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Ulysses by Hugh Kenner (1980)

The more we know of someone, the harder it is to say what he is about, he is about so many things…
(page 21)

Few writers have been more intensely, intimately autobiographical.
(p.171)

Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner (1923 to 2003) was a Canadian academic who spent his time teaching at universities in the United States and writing a series of critical books about modernist literature. I read his masterpiece, ‘The Pound Era’ (1971), in the late 1970s and it changed my life. It gave me a deep grounding in the modernism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the rest of them, providing handy background info for my English A-level reading of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and helping me to ace my university entrance exams. ‘The Pound Era’ is not just a dazzling overview in the mindset of the modernist moment just before the Great War, packed with insights and arcane learning, but immerses you in a whole new way of seeing the world and books.

Although Kenner did his PhD thesis on James Joyce, published as a book in 1956, he only wrote about him periodically thereafter. This book was published in 1980 as part of the then-new Unwin General Library shortly after the publication of another Joyce book by him, ‘Joyce’s Voices’ – I wonder how much overlap there is between the two.

The Unwin General Library volumes were intended as study aids but Kenner’s book is every bit as opinionated and eccentrically informative as his other works. From the blizzard of digressions and divagations, here are the bits which stood out for me, starting with the obvious and moving on to the arcane and inspired.

Learnings

Bloomsday ‘Ulysses’ is set over the course of one long day, from 8am on Thursday 16 June to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June, 1904. The book’s millions of fans long ago christened 16 June ‘Bloomsday’, and celebrations are held in Dublin and elsewhere every year.

Victorian It’s worth stopping right there to reflect that although the novel was published in 1922 and had a huge impact on between-the-wars literature, it in fact depicts a world which was barely even Edwardian, was in fact late-Victorian in culture, economics and mindset (Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901; the Boer War had only just ended, May 1902).

Let’s go back to ‘Ulysses’ prequel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and reflect that almost its entire action takes place in the reign of Queen Victoria. For example, the scene where Stephen Dedalus watches a girl on the beach is supposed to take place in 1898. Only the very last scenes in the book are not Victorian, as Kenner reckons the scenes where Stephen prepares to quit Ireland take place in 1902. So although it became a totem of the Jazz Age, all the music in ‘Ulysses’, the clothes, the culture, the political and social mood, are late-Victorian.

Daylength An awful lots happens in the minds of the protagonists of ‘Ulysses’ but then they have a lot of time. At the latitude of Dublin, the sun rises at 3.33 am and sets at 8.27 pm. The action of the novel actually starts at 8am on top of the Martello Tower at Dalkey on Dublin Bay and continues until 3am the following morning.

Mourning Both the book’s male protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are dressed in mourning black for the entirety of the novel, Stephen mourning his recently deceased mother, Bloom in black to attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral. It is a novel about two men in mourning, or two Men in Black.

Locations Joyce began writing ‘Ulysses’ in Trieste sometime in 1914 and continued for the next 8 years, in Zurich (during the Great War) then Paris (after the war). It was published in Paris on 2 February 1922, the author’s fortieth birthday. It was promptly banned by the authorities in Britain and the USA, where it was only allowed to be published in 1936, and 1933 respectively. (It was never banned in Ireland because the authorities new they didn’t need to; no respecting publisher dared publish it or bookshop sell it.)

Modernist peers Of Joyce’s three great modernist peers:

  • T.S. Eliot admired what he called ‘the mythic method’ of basing the novel on Homer’s Odyssey, welcoming it as a whole new way of ordering ‘the panorama of anarchy and futility that is the contemporary world’ (‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, 1923)
  • Ezra Pound, on the contrary, dismissed the mythic method but welcomed the novel as an encyclopedia of contemporary stupidity, a kind of grotesque continuation of the realism of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet (‘James Joyce et Pechuchet’, 1922)
  • Wyndham Lewis saw it as a sign of how the modernism he’d helped inspire with Vorticism had gone off course, into trivia and technique, dismissing the use of interior monologue as a simple extension of Charles Dickens’s Alfred Jingle (‘Time and Western Man’, 1927)

Sui generis Kenner considers ‘Ulysses’ one of the small number of great modernist works which created a new genre for themselves, much as ‘The Waste Land’, ‘The Cantos’ and Molloy did. Personally, surveying the literary output of the 2020s and earlier, it feels like the modernist moment was a great digression or diversion. Much was learned and much fanfare was made about the revolutionising of the novel but with a decade novels, by and large, settled back into a 20th century version of the traditional mould (Waugh, Orwell, Greene).

Thoms For the geography of Dublin, Joyce in exile relied very heavily on ‘Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ published in 1904.

Chiasmus Joyce is fondness for chiasmus, the ‘a rhetorical device where grammatical structures or ideas in a sentence are repeated in reverse order, creating a mirrored or X-shaped pattern (A-B-B-A)’. Here’s a not quite perfect example.

An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs. (‘A Portrait’)

Kenner points out that the overall structure of ‘A Portrait’ is chiasmic in the sense that it both opens and closes with fragments (p.68).

Technology Ulysses is notably more mechanical than ‘Portrait’ in the sense that there is more modern technology in it. Stephen takes an electric tram into the city centre, the newspaper office has enormous printing machines, people use typewriters, telephones. In ‘A Portrait’ all transport is horse-drawn. Reflecting the sweeping technological innovations which came in between completing ‘Portrait’ in 1914 and writing ‘Ulysses’ in the later teens.

Performance Much can be made of the opening sentences:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Mulligan is an actor Kenner makes two points: 1) Mulligan is acting, he is prancing and performing for his own pleasure; 2) and he is performing a mockery of the Catholic Mass, a mockery Kenner goes so far as to say is like an invocation of the Satanic Black Mass. This feels unlikely to me, it feels more like youthful high spirits. But I agree with Kenner’s diagnosis that it 1) introduces the entire novel as an enormous performance and 2) is a cultural critique, suggesting that Ireland and Irishmen are all playing a part, cheerfully and humorously, but somehow alienated from their true selves.

Inside, outside and in-between The narrative never gives Mulligan free indirect speech from his point of view because he has no inside. He is all performance, a mummer, a mocker, a clown. In this he is in stark contrast to Stephen who is almost entirely inside, and whose stream-of-consciousness thoughts reach an early peak in chapter 3. So Stephen and the Buck are yin and yang, chalk and cheese. From this perspective, Bloom comes along, in chapter 4, as a synthesis of opposites, a happy balance of the internal (psychological) and external (sensual) worlds. Very neat. Although in later chapters, this simple model is itself superseded (p.45).

Divisions The division of the book into three parts, of 3, 12 and 3 chapters each, is clear for everyone to read in its table of contents. Kenner suggests it’s also in two parts: the first ten or so chapters are all done in a roughly similar stream-of-consciousness style: Kenner calls them ‘the naturalistic episodes’ (p.53) and tells us that Joyce himself referred to them being in ‘the initial style’ (p.62). From ‘Sirens’ onwards however, each individual chapter has not only a style, but a format of its own. And a possible reason for this? Because between chapters 11 and 12 Boyle sleeps with Molly. Up to then all the chapters are a sort of anticipation and show Bloom in what Kenner insists is virtually a state of shock; afterwards, they become extremely idiosyncratic.

Bloom’s Jewishness Kenner points out that Jewish affiliation is passed down through the mother but Bloom’s mother was Ellen Higgins, herself the daughter of Fanny Hegarty i.e. no Jewish female inheritance there. Moreover, his (Jewish) father converted to Protestantism in which Leopold was raised, and Poldy himself converted to Catholicism before marrying Marion Tweedy. So he is doubly an outsider: although he played with Jewish friends as a boy, and although he has a Jewish name and appearance, he is not part of Dublin’s small Jewish community (p.43). But although he has been baptised a Catholic, on the one occasion he briefly pops into a church, there is plenty of time to make clear that he’s never taken communion, so he is also an outsider to Dublin’s cradle Catholic culture (p.71). ‘Most readers never realise that Bloom by Jewish standards isn’t Jewish’ (p.152).

Narrative skips Despite bombarding us with ‘its din of specificity’, ‘Ulysses’ is oddly silent about key facts. I was puzzled in chapter 4 by the way we get Bloom giving milk to his cat and popping out to buy a pork kidney and then having a poo in his out-house – but we do not get a description of him running, getting into or out of his bath, although he refers to having had a bath many times later on. It is oddly omitted. Far more significant is how Bloom comes to know that Blazes Boylan is popping round to plook his wife at 4pm. He knows and all the commentators know, but how? He doesn’t take a sneaky peek at Boylan’s letter, and in fact it is weirdly absent from the entire final colloquy between Bloom and Molly before he leaves the house for the day. For all its bombardment with facts, many key aspects of the narrative are mysteriously glossed over. (p.49)

Where’s Blazes? The more commentary you read, the more central the event of Boylan shagging Molly becomes, and yet not only is this central scene not described, but Boylan himself is barely even a fleeting presence in the novel, only briefly glimpsed on a couple of occasions (chatting up girls in ‘Wandering Rocks’ and ‘Sirens’). His, also, is a deliberate and glaring absence (p.53).

Timetable of Stephen’s day

  • 8am: Stephen gets up ‘displeased and sleepy’, having been kept awake by Haines raving about shooting a black panther. Since Haines actually has a gun and Stephen is wearing black in mourning for his mother, he is justified in feeling anxious. He refuses to bathe in the sea with Buck and Haines, and makes a date to meet Mulligan at the Ship pub at 12.30.
  • 9 to 10.30am: walks to his school in Dalkey and gives a history lesson, then has the interview with the school’s head, Mr Deasy, who gives him a letter to take to the newspaper.
  • 10.30 to 12 noon: tram to Haddington Road where he toys with going to see his Aunt Sara to ask if he can stay the night with her but instead goes for a walk on Sandymount Strand.
  • 12 to 12.30pm: decides not to meet Mulligan and sends a telegram telling him so. Instead walks across the river to the offices of the Evening Telegraph.
  • 12.30 to 1pm: delivers Deasy’s letter to the newspaper editor.
  • 1 to 1.30pm: drops into Mooney’s bar a few doors down from the Ship.
  • 1.30 to 4pm moves onto another bar then goes to deliver another copy of Deasy’s letter to A.E. at the Irish Homestead where he is (probably) told the A.E. is in the National Library. So Stephen goes to find him there which is where the narrative finds him again in chapter 9 trying to impress A.E. and John Eglinton with his Shakespeare theory. Leaves the Library with Mulligan, bumps into an Italian acquaintance who tells him he should become a professional singer, bumps into his impoverished young sister Dilly but doesn’t give her any money. Given to highfalutin’ rhetoric about Irish nationalism and escaping nets, he lacks charity or fellow feeling for his own family.

Stephen’s plight Kenner sums up Stephen’s situation by 4pm, the cardinal hour when Boylan is plooking Molly: Stephen has nowhere to stay, barely has a job and no prospects, has given it his best shot to impress Dublin’s literary elite and failed miserably. It is flashy superficial Mulligan who will be going that night to George Moore’s gathering of ‘the best wits in town’. His is the bitterness of the outsider. Very depressed, he decides to carry on drinking, accepting his fate as his fluent but shiftless father’s son. We don’t meet him again till 10pm, at the maternity hospital, by which time, having been drinking all day and eaten no lunch, he is shitfaced.

David Hayman and The Arranger Kenner says the critic David Hayman was the first to nail Ulysses’ main technical innovation which was the irruption half-way through the book into the text of a voice which belongs to none of the characters nor to any narrator, but just intrudes. For example, the 63 newspaper captions in ‘Aeolus’, who is ‘saying’ that? No-one. And as the narrative continues, you realise that, yes yes yes we are getting the famous ‘stream-of-consciousness’ thoughts of the leading characters, but that there is another voice who adds phrases in among the characters’ thoughts. Hayman gives it a name, calling it The Arranger and Kenner devotes a whole chapter to describing its effects.

Parallax Parallax means viewing the same thing from different positions. Kenner explains that thousands of details, moments, perceptions, scraps of speech occur multiple times in ‘Ulysses’, but often seen from two or more angles, described hundreds of pages apart. No one reading can spot all these repetitions, but each rereading leads you deeper into the vast labyrinth of correspondences and correlations Joyce has constructed, building up the impression of infinite interconnection.

Delays Classic detective stories delay the explanation until the end, when Holmes or Poirot make everything clear in One Big Reveal which shows how all the pieces of the puzzle are connected. One Big Revelation explains everything. In ‘Ulysses’, by contrast, there are thousands of little revelations, repetitions and correlations which shed a little light on this or that mystery from earlier in the text. Not one big reveal but thousands and thousands of small reveals because ‘Joyce is all trivia’ (p.76) so no individual one of them transforms our reading, but taken together all immeasurably deepen the experience.

Songs performed in Sirens The primary songs performed or mentioned in the ‘Sirens’ chapter, in chronological order of their appearance or performance:

  • The Bloom is on the Rye, hummed or thought of by Bloom as he watches the barmaids
  • ‘Love and War’, a duet performed by Ben Dollard (bass) and Father Cowley (tenor) shortly after Bloom enters the dining room
  • ‘Tutto è sciolto’ (from Bellini’s La Sonnambula), whistled by Richie Goulding as he and Bloom sit in the dining room
  • ‘M’appari’ (from Flotow’s Martha): the emotional centre of the episode, sung by Simon Dedalus at the piano
  • ‘The Croppy Boy’: a nationalist ballad performed by Ben Dollard toward the end of the episode as Bloom prepares to leave
  • ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’: although not fully performed in the bar, its melody and lyrics recur throughout the episode in Bloom’s thoughts and are associated with Molly Bloom and Blazes Boylan
  • other musical pieces referred to or hummed include ‘Those Lovely Seaside Girls’ and various motifs from operas like ‘Don Giovanni’ (specifically the minuet played by Father Cowley)

Circe After long trying days, both Stephen and Bloom need purging. According to Aristotle’s classical theory, the form which purges emotions is the drama, the play, so a play is needed to purge his characters. And both men need to confront their ghosts so this shall be a ghost play, wherein Stephen  will confront the accusing ghost of his mother and Bloom will see the ghost of his dead baby, now grown to be an 11-year-old boy. These themes were first mooted when Stephen himself dwelled at length on the nature of theatre in his long disquisition about Hamlet and Shakespeare at the National Library

The nightmare of history Kenner makes one really big point about ‘Circe’. You remember Stephen’s famous declaration to the Unionist headmaster Deasy, which is often quoted out of context, that: ‘History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake’? Well, maybe ‘Circe’ can be seen as a dramatisation of the nightmare of history, with its trials and revolutions and politics and crowning of kings and burning at the stake and haunted terrors. Maybe it is the nightmare of history come to life.

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: (Raises high behind the celebrant’s petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck.) My body.

John F. Taylor and the Gaelic revival It was a commonplace of Irish nationalism to equate the small oppressed Irish nation with their its subaltern language and zealous about its religion struggling to be free, with the Israelites in Egypt, small in number, with their own minority language, struggling to be free. This comparison did all kinds of things, giving the struggle for Irish independence the authority of the Bible, guaranteeing that each generation’s independence leader would be dubbed the ‘Irish Moses’, and so on. In the area of language it supported calls for the revival of Gaelic to accompany campaigns for independence.

On 24 October 1901 the lawyer, orator and man of letters John F. Taylor delivered a speech to the Law Students Debating Society pointing out that if Moses had given in to reason, learned Egyptian and aspired to a high place in the Egyptian administration, we’d have never had the ten commandments, Judaism or Christianity. Well, it is this speech which Professor MacHugh recreates in the office of the Freeman’s Journal in ‘Aeolus’.

Gaelic and Hebrew In questions 98 and 99 of ‘Ithaca’ this topic is treated to debunking irony when Bloom and Stephen try to demonstrate their ancestral languages (Hebrew and Gaelic) to each other and it turns out they can both only manage a few lines of songs, and then scrawl down a handful of characters, of their supposed ancestral tongues. Comedy of mutual ignorance.

Ithacan program Kenner usefully pulls together the thoughts scattered in Ithaca’s question and answer format to clarify that Bloom has parental fantasies about Stephen. Bloom fantasises that he will:

  • become a permanent lodger at Eccles Road
  • pay rent
  • take singing lessons from Molly in return for which he’ll tutor her in Italian
  • distract her from Boylan
  • pass evenings of civilised conversation with him, Bloom
  • become a successful and profitable tenor in Bloom’s travelling troupe of singers
  • in time fall in love with and marry Bloom’s daughter, Milly
  • and produce a little light literature on the side

It’s quite the package, then, for a drunk, depressed young man completely adrift in life, the offer for him to become a son-in-law for Bloom and a replacement for Bloom’s dead son, Rudy. But when you list all the elements like that, you can also see it’s a trap, closing off all of Stephen’s ambitions. When it’s put like this you can see why Stephen politely walks away.

Is Bloom Jewish?

For:

  • he has a Jewish name
  • almost everyone treats him as Jewish i.e. with antisemitic slurs
  • in ‘Cyclops’ he becomes angry and says persecution of ‘his people’ is going on right here, right now
  • and the chapter climaxes with him yelling at the Citizen that ‘Christ was a Jew like me’
  • he owns some of the paraphernalia of Jewish ceremonies inherited from his father and grandfather
  • in ‘Eumaeus’ he delivers a defence of the Jews to Stephen

Against:

  • he is uncircumcised (Nausicaa)
  • nowhere is a bar mitzvah mentioned
  • the novel opens with him buying and eating as pork i.e. no-kosher kidney
  • his mother wasn’t Jewish but Irish and so was his grandmother (Ithaca)
  • he has received not one but two Christian baptisms (as a Protestant and a Catholic)
  • crucially he rolls back from his shouted taunt at the Citizen, in Eumaeus telling Stephen: ‘I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.’
  • and in ‘Ithaca’ question 68:
    • What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? is answered thus:
    • He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.

So in a religious (christenings) and biological (mother and grandmother) and dietary and ceremonial way, Bloom is not a Jew. And yet in a cultural and self-identifying kind of way Bloom clearly still identifies with ‘his people’, his ‘race’, feels their persecution (and experiences it for himself), stands up for them whenever he can. So yes and no.

Molly’s lovers Question 275 in ‘Ithaca’ asks ‘What preceding series?’ and the answer proceeds to list 25 men. For 40 years or more these were taken at face value as a list of Molly’s lovers. Only in the 1970s was the list reinterpreted and came to be seen as anyone who had given Bloom any cause at all to be jealous, and since jealousy can be completely irrational it explains why the list includes a priest (her confessor), her doctor, Simon Dedalus (a drinker not a swiver), and others of the same ilk. And so the list is nowadays reinterpreted as anyone who got close to sexy Molly and triggered jealousy in young Bloom, and so Molly’s reputation has been completely rehabilitated. Scholars have returned Blazes Boylan to his rightful place as the only man Molly has been unfaithful with which also, of course, makes far more sense of why it’s such a big deal for Bloom (p.143).

Bloom’s books ‘Ithaca’ contains a number of catalogues or lists. Kenner notes that the list of (23) books on Bloom’s shelf (in answer to question 292) shows that he does not own a copy of The Odyssey.

Archaeology In a characteristic stretch, Kenner associates the list of memorabilia Bloom finds in his drawers with archaeology. Archaeology reached a golden age in the late nineteenth century; it was in the 1870s that Schliemann excavated Troy in Turkey, capturing the public imagination. Kenner points out that the detailed inventory ‘Ithaca’ makes of the contents of Bloom’s house, in one way treats it as an archaeological site.

Sherlock A little more obvious is the fact that the list of Bloom’s books contains one by Conan Doyle (The Stark-Munro Letters) which makes us think of Sherlock Holmes, and the rather more obvious idea that ‘Ulysses’ is, as well as everything else, a book which is packed with clues which we are meant to find and decipher, starting with the way the parts and chapters of the book are deliberately left unnamed. Whether this world of clues in the end reveals anything beyond the astonishing ingenuity of its own creation – well, that’s a different type of question.

The acme of naturalism Kenner ends with some high-level meditations. In one way ‘Ulysses’ took the late-nineteenth century passion for naturalism (think Émile Zola) to a logical conclusion in a novel where very little happens but we are overloaded with thousands upon thousands of details. The line of thinking anticipated by Ezra Pound.

Eternal recurrence Joyce gets his characters to mull over whether life is predestined and fated, a question of eternal recurrence. Odysseus returns, maybe everything returns.

Picasso, Einstein, Joyce They’re often grouped together because they all removed the distance between the observer and the observed, and so demolished he old-fashioned notion of ‘reality’.

Art: Picasso’s works are rarely and barely ‘about’ the subject (still lives, women in his studio, bullfighters) in the old way that the artist painted a separate reality: the cubist works in particular declare that the subject of the work of art is the work of art itself; the interesting thing is the style and the treatment. (Which explains what, in my opinion, is Picasso’s boring poverty of subject matter, the same half dozen subjects again and again – because the interest is in the style and treatment.)

Physics: In Newtonian physics the observer walked through a fixed, mechanical universe and the two (observer and universe) were completely separate. In Einstein’s view, the observer, their position and speed, create the world. The classical separation between observer and observed is eliminated.

Joyce: in the traditional novel the author writes about something, they are separate from the world and depicting it. Joyce takes late-nineteenth century realism and pushes it to the max and beyond, in a text which became notorious for his pedantic attention to detail, for verifying every aspect of the Dublin of June 1904. But in doing so, he created a text which doesn’t depict the world so much as become a world.

And following from that thought is the idea that at just the moment that the novel reached a peak of naturalism, in Joyce’s idiosyncratic hands, it became an utterly verbal construct. The reader may think they’re reading about the street layout or businesses of Dublin but that world of details’ deeper purpose is to create an encyclopedic system of self-referencing verbal nodes – a vast system of references and clues which no reader can hope to encompass and decipher in just one reading, which demands multiple readings, at each of which the reader notices new details and makes new connections. Each reader writes their own version of ‘Ulysses’.

Somehow it manages to be a vast concordance of objective facts and a Rorschach test of subjective responses, at the same time.

Key books about Ulysses

In a useful appendix, Kenner lists and summarises the main scholarly books written about ‘Ulysses’ in the decades between its publication (1922) and this one (1980).

1920: Joyce sent a schema of ‘Ulysses’ i.e. the Homeric title and parallels for each chapter, along with what happens in each, they style and other structural aspects, to Carlo Linati to help him prepare a lecture. In 1921 Joyce sent a comparable schema to Valery Larbaud for a book he was writing. The key thing is that the two schemas differed in many details.

1930: James Joyce’s Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert: helped by Joyce himself, this was a semi-official guide to the book. It revealed an intensely detailed schema Joyce claimed to have worked to, which showed not only the hour-by-hour events of the day, but revealed that they all take place under a specific Symbol, Colour, Bodily Organ, Art and so on, plus the Homeric parallels. So for a while it set everyone looking for systems and structures.

1931: Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson set ‘Ulysses’ in the wider context of late nineteenth century European symbolism and modernism. Wilson was puzzled by the aspects which wouldn’t yield to ‘a naturalistic-psychological interpretation’.

1934: James Joyce and the making of Ulysses by Frank Budgen, an ex-sailor and painter, a non-literary type which is why Joyce liked him. Budgen took a more down-to-earth approach, making Bloom an ordinary everyman, the centre of the narrative. It contains accounts of many conversations Joyce had with Budgen about his book as he wrote it in Zurich during the years 1918 to 1920.

1937: Word index to James Joyce’s Ulysses by Miles L. Hanley: meticulously lists and locates every word in James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’, acting as a foundational reference for understanding its complex vocabulary and linguistic patterns.

1939: James Joyce: The Definitive Biography by Herbert Gorman: a modest account, heavily edited by Joyce himself who wanted to present himself as a visionary martyr to art.

1941: James Joyce by Harry Levin: Levin was able to take account of the recent publication of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, which made ‘Ulysses’ no longer the climax of Joyce’s oeuvre but a way station on the road to something even bigger and weirder.

1947: Fabulous Voyager by Richard M. Kain: used both the Word Index and Thom’s Directory to showcase Ulysses’ amazing amount of local fact and detail, and link these with the book’s larger themes.

1958: Joyce among the Jesuits by Kevin Sullivan: analyzing James Joyce’s early life, education and writings, focusing on the profound impact of his Jesuit schooling (at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere College) on his works, particularly ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, exploring themes of faith, rebellion, and the Catholic tradition he later rejected.

1959: James Joyce by Richard Ellmann: transformed Joyce studies with its scale and detail (it contains 50% more words than ‘Ulysses’). In the context of this immense biography, the works shifted from being standalone masterpieces to being episodes in Joyce’s heroic life.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by Hugh Kenner was published by George Allen and Unwin in 1980.

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 4, 2026

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Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster (1905)

‘The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in “the right”.’
(Harriet Herriton’s view, page 71)

This is E.M. Forster’s first novel and his shortest, 10 brisk chapters clocking in at a tidy 160 pages in the Penguin paperback edition. It concerns prim middle-class Edwardian Brits getting into trouble in Italy. It shows a set of English people who pride themselves on their detailed knowledge of Italy’s art and historical glories but haven’t a clue how to handle actual Italian people. On a superficial level it depicts the inability of people from two cultures to understand each other and so, in this respect, shares the same fundamental idea that underpins his mature masterpiece, ‘Passage To India’, 25 years later.

But that’s not really an adequate description because, pushing a little deeper, you realise that, right up to the surprisingly grim and tragic climax, it’s not just Brits versus Italians, it’s about all the characters’ inability to communicate with and understand each other.

The book is heavily dated in two ways, obvious and less obvious. First off, all the characters are Edwardian ladies and gentlemen whose lives and minds are hemmed in by conventions and constrictions which we have long since abandoned / moved beyond. Costume drama. Historical distance. The other way it’s dated is that, especially at the climax of the story, Forster isn’t quite up to managing the task he has set himself and so his prose, and his characters, lapse into heavily dated tropes of chivalry and honour and saintliness which remind us that Forster was much closer to Tennyson than he is to us today. (Tennyson died just 13 years before the book was published.)

Plot summary

1. Backstory

Lilia Theobald is the daughter of old Mrs Theobald and grew up in Yorkshire. Ten years before the narrative opens Lilia married Charles Herriton. He was the son of domineering Mrs Herriton, who is also mother to Harriet and, the youngest son, Philip, a huge fan of Italy, its Beauty and Culture etc. Mrs Herriton tried to deter her son from marrying Lilia and, when he disobeyed her, set about taming and reforming her. (There’s no mention of the husband of Mrs Theobald i.e. Lilia’s father, nor of Mrs Herriton’s husband. Forster’s families are generally matriarchies.)

At some point Charles got Lilia pregnant and she had daughter Irma. Then a bit later Charles died. This fact is told with no drama or emotion whatsoever as it is simply the background and setup to the main narrative. Now a widow, Lilia wants to move in with her mother (Mrs Theobald) but for reasons I don’t understand, perhaps simply to oversee her grandchild, this is blocked by interfering Mrs Herriton who insists that Lilia sets her up house close to the Herriton family in the Cambridgeshire village of Sawston.

2. Main narrative

The narrative proper kicks off when a solution to the ‘problem’ of what to do with Lilia has presented itself. Nice Miss Caroline Abbott who lives near the Herritons, is travelling to Italy for a year and needs a female companion. Perfect! Egged on by Philip (Mrs Herriton’s clever, pompous younger son who has himself been to Italy and raves about its art and culture etc) Mrs Herriton encourages Lilia to take this opportunity, to sell her house and hand over young Irma (‘Poor child. So vulgar’) to her (Mrs Herriton) and go off to Italy with Miss Abbott.

After a steady stream of unremarkable letters describing their tour of the Grand Sights of Italy, one fine morning the Herritons get a letter from Lilia announcing that she is engaged to be married. To an Italian! Outraged, Mrs Herriton despatches young Philip to find out what’s going on and stop it.

A few days later Philip arrives in the small Italian town of Monteriano where most o the the action is set, and is introduced to Lilia’s fiancé, Signor Carella. Lilia’s letter had given the impression he was an aristocrat, which was at least something for the snobbish Herritons to cling onto, but this turns out to be a deception – Carella is the son of a dentist, so you can imagine snobbish Philip’s horror! In any case, when they hear Philip is on the way, the ill-starred couple have hurriedly gotten married, which flabbergasts Philip but makes them burst out laughing at his folly.

Humiliated, Philip returns to England with the news and the Herriton family promptly cut off all contact with Lilia and also stop her communicating with her daughter.

The narrative then switches to focus on the slow unravelling of the cross-cultural marriage between Lilia and Carella, lingering on 1) the 101 cultural differences between a Brit and an Italian, between a Northern woman and a southern man:

No one realized that more than personalities were engaged; that the struggle was national; that generations of ancestors, good, bad, or indifferent, forbad the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man.

And 2) the specific failings of these two particular characters: Lilia soon realises she is totally isolated in an alien landscape and has few if any mental resources to fall back on, while Gino is influenced by his local friends (such as Spiridione) to assert himself as a man, an Italian man and a good Catholic, which means forbidding Lilia from leaving the house, and having an affair.

They had married in the spring and by the autumn the marriage has failed and Lilia makes the first of several attempts to run away. Forster tells us that both partners, for different reasons, become obsessed with having a baby, specifically a son. In a way this represents Forster turning the knife, pushing the unhappy marriage onto the next level of misery. To my surprise Lilia dies giving birth to the child and we’re only at the end of chapter 4. Farewell Lilia.

The Herritons are mildly upset by the news but Caroline Abbott is distraught at Lilia’s death, blaming herself for ever taking her to Italy. The Herritons resolve to forget the whole sordid affair and concentrate on bringing up the orphan Irma, now 9 years old. However this plan is scuppered when several postcards arrive from Italy, addressed to Irma and claiming to be from her ‘little brother’. Despite their attempts to intercept these, Irma gets sight of them and not only asks awkward questions about her little brother, but spreads the word at her school, telling her friends who tell their mums, and so the issue becomes a social problem for Mrs Herriton.

Domineering Mrs Herriton realises Something Must be Done and dispatches Philip the lawyer to go and meet up with his sister, Harriet (taking a holiday in the Tyrol) and, together with her, journey on to Monteriano and persuade Gino to part with the child and let him be brought back to England.

In the event, Philip and Harriet have a comically disastrous trip, becoming rapidly exhausted in the summer heat, losing things or leaving them at hotels and Harriet has a talent for opening train windows and getting smuts (small cinders from the burnt coal burned to drive the train) in her eye. With the result that the siblings bicker all the way. She is prim judgemental Low Church, he fancies himself as a Bohemian non-conformist.

Chapter 6

When they arrive at Monteriano after much squabbling they are amazed to discover that Miss Abbott has beaten them to it and is staying at the same hotel, the Stella d’Italia. Three Brits versus an Italian.

But things don’t go the way anybody planned. On the first day, when they go round to his house, they are told Gino is out, so they’re at a loose end; until they notice that a production of the opera Lucia of Lammermoor is on that evening and, on an impulse, decide to go.

This is an opportunity for Forster to describe the florid interior of an Italian opera house and to contrast the vibrancy of the production with those of the British or Germans. But in the final act of the opera Philip finds himself invited into a box where sit Gino and some of his friends where he is treated with great hospitality and embarrassed to raise the reason they’ve all come i.e. to deprive Gino of his son.

Chapter 7

Worse follows the next day when Miss Abbott decides to make an early assault upon Gino, before Philip’s scheduled meeting with him. To her horror she discovers that Gino is a loving doting father, more than that, he has a primeval pagan paternal connection with the 8-month-old baby. When Gino proceeds to bathe the beautiful bronze baby Miss Abbott feels as if she’s entered a Renaissance painting, is softened and hypnotised by the baby and completely forgets the point of her mission. Which is the moment when Philip arrives, puzzled to find her there before him. And then both men are puzzled when Miss Abbott, confused and upset by the crudeness of their mission and her failure, bursts into tears and goes running out.

Chapter 8

Cut to Harriet Herriton ranting at Philip, criticising him for failing to obtain the baby, criticising him for letting Miss Abbott go see Gino first, while Philip weakly defends himself. It is central to the plot that Harriet is a big graceless woman, in her thinking as her physique. She takes very literally the mission her mother has sent them on – to remove the baby from the Gino, who she is convinced murdered Lilia, which is so far from the truth (Lilia died in childbirth) as to be farcical if it didn’t turn out to have such tragic consequences.

Stung by his sister’s criticism, Philip tracks down Miss Abbott to the church of Santa Deodata where she appears to be praying. She, like Harriet, still believes they should take the baby back to England but is more human, realising how difficult it is going to be now she understands just how much Gino is attached to it. This chapter is designed to really bring out the differing attitudes of the three young English people, for Philip stands distinctly apart from the two women in his lack of involvement or commitment. To him the whole thing is a comedy which is doomed to fail and which should be enjoyed for the entertainment he provides. He is given a speech summing up his attitude:

‘Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them; I never did anything at school or at the Bar. I came out to stop Lilia’s marriage, and it was too late. I came out intending to get the baby, and I shall return an ‘honourable failure.’ I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed. You would be surprised to know what my great events are. Going to the theatre yesterday, talking to you now – I don’t suppose I shall ever meet anything greater. I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it – and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die – I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there. You are quite right; life to me is just a spectacle, which – thank God, and thank Italy, and thank you – is now more beautiful and heartening than it has ever been before.’ (p.134)

During this conversation, which is really a debate between different attitudes to life, Miss Abbott comes to understand Philip more and Philip comes to really admire her. He is attracted to her. He even allows himself to think their relationship might develop into…you know… lurv.

Over lunch Harriet is rude to Miss Abbott who she thinks has gone over to the enemy. On the practical front they order two carriages for that evening to take them to the station. Both the women talk as if they will be taking the baby with them though we now realise Philip doesn’t think there’s a hope in hell of that happening and doesn’t care.

He felt little interest in the matter, and he was sure that he had no influence.

But he goes through the motions, keeping an appointment he’d made with Gino to meet him at the Caffe Garibaldi. Gino now finds the whole proposition of the Brits buying his son off him is funny and mocks Philip who doesn’t care. They have become pretty good friends and when Gino learns Philip’s leaving that evening he tells him to come back the following year.

He also informs him that he is planning to get married, to a not particularly attractive woman who, he thinks, will be a good mother to his son. Philip wishes him well and Gino invites him to be the boy’s godfather. Philip returns to the hotel, informs the two women of his total failure and they all pack. Soon it’s 8pm and the two carriages arrive. It starts to rain. Miss Abbott packs her stuff into one which sets off down the hill to the railway station but Philip is irked then worried when Harriet fails to show.

Then the village idiot appears in the pouring rain and hands Philip a note from Harriet telling him to get in the coach and meet at the town gate. This he does but when she clambers into the carriage he realises she is carrying a bundle in which is Gino’s baby. She had gone to his house to make one last plea and, finding him out and the maid, Perfetta, distracted, had simply wrapped the baby in some shawls and stole it.

Philip is still processing the implications of this theft which is likely to get them arrested and maybe prosecuted, and takes a turn in holding the little mite which he sees is crying, when, without any warning, the carriage they’re riding in is violently overthrown and he is knocked unconscious.

When he comes to he realises his arm is badly hurt, maybe broken, the lamps have been knocked out so they’re in pitch dark in pouring rain. Harriet is alright as is the coachman but the baby is nowhere to be seen. Philip has the presence of mind to tell the others to remain absolutely still and feels around in the dark till he finds the bundle lying across a deep rut in the road. When he examines the baby he realises it is dead!

Chapter 9

Turns out it was Miss Abbott’s coach which their coach collided with to cause the crash. Now all three Brits take the remaining coach back up to Monteriano. Here Philip takes the responsibility of confronting Gino and telling him the terrible news. Something happens to Forster’s prose. It becomes as overwrought as the subject matter. previously it had been enjoyably amiable and gently mocking. Now he’s created a melodrama and his prose and authorial attitude lose their poise to become more overwrought:

Round the Italian baby who had died in the mud there centred deep passions and high hopes. People had been wicked or wrong in the matter; no one save himself had been trivial. Now the baby had gone, but there remained this vast apparatus of pride and pity and love. For the dead, who seemed to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy. (p.146)

Gino, returning happy from the café, understandably fails to take in what Philip is telling him, that these English tourists, having failed to buy his son from him, stole him and, just down the hill a little way, were involved in an accident and now his son is dead. Although the narrative focuses entirely on the English characters, you can’t help feeling that Gino is the central character.

Anyway, he moves from disbelief through to mental disturbance – systematically tapping every surface in the little house – to sudden rage at Philip, seizes his broken arm – which makes Philip punch him as a reflect action – then following him into the baby’s room where Philip hides behind the bed but Gino finds him, kneels on him and starts to strangle him. Next thing we know Miss Abbott has arrived and pulled Gino off him and over to a chair. At which point Gino breaks and cries like a baby, Miss Abbott cradles him, and the narrative tone again stumbles, lurching into late Victorian sentiment crossed with Italian art connoisseurship.

All through the day Miss Abbott had seemed to Philip like a goddess, and more than ever did she seem so now. Many people look younger and more intimate during great emotion. But some there are who look older, and remote, and he could not think that there was little difference in years, and none in composition, between her and the man whose head was laid upon her breast. Her eyes were open, full of infinite pity and full of majesty, as if they discerned the boundaries of sorrow, and saw unimaginable tracts beyond. Such eyes he had seen in great pictures but never in a mortal. Her hands were folded round the sufferer, stroking him lightly, for even a goddess can do no more than that. And it seemed fitting, too, that she should bend her head and touch his forehead with her lips. (p.151)

Chapter 10

Cut to a new scene. Philip, Miss Abbott and Harriet are on the journey home, though still in Italy. Philip tells Miss A that this morning, as they left Milan, he received a letter from Gino, perfectly forgiving him. In this little exchange we learned that there was an official investigation and an inquest at which Gino lied to protect the English.

Forster ties up loose ends. Philip is now full-blown in love with Miss Abbott who is oblivious of the fact. He tells her he won’t go back to Sawston but will move to London and work. Incidentally, we discover that both of them have agreed not to mention that Harriet was responsible for the baby’s death. All that was hushed up in Italy and will be hushed up back in England.

The final scenes are just as extraordinary or weird or unpredicted as the sudden pointless death of the baby. Here, in the rattling train corridor, just as Philip is nerving himself to reveal that he loves her, Miss Abbott staggers him by revealing that she loves Gino. The two or three encounters they had have utterly bewitched her and she would give herself to him ‘body and soul’ in a flash, if he asked. Except being the obtuse son of a dentist he never did, and now here she is rattling back to England and to the stifling boring milieu of little Sawston where she will live out her life in dutiful service of the community and crush to death the mad passionate love which rages inside her.

This, as you might expect, has a devastating impact on Philip who, however, is an Edwardian gentleman, stifles his own deep feelings, and says the things he thinks will help her cope with her distress, as she gives in to a storm of tears.

Right to the end the novel is about misunderstandings and emotional repression.

Tropes, or types of content

So much for the story, the plot. But the narrative is also a vehicle for Forster to do quite a number of other things, to deploy and practice a number of novel-ish themes. These include:

Dissecting English snobbery

The character of bossy Mrs Herriton is enjoyably done. I liked the scene where she and her daughter a just planting out some peas when the post comes with the letter from Lilia saying she’s got engaged – with the result that the poor peas don’t get covered with soil and next morning the birds have eaten them. So carefully English.

The way she dominates and drives her children is entertaining (‘His mother knew how to manage him’), as well as how she plays and adapts to the changing social pressures evident in the little community (i.e. the other matrons) of Sawston so that, when little Irma spills the beans about her baby brother out in Italy, Mrs Herriton has to be seen to be doing something about it.

Showing off about Italy

There’s a long tradition of English novelists (as of English people) feeling compelled to show off their superior knowledge about the art and literature of Italy, along with their superior knowledge of the finest Italian wines and the best Italian restaurants and the tastiest Italian food to eat in each of the yummy Italian regions etc.

Actually Forster is lighter on this aspect than a determined show-off like Aldous Huxley, but still, fairly regularly, adopts the tone of the Italy Expert:

They clattered up the narrow dark street, greeted by that mixture of curiosity and kindness which makes each Italian arrival so wonderful.

Signor Carella, with the brutality so common in Italians, had caught [the cat] by the paw and flung her away from him.

‘I’ll show you,’ said a little girl, springing out of the ground as Italian children will. ‘She will show you,’ said the Dogana men, nodding reassuringly. ‘Follow her always, always, and you will come to no harm. She is a trustworthy guide. She is my daughter/cousin/sister.’ Philip knew these relatives well: they ramify, if need be, all over the peninsula. (p.97)

‘He said he was sorry – pleasantly, as Italians do say such things…’ (p.103)

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence. (p.107)

Gino had the southern knack of friendship. (p.153)

Every time I read these rather patronising generalisations about Italians (on virtually every page) I wondered what Italian readers made of them back then or make of them now. Did Italian intellectuals find it boring and tiresome that tourists from Surrey or Cambridge claimed to know more about their country, their history and their culture than Italians themselves?

Showing off about art

As with Italy, so with Italian art, English authors just feel compelled to show off their superior knowledge at every opportunity.

There she sat, with twenty miles of view behind her, and he placed the dripping baby on her knee. It shone now with health and beauty: it seemed to reflect light, like a copper vessel. Just such a baby Bellini sets languid on his mother’s lap, or Signorelli flings wriggling on pavements of marble, or Lorenzo di Credi, more reverent but less divine, lays carefully among flowers, with his head upon a wisp of golden straw. (p.126)

The author showing off not only his scholarship but also his exquisite taste in making so fine a distinction between Signorelli and Lorenzo di Credi (‘more reverent but less divine’).

Mocking showing off about Italy i.e. Philip

However, what makes Forster more interesting than the run of show-off novelists is that, at the same time as indulging it, Forster gently mocks the tedious English tendency of claiming superior knowledge about Italy. This is done in the essentially comic figure of young Philip, right from the first page described as ‘intoxicated’ by his memories of Italy, determined to be the suburban bourgeois Italy Expert, and so given lots of speeches where he mansplains Italy to everyone else:

Italy, Philip had always maintained, is only her true self in the height of the summer, when the tourists have left her, and her soul awakes under the beams of a vertical sun.

And:

‘I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her… Don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.’

And:

‘When you know the Italians as well as I do, you will realize that in all that he said to you he was perfectly sincere. The Italians are essentially dramatic; they look on death and love as spectacles.’

What makes all this comic is that when Philip comes face to face with actual Italians he is either completely flummoxed, as when encountering Gino, or exasperated, as when trying to navigate their train system, or (rightly) suspects that he is being mocked by the townspeople of Monteriano:

‘Monteriano seemed in one conspiracy to make him look a fool.’

There’s a particularly comic moment when Philip recognises in Gino’s face the look of the kind of rough handsome Italian man he has admired on his aesthetic trips to Italy, admirable to look at… but not to have in the family! One of the broadly comic aspects of the novel is the way that the English characters love of all things Italian doesn’t extend to actual Italians, who are dismissed as unreliable, chaotic and ineffective.

So Forster has it both ways – as a narrator he professes Italian Knowledge while at the same time mocking characters who aspire to the same kind of hoity Italian Knowledge. Mirrors reflecting mirrors.

The (alleged) Italian attitude to women

Forster treats us to this slab of wisdom about Italian attitudes to men and women.

Lilia gathered somehow from this conversation that Continental society was not the go-as-you-please thing she had expected. Indeed she could not see where Continental society was. Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism – that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffe or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women. Why should you not make friends with your neighbour at the theatre or in the train, when you know and he knows that feminine criticism and feminine insight and feminine prejudice will never come between you? Though you become as David and Jonathan, you need never enter his home, nor he yours. All your lives you will meet under the open air, the only roof-tree of the South, under which he will spit and swear, and you will drop your h’s, and nobody will think the worse of either.

Meanwhile the women – they have, of course, their house and their church, with its admirable and frequent services, to which they are escorted by the maid. Otherwise they do not go out much, for it is not genteel to walk, and you are too poor to keep a carriage. Occasionally you will take them to the caffe or theatre, and immediately all your wonted acquaintance there desert you, except those few who are expecting and expected to marry into your family. It is all very sad. But one consolation emerges – life is very pleasant in Italy if you are a man.

Was it true then, in 1905? Was it true, generally, of Italian culture in the 20th century? Or is the point of this sweeping generalisation to describe the character of judgemental Lilia more than Italy? Is its main purpose to amplify and generalise out the crushing disillusion which she experiences? (see below)

Generalisations about life in novels

So I’ve considered generalisations about Italy and art and women. These are all clearly subsets or specific examples of the broader tendency of novels of the classical period to overflow with generalisations about life.

For centuries novels have been a channel for writers to pass on their supposed insights and wisdom about human nature and the human psyche. Judged by the standards of science or psychology, these are often of dubious truth or accuracy but then, quite obviously, a lot of the time these little life lessons aren’t to be assessed for their truth. Their purposes are 1) to reinforce the voice of the narrator, to build him up as someone blessed with insights and wisdom about life that the likes of you and I are not party to; and 2) to build up the atmosphere of the story. They do this by implying that this isn’t a story about 3 or 4 insignificant people but that these characters, actions and opinions somehow embody universal values or aspects of human experience. So the generalisations help to big up the author and his story.

As I mentioned in connection with Italy boasting, Forster isn’t an excessively didactic writer, but he does slip in his fair share of generalisations about human nature every two or three pages, things like:

Suffering, however, is more independent of temperament, and the wisest of women could hardly have suffered more.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.

Our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some sad, strange irony – it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

The barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or – to put the thing less cynically – we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. (p.138)

These may or may not be ‘true’ but they 1) are a recognised part of the classical novel tradition; readers have paid their money and they expect a reasonable serving of wisdom sayings; 2) they make the author sound clever i.e. give him the authority which helps make the narrative more effective, makes us take it more seriously.

Ad hoc or partial generalisations

There is a third aspect to this which is 3) when the generalisation is clearly not expressed in the abstract as a universal truth, but tied to a certain situation or character. In this case it is a kind of implemented or dramatic truth, designed to shed light not on universal human nature, but on a specific character or incident or interaction of characters. Thus when Lilia reflects on her new husband’s status as the son of a dentist and Forster writes:

Even in England a dentist is a troublesome creature, whom careful people find difficult to class. He hovers between the professions and the trades; he may be only a little lower than the doctors, or he may be down among the chemists, or even beneath them.

The purpose of this little nugget is not to tell us anything about dentists but to give us a feel for Lilia and her snobbish sense of English social hierarchy. Slightly different but in the same ballpark is this one which opens chapter 4:

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say ‘yesterday I was happy, today I am not.’

On the face of it this is a universal wisdom saying of the kind I described earlier, but the real point is that this leads straight into a consideration of how Lilia became disillusioned with her marriage. Why not say that straight out – ‘Over the next few months Lilia became disillusioned with her marriage?’ Because Forster is gathering rhetorical weight or evidence to back up his characterisation and his story. He is invoking a kind of folk wisdom to give his story extra weight and depth. Just telling the facts is boring. The reader wants their money’s worth.

Also this kind of thing often acts as an introduction to a new scene, lofty generalisations before we descend to a new section of the narrative. They ease us into the specific situation. This is a very old technique in the novel. The most famous example in all English literature is probably the opening line of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This isn’t famous because it’s true. It’s famous because it’s such a classic example of what I’m talking about, the sweeping generalisation about human nature or society which is used to introduce, ease and usher us into a narrative.

Anyway, this leads on to another logical category, which is where the author has his characters make great generalisations about life.

Novelist’s characters generalising about life

He concluded that nothing could happen, not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes conquer where love of beauty fails. (p.71)

‘Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.’

‘There’s never any knowing – (how am I to put it?) – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever.’ (p.136)

Sometimes the characters’ truth sayings are plausible in and of themselves but mostly they are designed to expand on and illuminate a character, and can do so in both a positive and a negative way:

‘Women… are never at ease till they tell their faults out loud.’

Evidently she had the usual feminine incapacity for grasping philosophy [thinks pompous Philip]

As we all do, characters in fictions tend to express general axioms as the basis for specific arguments, only in novels they do it more fluently and articulately than most of us manage in real life.

These generalisations, then, are not intended to hold true of the world, they are very clearly meant to demonstrate the characters’ foibles and imperfections. As in this Lady Bracknell-ish declamation by Mrs Herriton:

‘Then you were still infatuated with Italy. It may be full of beautiful pictures and churches, but we cannot judge a country by anything but its men.’ (p.73)

Conclusion about generalisations

When I read novels as a boy I furiously underlined these kinds of life sayings, convinced I was learning wisdom. Forty years later I have read thousands and thousands of the things and realise they are best accepted as purely rhetorical, serving various aims for the novelist such as introducing new scenes or themes, of illuminating particular characters through their own mouths, showing the basic principles they base their behaviour on and soon. Seen from this perspective, novels can be thought of as marshalling conflicting arguments and principles as much as contrasting characters. But none of the axioms have to be true to make the novel work as a fiction – they just have to be plausible enough to make the narrative go.

Puppets

Characters in a novel are obviously puppets of the author’s plan. Sometimes they hint that they’re aware of this. The issue comes into full view several times in relation to young Philip who is all-too-aware that he is a puppet to his mother, who is in many ways a stand-in for the scheming novelist himself:

[Philip] was sure that [Mrs Herriton] was not impulsive, but did not dare to say so. Her ability frightened him. All his life he had been her puppet. She let him worship Italy, and reform Sawston—just as she had let Harriet be Low Church. She had let him talk as much as he liked. But when she wanted a thing she always got it.

Philip saw no prospect of good, nor of beauty either. But the expedition promised to be highly comic. He was not averse to it any longer; he was simply indifferent to all in it except the humours. These would be wonderful. Harriet, worked by her mother; Mrs. Herriton, worked by Miss Abbott; Gino, worked by a cheque—what better entertainment could he desire? There was nothing to distract him this time; his sentimentality had died, so had his anxiety for the family honour. He might be a puppet’s puppet, but he knew exactly the disposition of the strings.

Forster’s amiableness

Forster’s distinguishing feature is his amiable good humour. He’s not exactly a humourist but most of the time he is drolly amused by his own creations and reading a novel by him is to enter into the same spirit of civilised good humour.

Gino’s father could have been given any profession, he could be an anonymous generic businessman. It is characteristic of Forster that he makes him a dentist because of its comic incongruity and because of the impact it has on Philip, the comic version of the pompous Italy-lover. Here’s Philip’s dramatic response to the news:

A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.

This is comedy at the character’s expense. Forster makes more of the scene of Philip confronting Gino, who bursts out laughing at his pomposity, than of the scene of Lilia dying and that tells you the kind of novelist he is – essentially comic, although of a very dry or ironic flavour.

There’s a moment when Philip forgets all about the baby he’s come to Italy to rescue because Caroline Abbott reports that Gino apologises for pushing him over and this pleases and flatters Philip’s vanity. He smiles and feels that all is well with the world again. And Forster is more than usually intrusive when he comments:

This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good. (p.103)

The description of angels as actual beings is, for a moment, reminiscent of Forster’s fantasy short stories, which often describe death and the afterlife with unnerving concreteness – but above all this little moment indicates how forgiving Forster is to his characters – he is humanely understanding of their weaknesses.

Lawrence versus Forster

Forster and his characters timidly dream about breaking free and living an untrammelled life, in the meanwhile mocking and sniping at each other for their petty vanities and snobberies, and breaking each others’ lives without meaning to. Lawrence’s characters do it. They really try to escape England’s stifling conformity. Which explains why Forster became a cosy member of the British establishment while Lawrence was driven into exile.

A sentence in the second paragraph of his first short story sums Forster up:

Ravello is a delightful place with a delightful little hotel in which we met some charming people.

He manages to make one of Italy’s most beautiful and historic towns sound like Dorking. There is something irremediably bourgeois, middle class and Little England about Forster. He can set stories in Italy till the cows come home but his mind is that of a timid vicar or maiden aunt, terrified of any lapse from the most repressed and timorous good manners.

Forster is what D.H. Lawrence had to flee England to get away from. Ghastly good taste and spiritual timidity.

Credit

Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster was first published in 1905 by Edward Arnold. References are to the 1982 Penguin edition.

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by Simon on January 15, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 15, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/01/15/where-angels-fear-to-tread-e-m-forster/

Cruel Tales by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1883)

It is so amusing to play the dandy! I prefer that to playing cards.
(The narrator of ‘Maryelle’, page 216)

This book contains 27 short stories, vignettes, squibs and satires. Someone online commented that they are not cruel tales at all, and certainly anyone expecting the thrill or horror of Edgar Allen Poe will on the whole be disappointed (with a handful of possible exceptions). Much more accurate is the title of used by a 1920s translation of the same collection, ‘Sardonic Stories’. They are more about irony, satire and sarcasm than anything cruel and macabre – in particular, satire of the Paris literary and theatrical worlds which de l’Isle-Adam tried all his life to break into with impressively consistent lack of success.

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) spent his entire life thinking his writings would make him famous and restore the fortunes of his aristocratic family, which he insisted was ancient and venerable. This didn’t happen. Instead he churned out novels and plays which nobody cared about while living in sometimes abject poverty, associating with a series of illiterate working class mistresses who bore him various children. Only in the last years of his life, with the publication of the ‘Cruel Tales’ in 1883, did he begin to garner some critical recognition.

Like so many French writers, de l’Isle-Adam despised his countrymen. As an aristocrat he was contemptuous of the bourgeoisie, as a monarchist he was contemptuous of democracy (in 1881 he stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the Legitimist party), and as a Catholic he was contemptuous of science and materialism. He was, in other words, a reactionary berk.

A reactionary berk convinced of his own ineffable superiority to the rest of the human race, on account of his aristocratic family and his superb talent, even if the rest of the human race was too ignorant to recognise it. Outraged pride and lofty superiority run through the stories like a silver thread. I liked A.W. Raitt’s note pointing out that de L’Isle-Adam was well known for stopping in his walks around Paris to admire himself from all angles in shop windows and mirrors. He fancied himself a great actor, a championship boxer, as well as a writer and playwright and exquisite soul.

1. The Bienfilâtre sisters (10 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam drolly paints a dry picture of a famous café on a Paris boulevard, habituated by eligible young men and packed with courtesans. Two leading figures among the latter are the Bienfilâtre sisters, Olympe and Henriette. They have been working girls since young in order to support their parents, poor concierges, which allows de L’Isle-Adam to ironically describe them as dutiful daughters who honoured their engagements and could hold their heads high.

With further irony he then describes how one of the sisters, Olympe, fell from the straight and narrow of her profession when she (gasp!) fell in love! With a poor student called Maxime. Her work went to pot. Her sister had to pick up the slack. Other courtesans at the café talk behind her back. Henriette is ashamed. The family who have always eaten together, are now reduced to three in Olympe’s absence. There’s a funny scene where Henriette confronts her sister in the café, while all the other habitués pretend not to be listening, and delivers a rhodomontade made up entirely of Daily Mail-style bourgeois clichés and recriminations: ‘should be ashamed…owes a duty to her class…running off with a youngster like that…you’re not in this world to enjoy yourself but to work, young lady…what about her poor parents…’ etc etc.

Finally her guilty conscience (at ceasing to be a prostitute, at throwing away a good honest living in order to ‘fall in love’) strikes her down with illness and she takes to her bed. She calls for a priest and confesses her’ sin’ of falling in love and so straying from the straight and narrow, the path of purity (all ironic terms applied to her previous career as a prostitute).

At that moment the door is flung open by Maxime who bursts in chinking coins in his hand. His parents have sent him the fees for his exams. Olympe feebly stretches out her hand to him. The priest takes this as a moving sign of her true repentance. In fact it is joy that her lover has come true and has coughed up some cash. And with this beatific knowledge filling her soul, she expires.

This is a genuinely funny ‘story’, the sustained irony of the premise maintained right till the end. It was originally published in 1871, 20 years before Oscar Wilde used the same kind of satirical irony in a story like Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891).

It establishes a major theme, in fact the fundamental worldview which underpins the stories, which is that de L’Isle-Adam assumes his readers to be as au fait with the cynical realities of Paris nightlife, with prostitutes and dissolute aristocrats and starving poets and so on as he is, so as not only not to show the conventional bourgeois horror at the subjects he tackles, but to take pleasure in his detached, ironic treatment of them.

In later stories he describes characters who are so blasé and over-familiar with every possible kind of ‘scandalous’ affair, with the plots of umpteen melodramatic novels, plays and operas that, when they actually find themselves in situations which could come from such productions, they not only feel they are acting a part, but observe themselves acting a part, and award themselves marks out of ten for their performances (most notable in ‘Sombre Tale, Sombre Teller’).

2. Véra (11 pages)

Powerful description of an aristocrat, the Comte d’Athol, whose wife passes away just six months after they were married, who leads the mourning and sees her body laid in the family tomb, returns to his grand apartments on the Faubourg Saint-Germain, tells his loyal retainer Raymond to dismiss the other servants, to refuse all invitations and visitors, and then immerses himself in a visionary state where he pretends his wife is still alive. It has the dreamlike intensity of Poe story but described in the sumptuous prose of late-Romanticism toppling over into the Decadence.

3. Vox populi (4 pages)

A prose poem designed to mock the fickleness and stupidity of the masses, the mob, ‘the people’. It zeroes in on three moments in recent French history – an 1868 review of Napoleon III’s birthday, the start of the Siege of Paris in 1870, the Commune of Paris March 1871 – on which the masses shouted the inane slogan of the times – Vive L’Empereur, Vive La Republique and Vive Le Marechal – all of which is counterpointed by the unchanging plea of an old blind beggar ‘Please take pity on a poor blind man’.

The moral being that the fickle face of politics and popular enthusiasms come and go, but the human condition remains the same. Or as Jesus said, the poor are always with you. Justifying de L’Isle-Adam’s lofty, aristocratic disdain for the people, the mob, the bourgeoisie, liberalism and all the other disgusting symptoms of the late-19th century world.

4. Two augurs (14 pages)

A satire on the press where a writer presents himself to the jaded philistine editor of a successful paper. The ironic twist is that the writer is proud of being a third-rate poetaster who’s produced a long-winded article bloated with complacency and bridles when the editor starts praising the quality of his work and then – horror of horrors – has the temerity to call him ‘a man of genius’, when all he’s aiming at is to churn out 5th rate bilge.

All this is a rather contrived satire on the world of the press, papers and magazines which, of course, de L’Isle-Adam himself occupied but which for so long refused to acknowledge what he considered his own genius. Sour grapes.

5. Celestial publicity (5 pages)

A satire which deadpan praises a magnificent new invention developed by M. Graves, which allows the projection of crude adverts onto the heavens. The satire is as much in the breathlessly enthusiastic tone, the tone of adverts and promotional bumf for the new technologies beginning to flood late-Victorian life, as in the (horrifying) plan to turn the heavens into advertising hoardings.

6. Antonie (2 pages)

Very short vignette describing a courtesan at a drinking party of men who, amid the drinking and banter, ask her who the locket she wears between her breasts is dedicated to. She opens it to show a lock of hair, teases the men for a minute who all want to know what heroic lover enjoys such devotion – before revealing that it is her own hair, which she wears as a gesture of fidelity (i.e. to herself). Very droll.

7. The glory machine (16 pages)

Similar to the machine which projects adverts into the sky, this satire takes the same excited tone about a new machine which produces glory. Unfortunately it then turns into a long tedious explanation of what ‘glory’ means in the world of poetry (alas) and explains the composition of ‘claques’ in Paris theatre. Laboured and boring.

A thing like this isn’t a story at all so much as a sustained expression of de L’Isle-Adam’s sour grapes and resentment.

8. The Duke of Portland (7 pages)

This is obviously intended to be one of the macabre stories. The Duke of Portland returns to his grand house by the sea, continues to host dinners and parties for all the best people but never attends them himself, sends a letter to Queen Victoria after reading which she gives him permission not to attend the House of Lords or carry out any official functions and a year later his fiancée arrives by boat on the beach at night to discover him dying and he dies as she is with him. His secret? On a trip to the Middle East he met a leper who gave him the disease, hence the letter to Victoria and his seclusion and the sadness of his fiancée.

It seemed obvious from this one that de L’Isle-Adam is much better at the wordy trappings of the Gothic tale and melodrama than he is at devising an actual plot.

9. Virginia and Paul (5 pages)

Many of de L’Isle-Adam’s pieces start with a sort of prologue describing the theme or subject of the story – Paris boulevards, the life of a courtesan, death and mourning – in general and poetic terms before finally arriving at t(often slender) plot.

Here there is over a page asking the reader to remember the emotions, the images and objects associated with their first love, before it finally arrives at the ‘story’ which concerns two young lovers, both aged just 15. They are cousins, he has slipped out of his parents’ house to climb over the wall into the grounds of her boarding school and they gushingly mix expressions of first love with clumsy talk of practicalities, like trying to conceal their love when they are with their families and how Paul can extract money from his father so they can run away.

Maybe the point isn’t the 3 or so pages devoted to their naive dialogue, but to the last paragraph which suddenly switches the perspective and reveals that the narrator (improbably enough) has been eavesdropping this little scene, which is not very likely in practical terms (how? if it’s happening on the other side of a high wall and, presumably, hidden in bushes) but is really just a pretext for him to deliver a little paean:

Oh youth, springtime of life! May God bless you, children, in your ecstasy – you whose souls are innocent as flowers, and whose words, evoking memories more or less similar to his first rendezvous, bring tears to the eyes of a passerby! (p.76)

10. The eleventh-hour guest (25 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam’s stories are 1) often barely stories at all, with very little narrative and 2) very contrived. He is proud of their contrivance. As far as I can make out, the show of contrivance is part of the aim. Their artificiality is to be prized.

The story is that one night he and his friend are in a box at the opera when, in the interval, three well-known ladies about town invite them out for dinner. At that moment the narrator spies a gentleman he recognises from somewhere, they get chatting and then, on a lordly aristocratic whim, they decide to invite him along. There follows an interesting description of what such an evening in a private room at a posh Parisian restaurant was like, with detailed descriptions of the meal, actions and banter of the six characters.

The last-minute guest is, as you might expect, mysterious, given to gnomic sayings, and insists on being referred to as Baron Saturn, which they playfully agree to. As the hour draws late he says he needs to leave as he has an urgent appointment in the morning. It’s only after he’s left, that another friend turns up and tells them who their mystery guest was. Turns out he is one of the most notorious unbalanced monomaniacs of the age and obsessed with public executions. Turns out h travelled widely in the East (Orientalism!) where he bribed his way to being allowed to carry out public executions and tortures. On his return to Europe he wrote to all the heads of state of the continent asking to be allowed to apply the exquisite tortures he had learned in the East to western criminals and condemned men.

In this he consistently failed but it is said that he quietly bribed executioners in some European countries in order to take their place. Still, he manages to get advance notice of executions across the Continent and then rushes to be present t the scene, at the foot of the scaffold soaking up the grisly thrill of the moment.

This puts a damper on the previously light-hearted party and as the hour of 6am approaches, when that morning’s execution is scheduled to be carried out, they all feel a ghost walking over their graves. Voodoo spooky.

The ‘story’, such as it is, is garnished with reflections about psychology, about perception and meaning, which feel pregnant with the Symbolist movement which was just about to be christened. (Symbolism was given its name when Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto in the Paris newspaper ‘Le Figaro’ on 18 September 1886). It contains paragraphs like this:

The sound waves of the nervous system have mysterious vibrations…They deaden, so to speak, with their multiple echoes, the analysis of the initial blow which produced them. The memory makes out the atmosphere surrounding the object, but the object itself is lost in this general sensation and remains stubbornly indistinguishable. (p.83)

As the Wikipedia article on Symbolism explains:

Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile to ‘plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description’ and that its goal instead was to ‘clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form’ whose ‘goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal.’… As Mallarmé writes in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, ‘to depict not the thing but the effect it produces’.

Or, as de L’Isle-Adam puts it:

Objects are transfigured according to the magnetism of the human beings who approach them. Things have no significance for people other than that which the latter are able to give them. (p.84)

The Naturalism of Émile Zola and his followers strives to depict the world and everything in it exactly as they are, with full realistic descriptions. Symbolism has the diametrically opposite aim of trying to capture the feelings and moods (sometimes verging on hallucinations) which the world, and especially particularly powerful objects or experiences, evoke in us.

11. The very image (4 pages)

A very short text which is a premonition of Kafka.

A man is hurrying through Paris ‘on business’ when he finds himself next to a hospitable-looking building and pops inside to find the atrium has a glass ceiling, there are pillars on which are hung coats and mufflers, marble tables laid out bearing portfolios of official papers around which sit blank-faced people, and realises that the hostess of the place is none other than Death (!).

He hears the rumble of cab wheels outside, exits, gets into the cab and announces his destination. He arrives at another building, goes inside to find the atrium has a glass ceiling, there are pillars on which are hung coats and mufflers, marble tables laid out bearing portfolios of official papers and the same blank-faced people i.e. a complete repetition of the first experience.

At this point you expect some kind of cunning payoff as you might have in Kafka or, especially, Borges, but instead the narrator goes out, gets into his cab which he asks to take him home, and (rather limply) vows to stop rushing around ‘on business’.

Is it an allegory implying that the ordinary bourgeois running round Paris on business is living a kind of living death? That ‘business’ is the death of the soul and the antithesis of the sensitive refined thoughts which de L’Isle-Adam is at such pains to show off in these stories?

12. The impatient mob (8 pages)

The title reflects de L’Isle-Adam’s (comical) contempt for the mob, the masses, the people, in all their forms. This is another tale long on atmosphere and looming symbolism and short on actual story. It describes the population of Sparta crowding to the city walls because rumour has reached them that the vast army of the Persian Empire under Xerxes I has crushed the Greek army sent to stop it at the Battle of Thermopylae. The story describes a sole Spartan warrior who is spied descending from the hills and staggering across the plains towards the city. The entire city starts booing and shouting insults because a Spartan soldier was meant to come back holding his shield or dead on it, while this one doesn’t carry a shield and is taken to be a coward. They throw stones at him and the city cook spits a gob of phlegm at him. Utterly exhausted, ashamed and humiliated the soldier lies down in the dirt and lets himself be attacked by the ominous flock of black crows flying overhead. In the morning nothing is left of his body except the bones picked clean. And so the city never gets to learn that the Spartans won and that this man had been stripped of his spear and shield by his generals all the better to run faster back to the city and tell his countrymen of their victory. Never trust the masses, you see.

This is such a cheesy reversal, such a heavy moralising twist, that it reminds me of the cheesy payoffs of lots of cheap science fiction stories.

13. The secret of the old music (5 pages)

The Paris orchestra prepares to play the new piece by an unnamed ‘modern’ composer (strongly hinted to be Wagner) but discovers it has a part for the Chinese pavilion, an instrument it doesn’t possess and nobody can recall having been played in their lifetimes. But some of the musicians think they know an old guy who might have one so they visit him in his apartment (surrounded by versions of the instrument and sheet music) and persuade him to come along to rehearsals the next morning. But he finds the new music so difficult he protests against it, halting the rehearsal to declaim that Music is finished and promptly falling into the bass drum. Maybe this is meant to be funny.

14. Sentimentality (9 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam was a member of the Parnassian group of poets:

Parnassianism was a group of French poets that began during the positivist period of the 19th century (1860s to 1890s), occurring after romanticism and prior to symbolism … As a reaction to the less-disciplined types of romantic poetry and what they considered the excessive sentimentality and undue social and political activism of Romantic works, the Parnassians strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and (neo-)classical subjects that they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment.

This, then, explains the emotional detachment, the clinical approach, and the occasional classical subject matter of L’Isle-Adam’s ‘stories’.

This isn’t really a story but a dialogue designed to demonstrate and show off Parnassian values. The young poet, the Comte Maximilien de W– and the well-known beauty Lucienne Émery are sitting on the Champs Elysees. They are romantically involved. She asks him to explain why he, as a Parnassian poet, gives the impression of performing everything, of acting out feelings and emotions. Why can’t he be more like ordinary people? He explains that a poet and artist like himself feels things so deeply that he is lost for how to behave and so ‘acts’ feelings with the appropriate gestures which the ignorant masses would understand.

Very casually, she, also a devotee of this Parnassian way of living, informs him that this is their last hour together as she is leaving him for another man, who she’s meeting later the same night. True to his philosophy of deep feeling kept under clinical self-control, the Comte barely flickered an eyelid, possibly going just a shade paler before congratulating her on her choice. There’s a bit more explanation of art and feeling etc before he hails her a cab and she drives off. He walks home, files his nails, writes a few lines of verse, opens a new book, then calmly takes a small pistol from his cabinet and shoots himself through the heart. Émery has since that day worn mourning black.

15. The finest dinner in the world (9 pages)

I think de L’Isle-Adam’s obvious contempt for people would stop him being considered a major writer. In this little vignette two notables in an unnamed provincial town bet each other they can produce the finest dinner in the world. Maitre Percenoix goes first and produces a 13-course marvel which astonishes the 17 provincial worthies invited to enjoy it. At its climax his bitter rival, Maitre Lecastelier, stands up and says he will serve up one even better in exactly one year’s time.

The joke or gag or point of the story is that one year later Lecastelier serves the same bunch of (lampooned) provincial notables exactly the same dinner down to the last detail BUT…into each napkin he has slipped a 20 franc piece. These fall out as the guests open the napkins and each guest, in a provincial bourgeois way which de L’Isle-Adam mocks, hurriedly slips it into their pockets or purses, pretending they never saw it.

The joke is that, as they leave, and for days afterwards, all the guests for some reason feel that, although the menu was identical to the one laid on by Percenoix, the Lecastelier dinner really was better but, because of their bourgeois hypocrisy, none of them will admit why.

16. The desire to be a man (10 pages)

A variation on the Parnassian theme of ‘true’ feeling. The protagonist is Esprit Chaudval, the famous tragedian, getting on a bit now as he’s turning 50. Wandering the streets of Paris as the restaurants shut down he catches sight of himself in a mirror and poses and preens as he has done all his professional life. His hair is turning grey. It’s time to retire. In an incongruous and improbable development it turns out that he has applied to be a lighthouse keeper. He has just received a letter answering his application, now opens it and squeals with pleasure, then catches himself acting.

It dawns on him that he’s acted so many parts but, deep down, never really felt anything and he finds himself saying that he needs to be a man. Because of the histrionic way his (and de L’Isle-Adam’s) mind works, the old actor thinks the best way to really feel something is to commit a great crime and feel himself flooded with remorse, a genuine emotion which he can hold onto and feed off for the rest of his quiet life as a lighthouse keeper.

So he sets fire to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Paris full of warehouses of oil etc which goes up in a huge blaze, spreading to the nearby houses of the urban poor, some of whom are burned to death, many made homeless. He loiters long enough to enjoy the fruit of his labours – ‘At last I’m going to find out what it means to be “tortured with remorse”…I’m born again. I exist!‘ – then takes a cab with trunks of his belongings to the station whence he will travel to his lighthouse.

A small digression on outsider literary criminals

His grand arson puts Chaudval in the lineage linking Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s alienated student, Raskolnikov, in the novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ (1867); with Albert Camus’s blank-minded murderer, Mersault, in ‘The Outsider’ (1942); via André Gide who invented the concept of the ‘acte gratuite’ (an utterly unmotivated behaviour that defies routine, custom, and normal explanations) in his novel ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ in 1914.

17. Flowers of darkness (2 pages)

A baleful little 2-page meditation on the trade in Paris whereby flowers and wreaths left at funerals, come nightfall, are scavenged, thrown into carts and taken to ateliers where they are reworked as attractive bouquets and handed to the sweet little flower girls who come out at night and loiter in front of theatres, restaurants etc so that men can impress their dates by buying them bouquets.

De L’Isle-Adam gives it a characteristically morbid and moralising turn by saying that these flowers of the dead are an apt emblem for the pale-faced ladies of the night who all-too-often hand out love which is death, by which I take it he means sexually transmitted diseases.

18. The apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last breath (8 pages)

Like ‘Celestial publicity’ and ‘The Glory Machine’, this is a heavy-handed satire on the unrelenting pace of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ which de L’Isle-Adam associates with unbridled technical innovation, commercialism and advertising. It isn’t a ‘story’ at all but more a satirical article about a fictional invention.

The narrator hails the invention of a device which can capture and analyse the last breaths of the dying. He goes on to say that children are now practicing on their parents when they fall asleep in front of the fire, getting used to the experience and feelings of death so it’ll seem boring when it actually happens. An extended satire on how the young will learn to be heartless, respect for the dead will vanish and good thing too, art and literature will lose their mystery which is just as well in an age when time is money, and other sarcastic sallies.

19. The brigands (7 pages)

A broad farcical satire on the provincial bourgeoisie. A beggar, an old fiddler from the Gascon town of Nayrac, stops the churchwarden of the neighbouring town of Pibrac on the highway and asks for some alms. Within hours rumour passes round both towns that a huge gang of ferocious brigands is at large. So the bourgeois landowners of both places nerve each other to assemble a posse and, armed with ancient muskets (and cough drops from anxious wives) set off on a tour of their lands during which they’ll collect all the rents owed them.

They see no sight of any brigands because there aren’t any but as night falls they become distinctly nervous. Then in the darkness the two wagons, one of nervous burgers from Pibrac, one of the same from Nayrac, surprise each other on the dark road. The moon disappears behind a cloud and a nervous landowner fires his gun by mistake. What follows is a general massacre in which everyone, even the horse, is slaughtered.

Some distance away the blind fiddler and his loose group of beggar friends hear all the shooting and decide to investigate. They arrive just at the moment that the last burger accidentally blows his brains out and to find a scene of mayhem and massacre.

And, as you might have predicted, seeing all these dead bodies and bags of coins scattered everywhere, the fiddler suggests to his mates that they steal all the swag and hot tail it out of the province, which is what they do.

20. Queen Ysabeau (8 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam wrote a biography of Ysabeau de Bavaria (who was a real historical personage) which was itself meant to be only part of a vast history of his aristocratic family which he insisted stretched back at least as far as the 1400s. In the event this grand history was never completed and even the biography of Ysabeau de Baviere was never published during his lifetime. This ‘story’ is an episode from the larger biography.

It is a deliciously cruel story, a kind of historical Roald Dahl story. It is 1404. Queen Ysabeau de Bavaria is the wife of King Charles VI of France. He has gone mad and she has taken a lover, Vidame de Maulle. One day, carousing with his aristocratic friends who are discussing the nubile women at court and in particular the daughter of the Court silversmith, Bérénice Escabala, de Maulle is foolish enough to bet that he can take her virtue before anyone else.

Now, among the mob of jesting courtiers is Louis d’Orléans, the Queen’s brother-in-law, who has an unhealthily incestuous passion for her. He doesn’t hesitate to report de Maulle’s boast to the Queen, who is not amused. Thus, the next time they are in bed together, having had the usual passionate sex (‘the abandoned delights of the most wonderful pleasures’), the following scene transpires. De Maulle wakes the drowsy Queen to say he can hear bells ringing and the sky is red, there must be a big fire somewhere. Yes, Ysabeau, drowsily says, yes she had her people set fire to the home of the court silversmith. The next day he (de Maulle) will be arrested on the charge of starting the fire in order to abduct the silversmith’s daughter and win his bet. He has only one alibi, that he was here with the Queen on the night in question, which his honour as an aristocrat will forbid him from using – and also the fact that admitting to having sex with the Queen is Treason, also punishable by death. So it’s death either way. In any case he will be tortured until he confesses whatever he’s told to.

Now, they are in bed together, naked, having just had sex, as the Queen lazily and sleepily tells de Maulle all this and he laughs nervously and embraces her again. Ha ha, you’re joking, right? But next morning he is arrested, taken off to the Grand Chatelet prison, and thoroughly tortured, as the Queen predicted.

There’s a final twist. De Maulle’s lawyer believes the young nobleman and makes the noble gesture of swapping places with him in prison, lending de Maulle his cloak so the latter can leave pretending to be the lawyer after a prison cell conference. But when the Queen hears of this, she doesn’t display the nobility you might expect in a more bourgeois story and free the noble lawyer. Instead she has the lawyer ‘broken on the wheel’ in de Maulle’s name so that the latter’s title can be struck from the register.

And the moral of the story is: If you’re having an affair with a medieval queen do not make a public bet to take another woman to bed. A lesson we can all take to heart.

21. Sombre tale, sombre teller (10 pages)

It might be me adapting to de L’Isle-Adam’s style and worldview but, with this run of 5 or 6 good stories, the collection seemed to significantly improve. A bunch of writers go for dinner to celebrate a playwright’s success. Food and drink make them talkative and the subject turns to duels. One of them is asked to explain more about the duel he’s recently taken part in. This writer certainly does describe, in detail, the duel he assisted at which involved an old schoolfriend seeking satisfaction for a bounder who insulted his mother. But the point of the story is that he is so imbrued with writing and playwriting that he assesses every situation, every step of the unfolding story, as if it was a fiction, awarding marks to his friend as he retells the story of the original insult, then comparing him to famous actors of the day for his restraint, nobility and then, after he’s been mortally wounded in the actual duel, the dignity of his death speech. So much can he only see it as a drama that as his old friend expires in his arms he bursts out applauding.

This story had a little of the delirious effect, the effect of dizzying paradox, of one of Borges’s short stories (a little).

22. The sign (19 pages)

The narrator and some writer friends are drinking tea round a friend’s house when this friend, as always a titled gent, Baron Xavier de la V— offers to tell a story about an uncanny coincidence. To start off he makes all the fashionable claims about being doomed by hereditary spleen, a morose and taciturn creature prey to crippling depression. And that’s why he decided to take a rest cure in the country.

He decides to go and visit the Abbé Maucombe in the town of Saint-Maur in Brittany. His journey there, the farm and the good Abbé are all described in adequate detail. What stands out is the Baron’s hallucinations. Everything looks calm and bucolic around the old house where the priest lives but then a cloud passes over the sun and he sees it all in a different way, rundown and crumbling and sinister. (It reminded me a bit of the TV series ‘Stranger Things’ where you see an innocent small town by day and then are shown the grim, overgrown derelict place it will become if They take control.)

They have philosophical talks about God and stuff but that night the Baron has a sinister dream in which he a creepy figure whose face is masked hands him a cloak. Long story short, several days letter the Baron has to return to Paris on business and the Abbé insists on walking him to the village where the stagecoach stops and it starts to rain, and the kind-hearted Abbé lends him his cloak, handing it over in a gesture which exactly matches what the Baron saw in his dream. With a certain inevitability, a couple of days later, in Paris, the Baron gets a letter saying the Abbé has died of a cold picked up in the rainstorm.

But these ‘facts’ barely matter. What matters is the tremendous atmosphere of ominous premonition which de L’Isle-Adam whips up, and especially the couple of genuinely creepy moments when he suddenly sees an alternative reality, the rundown haunted landscape behind the bright sunny one we see most of the time.

23. The unknown woman (14 pages)

The scene is a grand night at the opera, the farewell performance of noted soprano Maria Felicia Malibran, singing in Bellini’s Norma. The narrative singles out a handsome young man in the stalls, displaying a notable excitement and enthusiasm, explaining that he is the Comte Félician de la Vierge, a provincial aristocrat who only comes to Paris occasionally. This young man catches sight of a beautiful woman in a box and is bowled over by her beauty. Her image speaks to something inside him and he realises that he is in love.

He follows her outside, ignoring the flashy opera crowd, and when she dismisses her cab, he does the same to his and follows her on foot. Seized by a sudden premonition that he might lose her and never see her again, he overtake he, turns and bows and declares his undying love for her. So far, so melodramatic and overwrought and improbable. But all this is to set up what follows, for the pale beautiful young woman waits till the man has finished his speech then declares that she is…deaf!

This staggers the young man for a moment but then his love is reinforced by compassion, and he renews his assault, declaring her disability will make him love her even more. Whereupon the ‘story’ takes a turn, for the unnamed deaf woman delivers a series of long speeches. The gist is that their love can never work because he will, sooner or later, no matter what he promises now, get used to her deafness. Married life requires a lot of practical discussion and agreement and she won’t be able to hear him and eventually he will just mouth ‘I love you’ and write her practical notes and she couldn’t bear that.

Having reduced him to stricken silence, she turns, steps into the cab which has been following her all that time, and is whisked away. Next day the tragical young man packs his bags, returns to his estates in Brittany and is never heard from again, living in heart-broken solitude.

That’s what happens, but in reality the last 6 or so pages are a peg or pretext for de L’Isle-Adam to get his unnamed woman to deliver a series of lectures or addresses on a variety of topical themes. In fact I detected (or think I detected) in the 14 pages of the story a variety of tropes and styles from the period, including Realism, Naturalism, Parnassianism, Romanticism, Decadence and Symbolism. If I have time, I’m thinking I might have a crack at analysing out all the different tones, registers and styles which thong this packed little text.

24. Maryelle (10 pages)

A well-known lady of easy virtue suddenly disappears from society and the narrator, from lordly aristocratic boredom, sets out to find out why. This isn’t very difficult since he bumps into her on the street, on the Avenue of the Opera, to be precise.

She is 25 and pale. He invites her to lunch at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne ‘so that we might get bored together’, striking the note of exquisitely aristocratic world weariness. He tells her a story ‘to break the ice’ which captures the cynicism of de l’Isle-Adam and his circle perfectly. It concerns a vengeful squire who arrives home to find his wife ‘in a questionable position’ and swiftly inflicts a mortal wound on the lover. As he lays dying in the unfaithful wife’s arms, the husband has the bright idea of tickling her feet with a feather so that she bursts out laughing in the face of her beloved!

It now appears that they had some days of passion a year or so ago but Maryelle makes it quite clear that that is not going to happen again, at which, like so many de L’Isle-Adam characters, the narrator acts the part.

I considered it incumbent on me to assume a somewhat melancholy expression, as the tribute any well-bred man must always pay to a pretty woman. (p.217)

Then she tells him a story. Last winter at the theatre she became the object of a naive young man up from the provinces. Maryelle has the gift of becoming whatever other people want her to be. Here, as in so many of the other stories, it’s about a person who plays at living or acts a role, for at least two reasons: 1) they are such experts at life, they have lived so thoroughly, that most scenes are just repeats of things they’ve experiences, so they’re just going through the motions; 2) from another perspective, their acting turns their lives into art, gives them an artful completeness and aesthetic finish which ‘real life’, alas, usually lacks.

Anyway, when Maryelle becomes aware of the youth’s interest she adopts the role of a respectable widow of a respected army officer, deceased, on a rare trip up to Paris. (She is a courtesan. This is all an act.)

She receives one then several letters (which she shows the narrator who is cynically amused at their naive innocence) but then something strange happened. As she agreed to meet the poor innocent lad she found herself…falling in love with him!

She plays the part of the chaste widow so well that she comes to believe it herself conveniently forgetting her entire previous existence as a lady of the night. And the narrator, with typically droll irony, praises this sweet and innocent love based, as it is, on all-round lies and deceit. The only slight snag is that, while being faithful in her heart to the young innocent she is, apparently, continuing to see and sleep with an impressive roster of other gentleman to which her response is the admirably practical: ‘Is it my fault if a girl has to live?’

She then delivers a page-long speech about the artificiality of modern life, whose gist is:

Haven’t the appearances of love become, for nearly everybody, preferable to love itself? (p.223)

The implication that he (the narrator) has never had a meaningful relationship with Maryelle infuriates the narrator who shouts at her to go back to her penniless lover, Raoul. She, by contrast, keeps her cool, rises, adjusts her veil, and disappears into the evening.

There’s a funny payoff. From the balcony of the restaurant the narrator looks out over the grass bright with the evening dew. Vexed and irritated, to try and calm his mood, in a petty gesture, he insouciantly tosses his dead cigar onto it. Which explains why, one billion cigars later, the world is dying.

25. Doctor Tristan’s treatment (5 pages)

Hurrah!…Hosannah! Progress sweeps us along on its torrential course. (p.225)

Another right-wing satire on ‘progress’ and ‘liberalism’ and ‘humanitarianism’ like ‘The apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last breath’, ‘Celestial publicity’ and ‘The Glory Machine’. In many ways it’s the best because the satirical premise is kept simple and punchy.

A Dr T. Chavassus has invented a treatment for anyone suffering from those troublesome voices in their head, such as: the voice of God a la Joan of Arc, the voice of conscience, the voice of patriotism, the voice of outraged honour etc etc a sarcastic list of all the right-wing shibboleths.

The doctor’s technique is to clamp the patient to a chair, then yell in their ear for 20 minutes the magic word HUMANITY, after which he slips an electric wire in each ear and sends such a voltage through it that it bursts the eardrums, and makes the patient permanently deaf. But no more irritating inner voices which detract from the citizen’s efficiency in the modern economy.

This is carried along by de L’Isle-Adam’s anger but, as with all the other science satires, you only have to reflect for a few seconds to realise that deafening someone won’t interfere in the slightest with the voice of conscience or God or outrage patriotism or whatever which continua assailing those who hear them. It’s a bravura comic performance for the 7 or 8 minutes it takes to read, then instantly revealed to be impossible and not even internally consistent and so, like so many of his stories, discarded.

26. Occult memories (5 pages)

Originally a prose poem and only just about converted into something approaching a ‘story’, a 5-page monologue by a proudly Celtic son of Brittany who describes the career of his ancestor, some kind of soldier-adventurer in France’s Indian colonies, which opens with a deliberately Gothic description of the Dead Cities, overgrown with foliage, into whose tombs his ancestor crept, having massacred all the guards, to steal ancestral treasure, until he was eventually betrayed by a fellow adventurer, an Irishman with the splendid name of Captain Sombre.

It is another variation on one of de L’Isle-Adam’s idées fixes – the descent from grand, wealthy ancestors, the lament for present poverty, the refusal to truckle to the degraded ‘values’ of the present age.

27. Epilogue: The messenger (23 pages)

This is the longest story in the collection and de L’Isle-Adam was particularly proud of it. It’s based on a story told in the Old Testament which the book’s editor, A. W. Raitt, quotes in the notes in its entirety before going on to comment that de L’Isle-Adam’s main achievement was to ‘overlay it with a veneer of pretentious erudition’ (Notes, p.285). A bit later Raitt comments that de L’Isle-Adam ‘optimistically claimed to know Hebrew’ when he very obviously didn’t. Raitt’s notes are a joy to read in their own right, especially for the more absurd moments of de L’Isle-Adam’s biography which he pulls out.

It’s set in Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon and mostly consists of a long prose poem describing the layout and buildings and trees and canals and gilded decorations of the city as the narration, like a camera, pans over it and up to the great palace of Solomon himself. Here the text becomes clotted with descriptions of the exotic peoples who attend the court, in all their oriental variety, stuffed with Biblical placenames. It is striving for the same kind of gorgeous Biblical ornateness as Flaubert’s story, Hérodias‘, published just a few years before, in 1877, and anticipating Oscar Wilde’s play on the same subject, Salomé, published in 1891.

Almost the entire story is a gorgeous description of the celebrations of the Passover in the great palace of King Solomon at the height of which the sky goes ominously dark, heavy raindrops fall, a bolt of lighting demolishes a column and suddenly appears an angel of the Lord, Azrael. Initially Solomon thinks the angel of the Lord has come to take him away from this world of sorrow but he is disappointed because the Angel has, in fact, come to whisk away the King’s chief priest, Helcias.

This piece forms the deliberate climax of the collection, a spectacular cornucopia of Biblical names and descriptions rendered in a deliberately clotted, gorgeous poetic prose which you can imagine de L’Isle-Adam labouring over long and hard. It probably ought to be read aloud, recited or declaimed from a stage rather than silently read.

It prompted one simple thought, which is that, in a way I doubt de L’Isle-Adam intended, it shows how the entire edifice of Symbolism depends, ultimately, on the voodoo resonances of Judeo-Christianity. Symbolism piggybacks on Catholicism. It relies for its atmospheric effects on the most lurid and melodramatic aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition while ignoring the positive day-to-day practice of Judaism or the cheerful, ‘good news’ aspects of Christianity.

Conclusions

It took a while for me to adapt to de L’Isle-Adam’s tone and vibe and subject matter, but eventually, after an initial aversion due to their snobbery and melodrama, the sheer number of stories drew me in and I found myself enjoying them more and more, and rereading a number of them purely for pleasure of their arch, contrived, improbable, sometimes comic, but sometimes genuinely effective melodramatic appeal.

Purple prose

Here’s what de L’Isle-Adam regularly sounds like:

‘You, I thought to myself, who lack the refuge of your dreams, and for whom the land of Canaan, with its palm-trees and its living waters does not appear in the dawn after you have walked so far beneath the hard stars; traveller so joyful when you set off and now so gloomy; heart made for other exiles than those whose bitterness you now share with evil brethren – behold! Here you can sit on the stone of melancholy! Here dead dreams revive, anticipating the moment of the grave! If you wish to feel a real longing for death, approach: here the sight of the sky thrills to the point of forgetfulness.’ (Baron Xavier de la V— sounding off in ‘The Sign’)

Characteristic ingredients include:

  • exotic location from the Bible (land of Canaan) or some Romantic source text
  • melodramatic vocabulary (gloomy, dead dreams, grave and death death DEATH)
  • long histrionic sentences, as if written not to be read but declaimed from the stage in some Gothic melodrama

A.W. Raitt’s notes

The notes in this 1985 Oxford University Press edition by de L’Isle-Adam scholar A.W. Raitt are a droll delight. Apart from annotating particular aspects of the text, his throwaway references to aspects of de L’Isle-Adam’s life create a kind of collage biography. Thus:

  • Villiers (as Raitt calls him; much shorter and easier) was very proud of his skill as a boxer and at one time earned money as a sparring partner in a gymnasium (p.261)
  • Villiers was a devoted monarchist and stood unsuccessfully as a royalist candidate in the 1881 elections to the Paris Municipal Council (p.262)
  • the poet Stéphane Mallarmé was for many years Villiers’s best friend and wrote a mighty funeral oration for him (p.264)
  • Villiers was an ardent Wagnerian and visited the great man in Switzerland in 1969 and 1870 (p.265)
  • as a Breton, Villiers had a great love of the sea (p.266) [in which case it’s striking how few of his stories feature it; most are firmly wedged in Paris]
  • Villiers had a morbid interest in the guillotine and was a regular attender at executions (p.270)
  • Villiers was a member of the Parnassian group of poets who were routinely accused of being too cold and clinical in their approach (p.272)
  • Villiers believed he had the makings of a great actor (p.273)
  • Villiers was well-known for stopping in the street to gaze at his own reflection in mirrors and shop fronts (p.273)
  • his uncle (his father’s younger brother) was a parish priest in Brittany for his entire life (p.278)
  • Villiers was extremely suspicious and regularly took elaborate precautions to defend himself (p.279)
  • towards the end of his life Villiers, obviously unwell, returned to his Catholic faith (p.281)

The funniest biographical snippet concerns Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury who succeeded Disraeli as the leader of the Tory Party in 1881. Villiers named a character in his novel ‘The New World’ Lord Cecil and sent a copy of the book to the Marquess along with a flattering letter. Having read Andrew Roberts’s vast and hugely enjoyable biography of Cecil, I’m not surprised that the Marquess a) was polite enough to write a reply which was b) studiedly distant. But it was enough to delude the ever-hopeful Villiers into believing he had at last found the wealthy patron who would make his name and fortune, and Villiers proceeded to bombard the Marquess with copies of each of his new works as they were published. Villiers did, in fact, finally meet the Marquess in Dieppe when the latter was on holiday there in 1888, but was intensely disappointed that nothing came of the encounter (p.286).

It is richly comic to imagine the response of the immensely wealthy, profoundly conservative, philistine and reactionary Cecil to the tactless importuning of a poverty-stricken, scandalously immoral Bohemian depicter of Paris’s high-class prostitutes and dissolute wastrels. Hard to imagine two more opposite types.

At one point he sums up Villiers’ profile in a snappy sentence:

Breton origins, illustrious forebears, present poverty, nostalgia for past glories. (p.284)

Credit

Contes Crueles by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam was published in France in 1883. Oxford University Press published an English translation, ‘Cruel Tales’, translated by Robert Baldick, in 1965. Extensive notes and a new introduction by Oxford academic A.W. Raitt were added in a revised edition published in 1985.

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Posted by Simon on June 28, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/06/28/cruel-tales-villiers-de-lisle-adam/

In the Age of Giorgione @ the Royal Academy

At the very start of the 16th century Giovanni Bellini was still the leading artist in rich, imperial Venice. But a younger generation was emerging in his wake, including Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, and another newcomer, later referred to as ‘Giorgione’.

Little is known about Giorgione and there is little agreement on which works can be firmly attributed to him. According to the National Gallery website, he came from Castelfranco in the Veneto, and is referred to as ‘maistro Zorzi da Castelfranco’ in an inscription dated to 1506, Zorzi being Venetian dialect for Giorgi. Giorgione means ‘Big George’.

Giorgione in his time

This exhibition brings together 39 oil paintings, 6 drawings and one carved relief to set Giriogione in the context of the Venice of the day, among his eminent peers, Bellini and Titian, as well as other contemporaries such as Sebastiano del Piombo and Lorenzo Lotto and the largely neglected Giovanni Cariani, with mention of notable visitors to the city at around this time, namely Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci (there are several portraits and drawings by Dürer, to show his influence, nothing actually by Leonardo).

Attribution

Giorgione was only active from around 1500 to 1510 when he died, probably in his 30s, probably from the plague. During that time he developed a style notable for its intimacy, sensuality and mystery. But study of Giorgione is plagued by problems of attribution. Numerous paintings here have had contested attributions: Is it Titian? Bellini? Big George? Listening to the audio commentary became quite confusing after a while because so many of the paintings have been attributed first to one, then to the other.

You think you’ve got the hang of Giorgione’s style from the second work in the exhibition, and maybe the best, the Terris portrait.

This is one of the few really brilliant works in an otherwise disappointing show and well worth the admission just to see it in the flesh. The use of shadow on the right side of the face, by the nose, the stubble, the darkness of the chin and jowls, create a tremendous sense of personality and depth. The commentary says the work appears to use or have been influenced by Leonardo’s technique of sfumato, or smokiness.

But having established this as Giorgione’s signature style, surprisingly few of the subsequent works attributed to him show this degree of subtlety and mastery.

Compare and contrast with the Giustiniani Portrait, below. The gaze is striking as is the pose with the hand on the lintel in the foreground, but it is not a complete masterpiece like the Terris portrait, it lacks the amazing modelling of the features, the softness and depth. And there’s something childish, almost naive, about the overall image, unlike the tremendous maturity of the Terris portrait.

Portrait of a Young Man ('Giustiniani Portrait') by Giorgione. Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preubischer Kulturbesitz. Photo (c) Jorg P. Anders

Portrait of a Young Man (‘Giustiniani Portrait’) by Giorgione. Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preubischer Kulturbesitz. Photo © Jorg P. Anders

The exhibition is divided into sections: Portraits; Landscape; Devotional works; Allegorical portraits. The room on landscapes includes a lot of bad paintings by contemporaries, and some so-so drawings by Domenico Campagnola and Titian. Look at the musician’s face and his post-Michelangelo weightlifter’s legs in this Arcadian idyll, attributed to Titian.

Titian, Two Arcadian Musicians in a Landscape. Pen and brown ink over black chalk on paper. On loan from the British Museum, London (c) The Trustees of the British Museum

Two Arcadian Musicians in a Landscape by Titian © The Trustees of the British Museum

Maybe Giorgione’s most famous painting is The Tempest, a puzzling and haunting work, the hazily realistic depiction of an unexplained and strangely symbolic scene, pregnant with meaning. Who is the woman suckling the baby? Who is the man watching (or guarding) them? What city lies (half ruined?) in the background? Why is it set during a storm?

This work isn’t in the exhibition. The nearest thing is the large and nearly as strange work, The Sunset.

Il Tramonto (The Sunset) by Giorgione. The National Gallery, London. Photo (c) The National Gallery, London

Il Tramonto (The Sunset) by Giorgione Photo © The National Gallery, London

Only in the flesh can you appreciate its strange details: a tiny big-beaked bird in the centre right at the bottom, a strange beast emerging from a cave in the bottom right, another weird creature lying on the surface of the pond at the bottom right. The commentary complicates matters by saying the painting was only discovered in the 1930s in a badly degraded condition and was sent off to Rome to be restored. When it reappeared much improved it did so with the completely new figures of St George on horseback lancing the dragon in the centre right! Why? Did the restorer think it needed improving? Did the dealer who went on to sell it think it would sell better if it had a bit of narrative excitement?

And to the amateur eye, although the subject matter is obscure, the overall visual feel of this painting is very different from the Tempest, in at least two striking ways: in The Tempest the focus is very much on the human figures, especially the suckling woman looking at us; here the human figures are an afterthought in what is basically a strange landscape; and the Tempest is green, very green, green grass, green trees, even the river is green; this whole painting is a muddy brown.

This is just one of the most striking examples of the problems of attribution and authenticity which afflict Giorgione’s works.

Devotional works

The biggest room focuses on devotional and religious works by Giorgione and his peers. All of these struck me as ugly and clumsy. At one end is the big work, Jacopo Pesaro being presented by Pope Alexander VI to Saint Peter which is attributed to Titian.

Close up, I didn’t like it at all: the clumsiness of the composition eg the dais St Peter is sitting on is wonky, the way it cuts into the floor tiles is not convincing. Worse still is the way the floor ends and the sea just begins, as if about to pour over the floor at any moment: something is badly wrong with the perspective.

Then there’s the subject matter: this painting glorifies the Pope presenting to St Peter, one Jacopo Pesaro, bishop of Paphos who led the Venetian navy to victory over the Ottoman Turks at the battle of Santa Maura on 28 June 1502. I think it’s a hilariously unsuitable subject for an oil painting: a portrait of the victorious admiral would be one thing: the Pope blessing the victorious admiral would work; but the badly drawn Pope presenting the victorious admiral to St Peter, depicted as sitting on a wonky dais decorated with scenes from Greek mythology, seems tackily ill conceived.

The paintings in this room glorify a Roman Catholic Papacy which was already a byword for rapacity and corruption. Only ten years or so after this painting was made, Martin Luther would rebel against the systematic theological and financial corruption of the Italian church, leading to the wholesale rejection of its organisation, theology and practice by the north of Europe – the Reformation; an upheaval which would then lead to the shambolic attempts to reform the Catholic church known as the Counter-Reformation.

Thus the religious paintings of Giorgione and his peers celebrate the Catholic church at the most corrupt period of its long history. Maybe we could overlook this fact if the paintings were of a ravishing and transcendent perfection. But they aren’t. Here’s Bellini (1430 to 1516) at his best – Virgin and Child with Saint Peter, Saint Mark and a Donor. Not a very appealing painting, I think; the faces of the Madonna and baby Jesus are, in my opinion, actively unpleasant to look at, like looking at photos of deformed people. The commentary points out that the donor’s hand isn’t quite touching the baby Jesus’s feet, but is everso slightly overlapping them, as if this is clever, or as if it it redeems the unattractiveness of the painting. I know it was traditional in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and beyond for rich people to pay for themselves to be included in paintings of the Madonna, of the Crucifixion and other key moments in Jesus life (less so the Sermon on the Mount or when Jesus attacked the moneylenders in the Temple) but to the liberal mind it always looks phenomenally crude, arrogant and blasphemous.

It is included in the exhibition to demonstrate Bellini’s clarity and crispness of image, the sharp outlines of the figures against the bright blue background, the detailing of the stone plinth behind the Madonna, a clarity which Giorgione and Titian were replacing with their more shady, smoky visions.

Virgin and Child with Saint Peter, Saint Mark and a Donor by Giovanni Bellini. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Photo (c) Birmingham Museums

Virgin and Child with Saint Peter, Saint Mark and a Donor by Giovanni Bellini. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Photo © Birmingham Museums

The Bellini and Titian are hung alongside 10 or so other religious paintings, but directly contrasted with the big painting at the other end of the room, Christ and the Adulteress, which is also attributed to Titian.

Christ and the Adulteress by Titian. Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) on behalf of Glasgow City Council. Archibald McLellan Collection, purchased 1856 Photo (c) CSG CIC Glasgow Museum Collections

Christ and the Adulteress by Titian. Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) Photo © CSG CIC Glasgow Museum Collections

There is something appealing about the frank posture of the man with the red pantaloons but I am not much moved by the fainting adulteress, let alone the head of the old man in the middle or the dead-looking person at the far left. The audio commentary tells us that for a long time this painting wasn’t attributed to Titian, and even an amateur can see why, because it does seem completely different from the crisp sharp outlines of The Presentation of Jacopo Pesaro. (I was gratified to see the mismatch between these two paintings highlighted in the London Review of Books review of the show by Charles Hope, link below.)

It’s yet another contested attribution which undermines your confidence in a lot of the works here. As if that weren’t enough, the commentary then continues with the stunning revelation that we’re not even sure the painting is depicting the scene of Christ and the adulteress; just possibly it’s depicting the Old Testament scene of Daniel judging Susannah. We’re not sure who painted this painting and we’re not even sure what it depicts!

Mystery, intimacy and sensuality

Nonetheless, through the slightly confusing fog of problematic attribution and doubtful naming, I had just about got the general message that Giorgione’s works are notable for their use of shade and shadow to create a special closeness, a sense of ‘mystery, intimacy and sensuality’, when I came to almost the last painting in the show, an unsparing portrait of an old lady (maybe the artist’s mother, maybe not).

Probably, as so often in an exhibition about a specific artist, we are meant to approach the final works with a hushed feeling of sympathy and pathos, as if last works carry a special message from a genius who has plumbed the depths of wisdom to us, his earthly followers (cf the final work in the big National Gallery Goya exhibition which showed the artist and his doctor in a would-be moving scene).

Certainly La Vecchia is an appealingly vivid picture, a poignant depiction of old age – but surely it’s completely at odds with the smoky use of shadow, with the mystery and sensuality which we first saw in the Terris portrait and have been hearing about ever since. The clarity of the wrinkles, the lined flesh, the detailing of the sparse hair, the quality of the even, unshadowed light, these all look like the work of a completely different artist. Another case of mistaken attribution? Time will tell…

Conclusions

I thought hardly any of the paintings on show here were beautiful: none of them took the breath away for their masterful depiction of the human face, or evocation of the sights and smells of landscape, or pleasing composition or ravishing use of colour. Rather, this exhibition is quite a demanding lesson in art history; it sets out to illustrate the birth of a new, more smooth, sensual and mysterious style in the Venice in the early 1500s, but turns out to be as much or more about quite knotty problems of attribution and authentication.

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by Simon on March 26, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 26, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/in-the-age-of-giorgione-the-royal-academy/