guests across the bridge over the little stream and into her ‘kingdom’ for a picnic. This develops into a genteel argument. Everyone gets to see Hartley and his fiancée interacting and realise that they don’t quite mesh. She is penniless, a ‘crude, unsophisticated person’ from Ireland, from whence he plucked her to be his bride. But as the picnic goes on we see she is empty-headed and wilful.

That said, their little squabble is amazingly civilised. She says she likes the classics while Hartley thinks they are cold, lack a certain something, and goes on to mention ‘Dante, a Madonna of Raphael, some bars of Mendelssohn’…Hard to imagine anyone these days having the same kind of conversation.

After more ragging the picnickers break up, Ford goes off with the ladies leaving the narrator alone with Mr Worters. He is not stupid. He knows his job is to humour his employer. So he cautiously assents when Harcourt points out that Miss Beaumont is not too bright and is probably holding back the lessons for young Ford.

They have just agreed this when Miss Beaumont returns, happily yelling them that she has counted and her wood contains 78 trees! Unfortunately, Harcourt goes on to ruin the mood by explaining all his plans for ‘her’ wood, which include laying an ugly asphalt path from the house across the meadow to it and enclosing it in a fence with just one gate, with a two keys for him and her.

Predictably, Miss B doesn’t like this at all, and goes further. Harcourt doesn’t like the way the local yokels come up to the wood and carve their names into it. Surprisingly, Miss B knows this is part of local folklore, that the carving of names is part of local wooing customs, and if couples get married they come back and carve the initials of their children.

Something strange happens. She goes into almost a trance as she insists that she mustn’t be fenced in, she needs to be free. Harcourt tries to reconcile the quarrel by saying they can cut their initials into a tree now and Miss Beaumont (I think) utters almost visionary words:

‘E.B., Eternal Blessing. Mine! Mine! My haven from the world! My temple of purity. Oh the spiritual exaltation—you cannot understand it, but you will! Oh, the seclusion of Paradise. Year after year alone together, all in all to each other—year after year, soul to soul, E.B., Everlasting Bliss!’

This echoes the ‘there is a spirit in the woods’ motif announced in the Panic story and recurring through most of them.

Part 3

Cut to another scene (the story is in 4 distinct parts). Young Ford had been keeping a journal, with poems and sketches and so on. Unfortunately, Hartley discovered it and read some things about himself in it. Now Hartley is threatening to send him away. The narrator counsels complete prostration and abject apology. Unfortunately he does it loud enough for interfering Miss Beaumont to over hear and come over to them. When she hears about it, she promises to go see Hartley immediately and insist that Ford be allowed to stay.

There then follows a scene which reminded me very much of something similar in Roald Dahl’s story ‘Neck’, where he and the owner of a grand country house watch the owner’s wife and her lover walking and cavorting in the landscaped garden. Here, the narrator watches Miss Beaumont walk over to Hartley who is supervising workmen laying down the asphalt path to the woods (Miss Beaumont lost her arguments over that) and then, far enough away so he can’t hear them, watches the gestures as she remonstrates with her fiancé who mimes the part of a tall, decisive man whose mind is made up.

What followed was a good deal better than a play. Their two little figures parted and met and parted again, she gesticulating, he most pompous and calm.

As part of her presentation she took a few steps backwards and fell into the stream. Oops. Comedy. She’s fished out and sent back to the house with muddy skirts, to get changed and go straight to bed (to prevent a cold etc).

Part 4

Cut to the fourth and final part of this tale. Ford has been banished. Miss Beaumont is considerably subdued. And the narrator has been kept on as Harcourt’s personal secretary and so is more servile than ever.

I admire people who know on which side their bread’s buttered.

A strong wind blows up but Harcourt decides to defy it and take Miss B and the household’s other women down the new path to the Other Kingdom. On the way Miss B comes to life, shimmers and twirls in the strong wind, looks almost like a strong tree covered in foliage, spouts the pagan sentiments uttered by Eustace in Panic, runs flirtatiously ahead of Harcourt and disappears into the copse. And disappears altogether. She has been transformed into a tree. The entire story turns out to be the modern-day equivalent of one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

A ferocious storm drives the search party back to the house, Harcourt conceives the notion that she has eloped with Ford (how old is this Ford?) and he and Inskip travel speedily up to Ford’s seedy lodgings in Peckham, but the studious boy just mocks them, saying Miss Beaumont has escaped (Harcourt’s patriarchal tyranny) ‘absolutely, for ever and ever, as long as there are branches to shade men from the sun.’

Comments

Although there’s obviously a plot etc, as in ‘The Story of A Panic’ it’s also an experiment in tone of voice. This time the narrator is a lowly Latin tutor with a well-developed sense of his place in the social hierarchy.

If it were my place to like people, I could have liked her very much.

…I must keep in with Harcourt.

He is sly and calculating and self aware:

For us the situation was intolerable. I had to save it by making a tactful reference to the view, which, I said, reminded me a little of the country near Veii. It did not — indeed it could not, for I have never been near Veii. But it is part of my system to make classical allusions. And at all events I saved the situation.

The words themselves are not exactly funny, but Forster’s dry characterisation of this cautious pedantic man is. Drily judgemental. And droll:

Her discourse was full of trembling lights and shadows — frivolous one moment, the next moment asking why Humanity is here. I did not take the Moral Science Tripos, so I could not tell her.

As in story 1, Forster’s characterisation of the narrator is a central part of the pleasure.

5. The Curate’s Friend (9 pages)

Are there curates any more? Does the role exist? They are very Forster, with his vicar’s tea party timidity. This is another story based on the dichotomy between the strait-laced values of Edwardian middle classes and something wild and pagan and untamed. It’s announced in the first sentence:

It is uncertain how the Faun came to be in Wiltshire.

The deadpan comic tone of this reminded me of Saki’s bland statement of the most outrageous fantasies.

The story is narrated by a curate named Henry (‘Harry’). He goes for a picnic on the Downs with his wife and her mother and an unnamed male friend. Somehow the Faun erupts beside them, making Harry shriek with surprise and go running into the trees. Here he finds, bizarrely, that everything is talking to him, the air, the trees, the earth, and the voice of the Faun. When the Faun says: ‘For years I have only spoken to children, and they lose sight of me as soon as they grow up’ I thought of Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up who first appeared in a J.M. Barrie story in 1902 i.e. a few years before this.

The dialogue isn’t realistic but in the arch contrived (and deliberately dated) style of a fable:

‘Poor woodland creature!’ said I, turning round. ‘How could you understand? It was idle of me to chide you. It is not in your little nature to comprehend a life of self-denial. Ah! if only I could reach you!’

The curate demands the Faun prove his powers by making the wife he’s come on the picnic with happy. The Faun promptly does this but it turns out to involve making the wife and the male friend overcome with desire and fall into each others’ arms – as in so many fairy stories, Greek myths or fables where a wish is granted but turns out not to be, in practice, what the wisher intended.

What’s strange is that this betrayal does, in fact, make the curate happy. The Faun commands him to laugh, the hill holds its breath (nature is personified like this throughout) and then Harry bursts out laughing. A coda indicates that he has for many years now spread the happiness and joy the Faun showed him to his parishioners.

Comment

It strangeness of it reminded me of Ted Hughes’s eerie and strange fantasy about a possessed vicar, Gaudete.

Also, it is surely blasphemous. At the end the curate announces that he has now graduated from curate to have a ‘living’ (I think this means he has become a vicar) and goes on to claim that he is only able to preach joy to his miscellaneous congregation because of this great pagan experience which came to him. If serious Anglicans read this in 1910, wouldn’t they have been offended that a Christian preacher is made to base his confidence and preaching on a thoroughly unchristian revelation?

Was it symptomatic of the great loosening of cultural ties Roy Hattersley attributes to the Edwardian age? Or would this story have been acceptable earlier, in the 1890s or 1880s?

6. The Road from Colonus (14 pages)

Part 1

Another story where something strange, a kind of pagan epiphany, occurs to a very English figure.

Mr Lucas is on holiday in Greece with a group who consist of his daughter, Ethel, nagging Mrs. Forman, polite and helpful Mr. Graham, and the English-speaking dragoman (‘an interpreter or guide, especially in countries speaking Arabic, Turkish, or Persian’). They are all riding mules through the parched landscape.

Lucas has married, raised his children, grown old and, now, as we meet him, is lapsing into ageing indifference. But all his life he’s harboured fantasies of travelling to Greece and now, now he experiences an epiphany. Arriving on muleback ahead of the others at a wooden inn in the sun-scorched landscape he spies an ancient plane tree from whose roots a pure spring is babbling. The tree has been hollowed out by generations of worshippers and Lucas stumbles into the inner darkness and has one of Forster’s pagan epiphanies:

When he opened his eyes, something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over all things, and made them intelligible and good…in a brief space of time [he] had discovered not only Greece, but England and all the world and life…

When the others catch up with him, to their astonishment Lucas insists that he stop there, in this place, near this grove of trees and the dirty old inn and the tree with a spring magically bursting forth. The title of the story comes from the family joke that Lucas’s daughter, Ethel, is like Antigone, daughter of the grown-up wandering Oedipus. And since Oedipus met his end at a place called Colonus, Mrs Forman makes a joke that this dusty place in the back of beyond is Mr Lucas’s Colonus.

Mr Lucas insists that he wants to stay there because he feels the truth of the landscape and the universe, the whispering leaves and trickling water, are worth more than his old life back in London, more than anything.

There’s some inconclusive bickering until young Ethel begs willing Mr Graham to help and the latter simply lifts Mr Lucas onto one of the mules and leads him off alongside the others and so off they go, with Mr Lucas suddenly rendered passive and powerless. From out of nowhere the children from the dirty little inn appear and throw stones at them (as if they are, somehow, spirits of the place, trying to retain Lucas there) but Mr Graham sees them off. All of this Mr Lucas observes with complete equanimity.

Part 2

Cut to the short second part of the story. They are back in London. Ethel is to be married soon. When Ethel moves out, they have arranged for Mr Lucas’s unmarried sister, Aunt Julia, to come to stay and look after him. He complains querulously about the noisy children next door and the dog barking and the sound of the pipes at night.

The post arrives, bringing a parcel from Mrs Forman who is still in Athens. It contains asphodel bulbs wrapped in local newspaper. Ethel is curious to see if she can still read modern Greek and so starts reading the old newspapers used as packing. Her eye falls on a news story about a remote rural inn by a stream. According to the article, one night recently a nearby plane tree fell over and crushed the inn, killing all the inhabitants. Then Ethel suddenly sees the date on the newspaper and realises that this tragedy happened on the night of the day they were there. If Mr Graham hadn’t forced Mr Lucas onto the donkey and Mr Lucas had stayed the night, he would have been killed along with the family.

The real import of the news, the thing the reader is left puzzling over, is that Mr Lucas had a genuine revelation, an overwhelming sense of understanding the universe. Did that refer to the way he would have died if he’d stayed? Was it a kind of siren song of fate trying to lure him to stay? Or was the full realisation of the secrets of the universe he felt he trembled on the brink of, is that equivalent to death? Is the full epiphany of the meaning of the universe the same as death?

7. The Machine Stops (38 pages)

Discussed in full in a separate review.

8. The Point of It (11 pages)

Part 1

A really strange, extended fantasy about life, death, hell and reincarnation. Young Harold and Michael are rowing off the Norfolk coast. They get caught in a fierce current and, overstraining himself, Harold drops dead of a heart attack. Doctors, the police and relatives call, but the story skips over time in a cavalier way, telling us Michael was 22 when this tragic incident happened, but lived to be over 70.

Part 2

There follows an eerily normal overview of this character, Michael, who goes on to become a civil servant, works at the British Museum, marries a supportive but unintellectual woman, Janet, has three children who grow up to be decent types, he writes some well-received essays, is knighted, Janet dies and, as he becomes a valetudinarian (‘a person who is unduly anxious about their health’) is looked after by his daughter. His death was absurd and random, for he was taking a short cut through a slum when he got involved in a fierce argument between two wives and when he tried to bring peace, was hit, fell and hit his head.

There’s a powerful scene in which we gather that Sir Michael is in a coma, in bed and being cared for by a nurse. He comes to consciousness thinking only ten minutes or so have passed but is unable to speak and hears his grown-up son and daughter discussing him quite brutally as if he can’t hear. Two of his grandchildren come in and are equally disrespectful. He is filled with a sense of the irony of the whole situation and abruptly dies in this mood.

Part 3

Now commences the really unsettling, upsetting part of the story, for Michael’s soul appears to live on into an afterlife but not at all the one we’re led to believe in. he finds himself embedded in a vast plain of sand across which a few pillars of sand move and disintegrate. He feels he has existed here forever and only a fraction of his soul was incarnated in his sorry body.

How long had he lain here? Perhaps for years, long before death perhaps, while his body seemed to be walking among men. Life is so short and trivial, that who knows whether we arrive for it entirely, whether more than a fraction of the soul is aroused to put on flesh? … It seemed to Micky that he had lain in the dust for ever, suffering and sneering, and that the essence of all things, the primal power that lies behind the stars, is senility. Age, toothless, dropsical age; ungenerous to age and to youth; born before all ages, and outlasting them; the universe as old age. (p.158)

There is a general atmosphere of spite and contempt, degradation and discomfort. He realises it is a kind of hell. He has a neighbour, another large sandy fungous form. They have a strange colloquy, Michael asking about this place. There are two heavens, he is told, the heaven of the hard and the soft. They are in the heaven of the soft, the afterlife ‘of the sentimentalists, the conciliators, the peace-makers, the humanists, and all who have trusted the warmer vision’. In the distance he can see cliffs of stone and realises his wife is there, in the heaven of the hard, with ‘the reformers and ascetics and all sword-like souls.’ He realises that:

the years are bound either to liquefy a man or to stiffen him, and that Love and Truth, who seem to contend for our souls like angels, hold each the seeds of our decay.

What on earth does this mean? Is it a kind of humanist rewriting of the Christian heaven and hell or a horrible modernist vision, in its grim bleakness not far from Kafka or Beckett? He regrets having lived such a ‘soft’ life, and missing the chance to distil the joy which is possible at the heart of human existence. But here everything is degraded and disgusting and mediocre. It completely lacks the excitement of the Christian vision, that is too flattering by far.

For there is nothing ultimate in Hell; men will not lay aside all hope on entering it, or they would attain to the splendour of despair. To have made a poem about Hell is to mistake its very essence; it is the imagination of men, who will have beauty, that fashions it as ice or flame. Old, but capable of growing older, Micky lay in the sandy country…

I found this quite horrible and repellent. Then it gets worse. A voice comes from across the wide river on the other side of which dwell the damned. It crosses the river and shatters pillars of sand and preaches a wisdom which stabs Michael with pain.

‘I was before choice,’ came the song. ‘I was before hardness and softness were divided. I was in the days when truth was love. And I am.’

Is this Jesus, God, the Devil, what?

‘I have been all men, but all men have forgotten me. I transfigured the world for them until they preferred the world. They came to me as children, afraid; I taught them, and they despised me. Childhood is a dream about me, experience a slow forgetting: I govern the magic years between them, and am.’

I found it hard to understand. It has the shapes and rhetoric of religion but fits no religion I understand. I’m quoting it at such length because paraphrase would simplify it too much because it is so weird.

‘Death comes,’ the voice pealed, ‘and death is not a dream or a forgetting. Death is real. But I, too, am real, and whom I will I save. I see the scheme of things, and in it no place for me, the brain and the body against me. Therefore I rend the scheme in two, and make a place, and under countless names have harrowed Hell. Come.’ Then, in tones of inexpressible sweetness, ‘Come to me all who remember. Come out of your eternity into mine. It is easy, for I am still at your eyes, waiting to look out of them; still in your hearts, waiting to beat. The years that I dwelt with you seemed short, but they were magical, and they outrun time.’

And the narrator says that Mickey died another death, in pain, found himself standing in the plain (instead of lying half buried) staggered down the sand towards the river, was in the water bumping against some wood, and then…he is back in his young man’s body, in the rowing boat as Harry struggles against the tide. Apparently he has been reincarnated back to that crucial moment in his life, just as Harry is about to collapse. Apparently, he will live the next fifty years over again. And again?

This story confused and upset me, its fundamental unhappiness, the dreariness of the imagery, the sense of there never being completion but an eternity of sand-clogged old age and regret…Yuk.

9. Mr Andrews (5 pages)

Could be called ‘Mr Andrews goes to heaven’ for that’s what happens. It opens sounding like conventional Christianity only it isn’t:

The souls of the dead were ascending towards the Judgment Seat and the Gate of Heaven. The world soul pressed them on every side, just as the atmosphere presses upon rising bubbles, striving to vanquish them, to break their thin envelope of personality, to mingle their virtue with its own. But they resisted, remembering their glorious individual life on earth, and hoping for an individual life to come.

The Judgement Seat and the Gate of Heaven are Christian alright but the notion of the world soul isn’t and the idea that this world soul strives to burst the individual soul and absorb them is something out of science fiction.

Anyway, floating up to heaven he bumps into the soul of a Muslim, a Turk. They strike up a friendship, each under the impression they are heading for the heaven of their religion and that the other will be excluded. Sad about this, at the gate of heaven, rather than ask admittance for themselves they ask that their friend can be admitted. Of course they are both allowed in and given the accoutrements of their faith, a harp for Mr Andrews, a collection of nubile virgins for the Turk.

Mr Andrews goes wandering round heaven and sees many sights, including gods from all the religions, but is unsatisfied. He can’t find any friends, in fact the whole place seems curiously unpopulated. He experiences no joy or bliss (very reminiscent of Sir Michael in the previous story, who finds the afterlife grim, flat and depressing). When he stumbles across the Turk and his harem he discovers that he, too, is unsatisfied.

They decide to go back to the Gate of Heaven, Mr Andrew explaining on the way that maybe heaven is disappointing because it reflects his imagination and he’s never imagined anything so perfect:

‘We desire infinity and we cannot imagine it. How can we expect it to be granted? I have never imagined anything infinitely good or beautiful excepting in my dreams.’

So they ask to leave. The voice warns them but they insist. they have barely exited heaven before they feel the World Soul pressing against them and, this time, they abandon themselves to it.

As soon as they passed the gate, they felt again the pressure of the world soul. For a moment they stood hand in hand resisting it. Then they suffered it to break in upon them, and they, and all the experience they had gained, and all the love and wisdom they had generated, passed into it, and made it better. (p.170)

I need someone to explain this to me. Is it a fable dramatising Forster’s essentially secular humanism? Is he saying conventional heaven is disappointing, what you have to do is give yourself… but to what? Is it a variation on the motto ‘only connect’ which is the epigraph and central theme of ‘Howard’s End’?

10. Co-ordination (8 pages)

A weird tale combining St Trinians with the afterlife.

Teachers at a girls private school are giving lessons in music and history. They are all focusing on one subject, Napoleon, as part of what the Principal describes as her new co-ordinative system.

Meanwhile, up in heaven, sits Beethoven surrounded by his clerks (?!) annotating every single performance of his music anywhere, by anyone, no matter how amateur. They are logging each of the lessons the school music mistress, Miss Haddon is giving. Beethoven is pleased.

Meanwhile, over on another cloud sits Napoleon surrounded by his clerks, who are recording every time he is mentioned or studied, and are recording the lessons being given at this school by the history mistress.

Bored of the daily routine, that evening while the girls are at prep Miss Haddon lifts a paperweight to her ear and has a transcendent vision of the sound of the sea. When the Principal comes in and asks her what she thinks she’s doing and takes the shell from her, she puts it to her ear and hears the sounds of a vernal wood (?!).

Somehow both women are changed. Miss Haddon reveals that she is no good at music, doesn’t like it and wants to stop teaching it. Instead of bawling her out the Principal offers to supervise her prep lesson. Next morning Miss Haddon still wants to leave and announces that she’s inherited a house by the sea. The Principal not only accepts this but praises her. they cancel lessons for the day and drive the girls out into the countryside where they play games, again in a relaxed and slightly anarchic way. The day climaxes when the Principal announces she is abandoning the co-ordinative system to cheers from the girls.

Cut to the last page where, in a comic or fantastical coda, Mephistopheles, having noticed this is flying, apparently to God (?) bearing a scroll listing these deficiencies (the Principal’s abandonment of the co-ordinative system?). He bumps into the archangel Raphael who asks him whither he is flying. Mephistopheles says he has a real case to put to God. The little incidents just described prove the futility of genius; prove that great men think that they are understood, and are not; and that men think that they understand them, and do not. Ha! Got ’em! This is how the story ends:

‘If you can prove that, you have indeed a case,’ said Raphael. ‘For this universe is supposed to rest on co-ordination, all creatures co-ordinating according to their powers.’
‘Listen. Charge one: Beethoven decrees that certain females shall hear a performance of his A minor quartet. They hear – some of them a band, others a shell. Charge two: Napoleon decrees that the same shall participate in the victory of Austerlitz. Result – a legacy, followed by a school treat. Charge three: Females perform Beethoven. Being deaf, and being served by dishonest clerks, he supposes they are performing him with insight. Charge four: To impress the Board of Education, females study Napoleon. He is led to suppose that they are studying him properly. I have other points, but these will suffice. The genius and the ordinary man have never co-ordinated once since Abel was killed by Cain.’
‘And now for your case,” said Raphael, sympathetically.
‘My case?’ stammered Mephistopheles. ‘Why, this is my case.’
‘Oh, innocent devil,’ cried the other. ‘Oh, candid if infernal soul. Go back to the earth and walk up and down it again. For these people have co-ordinated, Mephistopheles. They have co-ordinated through the central sources of Melody and Victory.’

I literally don’t understand this. Is it some kind of satire on some Edwardian educational fashion? I don’t understand why the notion of ‘co-ordination’ needs a story like this. I don’t really understand what Mephistopheles is on about. And I don’t understand Gabriel’s rejoinder that ‘They have co-ordinated through the central sources of Melody and Victory.’

I really need a Sparks notes or some kind of explanation of what half these stories are about. This is much harder than Beckett or Kafka.

11. The Story of the Siren (9 pages)

Italy again, and the priggish narrator drops his notebook over the side of the boat he and his tourist party are being rowed in. Down into the Mediterranean it sinks to a chorus of comments from the various members of the group. One of their two sailors starts to strip to jump in and retrieve it, so one of the ladies suggests they leave him there to do so. In the event the narrator offers to stay as well. The Sicilian parks him on a bit of beach, reascends the rock and dives into the sea, a magnificent specimen of young manhood – maybe it’s my imagination that you can feel Forster’s gay sensibility in the description.

If the book was wonderful, the man is past all description. His effect was that of a silver statue, alive beneath the sea, through whom life throbbed in blue and green. Something infinitely happy, infinitely wise… (p.180)

After he’s resurfaced with the book, the Sicilian says on such a day one might see the Siren. The narrator thinks he’s joking and plays along, claiming to have seen her often. But the Sicilian isn’t joking. He perfectly seriously describes how the priests have blessed the air and the rock so the Siren can come out to breathe or sit anywhere, but she can remain in the sea.

He knows this because his older brother Giuseppe once dove into the water without making the preliminary sign of the cross and he saw the Siren. He re-emerged huge and endlessly wet, they put him to bed and had the priests bless him but nothing would make him dry.

Giuseppe becomes a zombie, he won’t talk, won’t work. He stands in the street and cries because he knows everyone will die. When the Sicilian reads a newspaper story about a girl who came out of the sea mad, Giuseppe immediately sets off to find her, abducts and marries her. Then the Sicilian finds himself working for two masters of one mind.

Then the girl got pregnant and the villagers started whispering, throwing stones. An old witch prophesied that the child would fetch the Siren up into the air, she would sing her song and trigger the End of the World. A storm blows up and the pregnant girl (named Maria) insists on going out along the clifftops to see it and, predictably, one or some of the villagers push her over. The Sicilian grabs some kitchen knives and makes as if to find the killer but Giuseppe grabs his wrists and dislocates them so the Sicilian faints with the pain. When he comes round Giuseppe is gone and he’s never seen him since.

He knows it was the village priest who killed her but he emigrates to America. He hears that his brother Giuseppe is scouring the world for anyone else who has seen the Siren but at Liverpool he sickens and dies of tuberculosis.

Then in the last few sentences the Sicilian changes tack by saying that never again will there be a young man and woman who see the Siren and are capable of bearing the child who will call her up from the sea to save the world. Save? Yes, from its silence and loneliness, he says, but before he can explain further the daytrip boat comes into their little grotto with its cargo of yakking tourists and the explanation is lost forever.

Comment

Magic grottos, beautiful young men, an atmosphere of magic, a mythical figure, a legendary tale. Come to sunny Italy where you can release your uptight English inhibitions!

12. The Eternal Moment (35 pages)

Part 1

Miss Raby is a successful novelist so people expect her to be a bit unconventional and opinionated. Her success is based on her bestselling novel ‘The Eternal Moment’ which was set in the picturesque Tyrol village of Vorta and featured many of the real-life inhabitants. Now, over nearly 20 years after the place brought her fame and success, she is travelling back there in a carriage with her maid Elizabeth and Colonel Leyland.

They cross the border from Italy and reach Vorta perched on its hillside. Here the Colonel, Miss Raby and Elizabeth are appalled by the way all the hotels light up garish illuminated signs come nightfall. They check into the Grande Hotel des Alpes. Miss Raby asks her porter about the owners, Signor and Signora Cantù. They still live here at the hotel they own. And their mother? Ah, there has been a family breach and the older Signora Cantù has been exiled to the lesser of the family’s two hotels, the Biscione.

Miss Raby is unexpectedly upset by this news and surprises everyone by insisting that she and Elizabeth check out of the Grand Hotel straightaway. So all their gear is packed up and they pay for a room they haven’t slept in and for an evening meal they haven’t eaten, and have their stuff shipped down the hill to the Hotel Biscione.

Colonel Leyland doesn’t go with them and begs Miss Raby to explain to which she replies:

‘I must find out tonight whether it is true. And I must also’ – her voice quivered – ‘find out whether it is my fault.’

After he watches them go he reads a letter from his sister, Nelly, back in England. This is an intrusive request for him to clarify whether he is or is not engaged to Miss Raby, a clarification of their relationships as the conventions of the time dictated. Forster devotes a couple of subtle pages to teasing out what Colonel Leyland thinks his relationship with Miss Raby is, namely the companionableness of two like-minded souls, both a bit unconventional, who don’t give a damn if tongues wag about them … although Forster puts a sting in the tail by saying the thought of marrying £2,000 a year is not unappealing to the Colonel…

Part 2

Miss Raby’s arrival at the Biscione Hotel is an opportunity for Forster to contrast the style of the nouveaux riches and over-wealthy new hotels with their electric signs, with the quieter, older, more ‘civilised’ family-run atmosphere of somewhere like the Biscione, with something ancient and beautiful in every room – the kind of ‘authenticity’ the bourgeoisie have been chasing ever since they destroyed it as a result of the Industrial Revolution. By the time I was 17 I realised the world I was looking for, the South of France or Italy I’d read about in books, had disappeared. The world was ruined by the time I arrived in it and it has carried on getting more and more ruined. Even the greediest tourist resorts are realising the impact of over-tourism which have, in fact, been blighting many of them for generations.

Anyway, this story is in part a reflection of this feeling, or of the kind of person who thinks this way, circa 1905. In fact the Biscione is the site of an impressive Renaissance fresco which was discovered during renovations and now is a tired conversation piece among its ghastly English clientele, although not as insufferable as the American tourists who have come all this way to stop the priests ringing their 6am bell and to tell the peasants to stop staying up late singing their ghastly songs. Miss Raby trembles with rage.

She walked through the village, scarcely noticing the mountains by which it was still surrounded, or the unaltered radiance of its sun. But she was fully conscious of something new; of the indefinable corruption which is produced by the passage of a large number of people.

8 billion people now occupy the planet. It has been thoroughly polluted and poisoned but worse, much worse, is to come.

Microplastics everywhere

Miss Raby goes to see the hotel proprietress, Signora Cantù who complains about the guests, about her staff, but most of all about her monstrously ungrateful son who kicked her and her husband (deceased) out of the Grand Hotel and now poach her guests and pay the villagers to badmouth her, him and his horrible wife are determined to ruin her etc.

The diatribe is interrupted by crashes from the street and they open the window to be engulfed by fumes from a motor car which has crashed into a guests’ table. Ah, the motor car, destroyer of our world.

Part 3

In the carriage, in part 1, Miss Raby had impulsively told the Colonel and Elizabeth that back on her original visit, a handsome young Italian lad, up in the mountains had told her he loved her. Now, 20 years later, Miss Raby climbs back up to the Grand Hotel, sits for afternoon tea, and realises that the swift and effective concierge is none other than the same lovely boy, now running to fat, suave and efficient at helping all the useless tourists with their problems.

It is a fraught and complex moment when she finally jogs his bad memory and he suddenly remembers his impertinence to her all those years ago. It threatens his entire position, his wife and child, he flusters, she reddens and at that precise moment the Colonel enters, adding layers of confusion. But in a flash she realises her love for this young man had been the one really true emotion of her life, nothing in all the years of her success had come close.

It is a peculiar intense conversation and suddenly she asks the man, Feo, whether she can have one of his three sons, to bring up as her own, to show that The Rich are not the as gullible, self-centred and corrupt as they seem. Strangely, the other two men accept this request and don’t find it strange. But when Feo very reasonably says his wife would never permit it, the Colonel loses his temper and shouts that he has insulted the lady. I didn’t understand the logic of this. There’s so much in these old stories we must miss.

Suddenly tired, old Miss Raby looks from fat terrified Feo to rigid unimaginative Colonel and realises she doesn’t like either of them. Miss Raby swishes out onto the terrace where she has an epiphany which echoes all the ones in this book of epiphanies:

In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself, and she saw that she had lived worthily. She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise. From the view-terrace she looked down on the perishing and perishable beauty of the valley, and, though she loved it no less, it seemed to be infinitely distant, like a valley in a star. At that moment, if kind voices had called her from the hotel, she would not have returned. ‘I suppose this is old age,’ she thought. ‘It’s not so very dreadful.’

But while she is having a transcendent moment, the two men close ranks against her. The Colonel is disgusted that Miss Raby has spoken so frankly to a member of the servant class, thus degrading him, and his entire class, in Feo’s eyes. Feo for his part is horrified because the scene was witnessed by plenty of the staff and some of the guests, the manager is hurrying to the scene, and there will be a great scandal.

The Colonel knows what to do. He takes Feo by the arm and with his other hand taps his forehead, indicating that Miss Raby is mad. Feo is pathetically grateful because the Colonel has found a way out of their dilemma whereby they are both redeemed and the blame falls entirely on the mad old lady.

Comment

I’m glad the entire volume ends on a realistic story as my incomprehension of some of the previous stories made me wonder if I was going mad.

Thoughts

It’s interesting reading Forster right after H.G. Wells. It highlights the way that Wells, although a very gifted writer, just wasn’t interested in the kind of thing Forster was. There may be a pretty simple pagan message running through Forster’s stories (the free, imaginative, pagan country life is more real, powerful and disruptive than the timid bourgeois manners of Edwardian aunts and curates) but the real interest in each of the stories is in Forster’s handling of them. He is interested in questions of technique, choosing the correct narrator, creating character carefully, and cutting irrelevant material back to the bones in order to make each story a honed and focused artistic product. Wells is always interesting, describes characters vividly and is especially good at conveying the mood and connotations of dialogue: but he is addicted to rambling digressions about his hobby horses and not at all interested in the overall artistic result. That’s why (to chance my arm) Forster is Literature but Wells isn’t.

Also, and probably more obviously, Forster is weird, genuinely impenetrable and even incomprehensible, which Wells never is. One of the scholarly introductions to Wells cites a critic joking that Wells was a journalist who endlessly wrote stories about his favourite subject, which was his own life. More to the point, Wells always writes with an aim on the reader, all-too-often to promote his hobby horses about universal education and the world government.

But what is Forster writing about in a story like ‘The Point of It’ or ‘Co-ordination’? I genuinely don’t know what they are about, what they are for, what they are trying to do.

Wisdom sayings

Something I do understand well enough is Forster’s addiction to wisdom sayings, to having his narrator or characters deliver pithy apophthegms and maxims about life:

The only thing worth giving away is yourself.

Toleration implies reserve; and the greatest safeguard of unruffled intercourse is knowledge.

It is inevitable, as well as desirable, that we should bear each other’s burdens.

It filled me with desire to help others – the greatest of all our desires, I suppose, and the most fruitless.

Credit

E.M. Forster’s Collected Short Stories was published by Sidgwick and Jackson in 1947. References are to the 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 13, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature, Short stories

Tagged allegory, Antigone, Athens, Aunt Julia, Beethoven, Beethoven A minor quartet, Bermondsey gasworks, British Museum, Cai and Abel, Cerberus, childrens story, Christian, Christianity, Co-ordination, Colonel Leyland, colonus, Dante, E.M. Forster, E.M. Forster Collected Short Stories, Edwardian fiction, Ethel Lucas, Eustace, fable, Feo, Gate of Heaven, Gennaro, Giuseppe, Grande Hotel des Alpes, Greece, H.G. Wells, Harcourt Worters, Harry Potter, Hartley, Hotel Biscione, J.K. Rowling, J.M. Barrie, Jack Ford, Judgement Seat, Keats, love, Madonna of Raphael, Mendelssohn, Mephistopheles, Miss Evelyn Beaumont, Miss Raby, Miss Robinson, Mr Bons, Mr Graham, Mr Inskip, Mr Leyland, Mr Lucas, Mr Sanbach, Mr Septimus Bons, Mr Tytler, Mrs Forman, Mrs Worters, Napoleon, Oedipus, Other Kingdom, Other Kingdom Copse, over-tourism, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pan, Peter Pan, Raphael, Ravello, Roald Dahl, Saki, sex, short stories, short story, Sicily, Signor Cantù, Signora Cantù, Sir Thomas Browne, Surbiton, Surbiton Literary Society, The Celestial Omnibus, The Celestial Omnibus And Other Stories, The Curate's Friend, The Eternal Moment, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, The Machine Stops, The Other Side of the Hedge, The Point of It, The Road from Colonus, The Story of a Panic, The Story of the Siren, the Tyrol, To Homer, Virgil, Virgil Eclogue, Vorta, Wiltshire, world-soul

Posted by Simon on January 13, 2025

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The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett (1902)

Thinking the matter out in the calmness of solitude, all seemed strange, unreal, uncertain to her. Were conspiracies actually possible nowadays? Did queer things actually happen in Europe? And did they happen in London hotels?
(Nella, pondering how the plot is thickening, The Grand Hotel Babylon page 62)

‘Perhaps you haven’t grasped the fact, Nella, that we’re in the middle of a rather queer business.’
(Nella’s dad, explaining, p.54)

I don’t know, Mr Babylon, whether you have ever tried to creep through a small hole with a skirt on. Have you?’
‘I have not had that pleasure,’ said little Felix, bowing again.
(An example of the book’s charming surrealism)

‘This isn’t a burglary, my dear. I calculate it’s something far worse than a burglary.’
‘What?’ she cried. ‘Murder? Arson? Dynamite plot? How perfectly splendid!’
(Nella’s character in a nutshell, p.172)

This is a preposterous farrago, a ridiculously entertaining, over-the-top, mystery thriller from the earliest days of the genre, and quite a surprise coming from the Edwardian novelist Arnold Bennett, who’s mainly remembered for his long earnest novels about life in the Potteries district of the Midlands.

Here’s a brief biog of Arnold pinched from Wikipedia:

Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 to 27 March 1931) was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.

His first novel was a fairly serious effort, ‘A Man from the North’. ‘Hotel Babylon’ was the second, published in instalments in a magazine called the Golden Penny during 1901.

It’s a frolic, an entertainment, Bennett’s attempt at a mystery thriller, capitalising on the popularity of shortish mystery novels being written by loads of contemporaries, not least the Sherlock Holmes novels and all their copyists (The Hound of the Baskervilles was published the same year). It’s not a mature work, it doesn’t speak with the voice he would find to write his many serious novels about the Potteries region of the Midlands.

To begin with it reminded me of the not very good early work of Robert Louis Stevenson, the New Arabian Nights, specifically the way each new development in the silly plot feels random and forced. The Sherlock Holmes stories have lasted so long because Doyle put a lot of effort into making his plots carefully crafted puzzles, with a modicum of plausibility. As you work through them you realise there is a plan, there is a secret, and it’s worth trying to work it out.

By contrast, the story of ‘The Grand Hotel Babylon’ gives the strong impression of having no plan at all and of Bennett more or less making it up as he went along. The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition praises it for ending every chapter on a cliffhanger but there’s quite a difference between giving the reader a steady sequence of clues to work out the puzzle (Holmes) and just serving up a series of sensational surprises! Thus ‘The Grand Hotel Babylon’ is packed with mysterious disappearances, secret passages, kidnappings and passings out, with a whole litany of sudden wilful events which feel completely implausible and, as a result, childishly enjoyable.

Part of this can be explained by, or derives from, the personality of the central character, the wilful American heiress, Nella Racksole, 23-year-old daughter of the famous American millionaire, Theodore Racksole, a ‘tall spare man, with the iron-grey hair and the thin, firm, resolute face’ (p.156).

Nella knows what she wants and always gets it, simple as that. There’s absolutely no subtlety or maturity about her character – Nella wants it, Nella gets it. She talks to men of all types of classes with utterly fearless candour which sometimes amazes herself and always astonishes them.

He was astonished at her coolness, her firmness of assertion, her air of complete acquaintance with the world. (p.62)

She was tremendously surprised at her own coolness, and somewhat pleased with it.

The foursquare frankness with which she faces every situation and keeps surprising all the male characters by her fearlessness, reminded me of a children’s story based round a fearless girl character, something like Pollyanna or Annie or Pippy Longstocking.

When I described the centrality of Nella not only as a character but also somehow embodying the spirit of the book my daughter said, ‘It sounds like a nellodrama.’

The critics compare it more with Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequels, because it involves a minor European princeling from a made-up eastern European country (Ruritania) and probably that is a more apt comparison / source for Bennett’s story.

But this is all to take it far too seriously. It’s a sixpenny murder mystery, written for the lolz and the entertainment. You’re meant to be amused and entertained and marvel as one preposterous development follows another in quick succession…

Plot summary

Nella is staying at the Grand Babylon Hotel with her American millionaire father, Theodore Racksole, ‘the third richest man in the United States’, worth some 40 million dollars.

Theodore has already irked the fantastically superior head waiter, Jules, by asking for an American cocktail, an Angel Kiss (‘equal quantities of maraschino, cream, and crême de menthe. Don’t stir it; don’t shake it’).

In the dining room Nella surveys the posh menu, throws it away and declares she wants a dinner of steak and a bottle of Bass beer. When Theodore instructs Jules, he replies that this is impossible, the world famous chef Rocco, would never stoop to such a thing.

So Theodore gets up, walks through the hotel to the office of the owner, short dapper Félix Babylon, and buys the hotel off him, lock stock and barrel for £400,000. Félix is happy to sell as he’d been thinking about retiring anyway although he warns Theodore that any major hotel is a hotbed of crime.

‘Do you not perceive that the roof which habitually shelters all the force, all the authority of the world, must necessarily also shelter nameless and numberless plotters, schemers, evil-doers, and workers of mischief?’ (p.26)

Theodore then calls in the chef, Rocco, and, as the new owner, gives him a pay rise (to £3,000 a year) and orders him to prepare the steak.

During this meal a friend of Nella’s shows up, a charming young man named Reginald Dimmock. As he serves the steak, Theodore notices Jules winking at Dimmock. Why?

Dimmock explains he works for Prince Aribert of Posen. His nephew is Grand Duke Eugen of Posen and that the Grand Duke is scheduled to marry a wealthy relation soon. During the conversation Jules brings Prince Aribert a succession of notes.

After dinner Theodore goes to see Félix again, in his private office, and they talk about hotel management till the early hours when Theodore decides to go roaming round his new possession.

After getting lost he finds himself on the second floor when he hears footsteps. He hides in a niche and observes Jules approaching a door with a white ribbon on it, silently opening the door and letting himself in, only to emerge a few minutes later and walk away.

When Theodore goes up to the door he sees it is room 111, the room his daughter is occupying. He runs off to his own room, collects his American revolvers then runs after Jules and grabs him. Waving his gun around he demands to know what Jules was doing breaking into his daughter’s apartment.

All suavity and self control Jules insists that 111 is not his daughter’s room so they both go back to check. On knocking and entering they discover the current occupant of the room is Reginald Dimmock. He explains that for some reason a stone was thrown through the window of the room and this so upset Nella that she asked the hotel servants to change rooms, a discussion Dimmock stumbled upon and immediately offered to switch rooms with her. At that moment Nella’s maid appears who confirms the whole story. Theodore is humiliated in front of Jules and Dimmock.

He goes to bed disturbed by ‘the wink’, puzzled by the business with the white ribbon, worried about the stone being thrown which broke the window, but with no specific accusation to make of anyone.

Next morning Theodore visits Félix who is preparing to pack and leave. The latter informs Miss Theodore that the long-serving hotel secretary, Miss Spencer, has packed her bags and disappeared.

Theodore installs himself in Félix’s office. First thing he does is call for Jules and sacks him. He makes it clear he’ll put every other hotel in London off hiring him. With dreamlike imperturbability Jules isn’t at all fazed and announces he will retire to an apartment somewhere and become a man about town.

That afternoon Theodore and Félix go to a banker then a stockbroker to seal the purchase of the hotel. Theodore tells Félix he intends to settle in England: there’s more to buy here than back in the States. Maybe he’ll buy a grand place in the country, too.

When he returns to the hotel he discovers his cheeky daughter Nella has installed herself in the hotel booth to replace Miss Spencer. he tells her off but she refuses to budge. They’re in the middle of this when appears His Serene Highness Prince Aribert of Posen.

Turns out Nella met the Prince last year in Paris when he was going under the name Count Steenbock, which he hurriedly asks her not to mention again. Mystery…

Aribert is surprised to learn that Theodore has bought the hotel. He explains that he is late arriving for his room because he was waiting for his assistant, Reginald Dimmock, to meet him at Charing Cross but Dimmock didn’t show up which is most unlike him.

Nella invites Aribert along to her father’s private office (previously Félix’s office) for a private chat, tea is served by servants. He reminisces about Paris, how they were both guests in a quiet, out of the way hotel, how they spent a rainy afternoon together in the Museum of the Trocadéro. He is, in other words, attracted by her nubile form and beauty and beginning to flirt. He tells her quite a bit more about the royal family of Posen and we learn that, should anything happen to Prince Eugen, Aribert would be next in line to the throne, when…

The door opens and Theodore enters accompanied by two staff who are carrying a figure on a stretcher. It is the body of Reginald Dimmock. He is dead! Collapsed walking across the quad of the hotel according to bystanders. Theodore speculates it was a heart attack.

Aribert asks the men to take the body of his assistant to his rooms and a little later they’re joined by a doctor who makes an examination and says he doesn’t think it was a heart attack but will need to do a closer examination.

That night a big ball is given in the Gold Room by the financier Mr Sampson Levi and his wife. Theodore has discovered the hotel has a secret room with a spyhole to look out over the Gold Room. To his surprise he spots Jukes mingling among the guests and runs out to confront him. But on the dancefloor he can’t find him and comes back to the cubby hole to find…Jules in it, using the spyhole!

The confrontation is not as fiery as you might expect. Theodore simply asks Jules to leave the hotel and he does. Theodore stays up all night, watching food arrive at the hotel from Covent Garden, happens to watch a big bundle of luggage going down in the lift and being loaded into a delivery van.

A little later Theodore is summoned to the Prince’s ante-room where a police inspector is, they indicate an empty coffin, and explain that the corpse of Mr Dimmock which has been deposited there has disappeared!

Theodore is left with the nagging feeling that he is being outwitted by some conspiracy centred on Jules but what it’s about is anyone’s guess.

Nella wants to make more of her acquaintance with Aribert and, three days later, contrives for her carriage to bump into his carriage as it trundles along the Embankment. She invites him to lunch in her father’s office.

Here Aribert reveals the big thing that’s been bothering him: he was scheduled to meet Prince Eugen but Prince Eugen has vanished! Somewhere between Brussels, where he was last seen, and the quay at Ostend where he was due to catch a ferry but never did.

Nella is instantly convinced that Eugen has been kidnapped! On what basis? On the basis of the secret wink between Dimmock and Jules and then the mysterious death of Dimmock. She tells Aribert to go back to Berlin to check that Eugen left. He kisses her hand as she leaves and she cherishes that kiss.

Next morning a plump old white-haired lady claiming to be Baroness Zerlinski arrives at the hotel. Nella watches her closely, convinced she’s seen her somewhere before. At lunch she sees her scoop the cream out of a cream puff and extract a piece of paper from it – a secret message! Could it be from Rocco the chef? Saying what?

Back in her bureau Nella has a flash of insight and realises ‘Baroness Zerlinski’ is Miss Spencer in disguise. She runs down to the office to ask if the Baroness has made any plans for dinner, where she can confront her, but discovers the Baroness left half an hour ago. Her luggage was addressed to Ostend – Ostend where Prince Eugen has gone missing! Without telling her father, Nella books herself on the 11pm ferry from Dover to Ostend.

In Ostend

Leaving the ship and walking onto Ostend quay at 2am Nella wonders what on earth she’s doing. How on earth is she going to track down Miss Spencer? Bennet enjoys bigging Ostend up:

The town was silent and almost deserted. It had a false and sinister aspect. She remembered tales which she had heard of this glittering resort, which in the season holds more scoundrels than any place in Europe, save only Monte Carlo. She remembered that the gilded adventurers of every nation under the sun forgathered there either for business or pleasure, and that some of the most wonderful crimes of the latter half of the century had been schemed and matured in that haunt of cosmopolitan iniquity.

Then, in one of the book’s most howling coincidences, she sees steam and is told it’s the 8am ferry from Dover which broke down and is arriving very late. Nella watches the gangway and the fist passenger to walk down it is…none other than Miss Spencer!

Miss S gets into a carriage so Nella immediately gets into the one behind in the queue and tells it to follow that carriage! It brings her to an anonymous looking house. Nella goes up to the door, demands to see Miss Spencer and to be let in.

‘I guess so,’ said Nella, and she walked past him into the house. She was astonished at her own audacity.

Nella confronts Miss Spencer, asking what she knows about Jules, the death of Reginald Dimmock and the disappearance of Prince Eugen. Miss Spencer gets up and pulls a bell rope as Nella pulls out an American revolver!

Nella now extracts a lot of backstory from Miss Spencer. Miss Spencer is married to Jules except his real name is Tom Jackson. She is terrified of him and does what he tells her to. It was Tom ordered her to get the job at the Babylon Hotel and then Tom who told her to up sticks and come to Ostend. She doesn’t know anything about Dimmock’s death. She was told to come to Ostend to guard Eugen. So he’s here? In this house??

Miss Spencer keeps wailing that she can’t say any more or it’ll be death for her and pretends to faint. When Nella goes to see if she’s alright, Miss Spencer leaps up, grabs the gun and throws it out the window (why? why not keep it in her hand?). Now Nella is at her mercy and feels suddenly weak and vulnerable. She hears footsteps coming along the hall, the door opening, a rush of cold air and then she, too, faints.

When she regains consciousness she is on a yacht out at sea. it is being steered by an imperturbably captain. A man comes up on deck and it is Jules. He is super suave and confident. He claims to know nothing about Dimmock’s death or any conspiracy. He is attracted to her bravery, in fact when she says she would rather starve than touch the breakfast he offers her, he replies:

‘Gallant creature!’ he murmured, and his eyes roved over her face. Her superb, supercilious beauty overcame him. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘what a wife you would make!’ He approached nearer to her. ‘You and I, Miss Racksole, your beauty and wealth and my brains—we could conquer the world. Few men are worthy of you, but I am one of the few. Listen! You might do worse. Marry me. I am a great man; I shall be greater. I adore you. Marry me, and I will save your life. All shall be well. I will begin again. The past shall be as though there had been no past.’

And Jules/Tom pushes closer to her to take a kiss. When with a cry a male figure leaps up out of the lifeboat and whacks Jules with a revolver knocking him unconscious. It is none other than Prince Aribert!

Back in London

Cut back to London where Theodore has invited Mr Sampson Levi to a meeting. After some preliminary sparring, Levi explains a big bit of the picture. He, Levi, is known as ‘The Court Pawnbroker’ because he arranges loans for the minor, second-class Princes of Europe. Prince Eugen was coming to London to meet him, Levi. Levi has promised to loan the prince £1 million to clear the Prince’s vast debts, run up by gambling and fast living. The Prince needs to clear his debts because it’s only by being able to show a clean sheet that he will be allowed to marry an heiress, Princess Anna of Eckstein-Schwartzburg, who’ll bring more than enough money to pay off the loan. Eugen hasn’t shown up. As to Dimmock, Levi explains that Dimmock is actually a distant part of the Posen princely family. But as to why Dimmock died and Eugen has disappeared, Levi hasn’t a clue. But Theodore does. What if some other European pauper prince wants to marry Princess Anna? Then they would want to keep Eugen out of the way till the possibility of a loan from Levi has fallen through…

Levi departs and Theodore goes to see Rocco. The great chef is so suave and confident that Theodore immediately sees he must be in on the conspiracy. But his aim in going to see him is to tell Rocco (falsely) that the police are coming to turn the hotel upside down looking for Dimmock’s body – with a view to flushing Rocco out.

Because Theodore has had a revelation. What was so significant about room 111 that Jules came sniffing round it that first evening only to discover his daughter had been replaced in it by Dimmock? Theodore’s revelation is that room 111 is directly above the hotel’s premise State Rooms. So that night Theodore lets himself into room 111 and goes poking around in it. Eventually he discovers a secret panel under the bath which gives way, which gives onto a hole, which has a rope ladder hanging down.

Theodore lights a match, goes carefully down the rope ladder and finds himself in a secret alcove behind one of the walls of the State Rooms. There’s a spyhole and through this he spies someone working at a huge marble-topped washstand. It is Rocco!

Rocco is bending over and working on something and slowly it becomes clear it’s a body! Theodore goes to climb up the rope ladder but it snaps tumbling him back down and accidentally opening a secret door into the State Room. So he confronts Rocco.

But as in previous confrontations it all goes with a weird dreamlike calmness. Rocco just says ‘Oh well’, sits down and admits that his name is Elihu P. Rucker and he’s from West Orange, New Jersey, New York State. Theodore now confirms the body he was working on was that of Dummock, and Rocco explains he was simply embalming Dummock’s body so it wouldn’t start to rot. As to whether he was murdered, Rocco says ‘not exactly’ and that he disapproved of bumping off Dimmock. He confesses that Dimmock was part of the scheme but then changed his mind. Rocco confirms that Jules is the mastermind of the whole plot and formerly his boss but that he started to disagree with him a week or so back.

Rocco is so quiet casual and disarming that Theodore guides him along to the nearest lift, intending to hand him over to the police, when Rocco suddenly bursts into life, pushing Theodore into the lift, slamming home the metal grille and locking him in. He is then politeness and suavity itself, apologises for the inconvenience and calmly strolls away.

Fuming and disgusted at his own gullibility Theodore spends the entire night in the lift till staff find him the next morning and unlock it. The detective in charge of the Dimmock case turns up and wants to take Theodore to a particular location when a messenger arrives with an urgent telegram from Nella: ‘Please come instantly. Nella. Hôtel Wellington, Ostend.’ So, leaving the detective in the lurch, within ten minutes Theodore is on his way to Victorian Station.

Back in Ostend

We left Nella on the steam yacht just after Prince Aribert had leaped out of the dinghy to rescue Nella just before Jules leaned over and kissed her. He ties Jules up. Meanwhile the captain of the yacht continues to steer away from Ostend. When Aribert points his gun at him he explains he is under orders to sail for England absolutely whatever happens on deck and won’t be persuaded to turn round. Reluctantly our guys realise their only option is to get into the dinghy, have it lowers into the water, and row back to Ostend. So that’s what they do.

On the way Aribert explains what happened: he had meant to go to Berlin as agreed but in the end changed his mind and instead happened to see her get in the carriage and follow Miss Spencer to the house, so he followed her. He climbed round the house and managed to overhear her whole conversation with Miss Spencer. When Miss Spencer grabbed the revolver and threw it out the window, Aribert picked it up. Then the silence when Nella fainted. He didn’t see who came into the room but was aware that she was carried out the house into a carriage.

He followed in his carriage down to the harbour where, in the general loading he managed to smuggle himself aboard and hide in the dinghy (just the latest in a series of heroic improbabilities). Thrown together like this, and building on the earlier conversations and the moment when he kissed her hand, it’s clear they’re falling in love:

They were both young; they both had superb health, and all the ardour of youth; and—they were together. The boat was very small indeed; her face was scarcely a yard from his. She, in his eyes, surrounded by the glamour of beauty and vast wealth; he, in her eyes, surrounded by the glamour of masculine intrepidity and the brilliance of a throne. (p.115)

Fit young Aribert rows strongly and they make it back to the harbour by 6am the next morning. Suddenly she’s shattered. He takes her to the hotel he’s staying in, they have chocolate on the terrace and that’s when Nella sends the telegram to her father that he received in the previous chapter.

Chapters are funny things. The mere existence of chapters tells you how utterly fake and artificial fictions are. The idea that texts come anything close to ‘reality’ is shot to pieces by the way chapters allow authors to divide their texts and carve up events or experiences into boxes and bite-sized chunks.

And now we cut to when Theodore arrives on the afternoon of the same day. Theodore, Nell and Aribert hold a conference in a private room and catch up with each other’s news. They decide two things: 1) Theodore sends Nella bed, this isn’t woman’s work (as if that’ll stop her); and 2) Theodore and Aribert decide to return to the house.

They’re still not certain what’s going on but Theodore shares what he learned from his interview with Levi, namely that Eugen was coming to borrow £1 million to pay off his debts. He thinks Eugen was put out of the way because another European princeling wants to marry the heiress and names the King of Bosnia.

It’s only 9.30 so to kill time before they go to The House, Theodore and Aribert go the famous (?) Ostend casino. Here they come across a glamorous lady wearing a red hat, she’s a bit solid so the narrator nicknames her the Juno of the red hat. Aribert says he has seen her before, in Berlin. She is glamorous but intimidating. Theodore is lucky (he just is) and wins a series of hands against the house and the Juno.

After her final loss she gets up and angrily exists. Our heroes follow. She gets into a carriage, they get into one that follows her. Inevitably she is heading for The House. When she gets out and enters, our chaps go round the back, climb over the fence and go close to a window where they hear a feverish conversation between red hat and Miss Spencer. They hear just the most incriminating piece of conversation they need to, namely red hat demanding more money, saying she’s lost everything at the casino, demanding to be paid more because she’s done her job of luring him to Ostend. Of course she must be referring to Eugen.

And, indeed, when our boys step back from the window they realise there’s a grating at the their feet and peering down through it they see the figure of Prince Eugen slumped in a chair!

So they break in through the window to the room the two women have vacated, open the door into the hall to see the front door ajar, presumably where red hat has left. There are stairs downwards and a corridor and at the end they encounter Miss Spencer with a knife. Her ferocity is driven by panic fear of Jules, she fiercely says they shall not pass and when Theodore walks forward she stabs him in the arm.

Shocked he takes off his coat and is in the middle of reasoning with her when he throws it over her head, grabs her arms and Aribert disarms her. They carry her to an upstairs bedroom and lock her in. They break down the door and confront Eugen.

Eugen is, of course, delirious, babbling about the woman with the red hat, saying he can’t go with them, till he passes out and they carry him to the sofa upstairs. They’re just wondering what to do when there’s a scrabbling at the window and guess who’s turned up but Nella! Of course she turns out to have attended New York medical school and so after a quick examination concludes that Eugen has ‘brain fever’.

With this diagnosis and her grasp of the situation, Nella assumes an air of command. She orders her father to go and get a doctor (who diagnoses brain fever and prescribes some medicines) and meanwhile supervises Aribert making his nephew comfortable. The trio settle in to occupy the houses and days pass as the get food, cook, and supervise Eugen. To begin with the patient gets worse.

One evening Aribert realises how thin and exhausted Nella looks and sends her to bed. He worries what will happen if Eugen dies, how the devil will he explain it to the emperor. He hears a sound and goes out into the hall to discover Nella has fainted there. He carries her ‘slender figure’ to a sofa, whispers to her and kisses her. When she comes to she swears she saw Jules at the foot of her bed, he laughed and left her room and she came running downstairs.

But then she remembers he kissed her and the conversation takes a serious turn as Aribert asks Nella to marry him. But scarcely are the words out of his lips than they hear a crash of glass. When Aribert goes to the back window he sees a ladder leaned against the wall and a figure at the end of the garden. When they go upstairs to the bedroom they locked Miss Spencer in, she has gone!

London

Cut to London a few days later where Prince Eugen is occupying the State Rooms at the Babylon, attended by his old servant Hans. He is cleaned and well dressed but he is not the man he used to be. He seems nervous and has a haunted look. When he and Aribert talk, the latter wonders if he’s mad. Slyly Eugen points out he saw Aribert kiss Nella but tells him it can come to nothing, the Emperor will not permit them to marry.

Aribert runs past him his understanding of the situation: Eugen needs a loan from Sampson Levi in order to pay off his debts and present a clean sheet to the parents of Princess Anna of Eckstein-Schwartzburg who will bring with her a dowry big enough to pay off the loan. He is relying on borrowing this £1 million from Sampson Levi who set a deadline for his loan to be taken out. But Eugen has a rival for the hand of the princess, the King of Bosnia. And he commissioned Jules and his gang to lure Eugen into a trap using the Juno with the red hat as bait. Eugen thinks they kidnapped him in order to get a ransom but Aribert counters with the simpler idea that Jules’s people just needed him out of the way till the deadline for the loan expires.

And this turns out to be the case for in the next scene Mr Sampson Levi visits prince Eugen and regrets to tell him the deadline for the loan expired and he has lent the money in South America (to the Chilean government). Eugen begs, says Levi made a promise etc but Levi says no it was Eugen who made the promise and broke it so…no loan. He bows and goes out.

The narrator moralises, invoking one of the oldest tropes of all writing, the tragic lament for the fallen and degraded times we live in – except that, in line with the tenor of the this preposterous book, it is cast in a comic mode:

It was a scene characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century – an overfed, commonplace, pursy little man who had been born in a Brixton semi-detached villa, and whose highest idea of pleasure was a Sunday up the river in an expensive electric launch, confronting and utterly routing, in a hotel belonging to an American millionaire, the representative of a race of men who had fingered every page of European history for centuries, and who still, in their native castles, were surrounded with every outward circumstance of pomp and power. (p.153)

After Levi has gone Eugen melodramatically (or should that be ‘nellodramatically’) announces he has only one option: to kill himself.

Meanwhile Theodore has gone for a stroll out into the city, along the Strand and who should he bump into but Félix Babylon. Félix explains that he got bored of Switzerland (where he was planning to retire) and missed the excitement of London. Félix gives Theodore an expensive cigar and they stroll arm-in-arm back towards the Babylon, like the comfortable plutocrats they are.

Here, over grilled chicken and champagne, Theodore briefs Félix on the extraordinary events which have taken place since the original owner left. When Theodore describes coming across Rocco embalming a corpse in the State Room Félix lets out a little scream of outrage.

Once he has heard the full story Félix says he isn’t surprised. He always knew there was a lot of skullduggery going on at the hotel but didn’t see it as his job to stop it. He goes on to say that he bumped into Jules himself that morning at a station in Paris (there are so many improbable coincidences it’s barely worth worrying about them). Jules was unfazed and declared he was off to Constantinople. Which turned out to be a lie because half an hour ago Félix spotted him at Charing Cross. The Baddie is back in town!

They fall to discussing how the baddie may be thinking of disposing of Prince Eugen and this leads to speculation about the death of Dimmock. Theodore thinks he was poisoned and puts forward his theory that it was done by poisoning his drink, his wine. This leads into a lengthy digression on the vast wine cellars lying beneath the hotel and prompts Félix to offer to give Theodore a tour. So they go and collect the keys of Mr Hubbard the wine cellar man and there are pages describing the labyrinth of cellars and the glorious wines that repose there.

En route Félix explains that prince Eugen’s favourite wine is the Romanee-Conti.

Eventually they come to the stone cellar where is stored the finest champagne. There is a faint light from a barred window and Theodore suddenly realises it has been broken into. next second he hears a sound coming from behind a wine rack and leaps upon a crouching figure and it turns out to be… his daughter, Nella!

She explains that she was in her room reading when she heard a funny noise. Looking vertically down she realised there was a sunken area by the side of the hotel and as she watched saw a shrouded figure climb down into it and then 15 minutes of sawing noise followed by the same man climbing back out of the area and walking down to the Embankment. She got dressed, went downstairs, round the side of the hotel, found a ladder down into the area, climbed down, crossed it to find a small skylight-type window with metal bars, gave it a tug and wasn’t surprised to find it came away in her hands, and wriggled through it to find herself in this wine cellar. Which is where Félix and her father have just found her.

They make a quick plan. It was almost certainly Jules and he’s almost certainly on his way back. So Theodore will leave Félix and Nella here, in the cellar, hidden outside the door to the champagne store while he, Theodore, will rush back through the cellars, up into the hotel, round the side, and catch Jules red-handed.

He leaves and hardly a minute has gone by when Félix and Nella hear the glass being removed, a body wriggling through the gap, standing, turning on the electric light and being revealed as Jules. They watch in silence as Jules finds the crate of Romanee-Conti – ‘Prince Eugen’s favourite wine,’ gasps Félix – undoes the seal, smears a black cream of some sort round the cork, then reseals it, puts it back in its crate, turns off the light and wriggles back through the window, replacing the skylight. So it was to be murder and it was to be via poisoned wine!!

Meanwhile Theodore had hurried as fast as he could but the wine cellars really were a labyrinth, extending wider than the base of the hotel, and once he’d managed to find his way out, he was waylaid by an importunate guest in the lobby; and then he was quizzed by a policeman who thought him suspicious and, when he saw him climbing down into the area, promptly arrested him.

It was only after he’d insisted on being taken back to the hotel to prove who he was that Theodore was able to return to the area and discovered that he’d just missed Jules who was fifty yards ahead of him. He followed at speed but Jules made it down to the Embankment and jumped over, into the river. Theodore was astonished at this apparent suicide attempt till he saw a steam funnel pulling away and realised Jules had jumped into a steam yacht which had soon pulled out into the river and was lost in the fog. Damn!

Next day Theodore informs Prince Aribert of what happened the night before. Aribert is due to dine with his nephew again this evening. Theodore proposes that he lets the wine be served in order to be served who among the servants are accomplices. This is just the author’s pretext to set up a tense scene in which dinner is served, and Eugen requests the Romanee-Conti as usual, and his manservant Hans prepares it, removing the seal, pulling the cork, wiping the rim of the bottle, pouring a glass and handing it to Eugen only for Aribert to blurt out that it is poisoned! Poisoned? Hans is scandalised and asks whether Aribert is calling him a poisoner and puts the glass to his lips to drink it himself, but Aribert leaps up and knocks the glass to the floor where it shatters. Well, at least that confirms Hans is not in on the conspiracy. End of Dramatic Scene!

Next morning Theodore ventures along to the Custom House where, for some ready money, he acquires the services of a Mr George Hazell, 30 and the acknowledged expert of all the ships in the Port of London to help him find the steam yacht Jules escaped on.

That night they set off in a black-painted wherry with two of Hazell’s assistants. Theodore finds life out on river strange and mysterious at night, all those spars and masts and funnels projecting up into the moonlight. The Port of London, which evokes such atmospheric writing in authors like Wilde, Doyle or Arthur Morrison. All of them trace back to the phenomenal descriptions of the Portside slums in Dickens, in Oliver Twist, Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend:

Down towards the east and the Pool of London a forest of funnels and masts was dimly outlined against the sinister sky. Huge barges, each steered by a single man at the end of a pair of giant oars, lumbered and swirled down-stream at all angles. Occasionally a tug snorted busily past, flashing its red and green signals and dragging an unwieldy tail of barges in its wake. Then a Margate passenger steamer, its electric lights gleaming from every porthole, swerved round to anchor, with its load of two thousand fatigued excursionists. Over everything brooded an air of mystery — a spirit and feeling of strangeness, remoteness, and the inexplicable. As the broad flat little boat bobbed its way under the shadow of enormous hulks, beneath stretched hawsers, and past buoys covered with green slime, Racksole could scarcely believe that he was in the very heart of London—the most prosaic city in the world. He had a queer idea that almost anything might happen in this seeming waste of waters at this weird hour of ten o’clock. It appeared incredible to him that only a mile or two away people were sitting in theatres applauding farces, and that at Cannon Street Station, a few yards off, other people were calmly taking the train to various highly respectable suburbs whose names he was gradually learning. He had the uplifting sensation of being in another world which comes to us sometimes amid surroundings violently different from our usual surroundings. The most ordinary noises — of men calling, of a chain running through a slot, of a distant siren — translated themselves to his ears into terrible and haunting sounds, full of portentous significance. He looked over the side of the boat into the brown water, and asked himself what frightful secrets lay hidden in its depths… (p.185)

When Racksole remembers that the beat of the steam yacht had a funny offbeat sound, the three experts laugh and all tell him that’s ‘The Squirm’, a steamer with one propeller half broken off, which belongs to the crook Jack Everett. they saw it anchored earlier in the day off Cherry Pier, and here they find it, tucked in snugly behind a Norwegian ship.

Hazell goes aboard the Screw calling out that he’s the Customs and wants to search it but finds only a woman who tells him to get it over with and bugger off. He’s getting back aboard the wherry to report no show when they see a dinghy shoot out from the lee of the Norwegian. Jules was hiding. There follows an exciting midnight chase in and out the anchored ships and barges of the Pool of London. Long story short, Jules scrambles aboard a high barge and looks down on Theodore in the wherry, brandishing a dagger in his hand and teasing him to come on up.

It looks like a standoff until, with lovely comic timing, some random kid, some mudlark, outraged at this intruder on his barge, comes up out of nowhere and simply pushes Jules off. He lands in the river with a splosh and turns out he can’t swim so our guys have to haul him aboard, tie him up and row back to the landing steps in front of the Grand Babylon.

They escort wet Jules into the hotel and up to his former room, a small space under the eaves and leave him bound hand and foot and tied to the bed and guarded by a massive member of staff, ex-army, no-nonsense.

Next morning bright and early Theodore comes to interrogate Jules. Jules makes the sally that Theodore will never turn him in to the police as it would prompt too many embarrassing questions. Theodore says he wouldn’t bother, he’d just take Jules out to sea in the hotel steam yacht and dump him over the side.

Jules comes clean and it is the story as we thought. He had been running a tidy little crime operation at the hotel for years. he was approached via a middle man from eminent people in Bosnia who offered to pay Jules £50,000 (about £2 million in modern money) if he ensured Eugen missed the appointment with Levi. He had planned to arrange this in the hotel itself but Theodore unexpectedly buying it ruined his plans. Instead he decided to intercept Eugen in Ostend and hired the Juno woman with the red hat to lure him to some rendezvous where he was abducted and held in the mystery house. Where Theodore, Aribert and Nella rescued him.

Nonetheless it took Eugen weeks to recover and by the time he had the deadline from Levi had passed. But then his contacts in Bosnia got restless and decided they wanted Eugen put out of the way permanently and offered a cool £100,000, not caring about the details. And so Jules arranged the wine bottle poisoning which didn’t come off.

Theodore asks the name of the middle man which Jules tells him but it won’t do him any good, he recently heard the man is dead. And it’s at this point that Nella enters to tell Theodore that Eugen is unwell…

Cut back to the evening before. You remember how Theodore had encouraged Aribert to go ahead with dining with Eugen in order to watch who proffered the poisoned wine, and Aribert swiping the poison glass out of Hans’s hands at the last minute? Well, that was the same evening that Theodore went out on the river with Hazell and caught Jules.

What we didn’t know until this moment is that, in the poison wine scene, although the glass was dashed out of Hans’s hands, Eugen slumped in his chair anyway, and now we learn that the others smell laudanum on his breath. Eugen has poisoned himself!

They carry him to his room, fetch a doctor then a specialist who all wash their hands of him. Nella and Aribert hold hands and talk about what kind of future they’ll have. Suddenly Eugen calls and Aribert is relieved that he is rallying… this means he will be king and Nella and Aribert can be married.

However, Eugen has regained consciousness only to tell Aribert that he is doomed. He can feel it in his heart. He is dying. It’s then that a servant tells Nella finally gets someone to tell her where her father is. He’d been missing all night and then his whereabouts were unknown this morning (since he went to Jule’s room at first light). Now rumour spreads that he’s up in the old head waiter’s room so Nella leaps out of her chair and goes bounding up the stairs.

Which explains her bursting in on the interrogation of Jules. She is taken aback for a moment then begs her father to come with her.

And so the novel builds up to a clever comic climax. Nella realises her Dad is the only one who can 1) save Eugen’s life and 2) ensure her and Aribert’s happiness. She asks him how soon he could raise a million pounds. Well, it would take a bit of doing but then his darling daughter explains it’s the only thing she wants in her life, to be allowed to marry the man she loves.

Long story short: she succeeds, she persuades him. Later that morning Theodore arranges for the payment of Hazell and his assistants, then has breakfast with Félix and brings him up to speed with the latest goss. Then strolls along to the City and arranges access to £1 million.

The doctors return and despair of Eugen’s condition which is when Nella takes Aribert aside and tells him to tell Eugen that the loan is arranged, his debts will be paid off, he can marry Princess Anna. Eugen sits up in bed he is so amazed. Everyone makes him sit back down but the change is effected. From this point onwards he wants to live and gets better.

Aribert and Nella are celebrating their good news when Theodore sneaks in and beckons Aribert to go with him. He takes Aribert to his office and pulls back a sheet to reveal the corpse of Jules. Miraculously he had managed to escape from his bindings, wriggled through the small window, used a cornice to get up onto the hotel roof, scampered along it to a fire escape and was merrily climbing down it when a rung snapped and he plunged to his death. The baddie is dead. the plot has ended.

A concluding chapter ties up a few loose ends: Miss Spencer is never heard of again. Rocco is heard of some years later making a name for himself at a hotel in South America. After a few weeks a fully recovered Prince Eugen and his entourage leave to travel back to Posen and propose to Princess Anna.

Aribert comes to ask for the Nella’s hand in marriage. He announces he is renouncing all his royal titles and reverting to plain Count of Harzen. He has an annual income of £10,000. Theodore grants his permission and then, rather breath-takingly, bestows on the couple £50 million, half his fortune.

That night, after dinner, the friends Theodore and Félix take the air on the hotel terrace and Félix confesses that he’s rather bored. He misses running the hotel. Is there any chance he could have it back? Theodore says maybe. How much? The same as he paid for it. Félix pretends to say be outraged, saying he sold him a hotel with three outstanding members of staff, being Jules, Rocco and Miss Spencer and Theodore managed to lose all three of them! But, yes, alright, the same price as he received for it, and they shake.

And so was brought to a close the complex chain of events which had begun when Theodore Racksole ordered a steak and a bottle of Bass at the table d’hôte of the Grand Babylon Hôtel. (p.219)

Thoughts

Although she’s in many respects a male-conceived stereotype, still Nella Racksole is a strong independent woman, a notable figure to be starring so prominently in a late-Victorian thriller.

Miss Racksole,’ he said, ‘if you will permit me to say it, I have never in my life met a woman like you.’ (p.63)

I really liked the character of Jules the superior head waiter and his sniffy comments about guests to Miss Spencer in the first chapter. Shame they both had to turn out to be criminals. I’d have liked to read a lot more about the snooty waiter. In fact at the end we learn that Jules had undertaken various other crimes and scams while at the hotel, which could have set Bennett nicely up for a prequel, if he’d cared to…

Quotes

Very enjoyable popcorn prose from the turn of the nineteenth century. Murder mystery intrigue:

The thin veneer of civilisation

This is a perennial topic in these kinds of thrillers, the thought that ‘civilisation’ is only skin deep, a flimsy veneer on top of dark and sinister men and activities. The same sentiment is expressed in every one of John Buchan’s thrillers and is given vivid expression here several times:

Twenty-four hours ago she would have declared it impossible that such an experience as she had suffered could happen to anyone; she would have talked airily about civilization and the nineteenth century, and progress and the police. But her experience was teaching her that human nature remains always the same, and that beneath the thin crust of security on which we good citizens exist the dark and secret forces of crime continue to move, just as they did in the days when you couldn’t go from Cheapside to Chelsea without being set upon by thieves. Her experience was in a fair way to teach her this lesson better than she could have learnt it even in the bureaux of the detective police of Paris, London, and St Petersburg. (p.80)

And:

Could this be a West End hotel, Racksole’s own hotel, in the very heart of London, the best-policed city in the world? It seemed incredible, impossible; yet so it was. Once more he remembered what Felix Babylon had said to him and realized the truth of the saying anew. The proprietor of a vast and complicated establishment like the Grand Babylon could never know a tithe of the extraordinary and queer occurrences which happened daily under his very nose; the atmosphere of such a caravanserai must necessarily be an atmosphere of mystery and problems apparently inexplicable. (p.99)

Fear

It was a curious psychological effect, this terrorizing (for it amounted to that) of two courageous full-grown men by the mere apparition of a helpless creature in a cellar. Gradually they both recovered from it. The next moment they were out in the passage which led to the front door of the house. The front door stood open. They looked into the street, up and down, but there was not a soul in sight. The street, lighted by three gas-lamps only, seemed strangely sinister and mysterious.

The narrative portrays the emotion of fear in persuasive detail because it is, of course, an echo of the emotion the book itself is trying to generate in the reader’s bosom.

The eternal enemy

The best baddies never die but eerily survive every catastrophe. This is because they are psychological projections of our worst fears which, by definition, can never be killed.

Men like Jules are incapable of being defeated. It was characteristic of his luck that now, in the very hour when he had been caught red-handed in a serious crime against society, he should be effecting a leisurely escape — an escape which left no clue behind.

Credit

‘The Grand Hotel Babylon’ by Arnold Bennett was serialised in Golden Penny magazine in 1901, for which Bennett received £100. It was then published as a novel by London publisher Chatto and Windus in 1902. References are to the 1972 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 10, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel

Tagged Angel Kiss, Anthony Hope, Arnold Bennett, Baroness Zerlinski, Bass beer, Brixton, Charing Cross, Cherry Pier, comic novel, Count of Harzen, Covent Garden, Edwardian fiction, Elihu P. Rucker, Eugen, Félix Babylon, George Hazell, Golden Penny, Grand Babylon Hotel, Grand Duke Eugen of Posen, Hôtel Wellington, Jules, King of Bosnia, laudanum, Miss Racksole, Miss Spencer, Monte Carlo, Mr Babylon, Museum of the Trocadéro, mystery thriller, Nella, Nella Racksole, Nellodrama, New Arabian Nights, New Jersey, novel, Ostend, Port of London, Prince Aribert, Prince Aribert of Posen, Princess Anna of Eckstein-Schwartzburg, Reginald Dimmock, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rocco, Romanee-Conti, Ruritania, Sampson Levi, Sherlock Holmes, Surrealism, The Court Pawnbroker, the Custom House, the Embankment, The Grand Hotel Babylon, the Potteries, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Squirm, the Strand, Theodore Racksole, Tom Jackson, West Orange

Posted by Simon on January 10, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/01/10/the-grand-babylon-hotel-arnold-bennett/

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900)

‘It is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush – from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe.’
(Marlow in chapter 5)

Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
(Marlow, appalled at the inadequacy of legal procedures to capture the complexity of life, Chapter 4)

‘We never know what a man is made of.’
(Captain Brierly’s first mate, Mr Jones, after Brierly commits suicide, Chapter 6)

I was doomed to be the recipient of confidences, and to be confronted with unanswerable questions.
(Marlow feeling sorry for himself, Chapter 34)

It was a lesson, a retribution – a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think.
(Marlow reflecting on the massacre which ends the book and its connection to fundamental human nature, Chapter 44)

Lord Jim was Joseph Conrad’s next publication after Heart of Darkness (1899). Like Heart of Darkness it was first published as a serial in Blackwoods Magazine, in this case from October 1899 to November 1900, and then published in book form. However, Lord Jim is a lot longer than Heart of Darkness (around 80,000 words and 313 Penguin pages compared to Heart’s 38,000 words and 111 pages) and uses the same techniques of a story-telling narrator who mingles a main narrative with numerous flashbacks, to much more complex effect.

My review divides the text into three parts. These aren’t in the book, which is simply divided into 45 chapters, but, as you read it, there is very obviously a part one (aboard the Patna), a part two (in Patusan), a few chapters at the end concluding the narrative, which I’ve labelled part 3. And I suppose the first four chapters, told by an omniscient third-person narrator, amount to an introduction.

Plot summary: Introduction

The first four chapters are told by an omniscient third person narrator and give a potted biography of the central protagonist. Jim (last name never mentioned) is a sound-looking young man from a country parsonage who trains to be a merchant sailor, gets his seaman’s license, gets work aboard various ships out East till he is injured by a falling spar. Not fully fit, he gets a job aboard a notorious old steamer, the Patna, 1,400 tons, captained by a fat and foul-mouthed German captain and owned by an unscrupulous Chinese. It describes the fateful voyage of the steamship Patna, up to and including its accident before cutting away to the courtroom where an official enquiry into the accident is being held. At the end of the fourth chapter we are introduced to Charles Marlow, captain in the merchant marine, and his interest in Jim’s case. In the courtroom he is described as:

A white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear. (Chapter 4)

All this is preparation for what follows.

Plot summary: part 1

Setting

It’s after dinner out East somewhere, in the imperialist 1890s. On a veranda half a dozen professional white men have dined well and, as it gets dark, they call on one of their number, Charles Marlow, the only seaman among them, to give them one of his famous ‘yarns’, and so he does.

The Patna

The core of the story is simple. Several years ago there’d been a scandal among seaman out East about an old rustbucket of a ship, the Patna, which was contracted to carry 800 pilgrims to Mecca and which, en route to Aden, struck some underwater obstacle, split the hull and began taking water. It was the middle of the night, the pilgrims were all asleep, and the drunken cowardly crew panicked and fled the ship in a lifeboat. A squall came up at just that moment and the survivors, once the lifeboat was picked up next day and brought to Aden, insisted they saw the ship go down, quickly and mercifully drowning all the pilgrims.

The scandal derived from the fact that the ship very much did not go down, but remained half afloat, despite the holing and the squall, which merely blew it out of sight of the crew in the lifeboat. The next day the Patna was spotted by a French warship who cabled her up and towed the stricken ship to Aden, where all the pilgrims were successfully unloaded.

An official enquiry was held but the captain of the Patna, an obese German named Gustav, skedaddled, and the chief engineer had an alcoholic collapse and was confined to hospital. Therefore the main witness and accused in the case was the young mate, 23-year-old Jim, who cut a defiant but forlorn figure in the courtroom.

Marlow, captain of a merchant vessel, happened to be in the port where the public enquiry was being held and went along out of curiosity. He was intrigued by the character of this Jim fellow and, after bumping into him in the crowd outside when the court recessed for lunch, invited him to dinner at the Malabar Hotel where he was staying.

The Malabar Hotel confession

After dinner they go onto the terrace of the hotel and there follows Marlow’s very long, very intense account of the interview he held with Jim, not exactly like a police interview but more like a therapy session, or maybe a Catholic confession – but very long and exhaustive. Although he teases out of Jim all the unflattering details, Jim is so young and woebegone that he is pitifully grateful for being given the opportunity to get everything off his chest.

‘Last night already you had done me no end of good. Listening to me – you know… I’ve thought more than once the top of my head would fly off… You have given me confidence.” (p.142)

Marlow is motivated because, as he tells his listeners on the veranda, he is a connoisseur of people (he repeatedly describes Jim as ‘too interesting‘ to ignore). Which explains why he is so fascinated by, and comments on, every single remark, gesture and expression which crosses Jim’s face, analysing and re-analysing everything Jim says and even the silences when he stumbles, hesitates or falls silent. An approach which explains why just this first section lasts about 100 densely-packed pages.

The factual content of this vast text goes into more detail about events, retelling it in nailbiting real time, putting the reader on the edge of their seat:

The ship hit something, the forward bulkhead gave and started flooding with water; when Jim went down to check the main bulkhead protecting the rest of the ship he saw it bulging with the pressure and bits falling off the rusty iron. Back on deck the captain and three white crew were wrestling to free the lifeboat while Jim stood back, detached from them and stricken with conscience. He saw one of them, George, keel over as if in a faint. Finally, the three crew members release the boat and descend rapidly into the sea (all this without warning the sleeping pilgrims) and yell up for their mate, George to join them

The jump

And this is the big thing, from Jim’s perspective and for the entire moral framework of the book. Jim was not a coward. Jim realised his responsibility to the 800 innocent pilgrims. Jim realised someone ought to stay on board to organise an evacuation, no matter how chaotic, no matter there weren’t enough lifeboats for the entire 800. As he heard the cowardly crew yelling up from the darkness (it is pitch black night) below him, urging ‘George’ to jump, all these responsibilities flashed through his mind and yet…

The next thing Jim knows he is in the boat, he has jumped (p.88). While his mind is still processing this fatal step, a squall comes up and sheets of rain hide the Patna from view and, when it passes, they can’t see the ship’s lights and assume it sank.

In the pitch dark it takes a while for the others to realise Jim is not George and, when they do, they are not only furious at having lost their comrade, but also there’s much muttering about whether Jim will betray them when they eventually are rescued, with a strong undertone of menace.

Jim stays up all night gripping the boat’s tiller in fear of his life. Next day the boat is picked up by a passing ship, a ‘Dale Line steamer’, and taken to Aden where they discover to their horror and chagrin that the Patna didn’t sink but has been towed there, too. Then, a few days later, they are compelled to attend the enquiry, which is where Marlow comes in.

Romantic imaginings versus bitter reality

The point to grasp, the central theme of this long dense novel, is the discrepancy between Jim’s fond fantasies and the bitter reality of his actions. Again and again Marlow brings out the way that Jim, from his boyhood, revelled in romantic stories of the sea and imagined himself to be a brave bold sailor, a doughty captain, a swashbuckling buccaneer in the mode of Raleigh and Drake. As he underwent his training, as he served on various ships, as he took the crappy job on the Patna, all the time he reassured himself that when push came to shove, when the crisis arrived, he would be the hero, he would be the man of resolve, he would save the day.

And yet, in the event, when the crisis came, it was this very imaginative faculty which undid him. As he stood wavering on the bridge he imagined all too vividly the remaining bulkhead bursting, the water flooding in, the realisation and panic among the pilgrims, the screams of men, women and children as the gushing water frothed around them, a great confusion of brown bodies all screaming in their death agonies and…next thing he knew he was in the boat. Again and again he insists to Marlow that he never made a conscious decision. The thing just happened. He leaped and, with that one action, undid the entire basis of his self image, the heroic fantasies he had nurtured all his life.

By the time this very long confession-cum-therapy session has ended, all the other guests at the hotel are long gone to bed and on impulse Marlow makes Jim an offer: he’ll write him a letter of recommendation to a friend out East and help him do a bunk to avoid the findings of the enquiry. But Jim is offended:

‘You don’t seem to understand, he said incisively; then looking at me without a wink, ‘I may have jumped, but I don’t run away.’

Intense scrutiny

Several things are important. First, the book is so enormously long, dense and chewy because Marlow makes a mountain out of every word, hesitation, gesture and flicker from Jim, freighting them all with huge and portentous significance.

Hyperbolic language

Two, Conrad is very prone to hyperbole, to interpreting relatively mundane actions with extreme words like horror, madness, vengeance, Fate etc. Sentences like this occur hundreds of times:

I knew too much already to hope for the grace of a single uplifting touch, for the favour of hinted madness, of shadowed horror.

At around the same time (the later 1890s) Sigmund Freud was paying exorbitant attention to the dreams, memories and verbal slips of his patients, freighting them an immense load of psychological and, above all, sexual significance. Conrad’s Marlow subjects Jim and his story to the same kind of hyper-intense scrutiny except that, instead of sex, Conrad detects in every word and phrase signs of the horror, despair, futility and madness which he sees everywhere, in everything, on every page.

Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion.

Digressions

Third thing is that, being a discursive, after-dinner narrator means that Marlow is free to jump around in time, frequently interrupting the great Malabar Hotel Confession scene with memories of people he talked to at the time or later, in the same port town or miles away, inserting facts and perspectives on Jim’s account which he only learned years later and sometimes rambling right off the main story altogether.

For example, he not only tells us that one of the officials who sat on the Board of Enquiry, Captain Montague Brierly, shortly afterwards committed suicide (which is odd and distracting enough in its own right), but spends some pages retailing the account of the captain’s last movements given by his first mate, a Mr Jones. And not only this, but this digression involves some Conradian pondering on Jones’s appearance, character, motivation and style of talking.

Again, some years later he meets one of the French officers who went on board the abandoned Patna, supervised its cabling up and towing to Aden, and this passage includes nearly as much circumstantial detail about this man’s appearance and manner as he does about Jim’s.

Again and again the flow of Jim’s story is interrupted by digressions like this which not only take us to other times and places, but dwell on and analyse other people.

Other characters

Thus although the basic narrative consists of this intense colloquy between Marlow and Jim, it digresses so often onto the subsidiary stories of others that it slowly builds up into a kind of matrix of secondary characters, which themselves shed light not only on the factual content of the narrative, but 1) build up the sense of the wider world of ships and crews and ports, painting a broader picture of ‘Conrad’s world’, as well as 2) shedding direct or indirect light onto the central theme of how we humans are so often undone, undermined from our best intentions by the perversity of events, Fate, call it what you will.

Secondary characters mentioned or described, sometimes at length, in part one, in include:

– ‘that unspeakable vagabond’, Antonio Mariani, owner of Mariani’s billiard-room and grog-shop near the bazaar. It’s typical that Marlow hears Mariani’s version of events ‘a long time after’, ‘when he came on board one day to dun my steward for the price of some cigars’.

– the (unnamed) engineer of the Patna, an alcoholic who goes on a three-day bender before the official enquiry and ends up in the local hospital with powerful delirium tremens. It is here that Marlow, playing the detective, visits him to shed more light on Jim’s actions. The man insists not only that he saw the ship go down but, in his delirium, insists that it was full of reptiles, monsters, threatening him. He howls so loudly that the other inmates of the ward yell at him to shut up. (Chapter 5)

– Captain Montague Brierly, captain of the Ossa and one of the three men on the Board of Enquiry, catches up with Marlow after the first adjournment and spends a couple of pages lamenting how beastly the trial is and how demoralising it is for everyone in the merchant service that Jim has ‘let the side down’. He echoes Marlow’s insistence on the standards of behaviour demanded by ‘the craft’.

‘We’ve got all kinds amongst us – some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose.’ (Chapter 6)

– Mr Jones, first mate of the Ossa, vividly describes the last time he saw Captain Brierly on the bridge of the Ossa before Brierly committed suicide by jumping overboard, only a week or so after the Board of Enquiry. Jones describes Brierly’s concern that his pet dog be locked in the bridge so it didn’t follow him overboard, then expressed his contempt for the replacement captain appointed by the Company. (Chapter 6)

– An elderly French lieutenant. He is third lieutenant of the Victorieuse, flagship of the French Pacific squadron and the French gunboat which finds the Patna marooned and adrift. He’s one of the party who boarded the abandoned Patna. One afternoon in Sydney, after they have met ‘by the merest chance, in a sort of cafe’, he tells Marlow that he stayed on board the Patna for the entire 30 hours it took to haul it to the nearest English port, Aden, going on to say how impressed he was when the boats of two other British ships in the harbour took off all the 800 pilgrims in just 25 minutes (pages 107 to 116).

– Deckhand of the Sephora, a completely different ship which also got into difficulties and sank, who describes watching a member of that crew (a completely different crew), little Bob Stanton who looked like a bearded gnome, go back onboard to try and rescue a maid who refused to leave the sinking ship. She refused and they both drowned, an anecdote which sheds oblique light on Jim’s story (p.116).

– Selvin, chief mate of Marlow’s own ship, who nurses a fiery jealousy of his mousey wife which can drive him into homicidal rages (p.121).

– The Australian Captain Chester sees Jim stagger off after the enquiry’s verdict and asks Marlow whether he could persuade him (Jim) to come in on his dodgy scheme of buying a knackered old steamer to collect guano off a remote reef. Marlow says no and the digression could have ended there but, in Conrad’s hands, it has barely even begun. Because Conrad now bolts on the completely unnecessary detail that this Captain Chester has already secured one backer, a decrepit old captain named Robinson. Conrad then adds the lurid detail that this man acquired the nickname ‘Holy-Terror Robinson’ because he was involved in a scandal where he and six others were shipwrecked on Stewart Island and when, some months later, a Royal Navy ship spotted him on the shore, he was the only one left – with the result that there was lots of muttering about cannibalism. The relevance to Jim is that Chester admires the way Robinson didn’t care a fig for what others thought, rejected all accusations and got on with his life just fine, the total opposite of Jim, who is visibly shattered by the court’s verdict that his master’s certificate be taken away (pages 124 to 130). Then, later on in the narrative, Marlow tells us that the knackered old ship which Chester chartered to head out for this guano-deep island went down with all hands in a hurricane (p.135).

Hopefully these examples demonstrate how the net effect of hearing about, seeing and reading the stories of all these other characters is to build up the impression of a whole world, the world of the merchant marine in the 1890s, Conrad’s world, the world of ‘the craft’ – and to provide foils, comparisons and contrasts for Jim’s behaviour, never bluntly direct, but numerous sidelights and oblique angles.

Malabar Hotel second night

Next day Marlow attends the conclusion of the public enquiry and hears the magistrate read out their verdict: the German skipper (who has long since disappeared) and Jim (sitting humiliated in court) are to lose their seaman’s licenses.

After the court breaks up and empties, Marlow is temporarily delayed but then finds Jim down at the dockside and invites him back to his hotel room. He realises that the poor man has just lost the only profession he had, has nowhere to go, and is the talk of the town. Marlow, very compassionately, gives him refuge for one long day, not bothering him with talk but sitting and quietly writing letters and leaving Jim in silence as it gets slowly darker toward evening and then a tropical storm breaks out.

The tone and content is very different from the long night of the Confession. Now it is full of pregnant silences and the ominous symbolism of approaching darkness. Finally, after much stilted dialogue, Marlow explains that he’s written a letter of recommendation of Jim to an old friend, Mr Denver, who owns a rice mill in another country. Jim thanks Marlow for listening to him and giving him some confidence back. He vows to start over with ‘a clean slate’.

Intermezzo: Jim’s jobs

1) Six months later Marlow, docked in Hong Kong, gets a letter from Denver, a confirmed anti-social misanthrope (characteristically, Conrad gives us a pen portrait), saying Jim is turning out very well, very companionable, good worker. He (Denver) wonders what Jim did to abandon the sea, which tells us that Denver is utterly in the dark about the Patna incident. All is well.

But a few months later Marlow gets back from a voyage to find another letter saying Jim has absconded from Denver’s employ. In the same pile of letters is one from Jim himself explaining why: by a far-fetched coincidence the drunken second engineer from the Patna turned up in this distant place and also got a job at Denver’s mill. The engineer didn’t blab but he established a greasy rapport with Jim about ‘our little secret’, the suggestion of their exact moral equivalence, which Jim found impossible to bear.

2) So Jim moved on and got a job with a ship chandler’s company called Egstrom & Blake. Marlow calls in at the relevant (unnamed) port, calls in on the shop and he and Jim have a catch-up. Jim explains why he left Denver and says he’s doing OK as the runner to the two owners, Egstrom & Blake. He claims to be able to put up with the way the owners notoriously bicker and fight all the time, though Marlow secretly thinks he must find it all very humiliating.

A few months later Marlow calls by and is upset to discover Jim has done another bunk. Egstrom explains that some captains came by and were jawing in the shop in Jim’s presence and the Patna case came up and one of the old captains said what ‘scoundrels’ the Patna‘s crew had been and Jim froze. When the captains left, Jim gave Egstrom his notice despite all the latter’s reassurance and pleas. Marlow has to explain that Jim was one of the ‘scoundrels’, which Egstrom, like Denver, did not know.

3) And so Jim fled from job to job until he became notorious. He works for the Yucker brothers in Bangkok where Schomberg, the keeper of the hotel where he boarded, ‘a hirsute Alsatian of manly bearing and an irrepressible retailer of all the scandalous gossip of the place’, would tell anyone who cared to hear, all about Jim’s story. Jim leaves this berth after he gets into a fight with a drunken Dane who whispered something at him and who Jim threw off the veranda into the river (p.152).

4) Marlow takes Jim away with him in his ship. By now, as we can tell, he is heavily involved in Jim’s life, and next places him as a ‘water clerk’ with another ship’s chandler named de Jongh, ‘with his little leathery face’. (Chapter 13).

Plot summary: part 2

Stein

This big book enters part two when Marlow turns for advice about what to do with Jim to Stein, ‘a wealthy and respected merchant, lead partner in Stein & Co, ‘an eminently suitable person to receive my confidences about Jim’s difficulties as well as my own.’

Stein is an old hand, a German trader with a long and colourful life story in his own right, which (of course) Marlow gives us in full. He had in his time been merchant, adventurer, sometime adviser of a Malay sultan who he always referred to as ‘my poor Mohammed Bonso’ because he was assassinated at the end of a tumultuous eight-year civil war. We hear that Stein inherited his position from a venerable old Scot named Alexander M’Neil who was well in with the local tribe, which was ruled by a tough old woman queen. Nowadays he is owner of a trading firm in the Malaysian islands.

Marlow discusses Jim’s case with Stein who says he runs a trading post on the remote island of Patusan, forty miles up the river in the interior. The current factor or head of the trading post is a Portuguese named Cornelius, who is giving an unsatisfactory performance. Stein says why not send keen young Jim to replace Cornelius? And so is comes about.

Patusan

Jim comes to thank Marlow for getting him the post, takes some last minute equipment, including Marlow’s service revolver (although, characteristically, he forgets the ammunition) and sets off on one of Stein’s ships.

What follows is, once again, chopped up into a mosaic of accounts which Marlow only pieces together over the following years. Roughly speaking there are three elements or phases:

1. Jim arrives and discovers the trading post not some isolated cabin but embedded in a native town, which itself consists of various quarters or neighbourhoods, which are supervised by a couple of competing native rulers. I.e. he finds himself thrown into a complex political situation which it takes him some time to understand.

2. A full two years later, when much has happened in this complex situation, Marlow makes his only visit, staying for 4 weeks. and getting introduced to all the major players, interspersing his account of his trip with flashbacks to Jim’s arrival and the incidents which follow. In other words, you have to be on your toes to keep track of the multiple timelines involved.

3. Finally there is the disastrous denouement of the book – maybe I should call it Part 3 – which is conveyed in a completely different manner, because it consists of letters sent to one of the men who listened to Marlow’s account on the veranda. Yes, I’ll make that part 3.

The politics of Patusan

Briefly, Patusan is is divided between three communities each with their own rulers. The main town is ruled by a native Sultan but the real power resides with Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan’s uncles, ‘the governor of the river, who did all the extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of extinction the country-born Malay’. (Chapter 22).

On his initial arrival Jim is promptly arrested and imprisoned in this man’s compound. In a bizarre touch the Rajah gives him an ancient broken clock to fix. It is only on the third day that he plucks up the guts to jump over the wooden stakes which ring the compound, run down to the estuarine river which is at low tide, and make a great leap across it, landing in the mud on the other side before, after some exertion, making it up onto dry land, hurrying threw the settlement on the other side and throwing himself on the mercy of the Sultan’s rival, Doramin.

Two things: Conrad makes much of this leap, making it into a Leap To Freedom and directly comparing it with the ill-fated lap Jim made from the bridge of the Patna, his leap into shame and guilt.

Second, who is Doramin? Well, Doramin is the leader of the community of Bugis, settlers from abroad who have lived and thrived her for generations. He is an old man now and very fat (he can’t stand up unaided) but led his people in the long civil war which wracked the island. It was during this that he became close friends with Stein, and gave him a silver ring as token of their friendship. When he briefed Jim, Stein had given him this ring as proof of his (Stein’s) trust and told him to contact Doramin. This is why Jim knew he had to escape from the Rajah’s captivity, and why he leapt across the river into the Bugis side and made his way to Doramin, who recognised the ring and did, indeed, treat him well, and protect him from the Rajah.

We are introduced to his tiny wife and his son, Dain Waris, who is the apple of his father’s eye.

But there’s a third element in this uneasy ethnic rivalry. Up on top of a nearby mountain is the base of Sherif Ali, an Arab, leader of a band of ‘wild men.’

The battle of Sherif Ali’s compound

To cut a long story short, once Jim had got cleaned up, fed and water, found his feet and won Doramin’s trust he persuades him to let him lead his men in an assault on the hilltop base of Sherif Ali. As you can imagine this is described at length with many flashbacks and accounts from other people which Marlow splices together but, in brief, Jim supervises the hauling up the neighbouring hill of some of Doramin’s antique cannons, then orchestrates a dawn attack, with cannons firing from one hill onto Sherif’s compound at the same time as Doramin’s best warriors attack, led by Jim.

Lord Jim

Suffice to say that Sherif and his men flee and Jim establishes himself as the Power in the Land. He fortifies Stein’s compound and establishes himself as the White Man who will bring peace and justice to the town. In this capacity he judges cases and complains between Doramin and the Sultan’s people and gains the trust of the people and the two suspicious rulers. He is awarded the title tuan or Lord Jim. He acquires Tamb ‘Itam, a Malay servant who becomes a loyal bodyguard.

Cornelius

However, there is a big fly in the ointment. Jim has been sent to replace Stein’s current factor, the Portuguese Cornelius. Stein knows he is lazy and corrupt, routinely stealing the supplies Stein sends him to sell.

Initially Cornelius helps Jim but, when he realises the Englishman has been sent to replace him, becomes resentful and then starts to scheme and plot against Jim. He certainly refuses to pack up and leave. He can’t. He is too embedded in the place’s politics. He had worked hard to build up a position of trust and refuses to be thrown out and start again somewhere else. Also he has a daughter.

Jewel

Cornelius has a step-daughter. A native woman was made pregnant and had a child by a white man, a trader, who then abandoned her, so the baby girl is mixed race. Cornelius, when he arrived, fell for the attractive and loving mother and marries her, this becoming the girl’s step-father. When the mother died, he was left to bring up the girl, resenting her just as he came to dislike her step-father and be full of enduring resentment at her biological father, who impregnated her mother and then abandoned them both.

Rather improbably, given the immense world of harshly utilitarian facts about sailing, shipwrecks, enquiries and suicides which have characterised the narrative up to now, Conrad says:

Remember this is a love story I am telling you now. (Chapter 33)

Long story short, they fall in love and she becomes his woman (I’m not sure whether they get married or not). But she lives in fear that he, too, will leave, when his contract is up, when he gets some command from the mysterious world over the seas (none of the natives have ever left the island). She lives in terror of betrayal.

Jim names her Jewel.

Assassination attempts

Straying into James Bond territory, Jim learns that the Rajah is planning to assassinate him. Although he doesn’t realise it at the time, Jewel stays up night after night watching over him as he sleeps and to protect him from any assassination attempts. This passage ends with Jim confronting a pack of assassins sent to kill him, confronting them in one of the rotten outhouses, shooting one dead and uncovering the three others who were hiding. Instead of killing them as Doramin would, Jim marches them to the river and makes them jump across the muddy banks, sending them back to the Rajah.

As you might expect, once word gets round this escapade enormously increases Jim’s ‘face’, leading to folk stories that he is invulnerable to weapons, a god. All of which Jim exploits to make himself master of the place and establish peace and justice.

Marlow’s visit

As mentioned, it’s two years later that Marlow visits, for four weeks, being introduced to all the characters – the Rajah, Doramin and Dain Waris, Jewel, Cornelius, Tamb ‘Itam and so on – and, in the Conradian manner, with lots of flashbacks and interspersing of accounts from moments in that two year period which shed light on the characters or Jim’s rise; plus, of course, reflections on Stein’s adventures in the place, long before Jim arrived. As in part one, you need to keep your wits about you to keep track of all the different timelines, episodes and ramifications which throng the text.

1. Marlow has a set-piece interview with Jewel, who’s terrified Jim’s going to leave like her father, the white man who abandoned her mother.

2. And a similar interview with slimy Cornelius who says he wants compensation from bringing up Jewel, as a kind of dowry. Both echo or are based on the same technique as the epic interview with Jim back at the Malabar Hotel.

Marlow stays four Sundays, then the day of his departure is described at some length. How he gets a boat down the river with Jim to the sea to rendezvous with the ship that’s been sent to collect him. He observes how Jim has to deal with two inhabitants of the beach village who keep being pillaged by the Rajah’s people and realises how Jim’s power and implementation of justice stretches right across the island.

On the beach Jim and Marlow says goodbye and, he tells his audience (we are still on the veranda after dinner, remember, with half a dozen white professionals listening to this immensely long yarn), it is the last time he sees Jim.

Momentarily, Jim is tempted to leave with Marlow, to leap into another boat and betray a community of natives (as he did on the Patna) but this time makes the conscious decision to stay where is he trusted, where he has regained his confidence, where he can make a contribution. He knows that ‘out there’ in the white man’s world, his name is a byword for scandal and shame. Only here, in this island paradise, is he a man, is he trusted, does he have integrity. Conrad describes his last sight of him with characteristic verbosity but also great power and symbolism, starting by describing the two natives who are still talking to Jim, as Marlow’s boat is rowed out to the schooner waiting to take him back into the world.

Their dark-skinned bodies vanished on the dark background long before I had lost sight of their protector. He was white from head to foot, and remained persistently visible with the stronghold of the night at his back, the sea at his feet, the opportunity by his side – still veiled. What do you say? Was it still veiled? I don’t know. For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child – then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world… And, suddenly, I lost him… (Chapter 35)

And with that, Marlow’s epic narrative, the yarn he’s telling to the men on the veranda, comes to an end.

Part 3. The tragic climax

Marlow’s epic yarn comes to an end and Conrad describes it thus:

With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off the veranda in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret; but there was only one man of all these listeners who was ever to hear the last word of the story. It came to him at home, more than two years later, and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in Marlow’s upright and angular handwriting. (Chapter 36)

So the provenance, the nature of the text completely changes. The long speech of Marlow ends and we switch to the point of view of one of the auditors. It is over two years later when this man revives a bundle of documents from Marlow. He’s been singled out because, as Marlow writes in his covering letter:

‘You alone have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story, though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate. You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love sprung from pity and youth…’

He is never named and the narration refers to him as ‘the privileged man’ and then by the pregnant phrase, the privileged reader.

The documents Marlow has sent the privileged reader tell the story of Jim’s final tragedy and death. It’s actually quite a complicated story, full of the usual details and descriptions. As briefly as I can, Jim is well established as the master of Patusa with Jewel his wife and the devoted bodyguard Tamb’ Itam.

Into this picture comes a notorious pirate, an Englishman, a brute ironically nicknamed ‘Gentleman Brown’. After a downward turn of his fortunes this man persuaded the crew of his ship that there easy pickings on Patusan and they set sail East to visit it. On the way they ran low on food and were desperate by the time they anchored at the mouth of the river and Brown took most of the ship’s crew in a large rowing boat up the river.

They had expected a tiny settlement they could plunder and so were dismayed to find a reception committee. Word had been passed up the river and so as they arrived near the town they were greeted with shots from the native troops lined up to greet them. Brown’s men fired back, quickly beached the boat on the mud flats and ran up to a slight mound where they build a makeshift fort from dead boughs and trunks and branches and dug in.

It was at this point that Jim tries to negotiate. The locals, led by Doramin, are all for storming the little palissade or certainly for wiping out the band of pirates as soon as they try to make it back to their dinghy. But Jim quells all this and approaches the dug-in bad guys under a flag of truce.

Here something bad and strange happens, for as he gets talking to Brown, Brown unknowingly invokes ideas of integrity and honesty and moral firmness all of which, without him knowing it, push Jim’s buttons. Conrad manipulates the dialogue so that Jim, eerily and uneasily comes to realise there is some kind of moral equivalence between himself and this hoodlum.

The upshot is that Jim agrees the pirates can leave under a flag of truce and won’t be attacked. The fly in the ointment is Cornelius who has, by now, become a ‘motiveless malevolence’, to quote Shakespeare’s description of Iago. Over the 2 days or so that the pirates are holed up, Cornelius approaches and introduces himself to Brown and explains the political situation in the town. Cornelius’s motive is to create mischief and mayhem, and knowledge of the situation makes Brown all the cockier when he comes to negotiate with Jim.

Above all Cornelius tells Brown that a cohort of native warriors has been sent back down the river, to camp on a flat sandbank at a curve in it, to ambush them on the way back. the force is led by Doramin’s much-beloved only son Dain Waris. Now Jim, having concluded his deal with Brown that he and his men can leave peacefully, doesn’t tell him about this camp because he doesn’t need to. But when Cornelius tells him about it, Brown – estimating Jim by his own morals – guesses it’s a trap.

So the big moment comes and Brown and his men are allowed back down into their dinghy and set off rowing downriver and Jim, Doramin, the Rajah, think the job is done. But a few hours later, as they draw abreast of Dain’s camp, Cornelius treacherously shows them an obscure offshoot of the river which Brown detours into. It doesn’t help that a tropical fog has descended and shrouded the river and its environs.

It is in these circumstances that Brown silently leads his men to a position behind Dain’s camp, line up, aim their rifles, wait till they see figures moving around and then… let fly a series of lethal volleys. Dain’s men, taken completely by surprise, fall left and right and, as Dain comes running out of his tent, he is shot clean through the forehead and dies on the spot.

Their grisly massacre performed, Brown and his men retreat to their dinghy, push off and row back down the river to rejoin their ship anchored off the coast.

Meanwhile, messengers from the massacre quickly arrive at the main town and Jim is roused by the sound of weeping and wailing and lamentation. Once he learns what has happened he is not only appalled but realises what the death of Doramin’s son means – it is the end of his rule and authority. Worse, by counselling mercy and letting Brown and his men go, Jim is directly responsible for Dain Waris’s death. And, worst of all, he knows in his conscience that it was Brown’s appeal to something broken and corrupt in his (Jim’s) own life story, it was by establishing a horrible connection of moral failure between them, that Brown was able to play on Jim’s weakness.

That moment of moral failure all those years before on the Patna has come back to haunt him again. Realising he will never be free of it no matter where he goes, Jim ignores the desperate pleas of his wife Jewel not to abandon her (like her father did, like white man always do) and the urgent recommendations of his loyal bodyguard Tamb’ Itam to flee – and instead crosses the river and walks up to the grand compound of Doramin, who, in his vast obese way, is a crushed man. And Jim stands there with no excuses while Doramin raises his treasured 18th century pistols and shoots Jim in the chest, killing him instantly.

THE END. Except that:

The last word is not said – probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word – the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. (p.172)

Themes

Conrad’s texts overflow with mannerisms of style and approach, with clever techniques and vivid language, not to mention countless traces of the worldview of his day, the late-Victorian era, strewn throughout the story, characters and style. In other words, Conrad’s texts are almost too rich in themes and ideas. In what follows I’ve tried to marshal some obvious ones into a useful order.

Imagination

Imagination is a destructive force in Conrad. Like a male Madame Bovary, Jim had lived his youth awash with dreams and ideals picked up from popular books, in his case of manly heroism, imagining himself superior to the drunk middle-aged cynics he found himself among (‘those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure’), imagining that, when the moment came, his true mettle as doughty hero would be revealed to an admiring world.

At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea that he smiled… (Chapter 3)

Yet it was this very imaginative faculty which undermined him when the moment of crisis came: all-too-vividly he could imagine the main bulkhead bursting, the floods of water, the pilgrims in the hold screaming and drowning in a terrible mass of bodies and then the ship foundering and sinking amid the screams of men, women and their children.

On one level the novel is about Jim’s struggle to face the reality of who he really is, and the terrible gap between a man’s find fantasies about himself and the always disappointing and sometimes sordid reality.

Jim’s significance

Marlow knows how trivial the story is, how crazy it is to lavish 300 pages on such an incident:

The occasion was obscure, insignificant – what you will: a lost youngster, one in a million – but then he was one of us; an incident as completely devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap, and yet the mystery of his attitude got hold of me as though he had been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind’s conception of itself…’ (Chapter 8)

Conrad’s two voices

1. The third-person narrator

The first four chapters are told by an omniscient third-person narrator and are highly enjoyable, in fact I found myself mesmerised by Conrad’s long, lulling descriptions of ships and the sea, his addiction to repeating clauses with variations, often in sets of three, as rhythmic as waves on a beach.

They [the pilgrims] streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur, or a look back; and when clear of confining rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship – like water filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the rim. (Chapter 2)

Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. (Chapter 2)

It was they that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath. (p.189)

To us, their less tried successors, they [the early explorers of the Malay archipelago] appear magnified, not as agents of trade but as instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful. They recorded it complacently in their sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of strange nations, in the glory of splendid rulers. (Chapter 22)

But, abruptly, at the start of chapter 5, we join Marlow’s first-person narrative and it’s Marlow who proceeds to narrate most of the rest of the book (excluding the last two chapters, which are guided by an omniscient narrator but in which the privileged reader is reading letters written by Marlow, so his voice still dominates.)

2. Marlow as narrator

At the very end of Chapter 4 Marlow is introduced by the omniscient narrator in the classic Conrad setting. It is after dinner and half a dozen well-fed Englishmen are sitting in darkness on a veranda in the East somewhere, puffing cigars and deciding to listen to one of Marlow’s famous long yarns (Marlow is the only seaman among them, Chapter 12). But Marlow doesn’t just tell stories, there is a mystical, other-worldly aspect to his tellings which turns them into performances, in which he ventriloquises the past.

With the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and was speaking through his lips from the past. (Chapter 4)

Marlow’s Englishisms

The switch in narrator brings out lots of aspects of Marlow’s voice which I hadn’t quite realised before, chief among them that he is disconcertingly pukka, posh, English, given to defending British values of hard work and steadfastness, given to almost caricature English ejaculations.

‘I couldn’t help exclaiming, “What an extraordinary affair!”

He is concerned with the stereotypical British virtues of good form and what’s done and what’s not done, with late-Victorian values. He may question them, but he always returns to them. This gives the whole thing a peculiar almost vertiginous flavour because he actual content of his stories is so corrosively nihilistic. His stories drip with futility and despair and horror so it’s often plain weird when, after long paragraphs describing men going to pieces in the tropics, Marlow is made to say things like ‘It was all so dashed unfair’. It’s a startling gear change, a clash of worldviews, almost as if the jolly English chap phrases were bolted onto the unnerving and nihilistic narrative right at the last minute.

Jim’s Englishisms

This schizophrenia in the text is even more true of Jim. On the one hand he is the focal point of this immense 300-page narrative and Marlow and Conrad pile on his shoulders a vast freight of significance and meaning whereby his fate summarises all human nature, the plight of the human race, the cruelty of Fate and so on. There are countless passages which make Jim symbolic of the entire universe:

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. Of course, as with belief, thought, love, hate, conviction, or even the visual aspect of material things, there are as many shipwrecks as there are men, and in this one there was something abject which made the isolation more complete – there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke. (Chapter 10)

And yet every time Jim opens his mouth he sounds like a character from P.G. Wodehouse.

‘Dashed if I do…’
‘It was a dashed conundrum…’
‘What a bally ass I’ve been…’
‘By Jove…’
‘Amazing old chap…’
‘How beastly it would be to get a jab with a bally long spear…’
‘Confounded nonsense, don’t you know?’
‘Oh it was beastly!’
‘He was off his chump…’
‘I was deucedly tired…’
‘Glad to get rid of the bally thing…’

This and hundreds of other Bertie Wooster phrases trip from the mouth of this symbol of Nature’s wanton destructiveness in a disorientating clash of cultures and worldviews. Everyone remembers Conrad’s lush prose and complex narrative structures but they tend to forget that his protagonists often sound like Jeeves and Wooster.

Xenophobia

Alongside the bally English locutions goes a very English dismissal of all other nationalities. In his narrative Marlow takes a lofty disdain, not so much to the ‘natives’ but to all other Europeans who aren’t made of ‘the right stuff’. Here’s his opinion of the captain of the Patna:

‘You Englishmen are all rogues,’ went on my patriotic Flensborg or Stettin Australian. I really don’t recollect now what decent little port on the shores of the Baltic was defiled by being the nest of that precious bird.

‘Defiled’, eh? Marlow is casually judgemental of every non-Brit in the story, confident in the knowledge that his pukka English auditors will agree.

Comparing the two narrators

But not only is Marlow lavish of criticism, he is also incredibly prolix and profuse. A paragraph of Conrad’s narration intoxicates with its colourful imagery and beguiling rhythms. Marlow, in sharp contrast, is often prosey and long-winded.

‘Talk? So be it. And it’s easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after a good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight that would make the best of us forget we are only on sufferance here and got to pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious minute and every irremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go out decently in the end – but not so sure of it after all – and with dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbows with right and left. Of course there are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten before the end is told – before the end is told – even if there happens to be any end to it.’ (Chapter 5)

Reading this particular passage out loud, for the first time it occurred to me that Marlow might be an old buffer, a tubby, red-faced whiskery old cove that the others invite along because they enjoy his long – his very long – and very rambling yarns after a good dinner. As he himself puts it at the start of his narrative.

‘Charley, my dear chap, your dinner was extremely good, and in consequence these men here look upon a quiet rubber as a tumultuous occupation. They wallow in your good chairs and think to themselves, “Hang exertion. Let that Marlow talk.”’ (Chapter 5)

Multiple perspectives

As already mentioned, the book is made up of the subtle and complex interweaving of multiple perspectives. Marlow circles round the central figure of Jim almost like a detective piecing together testimony from a wide range of witnesses who all saw part of the story, but never the whole.

But unlike a detective Marlow knows, from the start, that there is no such thing as the ‘truth’ of what happened. He isn’t really interested in events, he is hypnotised by the prospect of trying to reach into that unplumbable mystery, the soul of another person.

These glimpses or perspectives come in two levels or types.

1. Direct encounters with Jim

Marlow’s direct encounters with Jim. Marlow first sees Jim at the inquest, then bumps into him outside the court building, where there’s the unfortunate incident of the ‘cur’. (The man Marlow’s talking to spots a mongrel dog wandering amid the crowd and complains to Marlow about such ‘curs’ being aloud to roam free and Jim, passing by at that moment, thinks the man is referring to him.)

This gets them talking and Marlow takes Jim for dinner at the Malabar House hotel where he’s staying. These conversations are recounted with a great weight of puzzled and verbose interpretation by Marlow, who repeatedly uses the image of a fog or cloud to explain how impenetrable he found Jim.

I don’t pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog – bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country. They fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation. (Chapter 6)

The muscles round his lips contracted into an unconscious grimace that tore through the mask of his usual expression – something violent, short-lived and illuminating like a twist of lightning that admits the eye for an instant into the secret convolutions of a cloud… (Chapter 10)

It was one of those bizarre and exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure. (Chapter 10)

I had another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being… And even as I looked at him the mists rolled into the rent… (Chapter 11)

The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture. (Chapter 12)

My mind floated in a sea of conjectures… (Chapter 7)

2. Other voices

At a second level, there is the long list of witnesses who share with Marlow their various and fragmentary parts of Jim’s story. Their primary use is to fill in facts about various events which Marlow doesn’t directly witness (most of the story, in fact) – but Marlow is every bit as interested in their motives, in their psychology and characters, as in the light they shed on the central case history.

Marlow is a tremendous gossip. He gives the impression of knowing everyone – from the Consul to the dodgiest wharf rats, from rancid barkeepers to disreputable captains – and having a story or to tell about all of them.

He pokes and pries into everyone’s lives. Why, for example, does Marlow end up at the bedside of the mate of the Patna to witness at first-hand the man hallucinating that swarms of reptiles are attacking him? Why do we find him listening to the confession of Jones, mate of the Ossa whose captain, Brierly, in a completely unrelated event, committed suicide? Because he pops up everywhere, poking around, being in the right place, listening to so-and-so tell their tale. Because people seem to tell him everything.

The result is that Marlow’s voice in fact contains scores of other voices, he is a cacophony of characters, a plurality of personages. Through Marlow’s urbane tones we hear the gossip and chatter of all kinds of other people. I’ve listed the main ones above. Here are some more:

Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so discomposing that for some time he listened, quite unable to make out what that apparition wanted…

Jones: ‘This was the last time I heard his voice, Captain Marlow…’

One of the hands told me, hiding a smile at the recollection, ‘It was for all the world, sir, like a naughty youngster fighting with his mother.’

And not only does he bump into them, hear gossip about them, but he is able – absurdly – to repeat their immensely long conversations word for word. The mate of the Ossa sees fit not only to talk to him about the suicide of stout old, reliable old Captain Montague Brierly but does so via an improbably detailed, word-for-word reconstruction of their last conversation before the captain jumped overboard.

The whole book is like this. One enormous suspension of disbelief about how much of a long ago conversation a man could possibly remember, let alone quote perfectly.

Dubious English

For the most part Conrad’s bending of English idiom stays within limits, his deployment of unusually lush vocabulary in luxuriously repetitive phrases, stays within semantically the acceptable bounds of English usage. But from time to time he oversteps the mark and the reader is brought up short, remembering all over again that Conrad was not a native English speaker.

He accepted the disappointing course of events with a sulky obstinacy which seemed to draw more together his little yellow old face; and as he went down he glanced askant here and there, never giving up his fixed idea. (Chapter 42)

Meaning rather than story

Marlow’s focus on seeking some impenetrable inner ‘meaning’ to Jim’s life explains why he tells the story, the actual sequence of events, in such a round-the-houses way. For example, it’s only casually, a good way into his first meal with Jim, that the reader discovers, almost by accident, the single most important fact about the Patna incident – which is that it didn’t sink. The crew, including Jim, abandoned her – but she didn’t sink. The reader is left to work through the implications of this, while also still trying to follow the dinner conversation. This casual revelation of the most important fact in the book, as an almost casual aside, struck me as a mimesis of how we often actually come across information in the world – partially, obliquely, not understanding its significance at the time.

And instead of a straight line, the narrative is more like a shape made in the froth on the top of a takeaway cappucino which the drinker undermines when they empty a sachet of sugar into it and give it a stir. The narrative is like a froth of countless bubbles which has been stirred.

To give an early example: Marlow tells us that Old Brierly was the leading figure on the three-man tribunal which looked into the fate of the Patna.

Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness. The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense; it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush – from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe. (Chapter 5)

These thought bubbles, the author’s editorialising, float u away from any sense of narrative movement, floating sideways like a balloon into a world of fanciful speculation about the meaning of life. The whole book is like this, bubbles sticking to and circling other bubbles in a vast foam.

Conrad’s worldview

The permanent risk of solitary collapse…

So what worldview emerges from the book? A relatively straightforward one: the world, or ‘life’, is treacherous and cruel. You never know when it is going to get you, pounce with a cruel smile on its face, and bring you to your knees. Death isn’t the enemy – the enemy is psychological collapse: it is humiliation and despair that will get you (and count the triplet clauses):

It is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary – the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life. (Chapter 2)

Lord Jim is twinned with Heart of Darkness not only because they both have Marlow as their narrator, but because they are both extended studies of the psychology of failure of one central figure. Mr Kurtz is the brightest and best Europe has to offer but unrestricted power turns him into a monster. Jim is a variation on the theme, tall (5’11”), blonde, blue-eyed, in his heart valiant and pure:

This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on… (Chapter 5)

Surely a model white man in every respect. Jim is, as Marlow keeps telling his audience, ‘one of us’.

His frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was one of us. (Chapter 7)
I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us… (Chapter 5)
Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic. I only knew he was one of us. (Chapter 21)

And yet it turns out that there is something… something… something nagging at Jim, wearing him away from inside, the idea Conrad returns to again and again, ‘the subtle unsoundness of the man’ (p.72) which undermines him no matter what he tries to do, intends to do, wants to do. The narrator doesn’t let this go uncommented:

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. (Ch 7)

… versus communal solidarity

Set against the tripwires and pitfalls of the individual life – as a bulwark against the unknown terrors and psychological collapse which haunt all Conrad’s characters, and eat away at Jim – our best protection is to cleave to the fellowship of a cause, in particular the community of European sailors or ‘the craft’ as Marlow keeps calling it.

In all Conrad’s tales of the sea, this community is made up of sailors, of the merchant marine. We know many of them are crooks and scoundrels but… at least there is a standard of behaviour people pay lip service to, aspire to, cling to. This is better than nothing. It is a guide rail in the darkness.

‘Haven’t I turned out youngsters enough in my time, for the service of the Red Rag, to the craft of the sea, to the craft whose whole secret could be expressed in one short sentence.’ (Chapter 5)
‘I wanted to see him squirm for the honour of the craft.’ (Chapter 5)
‘Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft?’ (Chapter 11)
‘We’ve got all kinds amongst us – some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose.’ (Captain Brierly)
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind (p.121)

Marlow repeatedly declares himself and his auditors all members of this community and craft:

‘of an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct.’ (Chapter 5)

‘Hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand?—trusted! Frankly, I don’t care a snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of Asia, but a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo of old rags in bales. We aren’t an organised body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency.’ (Captain Brierly, Chapter 6)

And then there is the work itself. It may not prompt joy but the work itself enforces a kind of purity which Conrad conveys very eloquently in numerous passages:

He made many voyages. He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread – but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. (Chapter 2)

Hard work, the moral standards enforced by the craft, commitment to its values, these are what we must cling to in order to remain:

a member of an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct… (Chapter 5)

Suicide and the perils of the imagination

When he was twenty Conrad tried to commit suicide by shooting himself through the chest with a revolver. He has Marlow make the assumption that all men of sense have felt a similar impulse, at some point or another, to just give in.

Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person – this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? (Chapter 7)

In one sense this huge, long, convoluted text repeats again and again the same nihilistic sense of futility and wish for death, suicide.

He had pricked the bubble. The blight of futility that lies in wait for men’s speeches had fallen upon our conversation, and made it a thing of empty sounds. (Chapter 13)

Mention of suicide recurs a surprising number of times, the suicide of Captain Brierly embodies it and is, somehow, an anticipation of Jim’s suicidal surrendering of himself to Doriman which he knows can end only one way, in his own death.

It may be that before and afterward his suicide attempt, Conrad found himself to be over-thoughtful, racked with anxieties and imagined terrors which the sturdy men of the sea he moved among seemed to utterly lack. Hence his admiration for the solid-as-a-rock, utterly imagination-free man, but his nagging worry that even the most solid-seeming of them may be undermined, may be rotten at the foundations.

‘Imagination’ is mentioned 17 times in the novel, and always in a bad light, as the enemy of man, as thronging his mind with perils and fears, as undermining his ability to ‘do the right thing’. Jim is a prey to fantasies and over-romantic ideas about The Sea, and about his own Bravery. In the event, at the critical moment he is overcome by unexpected fears, overwhelmed by the negative power of:

Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors… (Chapter 2)

It is because Jim’s vivid imagination foresees the bulwark giving way, the ship flooding, the screams of the drowning pilgrims, that he is carried away on a tide of panic of his own making – and jumps ship. The same ‘imagination’ which stoked his unrealistic dreams of heroic achievement fuels his panic in the fateful moments on the Patna. Either way, it is a disastrous faculty to give in to.

Jim as a universal case history

Marlow is attracted by Jim’s ‘case’ (attracted enough to speak for nearly 300 densely-printed pages about it) because he feels that Jim’s failure somehow reflects on all of us, on all men trying to keep on the right track.

Marlow refers to Jim as ‘one of us’ no fewer than eight times in the text, and once in the introduction. It is clearly an obsessive idea. Behind it lies the unexpressed notion that by penetrating into the heart of Jim’s mystery, Marlow can reveal something profound and deep about all human nature, and particularly about ‘us’, about the white professional men engaged in the craft of the sea.

Which is why Marlow’s feelings are profoundly ambivalent: Jim is so very like ‘one of us’ and yet his moment of cowardice shows the inhuman temptations and failures lurking within all of us.

‘Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me – me! – of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour. (Chapter 11)

This is the nagging worry that keeps Marlow returning again and again to this powerful symbol of the weakness potentially lurking in all of us, as if by repeating Jim’s story he can somehow inoculate himself against his unsoundness, against his failure… despite knowing that he never can.

Worldly wisdom

For all its pomp, Conrad’s worldview is pretty simple. What is impressive is how many ways Conrad finds to say the same thing. This is partly because almost every encounter – with the impressive cast of characters, with Jim himself, and most of all as Marlow reflects, repeatedly and at length, on the ‘meaning’ of Jim’s story – triggers lengthy ‘philosophical’ reflections or throwaway remarks which all amount to repetitions of the same three or four basic elements.

We never know what a man is made of. (Chapter 6)

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. (Chapter 16)

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. (Chapter 7)

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy! (Chapter 5)

Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion. (Chapter 10)

The wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency – the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends (p.134)

When young, I often read novels in order to track down and isolate passages like these as Guides to the Big Questions of Life. Now I appreciate that they are artistic effects, no more intrinsically meaningful than Conrad’s descriptions of the jungle or the river or the sea are meaningful. They are colours in a painting.

To try and be more precise: they only make sense or mean something in the context of the fiction. Saying ‘Life’s a bitch’ or ‘You never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head’ are thumping clichés. It is only in the framework of Conrad’s repetitive and incantatory prose that these expressions gain meaning and force. Red, on its own, is just red. But dabs of red in a painting by Monet or Klimt become deeply significant parts of an overall composition.

Obviously words convey meaning and so readers are free to take Conrad’s many, many ‘philosophical’ passages out of context and adopt them as t-shirt slogans or memes, but having read the same kind of negative and nihilistic thoughts, in scores of authors, thousands and thousands of times, nowadays they have hardly any emotional impact or resonance for me: I simply register them as part of the design.

Hyperbole

To read Conrad is to be plunged into a boiling cauldron of extraordinary rhythmical nihilism.

In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal – a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour… (Chapter 9)

Almost every paragraph describes some variation on the persistent theme that life is terrifying, that every situation triggers the most extreme emotions and reactions which are:

The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb… (Chapter 41)

It was all threats, all a terribly effective feint, a sham from beginning to end, planned by the tremendous disdain of the Dark Powers whose real terrors, always on the verge of triumph, are perpetually foiled by the steadfastness of men. (Chapter 10)

In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal – a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. (Chapter 9)

He must have had an unconscious conviction that the reality could not be half as bad, not half as anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the created terror of his imagination. (Chapter 10)

No point reading Conrad if you’re not prepared to submit to vast quantities of hyperbole and emotional extremity.

There is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness. When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. (Chapter 10)

I believe that, in this first moment, his heart was wrung with all the suffering, that his soul knew the accumulated savour of all the fear, all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human beings pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death… (Chapter 10)

On every page, almost in every paragraph, the same extremity, hyperbole, shrill and wailing.

I knew too much already to hope for the grace of a single uplifting touch, for the favour of hinted madness, of shadowed horror.

Therapy

You can’t help thinking that Conrad’s (early) prose works amount to an immense act of public therapy in which he obsessively described the wailing banshees of despair which thronged his mind, the futility and madness which underlies all human endeavour, and desperately tried to quell them with brave but unconvincing talk of ‘the craft’ and ‘one of us’ and so on. But anyone who’s read any Conrad knows that the banshees burst through, again and again, and talk of ‘the craft’ is weak…

If writing the texts was a form of therapy for Conrad, then his characters also find solace in talking. Marlow’s immense after-dinner interview with Marlow at the Malabar hotel is really a huge therapy session and its purpose is not just to elicit the ‘facts’ from Jim (the ‘facts’ are, after all, trivially simple), but to get Jim to utter his complex feelings in a way which (as he himself admits) he finds psychologically very helpful.

‘You are an awful good sort to listen like this,’ he said. ‘It does me good. You don’t know what it is to me. You don’t… words seemed to fail him… ‘You don’t know what it is for a fellow in my position to be believed – make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It is so difficult – so awfully unfair – so hard to understand.’ (Chapter 11)

But it’s not just the beneficial impact on the client: this huge text also vividly describes the dynamic interplay between therapist and therapee, and describes the changing moods, feelings, fleeting thoughts and impressions of the interviewer as much as the interviewee.

For Marlow’s narrative dwells just as much on his own fascination for this patient, for this type, this case, this victim, and minutely describes how his own feelings continually fluctuate from sympathy to fascination, from worry to aversion. One aspect of this is the way his questions are not neutral and supportive, but inflected with his own emotions.

‘A hair’s-breadth,’ he muttered. ‘Not the breadth of a hair between this and that. And at the time…’
‘It is difficult to see a hair at midnight,’ I put in, a little viciously I fear. Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me – me! – of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour. (Chapter 11)

The therapist gets angry, resentful, contemptuous, dismissive of his patient and then, at other moments, listening to Jim bewail his sense of abandonment and loss, Marlow is continually infected with the same feelings.

‘What do you believe?’ he asked with violence. A pause ensued, and suddenly I felt myself overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue, as though his voice had startled me out of a dream of wandering through empty spaces whose immensity had harassed my soul and exhausted my body. (Chapter 11)

The more you look, the more you ponder it, the more complicated and significant the interplay between questioner and questioned in that long evening on the terrace of the Malabar Hotel inescapably becomes.

Summary

Late-Victorian readers hoping for an adventure yarn set in the exotic Malayan islands were disappointed. More literary readers realised that Conrad was doing fascinating things with narrative, swirling it round and round to create an enormous vortex of narrative moments, viewed in sophisticated and complex timelines, bubbling with the froth of his luxuriant prose, dotted with an unending stream of solemn apothegms about life and horror and defeat.

Only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things. (Chapter 4)

I would have trusted the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes – and, by Jove! it wouldn’t have been safe. There are depths of horror in that thought. (Chapter)

When I was young I thought Conrad was offering profound insights into the nature of a Godless universe. Now I think he gives a rich and deep impression of offering profound insights into the nature of a Godless universe but is really about creating a huge, rich, dense, luxurious painting. He is a style and a manner, immensely powerful, luxuriating in despair, bewitching and persuasive but it is ultimately… only a style, a wonderful, deep and luxuriant late-Victorian style but it isn’t ‘the truth’. Nothing is the truth.

End! Finis! the potent word that exorcises from the house of life the haunting shadow of fate. (Chapter 16)

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by Simon on November 25, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature

Tagged 1890s, Aden, alcoholism, Alexander M'Neil, Antonio Mariani, Assassins, Bangkok, Blackwoods Magazine, Bob Stanton, British Empire, Bugis, Captain Brierly, Captain Chester, Captain Gustav, Captain Montague Brierly, Charles Marlow, Cornelius, Dain Waris, de Jongh, Doramin, Egstrom & Blake, fiction, French Pacific squadron, Gentleman Brown, Godless universe, guano, Heart of Darkness, Holy-Terror Robinson, Hong Kong, hyperbole, imperialism, Jeeves and Wooster, Jewel, Joseph Conrad, late-Victorian literature, Lord Jim, Madame Bovary, Malabar Hotel, Marlow, Mecca, merchant marine, metaphysics, Mohammed Bonso, Montague Brierly, Mr Jones, Mr Kurtz, narrative, nihilism, novel, one of us, P.G. Wodehouse, Patna, Patusan, public enquiry, Rajah Allang, Ruthvel, Schomberg, Sherif Ali, Sigmund Freud, steamship Patna, Stein, story, suicide, Tamb 'Itam, the Ossa, the privileged reader, the Sephora, Therapy, third-person narrative, tuan Jim, Victorian literature, water clerk, xenophobia, Yucker brothers

Posted by Simon on November 25, 2024

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Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle (2011)

She was a high-profile figure whose beauty was widely acknowledged, whose activities were often reported in the press, and whose appearance and outfits were monitored for the sake of an intrigued public. Ever since their marriage Oscar’s charming wife had done nothing but enhance and complement his reputation. Constance Wilde balanced her husband. She was wholesome and earnest and provided the ideal foil to his determined flamboyance.
(Franny Moyle summarising her subject in Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, page 7)

‘She could not understand me and I was bored to death with the married life – but she had some sweet points in her character and was wonderfully loyal to me.
(Wilde summarising his wife to his first gay lover and lifelong confidante Robbie Ross)

As we know, the book market changes to reflect changes in society and culture. For some time now there’s been a feminist market for books about ignored, overlooked and suppressed women, the women history forgot, the women written out of the record – books which boldly proclaim that now, at last, their voices can be heard, their true stories told!

Stories About Women Who Changed The World

An easy-to-understand subset of this is that, wherever there’s been a man eminent in any field who historians and fellow professionals have noted and praised, there’s now a well-developed and profitable market for books about the woman behind the man. Quite regularly this wife or lover is now credited with much of the man’s achievement, facts which have, up to this moment, been erased from the record but now the truth can be told! Often (to paraphrase Wilde) these revisionist accounts are even true!

Very much in this spirit comes ‘Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde’, researched and written by former TV executive Franny Moyle. It tells the life story of Constance Mary Lloyd, from her birth on 2 January 1858 to her early death on 7 April 1898 (aged just 40) dwelling, of course, on her ill-fated marriage to one of the most notorious figures in English literature.

Horace Lloyd

Constance was the daughter and second child of Horace Lloyd, an Anglo-Irish barrister, and Adelaide Barbara Atkinson (Ada), who had married in 1855 in Dublin, when Ada was just 18 and he was 8 years her senior. Constance was born in London where her father had moved his legal practice and family.

Moyle tells us unflattering things about both her parents: Horace Lloyd was a fast-living womaniser, part of the Prince of Wales’s set, strongly suspected of having more than one illegitimate child. Adelaide (Ada) was ‘a selfish and difficult woman’. Horace died in 1874 when Constance was 16 and his death heralded a devastating deterioration in her life. Her mother began to abuse and insult her with a steady stream of insulting and sarcastic comments, snubs and public humiliations. Moyle quotes accounts by her brother Otho (2 years older than Constance) bleakly describing the insults and abuse she was subjected to. As you might expect this made Constance shy and nervous and lay behind the ill health and insomnia which dogged her youth. It also explains why, in adult life, she found herself attracted to older women (not sexually, just emotionally) and had a succession of older women she referred to as mother (including Wilde’s mother, Speranza).

William Wilde

Meanwhile, the Wilde family had troubles of its own. Oscar Wilde had been born to the eminent Dublin surgeon Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Elgée (‘the fiery poet and Irish nationalist’, who wrote under the nom de plume Speranza) four years earlier than Constance (1854) but the Wilde family had similar tribulations. William Wilde also sowed plenty of wild oats, fathering a number of illegitimate children via different mothers. Apparently he already had three illegitimate children when he married.

In the year of Oscar’s birth (1854) he started an affair with the 19-year-old daughter of a doctor colleague, Mary Travers, which was to last a decade. But when Sir William tried to end the affair, Mary was furious, put the word about that he had raped her, wrote a pamphlet denouncing him and then triggered a libel trial in which she was able to list every detail of the affair. She lost the case but a traumatised and humiliated Sir William retreated to the west coast of Ireland and never recovered. He died in 1876 while Oscar was at Oxford. Wilde – extra-marital affairs – the courts – all very prophetic.

So you can see that Wilde had plenty of personal experience when he wrote, in his essays and plays, about the gross hypocrisy of the British, who put on a respectable bourgeois facade, denouncing the kind of plays and stories which he wrote as ‘immoral’, while all the time having multiple affairs and numerous children out of wedlock.

And you can also see why this is a very enjoyable book, because it is full of gossipy stories like these. It immerses you in the family backgrounds of both its lead players as well as their extensive social lives, the network of relations and family friends that everybody socialised with in those days.

It also has one very big selling point which is that Moyle had access to the archive of Constance’s letters. A surprising number of these survive and barely a page goes by without extensive quotes from them, describing her teens, her life as a young woman ‘coming out’ in London, and then her engagement and marriage to Oscar.

Thus we get the story of Constance’s life and, from the age of about 20, her slowly escalating courtship of Oscar, very largely in her own words, via letters to her brother, mother, other family members, and some to Oscar himself.

Constance and Oscar

She and Oscar were pushed towards each other by their mothers, Lady Wilde keen to get Oscar married and settled, Ada Lloyd imagining Oscar was a successful young writer who would settle the daughter she resented and disliked. What I didn’t understand is that both matriarchs knew the other family was on hard times so it’s neither can have expected relief for their own money troubles. Surely Oscar should have held out for one of the American heiresses that he met on his famous lecture tour of the States (January 1882 to February 1883). In the event Constance supplied the money via a financial deal with her grandfather whereby she was given some of the money he was going to give her in his will, in advance before dying and leaving her the rest of the lump sum (p.100). Oscar didn’t marry rich, but he married comfortable.

The key to their relationship

It was also something to do with the fact that the Lloyd and Wilde households had not been very far apart in 1860s Dublin and the neighbourly contact continued when they all moved to London. At one point Moyle makes the best speculation as to what drew Oscar and Constance together which is that, having known her and her family since he was a boy, Oscar could drop his guard with her. He could speak to her quite frankly and naturally without putting on the pontificating pose and tone he adopted for almost everyone else.

This fact – that she was the one person he could be quite frank and natural with – explains why he was prepared to overlook her conventionality. The latter is crystallised in a letter which Moyle charitably says is carrying on a ‘debate’ about the nature of art but which Constance reveals herself to be as absolutely conventional as possible.

‘I am afraid you and I disagree in our opinion on art, for I hold that there is no perfect art without perfect morality whilst you say they are distinct and separable things.’ (p.71)

Reading that makes you wonder if she ever understood what came to be the quite complicated, wide-ranging and deeply worked-out theories of art which Oscar expounded in the essays in Intentions (1891). On the evidence here, she isn’t even on the same planet.

And yet her account makes it absolutely clear that both partners were genuinely, deeply head-over-heels in love. Oscar wrote letters to all and sundry gushing about his beautiful bride-to-be and, once married, praised the state of matrimony to all his friends till they got bored of it.

But all the time, in parallel to the love, went worry about money. Oscar’s main source of income was the endless lecture tours he undertook, first the famous one across America, but even when back in England, he was regularly away for long stretches on tours of the north or Wales.

Moyle’s narrative goes into minute and fascinating detail about the couple’s finances. Despite making money from his American tour and a little from his first few plays, Oscar was still burdened with debts from his Oxford days, not to mention trying to help out his mother who was living in increasingly straitened circumstances in a pokey apartment in Mayfair: nice address, shame about the shabby little rooms. Oscar worked hard to maintain everyone.

Constance’s achievements

Moyle makes a very decent fist of talking up her protagonist’s interests and achievements.

Apostle of aestheticism

Moyle describes Constance’s association with the Aestheticism which became fashionable at the end of the 1870s. Once she is married to Oscar she becomes a leading figure in the movement, supervising the interior furnishing of their home at number 6 Tite Street, as well as becoming famous or notorious for her adventurous clothes. She was widely greeted as an appropriate partner for Wilde as they jointly attended the theatre and art galleries, putting on a joint aesthetic front. They were acknowledged in society and the Press as a cultural power couple (p.93). Their ‘at homes’ became famous (p.126). The (lesbian) author Marie Corelli saw a lot of the couple and wrote a mocking portrait of them as the Elephant and the Fairy (pp.151 to 153).

Wedding

Many of her outfits are described in very great detail including her wedding dress (page 87). (The wedding took place on 29 May 1884 at St James’s Church, Sussex Gardens, with a detailed description of the wedding dress, what the bridesmaids wore, and the wedding ring Oscar designed for her, p.87.) Descriptions of dress pages 93 to 98.

Rational Dress Association

Constance’s focus on clothes led her to get involved with the movement for more ‘rational’ wear for ladies, the Rational Dress Society (pp. 109 to 111, 142 to 154). Along with other progressive and feminist women, she campaigned for an end to the absurdly constrictive Victorian womenswear. Constance presided over meetings of the Rational Dress Society (RDS) and in April 1888 edited the first issue of its magazine (pages 142 to 144).

Acting

In letters to her brother Constance speculates about going on the stage. Via Oscar she had become friends with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry who he praised in his reviews and who they socialised with. She had a minor part in an ‘authentic’ production of the Greek tragedy, Helena in Troas, and looked very fetching but nothing further came of it (pages 112 to 114). She wrote theatre reviews for the Lady’s Pictorial (p.130).

Writing

Meanwhile she had been pursuing a writing career of her own. When Oscar took over the editorship of The Woman’s World magazine, Constance contributed articles on her specialist subject of rational clothes. But in a completely different vein, in 1888 she also produced a volume of children’s stories she had heard from her grandmother, called There Was Once (p.133 to 138).

Moyle devotes a couple of pages to the speculation, based on recently discovered manuscripts, that Constance may have written Wilde’s fairy story, ‘The Selfish Giant’ (pages 136 to 137). Characteristically the main evidence for this is that the story is less well written and contains blunter Christian moralising than Wilde’s other tales.

Politics

Moyle shows us how active Constance was in a variety of organisations and bodies, most focused around the ruling Liberal Party. She was a member of the Women’s Liberal Association and the Women’s Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Movement. She supported Gladstone’s position on Irish Home Rule and went further. She made speeches at conferences. Her confidence and articulacy bloomed. Moyle devotes a few pages to showing how Constance was instrumental in the campaign to get the first women elected to the London County Council. She was at the heart of a lot of feminist and early suffragette activity. She dragged Oscar to Hyde Park to support the dockworkers strike of 1889. She helped to set up a women-only club, The Pioneer.

Spiritualism

This feminism and intellectual curiosity spilled over into an advanced interest in ‘spirituality’, all the rage in the last decades of the nineteenth century (pages 164 to 177). She was initiated into the secretive organisation, The Golden Dawn, whose initiation ceremony Moyle describes. After a while she dropped out of the order but maintained her interest in the subject, a few years later joining the Society for Psychical Research (p.176).

Photography

In her last years, especially in exile on the Continent, Constance developed an interest in photography, which Moyle describes a couple of times. However, taking photos of your family and children doesn’t really make you a pioneer.

In fact Moyle can’t overcome several problems. The main one is that despite all these attempts to make her sound exciting, and despite her involvement in all these causes, nonetheless Constance, in her letters, in her own words, often comes over as disappointingly conventional. Her letters portray her as a conventional Victorian lady who fusses and frets over family affairs, parties and gossip, as well as the endless money troubles the Lloyd family experienced after their dissolute father’s death, rarely rising above a very mundane, run-of-the-mill tone.

Plain

Oscar’s letters rave about Constance’s beauty but it is difficult to reconcile this with the few paintings and many photos of her we have. Moyle says she was self conscious and camera shy and it shows. She managed to look dour with a pronounced down-turning of the mouth, in more or less every photo ever taken of her.

Constance Lloyd in 1883

Clumsy

Constance had a tendency to clumsiness and misadventure when it came to everyday life. Throughout her life she was known for losing umbrellas or purses or losing things. (p.84)

Oscar bought her a pet marmoset to keep her company while he was away on his endless lecturing and she managed to kill it within a few weeks (p.84). Other examples pp.133 and 260 where she was tasked with carving a chicken but ended up dropping it on the floor.

Constance and Oscar’s prose

Oscar’s prose (in a letter to Lillie Langtry):

I am going to be married to a beautiful young girl called Constance Lloyd, a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop to listen to her…. (p.80)

Constance’s prose (in a letter to Oscar):

My darling love, I am sorry I was so silly: you take all my strength away, I have no power to do anything but just love you when you are with me & I cannot fight against my dread of you going away. Every day that I see you, every moment that you are with me, I worship you more, my whole life is yours to do as you will with it, such a poor gift to offer up to you but yet all I have and you will not despise it. I know it is only for 3 days but – it is the wrench of the parting that is so awful and you are so good to me that I cannot bear to be an hour away from you… (p.78)

Now it’s not a very fair comparison because Oscar is self-consciously performing for a high cultural figure while Constance is writing a private love letter to her fiancé. Nonetheless, it’s a good indication of the vast gulf between Oscar’s hard-won performative prose and Constance’s naive schoolgirl gushing.

It also belies Moyle’s insistence that Constance was a feminist revolutionary keen to overthrow gender stereotypes. In this and most of her writing and behaviour around her marriage and children, Constance was the embodiment of gender stereotyping. Compare a letter she wrote to a friend after Oscar’s imprisonment:

‘By sticking to him now I may save him from even worse…I think we women were meant to be comforters and I believe that no-one can really take my place now or help him as I can.’ (quoted page 282)

‘I think we women were meant to be comforters’ – not that feminist or revolutionary, and most of her letters display the same attitudes.

Children and schism

Constance undertook all these activities while being pregnant, bearing and raising two children, Cyril (born 5 June 1885) and Vyvyan (3 November 1886). As a modern man I don’t underestimate the effort, sickness, discomfort and risk involved in each of these pregnancies. Interestingly, Moyle tells us that Constance took advantage of the latest thinking about childbirth which was to anaesthetise the mother when she was in labour so that the child was delivered while she was unconscious (p.106).

The Wildes are described as doting parents. His children remember Oscar happily getting down on his hands and knees to join in with their games. But there were straws in the wind.

1) Vyvyan

Both parents wanted the second child to be a girl and were disappointed when Vyvyan was born. Unlike Cyril he was a weakly sickly child and was treated differently from Cyril who was very obviously his parents’ favourite (p.115).

2) Pregnancies

Moyle believes the second pregnancy and birth were problematic, though no record survives. Alas the physical changes the two births caused to her body had a very negative effect on Wilde (p.123). Moyle includes a letter from Oscar to a friend lamenting that he now found Constance – who thrilled him with her physical beauty two short years earlier, who he referred to as Artemis – repellent and disgusting and it was an effort to touch or kiss her. Poor Constance.

3) Oscar’s absences

Moyle points out that when Oscar returned from his American lecture tour he threw himself into a gruelling series of unending lecture tours around the UK and this meant he was often away from her, often for long periods i.e. their relationship right from the start included Oscar’s absences. When these lecture tours came to an end and Oscar settled down to be a) a family man and b) the more regular office job of editing a magazine, he rankled at the lack of travel and novelty. Quite quickly he reverted to the nearest he could get which was routinely going out without Constance, something she lamented but got used to (for example, even on his honeymoon, p.91).

4) Oscar and danger

Moyle also brings out how Oscar was always attracted by danger and the seedy side of life. He enjoyed being taken by friends who knew about them, to the worst slums, to the drinking dens of Docklands and so on. In this he was at one with the cultural mood of the times which was becoming more and more interested in in the gritty realities of poverty and squalor. Wilde insisted on visiting criminal dens in Paris on his honeymoon (p.91).

Wilde deprecated the scientific Naturalism of Zola and his school but was as fascinated by low life as them; just that in his hands it acquires a ‘romantic’ mystique, most obviously in the passage in Dorian Gray where the protagonist takes a hansom cab way out East to drinking and opium dens down by the docks. There was nothing massively new in this. Dickens depicted the hypnotic thrill of criminal lowlives and purulent slums in many of his novels.

As to his sex life, Moyle tells us that up to and including the first years of his marriage, Wilde routinely used female sex workers, especially on trips to Paris with his heterosexual friend Robert Sherrard (p.79). This kind of thing also comes under the heading ‘Oscar’s interest in the sordid side of life’, with Wilde fascinated by bordellos and brothels well before he began any homosexual activity.

Writing about Wilde, especially by gay critics, routinely refers to his ‘double life’ in terms of his concealed homosexuality as if this was a great achievement, a bold gay rebellion against Victorian values – but millions of Victorian men led ‘double lives’ with heterosexual sex workers and they are routinely labelled hypocrites (p.124). In the eyes of feminists and posterity these straight men are horrible exploiters. It’s a mark of our own double or dubious standards that when Wilde began to use male prostitutes, he became a queer icon. There was much more of a continuum of exploitation in Wilde’s sex life, from female prostitutes to male prostitutes to boys. Categorising Wilde or anyone’s sex life in simplistic binary terms seems to me factually and morally wrong. We’re all on the spectrum, on numerous spectrums…

Robbie Ross

Moyle describes the arrival of the 17-year-old Robert Ross in Oscar’s life. Despite being so young, Robbie was precociously experienced in homosexual sex and social practices. Moyle repeats the rumour that Oscar first met Ross in a public convenience where the boy propositioned the older man. He was welcomed to Oscar’s home and became good friends with Constance. In fact he was just one of many young men whose adulation Oscar encouraged, including students at Oxford and Cambridge. It’s unclear how much of this was homosexual and how much was narcissism.

I’m not going to repeat the stories of Wilde’s gay experiments, cruising and rent boys. From the perspective of this book, what’s interesting is Constance’s reaction which is that she didn’t know about it. She thought Oscar liked surrounding himself with youthful adorers (which was indeed true) but when he disappeared on absences and his affections seemed directed elsewhere, Constance thought it was to a woman and Moyle details the several women Constance was jealous of. In fact, in the period 1887 to 1889 Moyle calculates that Wilde had six homosexual lovers (p.181).

The Portrait of Mr W.H.

It’s striking that Frank Harris thought it was the publication of Wilde’s essay-dialogue about the disputed identity of the muse of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, in the July 1889 edition of Blackwood’s Magazine, which began the ruin of his reputation. Up till then he had been a well-known figure of fun in London Society and the Press, portrayed as a workshy, effeminate fop. But he worked on the ‘Portrait’ with Robbie Ross as ‘a barely concealed apology for homosexual love’ (p.179). Friends and colleagues in the literary world advised against publishing it but Wilde went ahead and it marked a change in tone of the attacks on him, from cheerful satire to beginning to detect ‘immoral tendencies’. As we know, this would snowball.

Separate lives

By the end of 1889 the pair were living separate lives. Oscar often stayed out at hotels for nights on end, allegedly to concentrate on his writing, in reality to entertain streams of young men. There were arguments and recriminations. Constance developed a close friendship with another older woman, Georgina Cowper-Temple (vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist) the latest in a line of mother figures (‘I turn to you for love and claim a Mother’s love because I need it so desperately’). Georgina lived nearby, in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, but also owned a big house on the coast at Babbacombe which was a shrine to pre-Raphaelite taste.

She also brought with her a passion for devout Christianity. As she felt more isolated in her private life (and worn down with concern for her dissolute brother Otho) Constance developed an intense late-Victorian Christian devoutness. She started attending church every day, making notes on sermons.

All this suited Oscar as it allowed him to pursue his own life, not just sex but all the socialising and schmoozing, the dinners and openings and whatnot required of someone trying to sustain a career as a freelance writer in London.

Moyle’s account of these years seen from Constance’s perspective are fascinating. As a general summary what comes over is that Oscar, despite long absences – for example months spent in Paris where he was writing Salome and having gay affairs – he continued to write regular letters to Constance full of the most loving endearments. Like a lot of women, Moyle struggles with the notion that a man can have sex with someone else and yet still love his wife, but that’s what Wilde appeared to do. Or he preserved one type or mode of love for her and the family life she created for him; other, most passionate and excitingly transgressive modes were expressed elsewhere. Human beings are complex.

Anyway, although they were now mostly living apart – with Constance taking holidays at friends’ houses around the UK – Oscar still sent her copies of his new play ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ to her and, a little later, the first copy of his next book of fairy stories, ‘A House of Pomegranates’ in November 1891 (p.199).

Enter Bosie

Bosie’s personality was twisted and difficult. Demanding and hedonistic, greedy and selfish… (p.221)

In Moyle’s account all this changes with the arrival of Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) in Wilde’s life in June 1891. The pair were introduced by poet Lionel Johnson (p.194). But it was in only a year later, in May 1892, that Bosie was being blackmailed by a fellow student at Oxford and turned to Wilde for help and Wilde brought in his trusted lawyer George Lewis, that really clinched the affair. By June they were lovers (p.203).

In August 1892 the family hired a farmhouse near Cromer for Wilde to complete ‘A Woman of No Importance’ only for Bosie to invite himself for a day and end up spending weeks. In the autumn Constance’s feckless brother Otho flees his creditors to the Continent to live under the family middle name of Holland (this would be the identity Constance adopted after Oscar’s disgrace).

His character and behaviour were changed by Douglas. While Constance would be staying at Babbacombe with Georgiana, Wilde was extending his network of handsome young gay friends, who themselves had contacts among regular ‘renters’ or gay sex workers. In spring 1893 she went for a break to Italy. Wilde regularly popped over to Paris, partly to supervise production of Salome, partly for gay socialising.

Bosie casually gave away the gifts Oscar lavished on him, including clothes. He gave a suit to gay compadre and unemployed clerk Alfred Wood, which still had in the pocket a candid letter Oscar had written him which Wood tried to blackmail Oscar with (p.217). While Constance was doing an Italian tour with a lady companion and improving her skills with a Kodak camera, Wilde was staging orgies and holding court among adoring young men and being blackmailed.

Nonetheless Oscar still wrote loving letters to her and Moyle points out that most biographies of him fail to take into account how attached he remained to her right till the end.

Oscar’s behaviour in every respect had changed. At the curtain call of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ (20 February 1892) he had provoked the audience not so much by ironically thanking them for their good taste nor for wearing a metal buttonhole, but for smoking as he did so, which was still regarded as impolite. At the first night of ‘A Woman of No Importance’ (19 April) 1893 most of the audience applauded but there were hisses and boos. Rumours were spreading of his transgressive lifestyle and Oscar again taunted the audience.

In June 1893 the Wildes hired a house at Goring. Bosie hired the staff who were insubordinate and sometimes drunk. For the first time Constance felt alienated. And for the first time Wilde started to be rude to her in front of others (p.211). The Belgian poet Pierre-Félix Louÿs who Oscar dedicated ‘Salome’ to cut off his friendship with Wilde when he witnessed the latter deliberately reduce Constance to tears in a hotel room in front of Bosie (p.223).

By August Wilde was exhausted by Bosie’s neediness, greed and tantrums and fled to France. Constance’s perpetual absence from Tite Street began to look like flight. Everything which warmed the first few years of their marriage had ended. On the rare occasions either returned there it felt an abandoned shell.

In the letters we have of hers, the ones she sent friends such as Georgina, she commonly refers to Oscar’s absences or holidays due to him being unwell. Moyle floats the theory that Constance may have been advised by one or more friends or doctors that Oscar’s homosexuality was an illness which could be cured. Alternatively, it might have been a comforting way of hiding from herself and others what she either suspected or knew to be true i.e. he had fallen out of love with her and in love with a disastrous young man.

Later Moyle quotes a letter where Constance describes herself as a ‘hero worshipper’. Nowadays maybe she’d be called a people pleaser. She had set Oscar up on such a high pedestal maybe she was just psychologically incapable of taking him down again.

Finally Wilde fled Bosie to Paris and, according to De Profundis, on the train there realised what a mess he had got his life into. He wrote to Bosie’s mother (who he was in regular correspondence with) suggesting that young scoundrel be sent to Egypt to join the Diplomatic Service. After hiding from Bosie for a month he returned to Tite Street and Constance in October 1893 determined to turn over a new leaf. She revived the house, hired new staff, they started attending plays together (three in one week) and reverted to being a celebrity couple. While Bosie was away from November 1893 to February 1894 all was like old times.

Then Constance made the worst mistake of her life. Bosie had been bombarding Oscar with letters to be allowed to see him again. Now he telegraphed Constance and Constance, writing that she felt it unbecoming of Oscar to ignore his friend, encouraged him to go and meet Paris. Catastrophe. As soon as they were reunited the pair fell into their old ways, ruinously expensive dining, sleeping together, posing ostentatiously. When he returned to London Oscar had reverted to being his cold self again.

Enter the Marquess of Queensbury

But a new element entered, Bosie’s almost insanely angry and vengeful father, John Sholto Douglas, the eighth Marquess of Queensbury. Queensbury began bombarding Wilde with messages telling him to cease his relationship with his son. He visited Wilde in Tite Street for a furious confrontation where Queensbury threatened to have Wilde horsewhipped and Wild threatened to shoot him. Bosie bought a pistol which he carried round with him and let off in the Berkeley Hotel, an incident covered in the newspapers which added to Wilde’s by-now seriously tarnished reputation (p.240).

I was interested to learn that in the summer of 1894 Wilde consulted a lawyer about taking out a restraining order on Queensbury or suing him for libel – in other words the step he was to take a year later. I.e. the 1895 libel action wasn’t a spontaneous act but rather the fulfilment of a long-considered one.

Constance takes the family on holiday to Worthing. At this time she conceived the idea of a book. I was prepared to be impressed by these signs of her authorial inventiveness so it felt bathetic when Moyle announces that it was to be…a book-length selection of Oscar’s best quotes, to be titled Oscariana. Not quite so original after all. But the main point is that, surprisingly, Constance seems to have fallen in with the young publisher tasked with helping to produce it, the general manager of Hatchard’s, one Arthur Humphreys. He was also trapped in an unhappy marriage and a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

During this holiday Oscar was sweet with the boys and sketched out the storyline for a play about a man who is beastly to his wife and drives her into having an affair. It was provisionally titled Constance and is evidence (or is it?) that he knew his wife had fallen in love with this Humphreys.

In any event the book was published privately the following year and the summer fling with Humphreys fizzled out.

September 1894

Anyway the Worthing idyll was ruined when Bosie invited himself to stay. In September 1894 Constance was upset by the publication of a novel satirising Oscar and his relationship with Bosie, ‘The Green Carnation’, by an author on the fringes of Oscar’s circle, Robert Hichens.

October 1894

In October Oscar stayed at the Grand Hotel Brighton with Bosie, a vacation he describes with horror in De Profundis. Meanwhile, following The Green Carnation, cartoons of Wilde and Bosie were published. On Constance and Oscar’s next visit to the theatre he was ostentatiously snubbed. December 1894 and the chickens were coming home to roost. Their checks were being bounced by the bank so they were both very anxious that Oscar’s next play, ‘An Ideal Husband’ which he was finishing that winter, would be a theatrical success.

Christmas 1894

At Christmas 1894 Constance had a fall which exacerbated her ill health. Moyle has periodically referred to her ill health, neuralgic pains in her side, being bedridden, intermittent paralysis, gout (p.10, 196).

January 1895

Premiere of ‘An Ideal Husband’. Oscar went on holiday to Algiers with Bosie.

February 1895

By 14 February, Valentine’s Day, he had returned for the first night of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest, a Trivial Comedy for Serious People’ at the St James’s Theatre. Oscar had been tipped off that the Marquess of Queensbury planned to make a speech from the stalls accusing Oscar of immoral relations with his son. He arrived with a bouquet of rotting vegetables but was prevented from entering the theatre by a cordon of police.

On 18 February Wilde arrived at his club, the Albemarle, to discover that the Marquess of Queensberry had been there a few days earlier and, finding Oscar absent, had scribbled on his card the famous words ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite’.

From here things unravelled quickly, as I’m sure you know and as is available in hundreds of accounts and at last half a dozen films. Because one or more servants at the Albemarle would have seen the accusation he couldn’t afford to ignore it: he was forced to take some action. He considered fleeing to the continent but was prevented by a very simple fact. The Avondale Hotel where he had been staying to be near the theatres where his plays were rehearsing and premiering, was owed money and had confiscated Wilde’s luggage as security (p.256).

Bosie arrived and, not thinking about Oscar’s safety, obsessed with the opportunity of putting his father, who he insensately hated, behind bars, advised Oscar to sue. When he said he had no money, Bosie (falsely) promised that he and his brother and mother would pay the court costs).

And so the well-worn story unfolded:

how the trial of Queensbury collapsed on the first day as evidence started to emerge that Wilde was ‘a somdomite’
how the evidence justified the public prosecutor in charging Wilde with gross indecency
how Wilde’s first trial failed when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict
how a second trial was held at which the jury (accurately) found him guilty of acts of gross indecency
how the judge, on an evil day, sentenced Wilde to two years hard labour

All was carried out under due process of the law, the evidence was plain to see, the jury did their duty, the judge awarded the sentence mandated by law – and yet this just goes to show that morality and right have nothing to do with law. It still feels like one of the darkest stains on the history of what is jokingly called British justice

Anyway, this is a book about Constance. How did all this affect her? During the build-up to the trial she was once again ill. She was diagnosed incapable of walking and needed care so went to stay with her aunt Napier.

It beggars belief that Wilde and Bosie were so sure of their case that Oscar let himself be persuaded to take the young egotist to Monte Carlo. Not only did they parade themselves in the most talked-about spot in Europe, but their holiday à deux was widely reported in the British press and could only confirm in the public mind all the Marquess’s accusations.

25 March 1895

Oscar and Bosie return to Britain.

28 March 1895

Trial date set for 3 April. While the pair had been gallivanting the Marquess of Queensbury had hired private detectives who had done an impressive job tracking down and getting evidence from an impressive number of Wilde’s gay sexual contacts.

1 April 1895

Constance’s last act for Oscar as a free man was to agree to accompany him and Bosie to the theatre, in a vain attempt, far too late, to rehabilitate his reputation or at least to put on a united front. So on the night of 1 April 1895 Constance put on one of her best outfits and the three of them arrived by carriage at the St James’s Theatre for a performance of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ determined to face down the mob. It’s hard for us to understand why Wilde clung on to Bosie’s company right to the last, and even harder to understand why Constance agreed to go with him and Bosie. Surely she should have insisted that just she and Oscar go as a couple in order to present a happy heterosexual face to the world.

3 April 1895

Wilde’s libel trial against Queensbury begins. By 5 April it has collapsed as the Marquess’s lawyers presented a litany of evidence proving Wilde’s homosexual associations with a long list of young men and male prostitutes.

24 April 1895

The entire contents of Tite street, all the family belongings, were sold at auction to pay Oscar’s creditors. Some things were simply stolen. Constance had kept all of Oscar’s letters to her in a blue binder. This vanished and all the letters with it.

26 April 1895

Start of the first trial, Oscar and Alfred Taylor charged with 25 counts of gross indecency and conspiracy to procure acts of indecency. Within a week it collapsed as the jury failed to agree a verdict. Oscar was allowed out on bail (provided by the Reverend Stewart Headlam). All his friends begged him to flee abroad. No hotel would have him so he stayed with his friend Ada Leverson. Constance visited him once and pleaded with him to flee. Like a fool he refused.

20 May 1895

Second trial begins. On 25 May he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to two years hard labour.

During Oscar’s imprisonment

Moyle shows how Constance’s friends and acquaintances divided, most sticking by her but some blaming her for being a bad wife in letting her husband carry on like this. Friends who visited described her as the most miserable woman in London. To her rescue came Edward Burne-Jones’s son, Philip, who offered her clear legal and financial advice. Moyle’s account shows how Constance’s behaviour was consistently motivated by concern to protect her children and secure their futures.

Money

The central point was that, if she were to die, all her money, property and income would revert to Oscar who, on the record of the past five years, would blow it all on his improvident lover leaving Cyril and Vyvyan with nothing. The key goal then, was to legally and financially separate from Oscar.

Name

At the same time, now that the Wilde name was irretrievably ruined and a curse on all who bore it, the best thing would be to change her and especially the children’s names. This she did, adopting the family name of Holland for herself and the two boys in October 1895 (p.284)

Exile

And, seeing as the lease on Tite Street had run out, all its contents had been auctioned off in the 24 April fire sale, there was nothing to stop her from going to live abroad and changing her name, which is what she did. Through her own family, but especially via Oscar, she had become good friends with some of the posh Brits who preferred to live abroad (notably Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, p.283).

She (and the boys) had already got used to a life largely lived moving around, staying with wealthy friends, at other people’s houses, sometimes at hotels. Now she shifted this way of life to the Continent and the last few chapters detail the impressive number of locations Constance lived at, sometimes with the boys, sometimes sending them to stay with relatives, or to boarding schools (in Germany), sometimes with her brother Otho, whose rackety life and second marriage had fallen down the social scale so that he was renting a few rooms in a house shared with the landlord.

June 1895 Glion near Lake Geneva

September 1895 Otho’s chalet in Bevaix

November 1895 Sori, outside Nervi on the Italian Riviera, to be near Brooke

Christmas 1895 Genoa for the operation

April 1896 Heidelberg

In her last year Constance divided her time between Heidelberg, Nervi and Bevaix. For a while she stayed with the Ranee of Sarawak at her villa, the Villa Ruffo.

September 1897 Villa Elvira, Bogliasco, near Nervi

Oscar and Constance

The story of Constance and Oscar’s relationship in the three years between his conviction (May 1895) and her death (April 1898) is complicated but makes for fascinating reading. She visited him in prison twice, first time on 21 September 1895, and was appalled at his condition, second time in order to be the person to tell him that his beloved mother, Speranza, had died in February 1896. She made him an offer to pay him (from her own straitened funds) £150 a year on his release. Basically, she continued to be a doggedly loyal and loving wife but was sorely tried and, eventually, alienated by the behaviour of Oscar’s advisers and friends.

One aspect of this was money. To recoup the costs of the trial Queensbury had forced Wilde into bankruptcy, compelling him to attend the Bankruptcy Court, in his prison outfit, on 24 September and again on 12 November. Here his debts were announced as £3,591 (most of which had been lavished on Bosie). What assets remained were placed in the hands of the Official Receiver. One of these was a life interest in Constance’s private income. Legally, this interest was now available to anyone to buy and it was to become a bitter bone of contention between the couple. Because Constance, not unreasonably, considered it hers, whereas Oscar’s advisers advised him to buy it so as to guarantee him some income.

Their rival bid in the spring of 1896 blocked her own (p.293). Robbie Ross wrote to explain that they were taking this step because they’d heard that Queensbury himself was bidding to buy it, but it felt to Constance like yet another betrayal. Advisors on both side became increasingly suspicious of the other side’s intentions. Constance became paranoid that their next move would be to legally remove the boys from her care, which she was prepared to fight tooth and nail.

The situation deteriorated until Constance instructed her solicitor to write Wilde a blunt letter telling him to do as she wanted or she would divorce him, the life interest would become null and void, and she would gain sole custody of the children. By now, a year into his sentence, Wilde was in very poor shape mentally and physically.

Under the false impression that his friends had gathered a sizeable fund to support him after his release he decided to play hardball and, in December 1896, told his solicitor to demand both the life interest and an increased dole of £200 per annum from Constance.

This was the last straw and Constance initiated legal proceedings which, on 12 February, awarded her custody of the children along with ‘a responsible person’. She named her neighbour from Tite Street, Adrian Hope, who she also made the sole beneficiary of her will.

Interestingly, though, her plans to divorce Oscar were stymied. It turned out that she should have done it straight after the trial and cited the legal evidence revealed in the trial as her grounds. By delaying for 18 months she had, in legal terms, condoned his offences and they could no longer be used as grounds for divorce. To divorce Oscar now she would have to bring a new court case which would probably require reviving much of the evidence from his trial. This, understandably, made her pause.

In April 1897 Wilde was preparing for his release and realised what a fool he’d been. He realised with a thump that his friends had not gathered a fund for him to live on, and that he would be almost completely dependent on Constance’s goodwill which his allies had, regrettably, alienated.

The net result of all these negotiations and misunderstandings was that in the month of his release, May 1895, Wilde was forced to sign a legal agreement with Constance’s solicitors agreeing to a) a legal separation b) the life insurance assigned entirely to Constance c) Constance agreeing an annual stipend of £150. This latter was dependent on Oscar not mixing with ‘disreputable people’ meaning, of course, Bosie. Oscar was humiliated but forced to sign it.

The year after prison

Wilde was released from prison on 20 May 1897. Constance died on 7 April 1898. In those 12 months the following happened. On the day of his release he took the boat train to France and took rooms in the Channel village of Berneval-sur-Mer. Oscar and she corresponded. Oscar invited her and the boys to come and meet him but she prevaricated. Partly this was because the boys were in boarding schools but partly the deterioration in her health.

Moyle describes this as a big mistake. A grand gesture was called for, a magnanimous reunion and mutual forgiveness. Instead Constance’s failure to reply left the weak and vulnerable Oscar open to the importunities of others chief among whom was, of course, Bosie. After taking the boys for a summer holiday to the Black Forest Constance moved into a new villa outside Nervi and began preparing it for Oscar’s visit and the Grand Reconciliation.

Imagine her horror when she received a letter from him asking the visit date to be put back till October (when the boys would be back at school) and stamped as coming from Naples. Naples! Notorious haunt of the person Constance now calls ‘the dreadful person’. It seemed to Constance that the nightmare had returned: Oscar had fallen back into his old addiction. He had chosen Bosie over her and over his sons. He was ‘as weak as water’. For the first time she snapped, her love broke. She realised she didn’t sympathise with his weakness. Now she despised him.

She wrote him a stern letter which doesn’t survive but we have then letter Wilde wrote in response to Robbie. This includes the very telling lines:

Women are so petty and Constance has no imagination. Perhaps for revenge she will have another trial: then she may claim to have for the first time in her life influenced me.

This is a revealing indication of Wilde’s true unadorned opinion of her. Meanwhile Constance had snapped and wanted nothing more to do with him. He had breached the terms of their legal agreement and so she cut off her allowance to him.

Christmas came and went with presents from friends. She went to see Vyvyan in Monaco. In January she learned that Wilde and Bosie had separated. In February she received a copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and was moved by it. She asked a mutual friend Carlos Blacker to find out where Oscar was. He tracked Oscar down to a cheap hotel in Paris and found a broken, querulous man who was only interested in cadging money. Moyle quotes a long letter which lays bare the money situation which was that Constance herself had very little and was still trying to pay off Oscar’s borrowings to old friends and so would now never give him money directly, but only pay his bills directly to the landlord of whichever hotel he was holed up in. He was utterly untrustworthy with money.

Constance’s death

I knew that Constance died before Wilde but maybe the biggest surprise of the entire book was the revelation that her doctors killed her in a botched operation.

Moyle has prepared the way by telling us all through the book about Constance’s poor health – gout, neuralgia, back and arm pains, partial paralysis and so on – and her occasional hints that there was a gynaecological aspect to her illness, though no details survive. (Elsewhere I have read the view that these were the symptoms of multiple sclerosis – and that ‘The second doctor was an Italian, Luigi Maria Bossi, who somehow thought that neurological and mental illness could be cured with gynaecological operations’ – etinkerbell. Moyle is nowhere as explicit this and doesn’t mention the multiple sclerosis diagnosis anywhere.)

Anyway, at Christmas 1895 she had gone to see a Dr Bossi, a gynaecologist in Genoa. This man claimed he could cure the creeping paralysis of her left side with an operation. She underwent an operation just before Christmas 1895, took a month to recuperate, but then did feel better.

Then a lot of water under the bridge, as summarised above. And then, in April 1897, she went to see Bossi again. On 2 April she underwent another operation. Moyle says the details are unclear. There is mention of the creeping paralysis, of tumours and the renewed hint of something gynaecological. She survived the operation but the paralysis accelerated and eventually stopped her heart. She had written to her brother and the Ranee to come see her but neither made it in time.

Otho blamed the doctors. He wrote to Lady Mount-Temple that the Italian doctor heading the clinic had suddenly mysteriously gone abroad. Nobody had told Constance how serious the operation might be. Friends and doctors in England had advised against an operation. They were right but then again, they weren’t the ones suffering from creeping paralysis and desperate to fix it.

Oscar was devastated. He wrote to Blacker ‘If only we had met once and kissed.’ If only Constance had made the effort to go see him in Dieppe, maybe he wouldn’t have fallen back in with Bosie, maybe they would have patched something up, she wouldn’t have cut off his allowance, he would have prevented her having the fatal operation.

Constance was buried on 9 April in Genoa’s Campo Santo cemetery.

Summary

I’m glad this book exists. Kudos to Franny Moyle for researching and writing it. I think she a little overeggs Constance’s achievements – in the middle sections making more of Constance’s literary or acting careers than they merit, towards the end making a big deal of her taking up photography when in fact she just appears to have taken half-decent holiday snaps, and so on.

But she doesn’t really need to. Constance’s achievements speak for themselves – being the loving supportive wife of one of the great writers of the day, decorating their house in a stunning modern style and hosting her fashionable at-homes, presenting a united aesthetic front at the theatre and art galleries, maintaining an interest in a host of causes from women’s rights and political involvement and the Liberal Federation through to the (to us) wilder reaches of spirituality, psychic research and the Golden Dawn. And much more.

It wasn’t a great life and Constance isn’t an interesting figure in any intellectual sense. Her writings are thin and her letters reveal a very run-of-the-mill, dutiful, limited and conformist personality. What evidence we have is that she hadn’t a clue about Oscar’s intellectual concerns; in no way was she anywhere near his intellectual equal. But that doesn’t matter.

Obviously being married to Oscar Wilde was a unique position, but in many other ways she’s a very representative figure of her time, particularly in her resistance to the restricted life dictated to women by the Victorian patriarchy and her restless search for other interests and activities and purposes to fill her life.

So many biographies are of kings and queens or great soldiers or great artists and so on. Constance wasn’t a great anything very much. In the end she’s remembered, like countless mothers through the ages, for her spirited defence of her children. But Moyle’s book shows us that, also like countless mothers through the ages, her life was much, much more than that.

And of course, her biography acts as a powerful corrective to the hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and half dozen movies which go on about Oscar Oscar Oscar. Their marriage had two people in it and Moyle has done a great job of bringing Mrs Oscar Wilde to life, presenting her as a sympathetic and valid person in her own right.

Coda: on biography

I’m glad I’m not famous and have achieved next to nothing in my life. Imagine 120 years after your death having all your private letters published, having every development in your private life, every mood, every emotion, every unwise word and silly decision, blazoned for all the world to read, allowing millions of complete strangers to assess and judge you. What a nightmare.

There’s something horrifying about the entire idea of biography.

Credit

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle was published by John Murray in 2011. References are to the 2012 paperback edition.

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by Simon on August 30, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Biography, Books

Tagged A House of Pomegranates, A Woman of No Importance, Ada Leverson, Ada Lloyd, Adelaide Barbara Atkinson, Aestheticism, Alfred Wood, Algiers, America, An Ideal Husband, Art for Art's sake, Artemis, Arthur Humphreys, Aunt Napier, Babbacombe, Bankruptcy Court, Berkeley Hotel, Berneval-sur-Mer, Bevaix, Biography, Blackwoods Magazine, Bogliasco, book, Bosie, Carlos Blacker, Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, Christianity, clumsiness, Constance, Constance and Oscar, Constance Mary Lloyd, Constance Wilde, Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, Cromer, Cyril Holland, De Profundis, Diplomatic Service, dockworkers strike, Dorian Gray, Dr Bossi, Dublin, Edward Burne-Jones, Egypt, eighth Marquess of Queensbury, Ellen Terry, English literature, Feminism, Franny Moyle, gay, Göring, Genoa, George Lewis, Georgina Cowper-Temple, Gladstone, Glion, Grand Hotel Brighton, Hatchard's, Heidelberg, Helena in Troas, Henry Irving, homosexuality, Horace Lloyd, infidelity, Intentions, Irish Home Rule, Jane Elgée, John Sholto Douglas, Kodak camera, Lady Mount-Temple, Lady Windermere's Fan, Lake Geneva, Liberal Party, Lionel Johnson, Literature, London County Council, Lord Alfred Douglas, Luigi Maria Bossi, Margaret Brooke, Marie Corelli, Marquess of Queensbury, Mary Travers, Monte Carlo, multiple sclerosis, naturalism, Nervi, nineteenth century, Official Receiver, Oscar Wilde, Oscariana, Otho Lloyd, Oxford, Paris, Philip Burne-Jones, photography, Pierre-Félix Louÿs, Prince of Wales, prostitutes, prostitution, queer, Ranee of Sarawak, Rational Dress Association, Rational Dress Society, renters, Robbie Ross, Robert Hichens, Robert Ross, Robert Sherrard, Salome, sex, sex life, sex worker, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sir William Wilde, slumming, Society for Psychical Research, Sori, Speranza, spiritualism, St James's Church, St James's Theatre, suffragette, Sussex Gardens, The Albemarle, The Avondale Hotel, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the Elephant and the Fairy, The Golden Dawn, The Green Carnation, The Importance of Being Earnest, the Italian Riviera, The Lady's Pictorial, The Mr Portrait of Mr W.H., The Pioneer, the Reverend Stewart Headlam, The Selfish Giant, the Villa Ruffo, The Woman's World, There Was Once, Tite Street, Victorian values, Villa Elvira, Vyvyan Holland, William Wilde, Women's Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Movement, Women's Liberal Association, Zola

Posted by Simon on August 30, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/30/constance-the-tragic-and-scandalous-life-of-mrs-oscar-wilde-franny-moyle/

The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

When The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in a book form in April 1891, Wilde took the opportunity to not only significantly expand the text – adding chapters 3, 5, 15, 16, 17 and 18, toning down the homoerotic vibe in Basil Hallward’s passion for Dorian, and expanding the James Vane storyline to bring the story more into line with conventional Victorian melodrama – he also added to it a Preface made entirely of pithy aphorisms about art and criticism.

These were both true to the aesthetic creed Wilde had perfected by 1891 and had expressed in detail in the critical essays in the Intentions volume, but were also calculated to provoke and even offend his more staid, conservative readers. For example, his extreme position that ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.’

Read alongside the essays, these aphorism amount (in my opinion) to an impressively consistent critical position. It’s not really tenable in the real world (for example, most of us would probably agree that ‘Mein Kampf’ is an ‘immoral’ book and, these days more than ever, artists in all media are keen to advertise their ‘ethical sympathies – #metoo, Black Lives Matter, refugees etc) but nonetheless he maps out one particular position in the vast realm of Criticism with impressive thoroughness and consistency.

Inevitably some of these were read out at Wilde’s trial and, under courtroom conditions, it was impossible for him to fully explain his critical theory.

And also, to us who know what happened next, all Wilde’s provocations have a terrible frisson. If you poke a tiger through the bars of its cage, eventually it will lose its temper, snap and bite your arm off.

The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

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by Simon on August 2, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature, Novel

Tagged #metoo, 1891, aesthetic theory, aesthetics, aphorisms, art, Art for Art's sake, Basil Hallward, Beauty, Black Lives Matter, criticism, Dorian Gray, James Vane, Mein Kampf, morality of art, Oscar Wilde, refugees, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Victorian melodrama

Posted by Simon on August 2, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/02/the-preface-to-the-picture-of-dorian-gray-oscar-wilde/

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

‘There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own.’
Dorian to the painter Basil Hallward, page 129)

His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of Wilde’s most famous productions. It was originally published in novella length of 13 chapters in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. A longer book version, in 20 chapters, was published 9 months later in April 1891.

The original magazine version scandalised book reviewers for its alleged immorality. Basically, an innocent young man is corrupted and led astray by an older one. Some critics noted the homoerotic descriptions of young Dorian and suggested Wilde should be prosecuted for corrupting public morals. Why is Lord Henry so concerned that Dorian is handsome? Why does Dorian blush and pout like a young maiden?

He was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity…

Dorian Gray stepped up on the dais with the air of a young Greek martyr, and made a little moue of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he had rather taken a fancy…

How charming he had been at dinner the night before, as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow…

Alongside this the book contains a welter of epigrams and repartee which rips to shred Victorian shibboleths like conventional morality, religion, the concepts of sin and redemption, the sanctity of marriage and fidelity, you name it Wilde’s lead character, Lord Henry Wotton, mocks and ridicules it.

‘What have you or I to do with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given up our belief in the soul.’

These criticisms prompted Wilde to justify himself in the press, arguing for the moral autonomy of the artist i.e. loudly denying the need to truckle to conventional ‘morality’ and asserting the artist’s right to use whatever subject matter is needed to create a mood and an effect.

In long essays published the same year, such as The Soul of Man under Socialism, he argued that whenever the philistine British decried an artwork as ‘immoral’, all it meant was that it was new and extended the subject matter of art and they consequently didn’t understand it. Seen from this perspective, accusations of ‘immorality’ should be worn as a badge of pride.

When the longer, book version was published, Wilde defiantly prefaced it with a page of witty aphorisms defending the right of the artist to complete autonomy over his subject matter, lines partly based on the defences of the novel he’d published in the press the previous year. (In fact the preface had been published as a standalone article in the March 1891 issue of the Fortnightly Review.) The content, style, and presentation of the preface made it famous in its own right, as a literary and artistic manifesto, although its more taunting statements were to come back and haunt Wilde at his trial.

Nonetheless, despite all this brave talk, in the book version Wilde toned down some of the original homoerotic passages, as well as boosting the main characters’ heterosexual backstories. He added no fewer than six chapters to the book’s original 13, all of which (regrettably) steered it towards conventional Victorian melodrama. It is to be remembered that Dorian’s love interest in the novel is very prominently made to be a young woman.

Short synopsis

Fashionable Society artist Basil Hallward is painting a full-length portrait of the ravishingly beautiful young man, Dorian Gray. He is infatuated by his ‘find’ and convinced that Dorian’s beauty is responsible for the new feeling in his art.

Lord Henry Wotton

He describes all this to his friend, witty aesthete and man-about-town Lord Henry Wotton, the Wilde figure in the book, the exponent of Wilde’s doctrine that the meaning of life is complete self-expression, that there are no such things as morality or sins, that one should give in to every temptation in order to expiate it (pages 23, 28).

The pact

Structurally if not in character, Wotton plays the part of Mephistopheles the Tempter to Dorian’s Faust, delivering a long speech which hammers away at the idea that Dorian’s beauty is due to his youth, which will pass away and be lost forever and leave him only regrets.

It is under the influence of these arguments that, when Dorian views Basil’s finished portrait, he laments that it will remain young and ravishing for all time while he, the real Dorian, is condemned to grow old and withered. In a fateful moment, Dorian declares he would give his soul if only he could remain as young and virile as he is at that moment and the portrait age instead of him (p.31).

The devil doesn’t actually appear, but someone or something hears Dorian’s wish and grants it. His physical person will remain eerily preserved and perfect as the years pass, and while he is lured deeper and deeper into a life of ‘sin’ by Lord Henry, who he soon surpasses in immorality and debauchery – and all the while the portrait of himself which he keeps up in his attic will rot and age and display every moment of degradation and corruption which he has experienced. Dorian will remain timeless. His portrait will become a ‘loathesome record of sin and debauchery’.

Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins — he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame…

Sibyl Vane

Dorian first realises this as a result of the Sibyl Vane storyline. Inspired by Lord Henry to seek out new sensations, Dorian wanders into a seedy theatre in the East End where he is astonished to see a girl performer, Sibyl Vane, barely 17 years-old, give stunning performances of Shakespeare’s female characters. he bombards his friends with praise for her and then astonishes them by announcing he is getting engaged to her. Unfortunately, as he woos her and she falls in genuine love with the man she refers to as ‘Prince Charming’, she loses her acting ability: she no longer finds pleasure in portraying fictional love as she is now experiencing real love in her life. In effect she has sacrificed her art and hopes of a career and her family’s ambitions, all for him. This becomes clear on the embarrassing night when Dorian finally persuades Harry and Basil to accompany him to the little theatre. She is as wooden as a chest of drawers and his friends embarrassingly make their excuses and leave.

Dorian goes backstage to see Sybil, who is head over heels in love with him. But he deliberately, cruelly crushes her, telling her he is no longer interested in her, she’s become just a third-rate actress, she humiliated him in front of his friends. Although she throws herself at his feet and begs him to stay, he simply walks out never to see her again.

The portrait changes

He wanders the streets in a daze but when he returns home at dawn he catches sight of the portrait and realises it has changed. A subtle new expression of cruelty hover around the lips.

Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized? — that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was there some other, more terrible reason? He shuddered, and felt afraid… (pages 106 and 118)

But there’s more. Overnight Dorian regrets his harshness and vows to repent, to return to Sibyl and to marry. But later that day Lord Henry arrives with the shocking news that Sibyl has killed herself. The die is cast; Dorian can’t go back…

Sibyl’s family

Originally, all the story needed was the character of Sibyl. But in the extended version Wilde added to her backstory. He gave her a worn-out single mother who had herself been an actress, had had an affair with a handsome man who got her pregnant then dumped her, in the classic style. It is a comic touch but also a serious point that this woman likes to adopt histrionic poses with her troubled daughter, constantly imagining herself being watched, as if on the stage.

More importantly, Wilde gives Sibyl a brother, James ‘Jim’ Vane, who’s even younger than she is, just 16. The old Jew (see section on Antisemitism at the end of this review) who runs the East End theatre where Sibyl performs has been ‘kind’ to the family (Mrs Vane explains to her daughter, rather ominously) and has paid for young Jim to go to sea as an apprentice.

On the afternoon of the fateful evening when Dorian takes Lord Henry and Basil to see Sibyl and she completely fails to perform and Dorian then cruelly casts her off, the night which triggers his moral decline – that afternoon Jim and Sibyl had gone for a last walk (in Hyde Park) and he had questioned her about this new aristocratic admirer, full of (justified) suspicion. He is an angry impetuous boy and, despite all Sibyl’s naive insistence that she is in love and her admirer could never hurt her, Jim makes a vow that if any harm comes to Sibyl, he will personally track down and kill the admirer.

Two points: 1) This is the second vow or promise in the book, a sort of echo of Dorian’s central one.

2) Crucially, Sibyl doesn’t know Dorian’s name but has referred to him throughout their little courtship as ‘Prince Charming’. Prince Charming is all she can tell Jim, but he remembers the name, they eventually catch an omnibus back to their squalid digs on Euston Road and we hear no more of Jim, presumed set sail to the ends of the earth. Until he suddenly pops up in Chapter 16, wanting revenge…

Decline

Like all versions of the Faust story, the narrative has two key moments: when the protagonist sells his soul and then, years later, when the devil comes to collect his debt. In between these two cardinal moments the narrative has to flesh out and demonstrate what Dorian’s decline and fall mean in practice. Initially he follows the suggestions of the charismatic hedonist Lord Henry but, as Basil remarked early in the book, Lord Henry may pose as a cynic and sybarite, he may talk a good game of decadence and corruption, but he himself rarely practices it. Soon Dorian has gone past his master in excess:

‘I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.’

and all the while the portrait records every step of his moral degeneration:

Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow’s feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood.

Beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it. He himself would not see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept his youth — that was enough.

When I first read the book at school I was hungry for details of Dorian’s descent into ‘corruption’ and ‘infamy’, hoping to learn how to become ‘decadent’ myself – but as with most supposedly ‘decadent’ literature, I was sorely disappointed.

Huysmans Against Nature

Dorian’s naughty activities can be grouped under two headings. 1) First, Dorian comes under the influence of a powerful book which Lord Henry loans him and leads him into a fascination with jewels and rare manuscripts and decadent perfumes etc. Wilde confirmed to various interviewers that this was based on Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel À rebours (which I immediately went off and read). In fact it isn’t so much ‘based on’ as, for 20 pages, a shameless plagiarism of that book, copying the hero’s obsession with rare jewels, precious perfumes and then accounts of Renaissance cruelty and imperial Roman debauchery.

Twenty years later

The second way Dorian’s ‘fall’ into a life of debauchery is suggested is via the four or five page long speech delivered by Basil when he comes round to see Dorian before leaving for Paris. (In chapter 16 we learn that 18 years have passed since Sibyl Vane’s death, so he must have been 20 at the time of the famous vow.

So the 20 or so pages describing the Huysman decadence have helped us skip 18 years of time.

Basil’s list of accusations

Basil turns up late one foggy night because he’s going to Paris for some months to paint but, before he goes, he needs Dorian to deny the dreadful things Basil’s been hearing about him. In all those 20 years Basil has retained his naive and trusting friendship with Dorian but he proceeds to rattle off an impressive list of wicked behaviour which is widely attributed to him. Or, to be more precise, rumours of wicked behaviour which manifest themselves in Dorian being shunned at clubs, refused invitations, people walking out of rooms when he enters and denouncing him. The list goes on and on because, the reader realises, it’s doing the main task of conveying Dorian’s decline and degeneration. A the end of an impressive list of hints and rumours, Basil asks Dorian to deny it all.

Seized by a perverse whim, Dorian tells him he keeps a diary in the attic and he’ll take him to see it. And so he leads Basil up the dark and spooky staircase to the dusty attic where he flings off the cover to show him the (by now) horrifying painting of a depraved bloated sodden man whose sins are marked in crimson across his degenerate face. Basil is suitably horrified, can’t believe it, but Dorian reminds him of the vow he made in his studio all those years ago, how it has magically come true, so that Basil slowly does come to believe it, cries out in horror, is appalled to realise that Dorian has been much worse than the worst rumours about him etc. Basil pleads with Dorian to pray with him:

‘It is too late, Basil,’ he faltered.
‘It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. Isn’t there a verse somewhere, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow’?’
‘Those words mean nothing to me now.’
‘Hush! Don’t say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My God! Don’t you see that accursed thing leering at us?’

But when Dorian also looks at the painting the narrative implies that its evil spirit enters him and suddenly fills him with blind fury at Basil for making the painting which ruined his life.

Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him, as though it had been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his ear by those grinning lips.

He sees a knife shining in the moonlight through the casement and, in a surprisingly blunt and crude scene, Dorian sneaks up behind Basil, thrusts his face down onto the table where he’s sitting and stabs him in the neck again and again while Basil throws up his arms to fend of the blows then crumples into a gurgling bloody mess… Dorian has crossed a grotesque Rubicon.

Complications: getting rid of the body

First Dorian has to get rid of the body. He sends for one of the young men mentioned in Basil’s list of shame whose life he is supposed to have ruined. As usual we get absolutely no sense of what it was that divided them.

This man, Alan Campbell, is a scientist who researches the human body by dissecting cadavers etc. Dorian confesses that he murdered Basil and then asks Alan to dispose of the body in the attic. Campbell is stern, moral, disapproving and refuses to do it until Dorian writes a name on a piece of paper and pushes it across the table to him. Campbell goes pales. Dorian says he has a letter written and ready to be sent unless he does this thing. Campbell coldly agrees. Dorian sends a servant to Campbell’s lodgings with a list of equipment, which is promptly brought back, and the two men mount to the attic where Dorian lets Campbell in, hastily covers the painting with its thick purple and gold hanging, not bringing himself to look at the cold white body sprawled over the table with its neck torn open.

Five long hours later Campbell comes down to Dorian’s study and says it is done. Dorian goes to the attic and finds no trace whatsoever of the body but a smell of nitric acid. Presumably Campbell chopped it up and dissolved it in acid.

The thoughtful reader might remember Basil’s sense of doom right from the start of the book: ‘we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.’

The power of the unstated

Presumably Dorian was threatening to send a letter to some innocent woman which would reveal the immoral or illegal behaviour of someone and so shatter her illusions? Maybe to Campbell’s wife describing his immoral activities? We don’t know, Wilde doesn’t tell us.

And this made me think three things:

1) Wilde can’t put a name to most of the awful immoral things Dorian has done because it was illegal to describe anything to do with sex (the state censor would have forbidden the book from being published).

2) Quite possibly the lack of detail about Dorian’s activities in the long, elliptical list Basil Hallward iterates, maybe it was the lack of detail, which made it worse. Because contemporary readers could project their own worst imaginings into the vague hints and maybe a lot of readers’ imaginings were actually worse, more sordid, than even Wilde intended. Not specifying what he meant made the book feel even more ‘immoral’ because every single reader filled the gaps with the worst they could imagine. In this respect, its vagueness perfectly fits one of the epigrams in the preface. The vague hints and dire rumours of Dorian’s misdeeds allowed the reader to project onto it their worst imaginings which promptly triggered ‘the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass’.

3) The obvious thought that if Wilde had specified Dorian’s misdeeds, they would have aged and dulled. Did he mean luring young men into homosexual practices or taking drugs? Did the young women whose reputations he ruined simply have premarital affairs with him? Not much along these lines would shock a 2024 readership. Keeping the details of all Dorian’s misdoings is one of the things that gives the book its timeless, fairy tale effect.

Chapter 16: Opium dens and James Vane

Dorian needs to obliterate all this from his memory so he dresses in disguise and, late at night, takes a cab far out East, down to the remote squalid docks. He enters a low drinking den and bumps into Adrian Singleton, one of the many young men, it is implied, who he has ‘ruined’ i.e. reduced to hanging round in the roughest pubs with slatternly whores.

As he leaves the pub one of the whores drunkenly yells at him, calling him by his ironic pseudonym, ‘Prince Charming’. Like a bolt of lightning up sits one of the drunks slumped at the bar for it is, of course, James Vane, now a 36-year-old grizzled old merchant seaman. He asks the whores to explain and they tell him the man who just left is a byword for corruption and depravity who they all know by his nickname ‘Prince Charming’.

Correctly thinking this must be the same privileged user who caused his sister’s death, Vane blunders out into the foggy night and follows Dorian down black backstreets eventually catching up with him down some dark back alley and thrusting him against the wall by his throat. He pulls out a pistol and is about to finish Dorian who, in his wild panic, has a brainwave and tells Vane to pull him over to a nearby streetlight and look at his face.

When he does so, Vane, of course, sees that Dorian is a young, innocent pretty boy. No way does he look like the middle-aged degenerate he ought to be. Puzzled and then scared that he nearly shot an innocent man, Vane staggers back and lets go Dorian, who gives him a smart aristocratic reprimand then departs into the night.

But the incident isn’t over. One of the whores had followed Vane and now asks him why he didn’t finish Dorian off? When Vane explains that he’s only a boy, the whore laughs and says it’s 18 years since he turned her into what she is (i.e. a prostitute). And out of the mouth of this prostitute comes the simple explanation that ‘he has sold his soul to the devil for a pretty face’ (p.211). Vane realises his mistake and rushes out into the street but Dorian has disappeared in the London fog. But this storyline isn’t over.

Chapter 17

In a really vivid example of the book’s deliberate use of dualities, the next chapter switches from the fog and squalid drinking dens of the East End back to the purlieus of the rich, in this case the conservatory at Selby Royal, the main country estate Dorian inherited from his grandfather. On the face of it, from the poor to the posh, although Wilde gives it a twist by making it the setting for a quite sustained attack on the English character by Lord Henry:

‘You don’t like your country, then?’ she asked.
‘I live in it.’
‘That you may censure it the better.’
‘Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?’ he inquired.
‘What do they say of us?’
‘That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop.’
‘Is that yours, Harry?’
‘I give it to you.’
‘I could not use it. It is too true.’
‘You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a description.’
‘They are practical.’
‘They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.’
‘Still, we have done great things.’
‘Great things have been thrust on us.’
‘We have carried their burden.’
‘Only as far as the Stock Exchange.’
She shook her head. ‘I believe in the race,’ she cried.
‘It represents the survival of the pushing.’

Obviously the word ‘burden’ rings bells for anyone familiar with Kipling’s 1899 poem, The White Man’s Burden, and is a kind of pre-emptive mockery of it.

Lord Henry and the Duchess of Monmouth exchange epigrams like characters in an Oscar Wilde play for half a dozen pages before they hear a cry and a thud, and rush to find Dorian fainted on the conservatory floor. He reassures everyone he is OK, dresses for dinner and is gaiety itself at table, but all the time, in the manner of the best Victorian melodrama / horror story:

Now and then a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.

Chapter 18

Stuff like this is what Peter Ackroyd (who supplied an introduction to the 1985 Penguin Classic edition of Dorian which I read) means when he talks about Wilde’s tendency to high Victorian melodrama:

The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself. The consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him. If the tapestry did but tremble in the wind, he shook. The dead leaves that were blown against the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild regrets. When he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor’s face peering through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once more to lay its hand upon his heart.

Anyway, the Vane threat is quickly dealt with. Next day there is a shooting party on Dorian’s estate and even as he’s chatting to one of the guests, the duchess of Monmouth’s brother, Sir Geoffrey Clouston, he spots a hare jumping up and running towards a copse and fires at it – only for them all to hear a human shout. On investigation the man is found to be dead.

Lord Henry assures him it is just a ghastly accident afflicting the lower classes and he should forget about it but Dorian, of course, as he has to since the novel is reaching its climax, feels oppressed by a sense of doom and foreboding, expressed in some of Wilde’s most overripe prose:

‘I feel as if something horrible were going to happen to some of us. To myself…I have no terror of death. It is the coming of death that terrifies me. Its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me…’

But that is not quite all. For that evening the head-keeper comes to Dorian to report on the corpse. Dorian is preparing to sign a check for the man’s family when the head-keeper says he wasn’t one of their staff, in fact no-one knows who he was. Seems he was a sailor from the tattoos on his arms. Dorian leaps up. Could it be…the sailor brother of Sibyl Vane whose face he thought he saw through the conservatory window? With Lorna Doone-style bodice-ripping adventure style he rushes to the stables and leaps onto a horse to gallop down to the outhouses where the body is being kept.

In less than a quarter of an hour, Dorian Gray was galloping down the long avenue as hard as he could go. The trees seemed to sweep past him in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his path. Once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly threw him. He lashed her across the neck with his crop. She cleft the dusky air like an arrow. The stones flew from her hoofs.

At the outhouse he gets a servant to remove the covering from the corpse’s face and sees that it is none other than James Vane! A wholly inappropriate cry of joy escapes his lips. He is safe!

Chapter 19

Dorian tells Harry he is going to reform. He had been seeing a country peasant girl off and on and was due to run away with her in order, in the usual way, to deflower her then chuck her, but at the last minute he didn’t show at their assignation. He is going to turn over a new leaf. He is going to reform. (The reader can’t help wondering if this is what Dorian’s ‘wickedness’ amounted to? Seducing country girls like every other second-rate rake?)

Anyway the entire chapter consists of Dorian swearing he is going to reform and Lord Henry rattling off epigram after epigram, apothegms about art and life and sincerity and whatnot till Dorian and the reader are quite exhausted. Specifically, Dorian blames him for poisoning him with the book he lent him (the one Wilde freely admitted to being based on ‘Against Nature’), to which Lord Henry gives a characteristically aesthetic reply:

‘As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.’

Lord Henry invites him to go with him to the club but Dorian cries off saying it is 11pm and he is tired, so puts his coat on and sets off to walk home (evidently they have been at Lord Henry’s rooms).

Chapter 20

The short final chapter. Anyone reading a hard copy knows they are at the end of the story. In a world-weary mood Dorian arrives home at his apartment reflecting on the strange tale of his life. Suddenly he wonders whether his good deed of the last few days i.e. not running off with the country virgin, might possibly start to cleanse the portrait. Maybe a sustained period of moral living could heal it. In an optimistic mood Dorian climbs the stairs to the attic but, when he takes the cover off the portrait is appalled to see that the blood on its hands seems to have spread and there is a new look of cunning and hypocrisy in its eyes. Was he deceiving himself when he spared the country lass or was it, as Lord Henry suggested, just a new kind of sensation for an inveterate sensation seeker?

Suddenly he is sickened and disgusted by the portrait which has ruined his life. Once more he sees the knife with which he murdered Basil Hallward, which he has washed and cleaned many times, lying to hand. He picks it up and stabs the portrait in its wicked heart and…feels the impact in his own heart, staggers, collapses and dies! His cry of agony is heard by the servants and by passersby out in the square.

After some confabulation, the servants creep up to the long-locked attic and discover there the body of a horribly bloated, withered, agèd old man (Dorian) lying dead with a knife through his heart in front of Basil Hallward’s portrait, which has been magically restored to its pristine beauty.

In a sense the best thing about the book is the way it ends there with no explanation or moralising or clever sayings, no funeral, no eulogy from Lord Henry, nothing. It needs nothing more. It is perfect as it is. It has the perfection of a thousands fairy stories and legends behind it, indeed Dorian has a claim to be Wilde’s best fairy story.

Commentary

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a brilliant fable, a retelling of the ancient Faust legend but with a lightness and delicacy which connects it with Wilde’s lovely fairy stories. It says something so profound about life that it feels like it – the story – ought to have happened. And so the fable, and the name, have become a permanent part of the culture because it speaks to some deep truth in all of us. In his own lifetime Wilde knew he had written a classic and he was correct.

A book of dualities

He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life. (p.192)

Sexual hypocrisy

It is a cliché that the late-Victorian high society led a double life riven with hypocrisy. Victorian bourgeois men in particular heartily endorsed a rhetoric of strict public morality but in private, provided the market for the largest population of prostitutes of any European city.

Dual life of a gay man

Wilde also partook of this double life, in public a successful writer and man about town, husband of a society beauty and father of two lovely children – all the while living a secret life as a gay man and using sex workers, or rent boys as we used to call them back in the day, as much as the famously hypocritical bourgeoisie used London’s vast population of female prostitutes.

London a city of extremes

London was famous for the duality between its rich and poor. At one extreme it was a city of dazzling opulence, led by the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Royal family, the aristocracy, the House of Lords, gentlemen’s clubs, great public shindigs like the Lord Mayor’s Show etc. At the other extreme were the East End slums pullulating with poverty and the docks seething with foreign seamen, opium dens, the roughest type of prostitution etc. See my review of Arthur Morrison’s 1896 novel A Child of the Jago.

The doppelgänger

The theme of characters having doubles or doppelgängers, of consciously or unconsciously leading double lives, had been a major theme in literature since the Romantic revolution of the early 1800s. In a text like Gray it reaches a kind of apotheosis, with the stark binary contrast between the man and his portrait, the one leading a charmed life, the other accumulating all the signs of ‘sin’ which should, by rights, have been marking the mortal. Probably the acme of the literature of doubles is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published just four years before Wilde began Dorian.

Two styles

This duality is reflected by the way the book has two completely different styles, 1) the deliberately drawling and nonchalant superficiality of the drawing room comedy and 2) the florid emotions and over-ripe style of Victorian melodrama.

I noted in my review of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime how easily Wilde slips into very purple melodrama, all wailing about Fate and Destiny and Tragedy. There is a duality in the text between these two modes which reflects the different psychologies and moods of the different worlds or scenes.

Quotable lines

DORIAN: ‘You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.’

I like cutting and pasting quotes into lists like this because 1) it makes me linger over them that little bit longer. Also 2) it makes you realise that the Lord Henry parts of the novel are as much a bombardment of bon mots as the plays are. And 3) makes you realise just how many of these lines were lifted wholesale from his earlier essays and/or were to be recycled wholesale into the plays.

Unless otherwise stated, all the lines are spoken by the Wilde avatar, Lord Henry Wotton:

‘The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.’

‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’

‘You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.’ ‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,’ cried Lord Henry, laughing.

‘As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.’

‘I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’

‘Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.’

‘The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.’

‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.’

‘People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’

‘Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.’

‘I adore simple pleasures,’ said Lord Henry. ‘They are the last refuge of the complex.’

‘I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.’

‘What a fuss people make about fidelity!’ exclaimed Lord Henry. ‘Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.’

LORD FERMOR: ‘Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.”
‘Yes,’ murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat, ‘and when they grow older they know it.’

LORD FERMOR: ‘Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.’

LORD FERMOR: ‘Why can’t these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.’
Lord Henry: ‘It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

‘I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.’

‘Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.’

‘When America was discovered,’ said the Radical member — and he began to give some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

‘But they are so unhappy in Whitechapel,’ continued Lady Agatha.
‘I can sympathize with everything except suffering,’ said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores, the better.’
‘Still, the East End is a very important problem,’ remarked Sir Thomas with a grave shake of the head.’
‘Quite so,’ answered the young lord. ‘It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves.’ (recycled from The Soul of Man Under Socialism)

‘Ah! Lord Henry, I wish you would tell me how to become young again.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Can you remember any great error that you committed in your early days, Duchess?’ he asked, looking at her across the table.
‘A great many, I fear,’ she cried.
‘Then commit them over again,’ he said gravely. ‘To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.’
‘A delightful theory!’ she exclaimed. ‘I must put it into practice.’

Lord Henry’s wife, Victoria, Lady Wotton:

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church.

LADY WOTTON: ‘I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage, don’t you think so, Mr. Gray?’

LADY WOTTON: ‘You have never been to any of my parties, have you, Mr. Gray? You must come. I can’t afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners. They make one’s rooms look so picturesque.’

LORD HENRY: ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ (recycled in Lady Windermere’s Fan)

‘Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

‘My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.’

‘As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.’

‘My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect — simply a confession of failure.’

‘When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

DORIAN: ‘The Jew wanted to tell me her history, but I said it did not interest me.’
LORD HENRY: ‘You were quite right. There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.’

‘Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.’

Experience Is of no ethical value. It Is merely the name men gave to their mistakes. (recycled in Lady Windermere’s Fan)

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. (Recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

‘Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.’

‘Are you serious?’
‘Quite serious, Basil. I should be miserable if I thought I should ever be more serious than I am at the present moment.’

‘I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.’

‘You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man’s existence. Besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience.’

‘Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.’ (recycled from The Soul of Man under Socialism)

‘You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?’ (recycled in The Critic as Artist)

‘I love acting. it is so much more real than life.’

‘It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting.’

‘There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.’

‘Good heavens, my dear boy, don’t look so tragic! The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.’

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

‘One should never make one’s début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.’

‘My dear Dorian,’ answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case and producing a gold-latten matchbox, ‘the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.’

‘Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.’

DORIAN: ‘Don’t talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.’

DORIAN: ‘It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them…To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.’

‘The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes,’ said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.

‘Lord Henry, I am not at all surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked.’
‘But what world says that?’ asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows. ‘It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

‘It is perfectly monstrous,’ he said, at last, ‘the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

‘When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.’

‘Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.’

LADY NARBOROUGH: ‘Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

LADY NARBOROUGH: ‘Don’t tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

‘I like him,’ said Lord Henry. ‘A great many people don’t, but I find him charming. He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely over-educated.’ (recycled in The Importance of Being Earnest)

‘The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.’ (reworked in The Importance of Being Earnest)

‘Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues…You, as a good Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.’

‘Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.’

‘The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.’

‘Of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.’

‘Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.’

‘The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.’

‘To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

Antisemitism

The fact that Wilde is a martyr to the LGBTIQA+ movement sometimes masks unfortunate aspects of his work less acceptable to modern sensibilities. He was, after all, a man of his times. I called out unacceptable antisemitic tropes in the work of Saki and do so here.

DORIAN: ‘I went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black grassless squares. About half-past eight I passed by an absurd little theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. ‘Have a box, my Lord?’ he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an air of gorgeous servility. There was something about him, Harry, that amused me. He was such a monster…

…There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young Hebrew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the drop-scene was drawn up and the play began.’

This Jew, the manager of the East End theatre where Sibyl performs, turns out to have been very charitable to Sibyl’s mother, taken on all their debts, and is financing her son, Jim, to go to sea. There are half a dozen more, consistently disparaging, references to him in the Vane subplot. A little disturbing…

But then the book is made up of stereotypes, starting with its basis in the Faust legend, going on to stereotype all its characters, such as:

the insouciant aesthete
the earnest artist
the innocent young virgin
the vengeful brother
the haggard single mother

all the way through to the servants, and the tradesman – Mr Hubbard, ‘the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street’ is ‘a florid, red-whiskered little man’.

They’re all stereotypes and clichés, which is one of the main things which makes the book more like a fairy story than a serious novel. And, of course, the book is simply crammed with stereotyped men and women spouting stereotypical epigrams about men and women, the woes of marriage etc (see below).

But modern (2024) culture is (rightly) more sensitive to the negative stereotyping of Jews wherever it occurs than these other paradigms which is why I am highlighting it here.

Sexism

Ditto his attitudes to women which, for someone posing as a refined dandy and an aesthete, can be surprisingly insulting. The comments the Wilde avatar, Sir Henry, are definitely sexist but do they go so far as to be misogynist? I suppose one defence is that these are the opinions of characters in a novel; but identical sentiments are expressed by the Wilde-type figures in all four plays, as well as by characters in his dialogue-essays, so… It’s a consistent, and consistently negative, attitude to women found across all Wilde’s work.

LORD HENRY: ‘Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not.’

LORD HENRY: ‘Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.’

LORD HENRY: ‘My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals…

LORD HENRY: ‘There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That is all over now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society…’

DORIAN: ‘Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious.’

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

‘Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.’
‘I should have said that whatever they ask for they had first given to us,’ murmured the lad gravely. ‘They create love in our natures. They have a right to demand it back.’
‘That is quite true, Dorian,’ cried Hallward.
‘Nothing is ever quite true,’ said Lord Henry.
‘This is,’ interrupted Dorian. ‘You must admit, Harry, that women give to men the very gold of their lives.’
‘Possibly,’ he sighed, ‘but they invariably want it back in such very small change. That is the worry. Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.’

Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have someone with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were.

‘That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar…

‘The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art…

‘Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history. Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands. They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one’s face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me, and I can quite understand it. Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all. Yes; there is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life…

DORIAN: ‘I was terribly cruel to her. You forget that.’
LORD HENRY: ‘I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.’

‘She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.’

LORD HENRY: ‘Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.’
DUCHESS OF MONMOUTH: ‘Not with women,’ said the duchess, shaking her head; ‘and women rule the world. I assure you we can’t bear mediocrities. We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.’

DUCHESS OF MONMOUTH: ‘Describe us as a sex.’
LORD HENRY: ‘Sphinxes without secrets.’ (recycled in A Woman of No Importance)

Wilde’s cult of Individualism and amorality

Individualism is the basis of Wilde’s worldview, expressed most fully in The Soul of Man under Socialism. The aim of life is to develop and express one’s personality.

‘To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self,’ he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. ‘Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life — that is the important thing. As for the lives of one’s neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one’s moral views about them, but they are not one’s concern. Besides, individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.’

Interestingly, Wilde anticipates Freud’s dynamic model of the ego or consciousness of man being in permanent turmoil.

He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

Obviously that bit at the end of Gothic melodrama but Freud would recognise the general drift. As to ‘morality’, there is no morality when it comes to seeking pleasure. Pleasure-seeking is deliberately amoral.

‘Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.’

Wilde completely upends traditional notions of morality which entail self-restraint, to praise self-expression at every opportunity, the pursuit of every sensation, and refuses to call anything a sin.

‘The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.’

Or:

‘I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.’

You can see why Victorian society was outraged. If someone appeared now, in 2024, preaching that every man should abandon all restraint, seek out every possible experience and sensation, live only for pleasure and self expression, combined with his sustained denigration of women, the outcry, not least from feminists, would be just as loud.

Tell-tale adjectives

Lord Henry goes on about the point of life being to constantly experience new things, new thoughts, new sensations, new ideas. Yet it’s striking how monotonous Wilde’s vocabulary is. When describing beautiful people (Dorian, Sibyl) he invariably compares them to lilies (10 instances), ivory (9) or silver (24).

The curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.

Lord Henry’s influence is continually described as dangerous (8), and propounding ideas which are strange (67), curious (59), fascinating (36), terrible (40), full of sins (37), terror (29), horror (24) and poison (21). Amazing how much mileage you can get from ringing the changes on this handful of key words.

It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him…

He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety…

Once you start recognising this handful of a dozen or so key words, and the simple melodramatic ideas behind them, you begin to understand why this, like all Wilde’s works, is brilliantly imagined, classic in storyline and character, stuffed with clever epigrams and yet, at the same time, curiously (to use one of his own words) superficial and shallow.

Although Dorian horrified adult critics at the time, just a generation later it was being treated as one more of his delightful, if rather gruesome, fairy stories.

And then, like so much of the fiction of the 1890s, despite being written for adults, after the apocalypse of the First World War, it came to seem childish and superficial. Not exactly children’s stories but not really stories for serious adults.

Oscar Wilde reviews

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by Simon on July 29, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel

Tagged 1890s fiction, A Child of the Jago, A Rebours, A Woman of No Importance, Adrian Singleton, Aestheticism, Alan Campbell, Antisemitism, art, Arthur Morrison, Basil Hallward, comedy, döppelgänger, debauchery, Dorian, Dorian Gray, Duchess of Monmouth, English literature, epigram, eternal youth, Euston Road, Faust, fiction, Fortnightly Review, gay, homosexuality, James Vane, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Kipling, Lady Narborough, Lady Victoria Wotton, Lady Windermere's Fan, LGBTIQA+, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, London, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, Lord Fermor, Lord Henry, Lord Henry Wotton, melodrama, Mephistopheles, morality, Mr Hubbard, murder, novel, Opium dens, Peter Ackroyd, Prince Charming, repartee, Robert Louis Stevenson, Selby Royal, sexism, sexual hypocrisy, Shakespeare, Sibyl Vane, sin, Sir Geoffrey Clouston, South Audley Street, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Soul of Man under Socialism, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Victorian society, Whitechapel

Posted by Simon on July 29, 2024

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The Decay of Lying: An Observation by Oscar Wilde (1891)

‘The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.’

Originally published as a magazine article in 1889, Wilde substantially rewrote this essay for inclusion in his volume of four long critical essays, Intentions (1891). In De Profundis Wilde refers to it as ‘the first and best of all my dialogues’ (Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, page 157).

The dialogue form

It is in dialogue form, harking back to the Platonic dialogues Wilde would have studied for his Classics degree, and signalling Wilde’s embryonic interest in drama – and his realisation that his ‘ideas’ were maybe less amusing than his taste for paradox, for surprising reversals of expectations, for sudden bon mots and witty phrases – all of which are easier to engineer in dialogue form. Dialogue allows:

quick fire interchange
one person to develop an idea at length until it is in danger of becoming boring, at which point – the other person interrupts with a deflating remark or a witty summary of the argument so far; this means that:
treatment of individual notions can be pages long or made in a throwaway one-liner; and
the case of the proponent can itself subjected to irony and satire by the interlocutor – Wilde can parody or ironise his own argument

His earlier essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, is a straightforward essay, no dialogue, so Wilde has to go a long distance in his own voice and strains a bit to make a consistent ‘argument’. The digressions and cul-de-sacs are there for all to see. In Lying, as soon as the dramatic lead (Vivian) tires of one line of witty sophistry, his foil (Cyril) can interrupt – not understanding, or pooh-poohing the idea, or asking for clarification, thus neatly ending one line of thought and setting up the next one.

The Argument

All Art is lying, wonderful imaginative lying.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

However, in Wilde’s time more and more artists were determined to drag the ‘real world’ into their art, making it ‘relevant’, addressing ‘issues’ and thus showing a tragic misunderstanding of what Art is and is for, and – the great crime in Wilde’s eyes – destroying their individuality – so that all the writers end up sounding like Parliamentary reports and all the artists end up creating works which are grim and depressing.

Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind.

Art is a form of lying, of rejecting the banality of ‘reality’ and creating something marvellous from our imaginations. Wilde must have had notebooks packed with sentences starting ‘Art is…’:

The object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.

Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of overemphasis.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.

Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts.

Taking this as his point of departure, the entire essay enjoys contradicting the popular view of the day (Wordsworth, Ruskin, Morris), that we must somehow get ‘back to Nature’, that Nature is a cure for modern industrial society. Quite the opposite:

What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition… Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity’ is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.

And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.

Provocation 1. The incongruous

Wilde enjoys provoking his reader, which takes at least two forms: one is the witty application of homely phraseology in an unexpected way, to create a humorously incongruous effect.

Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out…Art is…our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.

Thus, as he endeavours to show his friend Cyril how far lying has decayed, the protagonist Vivian makes a humorous survey of the professions, all on the witty assumption that they are and have been professed liars, so that he is in the witty position of lamenting the decay of lying in professions which most Victorians would assume to have been the bedrock of British honesty and probity:

CYRIL. Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.

VIVIAN. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue [!]…Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members. Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful…They…have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent [!]. But they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon [!]. One feels it as one wades through their columns…

Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy…or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination! and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability.

Later, he manages to include journalists in his list of the lying professions. The same journalists who would hound him into prison and cackle around his fallen corpse.

Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader writer is not without its advantages. But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity.

Provocation 2. Anti-England

Like any man of feeling or imagination, Wilde is depressed by the small-minded, xenophobic, philistine culture of England (something which has always driven our best writers abroad, to escape our stifling conformity and seek out a wider world). An attitude given bite by the fact that he was, of course, Irish and saw himself, as so many literary men of the Modern period (1890s onwards), as an outsider.(1)

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.

Nonetheless, one trembles when one reads his casual insults of England and the English. For, as we know, the English were going to have their total and humiliating revenge on Wilde and to drag all his witty paradoxes down into the lowest mud.

A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious non-comformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas.

But in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle.

The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy La Chimere, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.

The contemporary scene

Wilde gives a fascinating summary of the contemporary literary scene, of which he laments: ‘the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.’

He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything’ and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself. The loss that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.

In his way Wilde is echoing Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on Romance, a conscious revolt against the Gradgrindish obsession with facts, a wish to escape, to soar on the wings of free imagination. Although Stevenson is first in line to be criticised:

Mr Robert Louis Stevenson… is tainted with this modern vice [of realism]… There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet.
Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible ‘points of view’ his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.
Mr George Meredith! Who can define him ? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate.
Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot hear what he says.
Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a shortsighted detective.
The horses of Mr. William Black‘s phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.
Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things.
Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about ‘le beau ciel d’Italie.’ Besides, he has fallen into a bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying.
‘Robert Elsmere’ is of course a masterpiece – a masterpiece of the ‘genre ennuyeux,’ the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy. It is only in England that such a book could be produced.
As for that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.

Wilde prided himself of his knowledge of French culture – their poetry and painting vastly more advanced than their English counterparts. But he is equally as damning of the new French realist school:

M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears.
M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!.. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed. M. Zola’s characters have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.
M. Daudet is better. He has wit, a light touch, and an amusing style. But he has lately committed literary suicide… The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.
What is interesting about people in good society – and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London – is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit, and the like. The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality!

But he likes Balzac:

Balzac was a most wonderful combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples: the former was entirely his own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola’s L’Assommoir and Balzac’s Illusions Perdues is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality… A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism… But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.

Art does not express the world, Good Lord no! It expresses the individuality, the genius, of the artist.

Art should be quite detached, quite useless

Where Morris the Marxist argued that Art in an ideal world would be the results of happy men expressing their creativity, especially in decorating the everyday objects of our lives, so that everything a happy fulfilled worker makes is Art – Wilde the hyper aesthete argues that all Art should be quite useless, quite irrelevant to our everyday lives and concerns: that is its point.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject matter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind…

I do not know anything in the whole history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful book, The Cloister and the Hearth, a book as much above Romola as Romola is above Daniel Deronda, and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over.

Life imitates Art

So far, so plausible. Wilde has moved beyond outraging the bourgeoisie to establish his main point: Art is a wonderful kind of lying which, in his age, was everywhere in danger of being hobbled by the mania for Realism. But the essay goes to another level when Wilde pushes the conceit further to say that, not only is dull and vulgar Life bad for Art, but that Life itself actually copies Art.

Paradox though it may seem, it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters [the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti and Burne-Jones], has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the strange squarecut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of The Golden Stair, the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the Laus Amoris, the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivien in Merlin’s Dream.

And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They brought their types with them, and Life, with her keen imitative faculty, set herself to supply the master with models.

As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into sweet shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and unloaded revolvers… The boy burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is with trying to reproduce Fiction.

And, he goes on:

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.
Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempre, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comedie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.

Wilde doesn’t say there is a tendency to copy art: he thinks it is an absolute rule:

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life – the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it – is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.

This anticipates Raymond Chandler’s 1930s comments about his hoodlums and gangsters modeling themselves on the movies, a sentiment echoed by Alistair MacLean in his thrillers of the 1960s, and of what I know of Auden and his circle modelling their posing, the way they lit and held cigarettes, on the movie stars of the 1930s. It seems to me a very persuasive argument indeed that Art gives us the models and then people enthusiastically set about copying them – except that Wilde probably wouldn’t call movies, TV and pop videos Art: but they are what provide contemporary humanity with our models for behaving and talking.

Nature imitates Art

And Wilde’s comic style, his essential humour, combines wonderfully when Vivian is goaded by Cyril to go one step further and suggest that Nature imitates Art – the precise opposite of what most of the nineteenth century has been telling itself:

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows ? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge ? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art.

Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.

Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.

And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has done so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pisaros. Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to be relied upon.

The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.

But I don’t want to be too hard on Nature… That she imitates Art, I don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilized man.

Art doesn’t reflect its society and times – it creates them

In the same spirit, Wilde rejects another cliché, that Art reflects the society and times it was created in. Wrong, says Wilde; the precise opposite: Art doesn’t reflect: Art creates the style and look of its times.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence ? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

The Japanese people are, in fact, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

A new world

The essay ends, with a witty call for a revival of lying at all levels of society, beginning in the nursery and extending through school and into the higher professions. In a kind of satire on the millennial, revolutionary rhetoric of this decade of revolutionaries and nihilists and anarchists, Wilde looks forward to the overthrow of the present dull world of facts and the rebirth of a wonderful world of lying and imagination:

The solid stolid British intellect may not hear the voice of fantasy now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings. And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land.

The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.

Three principles

And the essay winds up with some more generalisations from Wilde’s books of sentences about Art.

1. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.

2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything… It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

3. The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.

It is a revealing moment when Wilde jokingly says that society must return to its ‘lost leader’, the skilled liar. Mostly this is paradoxical wit – but the phrase ‘lost leader’, by 1891, already referred to Charles Stewart Parnell, whose affair with a married woman split the Irish Parliamentary Party of which he was leader, and, arguably, set back the cause of Irish independence by a generation. Wilde’s oblique reference to a man hounded to his death by the British establishment because of his private life has a terrible reverberation for us who know what Wilde’s fate was to be.

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by Simon on July 17, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Books

Tagged 1891, Aestheticism, Anti-England, Aristotle, art, Balzac, Burne-Jones, Caesar, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, Charles Stewart Parnell, Christ, Comedie Humaine, Corot, critical essay, Cyril, Daudet, Decay of Lying, dialogue, Dick Turpin, Dostoieffski, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, essay, Flaubert, George Meredith, Guy de Maupassant, Hall Caine, Hamlet, Henry James, Hokkei, Hokusai, Holbein, humour, Illusions Perdues, Intentions, Irish Parliamentary Party, Jack Sheppard, James Payn, Japanese art, L'Assommoir, Life imitates Art, Literature, Lucien de Rubempre, lying, lying professions, Marion Crawford, Monet, Mrs Oliphant, Nature, Oscar Wilde, philistine culture of England, Piccadilly, Pissaro, Pre-Raphaelites, Rastignac, Rider Haggard, Robert Elsmere, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robespierre, Romance, Rossetti, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Second Empire, the Black Arrow, The Decay of Lying, The Soul of Man under Socialism, Tourgenieff, Vivian, Werther, Wilde, William Black, Zola

Posted by Simon on July 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/07/17/the-decay-of-lying-oscar-wilde/

My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl (1979)

‘Is this exactly what happened?’ Sir Charles asked me.
‘Every word of it, sir, is the gospel truth,’ I lied. (p.45)

Apart from his well-known children’s novels, Dahl also wrote movie screenplays, TV scripts, and some fifty-four short stories for adults which appeared in various magazines throughout his career, the first in 1942, the last in 1988. It was these which formed the basis of the Tales of the Unexpected TV series I watched as a teenager in the 1970s.

My Uncle Oswald is his only full-length novel for adults, sort of. The fictional character of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius is described as:

‘the connoisseur, the bon vivant, the collector of spiders, scorpions and walking sticks, the lover of opera, the expert on Chinese porcelain, the seducer of women, and without much doubt, the greatest fornicator of all time.’

He first appeared in two short stories, The Visitor and Bitch, first published in Playboy magazine and published in book form in the 1974 collection Switch Bitch, which I’ve reviewed.

It’s no surprise that Uncle Oswald eventually had a novel devoted to him, indeed it’s a surprise it took so long, he is such a garish, larger-than-life and transgressively monstrous creation.

As ‘the greatest fornicator of all time’, by the age of seventeen he’s already ‘had’ some fifty English lovelies, and goes to stay in Paris, where he swives nubile French daughters (Madamoiselle Nicole), the wife of the British ambassador (Lady Makepiece) and an energetic Turkish gentlelady.

After you adjust to the bantering tone about sexual conquests and the deliberately obscene subject matter, you begin to realise that arguably the real appeal of the book is the deliberately dated and nostalgic setting. The nameless narrator claims to be quoting verbatim from scandalous Uncle Oswald’s multi-volume diaries, specifically Volume XX, written in the 1938 when Oswald was 43 years old and much of the texture of the book is filled with young Oswald’s appreciation for fine wine, gourmet meals, and very early motor cars.

Thus the opening sequence is set as long ago as 1912, during the pre-Great War imperial heyday, when a chap could still travel the world flourishing his big British passport.

1. The Sudanese Blister Beetle aphrodisiac (1912)

The first story tells how Uncle Oswald made his fortune by learning, from a disreputable relation of his, about the most powerful aphrodisiac in the world made from the ground shells of the Sudanese Blister Beetle. Inspired, he sets off himself to the Sudan where he does a deal with the head porter at his hotel to get a few bags full of the precious powder, and brings it back to Paris.

Here he is staying with friends of his posh father (William Cornelius, member of the Diplomatic Service) and sets up a little chemistry lab in the rooms he’s been allotted, and proceeds to produce home-made aphrodisiac pills which, with an eye for marketing, he describes as products of a certain Professor Yousoupoff’s secret formula (foreign names impress the gullible).

Put in summary form like this, you can see that – although the theme is supposedly pornographic, as Oswald couples with women tall and short, foreign and British – in fact the basic ideas and the childish way they’re described (‘the greatest fornicator in the world’, ‘the most powerful aphrodisiac known to man’) are closely related to his children’s books (Danny the Champion of the World, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and so is the often funny and deliberately ludicrous way he describes his umpteen couplings:

‘Were you ever a gym teacher?’ I asked her.
‘Shut up and concentrate,’ she said, rolling me around like a lump of puff pastry. (p.34)

Also played for laughs is the conceit that Oswald is subject to vivid hallucinations while he is on the job – thus the second time he swives the nubile 19-year-old daughter of his hosts in Paris, we are treated to an extended and deliberately comic comparison of the whole thing to a medieval tournament, in which he appears as a knight in armour with an unusually long, firm lance and goes about his business to the enthusiastic cheers of the crowd – ‘Thrust away, Sir Oswald! Thrust away!’ (p.27)

There is also a good deal of humour at the expense of national stereotypes, especially in the dinner he gets invited to at the British Ambassador’s residence in Paris, attended by ambassadors from Germany, Russia, Japan, Peru, Bulgaria and so on, each a lively cartoon version of their national stereotype from the short, ultra-polite Japanese to the gruff German with his thick accent. It is to this assembly of bemedalled men that Oswald first explains the nature of the powerful aphrodisiac he has discovered.

The little Mexican clapped his hands together hard and cried out, ‘That is exactly how I wish to go when I die! From too much women!’
‘From too much goats and donkeys iss more likely in Mexico,’ the German ambassador snorted. (p.43)

When we are told (a bit later on) that a sexy young woman student he embroils in his schemes is named Yasmin Howcomely (p.90) we remember that Dahl worked on two movie adaptations of Ian Fleming novels – You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (the female lead of which is named Truly Scrumptious). And these connections made me see the gruff and candid German ambassador in this scene being played by the fabulous Gert Fröbe, who plays Goldfinger in the film of the same name, and the cartoon dictator, Baron Bomburst, in Chitty Chitty

Anyway, Oswald manages to enchant these rich VIPs with visions of the staying power afforded by his aphrodisiac pills and (very cannily) gives them each a free sample presented on a puff of cotton wool in a stylish little jewellery box. Soon they are coming back for more and he sells them for an outrageous amount (1,000 Francs) to the national ambassadors and, by word of mouth, to their fellow countrymen who come flocking.

So that’s how wicked Uncle Oswald made his first fortune.

2. The freezing sperm scam (1919)

The Great War comes, Oswald serves his country and ends the war as a captain with a Military Cross. He goes up to Cambridge and studies Chemistry with a brilliant if rather shabby tutor, A.R. Woresley, whose moustache is coloured yellow by his pipe.

One evening, over a fine bottle of port (Oswald who is, as you might expect, a confident connoisseur of wines and spirits) Woresley tells him a cock and bull story about how he has carried out extensive experiments and perfected a method for freezing sperm, specifically bull sperm.

This is the pretext for a grotesque story about the tutor and his brother stealing the sperm of the prize bull of his brothers neighbouring farm, by taking along an in-heat cow one night, smuggling it into the field with the bull and, as the bull gets and erection and goes to cover the cow, instead manhandling his pizzle into a fake rubber cow vagina, which then captures the bull’s ejaculate, with the tutor then getting onto his pushbike to wobble off along country lanes carrying a bag with a fake cow vagina full of bull semen back to the lab they’ve rigged up at his brother’s farm complete with liquid nitrogen to freeze the semen.

(In case it wasn’t obvious before, this story makes you realise the book is not intended as pornography, even soft pornography, but is instead a Rabelaisian satire on the whole preposterous subject of sex and its indignities and absurdities.)

Student Oswald goes home and lies in bed at night pondering the implications of his tutor’s experiment and realising… there is a fortune to be made selling the frozen semen of Great Men and Geniuses to women who want to be the mothers of the children of Great Men.

He recruits a lively young filly from Girton – the half-Persian Yasmin Howcomely mentioned above – who is sex incarnate.

The plan is for her to seduce the great and the good, writers and discoverers and scientists, with a sideline in the kings of Europe – slipping them each a dose of beetle powder, then clapping a sturdy rubber johnny over their manhoods as they attain rutting speed, in which the precious spermatazoa can be collected, before she makes her excuses and dashes back to Uncle Oswald who’ll be somewhere with the liquid nitrogen ready to pack and store the precious fluid.

What could possibly go wrong with such a hare-brained scheme?

The tutor thinks it can’t possibly work, at which point Oswald – who loves a challenge – makes Woresley his first conquest, sending Yasmin to him, getting him to sign a form for her (supposed) autograph book, and then to eat a chocolate with the fateful beetle powder in it. From his concealed position Oswald watches while stuffy, staid old Woresely is transformed into a virile stud and ravishes young Yasmin, who manages to collect a rubber johnny full of his sperm. Next day Oswald brandishes a container of the sperm and his signature in the tutor’s face. QED. Theory proved.

So they form a team and draw up a hit list of the Great Men of the age (an interesting list in itself). When it comes to the royals, Oswald reveals that he has faked introductory letters from King George V to all the crowned heads of Europe introducing Yasmin as an aristocratic lady in need of a private audience about a sensitive matter.

Imagine a particularly bawdy, not to say crude pantomime, and you have the spirit of the thing. The whole world of the arts and sciences is reviewed not in terms of achievement, but their potential spunk donations. The only snag is that the list of Great Men to be despunked includes some rather elderly ones that they worry might have a heart attack during the process.

‘Now see here, Cornelius,’ A.R. Woresley said. ‘I won’t be a party to the murder of Mr Renoir or Mr Manet. I don’t want blood on my hands.’
‘You’ll have a lot of valuable sperm on your hands and that’s all,’ I said. ‘Leave it to us.’ (p.115)

Woresley will remain Cambridge, doing his day job but also setting up the permanent sperm bank, while Oswald and Howcomely tour Europe collecting the sperm of Great Men!

So they set off on a grand tour of Europe and the first king to be milked is King Alfonso of Spain who, we discover (in this scandalous fiction at any rate), has a clockwork sofa which moves up and down and so does all the hard work for him while he remains more or less motionless ‘as befits a king’. Yasmin bounces out of the palace a few hours later with a johnny full of royal sperm and Oswald motors her back to the hotel where he’s set up a small lab to mix it with preservative, and then freeze it in liquid nitrogen.

And that sets the pattern for the following fifty or so pages. Next up is 76-year-old Renoir who is confined to a wheelchair, but still manages to deliver the goods and who leaves Yasmin in raptures about his greatness.

Followed by: Monet, Stravinsky, Picasso, Matisse, Proust (for whom Yasmin dresses like and pretends to be a boy, the seduction treated like a Whitehall farce), Nijinsky, Joyce, and then Puccini in his Italian villa – in the moonlight by the lake where Oswald prepares Yasmin by teaching her one of the maestro’s favourite arias. Thus when she starts singing it outside his window, Puccini is smitten, and swiftly has his way with her, but is charming and amusing and courteous.

Compare and contrast with Sigmund Freud, who admits this troubled young lady to his consulting rooms who promptly gives him a chocolate (laced with the aphrodisiac), the whole encounter a broad satire on Freud (who Dahl obviously despises).

And so on. It might have seemed a funny idea at the time but this litany of encounters with famous men soon pales, not least because the pattern is the same time – Yasmin introduces herself, offers them a chocolate spiked with beetle dust and precisely 9 minutes later they are stricken with untamable lust, she pops a rubber johnny over their member, then lets herself be ravished, then finds some way to extricate herself (sometimes being forced to use a hatpin to jolt the man off her) before rushing outside to hand the johnny full of Great Man sperm over to Oswald, who motors them both back to his hotel room where he mixes it with a preservative, secretes it into tooth-pick thin straws (a convenient way of dividing up the sperm), then pops these into the cabinet of liquid nitrogen.

In Berlin they harvest Albert Einstein – the only one of the victims to smell a rat – and then worthy-but-dull Thomas Mann, before returning to Cambridge to deposit the straws of frozen semen at the master vat kept by Dr Woresley. And then an English tour taking in Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and an extended passage satirising pompous, opinionated, dray-as-dust vegetarian George Bernard Shaw.

I suppose a lot of the pleasure of the book is meant to come from a) the outrageousness of the central premise, compounded by b) satirical portraits of various great men, plus c) the comic vulgarity of the actual sexual descriptions, which often sound like a grown-up children’s story. Of the encounter with George Bernard Shaw:

‘There’s only one way when they get violent,’ Yasmin said. ‘I grabbed hold of his snozzberry and hung on to it like grim death and gave it a twist or two to make him hold still.’
‘Ow.’
‘Very effective.’
‘I’ll bet it is.’
‘You can lead them around anywhere you want like that.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘It’s like putting a twitch on a horse.’ (p.182)

In the book’s closing passages Oswald and Yasmin embark on another European tour, milking the kings of Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Denmark, Sweden but are finally brought up short with the king of Norway (the country of Dahl’s parents). For here Yasmin makes her first mistake and is merrily badmouthing the King of England and even pointing out the queen’s lovers, all on the basis that the beetle powder will kick in and transform the king when… the beetle powder kicks in on her. She has taken the wrong chocolate! She tries to jump on king Haakon and ravish him but he has his guard throw her out, where she reports all to Oswald and they decide to make a quick getaway to Sweden and so back to Cambridge.

And here the partnership falls apart. Yasmin has had enough, and who can blame her. Oswald wants to press on to America – Henry Ford, Edison, Alexander Graham Bell – but Yasmin insists on a month long break and says she’s going to stay with an uncle in Scotland.

They agree to reconvene in a month’s time and Oswald buys tickets on the Mauretania to sail to the States. Then he goes on a massive bender in London, bedding a different member of the aristocracy every night. Until a terrible day. He is dallying in the bath with a duchess who decides she’s had enough and wants to go home. Oswald is unwisely rude to her and she –having got out the bath, dried and got dressed – contrives to lean over the bath and play with his parts while secretly removing the bath plug. Result: there is a sudden tremendous suction of water and Oswald’s goolies are sucked down the hole. His screams of agony can be heard all across Mayfair! Which leads him to warn us against aristocratic women or, as he puts it in a long-cherished motto:

Ladies with titles
Will go for your vitals

It takes weeks to recover and he is still hobbling with swollen privates when he arrives back in Cambridge at old Woresley’s house to discover a note pinned to the door. They’ve scarpered! Yasmin has married Worsely! And they’ve done a bunk with all the Great Men sperm. All except Proust that is, who Yasmin didn’t take to at all.

Oswald goes mad and trashes Woresley’s house, demolishing every single piece of furniture. Then conceives his final plan. On the last page of the book he tells us how he finally made his fortune. He goes back out to Sudan and buys up the entire area where the rare Blister beetle breeds, sets up plantations with native labour and builds a refining factory in Khartoum. He establishes secret sales operations in the world’s leading cities (New York, London, Paris etc)

There is some last-minute throwaway satire on generals, for Oswald discovers that retired generals are his best sales agents. Why? Because there are retired generals in every country; they are efficient; they are unscrupulous; they are brave; they have little regard for human life; and they are not intelligent enough to cheat him.

If you add this to the page or so satirising aristocratic ladies a few pages earlier, it confirms your sense that, although the theme of the book is sex, its real purpose is to be a scattergun, blunderbuss satire against all respectable values, people and institutions.

Kings, queens, aristocrats, inventors, Oxbridge dons, men and women – all come in for Uncle Oswald’s robust, take-no-prisoners attitude. It is a bracing and hilarious read and like many an older satire, if the narrative structure, if the ‘plot’, feels patched together and made up as he goes along, that, too, is part of the satirical intent.

If the reader was expecting anything remotely serious or dignified or carefully planned, then the joke is on us, too.

Credit

My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl was published by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1979. All references are to the 1980 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 24, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Comedy, Novel

Posted by Simon on May 24, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/24/my-uncle-oswald-roald-dahl/

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Hedging in Kingsley Amis

Introduction to hedging

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Aspects of hedging

Tense and aspect

Modal expressions

Vague language

Verbs

Stance adverbs

Fine discriminations

Unnecessary distinctions

Ors

Conclusions

Is hedging used to be polite… or rude?

Subtle discriminations… or no discriminations

Does hedging suggest inebriation?

Or is it pure mannerism?

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The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford (2006)

Executive summary

Longer synopsis

Notable factoids

Les Alyscamps

Two portraits of Mrs Roulin

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Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence by Martin Bailey

Lautrec’s van Gogh

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Collected Short Stories by E.M. Forster

The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911)

The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928)

1. The Story of a Panic (25 pages)

Comments

2. The Other Side of the Hedge (7 pages)

Thoughts

3. The Celestial Omnibus (18 pages)

4. Other Kingdom (27 pages)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Comments

5. The Curate’s Friend (9 pages)

Comment

6. The Road from Colonus (14 pages)

Part 1

Part 2

7. The Machine Stops (38 pages)

8. The Point of It (11 pages)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

9. Mr Andrews (5 pages)

10. Co-ordination (8 pages)

11. The Story of the Siren (9 pages)

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12. The Eternal Moment (35 pages)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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Thoughts

Wisdom sayings

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The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett (1902)

Plot summary

In Ostend

Back in London

Back in Ostend