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Ulysses by James Joyce: Wandering Rocks

—Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried,
(Stephen Dedalus’s father Simon is given many vivid curses throughout the book, this one is addressed to the man ringing his handbell outside Dillons auction house while Simon’s having an argument with his small daughter, Dilly)

Here’s a quick reminder of the chapter numbers and names in James Joyce’s epic modernist novel, ‘Ulysses’. Pretty much all discussion of the book needs to reference them. But note: none of the Greek chapter titles are indicated in the actual text of ‘Ulysses’; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel and they have been used by critics and commentators, including me, ever since, but none of them actually appear in hard copies or online versions of the text.

Part 1. Telemachiad or the odyssey of Telemachus

  1. Telemachus
  2. Nestor
  3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

  1. Calypso
  2. Lotus Eaters
  3. Hades
  4. Aeolus
  5. Lestrygonians
  6. Scylla and Charybdis
  7. Wandering Rocks
  8. Sirens
  9. Cyclops
  10. Nausicaa
  11. Oxen of the Sun
  12. Circe

Part 3. Nostos or Return

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Homeric parallel

Most of the other chapters in ‘Ulysses’ have a central figure and a central narrative but ‘Wandering rocks’ is an exception to this rule.

Chapter ten marks the mid-point of this 18-chapter novel and so is a sort of interlude or resting point. Joyce had the bright idea of basing it on the wandering rocks episode in Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. In the poem the Planctae (Greek for ‘wanderers’) were a group of rocks which constantly moved about, stirring up the sea and smashing any ship which tried to navigate between them, leaving only floating timber and flames. They are sometimes confused with the Symplegades or clashing rocks.

As Odysseus prepares to depart from the witch Circe, she warns him that the wandering rocks have only once been successfully navigated, by Jason and his argonauts. The rocks are one of only two routes onwards to Ithaca, the other route going by Scylla and Charybdis. Jason chooses to sail through the rocks, Odysseus avoids them and goes the Scylla and Charybdis route.

Joyce’s adaptation

Joyce’s adaptation of the episode is very characteristic in that he takes what he needs and simply abandons whatever doesn’t fit. Thus he uses the idea of wandering as the basis of 18 short vignettes, each about a different Dublin character, as they potter about central Dublin bumping into each other, seeing each other, thinking about each other, including three of the main protagonists, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan (section 5), Stephen Dedalus (section 6) and Leopold Bloom (section 10). So ‘wandering’ yes, but as to the danger part of the Greek legend Joyce just ignores it. There’s no clashing involved, there’s no danger anywhere. Bloom/Odysseus is never threatened. No-one is getting crushed.

Instead the chapter is like the novel in miniature. It even contains 18 episodes to match the novel’s 18 chapters (plus a coda, 19 sections in all).

The narrative’s clever interlocking of characters and incidents is widely admired. This is increased by the way each vignette contains references or entire paragraphs referring to incidents taking place in other vignettes, in other parts of the city, at the same moment. Critics call these sudden eruptions of another stories into each vignette, often in the form of one unexplained sentence, ‘interpolations’.

Many readers and critics have thought of this as a cinematic technique which builds up to give a sort of panoramic overview of an entire city at the time it is set, the hour from just before 3pm till a little after 4pm.

I have a major reservation about this, and ‘Ulysses’ as a whole, which I’ll explain at the end of this review.

Church and state

The chapter, like many before it, takes as a key foundation the binary of church and state. Thus it opens with a friendly priest walking through the streets of Dublin and bumping into various acquaintances, before popping up in the background of subsequent vignettes; while in the second half we catch steadily more glimpses of the progress of the Viceroy of Dublin riding in his carriage to open a bazaar, glimpses which lead up to its full presentation in the 18th and final vignette.

So the narrative is topped and tailed by a representative each of Church and of State, types which lay down a kind of conceptual frame of the chapter, which is then fleshed out by the appearances of the 20 or 30 other characters.

Mocked

And they are both mocked, gently but steadily. With Father Conmee Joyce does it with the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth squeaky cleanness of Conmee’s conversation:

Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed.

With the Viceroy, the mockery is implicit in the generally indifferent reaction to his passing-by of the various Dubliners. The job is largely done without resorting to large-scale parody (unlike the chapters which follow).

Material rebukes

The final response to the Viceroy in the chapter is the Italian music teacher Almidano Artifoni going into his house and, in effect, turning the bum of his trousers to the august carriage as it trots by.

Father Conmee receives a more obvious rebuke to his values and worldview when he is suddenly confronted by a couple stumbling out of some bushes, flushed because they’ve just had sex. Sex, in comedies, especially farces – or more precisely all the fussing and fretting surrounding it – is the great puncturer of pompousness and pretension.

Heart

If you visualise Dublin as a heart, as the first headline in ‘Aeolus’ suggests:

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

Then the 30 or so characters we meet in this chapter can be thought of as blood corpuscles circulating round it and bumping into each other.

Binaries

Both our protagonists are looking at books, according to their intellectual levels: Bloom is buying a popular romance, Sweets of Sin, for Molly; Stephen is looking through Abbot Peter Salanka’s book of charms and spells, specifically ones designed to attract a woman’s love. Love and sex.

Bloom’s anxiety

You can’t understand this chapter or ‘Ulysses’ as a whole, unless you realise that for the whole long day which it describes its central character, Leopold Bloom, is traumatised by the fact that he knows that his voluptuous wife, Molly, is preparing herself to have sex with the flash man-about-town and concert promoter Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan. Somehow (it’s really not made clear) he knows Blazes’ visit to his house is timed for 4pm, so for all the chapters leading up to then, he is in agony of anticipation, at around that time he is crushed by humiliation, and for the hours afterward, he is haunted by the fact the deed has been done.

We see Boylan at his flashy flirtatious best, in section 5. We see Bloom feeling sorry for himself in section 10.

Summary

Section 1: Father Conmee heads north

We first met Father John Conmee as the symapathetic rector of Clongowes Wood College who young Stephen appealed to after he was unjustly pandybatted by sadistic Father Dolan. Here we find him strolling through Dublin, mild and kind. He thinks about Martin Cunningham’s letter requesting help in securing a school place for the late Paddy Dignam’s son, ‘oblige him if possible’; he see a one-legged sailor begging, he stops and talks to the wife of Mr David Sheehy MP who is away in Westminster; thinks of fellow Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan’s cockney accent; he bumps into three schoolboys from Belvedere school and asks one to post a letter in the letterbox across the road; he sees the flamboyantly dressed dancing master Denis Maginni; he is bowed to by stately Mrs M’Guinness whose posh appearance belies the fact that she runs a pawn shop (mentioned again in section 4).

He passes a closed-up free church and laments the ignorance of protestants; a bunch of Christian brother schoolboys raise their caps to him; he walks past a grocer’s and a tobacconist’s, noting the newsboard about a disaster in New York (a real life disaster: the General Slocum steamship fire, 15 June 1904, the day before the events of the novel, in which over 1,000 people, mostly women and children, died); past Daniel Bergin’s publichouse, past H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook (Corny who will play an important role at the end of ‘Circe’ 10 hours later).

He salutes a policeman then passes a butcher’s shop. In the canal he sees a turfbarge and the bargee resting and smoking. He catches an outward bound tram because he doesn’t like walking through the dingy neighbourhood of Mud Island. He regards the other passengers. An older woman who forgets to get off at her stop reminds him of the poor of his parish, worn down by cares, always worrying.

A poster of a blackface minstrel triggers thoughts about Christian missions to Africa. He thinks of the millions of men and women who die without ever hearing the Word of God, and mildly and superficially thinks it a ‘waste’; he thinks about a book on the subject by the Belgian Jesuit Auguste Castelein SJ, ‘The Number of the Elect’.

He alights at Malahide Road whose name triggers thoughts of aristocratic families and glorious old days when priests like himself held real power. He’s written a book about it, Old Times in the Barony. He thinks about Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere, who was accused of adultery with her husband’s brother (adultery is a central theme of the novel, as of so many novels: compare Stephen’s joke about Admiral Nelson being the one-handled adulterer, or the fate of Charles Stewart Parnell, on one level the political tragedy of a nation, on another yet another of the book’s examples of adultery).

Which leads into reminiscences about his time as rector of Clongowes Wood College, reading his holy books and looking up at the calm clouds, listening to the boys playing. He realises he has forgotten to read one of the holy offices at the correct time, and so he pulls out his breviary and is reading the psalm of the day as he walks when, out of bushes beside the road, emerge a young man and woman, flushed after a roll in the hay. Later in the novel they are revealed to be Stephen’s friend Vincent Lynch and a girl called Kitty. Father Conmee blesses them then returns to his reading about sin. It’s important to note the sentence:

The young woman abruptly bent and with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

Note this phrase, which will recur later, in section 8.

Section 2: Corny Kelleher in the funeral directors’

Father Conmee ‘passed H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay’. Now we join Corny Kelleher a few minutes later as he examines a new coffin, before strolling over to the streetdoor and looking out (just as Father Conmee is getting into the tram).

A policeman ambles up and they pass a cryptic exchange. This tends to confirm gossip in earlier chapters that Corny has an ‘in’ with the police i.e. is some kind of informant to the force which are unpopular enforcers of British colonial rule.

Short though it is, this vignette contains an ‘interpolation’, the intrusion of a sentence which seems to come from another section, thus:

Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin.

Only in the next section will we discover that the white arm belongs to Molly Bloom throwing a penny to a passing beggar.

Section 3: The one-legged sailor begs

A handicapped veteran of the British Navy (seen and blessed by Father Conmee in section 1) stumps the streets, grunting snippets of a patriotic song. He grunts towards Larry O’Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, swings past Katey and Boody Dedalus, a stout lady drops a coin in his cap, two barefoot urchins chewing ‘long liquorice laces’ stare at his stump, ‘a plump bare generous arm’ throws a coin from a window in Eccles Street onto the pavement and an urchin picks it up and puts it in the beggar’s cap.

The text doesn’t specifically tell us it’s number 7 Eccles Street, so it’s left to us to work out that it’s Molly Bloom’s arm. We are told that in a window is a card advertising ‘Unfurnished Apartments’ for rent in their home, as the Blooms try to make money now their daughter Milly has left home.

Section 4: The Dedalus sisters are destitute

Stephen’s sisters, Katey and Boody Dedalus return home from school, entering the kitchen where sister Maggy who is cleaning shirts in a pot of boiling. They are really destitute and have just tried to pawn Stephen’s books at M’Guinness’s shop (the same stately Mrs M’Guinness that bowed to Father Conmee in the opening section).

They only have anything to eat (pea soup) thanks to the charity of Sister Mary Patrick. When Maggy tells them another sistr, Dilly, has gone to meet their father, Boody blasphemously says ‘our father who art not in heaven’ and Maggy chastises her.

The section ends with another interpolation as we cut away to a shot of the handed-out sheet of paper given to Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’ which he crumpled up and threw in the river, continuing its passage under Loopline bridge.

Probably the crumpling and wrecking of the sheet of paper is a diminished, mock heroic parody of the action of the crushing rocks.

Section 5: Blazes Boylan flirts with a shopgirl

Considering that Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan’s having sex with Bloom’s wife, Molly, is the central event in the novel, it’s striking that we see and hear so little of him throughout. Surprisingly, this brief vignette is our longest moment in his presence.

He is shopping in Thornton’s fruit and flower shop on Grafton Street, where he buys a bottle and a jar to be placed in a basket, topped with fruit (plump pears and peaches), to be sent in advance to Molly. He smells other ripe fruit and veg while outside the window the five sandwichboard men advertising HELYS that Bloom first saw in ‘Lestrygonians’ file past.

The shopgirl asks for the address the basket is to be sent to then tots up the bill while Boylan looks ‘into the cut of her blouse’ and thinks ‘a young pullet’.

As with most of the sections, there is a brief ‘interpolation’, an out-of-context sentence describing ‘A darkbacked figure under Merchants’ arch scanned books on the hawker’s cart.’ You’d never know without the commentators to help you that this is Bloom scanning second-hand books to find some romance novel for Molly to read.

Inserting a sentence about Bloom searching for second-hand fictional descriptions of seduction, while his rival, Boylan, is going about the practical mechanics of real-life seduction, is full of ironies.

The section ends with Boylan asking if he can make a phone call (see section 7).

Section 6: Stephen and Artifoni the music teacher

Stephen encounters his Italian voice instructor, Almidano Artifoni. While two tramcars full of tourists trundle past, Artifoni tells Stephen his voice would be a good source of income for him. True to his character as The Refuser, Stephen demurs. Another tram unloads soldiers who are members of a Highland regimental band who are heading through the gates of Trinity College. The pair shake hands but then Artifoni realises the conversation has caused him to miss his tram which he forlornly trots after.

Section 7: Miss Dunne

Miss Dunne is Blazes Boylan’s secretary. We find her sitting in her office where (like Molly) she has been reading a library copy of Wilkie Collins’s classic, ‘The Woman in White’ while the boss is away. It’s a bit too mysterious for her and she thinks she’ll swap it for something easier by Mary Cecil Haye.

She inserts a piece of paper into the typewriter and types out the date. This is the only direct reference to the famous date of the novel, 16 June 1904.

The five Hely’s sandwichboard men spelling HELY’S, seen by Boylan from the fruit shop, pass by, turn round and return again.

She stares at a poster of Marie Kendall. This was a real-life English music hall singer and comedian and the poster was for a real-life performance at Dan Lowry’s music hall in Dublin on June 16, 1904.

Miss Dunne thinks about her evening plans, a man who has caught her attention, and a skirt she wishes she could buy, thinking how attractive it made her friend Susy Nagle to ‘Shannon and all the boatclub swells’.

Boylan calls (the phone call we saw him asking the shopgirl if he could make in section 5). We hear her end of the conversation as she instructs her to book travel for two to Belfast and Liverpool (for Molly and himself during the upcoming concert tour), and he gives her permission to leave work at 6:15.

Then she tells Boylan that Lenehan has been looking for him and will be at the Ormond Hotel Bar at 4. (We will see Boylan meet Lenehan there, among other notable characters convene, in the next episode, ‘Sirens’).

Section 8: Ned Lambert, Reverend Love and J. J. O’Molloy

I was hopelessly at sea with this section until I read the commentaries. It takes place in the last remaining room of a 10th century abbey which now serves as a seed and grain warehouse where Ned Lambert works. (We met Lambert earlier at Dignam’s funeral in ‘Hades’ and reading out the overblown patriotic speech by Dan Dawson in the newspaper offices in ‘Aeolus’).

Ned is showing the building to a vicar named Hugh C. Love who is writing a book about the Fitzgeralds. St. Mary’s Abbey is relevant to Love’s research because it was here that Lord Thomas Fitzgerald (nicknamed ‘Silken Thomas’) proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534.

What makes it confusing is that Ned is in the middle of showing Love this when his pal, the lawyer J. J. O’Molloy, enters the dark room, lighting a match to find his way. Ned suggests to the reverend a couple of places where he can get good angles for a photograph.

It’s further complicated because the scene contains not one but two one-sentence interpolations. Suddenly:

From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.

We don’t know it yet but this is John Howard Parnell, brother to the late politician Charles Stuart Parnell, who we will meet playing chess in section 16.

The reverend thanks Ned and departs, and New and J. J. exit the warehouse into the bustling forecourt:

With J. J. O’Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary’s abbey where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut meal, O’Connor, Wexford.

Then, with just as little warning, the second interposition:

The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

If you recall, this phrase applies to the young woman emerging from the bushes after a roll in the hay with Vincent Lynch, as the come face to face with Father Conmee. The implication being that that is happening at this exact moment in another part of Dublin.

Back to Ned who realises he forgot to tell the clergyman a good joke:

—I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? I’m bloody sorry I did it, says he, but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was inside.

Ned confidently slaps a passing horse on the haunches then turns to J. J. who has come to scrounge money off him, but makes him wait a second while he loudly sneezes.

—Well, Jack. What is it? What’s the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.
With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an instant, sneezed loudly.
—Chow! he said. Blast you!
—The dust from those sacks, J. J. O’Molloy said politely.

But Ned says it’s that he caught a cold last night and it didn’t help hanging round at Paddy Dignam’s funeral this morning, holding up his hankie ready to sneeze again.

Once all this is explained to you, it’s easy, really easy. But it’s devilish hard to make sense of if you try to read and puzzle it out by yourself.

Section 9: Tom Rochford’s Invention, then Lenehan and M’Coy

Tom Rochford is explaining his invention for indicating which act is currently on stage in a vaudeville act to his mates, Nosey Flynn, Lenehan and M’Coy. Lenehan is impressed a promises to pitch it to Blazes Boylan who we know, from section 7 is meeting in the Ormond Hotel at 4pm, because Boylan is, it’s sometimes easy to forget, a successful music concert producer.

M’Coy and Lenehan leave together, passing Dan Lowry’s music hall displaying a poster for Marie Kendall the singer, the same poster we saw Miss Dunne staring at.

As they walk on Lenehan tells the story of how Rochford rescued a man stuck in a drainage hole. M’Coy waits outside Lynam’s while Lenehan nips in to get the final odds on Sceptre, the horse he backed in the Ascot Gold Cup. While waiting in the street, M’Coy nudges a banana peel into the gutter lest someone slip on it.

This simple narrative is then interrupted by not one, or two but three distinct ‘interpolations’. First a sentence showing the cavalcade of the Viceroy commencing its journey across the city.

Lenehan emerges and announces his horse was evens. They walk on through Merchants arch and spy ‘a darkbacked figure scanning books on the hawker’s cart’ which they both identify as Bloom. M’Coy describes a fine book Bloom bought for 2 bob whose fancy plates alone were worth more than that. Then, suddenly, the second interpolation:

Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.

This refers to the eldest of recently deceased paddy Dignam’s five children. Lenehan launches in on a long story about something that happened at the annual dinner at Glencree reformatory but he’s barely got going before there’s another interpolation:

A card Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street.

This is Bloom’s house and, since he’s out and about, it must be Molly who replaces the card in the window, the card we’d seen in place when she threw a coin to the beggar in section 3.

Lenehan continues with his story about how everyone got hammered at this reformatory dinner and came home in the early hours in a horse-drawn taxi cab. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one seat and on the seat opposite Lenehan sitting next to Molly. She’s had a skinful and at every jolt of the cab he was pressed up against her ample bosom.

Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
—I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
—The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She’s a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callinan, sure that’s only what you might call a pinprick. By God, he wasn’t far wide of the mark.
Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.

Lenehan can’t know it but much, much later Molly will give her side of this event in the long monologue which makes up chapter 18 in which she describes Lenehan as a creep.

To some extent, whether you really like ‘Ulysses’ or not depends on whether you find this kind of blatant crudity and vulgarity funny or not. I do, and I do. But it’s more subtle than that because M’Coy, a married man himself, recoils a bit at the tale and Lenehan notices it. He backtracks and in an attempt to save face changes tack to praise Bloom.

—He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or garden… you know… There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.

Is that not how human interactions often are? Complex, error-strewn, embarrassing, miscalculating, self-correcting?

Section 10: Mr. Bloom

Having caught two glimpses of him through the eyes of other characters, we finally come to Leopold Bloom browsing a second-hand book stall. In chapter 4 Molly asked him to get her a new book to read. He looks at some saucy ones but the one which triggers his thoughts is Aristotle’s Masterpiece with its anatomical images of foetuses curled up in the womb:

Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.

The last name referring to Mina Purefoy who Josie Breen told him is in maternity hospital having a prolonged and difficult delivery of her baby (more of that in chapter 14, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, which is set in the same maternity hospital and during which Mina finally has her baby.) This also has its ‘interpolations’. In among Bloom’s book browsing, suddenly the sentence:

On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

which is clearly written in the affected style in which Mr Maginni regards himself.

Back to Bloom at the bookstall, assessing whether books are suitable for Molly’s erotic tastes. He opens ‘Sweets of Sin’ and reads a few extracts at random, which describe a married woman dolling herself up for her exotic lover, Raoul. Sounds like the right kind of thing. And repeats the theme of adultery which, as we know, is central to ‘Ulysses’.

Bloom starts to get a little worked up, in a heady mix of the text’s soft porn cliches mixed with his own earthier knowledge of the stinks and mess of sex, all of which is interrupted by another interpolation:

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.

It would be overdoing it to say that everything is connected to everything else, but this is clearly Joyce giving the impression of an overview of the city, a gesture towards all the things taking place at the same time in different locations.

Back in the shop the phlegmy old owner hawks and gobs on the floor, then wipes it with his boot. This is Joyce rubbing into his reader’s middle-class faces the unforgiving materiality of human existence. This is what it is.

It ends on a mildly comic note as the bookseller approves Bloom’s choice:

The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.
—Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.

We need to take note of this title, Sweets of Sin, as it will recur again and again through the rest of the book, as a mocking title for Boylan’s tupping of Molly, but all other instances of adultery as well.

Section 11: Dilly and Simon Dedalus

The lacquey outside Dillon’s auction rooms shakes his handbell.

The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:
—Barang!

Not the first and not the last time Joyce transcribes the sound of an inanimate object. Also, this had appeared as an unexplained interpolation back in section 4.

Young Dilly Dedalus, one of Stephen’s 9 or so younger siblings, is waiting outside the auction rooms for her dad to arrive. Bloom saw here there back at the start of ‘Lestrygonians’. Simon has been drinking with the newspapermen in The Oval, just up O’Connell Street and around the corner from Dillon’s. Ashamed of keeping her waiting, like many a parent he goes on the offensive telling her off for her bad posture. When he imitates bad posture, Dilly is embarrassed and tells him everyone is looking.

He gives her a shilling but, hardened, she demands more and he sheepishly hands over a few pennies, telling her to buy a milk or a bun. The family really is destitute as Simon asks his daughter what she wants him to do, go along Connor Street scouring the gutter for stray coins.

Ignored by everyone the Viceregal procession passes by.

There are the following interpolations:

Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.

This is based on a report of a real-life half-mile bicycle handicap race that took place in Dublin on this day and at this time, as reported in the Evening Telegraph for 16 June 1904. The next one is:

Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James’s street.

This is explained or followed up in the very next section.

Section 12: Tom Kernan

We met Tom Kernan in the funeral scene in chapter 6. In fact we met him way back in Dubliners, in the short story Grace where his friends were trying to cure his alcoholism.

Here we see him emerging from a business meeting, running over the conversation he’s just had in a pub with the publican Mr Crimmins about the shocking tragedy at New York, the explosion of the Slocombe steamship with over 1,000 killed.

Kernan stops to admire himself in the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser, thinking his secondhand coat was well worth half a sovereign. He admires his grizzled moustache, he looks like an officer back from India. He notes the impressed looks he’s drawn from a few important people.

In the kind of stylistic innovation which so many people copied, Kernan is dazzled by the reflection of sunlight off a passing car:

Is that Ned Lambert’s brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He’s as like it as damn it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash like that. Damn like him.

He passes the site where the Irish nationalist Robert Emmet (1778–1803) was executed by the British after failing to overthrow British rule in the failed 1803 Dublin rising, which triggers pondering whether or not Emmet was buried at Glasnevin.

He see a carriage without a horse tied up outside the Dublin Distillers Company’s stores at the same moment, the text tells us, as poor mad Denis Breen with his legal books, tired of waiting at the offices of lawyer John Henry Menton’s office, is leading his wife over O’Connell bridge, heading towards another lawyer’s office in his obsessive quest to get justice for being sent the anonymous postcard reading U.P. up.

We are given unusually intimate access to Kernan’s stream of consciousness which is a mashup of nationalist heroes and poems and risings and gambling and so on, very reminiscent of the half-educated ramblings of Bloom.

Interpolations:

  • Simon Dedalus greets Father Cowley
  • next stage of the downriver journey of the crumpled-up flyer Bloom threw into the Liffey in ‘Lestrygonians’ which is, as I suggested, a mocking reference to the clashing rocks
  • the Dennis Breen scene

Kernan is pro-Britain as we learn when the Viceregal Cavalcade jingles past the end of the road and he is just a fraction too late to see it, damn!

Section 13: Stephen and Dilly Dedalus

Stephen’s section is, predictably, the most impenetrable one, opening with seven paragraphs so cryptic and oblique as to be impenetrable without commentary and annotation.

This tells us that they are the thoughts of an over-educated man peering through a series of shops windows at various wares. The prose emerges into something like lucidity when he stops at a second-hand book cart (four for sixpence) wondering whether he’ll find his schoolbooks which his family have pawned to buy food. They really are abjectly poor.

Stephen pauses over ‘Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter Salanka’. Unexpectedly he is spoken to by one of his sisters, Dilly, suddenly appearing by his side. He remembers her face as she crouched over the fire they’d made from useless boots. She shows him a French primer she’s just bought (with one of the pennies their dad gave her back in section 11) and he recognises his own urge to learn in her, but without the advantages of a private education which he enjoyed.

Stephen sees her utter poverty, of life and hope and is fraught with misery. But, as usual, he rejects and fights off any feeling, any temptation to become involved. His inner cry of Misery! Misery! is, on one level, for me, the truest thing in the entire book.

There’s an interpolation. In the middle of Stephen’s thoughts, suddenly a sentence describing:

Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.

Section 14: Simon Dedalus, Father Bob Cowley and Ben Dollard

We saw Simon Dedalus greet Father Cowley as in interpolation in section 12. Father Cowley says he’s barricaded into his house by two men because he owes money to the shark Reuben J. Dodd (seen and cursed by the men in the funeral carriage back in chapter 6, ‘Hades’) who has set two men outside Cowley’s house to collect the debt.

Cowley has asked a friend, Ben Dollard, to ask ‘long John’ Fanning, a subsheriff, to intervene. Just then Simon spots the very same Ben crossing a bridge towards them.

—There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.

Ben Dollard ambles over to them scratching his bum, they all hello each other, while Simon is critical of Ben’s outfit, while Ben defends it. By now the reader is getting used to the one-sentence interpolations. In the middle of these three’s conversation, the text cuts away for a moment to the madman Bloom pointed out to Josie Breen in chapter 8:

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring, glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.

He will reappear in section 17. Meanwhile, Cowley asks after Ben’s famous bass voice and Ben emits a low note for them to admire. There’s another interpolation (another character walking somewhere else):

The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint Mary’s abbey past James and Charles Kennedy’s, rectifiers, attended by Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of hurdles.

Ben announces he’s been to see the lawyer John Henry Menton about helping Father Cowley. Cowley explains that he owes rent to his landlord (who happens to be the Reverend Love we have just seen in the interpolation) and Ben says this changes things, because Love’s claim takes priority over Dodd’s. Or as Ben colourfully puts it:

—You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that writ where Jacko put the nuts.

Section 15: Martin Cunningham, Mr Power and John Wyse Nolan

Cunningham, Power and Nolan are walking. Cunningham has been working to make financial and other arrangements on behalf of the Dignam family. He tells the others he’s asked Father Conmee for help placing one of the Dignam boys in school, and we know from section 1 that Conmee intends to help.

John Wyse Nolan, looking at the ledger, notes that Bloom has put his name down for 5 shillings and Cunningham says he’s actually paid up.

—I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew, he [John Wyse Nolan] quoted, elegantly.

They see Jimmy Henry, the assistant town clerk, who Cunningham promptly buttonholes to join the cause. They arrive at the office of ‘long John’ Fanning, Dublin’s sub-sheriff. Henry’s corns are hurting and he passes Fanning and up the stairs. Fanning didn’t know Dignam, so Nolan describes him as ‘a decent little soul’ as they walk up the stairs.

They’re half way up the stairs when they hear harnesses and hooves and turn to see. Nolan goes downstairs back to the door and watches the Viceregal procession pass by, shouting up to the others to tell them what it is.

Interpolations of other scenes:

  • Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.
  • On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.
  • Outside la Maison Claire Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney’s brother-in-law [Bob Doran], humpy, tight, making for the liberties.

Section 16: Buck Mulligan and Haines

At the end of the preceding chapter, chapter 9 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, Buck Mulligan left the National Library with Stephen. Now he has met up with the Englishman Haines, who we met in chapters 1 and 2, for a snack at the Dublin Bread Company (D.B.C.).

As they enter the restaurant, Mulligan points out John Howard Parnell, Dublin’s city marshall, playing chess at another table. We saw the chess-playing Parnell as an interpolation back in section 8.

Buck and Haines each order a melange (a drink like a cappuccino), scones and cakes and Mulligan jokes they call it the DBC because it makes damn bad cakes.

Mulligan tells Haines he missed Stephen’s presentation about Shakespeare, to which Haines quips:

—I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.

Mulligan laughs that when he gets drunk, Stephen becomes unsteady on his feet.

—You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. Wandering Ængus I call him.

Mulligan analyses Stephen’s mind, saying the Jesuits planted a permanent fear of hell in him, which will prevent him ever capturing the pure Attic note, the note of Swinburne et al.

Haines replies to all this with prissy Englishness, quick with references to authorities, in this case saying Stephen’s idee fixe reminds him of the theories of professor Pokorny of Vienna (is this a reference to Freud?).

The cakes arrive, Mulligan slices and butters his and laughs that Stephen claims he’ll write something in ten years! (In fact ten years after 1904 is 1914 and that’s the year Joyce published ‘Dubliners’ and began work on this novel, ‘Ulysses’.) Haines is unexpectedly sympathetic and says he wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen does write something.

Interpolations:

  • we see the one one-legged sailor at his latest location, singing his shanty and begging
  • our last sighting of the religious leaflet Bloom scrunched up and threw in the Liffey, as it arrives at Dublin Bay and passes the Rosevean, the three-masted ship Stephen saw over his shoulder back in chapter 3

Section 17: Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell

We briefly glimpse the Italian music master on his way, but this short section follows the lunatic Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell as he walks along Merrion Square, gets as far as Mr Lewis Werner’s cheerful windows, turns and comes back the way he came.

As he passes a dentist’s surgery belonging to a Mr Bloom (no relation to our Bloom) his flying coattails bang the stick of the blind man we saw Bloom help across the road in chapter 8 ‘Lestrygonians’ but he walks heedlessly on. The blind young man curses Farrell.

—God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard!

Section 18: Patrick Dignam

Deceased Paddy Dignam’s son, also Patrick – ironically but also tenderly referred to as Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam – has escaped the stifling atmosphere of the house of the dead, full of sniffling old women eating cake, sipping sherry and endlessly jawing, to come out and buy a pound and a half of porksteaks. En route home he sees sights and sounds, including a poster advertising a boxing match, but then realises it took place on 22 May so he’s missed it. He’s a fan of boxing and ponders which current fighter is best.

In two mirrors in the shop window of Madame Doyle the milliner, he catches sight of himself dressed in mourning, and smartens himself up (as Tom Kernan did in the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser in section 12).

Master Patrick spots the poster advertising Marie Kendall, as Miss Dunne did in section 7, and M’Coy and Lenehan in section 9.

(Note the persistent presence of posters, advertising hoardings, newspaper hoardings and so on in the modern city, plus the memorable moment when sunlight off a car windscreen dazzling Tom Kernan – it is this sense of the city as a sensorium of random, fragmentary sights and sounds which would influence so many other authors of the 1920s and ’30s, including John dos Passos and Alfred Döblin.)

He sees a toff with a red flower in his mouth. He doesn’t know it but this is Blazes Boylan who we saw put the stem of the flower between his teeth in section 5. Boylan is apparently listening to a street drunk telling him something and, characteristically, grinning.

He sees some schoolboys with satchels and notes that he’s off school till the following Monday (it being Thursday) and that Uncle Barney is meant to get news about his father’s death into the papers so everyone knows why he’s absent.

Suddenly his mind flicks to concrete and disconcerting details of seeing his dead dad laid out: how his face had gone grey instead of its usual red; a fly walking over his face up to his eye; the scrunching sound at they screwed the screws of the coffin; the bumping sound it made being carried downstairs, and his Uncle Barney instructing the men how to manage it in the tight space.

The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he’s in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.

Pathos.

Section 19: The Viceregal cavalcade

As this chapter began with an extended description of a representative of the Catholic Church (Father Conmee) it ends with an extended description of the chief representative of the British state in Ireland, William Humble, Earl of Dudley, as he rides with his wife in one carriage, followed by dignitaries in several more, out from the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park and across the city on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital.

According to the commentators, Father Conmee’s movement is from south to north, while the Viceregal Cavalcade processes from Phoenix Park in the west across to the east side of Dublin, so that the two miniature odysseys form a cross over the geography of the city. In Joyce everything falls into patterns and schemas.

In a massive paragraph Joyce records the reactions to the cavalcade as it passes by of every one of the characters we’ve met so far in this chapter, plus some new ones: Tom Kernan; Dudley White (a real-life barrister); Richie Goulding Stephen’s uncle and down-at-heel lawyer; Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, the barmaids we’ll meet in the next chapter; Simon Dedalus doffing his hat, which His Excellency returns; the reverend Hugh C. Love similarly doffs his hat but unnoticed; Lenehan and M’Coy watch the procession unmoved; Gerty MacDowell is irritated because her view of what the Viceroy’s wife is wearing is blocked by parked vans; John Wyse Nolan smiles coldly; Tom Rochford notices Lady Dudley looking at him and quickly takes his hands out of his pockets; Marie Kendall stares down at the procession from her much-mentioned poster; Buck Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely watch the procession from the window of the DBC, the customers crowding to the window casting a shadow on John Howard Parnell’s chessboard; Dilly Dedalus looks up from her second-hand French primer to watch the wheels spin by; John Henry Menton watches from the door of his business; Mrs Breen pulls her husband back from stepping in front of the horses, he hastily salutes the carriages and the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp replies; the five sandwichboard men spelling HELYS stop to watch; Mr Denis J Maginni walks on, unaffected.

With typical confidence Blazes Boylan doesn’t unhat but admires the pretty women in their carriages. From their carriage the Viceroy and wife hear the band of Highland soldiers playing on College Green (the ones we saw getting off a tram in section 6).

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stares over the top of the procession; Hornblower, a Unionist, doffs his cap; Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam sees other people taking their hats off and so doffs his own dirty black cap. The cavalcade passes the blind stripling and the mysterious man in the brown mackintosh who keeps cropping up. Then on past Mr Eugene Stratton, two ladies and two small schoolboys.

Mockery The grandiosity of the Viceroy is mocked in at least two ways. First, the entire thing is done in a parody of a Court Circular or official report, complete with the full qualifications of everyone involved. Second, the list includes satirical figures and gestures, the best of which is:

From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage.

And after this long list of people reacting to the parade, the whole thing builds up to an image of rude indifference:

On Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.

How beautifully and amusingly this complicated set-piece of interlocking parts and references comes to a comic closure.

Caveat: when is a panoramic view not a panoramic view?

In all the commentary I’ve read, among all the fine words about Aristotle, Hume and Vico, I haven’t come across anyone pointing out how rough Joyce’s characters are. The novel is overwhelmingly about the lowlife of Dublin and impresses on you a sometimes crushing sense of a world of failures and cadgers, blowhards, parasites and drinkers.

The most impressive chapters in ‘Ulysses’ are 1) the encounter in Barney Kiernan’s pub with the drunk citizen and his little court of drunk sycophants; 2) ‘Circe’ which is set in a brothel among prostitutes and ends in a drunken fight with a squaddie; 3) 40-pages spent inside the head of Molly Bloom who middle-class professors claim to love but I wonder if they’d really invite the semi-literate, slovenly, sex-mad wife of a failing advertising canvasser to their nice dinner parties.

Even when we meet characters which ought to be solidly middle-class like the editor of the Evening Telegraph, he turns out to be crude and tipsy. The authors A.E. and John Eglinton in the National Library ought to raise the tone, but for some reason they don’t, instead the arrival of Buck Mulligan with his play about masturbation significantly lowers it. Any of the supposedly middle class characters are swamped by the world of cadgers, racing tipsters, loan sharks, debtors, pawners and beggars which is where Joyce’s imagination really lies.

Stephen may be a great intellectual but he comes from a family which has gone right down the tubes, is reduced to pawning its curtains and books, and relies on out-and-out charity to have anything to even eat. It’s all surprisingly close to the sense of threadbare impoverishment which Samuel Beckett picked up and made his own in the 1940s and 50s, it’s overwhelmingly bereft and immiserated.

Where are the middle classes? Where are the fine dinner parties and posh young ladies going to private school, the balls, the visits to the theatre, the recitals? Where are the well-paid, well-dressed officers in the army and in the administration? (making a fleeting appearance only to be mocked, in the finale of this chapter.)

It’s characteristic that (in the National Library chapter, and later) Stephen is embittered at not being invited to George Moore’s literary soirèe and so Joyce doesn’t show it. That would require a whole chapter of fine talk along the lines of George Eliot or Henry James. In its place we get the unbelievably rough and crude ‘Circe’ chapter.

Dublin was and is a port city but where are the business meetings and professional dealings of importers and exporters and customs officers and so on? Scenes set in the big companies that own the ships and the ships’ captains, educated capable men? Instead of them we get the scene in the cabman’s shelter in ‘Eumaeus’, among the roughest of the rough, notable for the threatening bluster of the tattooed sailor, the drunken argument about Parnell everyone gets into, and that the place is run by a convicted terrorist.

Bearing all this in mind, I don’t see how the book as a whole, let alone this chapter, can be said to give a ‘panoramic view’ of the city. It gives a cleverly interlocking and cross-referencing portrait of Joyce’s level of Dublin society, of the lower middle class, working class, hard drinking, scrounging and begging classes, yes. But an overview of all the people in the city, including the genuinely middle, upper and aristocratic classes? Emphatically not.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Related links

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on February 18, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/ulysses-james-joyce-wandering-rocks/

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)

Joyce is the most intimately autobiographical of writers.
(Hugh Kenner)

By thinking of things, you could understand them.
(Stephen Dedalus as a boy)

Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about them.
(Stephen’s boyish fascination with words)

Ad majorem Dei gloriam!
(Motto of the Jesuit order who run the schools where young Stephen is educated)

‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, published in 1916, was the second book and first novel by Irish writer James Joyce, following Dubliners, published in 1914. It is a Bildungsroman, a German term for a novel which describes the growth of a personality or mind, in this case, as the title indicates, it is pretty much a self portrait of the development of Joyce’s mind, although cast in the shape of his fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus.

The meaning of his name

Like everything in Joyce, Stephen Dedalus’s name is highly symbolic or meaningful. Stephen was the first Christian martyr, suggesting that the character is the inventor of a new aesthetic, mocked and martyred for a new vision of art. While his surname obviously alludes to Daedalus, the skilled artificer of Greek mythology who built the labyrinth to contain the monstrous Minotaur begging the question, Are the complex texts Stephen creates also designed to hide and contain some monstrous secret? The character is well aware of the connection.

Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy… Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore [Dedalus], a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

One-stop synopsis

So the narrative traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, divided into 5 chapters or phases. In a nutshell, Stephen grows up in a Catholic family which is initially wealthy enough to send him to a private Jesuit school but which then slowly sinks in the world. His education by systematic and intellectual Jesuits decisively forms Stephen’s mind, which becomes highly intellectual and systematic in its turn.

There are various boyhood and schoolboy adventures (the injustice of being ‘pandybatted’ (hit on the palm of his hand by a pandybat) when he had done nothing wrong; an extended passage around a theatrical performance at his secondary school) before Stephen hits puberty in chapter 3 and, as far as I can tell, becomes addicted to masturbation and sleeping with Dublin prostitutes.

This generates feelings of self-loathing which climax when his class at school goes on a four-day Catholic retreat. Here Stephen and his schoolmates are subjected to a series of sermons about hell and damnation which are brilliantly written, unrelenting in their Jesuitical logic, and terrify young Stephen so much that he overcomes his fears and goes to confession for the first time in eight months, and compulsively lists his sexual sins. To my amazement the text tells us that Stephen is, at this stage, still only 16 years old.

After this psychological purgation Stephen feels wonderfully liberated and cleansed and the shortish chapter 4 shows him undertaking a life of devout religious fervour, continually praying, counting off his rosary, observing all the Catholic feast days, and so on. His devoutness brings him to the attention of his teachers and he is called in by the Dean of his school who asks him to reflect on whether he has a vocation to become a priest, prompting the boy Stephen to reflect, not for the first time, on what this life would be like as Father Stephen Dedalus S.J. (i.e. of the Society of Jesus). Only towards the end of the chapter are there signs that he is starting to doubt his own sincerity, starting to doubt how effective his incessant religious practice really is.

The final chapter, chapter 5, is the longest and is set in real time rather than a scene-skipping retrospective. It shows Stephen as a student at Dublin university, placing him among a cohort of students of his own generation. Without much explanation he has shaken off the fervent religious faith and practice we were told about in the previous chapter and is now a cynical, worldly student.

At least that’s how he comes over to his peers, who are also playing at being cynical worldly students. In reality Stephen has retained a lot of his youthful idealism but it has been redirected away from conventional religion towards a religion of Art. (This, of course, very much reflects the fin-de-siecle movement right across Europe towards Art for Art’s Sake and Aestheticism which was – exactly as with Stephen – an attempt to create a secular religion of Art to replace the traditional Christian faith which had been so undermined by all aspects of nineteenth century life, from industrialisation to Darwin’s theory of evolution see Symbolism by Michael Gibson.)

Entirely in keeping with all this, we learn from a conversation he has with the Dean of Studies, that Stephen is working on a long essay on a theory of aesthetics. In chapter 5 he attends a university lecture then walks around Dublin, accompanied by a student friend who (conveniently enough) asks him about his essay, prompting Stephen/Joyce to a long and systematic explanation of his aesthetic theory.

Among other things he speculates that there is an evolution in art forms from the lyric – which is entirely about the artist, a magnification of the artist’s own feelings – to the dramatic, at the other end of the spectrum – in which the artist completely effaces themself in order to present the subject as objectively as possible. However, the artist can never completely eliminate themselves and so, even though they nowhere refer to themselves, their personality remains present in their choice of subject matter and style. This is the context of Stephen’ famous statement:

The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible aesthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Throughout the text, Joyce had dropped in umpteen phrases indicating Stephen’s alienation from his surroundings, from his family, from his friends, from the same old repetitive political issues (Irish nationalism) all of whom he regards with a kind of mocking detachment – and, finally, from the Catholic religion which he at one point embraced with all the enthusiasm he was capable of, before finding his faith slipping away from him. This lifelong sense of being an outsider looking on at everyone else is what underpins the book’s other famous declaration, in the last few pages, where Stephen tells us that he needs to escape the ‘nets’ which trap him.

— When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Which he amplifies and explains further:

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.

And so the book ends with Stephen determined to fly all the nets which threaten to imprison him and leave Ireland for good. As Joyce himself, of course, did.

Autobiographical timeline

First readers of any of Joyce’s works, especially those featuring Stephen Dedalus, sometimes ask how autobiographical the work is. The answer is, very autobiographical. Here are the relevant dates from Joyce’s own life – you can see how closely they match the career of Stephen Dedalus:

  • 1882 Joyce is born in Rathgar, Dublin on 2 February
  • 1888 Joyce begins school at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare
  • 1891 Has to leave Clongowes when his father could no longer pay the fees; studied at home and briefly attended the Christian Brothers O’Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin
  • 1893 Starts attending Belvedere College, a fee-paying day school for boys run by Jesuits; attends for 5 years
  • 1898 Begins college at University College, Dublin, to study English, French and Italian

Publication history

‘A Portrait’ began life in 1904 as ‘Stephen Hero’ — a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After writing 25 chapters, in 1907 Joyce abandoned ‘Stephen Hero’ and set about reworking its themes and protagonist into the condensed five-chapter novel we have now. He abandoned the first novel’s strict realism and switched to making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to directly share Stephen’s developing consciousness, to feel, see and hear things from Stephen’s point of view.

The American modernist poet Ezra Pound arranged for the novel to be serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B.W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of ‘A Portrait’ just two years after the short story collection ‘Dubliners’ (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism, a position which was, of course, to be clinched by the scandal and notoriety surrounding the publication of Ulysses, which began to be published in serial form in the literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, finally published in book form in 1922. 1914, 1916, 1918, a concentrated burst of publication which helped cement his reputation.

Here are sometimes abbreviated notes on the individual chapters.

Chapter 1 (48 pages)

Father’s nursery rhyme. Home life with Dante (Mrs Riordan) the nationalist. At school at Clongowes Wood College. Being bullied. Football. The sound of the word suck.

Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect’s false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

Thoughts about God and the universe. Holidays and prayers. The story of the ghost. The mystery of kissing:

What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

After being pushed into a mucky ditch by another boy, Wells, Stephen gets a cold. In the infirmary. Friendship with Athy.

He told Stephen that his name was Athy and that his father kept a lot of racehorses that were spiffing jumpers and that his father would give a good tip to Brother Michael any time he wanted it because Brother Michael was very decent and always told him the news out of the paper they got every day up in the castle.

Later, in Chapter 3, Stephen looks back at life at Clongowes which he summarises as: ‘the wide playgrounds, swarming with boys, the square ditch, the little cemetery off the main avenue of limes where he had dreamed of being buried, the firelight on the wall of the infirmary where he lay sick, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.’

Home for Christmas dinner, which is scene to a flaring row between Mr Dedalus, his friend Mr Casey and inflexible Dante about whether Parnell was hounded to his grave by lackey priests, or deserved punishment for being a fornicator. Story of the famous spit. Mr D says the Irish are ‘A priestridden Godforsaken race!’ When Casey says Ireland must be free of religion (‘No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!’) devout Dante storms out while Mr Casey burst into tears for his lost leader.

Back at school, gossip about why some fellows (Simon Moonan and Tusker) got a flogging (is it for some kind of homosexual escapade referred to as ‘smugging’?). Because Stephen’s glasses are broken (someone bumped into him and they fell and broke on a cinder path) Father Arnell gives him permission not to write, but when the sadistic Prefect of Studies, Father Dolan, visits his class, he ignores this excuse, accuses Stephen of slacking, calls him to the front of the class and hits him on the hands with a pandybat, inflicting intense pain. Stephen’s sense of injustice is so strong he overcomes his own fear to go down the special corridor to the rector’s room and report it. The rector assures him it must be a mistake and shakes hands. Back among the fellows, Stephen is cheered as a hero.

Chapter 2 (40 pages)

Opens with the Dedalus family enjoying an extended summer holiday in Blackrock, a seaside suburb of Dublin. Stephen accompanies old Uncle Charles on shopping trips. At the park, he is ‘trained’ as a runner by unhealthy looking Mike Flynn, mate of his dad’s, a fad which doesn’t last. On Sundays Stephen goes with his father and grand-uncle on huge walks. He is reading ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ and sees himself as the book’s hero Edmond Dantès seeking for his equivalent of the heroine, Mercedes.

Friendship with Aubrey Mills and they set up a gang but at the end of the summer the gang breaks up. He senses change at home, where his father’s fortunes are failing which is why he isn’t sent back to the fee-paying Clongowes school. The beginnings of the adolescent sense of frustration and aloneness:

The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet.

A fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue… his restless heart… The noise of children at play… made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others…

Removal vans turn up and move the household stuff from Blackrock to a new house in Dublin. Stephen doesn’t like the city, finds it overwhelming. More alienation:

  • his mood of embittered silence… He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses… He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret…

The text breaks down into short vignettes which demonstrate how ‘His silent watchful manner had grown upon him’. In the last of which a young woman is near him on the tram steps. Haunted by her, he goes home and tries to write a poem i.e. burgeoning sensuality and sensitivity.

His father arranges for him to go to a Jesuit day school, Belvedere. Long passage describing the first night of a school play at Belvedere, where Stephen is ragged by his frenemy, Heron. He’s now in the sixth form and filled ‘with unrest and bitter thoughts’. He goes onstage, performs and is so pumped with adrenaline when he comes offstage that he runs right past his waiting parents and wanders the streets till he’s calmed down and can go back.

Stephen accompanies his father on the latter’s nostalgic journey back to Cork. This is mainly to sell some of his remaining property at an auction, a financial necessity reflecting the family’s declining fortunes, but Mr D uses it to recapture his long-vanished youth. Stephen is appalled at his father’s sentimental drinking sessions with his old buddies. He is now permanently filled with self-disgust.

A leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind… Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust.

Stephen wins money for an exhibition (to college?) and a prize, and blows it all on luxuries for his family.

He feels completely alienated from his father, mother and brother (Maurice). He keeps talking about secret riots and orgies (‘dark orgiastic riot’) and living in sin (‘the wasting fires of lust’) so it began to dawn on me maybe all this refers to masturbation. He wanders the streets in a fever of lust. All this leads up to a visit to a prostitute. Lust leads to all other sins:

From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.

Chapter 3 (39 pages)

A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul.

Stephen has become a regular frequenter of Dublin’s red light district, sauntering and taking prostitutes as his fancy takes him.

He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment.

At Belvedere he now holds the position of prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, responsible for supervising the young boys at Mass, which sits bitterly ironically alongside his night-time debauchery but ‘ The falsehood of his position did not pain him.’

A little way into Chapter 3 his class are sent on a religious retreat which is marked by the series of sermons given by Father Arnall (who appears to be on secondment from Clongowes – after all, they’re both Jesuit establishments). The sermons’ subject is the four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell, and it triggers ‘a crisis of guilt and piety’ in Stephen, prompting a period of profound introspection and desire for repentance but which reads more, to me, like a panic attack:

The next day brought death and judgement, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair. The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He suffered its agony. He felt the deathchill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help!

The sermons describe in exquisitely logical detail: the original sin of Lucifer and his fellow angels who fell from heaven at God’s command; the torments of hell in terrifying detail, beginning with the physical horrors: the pestilential air of hell; the stench of rotting bodies; the nature of the fires of hell which rage intensely and eternally; how the blood and the brains of the sinner boil with no hope of relief; the torment deriving from the squalid company endured by every soul in hell, devils as well as other sinners.

This first sermon leaves Stephen paralysed with fear and convinced that he, personally, is going to hell. After chapel he listens to the trivial talk of the other students who are not as affected by the sermon as he is. There is an academic class, then it’s back to the chapel for another sermon in which Father Arnall continues his tour of hell, switching from physical to spiritual torments, chief among which is the pain of separation from God.

Stephen is terrified all over again. When he goes to his room he hallucinates a devil waiting in it to attack him. When he closes his eyes he has an image of being stuck in a muddy swamp with devil creatures, forever. He runs to the window, throws it open and gasps for air.

Walking through the city that evening he asks an old woman the way to the nearest church, restlessly waits his turn, and then makes a big confession to the priest. We learn that it is 8 long months since his last confession, and that he is a mere boy of 16. The priest offers forgiveness and Stephen walks home feeling light and purged and full of grace.

Chapter 4 (24 pages)

Following on from his confession and feeling of having been born again, Stephen becomes a religious fanatic, living every day and every hour according to optimum best practice, praying all the time, saying his rosary etc. This reaches a climax when he is called in by the director of Belvedere College and asked to ponder whether he thinks he has a vocation for the priesthood which, in fact, is something he has often wondered…

Only slowly, towards the end of the chapter, do doubts set in – and the whole chapter is capped by a walk on the beach where he sees a young woman with her skirt hitched up standing in a stream, and his whole being is shaken, not with lust exactly, but a rarefied sense of her transcendent beauty. I take this moment as symbolising the waning of his religious vocation, and its replacement by a romantic aestheticism.

Chapter 5 (71 pages)

— I have a book at home, said Stephen…

Chapter 5 is the longest one and describes Stephen the university undergraduate. He wakes up, his mother washes his neck, his father yells down the stairs asking whether he’s gone to the campus yet, so Stephen hurries off, reflecting on the urban scene, is briefly accosted by a beggarwoman selling lavender. I’ve given headings to the episodes which follow:

Stephen’s sense of English as an alien tongue

At the university buildings he comes across the Dean of Studies, who is English, and has a famous exchange in which he reflects on how natural the English language sounds on his lips and yet how Stephen can’t help feeling it alien. This all starts because the Dean is filling a lamp with oil and Stephen tells him the device he’s using to do so is called a tundish, a word the Dean has never heard before.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:
—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

Why consider English foreign but Latin as somehow Irish?

This all very is stirring but I nowadays I perceive it as facile: we all speak a foreign tongue; or, to put it another way, which of us invented the language we speak? None of us. Stephen’s thought is incomplete and doesn’t go far enough. All of us speak words invented by others. If you want to be super-sensitive, we are all oppressed by the un-usness, the non-us origins of the language we are compelled to speak. So what difference does it make whether he speaks words invented by long-dead Gaelic ancestors or long-dead Anglo-Saxons (and Vikings and Normans)? All of us speak words created by long-dead peoples. What alternative is there? Making up our own language?

Inconsistency between Stephen’s attitude to language and to religion

There is also a glaring inconsistency between Stephen’s nationalist approach to language and but subservient approach to religion. He resents speaking ‘another race’s language’ but has no problem at all believing another race’s religion.

Did Stephen invent Christianity? Obviously not. Christianity occurred against the background of Judaism, the sophisticated religion first developed by Jews speaking Hebrew at least two and a half thousand years ago in Palestine; it was created and spread among Jews who spoke Aramaic at the dawn of the Roman Empire; its leading theologians were initially eastern Greeks writing in Greek (the four Gospels are all written in Greek); only centuries later was it co-opted by Romans speaking Latin and then imposed across their empire, under duress – in fact after 380 AD under pain of death – by the brutal Roman Empire.

Which bit of this derived from the Celtic inhabitants of Ireland? Absolutely none of it.

Stephen goes to a school run by Jesuits, a religious order founded by a Spaniard, based in Rome, tasked with wiping out heresy and independent thought all across Europe and then around the brutally exploitative Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal. Stephen prides himself on his independence, on casting off all shackles, but for a while in chapter 4 he contemplates joining this repressive foreign order.

If he feels that English from a few hundred miles away is a foreign imposition on Gaelic-speaking Celts, then why accept 1) a religion created 2,500 miles away (Palestine) which is 2) expressed in a language created 1,100 miles away (Rome)? Why rebel against English linguistic imperialism and whole-heartedly accept Roman religious and linguistic imperialism?

Anti-Britishness

Because Britain was the current imperial oppressor of Ireland when Joyce wrote, and anti-British, pro-independence Irish nationalism was the dominant political issue of his time and the time he describes in his works (the pre-war Edwardian era). This passage describing his alienation from the English language only makes sense against the atmosphere of Irish nationalism i.e. the desire to overthrow everything English as part of a wider Irish national liberation, which pervaded the culture he was raised in and describes.

If he really wanted to escape the detested coloniser’s language a simple solution was ready to hand: why not write in Gaelic, the native speech of what he calls ‘his race’? Like Patrick Pearse, Liam O’Flaherty, and Seán Ó Riordáin? That would have been a simple and decisive statement of independence.

But he didn’t. We know that Joyce studied Gaelic for a while, and knew enough from his general upbringing in Dublin to sprinkle a handful of phrases into his texts. And he wrote in his stories and novels a number of fine-sounding anti-English passages like this. But they’re not borne out by his actual choices. Stephen says ‘I have not made or accepted its words’ but he has, hasn’t he? What language is he writing, thinking, arguing in? Which author does Stephen deliver a long analysis of in ‘Ulysses’? Shakespeare. Not exactly Ireland’s national writer, is he?

I think Joyce is making the character Stephen pose as a linguistic Irish nationalist. In the same way as Stephen will outgrow his high-flown romantic rhetoric by the time of ‘Ulysses’, in the same way as he will have moved drastically on from the aesthetic theory he expounds to Lynch (see below), I think in the same way Stephen will reject this linguistic nationalism. Although part of his sensitive soul will always rebel against it, English it will be.

Davin asks Stephen to ‘Join us…’

Back to the narrative, Stephen attends a lecture in physics, in which various student mates horse around and make clever remarks and continue to do so after the lecture ends and they mill around in the corridors. He encounters fellow students in a semi-schematic way, each one standing for a cause or issue, thus allowing Joyce to state his position on them: the nationalist one, the hearty one, the cynic, the joker and so on.

A case in point is Davin the nationalist who tells Stephen it’s his duty to join the Irish nationalist cause. This dialogue gives rise to a series of much-quoted declarations in which Stephen vehemently rejects Davin’s Irish nationalism.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

What does this mean for the anti-English passage about the tundish? I think it means Stephen felt himself between a rock and a hard place. With his immense sensitivity to language he resiles against the feel of English words in his mouth. And yet he in no way wants to be hamstrung and confined by the crude rhetoric of Irish nationalism which we see him angrily rejecting here, and brutally lampooning in the Cyclops episode of ‘Ulysses’. The only way out of feeling trapped by all these fences, is to get out, to flee the country which places him in this (and other) impossible quandaries.

This is why the Irish have such an ambivalent attitude towards Joyce. He provided them fine-sounding nationalist quotes such as the one quoted above. But scratch the surface, actually read Dubliners, let alone ‘Ulysses’ and you come to think that he maybe despised his own fellow countrymen as much as he resented British cultural rule.

Stephen expounds his aesthetic theory to Lynch

Tiring of his argument with Davin, Stephen takes his mate Lynch for a walk in which Stephen lays out the main points of his essay on aesthetics. He makes some lofty definitions:

—Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

He tells Lynch that literature is ‘the highest and most spiritual art’ – which will come as a surprise to all composers and musicians.

He claims to have achieved what Aristotle failed to do, which is to provide clear definitions of pity and fear, thus underpinning the ancient Greek’s analysis of tragedy as a genre. The central idea is that the highest aesthetic experience is static – any artistic artefact which creates kinetic feelings (for example, desire or repulsion) is impure. The highest art is static and, as he goes on to explain, utterly detached.

Stephen posits four types of literature

He suggests that it comes in four forms or genres which exist on a spectrum defined by the writer’s relationship with their material: At one end, 1) the lyrical represents a direct expression of the writer’s feelings; 2) the epical arises when the writer thinks of himself in relation to an epical event; 3) the narrative is when ‘the personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea’; and 4) the dramatic is reached when ‘the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life’. At this point, Stephen speaks a passage which became famous and much quoted:

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Brief reaction to Stephen’s aesthetic

This and what follows is fine and clever and has been quoted and debated over for a century. But it is, in a sense, irrelevant. From Dada and surrealism onwards, art has increasingly been whatever artists say it is and an artist is someone who is accepted as such by the self-policing community of artists, critics and curators.

Of course there’s been extremely clever debate about aesthetics for as long as human beings have been writing, some two and a half thousand years, and certain ideas – or maybe a better word is ‘obsessions’ or maybe ‘dead ends’ – recur again and again. But the mere fact that there has been so much energetic debate proves the simple point that there is not now, and never has been, any broad agreement about art and aesthetics. Any definition of art you settle on will leave out huge swathes of what people think of as ‘art’, while artists themselves have come up with all kinds of definitions of art which generally supported whichever kind of art they happened to make.

The study of aesthetics is a bottomless pit, an endless ocean, which it’s fun to swim and play in. But anyone who expects to discover some kind of ‘truth’ or settled definition, doesn’t understand the nature of the game they’re playing.

Joyce’s theory doesn’t even apply to his own book

So I read Stephen’s aesthetic theory with interest, noted his invoking of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the work of art as requiring three qualities – integritas, consonantia and claritas – but yet another intellectual fussing about Aristotle’s two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old definitions of pity and tragedy, or worrying about the formal attributes of ancient Greek literary genres, or redefining Thomistic terminology, couldn’t be further from our modern reality.

None of Stephen’s elaborate theory really applies to this book itself. ‘A Portrait’ is not an ‘aesthetic object’, not a picture or a statue you can pick up and move around, but a text which contains hundreds of passages and moments, most of which are far from static and far from isolated in the sense which the Thomas term integritas implies but are, on the contrary, part of a continuous narrative or flow of text, each element leading on to the next, each new element adjusting and changing your understanding of the previous ones, a process which continues after you’ve finished reading the book and dip into the secondary literature around it, or go on to read another book by the same author or from the same period or about the same subject.

The actual lived experience of reading this, as any, book is the precise opposite of an isolated moment of aesthetic stasis but is instead a collection of Joyce-flavoured passages within the endless flux of texts which themselves form part of the broader, never-ending flux of our lives.

The role of comedy in debunking Stephen’s high-falutin theories

So Stephen’s long disquisition reaches its climax with the claim that the godlike detachment of the writer mirrors the non-kinetic, godlike stasis triggered by the ideal work of art. But throughout the lecture, Joyce has been well aware of how pompous and pretentious this all risks sounding – and this is why he has Stephen 1) not write it out in one continuous essay 2), nor think it to himself, but 3) enunciate it all in dialogue with Lynch, and the main reason for this is so that Lynch can keep interjecting jokes.

Lynch fails to understand bits, takes the mickey out of Stephen’s phrasing, makes mock tributes, tells Stephen he’s forgotten key definitions so Stephen has to repeat them, and so on and so on. In other words, Joyce puts a lot of effort into dramatising the presentation of his theory; and, in my opinion, this is partly what makes it so memorable.

This strategy of Joyce’s tends to be overlooked or forgotten by critics who extract from the extended dialogue the bits they need to quote to summarise the theory but, in my opinion, it’s the way it is part of an extended and often comic dialogue which makes it so memorable.

Thus, as Stephen reaches the climactic part of the theory, it starts to rain and Lynch jokes:

—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.

(Incidentally, a few days later, I was reading Hugh Kenner’s book about ‘Ulysses’, in which he quotes Ezra Pound saying that Joyce complained to him, ‘If only someone would say the book was so damn funny.’ So I’m agreeing with Joyce’s opinion of his own works. Woven among the Jesuitical theology and the Thomist aesthetics, there are lots of sly Irish gags.)

Stephen’s invisible girlfriend

The outbreak of rain ends Stephen’s long disquisition, as he and Lynch hurry to take shelter under an arcade of the university, and it is here that Stephen sees his girlfriend (again). Now the notes tell me that the beloved young woman who haunts this final chapter is called Emma Clery but her name is very well hidden: a control + f search of the entire online text reveals just three mentions of ‘Emma’ and none at all of ‘Clery’, so I’m puzzled how commentators have extracted her name so confidently.

Reflecting on her near invisibility, I wondered whether she isn’t named because her role is to be The Woman With No Name; more precisely, her function is to be a semi-abstract peg for Stephen’s resentment and jealousy, notably when he sees her (in two earlier scenes I haven’t mentioned yet) joking with a priest and/or flirting with Cranly. I’m not sure we even get to hear her speak, certainly Stephen doesn’t have a dialogue with her as he does with his male friends. So she’s the Nearly Invisible and Totally Silent Woman.

Maybe there’s another, more bucket reason. It was arduous enough for Joyce just to nail down Stephen’s aesthetic theory and relationships with fellow male students. As it is, this final chapter which contains all this intellectual content is longer than the preceding four and already contains several abrupt cuts of scene. Maybe if Joyce had embarked on describing a full-blown love affair for Stephen, it would have doubled or tripled the size of the chapter and ended up distracting attention away from his political and artistic statements. Seen in this practical way, maybe Emma’s elusiveness and the role assigned her simply reflect the lack of space for her in Joyce’s overall design.

Whatever the precise reason, Emma’s role as a fleeting presence who never speaks but nonetheless haunts Stephen’s consciousness certainly fits with the rest of his character. It is entirely characteristic of the alienated outsider we have seen him to be in so many previous situations, that Stephen makes no effort to go and talk to her even when she’s only ten yards away, but prefers to watch, and bubble over with resentment and jealousy, from a distance.

Stephen composes a poem (by Shelley)

I mentioned abrupt cuts. One occurs in the middle of the chapter. After the long walk with Lynch and the exhaustive exposition of aesthetic theory ends with the pair taking shelter in the arcades and spotting his lady love at a distance, does the scene develop in any natural way i.e. Stephen goes after her, talks to her, or goes on to hang with his pals maybe go for a drink?

No, none of those. There is a line space and suddenly the narrative cuts to the next morning and Stephen waking up in his bedroom from a lovely dream and reaching out for pen and paper to write down a poem which has come to him. The next few pages are presumably Joyce’s attempt to describe the state of mind in which lines of poetry come to you, you shape and perfect them, and they trigger more until the poem feels ‘finished’ i.e. you have no more to say. I’ve had this experience many times as, I imagine, have hundreds of millions of other people, maybe most of my readers… It’s a common enough sensation among bookish people.

Here’s the first verse of Stephen’s poem:

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

What’s really striking is the fantastically old-fashioned Shelleyan style of the poem. In fact it may be deliberately echoing the famous Shelley fragment which Stephen quotes in chapter 2:

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless…?

Although the line length is different, the wistful sentiment is very similar. In fact, having read and reread it I’ve realised it’s as much late-Victorian, fin-de-siecle as Shelleyan. ‘Lure of the fallen seraphim’ is deliberately langorous and sensual, with hints of naughty Wildean transgressions (in strict Christian theology there is nothing alluring about the fallen angels; they are devils pure and simple; only in the naughty Nineties did lots of poets and artists flirt with blasphemy, black magic, Salome etc etc). Maybe it would be more accurate to attribute it to Swinburne, the naughty boy of Victorian poetry, rather than Shelley the romantic angel.

Anyway, the writing of the poem takes place across several pages of the novel. Maybe it’s meant to be a practical demonstration of the creation of a literary work which fits the aesthetic theory he outlined at such length to Lynch the day before; maybe Stephen is putting his money (metre) where his mouth is.

The pages describing the composition are also meshed with Stephen’s feelings about his beloved (the elusive Emma he saw the day before) who he is cross with for flirting (he thinks) with one of the priests. In angry jealousy Stephen says he doesn’t care if she throws away her beauty (and lovely body) on ‘the unworthy’. In other words, even here at the end of the novel he is displaying standard Goth, alienated teenager feelings.

Stephen wants to be free as a bird

Cut to later on this second day and Stephen standing outside the National Library and looking up at birds wheeling in the sky. Are they swallows which migrate from the south? This introduces the theme of flight and exile.

He comes across some mates inside the library, they chat and then, mindful of being told off for talking, leave, engaging in banter in the corridors: these buddies are Cranly, Temple, Dixon, O’Keeffe, Goggins. Older and less impressed by Stephen’s purist theories, I am (as I explained above) more entertained by the humour of these student scenes.

The stout student who stood below them on the steps farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him, saying in a soft voice:
—Did an angel speak?

Amid all this banter, Stephen again sees HER walking away from the library and is mixed up in a confusion of memories, something to do with her body and her smell but also a teenage attempt to save himself by damning and scorning her.

Well then, let her go and be damned to her! She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest. Let her.

Reading this you realise that, for all his precocious reinterpreting of Aristotle and Aquinas, Stephen is emotionally still a child.

Stephen’s last walk with Cranly

Stephen goes for the last of the walks which characterise this chapter, this time with his best friend Cranly. Their conversation turns to the fact that Stephen has argued with his mother: she wants him to take mass at Easter and he refuses to. In a half-joking way, Cranly presents a series of arguments for why Stephen should, from theological reasons (is he not afraid of damnation?) to humane (his mother has had a hard life; if he disbelieves in religion, why not go through this performance in order to make her happy?). The dialogue is crafted to build up to Stephen’s angry declaration that he will not submit or as he puts it, a bit more pompously, he will not serve.

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.

This is often quoted as a version of Joyce’s own manifesto. Less noticed is the way it is undercut by Cranly making jokes, much as Stephen’s earlier disquisition about aesthetics was undercut by Lynch’s joshing. Less impressed by Joyce’s rhetoric than I was as a young man, what I notice this time round is how all the high-minded statements appear in dialectic tension with comic responses. Stephen rarely makes any serious declaration without having some school or student buddy around to deflate him.

Stephen’s diary

In the last four pages the text disintegrates (again). Right at the start, ‘A Portrait’ opened with the disjointed perceptions of a very small child. Now, right at the end, the continuous narrative falls back into disintegrated fragments, in this case into four pages of brief diary entries, starting 20 March and ending on 27 April, so covering 38 days in total. They end with a phrase Joyce must have realised sounds ridiculously immature and overblown:

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

This kind of thing is widely quoted as expressing Joyce’s attitude. But in my opinion, like the overblown romanticism of other final passages, it instead indicates Stephen’s emotional and intellectual immaturity. I.e. it is a limited, imperfect and slightly ludicrous character who says this, not the canny author (aged 34 when the novel was published).

Cast

Sometimes creating a cast list sheds different light on the text, highlights characters as motifs, suggests alternative routes through the story. Also, it’s just handy to remember key attributes of leading figures.

Family

  • Stephen Dedalus – the main protagonist, who we follow from small boyhood, through junior school, secondary school and on to university, as he experiences all the stages of growing up from being bullied at school to adolescence where he goes through phases of sexual debauchery, then of religious enthusiasm, before his final dedication to a religion of art; named Stephen because Stephen was the first Christian martyr, and Dedalus after the ingenious inventor from Greek mythology
  • Simon Dedalus – Stephen’s father, a former medical student whose fortunes decline throughout the book, forcing the family to move from a large house in the suburb of Blackrock into a smaller house within Dublin itself; he’s a good man but, like many sons, Stephen is embarrassed by his sentimentalism and increasing drunkenness
  • Dante (Mrs. Riordan) – governess to the two Dedalus children, Stephen and Maurice, a devout and fiery Catholic who has a bitter argument with Simon and his friend about the fate of the Irish nationalist leader Parnell. In ‘Ulysses’, chapter 17, detail is given: ‘Mrs Riordan (Dante), a widow of independent means, had resided in the house of Stephen’s parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891 and had also resided during the years 1892, 1893 and 1894 in the City Arms Hotel owned by Elizabeth O’Dowd of 54 Prussia street where, during parts of the years 1893 and 1894, she had been a constant informant of [Leopold] Bloom who resided also in the same hotel.’
  • Uncle Charles – Stephen’s great uncle who lives with the family. Young Stephen enjoys taking long walks with his uncle and listening to Charles and Simon discuss the history of both Ireland and the Dedalus family
  • Mike Flynn – a friend of his father’s who tries to train Stephen as an athlete with little success
  • Aubrey Mills – friend his own age Stephen forms a gang with for adventures one summer
  • Mary Dedalus – Stephen’s mother, a shadowy figure who rarely appears or talks: who tries to keep the peace at the big Christmas day argument, a lot later chides Stephen for being late to lectures; her most notable appearance is when, at the start of chapter 5, she washes his neck and face from a bowl of hot water
  • Cranly – Stephen’s best friend at university who he confides in

At Clongowes Wood College (as a boy)

  • Nasty Roche –
  • Saurin
  • Cantwell
  • Jack Lawton
  • Wells – taunts the boy Stephen for kissing his mother before he goes to bed, and one day he pushes Stephen into a dirty cesspool, causing Stephen to catch a bad fever and be sent to the infirmary
  • Rody Kickham
  • Simon Moonan
  • Tusker
  • Corrigan
  • McGlade
  • Fleming – who gets pandybatted
  • Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee
  • Cecil Thunder

Staff

  • Father Conmee – rector i.e. headmaster of the school
  • Father Arnall – Latin teacher who stands by and lets Stephen get pandybatted; he later reappears on the religious retreat from Belvedere and delivers the series of sermons which terrify Stephen
  • Father Dolan – bully who unfairly pandybats Stephen
  • Brother Michael – the kindly brother who tends to Stephen and Athy in the Clongowes infirmary after Wells pushes Stephen into the cesspool

At Belvedere (as a teenager)

  • Vincent Heron – Stephen’s antagonist, always ready to rap his calves with his cane
  • Boland – Heron sidekick
  • Wallis – Heron sidekick
  • Nash – Heron sidekick
  • Doyle – producing the school play which Stephen appears in
  • Mr Tate – English master, erroneously thinks he detects Stephen committing a heresy in an essay

At the beach he sees some of his schoolfriends stripped to their trunks:

  • Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar
  • Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp
  • Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless sidepockets

At university

  • Davin – the peasant student who tells the story of a peasant woman, Irish nationalist, asks Stephen why he doesn’t learn Gaelic and become ‘one of us’; his insistence that Stephen devote himself to the cause of Irish independence prompts one of Stephen’s famous outbursts: ‘—Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.’
  • Cranly – Stephen’s best friend at the university, a kind of secular confessor
  • MacCann – politically committed student who tries to recruit Stephen to the causes of world peace etc: ‘MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsar’s rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament, arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number.’
  • Temple – with his dark gypsy eyes, literal-minded and limited he admires and tries to copy the cleverer students, leading Cranly to mock him: ‘You flaming floundering fool! I’ll take my dying bible there isn’t a bigger bloody ape, do you know, than you in the whole flaming bloody world!’
  • Lynch – a coarse and dryly sarcastic student who is even poorer than Stephen; big and muscular with a ‘whinny like an elephant’; but it is Lynch that Stephen explains his theory of aesthetics to as they walk round Dublin
  • Moynihan – witty student, prone to whispering comic remarks to Stephen
  • Donovan – member of the university field club
  • Glynn – a student who gives private tuition, Cranly calls him ‘a bloody ape’

Theology

Clearly the central chapter containing the hellfire sermons is awash with precise and detailed theology. I am not qualified and not particularly interested in enumerating and analysing it.

He found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences…

The sermons are constructed with impressive logic and have an awesome rhetorical and emotional effect… And yet I was more entertained by a passage where Stephen dwells on the absurdities which theological speculation can lead you into:

If a man had stolen a pound in his youth and had used that pound to amass a huge fortune how much was he obliged to give back, the pound he had stolen only or the pound together with the compound interest accruing upon it or all his huge fortune? If a layman in giving baptism pour the water before saying the words is the child baptised? Is baptism with a mineral water valid? How comes it that while the first beatitude promises the kingdom of heaven to the poor of heart, the second beatitude promises also to the meek that they shall possess the land? Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?

This has more the feel of Rabelais or scholastic satirists of the minutiae of Catholic philosophising.

Style

Initially I was impressed by the sensual lyricism of many passages, dawn or dusk in the city, the soft beauty of women etc. But as in ‘Dubliners’, I was also aware that Joyce’s prose is not as relaxed as it first appears; after a while you realise it is more studied and detached than it seems, more calculating.

When I read ‘A Portrait’ as a boy I was duly terrified by the series of retreat sermons; now, 40 years later, I am still impressed by the power of the rhetoric but what I notice is Joyce’s careful structuring of his material: the overall structure of subject matter, its crisp division into focused paragraphs, and, within individual sentences 1) an insistence on the logic of the content or 2) an intense attention to the detail of description, both of which take precedence over everyday word order and rhythm.

They are just the most obvious way in which Joyce’s careful and elaborate phrasing can make many of his sentences feel clotted and effortful, a little stilted, a little formal, pedantic, continually drawing attention to their own grammatical correctitude. Officiously accurate. Nitpickingly precise. Even at his most lyrical, there’s always a kind of metallic finish to Joyce’s prose.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.

I know this particular passage is meant to be sensual and overblown romantic. I know it also indicates the way Stephen’s taste is still adolescent and immature. But I also feel the tremendous control and intentionality of it.

Detachment battles passion

The text bombards us with messages about Stephen’s cold, aloof, detachment:

His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games…

He, apart from them and in silence..

‘You’re a terrible man, Stevie, said Davin, taking the short pipe from his mouth, always alone.’

And yet at the same time we know from the hundreds of passages of free indirect speech, that Stephen’s mind is a seething swamp of angers and resentments, of lusts and self-hatred or, as Cranly puts it: ‘You’re an excitable bloody man, do you know.’

I’ve already argued that the aesthetic of stasis and detachment which Stephen so famously expounds is wildly inappropriate for a form like the novel, and especially Joyce’s own novels, which unravel in all directions and are thus the precise opposite of detached and static objets d’art.

But there’s another way of thinking about Stephen’s theory, namely it could be interpreted in psychological terms as a man permanently driven by wild passions trying to establish control of himself. That it’s not just an aesthetic aim but a psychological goal. That what he’s really talking about is a kind of therapy. He wishes his mind was more calm and cold and detached and static, and not the seething swamp of lusts and resentments which the novel very vividly describes it as being.

Super-romanticism

One subset of Stephen’s stormy, troubled personality is his penchant for exceedingly lush hyper-romantic visions and sensations. On and on he goes about logic and detachment and yet the novel abounds in passages which demonstrate the precisely opposite qualities:

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.

Is this parody or does he actually believe in writing like this? Many a natural description throughout the book is in this tenor:

Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

‘Cleft’? No wonder young Stephen tells Heron his favourite poet is Lord Byron. When, half-way through chapter 5, he awakes from an enchanted sleep with a poem echoing in his mind and hurries to write it down, it is a clear pastiche of Shelley or his mid-Victorian avatar Swinburne.

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And here is young Stephen is sounding even more like Shelley in prophetic mode, imagining himself as:

a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

Joyce may have been taken up by Pound as a saint of modernism but reading the many, many passages like this can’t help but convince that his core values are arch-Romantic. And the characteristic aspect of romanticism is self-indulgence, indulgence of The Self, a grandiose rejoicing in the importance of our own emotions:

He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence…

A few pages later he watches birds flying which triggers a snatch of poetry and responds:

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.

I can see it’s beautifully, sensitively written. But I am also aware behind everything he published of Joyce’s steely focus.

Aesthetic

The last third or so of the book deal with Stephen’s development of an aesthetic. This has provided grist for tens of thousands of books, articles and papers. What struck me as key to his entire attitude is Joyce and Stephen’s poor sight as described in this passage.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:
—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

Having poor sight, Joyce is less distracted by the richness of the actual visual world and leans more towards its description in words. Indeed, as we have seen, the text repeatedly describes Stephen’s fascination with the sound of certain words (kiss, tundish, mulier) right from the start.

The focus of all his writings on the quality of words and language have proved a goldmine to academics, accompanying as they do the entire twentieth century ‘linguistic turn’, the turn towards endless theories of language, its structure, its fugitive nature, the way it creates and encodes reality and much more. Joyce is like the patron saint of this movement whose handful of revolutionary texts provide an endless reservoir of reinterpretations.

Poverty

Anyway, rereading Joyce as a middle-aged man who’s struggled to raise a family, I am less impressed by the flashy manifesto commitments of an over-intellectual youth and this time round noticed other, less prominent aspects of the novel. I’ve mentioned the sly ubiquity of the humour, easy to miss if you’re dazzled by the nationalist posing, the theology and aesthetics. Another is Stephen’s sheer poverty.

In the course of the book, the Dedalus family really goes down in the world. At the start of chapter 5 they are living in a poor dirty house. As he prepares to leave for his morning lecture, Stephen looks with pity at his younger brothers and sisters who will never enjoy the privileged education he had. They use jam jars instead of teacups. When he wants to write his poem down Stephen has to do it on a torn-open fag packet. When he walks in the street, he stumbles because the broken soul of his shoe snags in a grating. At the university physics lecture he has to ask a colleague for a sheet of paper to make notes on because he has no paper of his own. Breakfast is watery tea and crusts of fried bread. Supper is a bowl of rice, like a poor Chinese peasant. None of this is dwelt on but is what struck me this time round.

And the other members of his swarming impoverished family? His father and great-uncle Charles loom large in the early chapters but there’s no mention of Charles (presumed dead) at the start of the climactic chapter 5, where his father only makes an off-stage appearance, a voice yelling down the stairs to see whether he’s left for university yet, and his mother actually appears but only briefly, to wash his neck and tell him off for being late.

But it’s his kid brothers and sisters which get me. Before he leaves their slum for the university, Stephen looks at them with pity, knowing they’ll never have the advantages he’s had. At one point he tells Cranly in an offhand manner that his mother bore nine or ten children and that some died (!). We never learn how many there are, although a couple of names are casually mentioned (Katey, Maggie, Boody). What did they think of him, Mr Linguistic Nationalism, Mr Romantic Poet? What did they make of their too-clever, self-obsessed, lucky older brother, the one who fled to the continent and abandoned the family to its poverty?

I wonder if anyone’s ever written a short story or novel about Stephen Dedalus’s siblings in which the great Martyr to Art appears as the self-centred narcissist that he so clearly is?

Comparison with Katherine Mansfield

I read all of Joyce while still at school and then reread ‘Ulysses’ when I had to study it at university. I was swept up by the depth of Joyce’s intellectual worldview and readily agreed with the idea that he had a Shakespearian grasp of language. But now, 40 years later, I’m not so convinced. The persistent romanticism, the frequent passages of olde worlde, Shelleyan lyricism, now come across to me as very dated and as dating the entire text. While its main appeal, from the hellfire sermon onwards, is in the rigour and thoroughness of Stephen’s intellectual positions, 1) first Catholic, 2) then aesthetic.

I have, I think, two objections: One is that I now have no sympathy at all with any of his intellectual positions; I can 1) appreciate the thoroughness of the sermon and the intellectual structure of his Catholic belief, and 2) I sort of sympathise with the aesthetic position he reaches, but I just disagree with both.

My worldview is based on 1) biology, biochemistry and Darwinian evolution (Stephen explicitly dismisses Darwin at one point, which I simply regard as a profound intellectual mistake), and 2) my aesthetic position is an acceptance of the wild chaos of aesthetic theories produced by the twentieth century, not to mention the new ones being created by the digital age. The world, and the world of art, are so chaotic there is no point restricting yourself to one theory or type of response. The opposite; you should be open to as many ways as possible of receiving and responding to works of art. Stephen’s scholarly reintepretations of Aristotle and Aquinas strike me as impressive achievements which are completely irrelevant to anyone except scholars and students having to write about them.

The second objection is that the whole things seems too calculated; it too obviously has designs on me and on all its readers. ‘A Portrait’ is packed with not just subtle symbolism, but the structuring of incidents and the narrative as a whole according to clever references and precedents, are designed to encourage attentive readers to spot them, unravel them, and construct multiple frameworks of interpretation.

In this it was a spectacular success: there was already a cohort of fans busily decoding the text’s meanings even before ‘Ulysses’ was published, based on the instalments published in the Little Review. The advent of the finished book signalled the start of the Joyce industry which has grown hand-in-hand with the growth of Literary studies as an academic discipline. A century later, there are more essays, papers, articles and books written about Joyce than any one person could read, along with more seminars, lectures and conferences than any one person could possibly attend.

When I was a student I contributed my grain of sand to this mountain (I was particularly proud of an essay which compared the use of the ‘epiphany’ in the works of Joyce and Kafka) but now it turns me off.

And so to my own surprise, of the works I’ve read over the past few months, I’m surprised to find myself preferring Katherine Mansfield’s short stories to Joyce. I can see and understand Joyce’s mastery as a writer, his astonishing control of structure and symbolism, his fluency. But whether due to age and fatigue, or to having had a family of my own and been through various tribulations, I find life stranger and more uncanny than ever; and so I find the systematisation in Joyce – the creation of multiple systems of symbolism, resonance and meaningful structuring – I find his control to be metallic and repelling.

Whereas the 33 Mansfield short stories I read before Christmas are a) less controlled and systematic and so more accurately reflect the chaotic unplanned nature of life; and b) within each story the meanings are beautifully fugitive, fleeting; at every moment in a Mansfield story strange things happen, people’s lives are disrupted, events and emotions they can’t control derail their intentions, upsetting their entire understanding of their lives, and even what it means to be alive. This, it seems to me, is more what life is like, even the etiolated intellectual life Joyce is ostensibly recording.

There is no strangeness in Joyce; everything is controlled, every detail is subordinated to a very canny plan, and this is all very well in its own terms – nobody ever constructed a bigger, more multi-levelled matrix of meanings and symbols and associations than ‘Ulysses’. And yet one short story by Katherine Mansfield says more to me about the strangeness, the uncontrolledness and the uncanniness of human existence, than all of Joyce.

Credit

‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce was published in 1916 by B.W. Huebsch.

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Posted by Simon on January 28, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/28/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-james-joyce/

Dubliners by James Joyce (1914)

Dublin is such a small city: everyone knows everyone else’s business.
(The Boarding House)

Dubliners, that book of traps…
(Literary critics Hugh Kenner)

‘Dubliners’ is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, written between 1904 and 1907, and published as one volume, after various problems and delays, in 1914. The earlier ones are mostly pretty short and so have been described as vignettes, a vignette being ‘a brief evocative description, account or episode.’ The later ones are longer and more complex.

On the face of it the Dubliners stories present naturalistic depictions of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early twentieth century, although some readers, and subsequently a small army of academic scholars, have detected all manner of subtle symbolism and clever structuring in all of them.

  1. The Sisters (9 pages)
  2. An Encounter (9 pages)
  3. Araby (7 pages)
  4. Eveline (6 pages)
  5. After the Race (7 pages)
  6. Two Gallants (11 pages)
  7. The Boarding House (8 pages)
  8. A Little Cloud (14 pages)
  9. Counterparts (12 pages)
  10. Clay (8 pages)
  11. A Painful Case (10 pages)
  12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room (17 pages)
  13. A Mother (13 pages)
  14. Grace (22 pages)
  15. The Dead (41 pages)

1. The Sisters

A young boy is taken to see the lying-in of his dead priest.

A young boy who lives with his philistine uncle and aunt, reacts to the death of an old priest, the reverend James Flynn, who taught him much. From the start he is very alert to words, he lives through words which are as real as people:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

The title comes from the fact that the narrator is taken by his aunt to visit the two spinster sisters who looked after the dead man, Eliza and Nanny, to be shown the corpse in his coffin, then have a glass of sherry and a gossip.

2. An Encounter

Two schoolboys run into a flasher.

Another story about boyhood but told in a much more stilted and pompous style:

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one.

Three boys bunk off school to go swanning round Dublin.

We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce—the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay.

Except one of them, tubby Joe Dillon, doesn’t show up. So the narrator and Mahony roam round town till they come to rest in a field. Here they approached by a furtive old pervert, ‘a queer old josser!’ He asks about their girlfriends, talking about girls in a strange obsessive way. He excuses himself and goes off to a corner of the field and, it is strongly implied, masturbates.

After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim: “I say! Look what he’s doing!”

Then he comes back to the boys and, when Mahony goes off chasing a cat, launches into a monologue about how such boys should be whipped, repeating the word and idea obsessively.

It’s an encounter with a ‘flasher’, a case of indecent exposure, for sure, and creepy. But the man is also a type of mental blockage and paralysis, unable to get beyond his maundering obsessively repetitive phrases about girls and whipping. Perversion as paralysis.

3. Araby

An adolescent boy tries to impress an older girl he has a crush on but fails.

Everything around Joyce becomes charged with meanings and symbolism. So the apparently simple opening sentence is both realistic and symbolic:

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free.

One way to start with Joyce is not the awe-ful weight of the intellectual frameworks and symbolism, but more simply responding to his lyricism.

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

The narrator is a pubescent boy who is romantically obsessed with the sister of his schoolfriend Mangan, who lives in the house opposite. He takes her image in his heart everywhere, amid the hurly-burly of the Dublin streets and shops, giving rise to the famous sentence:

I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.

A bazaar comes to town. In an unclear passage, the narrator thinks Mangan’s sister says she wishes she could go but her convent are going on a retreat, so he promises to go and bring her back a present. All weeks he shirks schoolwork, burning to perform his quest for beautiful Mangan’s sister.

When Saturday comes he waits for his uncle (who’s gone out) to get home and give him a little pocket money to go to the bazaar but uncle, a bit drunk, doesn’t get home till past nine, and has to be reminded to give the boy some money.

He hastens to the train station to catch a train out to the bazaar and doesn’t make it till nearly ten, as it’s closing up, desolate and empty. He walks among different stalls, is asked whether he wants to buy anything by a bored shop assistant, reluctantly says no, and walks back through the now-empty bazaar, burning with humiliation.

Another story about frustration and paralysis and unfreedom.

4. Eveline

Young Evelyn is invited by her boyfriend to elope abroad and escape her closeted life, but at the last minute bottles out.

Eveline Hill is about to elope with a young fellow. She takes a last look round the family home, at the rooms she’s dusted once a week, at the estate of new houses which used to be fields where she played with her childhood friends, all grown up and moved away now. Reflecting on the weekly struggle to pool her own earnings at the department store where she is routinely demeaned, with whatever she can extract from her drunken bully of a father. She promised her dying mother to keep the home together as long as she could but the time has come. She’s been walking out with a young sailor named Frank, tall and handsome who’s back in Ireland on holiday from the merchant ships. Her father found out about the affair and tried to ban it. But now she’s written goodbye letters to him and to her surviving brother, Harry. When she remembers her mother’s final descent into madness, she is overcome with panic:

She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.

The short text cuts to her standing with Frank amid the swirling quay by the huge ship set to sail across the sea to Buenos Aires and when it comes to it, she has a panic attack, clutches the railing, and cannot move.

5. After the Race

Swept up into a glamorous international set, a rich young man gambles away the money entrusted to him by his father.

Crowds are gathered to watch an international car race through the roads around Dublin, a place characterised by ‘poverty and inaction’. The story focuses on the four young men crewing one of the motor cars.

  1. Charles Ségouin, the owner of the car
  2. André Rivière, his cousin, a young electrician of Canadian birth – both about to start a motor establishment in Paris with Rivière
  3. Villona – a huge Hungarian devoted to his food
  4. Jimmy Doyle – a neatly groomed young man, with a soft, light brown moustache and rather innocent-looking grey eyes

After the race, the four young men go on a prolonged binge. It starts with dinner at Doyle’s house where they are indulged by Doyle senior, a wealthy businessman who made his money the hard way. It is emphasised that Doyle senior has been grooming his son to take over the family business, sent him to posh private (Catholic) school in England, then to Cambridge where an indulgent father picked up the tab for young Jimmy’s moderate debauchery. Doyle senior has encouraged Jimmy’s friendship with Ségouin and this has crystallised into an agreement that the Doyles will invest in Ségouin’s new car company in France.

They had already bumped into an English chum, Routh who they bring to dinner. Afterwards, out on the town, they bump into another pal in the street, a rich American named Farley and drunkenly row out to his yacht anchored in the bay. Here there is heavy duty drunken gambling and, the implication is, Doyle gambles away all the money which was meant to be his family’s investment in Ségouin’s business.

The unsung hero of the piece is the Hungarian Villona who is on the face of it a greedyguts only interested in food but turns out to be knowledgeable about English madrigals, of all subjects, and is wise enough to sit out the card game and play the piano. Wisdom.

6. Two Gallants

A parasite waits for a cocky ladykiller to inveigle money out of his latest squeeze.

Lenehan is a leech, a ravaged-looking hanger-on, a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles who inveigles himself into partying groups. One evening he’s walking along with Corley, a swaggering police inspector’s son, who’s telling him all about a tart he picked up and has been seeing regularly; that they catch a tram out to the fields to have sex (he’s vaguely worried about her getting pregnant) but as important as the sex is the free fags and cigars she brings to every rendezvous. Lenehan listens and applauds and is all oily servility.

They walk through Dublin towards Corley’s rendezvous with the woman, Corley all the way regaling Lenehan with stories of past conquests. They come to the place where the girl is waiting and Lenehan gets a good look at here, minutely described. She looks like a tarty pig. Corley and she stroll off leaving Lenehan to kill time, because for some reason he is anxious to meet up with Corley afterwards, he is counting on Corley to pull off some kind of scam.

He pops into a cheap eatery, has a plate of hot peas, a ginger beer and laments his lot. He’ll be 31 next birthday and has no job or career and is fed up of leeching off people. Incidentally, all the stories reveal or display Joyce’s detailed knowledge of Dublin’s street layout.

He paid twopence halfpenny to the slatternly girl and went out of the shop to begin his wandering again. He went into Capel Street and walked along towards the City Hall. Then he turned into Dame Street. At the corner of George’s Street he met two friends of his and stopped to converse with them… He left his friends at a quarter to ten and went up George’s Street. He turned to the left at the City Markets and walked on into Grafton Street.

The aim of the story is to build up to a comic anticlimax. All the way through the narrative, every detail of his behaviour and thoughts rams it into our minds that Lenehan is desperately anxious that Corley ‘brings it off’, succeeds, achieves his goal, gets a result. Lenehan marches up and down the corner where he’d agreed to meet his palm long before he’s due there, it starts to rain and he begins to think it’s ‘no go’ bit then he sees the couple approaching. He ducks out of sight, watches the girl go down into the area (the low area in front of Georgian terraced houses), then sees her come out of the main door and skip down the steps and confer with Corley before disappearing back inside.

The bathetic anticlimax is that all this cloak-and-dagger behaviour has all been simply to extract some money from the poor girl. This, the story tells us, is the pitiful amount of time and nervous energy a leech and parasite expends on earning even a fraction of money.

‘Can’t you tell us?’ he said. ‘Did you try her?’ Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.

Squalid and pathetic. Lenehan goes on to appear in several chapters of ‘Ulysses’.

7. The Boarding House

A young man is intimidating into marrying the landlady’s daughter, who he’s unwisely had sex with.

At last, when she judged it to be the right moment, Mrs Mooney intervened. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat:

The situation is simple: a youngish (35) boarder in a boarding house (Mr Doran) has got into a relationship with the pretty daughter and servant in a boarding house (Polly Mooney) and had sex with her i.e. ‘taken her virginity’. Her mother and landlady of the house, the big solid no-nonsense Mrs Mooney, has got wind of the affair, obtained a full confession from her daughter. This vignette first of all gives a lot of backstory about Mrs Mooney (how she had to flee her drunken husband, and what became of him), how she set up the boarding house and how it became a popular venue for young artistic and musical types – before moving on to describe the tense mood of both young Polly and Mr Doran as they wait for Mrs D to call the young man in for an interview in which she will demand that he ‘does the decent thing’ and marries Polly i.e. half an hour which will change both their lives forever.

8. A Little Cloud

A flashy man who’s made his name abroad returns to Dublin and upstages his quiet sensitive friend who stayed at home.

Eight years ago Ignatius Gallaher left Dublin to start a career in the Press in London. Now he’s back in Dublin for a flying visit and has invited one of his old friends, shy timid Thomas Malone Chandler, to meet up with him at the loud garish Corless’s bar. Chandler fancies himself as a passionate poet but he is in reality ‘a delicate and abstinent person’, a chaste and methodical clerk, who long ago earned the nickname ‘Little Chandler’, timid and hesitant.

Predictably, the London man is large and hearty, wearing a vivid orange tie, and proceeds to regale timid Chandler with racy tales of life not only in London, but Paris and Berlin. When Chandler suggests he’ll settle down sooner or later, once he finds the right girl, Gallaher boomingly laughs off the idea.

Cut back to Little Chandler at home, at the end of the evening. He has irritated his prim wife, Annie, by forgetting to bring home some coffee. She’s loaded him with the sleeping baby and gone out. He looks at a photo of his wife and notes her pretty features, pretty but cold and prim. Compare with the lurid erotic fantasies conjured up by brassy Gallagher’s brave talk of rich Jewesses with dark oriental eyes, full of passion and voluptuous longing!

Dandling the baby he opens a book of Byron’s poetry and is transported. Why can’t he write poetry like that? The baby awakes, starts crying, refuses to be quieted and suddenly he feels trapped.

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life.

So he shouts ‘STOP’ at the baby which, after a moment of amazement, starts screaming even louder. And that’s when his wife walks back in, horrified and demanding to know what he’s done to the baby. Yes, he is trapped forever.

The story contains a line that may have been heartfelt for Joyce, who himself felt stifled by Dublin’s parochial and nationalist culture:

There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.

Which is, of course, precisely what Joyce did, moving to Trieste in the 1900s, Zurich during the Great War and then onto Paris (1920 to 1940).

9. Counterparts

Angry frustrated man, humiliated at work and hard up, gets angry drunk and returns to take it out on his poor young son.

Farrington works as a clerk and copyist in the offices of Crosbie & Alleyne and hates it. He is:

tall and of great bulk. He had a hanging face, dark wine-coloured, with fair eyebrows and moustache: his eyes bulged forward slightly and the whites of them were dirty.

Farrington is a slacker and a drinker. Despite being warned he must finish off a long copying job before 5.30, he nips out to a nearby snug for a quick pint of porter. He is a little tipsy, stressed and discombobulated when the owner calls him out in front of the entire staff for not including two letters in an important tranche of documents he gave him. But he turns the moment into a crisis by choosing to answer back to the boss. The exchange is, in modern terms, hard to understand.

‘Tell me,’ [Mr Alleyne] added, glancing first for approval to the lady beside him, ‘do you take me for a fool? Do you think me an utter fool?’
The man glanced from the lady’s face to the little egg-shaped head and back again; and, almost before he was aware of it, his tongue had found a felicitous moment: ‘I don’t think, sir,’ he said, ‘that that’s a fair question to put to me.’
There was a pause in the very breathing of the clerks. Everyone was astounded.

Not the snappiest reparteee I’ve ever heard, but 5.30 comes and Farrington 1) pawns his watch and chain for six shillings, then 2) makes a beeline for his favourite pub, Davy Byrne’s, where he keeps a succession of arriving friends in awe with recounting of this devastating wit. His mates are: Nosey Flynn, O’Halloran and Paddy Leonard, and Higgins from the office who retells the story with great drama.

They pub crawl on to another bar called the Scotch House where they are introduced to Weathers, an acrobat in the Tivoli, and Farrington buys another round. When the Scotch House closes, they go round to Mulligan’s, to a parlour room at the back. Here Farrington spots a couple of dolled-up ladies and a man who come in and sit at a nearby table; he spends some time ogling one of the women and is irritated when they leave and she fails to turn round and give him an encouraging glance. He’s also irritated that he’s spent all his money on drinks for the others, who he now thinks of as spongers, instead of saving some to impress a lady.

The conversation turns to physique and Weathers shows off his strong arms. The others call on Farrington, the biggest there, to defend Irish national honour and so they stage an arm-wrestling contest. Weathers wins twice, which makes Farrington even angrier.

Drunk and angry, Farrington gets a cheap tram back to his house. It is a squalid household. His wife, Ada, is a little sharp-faced woman who bullies her husband when he is sober and is bullied by him when he is drunk. They have five children.

One of the small boys come down and tells him his mother’s gone to chapel. Farrington, boiling over with rage, takes it out on the harmless child, blaming him for letting the fire in the kitchen go out, taking his walking stick and mercilessly beating the poor child on his thighs.

I needed Wikipedia to explain to me that the story is titled ‘Counterparts’ for two reasons:

  1. For Joyce’s the term ‘counterparts’ could be expected to suggest (hand-written) duplicate copies of legal documents.
  2. At the story’s end, Farrington is seen as the ‘counterpart’ of Mr. Alleyne because just as his superior at his workplace humiliates him, so he, Farrington, abuses his child at home.

10. Clay

The timid life of a mousey spinster.

‘Maria is a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin.’ She is a small, middle-aged spinster, very popular at the laundry where she works, Dublin by Lamplight.

It’s Halloween which Irish Catholics celebrated with a party and traditional games. The story follows her helping with evening tea at the laundry, distributing slices of ‘barmbrack’ to all the ladies, then being toasted and cheered, she is so popular.

As soon as that tea is tidied away, she sets off by tram for the house of a man called Joe Donnelly who she nursed when he was a boy, along with his brother Alphy.

She goes to several shops on the way spending a lot of time worrying about which cake to buy to take with her eventually choosing a big slice of plumcake. On the tram to Joe’s she is made room for and shown great courtesy by a stout gentleman wearing a brown hard hat, with a square red face and a greyish moustache, a ‘colonel-looking gentleman’. The implication is he’s a bit tipsy and flirtatious.

She is welcomed with fanfare and affection at Joe’s house by him and his wife and children and plunges straight into tea and games. but when she goes to look for the plumcake can’t find it, asks the children if they’ve hidden or eaten it, and only finally realises the colonel looking gentleman must have stolen it off her.

Joe is keen to brush over this and so gets on with the main Halloween game which is being blindfolded and led to a table on which are a variety of objects. these include a Bible and a ring, and what you select predicts your future. Blindfolded, Maria puts her hands in something soft and squidgy, leading to silence and then a hurried taking of it away. Only later did I realise this is the clay of the story, clay brought in from the garden by the children and put into one of the saucers, clay which, in the symbolism of the game, stands for Death. Which is why there’s an embarrassed silence, then it’s quickly taken away and Maria told to have another go.

She moved her hand about here and there in the air and descended on one of the saucers. She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage. There was a pause for a few seconds; and then a great deal of scuffling and whispering. Somebody said something about the garden, and at last Mrs Donnelly said something very cross to one of the next-door girls and told her to throw it out at once: that was no play. Maria understood that it was wrong that time and so she had to do it over again: and this time she got the prayer-book.

The prayer-book symbolising a life of spiritual vocation (service at a convent, suggests Joe’s wife). After more games for the children and wine for the adults, Maria is asked to sing. Mrs Donnelly plays the piano while Maria sings ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ from the opera The Bohemian Girl by Michael Balfe.

The narrative tells us that she by ‘mistake’ sang the first verse twice. Characters in Joyce might make mistakes but Joyce never does. In a story fraught with symbolism this omission, too, is symbolic, because in the second verse of the song the singer imagines being beset with lovely suitors, thoughts and imagery inappropriate to the confirmed spinster status of little old Maria.

In an ironic conclusion, Joe is so moved by her singing that he can’t find a corkscrew and has to ask his wife where it is. Much earlier Maria had said she loved Joe except when he drank, for then he became a different person.

Only she hoped that Joe wouldn’t come in drunk. He was so different when he took any drink.

Very subtly it’s implying that some men can only cope with emotion by drinking, thus channeling emotion into the familiar channels of inebriation. Given the horrible violence drunken frustration triggers in Farrington in the previous story, this casts a small shadow over the narrative (as did the tipsy colonel-type nicking her cake).

Not only is Maria, like so many of the characters, trapped in her condition, but she is hemmed round by these threats and risks, mostly from men.

11. A Painful Case

An emotionally constipated would-be intellectual starts an affair with a married woman but as soon as she becomes really engaged, backs off, with tragic consequences.

A portrait of a middle-aged man painfully isolated life, even from his own life, who begins a platonic affair with a married woman but, when she starts to have feelings for him, hurriedly breaks it off.

Mr Duffy is a middle-aged bank cashier of extraordinarily rigid lifestyle, every aspect of his life meticulous and ordered so as to incur as little social contact as possible. One night at a concert he meets a Mrs Emily Sinico, a middle-aged married woman. They strike up a conversation, arrange to meet again, and again.

These meetings are perfectly chaste and mostly an opportunity for Mr Duffy to sound off about his abstruse intellectual concerns. He feels uneasy about the surreptitious nature of the meetings and so asks to be invited to the family home, where me meets the husband, Mr Sinico, who mistakenly thinks his regular visits are by way of wooing their daughter. And so their friendship continues with Duffy sounding off and impressing her with his many intellectual interests.

Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.

In a scene which shows what a gulf there is between Joyce’s Edwardian times and our own, in the areas of sex and relationships, one night at a meeting, Mrs Sinico displays unusual levels of ‘excitement’ and then impulsively takes Duffy’s hand and presses it to her cheek.

This shocks our man in two ways, that he realises the lady hasn’t been listening to his lectures in the high-falutin’ way he intended but also that she’s getting sticky and he risks being sucked into human contact and emotion. So he arranges one last meeting, they walk round the park for three hours as he painfully extricates himself from the relationship. When she shows signs of getting emotional he jumps on the nearest tram and legs it.

As in a fairy story, four years pass and Mr Duffy has reverted to his utterly inflexible, chilly lifestyle when one evening he sees an item in his evening paper. Joyce quotes at length a fictional newspaper report about Mrs Sinico who was knocked over by a train while crossing the line at a station. The train wasn’t going very fast and obliquely from witnesses at the coroner’s enquiry it emerges that in the last few years she had changed character and taken to drink.

The title of the newspaper article is ‘A Painful Case’ which gives the story its title.

Duffy is at first disgusted by the report, dismissive of Mrs Sinico and thinking it weakness that led to her drinking. He is agitated enough to go out for a walk and drops into the local pub for a drink but as he reflects on their time together more, and then leaves the pub to walk into the park up a hill and looking out over Dublin, he slowly, guiltily, starts to think maybe it was his rejection of her which led to her drinking and, ultimately, her death.

He spots young people lying by the wall of the park, no doubt engaged in amorous activities and suddenly realises how lonely he is. ‘He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast’.

Unrelentingly sad aren’t they, these stories.

12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room

Rambling portrait of ten or so Dublin characters involved in a local election campaign.

The stories get steadily longer. This one is a sort of portmanteau piece, introducing us to quite a number of Dublin characters, men involved in the half-hearted politics of a local election, being:

  • Old Jack – the caretaker, ‘an old man’s face, very bony and hairy. The moist blue eyes blinked at the fire and the moist mouth fell open at times, munching once or twice mechanically when it closed’
  • Mr O’Connor – ‘a grey-haired young man, whose face was disfigured by many blotches and pimples’
  • Mr Richard J. Tierney – the Nationalist candidate
  • Mr Hynes – ‘a tall, slender young man with a light brown moustache’
  • Mr Henchy – ‘a bustling little man with a snuffling nose and very cold ears’
  • Father Keon – pops in, in search of someone, then pops lout again
  • Crofton – ‘a very fat man whose blue serge clothes seemed to be in danger of falling from his sloping figure. He had a big face which resembled a young ox’s face in expression, staring blue eyes and a grizzled moustache’
  • Lyons – ‘much younger and frailer, had a thin, clean-shaven face. He wore a very high double collar and a wide-brimmed bowler hat’

One by one they enter like actors onto a set, coming through the door to the outside where it’s a wet cold October day, and into the hall where there’s a fire, stoked by Old Jack the caretaker. For me, the overall impression of the thing is the slack amateurism of all involved but chances are it’s an accurate description of political canvassing in Dublin circa 1908 because, apparently, Joyce’s own father did just such canvassing. The Wikipedia summary is thus:

In a committee room, Matthew O’Connor, a canvasser for Richard Tierney, a candidate in an upcoming municipal election, discusses child-rearing with Old Jack, who tries to keep a fire going. Joe Hynes, another canvasser, arrives and needles O’Connor on whether he’s been paid for his work yet. He proceeds to defend rival candidate Colgan’s working-class background and maintains that Tierney, although a Nationalist, will likely present a welcome address at the upcoming visit of King Edward VII to which, as the spokesman for the working class, he objects. This sparks a debate about whether they, Dubliners, the Irish, should welcome the King or not.

When Hynes points out that it is Ivy Day (October 6), a date appointed to commemorate the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, a nostalgic silence fills the room. Another canvasser, John Henchy, enters and criticises Tierney for not having paid him yet. When Hynes leaves, Henchy voices a suspicion that the man is a spy for Colgan.

A priest, Father Keogh, makes a brief appearance, asking after a Mr Fanning and, when told Fanning’s at a certain pub, exits, triggering gossip about the priest, some wondering whether he’s even a priest at all.

A ‘boy’, in fact 16, enters to deliver a crate of stout from the nearby pub, the Black Eagle. He’s asked to pop out and fetch a corkscrew for the bottles, upon his return old Jack opens three of them and, reluctantly, one for the delivery boy, who finishes his off and exits with the corkscrew.

Henchy badmouths another canvasser, Crofton, just before Crofton himself enters with Bantam Lyons. Crofton had worked for the Conservative candidate until the party withdrew and gave their support to Tierney. Henchy offers Crofton and Lyons a drink but they realise they have no corkscrew to open the bottles. So Henchy shows them a trick, he places the bottles on the hob of the fire and, once they’ve warmed up enough, the corks pop out by themselves. This struck me as dangerous – what if the bottles crack before the corks pop out – and disgusting – drinking fire-warmed beer? Yuk.

The talk of politics drifts to Charles Stewart Parnell, who has his defenders and detractors in the room. Hynes returns and is encouraged to read his sentimental poem dedicated to Parnell. The poem is in simple ballad form and criticises those who betrayed Parnell, including the Catholic Church, and places Parnell among the ancient heroes of Ireland. All applaud the performance and seem to forget their differences for the moment.

Commentary

Apart from the air of amateurishness and laziness, the other thing that comes over, and which is odd for a story about canvassing for an election, is the lack of politics. Nobody really discusses political policies except objecting to a possible visit to Dublin by King Edward; some object they shouldn’t truckle to a German king (Edward’s father was the German Prince Albert); others say he’s a good fellow coming on a well-intentioned visit to meet and talk to his subjects, so they shouldn’t reject or heckle him before they’ve even met him, it will only confirm negative English stereotypes of the Irish.

In other words, the only thing close to a policy they discuss is their response to the English monarchy, on which they’re largely split. And the only thing that gives them all a temporary unity is sentimental nostalgia for the disgraced nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell.

But tipsy nostalgia is not a political platform. The lack of debate, the lack of readiness or preparation, the lack of discussion of any policies at all, is interesting background to the confusion and disagreement which afflicted all parties when radical political change was triggered by the Easter Uprising 6 or so years later.

13. A Mother

Pushy mother embarrasses her young singer daughter at a public recital.

The mother in question is Mrs Kearney. With characteristic thoroughness, Joyce gives us her backstory, how she was an educated, romantic, accomplished young lady named Miss Devlin, who intimidated man of her acquaintance and so ended up marrying the solid, reliable , who was very accomplished at a young age but found that the young men of her class were intimidated by her, which prompted her to marry the working class Mr Kearney, who was a bootmaker on Ormond Quay, ‘out of spite’.

So she becomes a mum and raises her girls with his educational and cultural standards. When the Irish Revival comes along in the 1890s she gets her girls educated in Gaelic and folklore. Her daughter Kathleen becomes an accomplished enough pianist to be offered gigs as an accompanist at concerts.

And that’s where the narrative proper commences: A Mr Holohan, assistant secretary of the Eire Abu Society, is organising a series of four concerts and approaches Mrs K to ask if Katherine could be the pianist. Mrs K agrees and sets the price at 8 guineas, and this is the core of the story because the concerts turn out to be very badly planned and publicised. Although Mrs K lends a lot of shrewd help to the creation of the posters, the night of the first concert is very poorly attended.

The second one has a larger audience but Mrs Kearney is bothered by both the behaviour of the audience and the casual attitude of the society’s secretary, Mr. Fitzpatrick, ‘a little man, with a white vacant face. She noticed that he wore his soft brown hat carelessly on the side of his head and that his accent was flat.’

The third concert is cancelled and Mrs Kearney now becomes concerned that her daughter will not be paid the full contracted price but is unable to get a straight answer on the matter from Holohan or Fitzpatrick. She brings her husband to the final concert, anticipating a confrontation.

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed…

and confrontation there is. In readiness for this final night, we get a full list of the performers, being:

  • The bass, Mr Duggan, was a slender young man with a scattered black moustache. He was the son of a hall porter in an office in the city and, as a boy, he had sung prolonged bass notes in the resounding hall. From this humble state he had raised himself until he had become a first-rate artiste.
  • Mr Bell, the second tenor, was a fair-haired little man who competed every year for prizes at the Feis Ceoil. On his fourth trial he had been awarded a bronze medal. He was extremely nervous and extremely jealous of other tenors and he covered his nervous jealousy with an ebullient friendliness.
  • Miss Healy, the contralto.
  • Madam Glynn, the soprano, wearing a faded blue dress which was stretched upon a meagre body.

In addition there are some gentlemen from the press:

  • the man from the Freeman – a grey-haired man, with a plausible voice and careful manners. He held an extinguished cigar in his hand and the aroma of cigar smoke floated near him – due to miss the concert in order to attend a lecture by an American priest
  • Mr O’Madden Burke who will write the notice

So you can see that there’s a narrative of sorts, but that arguably the point of the story is the range of characters, the sense of the variety of Dublin society.

Anyway the crisis of the story is that as the theatre fills up and then audience start to get restless, Mrs Kearney absolutely refuses to let her daughter go on until she is paid the contracted 4 guineas. At last, after a lot of feverish whispering and haggling, Haloran manages to return from the mysterious ‘committee’ he’s always talking about, with four pounds (a guinea is a pound and a shilling so he’s four shillings short).

At this point young Kathleen intervenes and insists on going onstage with the performers despite her mother’s wishes, and the first half of the concert is a triumph

The first part closed with a stirring patriotic recitation delivered by a young lady who arranged amateur theatricals. It was deservedly applauded; and, when it was ended, the men went out for the interval, content.

In the climax tempers get out of control and when Holohan tells her the committee will pay the remained the following Tuesday, Mrs Kearney says that’s not good enough and refuses to allow her daughter to go back onstage. At which all the performers, Holohan, Fitzpatrick et al roundly condemn her. Timid Miss Healy agrees to play one or two accompaniments, and when the performers troop back onstage for part two and the first act commences, Mrs Kearney forces her husband and daughter out the side entrance and into a cab in a blazing fury.

14. Grace

Four kind-hearted men try to talk their friend into reforming his alcoholic ways, employing comically ignorant Catholic theology along the way.

The story opens with two men helping to his feet a man who’s passed out drunk in the downstairs toilet of a pub. Carried upstairs, and a policeman called, he’s identified by a pal of his, a Mr Power, who identifies him as Mr Tom Kernan and promises the copper to get him home to his wife, which he does, in a cab. They carry him up to bed then Power is embarrassed before the hapless wife, used to Kernan’s drunkenness and who has nothing to offer him by way of hospitality. As if to make amends for this, Power tells her that he and Kernan’s other buddies will help Kernan turn over a new leaf.

And that’s what they do. Powers organises a plan with two other buddies, M’Coy and Cunningham, to get Kernan along to a Catholic retreat with them. The long central part of the ‘story’ consists of an extended dialogue between these four guys, as the three in on the plan chip in with various suggestions and pledged until Kernan is shamed into agreeing to join them. His wife tries hard to conceal her delight at the prospect of her husband stopping being such a pitiful drunk.

Cut to the third scene, which sees all four chaps in the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street and the arrival of the priest, Father Purdon, in the pulpit to deliver a sermon. Far from the high-falutin’ theology of redemption you might have expected, the priest’s approach is surprisingly mundane and worldly:

He came [Father Purdon said] to speak to businessmen and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience.

Commentary

1. Characters As so often, in one sense the most interesting part of the narrative is the backstory of the central characters. These are stated clearly and bluntly, as in a presentation: I mean they aren’t conveyed with subtle and scattered hints, but all plonked down in one interest bio.

Mr Kernan was a commercial traveller of the old school which believed in the dignity of its calling. He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster. He carried on the tradition of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite, whose memory he evoked at times by legend and mimicry. Modern business methods had spared him only so far as to allow him a little office in Crowe Street on the window blind of which was written the name of his firm with the address—London, E.C. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden battalion of canisters was drawn up and on the table before the window stood four or five china bowls which were usually half full of a black liquid. From these bowls Mr Kernan tasted tea. He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with it and then spat it forth into the grate. Then he paused to judge.

Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle. The arc of his social rise intersected the arc of his friend’s decline, but Mr Kernan’s decline was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends who had known him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character. Mr Power was one of these friends. His inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man.

Mrs Kernan… was an active, practical woman of middle age. Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him to Mr Power’s accompaniment. In her days of courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm. After three weeks she had found a wife’s life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother. The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband. Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money. The other children were still at school.

See how much time and detail, precision and effect, Joyce spends on each character. They are highly defined and positioned. As many people have pointed out, in ‘Dubliners’ Joyce feels like he’s taken nineteenth century naturalism as far as it can go. Nobody could write more careful detailed descriptions of his characters. Which is why, having reached the end of the line, he burst through the boundaries of the genre into something post-naturalist, experimenting with free indirect speech in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and then bursting the bounds of what a novel even is, in ‘Ulysses’.

2. Catholic dogma A good deal of the long central section consists of the three would-be conspirators struggling with various aspects of the Catholic faith, from the mottos of various popes to the role of the Jesuits, the difference between Catholics and Protestants, and so on.

Why is it called ‘Grace’? Is it a sympathetic view that the grace of spiritual rebirth stems from pretty much as low as one could go, a man falling down dead drunk in an underground toilet? Or is Joyce mocking religion, suggesting that there is no grace, here or anywhere? That fits the spirit of irony and satire which informs the entire collection.

15. The Dead

Beautiful extended description of a traditional Christmas party which ends with a sensitive husband suddenly made aware of the tragic death of his beautiful wife’s first love.

The Dead is routinely described as one of the greatest short stories in the English language. It is noted for its tenderness, and lyrical acceptance of lost love, death and bereavement. The main character is Gabriel Conroy who takes his beautiful wife Gretta to the annual Christmas party thrown by his lovely aunts, Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan, ‘in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island’. The narrative describes the preparations, the arrival of the guests, numerous conversations, dancing and singing, the big Christmas dinner at which Gabriel carves the roast goose, and then makes a movingly gracious speech of thanks to the old aunts, and then the slow winding down towards thank yous and farewells.

Cast

As usual, Joyce pays scrupulous attention to each of his characters’ backstories and appearance.

  • Gabriel Conroy – ‘plump’, ‘a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat’ — Gabriel is ‘son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks’ — he is a college teacher and book reviewer
  • Gretta Conroy – Gabriel’s wife
  • Kate Morkan and Julia Morkan – Gabriel and Mary Jane’s aunts – ‘two small plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.’
  • Mary Jane Morkan – niece of Kate and Julia, teaches music, ‘Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line’
  • Lily – the caretaker’s daughter, ‘a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair’
  • Freddy Malins – an alcoholic and friend of the family – ‘a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel’s size and build, with very round shoulders. His face was fleshy and pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips. His heavy-lidded eyes and the disorder of his scanty hair made him look sleepy’
  • Mrs Malins – Freddy Malins’ mother, ‘a stout feeble old woman with white hair. Her voice had a catch in it like her son’s and she stuttered slightly’, lives with her married daughter in Glasgow and comes to Dublin on a visit once a year
  • Molly Ivors – a long-time acquaintance of the family – ‘a frank-mannered talkative young lady, with a freckled face and prominent brown eyes. She did not wear a low-cut bodice and the large brooch which was fixed in the front of her collar bore on it an Irish device and motto’
  • Mr Browne – only Protestant guest at the party, ‘A tall wizen-faced man, with a stiff grizzled moustache and swarthy skin’
  • Bartell D’Arcy – a tenor, ‘a dark-complexioned young man with a smart moustache’
  • Other guests: Miss Furlong, Miss Daly and Miss Power, Mr Bergin and Mr Kerrigan

Incidents include:

– Upon arrival Gabriel tries to joke with his aunts’ maid, Lily, which doesn’t work out.

– He goes upstairs to join the rest of the guests, where he worries about the speech he has to give, worrying about too highfalutin’ reference to the poetry of Robert Browning, still, in the 1890s, considered difficult.

– When Freddy Malins arrives drunk, as the aunts had feared, Aunt Kate asks Gabriel to make sure he doesn’t cause trouble.

– As the party gathers pace, Gabriel is twitted by Miss Ivors, an Irish nationalist, because she has figured out that he is the GC who writes book reviews in the Unionist newspaper The Daily Express. She teases him by calling him a ‘West Briton’, repeatedly. Gabriel tries to reply but can’t come up with a convincing argument.

– Miss Ivor tells Gabriel she and some friends are organising a reading week in the West of Ireland. He says he can’t go but when he then tells his wife, she is excited at the thought of revisiting her childhood home of Galway.

– Dinner begins, with Gabriel seated at the head of the table. He boisterously carves and hands round the plates while the guests discuss music and theology. Once the eating is over, Gabriel rises to his feet again and makes his speech, courteously referring to Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia and Mary Jane as the Three Graces. The speech ends with a toast and the guests sing ‘For they are jolly gay fellows’.

– The party winds down and the guests leave one by one. Having got his coat Gabriel goes to the foot of the stairs and from the dark well looks up to see his wife lost in thought at the top of the stairs, listening to a song coming from the living room. She is listening to the famous tenor Bartell D’Arcy singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’.

– They walk part of the way back to their hotel, then get a cab. Gabriel has rarely seen his wife looking so beautiful and suddenly he is overcome with lust. He can’t wait till they are back in the hotel room alone together. There is what I suppose for the time was fairly graphic description of his desire, specifically the fact that he needs her to want it too:

If she would only turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would be brutal. No, he must see some ardour in her eyes first.

– BUT once they are alone in their hotel room, Gabriel’s lust reaches a peak and then is utterly dashed. Gretta sits on their bed but not in the heat of desire at all; instead she is crying. She tearfully admits that the song she was listening to reminded her of her first true love, reminds her of a young boy, just 17, named Michael Furey who had courted her in her youth in Galway. He, too, used to sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ for her.

– The boy fell ill as she was leaving for the big city, but insisted on getting out of his sick bed to come to her house and stand under her window in the winter rain just to see her. He returned to bed even sicker and died soon after.

– Gretta is overcome with grief and cries herself to exhaustion and then to sleep leaving Gabriel dismayed that there was something of such importance in his wife’s life that he never knew about. Now alone in the bedroom he reflects that we will all die, Aunt Julia, Aunt Kate, all of them – and finds this strangely comforting. He can almost feel the presence of the dead:

His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

And in the story’s famous last lines the narrative picks up on him looking out the window at the snow falling, to describe how it is falling all across Ireland.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

There should not, by these closing lines, be a dry eye in the house.

When I first read this as a boy, I wished my Christmases were like this, festive and convivial with lots of singing, and I wished I would grow up as soulful and sensitive as Gabriel…

Swayed by their beauty, for years I remembered the story for the haunting beauty of its closing lines. I had completely forgotten that the key passages beforehand give a surprisingly frank expression of Gabriel’s desire, nay lust. He becomes really inflamed with lust and desperately wants to ‘take’ his wife as soon as they get back to the hotel. Everyone remembers the poetic ending. Not so many people comments on the way it is also a story about the inappropriateness of male desire; a description of how male desire flares up but then is crushed, mortified and embarrassed by superior female sensitivity.

Commentary

Human life

The stories offer a loosely chronological overview of the different stages of human life, starting with:

  • boyhood (in The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby)
  • young adulthood (After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House)
  • maturity (Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, A Mother)
  • old age and mortality (The Dead)
  • with slyly comic digressions into contemporary politics (Ivy Day in the Committee Room) and the arts (A Mother)
  • before the grand meditation on mortality (The Dead)

Sociology

The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

Fiction doesn’t have to be sociological i.e. comment on the social issues of its time (see Kafka or Borges) but realist fiction tends to do so because a realistic depiction tends to take time to fill in details of character or aspects of events, which themselves tend to reflect contemporary practice. The three themes which stick out for me are drunkenness, Irish nationalism and the broader one of paralysis and trapment.

1. Drunkenness is shown in numerous aspects:

  • the youthful exuberant party drunkenness of young Jimmy Doyle who gambles away his inheritance
  • the hardened middle-aged drunkenness of the angry failure Farrington, who takes out an evening of humiliations by beating his poor son
  • the pathetic fall-down-drunk inebriation of Tom Kernan
  • the sad, pitiful drunkenness of Mrs Sinico after Mr Duffy dumps her

In a number of other stories, nobody gets drunk but drink plays a role. Thus:

  • it’s notable how the bottles of beer are a necessary emollient which take the edge off the political frictions in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’
  • Joe’s occasional drunkenness is a threat lurking at the edge of ‘Clay’
  • the scenes in which Little Chandler is compared with big brassy Ignatius Gallaher are set in a noisy bar where Gallaher not only knows his drinks but gets the bartender’s attention in a second whereas Chandler struggles to be seen etc

2. Paralysis Not much need be said because I’ve pointed out in individual stories where their guiding theme or mood is one of entrapment and paralysis. Almost all the characters are trapped in their behaviour patterns; when offered escape like Evelyn, they are too scared to take it. And entrapment becomes a way of life, for timid characters like Little Chandler or Maria; or underpins the alcoholic rage of a bully like Farrington.

Irish nationalism is well represented in the tales, notably in the character of Miss Ivors in ‘The Dead’ but the issues surrounding nationalism are most fully dramatised in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ – but in neither does the debate or argument get much beyond abuse – there doesn’t appear to be any plan or policy for how independence would be achieved, what steps are required, for example lobbying the Liberal government which was in power for most of the Edwardian period, and lobbying them for what, precisely?

In this way, the presentation of Irish nationalism – no doubt a massive issue in Joyce’s day and which flavours and sometimes becomes a dominant issue in all his writings – feels, ultimately, like a sub-set of the paralysis and stagnation which is the book’s central theme.

Lyricism

The volume concludes with the tremendous lyric vision at the end of ‘The Dead’ but this lyrical eloquence appears at key moments throughout all the stories. It is often very beautiful writing, worth savouring in its own right. It’s a large question for debate whether this lyricism can be said to underpin Joyce’s entire worldview, and how it is contained or subsumed in the more complex styles of his later works.

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by Simon on January 26, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Irish literature, Short stories
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Posted by Simon on January 26, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/26/dubliners-james-joyce/

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.

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by Simon on October 6, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 6, 2025

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

Fallen Angels by Noel Coward (1925)

WILLY: The car’s downstairs.
FRED: How very thoughtful of you not to bring it up.

JANE (writing a note to Maurice): ‘C’est amusant, n’est-ce pas’ – but it isn’t, particularly.

JULIA: It’s all such ridiculous nonsense.

Twitter-length executive summary

Two rich married women get roaring drunk while planning adultery with the same French lover.

Slightly longer summary

Julia and Fred Sterroll and Willy and Jane Banbury are happily married and the best of friends, until a postcard arrives with news of the imminent arrival of a handsome Frenchman who both women had affairs with years earlier – which throws the two wives into a tizzy of expectation.

Or:

Two married women, living a life of passionless boredom, whip themselves into a state of sexual excitement over the return of a former lover. In the play’s celebrated central act they get riotously tipsy as they await the nocturnal arrival of the Gallic Romeo. But, having stoked up the sexual fires, Coward banks them down again in the finely symmetrical final act as each woman falsely believes the other has had a secret assignation with the Gallic intruder.

Or:

Jane and Julia are happily married to pleasant if boring husbands when a message arrives from a former flame of both of them, sending their staid lives into a tizzy. It appears a man with whom they’d each had a passionate tryst in the past is planning a visit, which sets them both questioning whether they can – or want to – withstand his charms.

While the husbands are off playing golf, the ladies plot and plan over copious glasses of champagne (with some help from their worldly housekeeper, Saunders) while awaiting the arrival of their former lover.

A more woke/progressive summary

‘Fallen Angels’ is a biting and hilarious comedy about the rivalry between two bored married women as they await the arrival of their exotic former lover. Dramatising female sexual desire and frustration, the play’s first performances in 1925 outraged the critics, who claimed to find it shocking and obscene. But rather than insulting British womanhood (as its scandalised opponents asserted) Coward’s sharp, entertaining script incisively draws attention to male sexual hypocrisy, while probing the vacuous lives of the play’s privileged protagonists.

Plot summary

Act 1

We are in the living room of Julia and Fred, happily married for five years. We are introduced to Julia and Fred’s newly employed maid, Jasmine who, however, they agree to call Saunders. Saunders is disconcertingly well educated e.g. knows more about golf than Fred, can play the piano better than Julia, can speak French better than Jane.

Fred is packing his stuff ready to go off for a golf weekend with Willy. Willy arrives to collect him and they depart. After being humiliated by Saunders’ superior piano playing, Julia is forced to answer the door herself and let her friend Jane in.

(The trope of the clever servant who knows more than and outsmarts his masters and mistresses is a very ancient one, that goes back through Restoration comedy and Shakespeare, to ancient Rome – where the role was called the servus callidus or clever slave – and, before that, back to ancient Greek comedy, and flourished as a stock character in comedy throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. What’s amazing is that the notion of Saunders being smarter than her employers still gets a laugh two and a half thousand years later. Human nature, human relations, and the comedy of human relations, doesn’t appear to change much.)

Jane bursts in with appalling news: Maurice, a lovely Frenchman they both had a passion for in the days before they were married, has sent a postcard saying he’s coming to London, arriving any moment. This triggers panic mixed with nostalgia and giggling memories of their naughtiness. They agonise a bit, not much, about what to do to avoid him: should they leave London, leave the country?

Julia in fact quickly gets dressed and packs a small suitcase to run away but as the two women approach the apartment door to exit, the bell rings and they freeze! Dramatic end of act 1!!

Act 2

I was expecting the dashing Frenchman to stride in and create havoc. Instead there’s a powerful sense of anti-climax because Act 2 opens with the two women lounging around on sofas, bored, and asking Saunders to fix them drinks. What happened? Who rang the doorbell so dramatically?

A few minutes into the act the ladies reveal that the fateful ring at the bell was… the plumber! And then a friend, Lady Coswick, arrived for a visit – in other words, they’ve experienced a series of disappointments which have only built up the latent frustration we are about to witness…

This act consists of 15 minutes of watching two posh 1920s ladies not only getting drunk but showing theatrical symptoms of sexual arousal and frustration.

JANE: You know what we’re doing, don’t you? We’re working ourselves up. We have been all day. Oh, I should like to scream and scream and scream and roll around on the floor.

Jane goes on to say, with comic bathos, that it must be… lack of food getting her so worked up. Yes. That’s what it is. Not lack of ****. Moments later Saunders calls them for dinner which consists of oysters, the famous aphrodisiac, and as they continue troughing, Jane declares:

JANE: Oh I adore this little sausage with my egg.

Coward was doing as much as the censor allowed to portray two married women on heat. Surely it’s this, not the pair’s drunkenness, which outraged the savvier moral critics.

As they get really plastered the two women’s sexual rivalry comes out (as so often with Coward characters) in a sustained and furious argument, and Act 2 ends with Jane storming out, claiming that she is going ‘straight to Maurice’, while Julia collapses on her sofa in hysterics.

Act 3

Next morning, Julia is painfully hungover, as Saunders serves her a hard-boiled egg.

Willy (Jane’s husband) arrives unexpectedly and tells Julia he had an argument with Fred (as Coward characters so often do) and so abandoned the golfing weekend early, leaving Fred at the hotel at Chichester. Willy asks where Jane is and Julia is shocked to learn she isn’t at Willy’s house, immediately leaping to the conclusion that she really did storm off and spend the night with the legendary Maurice. She’s so furious at her rival stealing a march on her that she angrily tells Willy everything. Bluff old Willy can’t believe it.

JULIA: She’s gone off with a man.
WILLY: What?
JULIA: A Frenchman.
WILLY: Nonsense. She can’t have. You’re unhinged.
JULIA: I’m perfectly hinged…

That’s as good as the jokes and the punchlines get i.e. weak. It’s the basic situation and the permission it gives the actors to go way over the top which provides most of the entertainment. Compare the flaring shouting matches in ‘Hay Fever’ or ‘Private Lives’ or ‘Design for Living’. I don’t think characters in Oscar Wilde‘s plays shout because they don’t need to, they dispense withering barbs and witty ripostes. Whereas most of the characters in the three Coward plays I’ve read so far quite rapidly resort to insensate, furious shouting and abuse, and this is supposed to be funny.

Anyway, Julia yells at Willy that he must leave and that she’s coming with him in order to track down Jane and they exit leaving the stage empty.

A few moments later the phone rings and Saunders the servant enters to answer it. It is ‘Maurice’, the man Julia and Jane has spilled so many furious words waiting for who has, ironically, rung when neither of them are around. Farce.

Fred (Julia’s husband) unexpectedly arrives and moments later Jane (Willy’s wife) arrives, in obvious evening dress. When Fred asks where his wife has gone, the maid says she just left with a man (not knowing Willy’s name) and Jane leaps to the conclusion that she’s left with Maurice. And, exactly as Julia told Fred that his wife, Jane, had left him, now Jane tells Fred that his wife, Julia, has run off, with a Frenchman, and abandoned him.

Jane explains that both Julia and Jane and had an affair with the same man and Fred reacts exactly as Willy did i.e. accusing Jane of telling lies and being a depraved monster. He is just dragging her to the door so they can go and find Julia and this Maurice fellow when they bump into Julia and Fred coming the other way i.e. the two women confront each other.

At which point they both quickly clarify that neither of them have been off with Maurice. When their husbands confront them with what they’ve said, the women realise that in their anger they’ve given the game away and so gotten each other in trouble. Now they close ranks and rack their brains for some way to talk themselves out of it and… have the inspiration to declare it was all a joke. They were making it up. it was a practical joke ha ha ha. They are in the middle of trying to sell this implausible story to their sceptical husbands when…

Saunders announces a visitor and the legendary Maurice sweeps in!

He straightaway kisses both ladies but the husbands are understandably disgruntled. Julia and Jane quickly explain the situation to Maurice – i.e. only 60 seconds earlier they told both their husbands that they’d had affairs with him and ‘Oh my God, what are they going to do!?’

Thinking quickly on his feet, Maurice comes up with a solution and turns to the husbands. He has come up with a solution which suits the limited mentality of these two boringly conventional men, and now delivers a thumpingly clean and impeccable moral point. Maybe, he says with a great flourish of moral concern, maybe Englishmen take their wives a little too much for granted; maybe they should pay more attention to their wives!

And he goes on to concoct the (truly ridiculous) idea that he and the girls are simply old friends and concocted the story of them having had affairs with him back in the day as a joke, a contrivance, a scheme to shock the husbands out of their complacency.

Even more ridiculous than this hastily cobbled-together excuse, is the way the two dim husbands believe him, and promptly apologise to their wives, promising to love them better in future. I know it’s a farce, but the men are portrayed as unbelievably dim. This is only a fraction above the tradition of Whitehall farces.

At which point Maurice makes the genuine revelation, which takes everyone by surprise, that he’s come to stay in London and has rented the flat directly above Julia and Fred’s for a year! Jane collapses in hysterical laughter.

Maurice goes on explain that the flat needs furnishing and decorating and asks the girls if they will come and view it for him. And so, before the husbands can stop them, Maurice sweeps the two glamorous wives out the front door and away to his place…

Very dim Fred is just saying how much he likes this French chappy to Willy’s scornful scepticism, when they both hear a piano playing from the flat above. Going out onto the balcony they listen and (in the TV production I watched) we cut to Maurice sitting at a piano, playing beautifully and singing the same sentimental love song which captured the girls’ hearts all those years ago, while they sit either side of him, mooning and spooning and swooning on his shoulder. Boom boom.

Thoughts about comedy

As I noted in my notes on ‘The Vortex’ and ‘Hay Fever’, there is a general tone of amusement and some of the characters’ behaviour in those plays is actively funny (like Judith Bliss’s taking every opportunity to play a Grand Scene in ‘Hay Fever’) but one of the most striking things about Coward’s texts is the paucity of actual jokes. There are many lines which gesture towards being jokes, which sound like jokes, with punchlines and everything, but which aren’t actually funny.

At the start of Act 2 Julia and Jane ask Saunders to make them strong cocktails, which triggers her (Saunders) to give a little speech:

SAUNDERS: If you’ll allow me to say so Madam, several drinks never did any harm, it’s only the first drink which is dangerous; after that the damage is done.

It’s sort of amusing but very slight, not laugh-out-loud funny unless you have a very low threshold for humour. Its sententious quality makes me expect an Oscar Wilde type of unexpected reversal, a genuinely clever paradox. But Coward rarely rises to that level. Something similar with the unhinged/hinged line I quoted earlier. Fairly good. Sort of funny. Not a real gutbuster, though.

These kind of ‘jokes’ are severely rationed with only about three gags per play.

The critics

Feminist

Earnest modern critics have to say that it’s a penetrating study of female sexuality and desire, that the play interrogates gender roles in a patriarchal society, and generally trot out all the other clichés of progressive critical theory, because it’s what they’re paid to teach and write.

To the unprejudiced eye it could easily be read as the exact opposite: as a comically exaggerated caricature of two middle-aged sex-starved matrons who display a shopping list of caricatured behaviour (champagne, oysters), panting and flushing with arousal, then over-dressing and overdoing their make-up in a pathetic attempt to outdo each other in attractiveness to a man; generally acting out every sexist stereotype. The opposite of feminism.

Take your pick which interpretation you prefer.

The continental cliché

If anything, the entire thing conforms to and shouts to the rooftops another hoary old stereotype, which is that English men are jolly decent but extremely boring chaps, whereas Continental men, especially French men, have a ‘je ne sais quoi’ which dull practical golf-playing Englishmen will never have. That foreign men are sexy in a way few British men can match. This perception was still as widely held in the 1970s of my boyhood as in the 1920s when the play was written.

Contextual

Taking a more historical approach, we read that:

Fallen Angels was produced the stage at a time when alcoholism was barely mentioned onstage. Therefore its portrayal of two middle class ladies getting plastered (the second half of the play is entirely taken up with an alcoholic duologue between the two women) was decried as ‘degenerate’, ‘vile’, ‘obscene’, ‘shocking’.

As I mentioned, I would have thought it wasn’t so much the drinking as the two women being so evidently aroused that would have caused scandal. But maybe that only comes over in the post-permissive 1970s production I watched and was toned down to invisibility in the original productions.

Contemporary critics

The Wikipedia article quotes a variety of contemporary theatre reviews of which I thought The Observer one was most apt, both for this and the other Coward plays I’ve read and watched: the Observer critic thought it was ‘neither a great nor a good play’ on account of its overt theatricality and lack of depth, but nonetheless declared himself ‘vastly amuse[d]’ by it. Coward in a nutshell.

The Lord Chamberlain’s view

The Lord Chamberlain was the official censor for plays on the British stage. Apparently one of his staff thought the sight of two married women getting drunk on stage was immoral so argued that the play shouldn’t be given a licence to be performed. The Lord Chamberlain sagely overruled him, stating: ‘I take the view that the whole thing is so much unreal farcical comedy, that subject to a few modifications in the dialogue it can pass.’

‘Unreal farcical comedy’ is as good a summary as any.

1974 TV production

I’m watching the best modern Coward productions I can find on YouTube. For this I watched the 1974 TV dramatisation starring Joan Collins as Jane (married to Willy) and Susannah York as Julia (married to Fred) and the impossibly dashing Sacha Distel as Maurice.

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Posted by Simon on May 21, 2025

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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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Posted by Simon on November 25, 2024

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Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh (1955)

Tommy Blackhouse declared: ‘It’s going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it among friends.’
(Officers and Gentlemen, page 47)

Officers and Gentleman is the second novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. As its predecessor, Men at Arms was divided into three parts with a prologue and epilogue, so Officers and Gentlemen is divided into two halves, ‘Happy Warriors’ (London and Scotland) and ‘In The Picture’ (Egypt and Crete), with a small interlude and an epilogue.

Like Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen is entirely about the army and the adventures in it of the trilogy’s dour, self-conscious, 35-year-old, divorced, Catholic ‘hero’, Guy Crouchback – and yet the majority of the book features no fighting. Instead, like its predecessor, it is overwhelmingly about the absurdities of army bureaucracy, politicking and infighting, with a fair admixture describing the absurdities of civilian life during war.

Indeed, the larger presence of scenes of civilian life, in the form of the social circle of Guy’s former wife, Virginia, in London, and of the legendary Mrs Julia Stitch in Alexandria (when the action moves, in the second half, to Egypt)shifts the style and feel of the book noticeably back towards the more obviously silly social satire of Waugh’s 1930s comedies.

Book One – Happy Warriors

The previous novel ended with Guy aboard a flying boat carrying him back from Sierra Leone to England. Officers and Gentlemen opens on the evening of the same day. Guy arrives in the afternoon and makes his way straight to London in time for a big air raid during the Blitz. The novel opens with Guy standing on the steps of his London club, Bellamy’s, admiring the night sky over London lit up by German bombers, explosions, searchlights and anti-aircraft flak, quite a show of fireworks.

Stiff upper lip

Part of the humour derives from the stiff upper lip detachment of most of the characters and the narrator. This sense of ironic detachment is apparent from the opening scene. For many Londoners the Blitz was a time of terror and tragedy. Waugh completely transmutes it into a festival of fun. It’s there in individual sentences:

Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

In sardonic satire:

On the pavement opposite Turtle’s a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning-room.

Or in the extended comic tone of the opening scene when members of Bellamys watch the rival club, Turtles, down the road, burning merrily, and then confront a bedlam of rumours that wine and brandy are flowing in the gutters, the comic spectacle of the night porter, Job, having drink far too much and attempting to keep a straight face and voice, and the farcical spectacle of Ian Kilbannock’s superior officer, an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, hiding from German bombs under the club billiard table.

At the end of the Evelyn Waugh Wikipedia article, his lifelong friend Nancy Mitford is quoted as saying: ‘What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.’

Apthorpe’s last request

A central figure of Men at Arms was the often absurd figure of Apthorpe. In hospital and knowing he was dying, Apthorpe made Guy promise to carry out his dying wish and take his legendary collection of kit and equipment to a chap called ‘Chatty’ Corner (real name, James Pendennis). Apthorpe had brought this chap to a drunken dinner given by the regiment he and Guy are both members of, the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Waugh expresses it with characteristic levity:

A spirit was to be placated. Apthorpe’s gear must be retrieved and delivered before Guy was free to follow his fortunes in the King’s service. His road lay backward for the next few days, to Southsand and Cornwall. ‘Chatty’ Corner, man of the trees, must be found, somewhere in the trackless forests of wartime England.

This is the rather slender pretext for the first half of the book which is Guy’s quest to track down this ‘Chatty’ fellow and hand over Apthorpe’s huge pile of clobber.

Recurring characters

In the first novel there was quite an array of characters, who kept changing with the changing configuration of Guy’s regiment. In this novel the focus is a bit more on civilian life and so it feels like there’s a smaller number of characters who keep recurring up. These include:

  • Ian Kilbannock – early in the war wangled himself a job in the RAF and, during the course of this book, gets himself a cosy niche as information officer
  • Tommy Blackhouse – the man Guy’s wife, Virginia, left him for, but they’ve both gotten over this, Tommy is a member of Guy’s club, Bellamy’s, so they keep bumping into each other and the central event of part one is when Guy finds himself seconded to the commando group Tommy is commanding in Scotland
  • Virginia aka Mrs Troy, shallow-minded socialite ex-wife of Guy’s (‘It was the present moment and the next five minutes which counted with Virginia’, p.78)
  • Arthur Box-Bender – Conservative MP married to Guy’s sister, Angela, successful if often obtuse older man in his 50s
  • Miss Vavasour – the concerned old lady who resides in the same hotel as Guy’s father in the seaside resort of Matchet (his daughter, Angela, has dropped hints that she might be in love with him)

Guy spends that night in a hotel then next day Guy takes a train from Charing Cross and reports at the Royal Halberdier barracks. No one is expecting him or knows what to do with him. Guy explains his quest to find Chatty Corner to the Adjutant who promptly gives him some leave, so Guy turns right round, gets a taxi to the station and back to London.

Guy’s father and the Cuthberts

There is a prolonged storyline concerning Guy’s father. Years ago he had been forced to quit the old family home at Broome, let it to a convent, and settled as a long-term resident in a hotel in the coast town of Matchet. The storyline concerns the narrow-minded, uncharitable and profiteering attempts of the owners of the hotel, the Cuthberts, to eject Mr Crouchback from his room and make a lot more money charging it out by the week at the new higher wartime rates.

The general purpose of this recurring storyline is to emphasise what a jolly decent old buffer Guy’s father is (‘He was a man of regular habit and settled opinion. Doubt was a stranger to him.’) and what a thoroughly mean-spirited and greedy lot the horrid working class Cuthberts are.

His daughter, Guy’s sister, Angela, has three daughters by her husband, Box-Bender. All three have been evacuated to the safety of New England. From there they have sent a package containing American products which Mr Crouchback can’t make head or tail of.

He receives a letter from Angela enclosing a message they’ve had from Tony, her only son, who surrendered along with his regiment at Dunkirk and is now in a German prisoner of war camp.

Meanwhile wheels are moving. The Prime Minister, no less, orders that Brigadier Ritchie-Hook be rehabilitated. Along the complex hierarchy of bureaucracy this urge to find something for him to do spins off to affect Guy. Orders are drawn up for him to attend HOO HQ. These are top secret and must be delivered by hand. Who is there to deliver them? Well, old ‘Jumbo’ Trotter, a superannuated retired Colonel who returned to the barracks as soon as war broke out and has been hanging round under-employed ever since. He’s only too happy to be given something to do, namely sit in a car driven by an army driver all the way to the Marine Hotel Matchet where Guy is known to be taking his leave.

And thus Jumbo Trotter enters the lives of not only Guy but his father. For when he arrives in Matchet it rather inevitably turns out that he knows Mrs Tickeridge, wife of the colonel who resides at the hotel along with Guy’s father and was, in fact the man who wangled him a post in the Halberdiers.

The arrival of Jumbo overlaps with the storyline about the Cuthberts wanting to oust Mr Crouchback from the hotel because they have progressed as far as getting a Quartering Commandant, a Major Grigshawe, to force him to leave so his rooms can be taken by more ‘important’ (and higher paying) guests. But Jumbo knows this man Grigshawe, spots him in the bar, calls his name, Grigshawe jumps to attention, and Jumbo has a few words with him which result in Mr Crouchback’s future at the hotel being assured. All without Mr Crouchback knowing it even happened. Why? Because as soon as Mrs Tickeridge introduces Jumbo to Guy’s father, Jumbo recognises him as  ‘a good type’; not only the father of a Halberdier but a man fit to be a Halberdier himself. Contacts.

Anyway, you can see why describing this as a ‘war novel’ would be very misleading. For long stretches it’s more of a comic novel about civilian life during wartime.

Guy’s quest

Meanwhile Guy’s quest takes him to some of the barracks the Halberdiers were posted to in the first book. At Brook Park he collects a stash Apthorpe had left, before moving on to Southsand where the Commodore of the Yacht Club is only too glad to be relieved of three taxis’ worth of clutter Apthorpe had left there. And here Guy finds himself becalmed because military orders had it that no soldier should carry more than a haversack. He had assembled all Apthorpe’s gear alright, but isn’t allowed to move it. All Souls Day, 2 November 1940, comes and goes and, ‘ever prone to despond’, Guy broods.

Finally Jumbo Trotter arrives, having tracked him down, and delivers his secret message ‘by hand’. It is instructions to report to HOO HQ at Marchmain House, London. Now this is a tiny but significant detail because readers of Brideshead Revisited will remember that the family title was Marchmain, that their London house was called Marchmain House, and that old Lord Marchmain had been obliged to sell the house to developers who knocked it down and built a block of modern flats. Well, this is the same place, the top floors having been commandeered by Hazardous Offensive Operations (HOO) Headquarters. It’s not only an example of the way all of Waugh’s fictional oeuvre inhabits the same ‘universe’ with multiple cross-references and recurring characters, but also an indication of the way Officers and Gentlemen is a bit more tied into his pre-war comedies than Men at Arms.

Anyway, here occurs one of the many comic misunderstandings which litter Waugh’s stories. Guy tells him that the secret message instructed him to report to London, but he has a devil of a lot of kit. He takes Jumbo to see the kit and Jumbo is suitably impressed:

Together they visited the baggage store and stood in silence before the heap of steel trunks, leather cases, brass-bound chests, shapeless canvas sacks, buffalo-hide bags. Jumbo was visibly awed. He himself believed in ample provision for the emergencies of travel. Here was something quite beyond his ambition. (p.42)

Because Guy doesn’t explain about Apthorpe, Jumbo thinks all this kit is part of a top secret mission Guy is on. Therefore he pulls strings and secures the services of a five ton truck and driver and next morning all this kit is loaded into it and they are driven to London.

When Guy finally reports to a functionary of HOO HQ in Marchmain House, he is told he is being sent  on temporary attachment for training purposes to X Commando on the (fictional) Scottish Isle of Mugg, where he will report to Colonel Tommy Blackhouse who, by huge coincidence, the reader will remember, is the man who took Guy’s wife away from him.

When he hears the news Jumbo is thrilled and offers to come with him, extending the use of the three-ton lorry and RASC driver has found him. So they head north.

The Isle of Mugg

After several overnight stops, they arrive at Inverness, where the ferry for Mugg departs. Jumbo volunteers to stay on the mainland with the lorry and Apthorpe’s gear, while Guy takes the ferry to the island.

Once on the little island, Guy makes his way to the only hotel where he’s told the commando is posted. Here he finds Ivor Claire, the famous international horserider (who won medals with his mount, Thimble). After chat with him, Trimmer enters. We know him from the first book, where he was an unpopular officer. Here again he is much disliked, but is masquerading as a Scotsman and (indicative of his slipperiness) is calling himself McTavish. Trimmer is not actually as part of the commando, his regiment were sent to Iceland but he’d sprained a wrist and stayed on here.

Trimmer tells him it’s a small world because a chap’s there who was at the Halberdiers’ guest night the night Guy sprained his knee and, by a massive and implausible coincidence, Chatty Corner is there. Up here his nickname is Kong, short for King Kong. Trimmer offers to take Guy across to his digs, which turn out to be the ‘Old Castle’ a walk away through freezing night along a sheet ice path. And indeed James Pendennis Corner is inside, nursing a heavy cold, wrapped in blankets, with his feet in a mustard bath. He explains he was an old Africa expert, that’s he got to know Apthorpe, and came back as soon as war broke out and began to give Africa training but after Dunkirk somehow the army got it into its head that he knew about mountaineering so they sent him here to teach it. He’s a big hairy man who likes climbing up things, and that’s the reason for the nickname King Kong.

With delight in his heart, Guy gets Corner/Kong to sign a document officially taking ownership of Apthorpe’s stuff. His legal and moral debt is paid. It is, in the chronology of the novels, 7 December 1940.

Back at the hotel Tommy invites Guy to dinner with the old laird, Mugg, who lives in the new castle. It is a spectacular comic passage as they make their way through to the snow and ice to the impressive pile, where the door is opened to the deafening sound of bagpipes. The laird is obsessed with dynamite, he thinks the way to transform the island’s economy is to blast away the tons of rock covering what was once a lovely sandy beach pipes at dinner (later the laird takes Guy on tour of the island and explains it was he who dynamited the old stables and caused the rockfall which has buried the beach). Over the very tough and indigestible venison, he is introduced to the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael who is an ardent Scottish nationalist and so a vehement supporter of Hitler.

Next day Tommy finds the letter sending Guy to Mugg but sadly says he isn’t to become one of them, he is assigned to Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, once he’s better. Meanwhile what Tommy really needs is an old hand who knows his way round the system. Guy describes Jumbo, and Tommy leaps at the opportunity of nabbing him for his commando, and dispatches Guy back to the mainland to fetch him.

Trimmer gets leave and goes to Glasgow. Waugh doesn’t like Trimmer. Here he is among the crowds at the station hotel:

He passed on with all the panache of a mongrel among the dustbins, tail waving, ears cocked, nose a-quiver. (p.73)

In an upmarket place, the Restaurant de Madrid, with another tremendous coincidence, Trimmer bumps into Virginia, Mrs Troy, Guy’s ex-wife. At one point in his career slippery Trimmer was the hairdresser on an ocean liner, the Aquitania, going under the name of Gustave, and used to regularly do her hair and give her a massage. They get talking and Virginia is perfectly prepared to leave behind the crowded, sordid world of the current war in memories of happier times aboard luxury cruise liners. They have dinner then go back to her hotel room.

Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole

There is a comic running thread, which kicked off in the first book and runs through this one, about a top secret intelligence unit based in London, led by this Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole, which gathers intelligence from all over. It gained stray information about Guy and Apthorpe to open a file on him, completely misinterpreting the various events that happen to him, and interpreting them in a sinister light as if Guy is involved in some kind of sinister conspiracy.

In a way it is a distillation or exaggeration of the misinterpreting, distancing effect of gossip which I have identified as a key element in Waugh’s fiction. It is also a satire on the conspiracy theory mindset:

Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war. (p.79)

After four days of sensual bliss, Trimmer runs into the commanding officer he thought was far away in Iceland in the hotel bar. The man is incredulous and inclined to be angry, Trimmer makes up a cock and bull story about having been co-opted into the commando, manages to get away, and tells a not very surprised Virginia that he has to leave straightaway. He hastily writes a letter to Tommy actually requesting to join the commando. Jumbo and Guy see this, and advise against it.

The commando begin training in earnest for a landing on a Mediterranean island. Claire cheats in a night-time exercise to travel to a spot 12 miles distant, by commandeering a civilian bus and getting there before any other squad. This irks all the other officers involved in the exercise and, in his isolation, pushes Claire towards deeper friendship with Guy. They both feel like outsiders.

Trimmer returns and Tommy finds a place for him with a group loosely called ‘Specialists’. The head of this, Major Graves, says Trimmer can have charge of his sappers. A few days later Guy calls in on the laird and realises he’s been chatting to Trimmer. Thinks him an awful fake but he is in charge of the sappers and so has access to the laird’s obsession, explosives, so they are becoming matey. The laird takes him out to the cliffs to show him the spot where he dynamited the old cliffs onto the beach.

Guy has a surreal encounter with a tall, wild hatless man on the beach who turns out to be an expert in dietetics, Dr Glendening-Rees, a forager avant la lettre who’s been sent there by HOO HQ and is going to recommend to the troop that they abandon their usual diet and try to survive on limpets, seaweed and heather roots. It is decided that Trimmer and his little troop of sappers will be the victims of this experiment so they are dispatched into the wilds under the direction of Dr Glendening-Rees.

Improbably, surreally, a luxury yacht appears off the island, the Cleopatra. It used to belong to the famed socialite Mrs Julia Stitch (who played a pivotal role in the earlier novel, Scoop), but she is nowhere in sight. Instead it has been commandeered by a troop of top brass, consisting of Tommy Blackhouse, an admiral, General Whale, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Even Ian Kilbannock is included. He comes ashore, Guy takes him for lunch and he explains he finally escaped his dreaded Air Marshall and has got a new job as press liaison.

Navy ships arrive. For several days there is speculation. Tommy is told they are embarking on a ship-borne exercise and makes detailed plans. But this is a decoy. Once all the men from the various troops of the commando are aboard ship it is announced there will be no exercise. Instead they are sailing for real combat. They are to be collectively titled ‘Hookforce’.

Before embarking Tommy had an uncomfortable interview with Jumbo where he told him he wouldn’t be wanted. Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke had specifically said no, too old. Instead he is to report to HOO HQ in London. Ritchie-Hooke has personal command over Guy who has been given a role as Intelligence Officer.

The ships sail before trimmer and his little squad of sappers stagger back into Mugg town, haggard and unshaven after their seven-day experiment living wild in heather.

Interlude in South Africa

February 1941. Nine weeks after embarking, the three ships carrying the commando battalions have docked at Cape Town which, with its blazing lights at night and shops full of nice products is the opposite of blackout rationed Britain. It’s nine weeks since they left Mugg but four of them were spent ashore on Scapa Flow while Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke put them through training, up ‘biffing’ the surrounding hills day and night. The ships are taking the long way round Africa to the Suez Canal and the Middle East.

Guy has become even more friendly and confidential with Ivor Claire. They have a leisurely conversation in the hotel bar, then wandering round the streets, then back at the hotel, and then in the garden under the southern stars, which is actually a stylish way for Waugh to drop in the backstory of what happened in the intervening weeks.

Colonel Tommy turns up with the bad news that Ritchie-Hooke and the Brigade Major took off by plane from Brazzaville and haven’t been heard of since, presumed crashed, presumed dead.

A couple of fellow officers, Eddie and Bertie, spent the afternoon getting drunk, then trying to sober up again in order to take out a couple of young ladies, then they turn up back on the ship at the end of the evening, walking round the deck trying to sober up while, paradoxically, swigging from a bottle of powerful local liquor they’ve bought because it was named ‘Kommando’.

Book Two: In the Picture

Waugh shows how at a meeting of the top brass in Easter 1941, several further incidents involving the commandos (referred to as Special Service Forces) were reviewed, all of them unfortunate, such as the way that a) they lost their brigadier, Ritchie-Hooke b) when they arrived at the Suez Canal it was closed and c) when the canal was cleared their ships were commandeered to ferry Australian troops to Greece.

Major-General Whale, Director of Land Forces and nicknamed ‘Sprat’, defends his boys and manages to avoid getting them broken up. But he returns to his office aware they need to achieve a success of some kind, preferably one which can be promoted by the Ministry of Information in the press. He calls together his senior planners and asks them to recommend something which can achieve a quick win. Someone digs up ‘Operation Popgun’, a small assault on an unmanned island near Jersey.

Sprat approves it and tells Ian Kilbannock (who is now his chief information officer) it will be led by this MacTavish chap (who we also know as Trimmer) who’s in charge of the sappers unit (we saw how casual his appointment was back on Mugg.

Then the narrative cuts back to our hero, Guy, as he wakes in the commando’s temporary base in Sidi Bishr, then in the desert just outside the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Guy is still Intelligence Officer, Tommy Blackhouse is Deputy Commander with the acting rank of full colonel, and a new character is introduced, a small, bald, youngish man named Hound who is the Brigade Major. Major Hound does not like the irregular setup and behaviour of the commandos:

They had no transport, they had no cooks, they had far too many officers and sergeants, they wore a variety of uniforms and followed a multitude of conflicting regimental customs, they bore strange arms, daggers and toggle-ropes and tommy-guns.

Reading this little sequence about official disapproval of the commandos suddenly made me realise why Waugh was drawn to make them central to his big war trilogy – because they are unconventional, because there’s more scope for mischief, anarchy and comedy.

After some business establishing the fractious relations between Guy, Hound (who disapproves of the entire commando), Major Graves (who thinks he ought to be in command of X commando) and a new member of the commando, pale-eyed, journal-keeping Corporal-Major Ludovic, Tommy sends Guy into Alexandria to check up on Ivor Claire who managed to trip over a tent rope and twist his knee and chosen to instal himself in a private nursing home.

En route he drops into a Catholic church to make confession to a French priest who seems to ask rather too many questions about Guy’s brigade. Guy thinks he’s a spy and tries to track him down to the local clergy-house but gets no joy from the Arab doorman.

When he visits Ivor in his private hospital the latter informs him that the egregious Mrs Julia Stitch is in town, a one-woman dynamo of high socialising and bravado behaviour. She once visited the Castello Crouchback on her yacht with some very posh friends. Now, nearly 10 years later, she remembers it perfectly. She remembers everything perfectly. She is a comic prodigy.

Kissing Claire goodbye, she dragoons Guy into her car and for a mad drive across Alexandria, stopping at random moments and blocking all the traffic in order to point out to Guy ancient sites mentioned in the rare copy of E.M. Foster’s guide to Alexandria which she is reading. (Readers of Scoop will remember that, in that book, she drives a kind of baby motor car which she manages to drive into a downstairs men’s public lavatory.) Here she upsets all the local drivers and, in quest of a shoe shop she’s been told about, drives down an alleyway which becomes too narrow her car becomes wedged fast in it.

She obtains the shoes, or rather carpet slippers, she wants then forces Guy to hurry to catch a taxi back to the villa she and her husband have been assigned a little outside of town. It is a typical Stitch luncheon party, featuring a the Commander-in-Chief, a young Maharaja in the uniform of the Red Cross, a roving English cabinet minister, and an urbane pasha, and two little local millionairesses, sisters, who hang on Mrs Julia Stitch’s every word, comically misinterpreting them. They think Guy must be her lover, only reason such a lowly undistinguished officer could be there.

This leads to the comic incident whereby, when lunch is over, the Commander-in-Chief (presumably of the entire army in North Africa) offers Guy a lift back to his base and even directs his driver to go right into the base and drop him at his barracks – to the initial disbelief of captious Major Hound.

It is Holy Saturday, 12 April 1941. We know this because there is a brief description of Guy’s father, venerable old Mr Crouchback, breaking his lenten fast with lunch, a pint of burgundy and a luxurious pipe.

Kerstie Kilbannock

The scene suddenly cuts back to London, to describe the life of Kerstie Kilbannock, dutiful wife of Ian Kilbannock who we’ve met as information officer to Special Service Forces. Kerstie has taken two friends named Brenda and Zita into her house in (very smart) Eaton Terrace as paying guests, and to work alongside her, unpaid, in the canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District. When she meets Virginia Troy at the Dorchester Hotel during an air raid, visibly hard up, she invites her to come and join the female menage.

Kerstie tells Virginia about a regular customer, a quite frightfully awful man they’ve nicknamed ‘Scottie’ and the reader is not altogether surprised when, a week or so later, this ‘Scottie’ saunters into the busy canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District and turns out to be none other than Trimmer. He is momentarily taken aback, but nothing daunts Virginia and she says hello. She is obviously going to keep silent about their four days of passion in a Glasgow hotel in November, but that’s no reason not to be civil.

Trimmer is back in the frame because he is called in by General Whale and told he is to carry out a little operation, which will involve a journey by submarine. He is to take his squad and report to Portsmouth. Ian Kilbannock will be, as we’ve seen, accompanying him. Trimmer is taken as the epitome of a bad officer since he has mislaid his ‘section’, never calls them together, never inspects them, is only really semi-attached to the army at all.

In yet another coincidence, Kilbannock says he’ll need to prepare a bit of a profile for the press about Trimmer and asks him to pop into his place for a drink before going onto Portsmouth and, of course, when Trimmer thus pops in, it is to discover Kerstie and Virginia. There is a passage of social comedy, not least the way Ian Kilbannock realises from Trimmer, Kerstie and Virginia’s conversation that something is going on but can’t work out what.

Back in Egypt the small incident of the priest Guy thought was asking too many questions comes back to haunt him. Tommy calls him in to say the priest has definitely been identified as a spy and he has been reported talking to him. Guy says yes, he thought he was a spy, and he reported it to Major Hound. Major Hound who had, until that moment been quietly gloating in a corner of the room is now put on the spot and has to admit to Tommy that, yes, Guy did mention something about it. Tommy tells Hound to write a formal letter to HQ exonerating Guy. Eventually a copy of this letter finds its way to Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole who adds it to his ever-expanding file on Guy Crouchback.

Operation Popgun

Trimmer and his little squad of eight men is kept hanging around at Portsmouth for weeks. Finally they are sent aboard a submarine, along with Ian Kilbannock and a lot of explosives. His description of a journey by submarine is interesting. Basically, boring with no sense of movement. After quite a few hours they surface at night but can’t find the island which is the objective. It is very foggy. An atmosphere of farcical amateurishness. Ian has had quite a few whiskeys to fortify himself i.e. is tipsy during this military operation.

‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Trimmer. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘You’re in command, old boy. In your place I’d just push on.’
‘Would you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘But you’re drunk.’
‘Exactly. If I was in your place I’d be drunk too.’

They are fired on from her window by an old lady with a shotgun who swears at them in French. Turns out they are not on a little Channel island at all but have landed on mainland France. They run and tumble down a slope into a railway cutting. A slow train passes as they hide. It takes them 25 minutes to make it back to the beach. Trimmer is revealed as a catastrophically bad officer, with no idea what to do, lets the soldiers smoke once they’re ashore, runs away at the first shot etc. What Jumbo Trotter would call a ‘wrong ‘un’.

In his absence his sergeant led the men a little way inland and blew up the railway line then calmly returned to the beach where Trimmer was waiting impatiently, and embarked in the dinghies back to the submarine. The submarine signals ahead that the mission was a great success, and on arriving in Portsmouth McTavish / Trimmer and his men are hailed as heroes by Major Albright, GSO II (Planning), HOO HQ, and the General tells Ian to a) write it up and b) write citations for medals for the sergeant and Trimmer. Farce. Absurdity.

This is then wonderfully embellished by Kilbannock in the press release he gives to the papers (shades of Scoop and its satire on the fabulous lies routinely told by newspapers, shades crystallised when one of the characters mentions the Daily Beast and its proprietor Lord Copper). Then, in a sweet piece of plotting, is read by none other than Mr Crouchback in distant Matchet, who tells his friend Mrs Tickeridge what a fine fellow this Captain McTavish must be. Then it is relayed to the commando in Egypt where the colonel who suggested McTavish be included swanks himself on his ability to spot men and ridicules Guy’s scepticism about Trimmer’s abilities.

In fact the Trimmer affair becomes a stick to beat all Waugh’s enemies with. Head of the commando emphasises that news of the operation must be passed to the Spanish veterans who’ve been assigned to the unit. And the Labour members in the House of Commons get wind of the fact that Trimmer was rejected from the Halberdiers because of his working class background as a hairdresser i.e. snobbery and the old school tie.

He becomes so popular that a very senior meeting is convened to find him an appropriate post and General Whale is appalled to find himself being ordered to give him a senior command, maybe of an entire commando battalion. Ian Kilbannock helps his boss out with a wizard wheeze: Trimmer has a certain confident breezy style: how about sending him to America to promote Anglo-American friendship.

In Waugh’s hands the war is a kind of Engine of Absurdity; it takes ordinary peacetime absurdity and cranks it up to completely new levels.

The fall of Crete

Out in the real world Greece quickly falls to a well planned and executed German invasion 6 to 30 April 1941. 7,000 British and Australian troops are captured. There’s a panic-stricken evacuation of the rest. Guy’s commando is put in charge of defending Alexandria as the war in North Africa turns in the Germans’ favour.

Quite suddenly X commando are told they are to be embarked and sail to the relief of Crete which the Germans, following the total capture of Greece, are now attacking. The complicated business of embarking the entire commando and setting sail, but next morning Guy wakes to find they’re sailing back to Egypt, the ship’s engines have become faulty. Tommy and Guy go for a splendid meal.

Next morning, rather hungover, they embark on a new ship and steam in a heavy swell to the waters round Crete. Here Colonel Tommy slips off a ladder and breaks his leg. Guy finds a haggard senior officer, a Lieutenant-Commander from Crete, in conversation with the captain, saying it’s all a shambles. A motor launch comes alongside their ship, they think it’s for them to embark in but in fact it’s full of walking wounded who painfully come aboard, overfilling the ship. Its skipper says he has another run to make then has orders to scuttle the launch. He tells Guy it’s all over: Crete has fallen.

Nonetheless X commando’s orders are to embark so they climb down and in and are ferried to the wrecked quay which is packed with wounded men clamouring to get on the boat and away. Hound and Guy shout for any representatives of B commando and a battered weary man replies who tells them its commanding officer Prentice is dead, killed during an attack on an airfield. It is 26 May 1941.

The disintegration of Major Hound

In Tommy Blackhouse’s absence Major Hound is in charge of X commando and the core of this long complex account of the collapse and evacuation of Crete is a painful description of the mental and moral collapse of Major Hound. Very early on he tries to cultivate a friendship with Guy by asking if he can address him by his first name (fine) and telling guy his own nickname is Fido. From that first misplaced confidence, it is steadily downhill (p.175).

Under the stress of the chaos and confusion, and huge columns of men marching to the sea, and the constant attacks of Stuka dive bombers, the lack of sleep and, very quickly, the hunger and the thirst, all Major Hound’s book training goes out of the window, he makes foolish decisions, he makes wild decisions, stabbing randomly at a map to indicate where they’ll set up their HQ, then hunger drives him to muck in with the ordinary soldiers and lose all authority.

And then he abandons his post, abandons his men, and begins a wild hallucinatory march to the sea and escape. At one point he slips off a path and falls through the branches of a tree into a deep gully, and I expected him to die. He is thoroughly looted by a huge Cretan peasant and then, to my surprise, is discovered by Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Ludovic has already impressed everyone he meets as an odd fish, a sense confirmed by the philosophical journal he keeps and which Waugh quotes for the reader. When Major Hound insists on driving his men in a lorry up to a location he has almost arbitrarily chosen will be the commando’s HQ, Ludovic begins to display his skills at scrounging and at talking to the common soldiers in their own ‘plebeian’ tongue, or to Australian or New Zealand troops, as easily as talking posh to the officers.

Anyway, Ludovic discovers Major Hound lying bruised in this valley and helps him back to what turns out to be a very cosy cave Ludovic and half the rest of the Major’s troop have assembled up the hill. Seeing which way the land lay, they set about looting and scrounging within a day of arriving and have built up an impressive supply of food. His ulterior motivation emerges when Ludovic frankly tells him that they’ve tried to get aboard one of the launches evacuating men, but there are thousands waiting on the quays and the guards are only letting through troops of men accompanied by an officer. Aha.

Guy among the Halberdiers on Crete

Meanwhile Guy very much does not go to pieces. After Major Hound disappears, Guy makes his own way back towards the sea in the three-ton lorry they’d set out in, having a series of chaotic encounters,  for example picking up a venerable old Greek general and giving him and his ADC a lift, running into a German motor cyclist, both sides eyeballing each for a moment before turning round and retreating. He stumbles into an abandoned Greek village and finds two brown-eyed girls guarding the body of a dead soldier. Guy notices he is a Catholic and say a prayer over his body. In some ways he likes travelling alone and travelling light.

But eventually he finds himself at the headquarters of his old regiment, the Halberdiers. Just to be clear, Guy was a proud member of the Halberdiers until he blotted his copybook at the end of Men at Arms, and was then seconded to the commandos, X commando in particular, the one led by Tommy Blackhouse up in the Isle of Mugg. The overall title given the commandos is ‘Hookforce’, even after it becomes known that Ritchie-Hooke has gone missing presumed dead in Africa.

So Guy is delighted to be suddenly among friends again when he discovers the Halberdiers HQ at a place called Babali Hani, men like Colonel Tickeridge and number of the men, including some from his own D company. But when he asks to take part in a forward movement against the enemy he is turned down. He is not part of the regiment any more and the middle of a battle is no place to start swapping units. And he feels the familiar Guy Crouchback of being an outsider, an alien, with no family, that has dogged him all his life:

A few hours earlier he had exulted in his loneliness. Now the case was altered. He was a ‘guest from the higher formation’, a ‘Hookforce body’, without place or function, a spectator. And all the deep sense of desolation which he had sought to cure, which from time to time momentarily seemed to be cured, overwhelmed him as of old. His heart sank. It seemed to him as though literally an organ of his body were displaced, subsiding, falling heavily like a feather in a vacuum jar; Philoctetes set apart from his fellows by an old festering wound; Philoctetes without his bow. (p.210)

At least Tickeridge allows him to accompany him in a visit to the front line, Halberdier units spread across a shallow valley, coming under mortar fire from the Germans opposite. Guy observes the Halberdiers withdraw their line a little. The plan is for the Halberdiers to withdraw through Hookforce who will provide a last line of defence. Guy returns to his own troop to begin to organise them. The absence of Major Hound is not mentioned as he briefs reliable Sergeant Smiley.

Trimmer the PR phenomenon

Cut to London. Ian Kilbannock is touting Trimmer the war hero round the press, and has a date to meet three hard-bitten American journalists at the Savoy. Trimmer has become infatuated with Virginia who says he disgusts her. This is the opportunity for some pretty crude satire of American journalists, who Waugh has named Scab Dunz, Bum Schlum, and Joe Mulligan and who Ian is trying to persuade that Trimmer is the heroic face of a new classless Britain. The ramshackle journalists get drunk and sentimental, a crude caricature of belligerent, ignorant Yanks.

But Trimmer is genuinely haunted by his four days of love with Virginia in Glasgow. He can’t concentrate and Ian is worried because Trimmer is about the only good news propaganda coup he and his department have had all year. All this he explains to Virginia when he gets back to his HOO HQ office in Marchmain House for he has got her a job working as his secretary. She did it precisely to get away from the bloody canteen and avoid Trimmer, but now Ian tells her she has to do her patriotic duty and see him, cheer him up, gee him up to perform better in his visits to munitions factories and so on. the war effort depends on it!

Guy at Sphakia

It is 31 May 1941. Guy has kept in touch with moving HQ and followed orders to march his men down to this hill overlooking the sea. Their task is to hold up the enemy while the last stragglers leave the beach and then surrender.

He has a last chat with Ivor Claire, both speculating what it will be like in a prisoner of war camp, then he falls exhausted, like everyone else, shattered.

Dawn finds Guy in the wrecked harbour with thousands of other abandoned and exhausted soldiers, foraging for food and water, smashing their weapons and any other smashable equipment so the Germans don’t get it, the enormous litter of war.

After gazing at the twinkling Med for a while he decides on a whim to go for a swim, luxuriating in the clear water of a cove round the corner from the filthy harbour, floating on his back looking up at the cloudless blue sky. Beautiful evocative description. Eventually he swims over to a spur of rock sheltering the cove and is just pulling himself out onto a rocky shelf when to his amazement a hand is stretched out to help him and it is…Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Up and out he gets and they talk. The subject of Major Hound is raised and discussed in a sentence, the reader getting the strong impression Ludovic used him to get to the beach and then… dumped him…or murdered him? Guy asks him what the devil he’s doing here and Ludovic, in that unnerving way of his, replies that he was contemplating suicide, diving into the sea and swimming south till he drowns. He asks Tony whether that would count as suicide, theologically speaking.

Tony doesn’t know and moves the conversation onto swapping survival stories, then Guy fills him in on the final orders i.e. surrender to the Germans. They both sit surveying the scene of hundreds of men engaged in various pointless activities, including some soldiers fixing a local fishing boat. After a while he notices they’ve manhandled it down the beach and into the sea and are fiddling with the engine. It kicks into life with a puff of black smoke. The little sapper who’s been leading the team and shouts at the beach that they’re taking the boat to freedom, anyone want to come?

Guy consults his men who all prefer to take their chances on dry land then wades out and hauls himself over the side of the boat. Only then does he realise Ludovic has followed him having heard something, but both men are drowned out by the enormous racket of the diesel outboard motor. They start to chug away from the beach and then Guy sees what suddenly motivated Ludovic. Out of the sky appears a wing of Stukas which proceed to systematically dive bomb the beach and harbour, massacring the men waiting there, mangled bits of body thrown into the air. One Stuka makes a strafe over the little boat but then returns to the richer picking onshore. And so, having narrowly escaped annihilation, the little local fishing boat puts out of the picture, one of the last survivors of the ghastly fiasco and failure which was the defence of Crete.

Hospital in Alexandria

Part two chapter seven opens with an absolutely brilliant description of Guy coming round in the hospital in Egypt, of the world of silence and great distance which he inhabits as he recovers from shock and exposure.

Confused memories drift through his mind – he refuses to talk. Then one day Mrs Stitch breezes into his room, repeating the famous quote from the incident on the Italian island and without thinking Guy replies. It is one of the most wonderful moments in a wonderful book – now he can talk again he pops down the hall to see Tommy Blackhouse who’s still laid up with his broken leg. Tony tells him he was carried ashore by Ludovic when their ship finally reached shore in Egypt. Of the four or five other chaps on the boat there was no sign. In the third book in the trilogy it is darkly hinted that Ludovic did away with them, though we never find out for sure.

The Ivor Claire affair

Tommy and Guy discuss the case of Ivor. There is a great scandal because Ivor’s troop were unambiguously ordered to wait till the last minute and then surrender to the Germans. Mrs Stitch tells Guy that Ivor made his way to the beach for last orders and there found a launch leaving whose captain ordered him to get aboard and be saved, claiming another launch was on its way to collect his men. Of course the second launch never arrived and so Ivor stands accused of disobeying a direct order and abandoning his men.

Guy is appalled and disillusioned. He considered Ivor a flower of English gentlemanliness, but turns out to be a sneak and cad. To be honest, I spent the last pages confused because I couldn’t see the difference between Guy who left his men on the beach (to be bombed to death) and made it back to Alex, and Ivor who left his men in the hills and made it back to Alex. What would Ivor letting himself be captured have done for the war effort? This is the common sense view taken by Mrs Stitch who appears to have been involved in spiriting Ivor away to distant India on some secondment, where he can sit out the war among people who know nothing of the story and don’t care.

Staying with Mrs Stitch

Mrs Stitch insists Guy comes and stays with her at the swish villa assigned to her or, more accurately, her very well connected husband Algernon (Algie). It is a comic conceit that Julia has inherited from her strict Victorian grandparents a belief that bachelors should not be pampered and so awards him a squalid concrete bunker of a room, down at basement level, liberally populated by cockroaches.

But he gets to lie on their chaise longue, be waited on hand and foot and to attend some truly swanky parties. One day Julia returns from town with the staggering news that Germany has invaded Russia, 22 June 1941 (p.239).

Mrs Stitch asks Guy if there’s anyone he’s like to see and he says old Major Tickeredge – so he comes to lunch and is awed by the VIPs around him, but after lunch stuns Guy by saying Ben Ritchie-Hook is alive after all!

With the wiping out of X commando Guy is looking forward to being returned to the Halberdiers so is very upset to receive a letter delivered by motorcycle courier ordering him to join a ship the following morning which is to take him back to Blighty. He drives into town to see the officer who signed the order, who tells him it comes from the very top. He begs Mrs Stitch to fix it but she can’t. Very upset. There is a whiff of implication that Mrs Stitch in fact arranged it in order to get Guy completely out of circulation while she spirited her favourite, Ivor Claire, off to safe obscurity out in India.

Epilogue

It takes eight long weeks sailing in a rusty old hulk, Canary Castle, right round Africa with a long stopover in Durban to be refitted. But eventually Guy arrives back in England, back in London and back in his club, Bellamy’s.

This brief epilogue opens with no narratorial introduction, just dialogue. We have got to know the so well we can identify the speakers. It recalls the liberal use of the same technique in Vile Bodies, the early 1930s novel this shares a surprising amount with.

And of course there is a simpler pattern going on here, which is that Bellamy’s is where the novel opens and where it closes. Symmetry.

Thus the epilogue opens with Guy being accosted by the usual suspects, not least the humorous press man Ian Kilbannock and his earnest MP brother-in-law, Box-Bender. The former wants to know more about the Ivor Claire affair, then informs him Virginia is doing her patriotic duty and accompanying Trimmer on a tour of munitions factories in Scunthorpe, Hull, Huddersfield, Halifax…

Box-Bender informs Guy that his nephew Tony has written from his German prisoner of war camp asking for works of religious devotion, which troubles him. Why should it? asks Guy.

All the conversation is about help for Russia, Tanks for Russia Week, his allying with Russia has, at least, motivated the working classes to work harder in those factories. And bloody good thing, too!

Guy never wanted to come back, he wanted to join the Halberdiers in the Middle East but when he reports at Halberdiers barracks the C-in-C tells him it was the doctors at Alexandria’s hospital who reported that Guy needed a complete change of scene. (Or is that all part of Mrs Stitch’s ruse?)

And so the novel ends with Guy back where he began, practising drill on the barracks parade ground, waiting to find his place in the big world around him. Except that things are now no longer so clear and (childishly) simple as they were two years earlier. The performance of British services have been lamentable, the man he considered ‘the flower of English chivalry’ Ivor Claire, turns out to let the side down; but overarching everything, the alliance with barbaric Bolshevik Russia hugely compromises the claim of the war to be any kind of moral crusade. And so the novel ends with Guy back at square one, looking for a role and repossessed by his characteristic gloom and pessimism:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.

Themes and images

Public school

As pointed out so many times, when Waugh (or his characters) reach for a comparison, almost always the first ones that come to mind are taken from their experiences at prep school or private school. Thus, for Guy, in the middle of an air raid:

Guy was momentarily reminded of Holy Saturday at Downside; early gusty March mornings of boyhood; the doors wide open in the unfinished butt of the Abbey; half the school coughing; fluttering linen; the glowing brazier and the priest with his hyssop, paradoxically blessing fire with water.

Snobbery

Waugh’s belief in a class system can be deduced from comments he makes about being an officer in the army:

In all his military service Guy never ceased to marvel at the effortless transitions of intercourse between equality and superiority. It was a figure which no temporary officer ever learned to cut. Some of them were better than the regulars with their men. None ever achieved the art of displaying authority over junior officers without self-consciousness and consequent offence. Regular soldiers were survivals of a happy civilization where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.

‘Where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.’ That is his ideal world, a medieval world of precise rankings, accompanied, ideally, by sumptuary laws.

The working classes rarely appear in his narratives except as servants, waiters, valets, drivers, cooks and so on. They rarely if ever speak, they are nameless serfs at the beck and call of the only people who have agency, Waugh and his class.

If they do speak it is either to reveal they are solid chaps – like some of the brave soldiers Guy meets in Crete whose dialogue is entirely restricted to either ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ – or it is to reveal their coarse, petty money-mindedness, as is the case with the scheming Cuthberts who try and evict nice old Mr Crouchback from their hotel, and are indicted either by their dropped h’s and plebeian idioms or, more subtly, by their complete failure to understand the superior moral standards of their lords and masters:

‘He’s a deep one and no mistake. I never have understood him, not properly. Somehow his mind seems to work different than yours and mine.’

Amateurism

I appreciate from everything I’ve ever read about them that lots of plans and arrangements in times of war are shambolic, but Waugh goes out of his way to emphasise the shambolic nature of pretty much everything his hero encounters, from office politics and rivalries, the loss and misplacement of paperwork, errors over train or shipping times and so on.

These litanies of relatively minor incompetence are then reflected in actual military operations – on a small scale by Operation Popgun, on a massive scale in the fiasco of Crete (which itself followed the fiasco of Norway [described in Put Out More Flags] and the fiasco of Dakar [described in Men at Arms]).

The breezy incompetence displayed by almost every aspect of the military is connected to the cult of upper-class nonchalance, of displaying your upper class credentials by refusing to be seen to be trying too hard, and refusing be fazed or perturbed by anything.

This is exemplified by the elephantine imperturbability of old Jumbo Trotter or, in a different way, by the administrative officer of HOO HQ who gets used to hearing the most preposterous stories. ‘My entire platoon has just been ambushed and massacred.’ ‘Oh, I say, bad show, old boy.’

Drunkenness

At luncheon Mr Crouchback drank a pint of burgundy.

Everyone gets drunk. ‘Have a drink?’ remains the watchword among these people, as it had been in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. ‘Tight’ is the word they use for ‘drunk’. The narrative describes what this or that individual is like ‘when they’re tight’ because it is just taken for granted that everyone will gets tight at some point or another, sometimes every night.

These posh characters’ haunt is their London club, where they drink prodigious amounts of booze, indeed the novel opens with the image of fine wine and brandy flowing in the gutters of Blitzed London. Evening drinks and evening dinner are always accompanied by plentiful booze. On Mugg they get drunk and in Cape Town they get drunk and in Alexandria they get drunk.

They ate lobster pilaff and a great dish of quail cooked with Muscat grapes…They ate six birds each and drank a bottle of champagne. Then they had green artichokes and another bottle. (p.163)

The character who dominates the first book, Apthorpe, literally drinks himself to death (and is thus a spiritual cousin of pretty boy Sebastian Flyte who drinks himself into impoverished middle age in Brideshead Revited).

And Waugh venerates this drunkenness, finds it admirable, stylish, amusing. I was really struck by the ending of the short South Africa interlude, where we have witnessed Eddie and Bertie getting drunk all day long before going off to a club to drink some more, while Guy admires Ivor Claire do a kind of sub-Noel Coward impersonation of nonchalance and airy superiority. Guy delivers quite a pompous reflection on these three fellow officers:

Guy thought instead with deep affection of X Commando. ‘The Flower of the Nation’, Ian Kilbannock had ironically called them. He was not far wrong. There was heroic simplicity in Eddie and Bertie. Ivor Claire was another pair of boots entirely, salty, withdrawn, incorrigible. Guy remembered Claire as he first saw him in the Roman spring in the afternoon sunlight amid the embosoming cypresses of the Borghese Gardens, putting his horse faultlessly over the jumps, concentrated as a man in prayer. Ivor Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken into account, Guy thought.

This strikes me as a ludicrous thing to write. Hitler had accurately counted on the decadence of the class which ran the British Empire, which had appeased him throughout the mid-1930s and which, for a year or so after the declaration of war, continued to seek some kind of accommodation with him, led in the cabinet by Lord Halifax. Hitler, of course, had many sympathisers among the British upper classes, even among Waugh’s own friends, even the abdicated king.

The thought that two drunks and a camp horserider represented the spirit which defeated Hitler is absurd. The brute fact of the English Channel and the heroic efforts of the RAF during the Battle of Britain stymied Hitler’s ambitions but didn’t defeat him, just led to a stalemate. Where Hitler did badly miscalculate was in thinking Soviet Russia would collapse like a pack of cards in the autumn of 1941 and then thinking he could take on Russia and America after Pearl Harbour (December 1941). Set against the enormity of these vast mistakes, the antics of Guy and his drunken shambolic friends seem risible, almost shameful.

‘What say we all have a drink?’ said Bum. (p.215)

(Then again, I suppose you could argue this pompous passage reflects badly on Guy not his author; that it has an artistic purpose which is to set Guy’s childish patriotism up for the fall it receives when Ivor Claire betrays his high calling and lets the side down. Maybe it’s there to set up this further step in Guy’s slow disillusionment with the war and the values it’s supposedly being fought for.)

Childishness

Arguably the amateurishness and the drunkenness are related to the prep school obsession in that they are all childish. These people live in a state of permanently retarded development. The most praised characters, Mr Crouchback and Jumbo Trotter are, in effect, schoolboys protected by their prep schoolboy innocence. The comedy of a character like Mrs Stitch is that she’s a childish cartoon.  Ditto the comic figure who dominates the first book, Apthorpe. Occasionally he writes phrases which bring the implicit childishness of the entire worldview into the open:

Guy set his intelligence section to make a map of the camp, for Major Hound had returned from one of his trips to Cairo with a case labelled ‘intelligence stores’ which proved to contain a kindergarten outfit of coloured inks and drawing materials.

Mental illness

The exception which proves the rule to the dominating sense of childishness is Waugh’s odd fictional relationship with mental illness and states of extremity. They tend to come at the end of the books as a climax to the narrative, hence the description of Tony Last’s delirium then despair at the end of A Handful of Dust.

And so the final passages of this brilliant novel include a) a prolonged passage describing the moral and mental collapse of Major Hound and b) the wonderful, luminous description of Guy’s detached mental state and mutism in the hospital in Alexandria, as he recovers from the terrible effects of prolonged exposure at sea, but for a long time is incapable of responding to anyone, even friends, doctors, nurses.

But there is a wide array of odd mental states throughout the book: for example, the laird of Mugg with his potty obsession with explosives; the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael with her outrageous support of the Nazis; remember that Guy’s elder brother, Ivo, went mad and starved himself to death. Guy himself suffers from recurrent feelings of emptiness and depression. Waugh’s books are weirder and deeper than you first realise.

Credit

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1955. All references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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Posted by Simon on January 5, 2022

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Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh (1952)

‘I’m what’s called a “conducting officer”. I take American journalists round fighter stations. But I shall find something else soon. The great thing is to get into uniform; then you can start moving yourself round. It’s a very exclusive war at present. Once you’re in, there’s every opportunity.’
(Lord Ian Kilbannock explaining to Guy the importance of getting on in a war, Men at Arms)

Men at Arms is the first in what developed into a trilogy of novels about the Second World War which Waugh named The Sword of Honour trilogy. It tells the story of devout Catholic, conservative, standoffish but honourable and frequently depressed fellow, Guy Crouchback:

Thirty-five years old, slight and trim, plainly foreign but not so plainly English, young, now, in heart and step…

The novel starts with the outbreak of the Second World War and follows Guy’s long, clumsy and sometimes very funny progress through the military machine, with a world of details about the farcical bureaucratic aspects of army life.

But the book also includes, like a persistent background hum, Guy’s deep Catholic faith and his feel for the ‘old’ values of religion and an older traditional way of life embodied in the figure of Guy’s venerable father, Mr Crouchback.

And the book’s other understated but persistent theme is for Guy’s loneliness and isolation, his unhappiness, sometimes sinking as low as actual despair. For too long, the narrative tells us, Guy has inhabited a ‘dry, empty place’ of the soul.

The Crouchback family

How so? Well, Guy’s character is carefully constructed to evoke the same kind of pity and compassion he was seeking to evoke in Brideshead Revisited, the sense of the decline and fall of a once noble family, the sense of quietly heroic old buffers trying to keep up ancient values and dignity in a world gone to hell.

Guy’s father is over 70, a quiet, decent man of deep devout Catholic faith who has nobly weathered a series of setbacks. He is the representative of a family which can trace its lineage back to the time of Henry I. For centuries the Crouchback family have lived in a country estate named Broome, somewhere in north Devon. But the family suffered a) personal and b) financial setbacks.

On the personal front, Mr Crouchback’s wife gave him four children then died young, leaving him with a permanent sense of sadness. Worse was to come because, at the outbreak of the Great War, the eldest son and heir, Gervase, went straight from his Catholic private school, Downside, into the Irish Guards, where he managed to get himself killed on his first day in the trenches. Then the second son, Ivo, always a loner and oddball, when he was 26 went missing from home and was discovered months later, holed up in a lodging in Cricklewood where he was deliberately starving himself to death. He was brought home but the damage was done and he died soon after.

There was an only daughter, Angela, who married a non-Catholic, an ambitious chap who’s gone on to become a successful Conservative MP, Arthur Box-Bender.

And Guy himself. Guy also ‘married out’ of the family religion, marrying the beautiful non-Catholic socialite, Virginia. He took his younger son’s share of the diminished family fortune and settled in Kenya, running a farm beside a mountain lake where the flamingos rose at dawn first white then pink. Wow. But his wife pined and said she needed to go to England for a break and then, after 6 months or so, wrote to announce she was leaving him, for a mutual friend named Tommy Blackhouse.

‘Poor Guy, you did get in a mess, didn’t you? Money gone, me gone, all in one go. I suppose in the old days they’d have said I’d ruined you.’
‘They might.’

Now, Guy is a Catholic, his father is a Catholic, his sister is a Catholic and so they all take it for granted that, although he can get divorced according to the law of the land, he cannot be divorced in the eyes of God. In other words, he will never be able to remarry, never be able to have children, in particular a son. Therefore the family name is doomed to die out. This is the pessimistic scenario Waugh has engineered for his characters, one source of the sense of loss and mild depression which hangs over the figure of Guy Crouchback.

His non-Catholic brother-in-law Box-Bender is just the most prominent of their friends who think this is all nonsense: Guy should just remarry, have children, reclaim the home farm, revive the estate and the family name. Where’s the problem? When Guy meets up with his ex-wife again in London, she also is blissfully light-hearted about it all:

‘You never married again?’
‘How could I?’
‘Darling, don’t pretend your heart was broken for life.’
‘Apart from my heart, Catholics can’t remarry, you know.’
‘Oh, that. You still keep to all that?’
‘More than ever.’

But Box-Bender, Virginia and all the rest of them are pagans, non-believers, not part of the clique, not part of sinn fein (Irish for ‘ourselves’), of the cosa nostra (Italian for ‘our thing’), of the special ones. They are not Catholics, and Catholicism, at least in Waugh’s hands, is not only a theological but a sociological marker, which sets the believer apart and, though he doesn’t overplay this, pretty obviously marks them as morally and spiritually superior to everyone else around him.

So much for a) the personal; as to b) the financial situation, in the aftermath of the First World War the estate became slowly too large and costly for Mr Crouchback to run. So he sold off the contents (attending the auction himself), let the house to a convent and retired to a hotel in Matchet, a nearby seaside resort.

However, it is important for Waugh and his characters that the ancient rituals do not completely die out and so ‘the sanctuary lamp still burned at Broome as of old’ and Guy’s father attends mass there once a year.

So, both financially and personally, the Crouchback family has fallen a long way and Guy is its embattled, lonely, often depressed last representative.

Guy is a loner

Guy’s Kenya period is underplayed, referred to only in a couple of sentences. Much more is made of the family’s Italian property, ‘Castello Crouchback’, on the idyllic Italian island of Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, a property bought by Guy’s grandfather back in the time of Queen Victoria. In fact the novel opens with a historical passage describing the first arrival of those grandparents on a yachting holiday at the island and their decision to buy the run-down ruins.

You might have thought these opening passages would afford luxury descriptions of pre-war Italy, and they do, a bit, but what they’re really for is to establish a) the penumbra of sadness which hangs over Guy ever since his wife left him eight years earlier, and b) the way he can never really make friends. He’s always an outsider. The Italian villagers take to nearly all the other expats on the island, they are sympatico, but Guy is not simpatico.

He was not loved, Guy knew, either by his household or in the town. He was accepted and respected but he was not simpatico.

Guy is lonely. Inside him is a blankness, an emptiness he can’t put into words, his imagination a prey to mournful images:

Sometimes he imagined himself serving the last mass for the last Pope in a catacomb at the end of the world.

It is against this complex family and personal background that the declaration of war comes on 3 September 1939 and (like many other men) Guy is hugely relieved to escape the frustrations and unhappiness of personal life, and make a clear and unambiguous commitment: to return to England to serve his king and country and fight against unambiguous evil.

Guy back in England

All the above is explained in a sort of prologue to the book. The main action of the novel opens with the declaration of war and Guy packing his stuff to return from his Italian island home to England to serve king and country.

Guy arrives in London hoping to find a role in the army straightaway. He goes to his club, Bellamy’s, every day. Everyone is in turmoil. Everyone has evacuated their families from their London places and sent them down to the country. Box-Bender is locking up his London place and moving in with two male friends. Guy embarks on a campaign to get himself into the army, buttonholing military friends and writing countless letters to ministries and old contacts. No joy.

So he goes to stay with his sister Angela at her home in Gloucestershire.

Box-Bender’s house was a small, gabled manor in a sophisticated village where half the cottages were equipped with baths and chintz.

In a typically comic/farcical detail, their hallway is stuffed with crates of ‘Hittite tablets’ evacuated from the British Museum.

Guy is impressed by Arthur and Angela’s son, Tony, young and keen, who’s already got himself a place in the army, lucky blighter. They gossip about all the local families, some who’ve left the country altogether (the Abercrombies have decamped to Jamaica) and about the numerous accidents resulting from the blackout. Scandalised reports of the crime wave prompted by the blackout, lots of muggings.

After staying the night Guy travels down to see his father at the pub, the Marine Arms, in Matchet, where he took rooms as a long-term resident after he relinquished the estate at Broome. Like everywhere in England it’s in a tizzy because of the war, packed with an unusual numbers of guests, some of the staff have been conscripted etc. In the dining room, his father introduces him to Tickeridge, a hairy old cove who’s a major in the Halberdiers. When Guy expresses a genuine wish to be in the army, Tickeridge says he’ll see what he can do. Ha! Contacts. It’s not what you know, or who you know – it’s who your father knows!

Guy joins the army

And so Guy finds himself one of a new cohort of officers in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, nicknamed the Apple Jacks and the Copper Heads, a fictional regiment which is going to be central to his career in the army and all three novels. His closest associate is a lightly eccentric fellow called Apthorpe.

Both being that much older, they find themselves referred to as ‘uncle’. Lots of detail of army protocol, an extension of the strict rules around correct dress which were drummed into him at school, then university. Regimental traditions. Pen portraits of the other new officers, namely de Souza, Sarum-Smith, Leonard and a slightly shifty chap called Trimmer.

Guy joins his regiment

Guy joins the Halberdiers at their peacetime barracks. There is basic training and squarebashing i.e. drill on parade grounds. There is a lot of fuss about dressing correctly for different functions at different times of day, for example, the officers have to dress appropriately, and immaculately, for dinner in the mess hall.

It is obvious to me, at any rate, how life in the army follows naturally from life at prep school, life at private school, life at Oxford or Cambridge, and then life in the kind of upper class country house which Waugh idealises. What they all have in common are servants who do all the drudgery, change bedding, do all laundry, clean shoes and boots and cook and bring drinks. Their country houses are full of servants, their junior boys fag for the seniors at private school, there are ‘scouts’ to clean their rooms at Oxford and waiters bring meals in hall dinners, but on the other side of the ledger, in return for all these privileges, it is expected that the beneficiary, the boy growing up in a country house, at private school or Oxford, and then an officer in a good regiment, will follow the rules and there are lots and lots of rules governing all aspects of behaviour, dress, speech and thought.

It is a world of huge privilege but also of tremendous constraints. There is often no legal punishment for breaking the rules, but the army has a wide variety of sanctions for chaps who do not behave like an officer and a gentleman, and the narrow society of London clubs which Guy moves in also has its sanctions, its ability to cut or snub anyone who behaves incorrectly.

Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook

We are introduced to the feared and renowned figure of Ben Ritchie-Hooke, who will become their brigadier. I don’t really understand the structure of the British army, but I think what is happening is that , now war has been declared, all regiments, which had been allowed to dwindle in peacetime, are being rapidly up to full strength, recently retired officers asked back in and new officers being recruited. This is the new intake of officers which Guy is part of. First they will be trained, then newly recruited and conscripted ordinary soldiers will arrive and be put in their charge. At some point the regiment will become fully operational and Ben Ritchie-Hook will come into full command.

Throughout the first part of this novel this process takes place, observed from Guy’s point of view, sometimes, confusing the reader, sometimes confusing even Guy who’s in the thick of it.

Anyway, Ritchie-Hook is an almost Monty Python level of a caricature of a senior army officer. He wears an eye patch and a black leather glove on one hand, having lost an eye and fingers and thumb in battle. A sharp line is drawn between the initial commander in chief of the barracks who oversees thorough but pedestrian training, and the terrific change in mood which takes place when Ritchie-Hook arrives and takes over. He is all about biffing the enemy.

For example, the initial rifle range practice consists of long boring afternoons loading your gun, lying down, firing at a distant target, and having the target monitor flag whether you got a hit, a bullseye etc. By contrast, under Ritchie-Hook the brigadier himself runs up and down the trench at the end of the range waving a stick with a tin hat on it above ground level and defies his men to hit it. Later they have to crawl on their hands and knees just under a barrage of live fire.

Ritchie-Hook is a wonderful comic creation and the trigger for a series of comic incidents. For example he first appears at a drinks party held by a senior officer where, through a series of verbal misunderstandings, he mistakes Guy for Apthorpe the fellah who was in Africa for years, gruffly dismissing the fact that one of his officers seems to have spent the 1930s in Italy, no good that, don’t like the sound of that – which of course refers to Guy who keeps very silent about the fact for the rest of the evening. Comedy of manners.

but he also allows Waugh to create the kind of war he wants, which is farce. If you read war books from the Great War you are left in no doubt that it was a tragedy of enormous scale. Anyone coming to Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy expecting the same will be surprised. It is overwhelmingly concerned with the boring humdrum details of training and office politics (as officers jostle for promotion) and bureaucracy and pettifogging rules, interspersed with moments of ludicrous farce. Only at the very end are any guns fired in anger and then only a dozen or so and for a few pages, on a tiny night-time excursion onto a beach in Africa which is over half an hour after it began and achieves nothing.

Southsand prep school

The officers are sent to a place called Kut-al-Imara House at Southsand-on-sea. It is a preparatory school, vacated by staff and pupils so the army can take over. Its rooms are named after World War One battles and, as Guy explores it on arrival, he paints a very vivid picture of a certain kind of lower league school, redolent of embarrassment and shame.

He leant against a coil of antiquated iron pipes and was surprised to find them hot. They seemed to lack all power of radiation; a yard from them there was no sensible warmth. He could imagine a row of little boys struggling to sit on them, tight-trousered boys with adenoids and chilblains; or perhaps it was a privilege to sit there enjoyed only by prefects and the First Eleven. In its desolation he could see the whole school as it had been made familiar to him in many recent realistic novels; an enterprise neither progressive nor prosperous. The assistant masters changed often, he supposed, arriving with bluff, departing with bluster; half the boys were taken at surreptitiously reduced fees; none of them ever won a scholarship or passed into a reputable public school or returned for an Old Boys’ Day or ever thought of his years there with anything but loathing and shame. The History lessons were patriotic in design, turned to ridicule by the young masters. There was no school song at Kut-al-Imara House. All this Guy thought he snuffed in the air of the forsaken building.

It’s one more image which brings the reader up short and makes you realise just how much Waugh was writing for readers of his own class and not for the humble likes of you and I. And also one more example of the way this class obsesses about its prep and private schools. It’s a common observation that Waugh’s generation of writers – including George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, W.H. Auden and many others – never really seem to have escaped the clothes, drill, mannerisms and world view inculcated by an English public school system which reached a kind of acme in their day.

And then the equally commonly commented-on fact that so many of the institutions of English public life – the quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge, the quadrangles of the inns of court for lawyers, the quads and committee rooms of Westminster, the parade grounds and officers messes of the army – are a continuation of that ordered, regimented, elite, blinkered, narrow but highly effective view of life.

The characters frequently compare this or that army regulation to ‘school’, the narrator compares this or that situation to something similar at a public school. It comes as no surprise when a prep school moves into Malchett and hire old Mr Crouchback as a supply teacher, teaching, of course, not maths or geography or something useful, but, of course, Classics, ancient Greek to be precise. Apthorpe even takes Guy, one drunk night, in a taxi out to the location of his prep school Staplehurst, now, he discovers to his horror, demolished and a modern estate built over it. Sic transit…

Anyway, life at Southsand is the backdrop for Waugh giving a thousand and one little details of army life, starting with the typical ‘foul-up’ that Guy and his cohort of officers arrive at Southsand station an hour after the bus arranged to pick them up had left and having to make their own way by taxi. Bureaucratic cock-up typical of hundreds and hundreds more which Guy will become used to in army life.

There are comic incidents. At a guest night for the regiment the officers end up getting drunk and playing a game of rugby with a waste paper basket and when everyone piles onto Guy his knee is painfully wrenched. It swells up and so for weeks afterwards, he wears a bulky dressing, needs a cane to walk and is excused drill practice.

When his fellow older officer, Apthorpe also manages to injure his leg on a drunken night out, the two eldest new officers, who had both already gained the ambivalent nickname ‘uncle’, both appear limping and using canes, to general hilarity. The comedy is like that. Schoolboy comedy.

Similarly, Guy discovers he can’t actually see the targets at the firing range at the statutory 300 yard distance, thus discovering that he needs glasses, but on a whim, instead has a monocle made by a local optician, which solves his firing range problem but, of course, also contributes to making him a figure of fun.

Another little plot strand is the Italian restaurant kept by Mr Pelecci which they take to frequenting, chatty Mr Pelecci often sitting with them and chatting about the news. They don’t at first realise that he is a spy.

Catholic theology on Guy’s marriage

The officers are allowed out to explore the town. Guy and Apthorpe join the town yachting club, chiefly for its bar. He meets a Mr Goodall, Ambrose Goodall, who turns out to be a Catholic convert with a hobby of studying the old Catholic families of England. They have lunch and dine and go to the yacht club bar and it emerges that Goodall knows the history of Broome and Guy’s own family. And then, in the context of another family, in passing remarks that, theologically, it is no sin or crime for a man to have sex with his divorced wife as, in the eyes of God, she has never been separated from him. Although Virginia has been unfaithful, he hasn’t, and so the marriage is still, theologically speaking, valid.

Seduction of Virginia

This leads to disastrous episode where Guy tracks Virginia down in London. She is, typically for him and the circles they move in, staying at Claridge’s hotel. He moves into a room down the hall and she is initially delighted to bump into him, as she is delighted to bump into everyone, darling, during this beastly ghastly war. He invites her round for drinks and it is then that he puts his arm along the back of the sofa and makes an attempt to kiss her. Virginia thinks he’s being ridiculous. If you’re going to do it, do it properly, and puts down her drink and kisses him back.

But then she asks what’s brought this one and Guy makes the disastrous mistake of explaining the theological position i.e. she is still his wife in the eyes of God and it is still theologically permitted for him to have sex with her. This shocks and horrified her much more than if it were a casual attempt at sex and she stands up and moves to the fireplace expressing horror, at which point Guy really screws things up by venting 8 years of frustration and accusing her of being a tart. Then there is a big silence when they both react to what has happened and been said.

Virginia: ‘You take too much for granted.’
Guy: ‘That’s an absolutely awful expression,’ said Guy. ‘Only tarts use it.’
Virginia: ‘Isn’t that rather what you think I am?’
Guy: ‘Isn’t it rather what you are?’

Guy grovellingly apologises, more because it’s bad form and poor manners than untrue, and they sort of patch things up. But, later, leaving Claridge’s, the incident does have the positive effect that it seems to have laid a ghost. His true feelings for Virginia have come out and he feels some sense of closure. It is  14 February 1940.

Apthorpe

His fellow ‘new’ officer, Apthrope, is arguably the dominant figure of the novel. Indeed the three main sections the book is divided into each use a Latin word to describe the three stages of Apthorpe’s progression, namely: Apthorpe Gloriosus, Apthorpe Furibundus and Apthorpe Immolatus where gloriosus is self evident, furibundus means ‘frantic, frenzied, maddened’ and immolatus means ‘having been immolated or sacrificed’.

Apthorpe’s character fascinates Guy from the start, his comic obsessions and behaviour. Thus, when Apthorpe is promoted to rank of captain ahead of Guy, he insists Guy salute him, and asks him to ask all the other new officers to do so, too. This, apparently, was technically correct but not necessary and makes Apthorpe look like a pedantic fool; in fact his fellow officers play various games with the act of saluting or not saluting when Apthorpe expects it which drives the poor man into a frenzy.

A platoon of signallers are billeted with the Halberdiers and Apthorpe insists they conform to Halberdier discipline and procedure, which leads to a long and increasingly embittered feud with their commanding officer, Dunn, which eventually escalates up to commanding officer level. Although he has been promoted. Apthorpe is acquiring a reputation as an eccentric.

Apthorpe and the saga of the Thunder-Box

One of Apthorpe’s eccentricities has been carrying round an enormous amount of lumber and ‘kit’ and ‘gear’ with him which he insists was vital to his much-mentioned but obscure ‘time in Africa’. ‘Somewhere among these possessions lay something rare and mysterious which Apthorpe spoke of as his “Bush Thunder-box”.’

This develops into the book’s best-known comic sequence, the kind of extended comic digression which characterised the best of his 1930s comic novels, reminiscent of Basil Seal’s scams in Put Out More Flags. The thunder-box is a beautifully made Edwardian chemical toilet, a cube of solid wood, which opens to reveal a porcelain seat and bowl. But why? asks Guy: there are toilets just down the hallway. ‘The clap old chap,’ Apthrope confidently explains. ‘A chap can never be too careful.’ So Guy watches Apthorpe surreptitiously, one evening, when the other chaps are in the game room, haul this big box out of the general lumber room and drag it across the prep school playing fields into a little games storeroom hidden among the bushes. For a couple of days Apthorpse disappears for ten minutes at a time and only Guy knows where he’s going.

However, disaster strikes when one evening Apthorpe encounters fearsome Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke exiting the clump of bushes which conceal his secret. Both are forced to salute each other but very uneasily. Apthorpe tells Guy the terrible news but worse is to follow. Next day Apthorpe goes for his daily evacuation and is horrified to see a sign pinned on the little outhouse saying the place is out of bounds to everyone below the rank of brigadier.

Apthorpe anxiously discusses the situation with Guy and ropes him into moving the dread device. So one evening they sneak down to the outhouse and manhandle it some distance away to another hiding place, returning very satisfied with their work. A few evenings later Apthorpe makes his usual excuses and slips off and a few minutes later Guy hears a muffled explosion. He knows at once what it is, and sets off running across the playing fields and into the bushes. He discovers a dazed Apthorpe sprawled on his face a few yards from the thunder-box which is now a splintered smoking wreck. Ritchie-Hook, in one of his famous practical jokes, had rigged the thing with a small explosive device.

The sequence of events themselves are fairly funny, but what turns it into award-winning farce is the tremendous seriousness with which Apthorpe takes it all, and the completely straight-faced way Guy plays along with him.

Penkirk

The regiment is moved to Penkirk not far from Edinburgh in a camp of tents. A castle is nearby. Here Apthorpe’s eccentricities continue to flourish. It is here that he commences his long-running vendetta against the officer in the Signalling regiment.

It is here that the first division of commands is given and Guy is bitter to be given only a platoon while Apthorpe is promoted above him. Only later does a friendly superior explain this is because Apthorpe is actually fingered for promotion into purely administrative positions whereas the Brigadier doesn’t want anyone in command of actual fighting units who hasn’t started out with experience of commanding a platoon. That cheers him up a bit.

A new commander is assigned, one Hayter, who Guy comes to dislike. There is a great deal about relations between the new officers of his rank and the complex array of commanding officers who come and go as the regiment is restructured and reorganised.

There is a long sequence which Waugh cleverly arranges around the one hundred and forty-three questions in the Army Training Memorandum No. 31 War. April 1940 which all the officers receive and are ordered to complete.

On 10 May 1940 Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, replacing the hapless Neville Chamberlain. It is worth lingering over what Waugh, or at least his character Guy, thinks of him:

Guy knew of Mr. Churchill only as a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an advocate of the Popular Front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and of Lloyd George.

He thinks he’ll be better than the other chap. But this is a novel and another character, Major Erskine, who, in the dim-witted nature of these characters is thought to be ‘brainy’ because he reads novels and is a bit scruffy, this Erskine is made to say, prophetically:

‘Churchill is about the only man who may save us from losing this war.’

The difference between history and novels is in novels opinions, ideas, perspectives are distributed among different characters for dramatic effect. Might be worth also quoting the place where Waugh gives his clearest explanation of Guy’s motive for fighting, for taking part in this war:

[Guy] was a good loser, but he did not believe his country would lose this war; each apparent defeat seemed strangely to sustain it. There was in Romance great virtue in unequal odds. There were in morals two requisites for a lawful war, a just cause and the chance of victory. The cause was now, past all question, just. The enemy was exorbitant. His actions in Austria and Bohemia had been defensible. There was even a shadow of plausibility in his quarrel with Poland. But now, however victorious, he was an outlaw. And the more victorious he was the more he drew to himself the enmity of the world and the punishment of God.

Note the complete absence of political analysis. Waugh doesn’t, for example declare his protagonist an enemy of fascism or Nazism (in fact, having lived in Italy for most of the 1930s, Guy has a relaxed attitude to the reality of Italian fascism on the ground). Certainly not in the way that English left-wing or liberal thinkers thought of Nazism as unambiguously evil and a threat to all notions of freedom. Guy just seems to think that in invading Poland, Nazi Germany has gone a bit too far. And then this phrase ‘the enmity of God.’ Is Waugh serious? Well, his character probably is. Guy is a devout and in many ways simple Catholic, with a simple sense of right and wrong.

The flap

All this is taking place in the spring and early summer of 1940 which saw, in the wider world of war, the Russian invasion of Finland and the German invasion of Norway, this latter prompting a badly organised and chaotic British attempt to land troops and hold the German advance. (Waugh’s earlier novel, Put Out More Flags, includes towards the end a passage describing the ill-fated involvement of one of the characters, Cedric Lyne, in this badly organised fiasco.) And then, of course, the evacuation of Dunkirk, 26 May to 4 June 1940.

All kinds of rumour reach our chaps and this is a useful social history aspect of the novel, what makes it more than history, that it doesn’t record what happened, but what educated people of the time thought was happening and was going to happen.

Aldershot

So they’re sent to Aldershot in Surrey, with some description of the surrounding sandy heathland. Apthorpe distinguishes himself again by, the second he’s put in charge when the commander in chief is briefly absent, causing a great panic when he claims he has reports of German paratroopers landing.

Maps of Calais are issued as if they’re going to be shipped across to fight there, the officers memorise them, discuss lines of defence and so on. Guy’s platoon is dominated by the impressive figure of Company Sergeant Major Rawkes. Guy leads his men on a training exercise on the big barren heathland, everyone gets lost, some men go absent without leave, no-one knows what is going on, rumours fly in all directions.

Tony

Guy receives two letters from his father, the first one (2 June 1940) lamenting that his nephew, Tony, appears to be missing presumed killed in France, the second one (12 June 1940) with the reassuring news that he is in fact a prisoner of war, but the doleful commentary that a) it was shameful that his regiment surrendered to the Germans, but they were ordered to and b) it is likely to be a long war and so a shame that such a fine fellow is going to spend the best years of his young manhood behind bars. He receives both letters on the day the Germans march into Paris, 14 June 1940.

The world has shifted on its axis. Nobody expected France to fall at all, and certainly not so quickly. Now Britain really is alone. Churchill gave his ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ speech on 4 June 1940.

North Cornwall

The regiment is moved to Cornwall. Waugh details the boredom of hanging round not knowing what the future holds. There are wild rumours that the Germans are about to take Limerick in Ireland and the Halberdiers are about to be shipped over to defend it. Much studying maps of Limerick. Nothing happens. The officers have to cook up ways to keep the men entertained, lectures (Guy gives a well received one about wine making, knowledge he gained in Italy). Football. Evening games of bingo which, surprisingly, Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke recommends and calls ‘housey-housey’.

Extraneous figures came to add to the congestion. An odd, old captain like a cockatoo in the gaudy service-dress of a defunct regiment of Irish cavalry. He said he was the cipher officer and was roped in to lecture on ‘Court Life at St. Petersburg’.

Seen from Waugh’s perspective, army life is one surreal and farcical event after another. This is what makes the books so supremely readable and enjoyable, the tone of quiet humour which suffuses them, occasionally rising to moments of supreme farce.

South Cornwall

Then they are ordered to pack up everything and shunted on a series of trains across to the South Cornwall coast where they are ordered to guard several miles of heavily barbed wired beach. Top brass come for an inspection and one of the intelligence officers goes out of his way to emphasise the risk of fifth columnists, a concept and phrase which had only recently been coined, by General Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

This leads to an incident when Guy has a touch of the Apthorpes and reacts with paranoia when two officers turn up at his HQ (a requisitioned hotel) claiming to be from A Company, the 5th Loamshires. Guy suspects them of being fifth columnists, is impressed by their accurate seeming papers and posh English accents, but nevertheless instructs the sergeant major to take over the bren gun next on the clifftop and cover the pair as they’re taken down for a dip in the sea by a soldier he deputes for the job. If they make one funny move, the sergeant major is to shoot them. The dismay of Sergeant Major Rawkes who had, until this moment, thought Guy wasn’t too bad, for an officer, is very funny.

Brook Park

They’re ordered to pack up yet again and entrain for Brook Park in Surrey. Here occurs an event which the sardonic and witty fellow officer, de Souza, nicknames ‘the Languishing of Leonard’. Early on we had met officer Leonard’s wife, Daisy, who is distinctly not the right class, who drops her aitches and speaks out of turn at dinners or drinks for the regimental officers. She has followed her man from base to base, taking hotel rooms and now announces that she is pregnant. She kicks up an immense fuss and wants Leonard seconded to a safe domestic posting so he can be with her. Very sheepishly Leonard falls in line with her demands, secures his posting, from which point onwards the Adjutant, or acting head of the regiment, requests that his name never be mentioned again. Shame.

Liverpool

Next thing they know they are given two days leave (Guy goes to visit his father and finds him, of course, knee deep in the classics text he’s teaching the little chaps at the evacuated prep school) before returning to barracks at which point the entire regiment is packed up and sent to Liverpool.

After the usual chaos, embarking, disembarking and so on, they finally set sail to the Bay of Biscay, are joined by a fleet and sail on to the coast of Africa, near Dakar, to be precise (capital of what is now Senegal).

Here the fleet moors and numerous high level meetings are held. Initially Brigadier Ritchie-Hook is excited because they are finally going to get to land and biff the enemy. But this turns to bitter frustration when the raid is called off. The ordinary soldiers celebrate but Guy is called to a meeting of senior officers, namely the Brigadier, Colonel Tickeridge and the ship’s captain.

The beach raid in Africa

Ritchie-Hooke is furious that the raid has been called off because naval intelligence has some aerial photos of the beaches which could be interpreted to indicate that they’re criss-crossed with wire. But in this little meeting he is gleeful because he and Tickeridge have persuaded the captain of the ship to let them send a tiny little landing party to ascertain whether this is true. And Guy is to lead it.

He is told to go and choose a dozen men who will be taken aboard a launch by a navy captain, shuttled ashore under cover of darkness, faces blacked, carrying minimal equipment. Their mission is to ascertain the existence or not of ‘wire’ and capture a souvenir, a coconut, say, as proof of their trip.

The atmosphere of tense excitement is beautifully conveyed. There’s a beautiful little description as Guy and his men wait in the hold for the little sally-port, or door low down in the side of the ship, to be opened so they can climb a short distance down a rope ladder into the launch:

The lights were all turned off in the hold before the sally-port was opened by one of the crew. It revealed a faintly lighter square and a steamy breath of the sea.

Well, to be brief, they chug onto the beach, slip over the side and wade through the warm water, tiptoe up the ashore and do, indeed, find wire, rows of wire amateurishly strung across it. Then sounds and someone starts firing and then lots of guns start firing. Guy blows his whistle for general retreat but one of his chaps goes haring forward into the darkness. The rest return to the boat unharmed and the sailor captaining it reports everyone present and correct but Guy knows he saw someone else and goes back to check.

Just as well he did, for he discovers one of his men crawling back through the dunes, wounded in the leg. Guy curses, runs forward, supports him arm over shoulder back to the launch, heaves him in and the launch turns and putters back to the ship. As he helps him Guy realises this disobedient man is none other than… Ben Ritchie-Hook. Not only that, but after he is manhandled into the launch he slips into Guy’s lap the object he’s been hugging close all this time. It is the severed head of an African soldier.

The ‘gruesome’ in Waugh

What to make of this? It is at the same time farcical, comic and gruesome. But readers will remember this is the sometimes puzzlingly extreme tone he takes in many of his books. It is as if part of his approach to humour is to occasionally crank it up to broad farce, and then sometimes to take farce way over the top into The Gruesome.

It’s easy to forget that in his very first novel, Decline and Fall, when the young innocent Paul Pennyfeather finds himself in prison, he discovers that the padre is none other than one of his teachers at the crappy private school he taught at in Wales, Prendergast, who has retrained as a chaplain, and how the prison governor with his fancy ideas, decides it is a good thing to try and reform one of their most notorious prisoners by allowing him to express himself in the carpentry shop – and how this prisoner takes the first opportunity to saw off the padre’s head.

Ritchie-Hooke later explains that the man raised his gun at him so Ritchie chucked a grenade which blew him to bits, one of the bits of which was the head (which he proceeded to ‘trim’ a bit). The beheading of the African is no more offensive than the decapitation of Prendergast i.e. a bit offensive against good taste and restraint. What definitely is offensive is the way Ritchie-Hook refers to the head as his ‘coconut’ and so does everyone else concerned during the incident’s repercussions.

The repercussions are that Ritchie-Hooke has gone too far this time and is recalled to London for a bollocking and possibly the end of his military career. Guy was only obeying direct orders but finds himself also condemned to have a black mark against him.

Freetown

Having abandoned the attack on Dakar the allied fleet sails on to Freetown, the port capital of Sierra Leone (a British colony which remained secure during the war). Damaged ships turn back. The two ships carrying the Halberdiers dock and they go ashore.

There is a new brigadier. He calls Guy in, tells him that during the journey he was promoted captain but that, in light of his involvement in the Dakar fiasco, he has been demoted again. He is to be recalled to London. He will be flown there along with Ritchie-Hooke as soon as the latter is fit enough to travel.

Here in Freetown he makes his second mistake. Apthorpe took the opportunity of leave to go up country. Now word comes back that he is ill. In fact he has been brought back by native bearers in a Victorian style ‘sheeted hammock’ and deposited in hospital.

The brigade major gives Guy permission to visit Apthorpe and recommends he take a bottle of whiskey along, it’s always a nice gesture, though strictly speaking advised against. Guy does so and has a long rambling encounter with Apthorpe who is genuinely ill. Guy slips the whiskey under his bedclothes. A nurse coming in smells it on their breath and says the doctor has forbidden it but Guy lies and says he just gave Apthorpe a nip from his flask.

During this interview Apthorpe, in his comically earnest and tragic way, entrusts Guy with a last wish, which is to ensure that he (Guy) hands over Apthorpe’s legendary pile of kit and equipment to his old friend ‘Chatty’ Corner (who we met earlier in the book when he attended one of the regimental drinks parties). Guy promises and leaves.

A few days later the brigade major calls him in to tell him that Althorpe is dead. Drank the whole bottle of whiskey in a day. Guy is shocked but then more shocked to learn that he is being blamed. The brigade major was the one who suggested the idea, but now holds him responsible.

(Throughout Apthorpe’s dying scenes there is another thread of Waugh’s irrepressible cheeky comedy, which is that Apthorpe solemnly assures him that when he told him, all the way back at the start of the book, that he had two aunts, he was, in fact, fibbing: he only has one. Guy accepts this deathbed confession with a straight face. But this misconception, that Apthorpe had two aunts who will grieve his loss, is then repeated by every other officer and official involved in the case, adding a wonderful thread of humour to counterpoint the rather grim fact of his actual death.

Again, as in the story of the decapitated African, grim death is inextricably intertwined with farce. It is a conscious policy.

So anyway, now Guy has two black marks against him. A flying boat lands in the harbour. It is to take him and Ritchie-Hook back to London and at this point the novel ends.

Cutaway ending

Except that, as Guy flies back to Blighty and an uncertain future, Waugh uses his characteristic technique of cutting away from the protagonist to have him and his plight be discussed by people at some distance from the action who, therefore, treat it with the levity and half attention we all give to gossip about people we half know or have vaguely heard of. It is a home counties version of the Alienation Effect. It is half humorous, half-despairing. It is the way human life is, never really understood, immediately transformed into gossip, all our lives, ultimately, dust. Sarum-Smith and de Souza attend the funeral of Apthorpe, laid to rest in the English cemetery in Freetown, and then remark on the fact that both of the oldest ‘new’ officers, the ones they nicknamed ‘uncle’, have left on the same day (one being buried, the other flying home under a cloud):

‘Both Uncles gone the same day.’
‘Funny, I was thinking the same. I rather preferred Crouchback on the whole.’
‘He seemed a nice enough fellow. I could never quite make him out. Pity he made an ass of himself.’
Already the Second Battalion of the Halberdiers spoke of Guy in the past tense. He had momentarily been of them; now he was an alien; someone in their long and varied past, but forgotten.

The old truth: life is intense tragedy to the person living it, but comedy to everyone else.

Waugh’s worldview

Snobbery

Only members of his class count. The narrator is scornful of anyone outside his circle and its very limited extension into the narrow circle of People Like Us.

The vulgar middle class

Throughout his works Waugh is snooty about people who make a living through trade, shopkeepers, merchants, and what you might call the lower professions, accountants and the like. Thinking about the professions, the very big gap in his oeuvre is the legal profession. If you think about Dickens, his works are full of lawyers and legal cases. None in Waugh. The central profession is, in the 1930s comedies, journalism and, in the novels from Put Out More Flags, the army.

The working classes

The working class is invisible except for servants, publicans, waiters and waitresses (in civilian life) and batmen, valets, servants and drivers (in the army). Oh and the actual soldiers, the common soldier, the private. Almost none of these are mentioned and none are named. When Guy takes his little troupe ashore at Dakar the sergeant has a name but none of the men. They are anonymous extras.

But what interests me is not Waugh’s snobbish, privileged, entitled elitism, as such. It’s more to do with the way that, operating within this closed, super-narrow, elite worldview – the upper class, private school and Oxbridge, country house and the-old-regiment kind of world, bolstered by the exclusiveness and elitism of his upper-class Catholic faith – enables his discourse, allows the texts to be written. A writer can’t write about the entire world; you have to pick a subject. Waugh isn’t trying to describe the great shambling chaos of the modern world. His bright, alert, highly regimented, policed and orderly world is the unshakeable foundation which allows him to create these comic, satirical and, occasionally, devastating fictions.

The elitism is as much a genre as a worldview, with its own customs and conventions. If, for the purpose of reading and enjoying his books, you accept this worldview, then the interest moves on from anatomising the worldview itself, to enjoying the way Waugh subverts, bends and occasionally breaks it.

Private schools and prep schools

Authors of his generation just can’t get away from memories of their childhood prep schools and boyhood private schools. They make endless comparisons to them, something reminds them of this or that at prep or public school, somehow prep schools are always cropping up as actual items: thus the location of training in Southsea is a requisitioned prep school and Mr Crouchback finds a private school evacuating to near his hotel and is invited to become a teacher, a Classics teacher, of course. I wasn’t at all surprised when (in the third book in the trilogy) de Souza tells Guy:

‘All army courses are like prep schools–all that welcoming of the new boys.’ (Unconditional Surrender, page 97)

It’s the first point of comparison for all these privately educated men.

Mental illness

I’ve mentioned it repeatedly in my reviews of Waugh’s novels, but a surprising number of them feature characters or passages dealing with mental illness or mental breakdown. Thus the nervous collapse of Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies, the teetering on the brink of shocked breakdown of Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, the decline into depressed alcoholism of former High Society doyenne Angela Lyne in Put Out More Flags, the mental collapse of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, not one but two suicides in The Loved One. Several of his short stories are about homicidal lunatics (Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing and The Sympathetic Passenger).

In the trilogy Waugh continues his interest in several ways, at several levels. Guy’s elder brother, Ivo, has a complete collapse into psychosis and starves himself to death. Guy himself has been down enough to qualify as depressed and there are plenty of descriptions of his sense of hollowness, emptiness and futility:

He [was] himself destitute, possessed of nothing save a few dry grains of faith.

His brother-in-law, Box-Bender, frankly expects Guy to go mad at any moment, like his older brother, which doesn’t help. And then there’s something odd, ‘rum’, about the central figure, Apthorpe, mounting in eccentricity all the way through to his final collapse.

It feels like madness is constantly lurking just around the corner in any Waugh text. For the most part Waugh manages to keep the lid on it, contain it, and express it in socially acceptable form as a sense of the ludicrous or the farcical. But sometimes, pop! madness or despair emerge into the open.

Influence of film

1. As I’ve pointed out in other reviews, the film technique of quick cutting between scenes is something Waugh absorbed and used to great effect, most notably in an early novel like Vile Bodies but more subtly throughout all his fictions. He is still using it liberally throughout the trilogy, which often features sequences of 2 or 3-page scenes, moving quickly from one setting to another.

2. At moments, like so many of us, like so many characters in twentieth century fiction, Guy compares his behaviour to what people would do in a film and finds himself failing to live up to the Hollywood ideal of dashing masculinity.

3. And then, sometimes, he just takes the mickey out of movies, very amusingly:

Once Guy saw a film of the Rising of ’45. Prince Charles and his intimates stood on a mound of heather, making a sad little group, dressed as though for the Caledonian Ball, looking, indeed, precisely as though they were a party of despairing revellers mustered in the outer suburbs to meet a friend with a motor-car who had not turned up.

An awful moment came when the sun touched the horizon behind them. The Prince bowed his head, sheathed his claymore and said in rich Milwaukee accents: ‘I guess it’s all off, Mackingtosh.’

Influence of books

The comparing oneself with cultural ideals comes over more clearly in his comparisons with popular fiction. Early on in the book Guy recalls a story of derring-do he was read at prep school (naturally) during the Great War, and which inspired him and his friends with images of dashing heroism. The memory comes when the Brigadier addresses the men:

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘to-morrow you meet the men you will lead in battle.’

It was the old, potent spell, big magic. Those two phrases, ‘the officers who will command you…’, ‘the men you will lead…’ set the junior officers precisely in their place, in the heart of the battle. For Guy they set swinging all the chimes of his boyhood’s reading…

‘…”I’ve chosen your squadron for the task, Truslove.” “Thank you, sir. What are our chances of getting through?” “It can be done, Truslove, or I shouldn’t be sending you. If anyone can do it, you can. And I can tell you this, my boy, I’d give all my seniority and all these bits of ribbon on my chest to be with you. But my duty lies here with the Regiment. Good luck to you, my boy. You’ll need it”…’

The words came back to him from a summer Sunday evening at his preparatory school, in the headmaster’s drawing-room, the three top forms sitting about on the floor, some in a dream of home, others – Guy among them – spell-bound.

This passage explains much, about ideals and identity and the centrality of his bloody private school in both of them. But it also, on a comic level, gives rise to a recurring trope which is when Guy finds himself in a tight corner and wonders what this ‘Truslove’ character from his boyhood stories would have done in his place. Thus he refers, later on, to an officer volunteering for a mission ‘Truslove style’, and ironically nicknames the farcical episode on the beach of Dakar ‘Operation Truslove’.

It is a variation on the deep central issue I’ve mentioned above, of the way so many men – well, writers, anyway – of this generation, never escaped their public school manners, morals and essentially immature, schoolboy worldview.

Credit

Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1952. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 3, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 3, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/men-at-arms-evelyn-waugh/

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (1942)

‘[A uniform] is the best possible disguise for a man of intelligence. No one ever suspects a soldier of taking a serious interest in the war.’
(Colonel Plum to Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags, page 150)

Background

In his preface to the 1966 edition, Waugh tells us Put Out More Flags was the only book he wrote for pleasure and it shows. It isn’t exactly a comic masterpiece like Decline and Fall or Scoop, it isn’t a scandalous portrait of a generation like Vile Bodies, it isn’t scarred by a devastatingly bleak conclusion like Black Mischief or A Handful of Dust. Instead it is suffused by a warm, deep sense of English patriotism, embodied in a surprisingly buoyant good humour, occasionally rising to real laugh-out-loud comedy.

Waugh wrote Put Out More Flags on a troopship back from Crete after the island fell to the Nazis in 1941. He had been serving in the army for two years (experiences which would be transmuted into the wonderful Sword of Honour trilogy). Now, as the ship sailed slowly around the entire coast of Africa, he had time on his hands, so he took advantage of the enforced idleness and wrote all day every day,  completing the first draft in just a month.

Subject

The narrative covers the period of the Phoney War or what some humourists called the Bore War, between Britain’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939 and the sudden German attack on France in June 1940, a long nine months during which we were technically at war but there was no direct attack on Britain. The narrative is divided into four simply named sections, Autumn, Winter, Spring, with a brief epilogue, Summer.

The return of Basil Seal

In part, Waugh wanted to find out what had happened to the characters he’d created in his previous novels. As Waugh himself puts it:

The characters about whom I had written in the previous decade came to life for me. I was anxious to know how they had been doing since I last heard of them, and I followed them with no preconceived plan, not knowing where I should find them from one page to the next.

The narrative opens with Basil Seal, the dashing scapegrace who was at the centre of Black Mischief, because Waugh obviously realised he could use Basil as an entry point to different aspects of English life.

1. Thus we hear for the first time about Basil’s extended family and in particular his sister, Barbara Sothill, who lives at a classic Waugh country house, Malfrey, beside a lovely village in a lovely part of the Midlands, somewhere. This allows Waugh to do lovely descriptions of the countryside and repeat the rather sentimentalised vision of the English country squire he had deployed in A Handful of Dust.

But the house now wears a mournful aspect: Barbara’s servants have mostly gone off to work in factories, and her husband, Freddy, has rejoined his reserve regiment. To her own surprise, Barbara has  become the billeting officer for her district, that’s to say she has responsibility for finding accommodation for evacuees from the nearest city (Birmingham) among the local villages. This is played for laughs as Barbara, previously a welcome sight to friends and neighbours, now becomes a scourge, the arrival of her car in the drive now the prelude to requests to the tremendous inconvenience of putting up ghastly working class families or children.

2. Basil’s mistress is Angela Lyne. In what develops into an interesting and moving storyline, we watch Angela hurry back from the South of France immediately after war is declared, back to a service flat in Mayfair and then… then something happens. She holes up in her bedroom and becomes addicted to listening to the news on the radio and… takes to drinking, takes to asking her maid for a drink early in the morning and then… takes to wearing dark glasses, at home, during the day, even with the curtains drawn. It’s a really interesting portrait of someone badly undermined by the declaration of war, someone thrown off their game, made ill by uncontrolled thoughts.

Insofar as Angela was once a luminary of London high society she is also a kind of entrée into that world, occasionally leaving her seclusion to attend a party given by the egregious Lady Metroland, no matter how peripherally, in every Waugh novel since Decline and Fall.

Also, Angela has a husband, Cedric Lyne. They’re in their later thirties now and it is very sympathetically handled, the way Cedric was initially upset when his wife began an affair with Basil, thinking it would all blow over, accepted it was going to last a bit longer, and only slowly realised Basil was in the fact the love of her life. They remain married because, well, the fuss my dear, of getting divorced. So disruptive. More importantly, being a ‘divorced woman’ would close society doors to her, and being in society is her life, and so she persuades Cedric not to divorce her but to continue living on at the family place in the country where he has poured the energy which should have gone into being the head of a happy family into, instead, collecting, importing and installing grottos from around southern Europe.

3. Thirdly there is Basil’s mother, the rather formidable Lady Seal, on first name terms with the Prime Minister, a type of the grand old lady of London society, who is endlessly fussing and fretting about her errant son.

Sir Joseph Mainwaring

Sir Joseph is a minor character who provides great amusement. He is an old friend of Basil’s mother. He enjoys her company but dreads the conversations they have to have about her scapegrace son’s future. As soon as war is declared Lady Seal conceives the ambition to get Basil into ‘a good regiment’. For people like her the war isn’t so much a thing to be fought and lost – or their assumption is simply that England, being in the right, will win – it is about having the right sort of war.

Thus she persuades a very reluctant Sir Joseph to invite Basil for lunch at his gentlemen’s club, the Travellers, with the aim of introducing him to the Lieutenant-Colonel of a (fictional) regiment, ‘the Bombardiers’ who, as Waugh goes on to say with typical bitchiness, is ‘-an officer whom Sir Joseph wrongly believed to have a liking for him’.

Basil’s luncheons at the Travellers’ with Sir Joseph Mainwaring had for years formed a series of monuments in his downward path. There had been the luncheons of his four major debt settlements, the luncheon of his political candidature, the luncheons of his two respectable professions, the luncheon of the threatened divorce of Angela Lyne, the Luncheon of the Stolen Emeralds, the Luncheon of the Knuckledusters, the Luncheon of Freddy’s Last Cheque – each would provide both theme and title for a work of popular fiction.

The lunch with the Lieutenant-Colonel is a predictable and amusing disaster, Basil turning up unshaven and unkempt, and making a disastrous impression. He follows this up with a visit to the L-C in his office which goes even worse, with the old boy almost choking with fury at Basil taking for granted that he will be quickly promoted and able to leave the boring old Bombardiers behind. He barely escapes the old boy’s office without a serious shouting-at.

So much for Sir Joseph. After this abortive attempt to help Basil, he settles down to become a bit character, pompous possessor of ‘a peppercorn lightness of soul, a deep unimpressionable frivolity’, occasionally wheeled on to give opinions and predictions about the war which are consistently and hilariously wide of the mark.

A theory of gossip

A word about gossip. Waugh loved gossip. If his novels weren’t enough of an indication, we have Waugh’s extensive letters and diaries which show what a tremendous party animal, socialiser, snob and social climber he was. From private school through Oxford and on into London’s society and literary circles, it was very important to Waugh to cultivate friends in the right places, be au courant with the young party set, and hobnob with the finest titles he could manage.

So far, so biographical. The point I want to make is the distinctive effect this has on his fiction. This is that no matter what happens to the main characters, Waugh always shows us its impact on ‘society’, on other people gossiping and commenting about them. There are always two levels: the level of the main events happening to the central protagonists; and then a fog of rumour and gossip about them.

In A Handful of Dust an entire extra layer is added to the narrative by the way Waugh describes not only the central tragedy of the accidental death of little John Andrew, but the way every step of Tony Last’s response is reported, repeated, commented on and analysed by outsiders, people not directly connected, people in London’s endless parties who get the facts wrong, twist the facts, and end up making Tony the bad guy in his divorce with Brenda in which, as we the readers see and know, he is utterly innocent.

Although the word ‘gossip’ sounds trivial, I think the way Waugh deploys it in most of his novels reflects a profound truth about human life. Gossip is, in fact, how most of us are perceived in society – not as the brave, clever, hard-working people we think ourselves to be, but as other people see us: the cranky one who’s always getting into arguments, the boring one who always sits in the corner, the scruffy one who always arrives late, who got drunk and did something embarrassing at the Christmas party, and so on.

Most of us live our lives very much for-ourselves and only occasionally overhear what other people really think about us. And when it happens, it is without exception profoundly disturbing to overhear friends or work colleagues everso casually dismissing you, reducing you to a few crude strokes of caricature, to the punchline to a few unrepresentative anecdotes. ‘But I’m more than that,’ you want to protest, ‘I am all these wonderful feelings and perceptions and thoughts and intuitions!’ Not to other people, you aren’t. To other people you’re the one who’s rubbish at telling jokes, gets drunk and argumentative at parties, and broke the office photocopier. A ridiculous caricature.

Lots of people rattle off John Donne’s quote about ‘No man is an island’, but it would be far more accurate to say no person can escape the comments, jokes, criticism, and behind-their-back sniggering of family, friends and work colleagues. No one.

Waugh’s fiction brilliantly conveys this sense that, despite our fondest illusions, we may like to think of ourselves as people-for-ourselves but can never escape mostly being people-for-others. The mistreatment of Tony Last in Handful of Dust, the way his behaviour is misrepresented and traduced by everyone else in the story, even his own servants, is probably the epitome of this vision of humans trapped in a web of other people’s commentary, but it is present in all Waugh’s novels – the notion that all human lives are lived on two levels: first, the actual events themselves and the feelings and motivations of the main actors; and then the limitless way all these fine feelings and high motivations are eclipsed by the superficial rush to judgement of hundreds of strangers who don’t the know the first thing about you but gleefully repeat the most malicious distortions of what you said or did.

Most of the time Waugh plays it for laughs but sometimes to bring out the intense bitterness his characters feel at society’s misunderstanding and judging them (as in Handful of Dust). That’s one it its strengths, as an approach to fiction, this deployment of ‘society’ as a kind of permanent chorus on the action, is that it can be either comic or tragic, as required. But it is always there. Not the fashionable ‘Other’ of sociology and literary theory, much worse: the others, the potentially endless ranks of people who don’t give a toss about you or, if they think about you at all, it’s as a monster, a bully, an oaf, or a fat figure of fun.

In the deftness with which he captures this often overlooked aspect of society, I think Waugh is more profoundly realistic than many more supposedly ‘serious’ novelists.

In this book this aspect of society is epitomised by the incident of Angela at the cinema. As mentioned above, the once supremely confident and renowned Mrs Angela Lyne undergoes a sort of breakdown, taking to her bed, obsessively listening to the radio news and drinking. Her only escape is now and then to totter down the road to the pictures.

One of the recurring characters, Peter Pastmaster, son of Lady Metroland, has a) joined the army b) decided he ought to get married so, in a comically frivolous way, is dating three of the most eligible young heiresses in London. One evening he’s taking one of them, Molly Meadowes, to the pictures and they come across Angela making a fuss because she can’t get the kind of ticket she wants, down at the front. As Peter and Molly push through the queue to get to her, Angela trips and sits down with a bump and the commissionaires are starting to make a fuss. So they pick her up, call a cab, and take her back to her flat, leaving her in the hands of her maid, Grainger.

And then – and this is the point in mentioning it – Waugh shows us how this fairly simple event gets quickly blown up by society gossip into a legend about a roaring drunk Angela getting into a fight with the commissionaire and cabby before being rescued by Peter. Nothing goes ungossiped about. Nobody can escape their life being pawed and prodded and simplified and ridiculed.

(There’s also something profoundly psychologically true in the way that the little escapade of helping drunk Mrs Lyne back to her flat brings Molly and Peter together. Molly thinks it’s sweet the way naive Peter doesn’t even realise Angela is drunk. And she is touched by his genuine chivalry and concern. And so she decides to marry him, a fact Peter proudly announces to his mother, Lady Metroland, later the same evening.)

Left wing intellectuals

So the book reintroduces us to a number of recurring characters from the previous novels, but there are also some new developments. One is a departure for Waugh, a comic description of left-wing bohemians. This is the social set revolving around the fiery painter Poppet Green. A bit like in Vile Bodies Waugh establishes the speech patterns or the recurring topics of conversation in Poppet’s circle so that he can drop snippets of their conversation into larger chapters; so he can cut away to brief dialogue between Poppet and comrades for a quick page before cutting away to something else, having established their tell-tale topics of conversation.

We generally know we’re in that milieu because Poppet and all her friends talk endlessly about communism, and the proletariat, and Russia, are very quick to throw the accusation of ‘fascist’ about (how nothing changes in the ‘progressive’ mind) but above all, how they obsess about the two noted communist poets and best friends, Parsnip and Pimpernell. This pair and their fierce and urgent poetry are seen as the ne plus ultra of the proletarian pose in the arts, literature, specifically poetry.

It helps if you know that Parsnip and Pimpernell are Waugh’s (very effective) comic nicknames for the poet W.H. Auden and his best friend, the playwright Christopher Isherwood. For the entire decade of the 1930s Auden’s thrillingly modern poetry had dominated the world of literature, capturing everything, describing everything, making all political issues more burning and urgent with his brilliantly modern tone of voice and imagery of factories and cars and planes and skyscrapers.

However, just as his reputation was at its height, and just as the political world they had described so well finally reached the crisis they had predicted for so long, with the outbreak of war against international fascism…that’s the moment when Auden and Isherwood, in real life, decided to leave England and emigrate to America (in January 1939). And so, in this fictionalised caricature of events, the great debate which rages among Poppet Green and her friends, is whether Parsnip and Pimpernell were right to abandon their country in its time of need… or did they do the right thing, by staying loyal to their muses and their ART?

The name of the poet Parsnip, casually mentioned, reopened the great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy which was torturing Poppet Green and her friends. It was a problem which, not unlike the Schleswig-Holstein question of the preceding century, seemed to admit of no logical solution for, in simple terms, the postulates were self-contradictory. Parsnip and Pimpernell, as friends and collaborators, were inseparable; on that all agreed. But Parsnip’s art flourished best in England, even an embattled England, while Pimpernell’s needed the peaceful and fecund soil of the United States. The complementary qualities which, many believed, made them together equal to one poet, now threatened the dissolution of partnership.

In the five novels and four travel books up to this point, Waugh had shown himself a master of depicting the English upper classes partying in Mayfair or at home in their delightful country houses. Describing the rougher, avowedly left-wing and ‘radical’ world of bohemia and the arts is a notable departure of milieu but one he brings off very well. Poppet and her creatures’ endless internecine bickering over ideology and the ‘correct’ line to take is very funny in itself and shows the reader just how little changes in the harshly judgemental and accusatory progressive mindset.

Ambrose Silk

A doyen, a leading figure in this world, although older than many of the others and not as politically engaged as the young firebrands, is the gay, Jewish aesthete Ambrose Silk. The novel contains a number of new characters, but Silk is the one, standout, major new character. He is a great creation and joins Basil as the other major protagonist of the story.

For Ambrose has depths. He is unhappy. He feels like a man out of time. He is an aesthete. He should have been born in the age of Oscar (Wilde) and Aubrey (Beardsley). He goes along with the fashionable political chatter of Poppet Green and her salon of fashionable communists, but feels alienated from them.

But then, he feels alienated from everyone. When he finds himself in the kind of fashionable society party he feels just as ill at ease. He gets a comedy job at the Ministry of Information, in the religious department of all places, and, as an atheist Jew, feels out of place among his caricature Catholic, Anglican and nonconformist colleagues.

And Ambrose is clinically paranoid, a prey to fluttery ‘persecution mania’ (p.174). Just as Waugh shows us Sir Joseph Mainwaring on a number of social occasions making wildly inaccurate predictions about international affairs (for example, that Italy is biding its time before allying with Britain and France), so Waugh shows us a series of scenes in which Ambrose anxiously asks the people he’s with whether they think that, if the Nazis win and invade Britain, they’ll come for Jews like him? And ‘communists’ like him? And intellectuals like him? And homosexuals like him?

On all these occasions Waugh goes deep into Ambrose’s thoughts, giving us almost stream of consciousness depictions of his anxiety and alienation, something he rarely does. Most of his characters just act and talk and we see them only from outside. This dwelling on Ambrose’s inner world is most unusual. It sounds like this:

The party left the restaurant and stood in an untidy group on the pavement, unable to make up their minds who was going with whom, in what direction, for what purpose. Ambrose bade them good-bye and hurried away, with his absurd, light step and his heavy heart. Two soldiers outside a public-house made rude noises as he passed. ‘I’ll tell your sergeant-major of you,’ he said gaily, almost gallantly, and flounced down the street. I should like to be one of them, he thought. I should like to go with them and drink beer and make rude noises at passing aesthetes. What does world revolution hold in store for me? Will it make me any nearer them? Shall I walk differently, speak differently, be less bored with Poppet Green and her friends? Here is the war, offering a new deal for everyone; I alone bear the weight of my singularity.

Ambrose’s magazine

Out of this swirl of emotions and worries, Ambrose conceives the idea of publishing a literary magazine. But isn’t this the worst possible timing, people ask, just as a war is breaking out? No darling, Ambrose explains, it is exactly the right time for a magazine which will preserve all that is best in our civilisation. So he persuades the niche and not very successful publishers of his previous books to back him, being Rampole and Bentley. His magazine will breathe the same rarefied atmosphere as the famous Yellow Book and will be called the Ivory Tower.

There is comedy in the way, over the next few weeks, it becomes clear that almost all the articles in the magazine will be written by Basil himself. His publisher says this will spark criticism, he needs to think up some noms de plums to give the sense of a variety of contributors and so he comes up with some ludicrous names:

Ambrose rather let himself go on names. ‘Hucklebury Squib’, ‘Bartholomew Grass’, ‘Tom Barebones-Abraham’.

Above all, Basil realises the magazine will give him an outlet to express his great, romantic (homosexual) love for a good-looking German boy he met and had an affair with only last year, a youth named Hans. He quickly pens a 50-page hymn to the young man’s virility and good looks and vitality. Tragically, although Hans was a keen member of the Nazi Brownshirts, when it was discovered that he was (like Ambrose) Jewish he was swiftly arrest, disgraced and taken away to a concentration camp,  while Ambrose was forced to flee Germany in fear of his life (shades of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin memoirs).

The memoir will, Ambrose breathlessly tells his friends, be titled ‘Monument to a Spartan’ and he shows his friend Basil a copy.

Basil’s scams

Back to Basil for a moment. In the winter section, having signally failed to join the army he goes to Malfrey to stay with his sister. She’s grateful for the company and they soon fall back into the nicknames and games rough and tumble they shared as small children.

The Connollys

Basil gets involved with his sister’s role as evacuating officer and soon discovers there is one particular set of orphaned kids from Birmingham who no-one will touch, the Connolly children:

There was Doris, ripely pubescent, aged by her own varied accounts anything from ten years to eighteen. An early and ingenious attempt to have her certified as an adult was frustrated by an inspecting doctor who put her at about fifteen. Doris had dark, black bobbed hair, a large mouth and dark pig’s eyes. There was something of the Esquimaux about her head, but her colouring was ruddy and her manner more vivacious than is common among that respectable race. Her figure was stocky, her bust prodigious, and her gait, derived from the cinematograph, was designed to be alluring.

Micky, her junior by the length of a rather stiff sentence for house-breaking, was of lighter build; a scrawny, scowling little boy; a child of few words and those, for the most part, foul.

Marlene was presumed to be a year younger. But for Micky’s violent denials she might have been taken for his twin. She was the offspring of unusually prolonged coincident periods of liberty in the lives of her parents which the sociologist must deplore, for Marlene was simple. An appeal to have her certified imbecile was disallowed by the same inspecting doctor, who expressed an opinion that country life might work wonders with the child.

There the three had stood, on the eve of the war, in Malfrey Parish Hall, one leering, one lowering, and one drooling, as unprepossessing a family as could be found in the kingdom.

It should be added that Marlene pees and poos everywhere, indiscriminately. Well, to cut a long story short, after some attempts at trying to park these delinquents with decent folk, Basil has a brainwave. Potential hosts take against them so quickly and totally that one of them offers him money to take them back. Bingo! He realises they are a money-making proposition. And so Basil gets hold of Barbara’s address book and embarks on a campaign of parking the revolting children with the sweetest, nicest, kindest people he can find – almost all of whom ring up within a few days, sometimes a few hours, begging to have them taken off their hands. How much? asks Basil, and start to turn a tidy profit.

What makes it that much more realistic and funny is that flirtatious Doris takes a massive shine to Basil and wants to follow him everywhere and be with him all the time. Basil is a rascal and they soon come to an understanding, namely he is nice to Doris provided she controls her horrible siblings and then obeys orders to play up the second he’s left them with an innocent family.

Meanwhile, as a kind of side order, Basil comes across a nubile recently married young woman whose husband has gone off to join his regiment, is all sad and lonely and so… being the charmer he is, starts an affair with her.

The Ministry of Information and the Ambrose scam

From time to time he travels up to London and hangs around the Ministry of Information, located in Senate House, Bloomsbury (where George Orwell worked, where John Wyndham worked, where half London’s unemployed writers hung around hoping to get a gig, and where Ambrose Silk incongruously gets a job in the Religious Department).

A fluent liar he bluffs his way past security telling them he works for (the non-existent) M.I.13. Utterly at random he is distracted by a very good-looking young woman and follows her down corridors and into the office of one Colonel Plum. He resolves to get a job here, purely and solely to see if he can seduce Susie the sexy secretary, but to do so he finds himself having an impromptu interview with the Colonel in charge of this little unit.

In this absurd interview, Colonel Plum makes it clear he needs to track down and, ideally arrest, enemies of the state. Basil reflects on Poppet Green and her circle of left-wing bohemians, and quickly ad libs:

‘I know some very dangerous communists,’ said Basil.
‘I wonder if they’re on our files. We’ll look in a minute. We aren’t doing much about communists at the moment. The politicians are shy of them for some reason. But we keep an eye on them, on the side, of course. I can’t pay you much for communists.’

What the colonel can pay for is fascists, does Basil know any fascists, he’ll make him a captain in the Marines if he can hand over some fascists? Basil thinks again and has a characteristic brainwave. Ambrose and his essay about beautiful German youth, Hans, a member of the Hitler Youth! Basil tells the colonel he may be onto something, he’ll report back in a few days.

Basil goes his ways, which involve dropping into the office of the Ivory Tower. There are some proofs of the first edition lying around and also a passport, from an Irish priest of all things, a Father Flanagan, S.J., Professor of Dublin University. He wants to visit the Maginot Line in his capacity of correspondent for some Catholic paper and, in the usual chaotic way of the ministry, his application along with his passport have found their way to the religious department of the Ministry of Information, where Ambrose pretends to work. On a whim, Basil nicks it, like he steals so many other random bits and bobs, never knowing when they’ll come in handy or he can flog them for a little cash in hand.

Anyway, he rifles through the proofs and rereads Ambroise’s stirring essay about Hans again. When Ambrose returns to the office, Basil tells him it’s a masterpiece, except for the ending, the bit where the hero is dragged off kicking and screaming to a Nazi concentration camp. Reads like pure propaganda, Basil says, the worst kind of yellow press melodrama, ruins the artistic integrity of the whole.

Ambrose, permanently nervous and paranoid, takes Basil at his word and cuts the final pages of his memoir thus, unintentionally, converting it into a hymn to Nazi youth. A few days later, once it’s printed, Basil triumphantly re-enters Colonel Plum’s office and throws on his desk a copy of Ivory Tower open at the Nazi essay.

The Colonel is delighted, all the more so since the magazine is so obviously a hotbed of Nazi sympathisers, this Hucklebury Squib, Bartholomew Grass and Tom Barebones-Abraham, yes he’s going to arrest the lot of them!

Only as he overhears the Colonel phoning up the police and Special Branch to plan a dawn raid on the magazine’s offices does it dawn on Basil, for the first time, that he might have overdone it a little. It is worth remembering that Basil is prepared to betray one of his closest ‘friends’ and a number of other utterly innocent people (the publishers Rampole and Bentley) purely so that he can get the promised job of captain in Marines and maybe sleep with Susie, ideally both. Basil is charming, funny, and utterly amoral which sounds funny but boils down to the fact that he is a scumbag.

Waugh milks the unfolding disaster for all the comedy he can. Officials interview Mr Bentley, the younger of the two publishers and, seeing the way the land lies, he agrees to co-operate fully and, in a funny scene, proceeds to give detailed descriptions of the magazine’s other contributors, Hucklebury Squib, Bartholomew Grass and Tom Barebones-Abraham, people we know to be utterly fictional but the cops don’t.

In a comic scene written in a deliberately arch knowing style, Waugh describes the arrest of the older partner in the publishing firm, Mr Rampole, his bewilderment at the accusations, his trial, conviction and sending to prison, Brixton Prison to be precise, up the road from me as I write, where, with typically Waughian whimsy, he turns out to be quite comfortable, discovers a taste for reading light literature and gains face, especially with the prison padre, from personally knowing several of the authors. ‘He was happier than he could remember ever having been.’ Waugh likes throwing his characters in prison; remember how half the cast of Decline and Fall end up in chokey and the way Paul Pennyfeather, also, rather enjoys its solitude, the lack of distractions, the luxury of reading all day long. Waugh’s vision of prison makes it sound like a cross between a monastery and a rarefied college library.

So what about Ambrose Silk, the man Basil has told Colonel Plum is at the centre of this dangerous Nazi conspiracy? Basil doesn’t let him be arrested like the publishers but has another brainwave / elaborate scam up his sleeve.

Remember the passport of the Irish priest he pinched in Ambrose’s office? Turns out to be a vital prop or peg for the plot because. For late the night of the arrests Basil bursts into Ambrose’s flat and tells the half-awake wretch that the authorities are coming to arrest him (Ambrose doesn’t need much persuading and doesn’t put up any resistance because, as has been amply emphasised throughout the book, he is a quivering jelly of paranoid fear that ‘they’ are out to get him). Basil persuades him his best course of action is to flee to Ireland in the guise of this Jesuit priest, Father Flanagan and he has brought along ‘a clerical collar, a black clerical vest ornamented with a double line of jet buttons, and an Irish passport’. He hustles Ambrose out of his flat, down the stairs and they are at Euston station waiting for the train to Holyhead in 15 minutes.

‘But what about my flat and my things?’ wails Ambrose at which point Basil has another, simple brainwave. ‘I’ll move in,’ he tells Ambrose,’ and look after everything for you.’ ‘Oh you are so kind,’ smiles Ambrose, in a moment which exemplifies Waugh’s technique of comic and malicious irony. So Ambrose keeps his hat pulled low over his head and tells the rosary beads Basil has provided and catches the train to Holyhead and the ferry to Ireland and then travels as far west as he can in order to escape the pursuing ‘authorities’ In the event he finds a room in a remote village on the west coast, settles in with his minimal belongings and finally finds himself with the peace and time on his hands to write the Great Book he’s been meditating for so long. He, also, rather like Rampole, has found an unexpected peace amid the beautiful Irish scenery.

And thus Basil takes over Ambrose’s luxurious flat which is a far more fitting scene for his seduction of Susie, which proceeds like a dream, especially after he wangles her a promotion at the Ministry, and soon she has moved in with him, the latest in a long line of conquests. In a typical detail which is both funny and heartless, Basil sets Susie to work with needle and silk and embroidery scissors, unpicking the As from the monograms on Ambrose’s crêpe-de-chine underclothes and substituting in their place a letter B for Basil.

Schoolboy japes

The book’s two highpoints are Basil’s scams, the Connolly scam in part one, and the Ambrose scam at the end of part three. From my descriptions you can see how both are really schoolboy japes, species of practical joke. they rank up there with the premise of Scoop, i.e the mistaken identity of William Boot, or the practical joke which launches his entire novel-writing career, the debagging and dunking in a college fountain of Paul Pennyfeather, for which it is Pennyfeather and not the hooligans who assaulted him who are punished. Waugh’s world is one where innocence is always abused and honour is traduced (as poor Tony Last is traduced in Handful of Dust). Clever people play practical jokes on dim people, and Fate plays practical jokes on everyone.

The war

Oh, the Second World War, that one? Well there is comedy or satire in the way that almost all the characters think about the Second World War as an opportunity and worry about whether they will have ‘a good war.’ (An example of a ‘good war’ is that of Rex Mottram, summarised in Brideshead Revisited: ‘His life, so far as he made it known, began in the war, where he had got a good M.C. serving with the Canadians and had ended as A.D.C. to a popular general’. That’s the way to do it: win a medal and get promoted.)

In a brisk, business-like way the older characters remembers friends or brothers or cousins who did damn well in the First War and worry about getting themselves or their sons into the new one as quickly as possible, but only in a ‘good’ regiment, of course, old boy.

Hence Basil’s half-hearted attempts to wangle a commission in the Bombardiers, and the more effective efforts of younger characters lie Peter Pastmaster and Alastair Trumpington to join ‘special forces’.

Sad Angela is visited in her London flat be her sad husband, Cedric, bringing their little boy Nigel.  He’s been allowed out of boarding school to come and see his Daddy. Daddy takes him shopping and buys him a model bomber which the other chaps at his school will think ‘absolutely ripping’. It is a sad interview between two utterly estranged people.

We then follow Cedric as he rejoins his regiment and is dispatched on the ill-equipped and ill-organised British expedition to Norway, which had been invaded by the Germans in April 1940. The narrative gives two extended passages describing Cedric’s experiences: first in the chaotic night-time loading of ships in British port, in which Cedric struggles against a welter of contradictory orders and timings (i.e. symbolic of the generally shambolic nature of the British campaign); and then a very long passage  right at the end of the book describing actual fighting in Norway, where Cedric is ordered to liaise between British units which have become split up by the German advance.

This scene is not remotely funny, but a kind of quintessence of Waugh’s bitter sense of futility. Two things are notable: in terms of content Cedric is dispatched to run across open ground to find A company and tell them to withdraw in the face of the German advance. Waugh is careful to tell us the A company have, in fact, already realised this and packed up and withdrawn; which is to say that Cedric’s brave run across country to their last know position is absolutely unnecessary. Second thing is that, in a very Waugh kind of way, his brave run through a hail of bullets is not described in itself, but through the dialogue of the Colonel and adjutant who watch him through binoculars i.e. the event is commentated on, viewed from a distance, detached, bleakly distant, alienated.

And then Cedric takes a bullet through the head and dies instantly.

Epilogue: tying up loose ends

At which point the narrative cuts away, as so many Waugh narratives cut, exit, leaving a scene briskly and brutally, the more devastating the event, the more brutal the cut.

The last short section is titled Epilogue: Summer. Waugh conveys the calamitous fall of France in June 1940 through the idiotic eyes of Sir Joseph Mainwaring, a useless fuddy-duddy from the old times. The Chamberlain government falls on a vote of confidence and is replaced by the government of national unity led by Churchill (10 May).

I haven’t mentioned at all two second string characters who recur throughout the novel, Alistair and Sonia Trumpington. You might remember Basil finding himself round this couple’s apartment at the start and end of Black Mischief. Here they are revived to form a comic commentary on the main action, with the comic conceit that, after Alistair has joined his regiment, Sonia ups sticks and follows him round the country as he is regularly posted, as soldiers are, to barracks all round the UK. Here, in the final paragraphs his regiment comes to rest on the south coast, tasked with coastal defence, mining the beaches, setting up rolls of barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. And in the evenings, when he has liberty, Alistair spends a few fleeting hours with his loving Sonia who is now pregnant. Ominous times to become pregnant.

But Alistair shares his boyish excitement that Peter Pastmaster and some of the other chaps are setting up new, small, mobile units to be called ‘commandos’. They carry knives and knuckledusters and rope-souled silent shoes and are parachuted behind enemy lines to assassinate VIPs and cause mayhem. He is everso excited!

Basil marries the newly widowed Angela. The jaded, sophistiqué tone of their conversation reprises all those dialogues from Vile Bodies a decade earlier.

‘I shall be a terrible husband.’
‘Yes, darling, don’t I know it.’

Brief mention of Ambrose, holed up in a tiny village on the far west coast of Ireland. It is not enough. He feels the urge to wander in his Jewish soul. Maybe Waugh is setting him up to reappear in a sequel.

We see Rampole in his prison cell, ‘happier than he could remember ever having been.’

Peter Pastmaster is at Bratt’s (Waugh’s ubiquitous fictional gentleman’s club) drawing up a list of officers to join his new unit. They include Basil, ‘a tough nut’.

Cut back to Basil telling Angela he’s going to join a new unit. It will be a lovely new ‘racket’ for the spring. Pulling the wool over old Colonel Plum’s eyes at the Ministry of Information was fun at the time, but:

‘Besides, you know, that racket was all very well in the winter, when there wasn’t any real war. It won’t do now. There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.’

The final word is given to Lady Seal, lunching with Sir Joseph. When she mentions Basil’s name his heart, as always sinks. Only this time it is not to beg yet another favour; it is to inform him that Basil has joined a new unit, all by himself, under his own steam. For once Sir Joseph smiles with genuine happiness. For once he says something unarguably true:

‘There’s a new spirit abroad,’ he said. ‘I see it on every side.’

So despite a hundred pages satirising, mocking and ridiculing the English social and military establishment, the novel ends on a resoundingly, if somewhat unexpectedly, patriotic note.

Summary

In Waugh’s oeuvre, it’s easy to overlook Putting Out More Flags because it doesn’t have the defined central protagonist and unified action of most of the other novels. But it does contain some of the best comic scenes in all the pre-war books and in the figure of Basil Seal his most monstrous trickster.  Alongside other more interesting themes, namely the semi-serious, paranoid self-pity of Ambrose Silk and the darker story of Angela Lyne’s strange descent into drunken loneliness, themes which give it a deeper, richer flavour.

If someone who’d never read him asked you to recommend a Waugh novel, I think I’d recommend this or Scoop, probably Scoop because it is more timeless in its satire on the press in general and foreign correspondents in particular, but Put Out More Flags runs it a close second for ripe comedy laced with evocative period observations, for the standout characters of Basil the Rascal and Ambrose the Sensitive Victim, but also for that thread of despair and futility which is always glinting at the edge of any Waugh story.

Credit

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1938. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

‘We must return to the Present,’ Ambrose said prophetically.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Bentley. ‘Why?’

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by Simon on December 20, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 20, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/20/put-out-more-flags-evelyn-waugh/

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