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Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen (1890)

‘Oh I just stand here and shoot into the blue…’
(The insouciant, impulsive and aloof Hedda Gabler, p.199)

‘Hedda Gabler’ is significantly longer than ‘The Doll’s House’ and ‘Ghosts/The Revenants’, four acts instead of three.

Hedda (29) is a brilliant character, an attractive, wilful woman who likes twisting men round her little finger, bored bored bored with the married life she finds herself in, given to sudden unpredictable whims.

She’s the daughter of local notable, General Gabler, who spoiled his little girl. After flirting with most of the eligible men in town she eventually got tired, began to realise her carefree days were over, and let herself be wooed and won by bumbling, naive academic, Jørgen Tesman, partly because it looked like he was about to get an academic position i.e a regular income which would fund her dream lifestyle, but also because he was ‘so pathetically eager to be allowed to support me’ (p.203).

Act 1

The play opens with Tesman and Hedda arriving ‘home’ after a 6-month honeymoon. Sounds great but only a little into the play Hedda confesses to a friend that she was bored off her face the whole time, stuck in small cabins and hotel rooms with an academic whose idea of a good time was visiting local historical archives day after day (p.201).

The ‘happy couple’ are welcomed home by Tesman’s Aunt Julia (his mother and father both being dead) who dotes on Tesman (the only son of her sainted brother Joachim), and by the old family retainer, Berte, who nursed Tesman as a boy.

The house they arrive at has, in fact, only recently been purchased for them while they were away. Tesman and Hedda used to walk past it on the way back from various parties and, for something to fill the boring silence, she told Tesman how much she would like to live there (p.207). Like everything else she says, we later learn she didn’t mean it and in fact loathes it, thinks it smells.

The arrival home scene allows Aunt Julia to share with the audience several bits of backstory. First, the house they’ve bought (and the entire play is set in) used to belong to a Lady Falk. It was purchased by her and her invalid sister, Auntie Rina taking out a mortgage on their annuity. Tesman, the simple honest mug, is overcome with gratitude to them while Hedda couldn’t give a stuff. And all the financials were arranged by family friend, Mr Brack, aged 45.

Lastly, we learn that the reason Tesman was rummaging about in all these archives abroad was to borrow the sources he needs to write his Big Book, on ‘the domestic crafts of medieval Brabant’. Aunt Julia and Berte are everso impressed, Hedda can barely stifle her yawns.

When the aunt and servant agree that Hedda has brought an awful lot of boxes back with her, I thought it might be another story about a spendthrift women like Nora Helmer but although her extravagant dreams are part of her character they’re far from being all of it and the play develops into something entirely different. Hedda is the spider at the centre of a web she’s helped to spin to entrap three men, each of them thinking she loves them, or at least has a special relationship with them.

The play suggests there are two kinds of people: the naive and simple souls who live on the surface of things, who believe in society’s values and morality, and the cynics and manipulators who have seen right through the social conventions to a layer of reality beneath, and act and speak to each other accordingly.

Enter Mrs Thea Elvsted. She is a slight, scared woman. She lives in a house outside of town (on a hill, I think). Hedda intimidates and scares Thea who she used to bully at school – on one famous occasion Hedda threatened to burn young Thea’s hair off.

Now a complicated picture emerges: Thea went up to live at the house on the hill to act as housekeeper for Mr Elvsted some five years ago. Elvsted’s first wife was very poorly and in due course died. In the way of these things, Elvsted then proposed to his housekeeper and Thea married him. Now, in dialogue with Hedda, it emerges that it’s been an empty marriage. Mr E is 20 years older than Thea and they have nothing in common. In fact, Thea reveals that she has run away from her husband, for good.

But there’s more. For the last three years a man named Ejlert Lövborg has been lodging up at Elvert’s. Lövborg was a notorious drunk and ne’er-do-well but after a number of shameful events, he made an effort to reform and ended up boarding at Elvsted’s. Here he has recovered his vocation as a gifted historian and has been working for those three years to write a history book which has just been published to good reviews. Thea was closely involved in helping him write the book and, since her husband was often away (carrying out his duties as the regional administrator), Thea fell in love with the charismatic Lövborg.

Now enters Mr Brack who helped them buy the house, and who tells Hedda and Tesman that Lövborg is a serious rival for the professorship which Tesman had been counting on winning. In other words, Tesman got married and bought the house and borrowed large sums of money on the virtual assurance of the professorship and all this is now thrown into jeopardy. Brack exists, leaving the ‘happy’ couple to process this disastrous news, Tesman trying to be upbeat, Hedda now seeing that she’ll never have the footman and the horse and the social life she was looking forward to but instead will be condemned to a life of unspeakable boredom.

Act 2

A few hours later the Telsman household is visited by Mr Brack. He enters in an unorthodox way by coming up through the garden but he is greeted in an even more unorthodox way because Hedda is standing at the French windows randomly firing off the pistols she inherited from her father (the General) (p.199).

First of all there’s a scene with just Hedda and Brack in which he makes it clear that he has a soft spot for her and she agrees they are in a sort of triangular relationship, the third one being her husband. Every time Tesman steps out of the room Hedda and Brack they start talking about being in a love triangle (Tesman being the third). But in fact we are soon to learn Hedda is at the centre of a triangle whose three points are her dim husband, the predatory operator Brack and her earnest old flame Lövborg.

This is the scene where Hedda explains to Brack how she married Telsman out of boredom, how she lied about liking Lady Falk’s house, but how excruciatingly dull she finds him and his historical researches; in which she says:

I’ve often thought there’s only one thing in the world I’m any good at…Boring myself to death.’ (p.209)

So, less than halfway through the play we have a lot of complicated relationships, histories and cross-currents. The succeeding acts and scenes work through the consequences of all this.

Next thing to happen is that Lövborg himself arrives, entering the scene with Hedda and Brack. He tells them he is a reformed character and also about his next book which is going to be much better than the one just published: it’s going to be about ‘the future course of civilisation’ (p.212). He has brought the manuscript of the book along with a view to maybe reading some excerpts to Tesman.

He also announces that he has no intention of competing against Tesman for the professorship, to the latter’s great relief.

Brack announces that he is holding a bachelor party that evening. Tesman is coming and he invites Lövborg. The latter declines saying he is a reformed character and doesn’t want to be tempted.

Brack and Tesman go into the back room for a little cold punch to prepare for the evening ahead and this leaves Lövborg and Hedda alone for the former to marvel that she’s married such a nincompoop, to remember the days of their (sexless) affair when he used to call round the General’s house. Hedda reveals to Lövborg that she never considered herself ‘in love’ with him; what she saw in him was his stories about a world of debauchery – he was a gateway into a world which she, as a young woman, wasn’t even meant to know about.

Although Hedda indulges this talk it’s only up to a point: as with Brack she is firm that she is not flirting and not going to be unfaithful – ‘No kind of unfaithfulness, I’ll have none of that’ (p.217).

But then she broke it off, she ended their friendship. Why? Because there was danger that talk of debauchery might lead into action. And now we learn that the breakup escalated into an argument during which Hedda got out one of her father (the General)’s pistols and waved it at Lövborg. Lövborg had told the story of the pistols a few times while staying up the hill at Elvsted’s but never named the woman in question and Mrs Elvstead assumed it was a well-known red-haired sex worker in town who Lövborg had a relationship with in his debauched days.

Mrs Elvstead arrives and Hedda tells Lövborg that she’s run away from her husband. Although Mrs Elvstead is a mousey timid figure, Hedda is actually profoundly jealous of her because of her courage (‘Oh if only you knew how destitute I am and you’re allowed to be so rich’, p.227). The word courage is repeated like a motif.

HEDDA: Oh courage, if only one had that…Then life might be liveable, in spite of everything. (p.221)

For her amoral enjoyment of the power, and because she is bored beyond belief, Hedda now takes malicious pleasure in telling Lövborg what Mrs Elvsted, at their earlier meeting, was terrified that Lövborg would start drinking again. Thea is horrified that Hedda has revealed this and Lövborg is upset that she has so little faith in him. Stung, he fills the glass he has up till now left empty and drains it in one. Thea is horrified (p.223).

At this point Brack and Tesman re-enter. Brack renews his invitation to his bachelor party. Earlier Lövborg had refused their kind invitation and said he’d remain her with the two ladies (Hedda and Mrs E) but now he changes his mind and says he will go with them after all. This decision sets in motion the wheels of tragedy.

Hedda and Mrs E say they’ll wait up till Lövborg returns from their drinks and escorts Mrs E to her lodgings (the ones she’s moved into after leaving her husband). After the menfolk exit to their party, the two women are left alone and Hedda explains that, ‘For once in my life I want to feel that I control a human destiny’ (p.226).

In a confused kind of way she imagines that Lövborg will master himself, control himself, and return to them with, as she keeps saying in an oddly haunting phrase, ‘with ‘vine leaves in his hair’ (p.227)

Act 3

Hedda and Thea wake up having fallen asleep on the sofa and chair respectively, to discover that it’s nearly dawn and the menfolk never returned from the party. Thea is petrified that her beloved Lövborg has fallen off the wagon.

Tesman reels in and tells Hedda what happened i.e. they stayed up all night drinking before staggering off to some bar. He tells her that Lövborg’s book is a masterpiece. Then he tells her that in their drunken staggering round town Lövborg dropped his manuscript. Following a bit behind Tesman found it, picked it up and decided not to return it to Lövborg when he was in such a state.

Now two things happen. A letter had arrived a little earlier for Tesman and it’s from Aunt Julle telling him that Aunt Rine is at death’s door. He reads it and decides he has to go straightaway. He’s just getting ready to go out when Brack arrives. In the kerfuffle Hedda takes the famous manuscripts and hides it in her husband’s desk.

Brack tells Hedda about the part of the evening’s shenanigans Tesman doesn’t know about. This is that Lövborg went onto the house of the red-haired demi-monde Mademoiselle Diana. Here he got into a fight because he drunkenly accused them of stealing his manuscript. the police were called and Lövborg was foolish enough to assault some of them. So he’s now in a cell awaiting trial. He has fallen right back to where he came from. he will be persona non grata all over town including in Hedda’s house. Brack admits that this pleases him because he hadn’t wanted Lövborg to insert himself into what he still thinks of as his nice little triangle with Hedda. Hedda smiles: ‘So you want to be the only cock of the yard, is that it?’ With this understanding between them, Brack takes his leave.

And who should walk through the front door or rather force himself than Lövborg himself. Thea had been dozing in the back room and now comes through to greet him with relief. But Lövborg explains that all is lost, he’s been arrested, news of his drunkenness will be all over town etc etc.

But now he is cruel to Thea. She loves him but he announces that he has no more need for her. She was useful to him as amanuensis writing his book but now he has no further need for her. But her life will be empty without her! He brutally tells her she should go back to her husband but she angrily refuses.

Their relationship centred on the book which is a joint venture but now Lövborg lies and says that last night he tore it to pieces and threw it in the fjord. But it was like her child, Mrs Elvsted wails and then, distraught, puts her coat on and staggers out, not knowing where she’ll go.

Nonetheless, when Lövborg says that Thea has broken his courage and his resolve, Hedda is jealous again. It’s Thea who controlled the destiny of a man, not her. Once again the slighter woman has beaten her.

Left alone Lövborg explains that he didn’t destroy the manuscript (and we and Hedda know this) but said he did something worse – he lost it! He is just as distraught as Mrs Elvsted, in fact he rather melodramatically declares he’s just going to put an end to it all (p.245).

Continuing her barely comprehensible theme about wanting to have a significant part in a man’s destiny, and following on from her obsessive vision of Lövborg returning from the party with vine leaves in his hair – Hedda now picks up on his mood and his intention but tells him to do it beautifully.

And she goes to the drawer and gets out one of the pistols, which we’ve seen her brandishing earlier in the play. He recognises it as the one she waved at him when they broke up and miserably says she should have shot him then, all those years ago. To which Hedda is explicit:

HEDDA: Use it now.
LÖVBORG: [Puts the pistol in his breast pocket.] Thank you.
HEDDA: And beautifully, Ejlert Lövborg. Promise me that!

So Ejlert Lövborg leaves with suicide on his mind and Hedda’s gun in his pocket. You’d have thought that would be quite enough for one scene, wouldn’t you? But the act ends with another shocker. For, left by herself, Hedda goes to the desk, takes out Lövborg’s manuscript, opens the door of the stove, and one by one burns all the sheets of the manuscript. All the time muttering that she is burning Lövborg and Thea’s child, burning burning their child.

It reminds us of the memory of Hedda threatening to burn Thea’s hair when they were at school. But it is also disturbingly destructive but, like all fire, eerily compelling at the same time. At a moment like this Ibsen’s imagination, on the face of it entirely realistic, rises to another level of intensity, feels like it breaks through some kind of barrier into a deeper understanding of human nature.

Act 4

It’s the evening of the same day and Hedda is alone. Then Miss Tesman arrives, Jörgen’s aunt, with news of Aunt Rina’s death, soon joined by Jörgen himself. A couple of pages as they process the old lady’s death and Miss Tesman, for a moment, seems to be implying how lovely if she could move in with them and they could all be one family together…

Miss Tesman leaves and Hedda amazes Jörgen by telling him that she’s burnt Lövbor’s manuscript. He can’t understand why she would do such a fantastic thing but she explains she did it for him – it was he who said the book would outshine and outrank him, now it’s gone.

She also seems, I think, in a highly elliptical way, to tell him that she’s pregnant and so now more than ever they need to be sure of his career. Jörgen is delighted and fusses about telling Aunt Julia but Hedda is just disgusted. For a moment she gives way to her conviction that she has fallen into a ghastly farce, wailing that it’s kill her, it’ll kill her (p.251).

In the middle of all this excitement Mrs Elvsted arrives with disconcerting news from her lodgings. Everyone is talking about Lövborg being in some kind of accident. While they’re all wondering how to confirm these rumours enter Mr Brack looking very serious. At first Jörgen, in his simplicity, thinks it must be because he’s heard about his Aunt Rina.

But in fact Brack has come to tell everyone that Lövborg has shot himself and is in hospital. He is not expected to live. The three people he tells all have their different responses. Mrs Elvert is absolutely distraught, beside herself. Jörgen has the ordinary common sense reactions, Oh my goodness, what a terrible thing etc. But Hedda nearly gives away that she knew he intended to kill himself. When she first hears the news she involuntarily says, ‘So soon!’ When Brack says Lövborg shot himself in the chest, instead of being horrified she says, ‘Not the temple? Well, it’s nearly as good’ which puzzles the others though they only half hear her.

Clearly she wants Lövborg to live up to his promise and to die ‘beautifully’ in order to demonstrate that she has some influence over the destiny of others. Now she defiantly tells the others that she admires Lövborg because he had the courage to do something, to ‘settle accounts with himself’ (p.256).

They’re lamenting that his book will be lost forever when Mrs Elvsted surprises them by pulling out of her skirts a notebook. Turns out she kept all the notes for the book she worked on with Lövborg. Jörgen is inspired, partly feeling guilty at 1) taking the manuscript then 2) not handing it back and then 3) that his mad wife burned it – all this makes him tell Mrs Elvsted that they can work together to recreate the book. She is overjoyed as we saw how losing the book had left her bereft as if she’s lost a child. Jörgen for his part grandly announces that he will put his own work in hold while he recreates the great work of his colleague – saying so with a knowing look at Hedda as a rebuke for her action.

So Jörgen takes Mrs Elvsted into the inner room for them to arrange and start poring over the notes, the same inner room Brack and Jörgen had retired to in Act 2, a handy way of leaving the other characters to have a tete-a-tete. In this case it’s Hedda and Brack. Hedda is full of irrational joy that Lövborg lived up to his promise, saying how good it is to know that an act of courage is still possible in this world.

However, Brack swiftly disillusions her. It turns out that the account he’s just given is wrong in lots of ways. For a start Lövborg isn’t in hospital in a critical condition, he’s dead. Second, he didn’t shoot himself at his lodgings but at Mademoiselle Diana’s boudoir. He’d gone back to the scene of his drunken affray, rambling something which none of them understood about them stealing his child, but which the audience understands as a reference to his lost manuscript. Thirdly he wasn’t even shot in the chest, but in the belly.

At all this news Hedda slumps in her chair. So Lövborg’s death was neither noble nor beautiful but ignoble and ugly. Everything she hoped would be beautiful has turned into meanness and farce.

But things get worse. Brack lets Hedda know that he recognised the gun that killed Lövborg. It’s one of hers. There is a risk the police will trace it back to her and she will be taken to court as an accessory. Unless, that is…he keeps quiet. Unless, that is…she makes it worth his while to keep quiet.

HEDDA: And so I am in your power, Mr Brack. From now on I am at your mercy…No, that’s a thought I’ll never endure, never! (p.262)

Hedda goes up and goes over to where (rather improbsbly) Jörgen and Thea are hard at work over the manuscript. They have (conveniently) come out of the second room, claiming it was too dark to work there. So the final passage of Hedda and Brack’s dialogue had been carried out in whispers.

Now Hedda gets up and walks over to Jörgen and Thea. She strokes Thea’s hair in the patronising and possessive way she’s done throughout the play and asks them if they’re getting on. Thea says, yes, it’s almost like the way she used to sit with dear Lövborg. Hedda drily remarks that yes, she can see them developing much the same relationship.

Hedda says she’s feeling tired and her husband absent-mindedly tells her to go into the inner room and have a rest on the sofa. Hedda goes into the room but, on a last impulse, plays a mad piece of music on the piano. Jörgen immediately leaps up and goes and asks her to stop; think of poor Aunt Rina. And Lövborg. ‘And’, Hedda wearily replies, ‘all the rest of them.’

Clearly this was a last mad burst of freedom and self expression but Jörgen’s telling her to be quiet is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. In fact there’s more straws. Tesman cheerfully tells Thea that he’ll get her installed in Aunt Julia’s newly vacant spare room, then he can come over every night and they can work together. There’s no hint of sex in this, Jörgen is too simple and too innocent. But Hedda hears him and calls from the inner room to ask what she’s meant to do left all alone night after night?

Jörgen in his innocence replies that no doubt Mr Brack will be all too happy to come round and keep her company and predatory Brack leans back in his armchair with a big grin and says, Oh yes, only too pleased to keep her company. The walls can hardly have closed in any tighter around Hedda. Her entire future looks like a hell of loneliness and exploitation.

There’s a pistol shot and the others run into the back room to discover that Hedda has shot herself (in the temple, a small but significant detail). Left with no power over others, reduced to a puppet and slave of other people’s wishes (her husband’s to devote himself to his books, Brack’s to blackmail her into God knows what compromises) Hedda asserts her agency one last time in the only way left to her, making for herself the ‘beautiful’ death Lövborg so signally failed to deliver.

Ibsen reviews

The Doll’s House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1886)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1892)

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by Simon on October 9, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on October 9, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/09/hedda-gabler-henrik-ibsen/

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (1879)

‘Poor little Nora.’
(Torvald Helmer speaking to his wife, Nora, in A Doll’s House, page 6)

When this volume, Four Major Plays by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828 to 1906), was published by Oxford University Press as a World’s Classic paperback back in 1981, the translator and editor James McFarlane was able to claim that Ibsen was the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare; and that, in the early 20th century, ‘A Doll’s House’ was the world’s most performed play.

What lay behind Ibsen’s extraordinary success and dominance? Between 1850 and 1899 Ibsen wrote a staggering 27 plays but it is the run of 12 issue-led plays he wrote in the last quarter of the century which made him the father of a certain kind of earnest social realism and A Doll’s House is widely considered one of the first and best of his mature plays.

Plot summary

We are in the house of a bourgeois couple with two children. It is just before Christmas (a Christmas tree is delivered and decorated during the play) presumably to highlight bourgeois hypocrisy, because Christmas should be when a happy nuclear family celebrates itself, whereas here, of course, it is used to highlight the secrets and lies hidden behind the respectable facade.

Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora Helmer are happy because he has just been given a new job as manager of the local bank. Torvald treats his wife, Nora, with extraordinary condescension, referring to her as various types of harmless little animal – my little squirrel, my little singing bird, my pretty little pet, my pretty little songbird, the pretty little skylark, little frightened dove – and continually demeaning her. ‘helpless little thing that you are’ etc.

And Nora does indeed come across as an empty-headed noodle, given to casual fibs, pleasing herself without thought of the consequences, thinking that if she means well all will end well. Several characters refer to her as a ‘child’:

MRS LINDE: Nora! In lots of ways you are still a child. (p.38)
HELMER: The child must have her way. (p.60)

But the husband’s pet names and these references all go to beg the question, Who has kept Nora silly and childlike? And how much has she gone along with her own infantilisation?

The core of the play, the central storyline, is that some years earlier Torvald was very ill. Doctors advised him to travel to the South for his health (so was it tuberculosis?). Nora’s father was dying at the time and so Nora told Torvald that her father had given her the money necessary to go on an all-expenses-paid holiday to Italy, which they duly did, had a wonderful time, and Torvald made a complete recovery.

But she didn’t get the money from her father. She got a loan from a disgruntled employee at the bank, one Nils Krogstad, signing a document promising to make repayments with interest. During the second of the play’s three acts, this Krogstad comes calling at the Helmer family house and confronts Nora with the need to repay the money. Nora is morbidly concerned that her husband doesn’t find out her secret because she only did it for the best, for his health etc. She has been trying to pay back the loan instalments, continually asking Torvald for extra bits of housekeeping money which she then, mostly, passes on to Krogstad.

She has also been doing some work, ‘a bit of copying’ which she did late at night. In a thought which echoes through the play about the lack of rights and freedom for women, she tells Mrs Linde ‘it was almost like being a man’ (p.16).

What’s impressive about the play is the way all aspects and characters are focused on this central issue, of money and Nora’s honesty. Right at the very start Nora returns from a shopping trip where she’s been buying stuff for Christmas, and this includes her favourite treat to herself, macaroons. But when Torvald enters and they immediately go into pat-name-calling mode, she hides them from him and lies about buying any. The issue of truth and lies is made the dominant theme from the start.

This is all helped by the two other main characters, Mrs Linde and Dr Rank.

Mrs Kristine Linde pays a visit. Nora doesn’t at first recognise her, they were at school together years ago, Kristine married a man and moved away from town. Now she reveals that a) her husband has died b) his business, always shaky, collapsed and so c) she has scrimped and saved. She worked to support her mother and brothers but when her brothers grew up and moved away she felt her life was ‘unspeakable empty’ so now she has come to the capital looking for work. She is paying Nora a visit to ask if she can help.

It’s in Mrs Linde’s first visit that Nora (rashly, on impulse) admits that she didn’t use her father’s money to pay for the trip to Italy, but borrowed it – $1,200, 4,800 kronar. Obviously Mrs Linde wants to know who Nora borrowed this huge sum from but Nora is childishly mysterious about it. So this sets one plotline or theme running, with is Mrs Linde’s attempts to guess who lent Nora the money, which includes speculation that Nora might have had an affair with a man to get it, or wondering if it was off the other main character, Dr Rank.

The plot thickens in two directly connected ways. First, Nora works on Torvald and is delighted when he announces that he can find a role for Mrs Linde at the bank where he’s just been appointed manager. Second, Torvald announces that he is going to sack Krogstad. This is for a number of reasons: one is that they were both at school together which makes Krogstad believe he can act on equal terms with Torvald and refer to him casually in front of the bank’s staff and clients (p.43).

But it’s also because Krogstad, at some unspecified point in the past, was discovered to have committed fraud – forged a document – and ruined his reputation. The bank job was by way of being a second chance. To twist the knife, Krogstad’s wife has died leaving him to look after a (unspecified) number of children.

So these are all the facts which lead up to Krogstad paying Nora a visit and, while her husband is busy off in his study, being quite brutally frank with Nora. Krogstad explains that he needs the job at the bank to support his children, but also, psychologically, because he was kicked out of decent employment once, has clawed his way back ‘in’ and will not let it happen again. Therefore he blackmails Nora. He says he will tell Torvald everything about the loan he made to her and how she lied to Torvald back then (about the source of the money which paid for the Italy trip) and has lied about the money she’s been paying back ever since.

But, again, Ibsen twists the knife and takes the situation to a new level of fraughtness buy having Krogstad tell Nora that he knows she lied to him. Specifically, the IOU he drew up required a (male) guarantor and Nora swore she got her (dying) father to sign it. Krogstad has worked out that it wasn’t Nora’s father who signed it, from the simple fact (now he’s looked into it in detail) that the signature was dated three days after Nora’s father died. Conclusion: Nora faked her father’s signature on a legal document. This is fraud. She could be taken to court and, potentially, sent to prison.

So it’s no longer an issue of taking out a loan behind her husband’s back and then sustained lying about it. That would be enough to wreck Torvald’s trust in, and love for, his little squirrel. It’s now about breaking the law and plunging the whole household into ruin, destroying the family reputation and blighting her children’s lives.

So Krogstad presents his ultimatum: if he’s going to be sacked from the bank (as Torvald intends), if he’s going to be kicked out of respectable employed society for a second time, then he’s going to take Nora with him. He tells Nora that she must work on Torvald to let him keep his job, then stalks out.

With every development you admire how streamlined and focused the play is. Because a few moments after Krogstad leaves, Torvald comes in through the front door, having been out on business, and asks Nora if anyone called. She, anxious to cover everything up, lies and says ‘no-one’. But Torvald says that’s odd because he just saw Krogstad leaving. In other words, he catches her out in a lie and proceeds to deliver a pompous lecture about the wickedness of lying, in the context of Krogstad’s act of forgery and how it spread a web of lies and deceit in his own household.

HELMER: Just think how a man with a thing like that on his conscience will always be having to lie and cheat and dissemble…A fog of lies like that in a household and it spread disease and infection to every part of it. Every breath the children take in that kind of house is reeking with evil germs. (p.33)

So it’s because of Krogstad’s lies and deceit, and his over-familiarity with Torvald, that the latter wants to sack him. Obviously this powerful sermon against lies and forgery, and the ruinous impact it has on a family and on the children raised in a household of lies, has a shattering impact on impressionable, simple Nora, who tries to hide how shaken she is.

When Nora suggests that Krogstad keep his job, Torvald mistakenly thinks that from kind-heartedness, hence his lecture about Krogstad’s moral corruption, and how he could never accept that in an employee of the bank he’s just taken over.

The fifth character is Dr Rank. He visits the Helmer household almost every day, ostensibly to have a chat with his friend Torval but – you’ve guessed it – mostly because, as he reveals in the second act, he is in love with Nora. She, in that Victorian way, says, Oh I wish you hadn’t told me (p.49). Turns out he is unhappily married and has been ill and depressed but, the new thing revealed in this act is that he has had the diagnosis that he’s dying. He only has a short time to live (a month? p.45), hence his declaration of his love for Nora.

(Incidentally, Rank’s illness is repeatedly attributed to his father’s womanising i.e. we are to take it that his father infected his mother with some kind of sexually transmitted infection (syphilis?) which was passed onto him at birth and is now about to kill him. In other words, he is a walking embodiment of bourgeois sexual hypocrisy, pages 38 and 46.)

Back in the main plot, the Krogstad storyline, Nora tries everything she can to prevent Torvald sending Krogstad written notice of his dismissal, but her insistence only makes Torvald more determined to do it, and so he sends it by messenger boy. Then Rank visits and tells Nora he loves her. This scene is placed here to give enough time for Krogstad to receive the letter of dismissal and walk to the Helmer house and ring at the door. Nora sends Rank into Helmer’s study and receives Krogstad.

Furious at being dismissed, Krogstad is now more aggressive. He tells Nora he’s going to extract everything he can from the situation. It’s not even a matter of the money any more. He’s going to hang on to the IOU as a threat to betray her to the authorities, and he has in his pocket a letter to Torvald explaining the whole situation. What he wants now is not just his old job back but a higher ranking job, he wants to become Torvald’s right hand man. He tells Nora she can’t wriggle out of it now, even if she tries… and neither of them say the word but they have implied suicide as Nora’s only way out.

He leaves but not before popping the letter which reveals everything into ‘the letter box’. This is clearly a box attached to the inside of the front door but which, importantly for the plot, Nora cannot access. Only Torvald has the key to it.

Now Mrs Linde had been in a side room all this time because she had popped round on a social visit and had agreed to help Nora try on costumes for a fancy dress party the Helmers have been invited to attend that evening.

Now Nora is looking so flustered that she admits everything to Mrs Linde – that Krogstad is the man she borrowed the money off, but it’s worse than that, how she forged a signature on a document, how he’s blackmailing her, and how everything is described in the letter he’s just dropped in the (inaccessible) letter box.

Quickly sizing up the situation, Mrs Linde says the only solution is for Krogstad to be called to return and request the letter back from Torvald unread. To carry out this desperate plan, Mrs Linde asks Nora for Krogstad’s address (it’s on a card K gave her) and quickly hurries off to fetch him.

Torvald emerges from his study and goes to look at the fateful letter box but Nora desperately distracts him by saying she has to rehearse her dancing, of the tarantella, for that evening, and persuades him into the living room to play the piano for her.

This turns into the most visually and dramatically vivid thing in the play, as Nora takes up the tambourine which is part of her performance and dances faster and faster, more and more wildly, turning into a Maenad. Her aim is to do it so badly that Torvald has to commit to coaching her all evening, but she is taken over by her genuine despair.

When she finally stops Torvald agrees that he needs to coach her and then takes Rank into the dining room for dinner. During the dance Mrs Linde had arrived back at the house and snuck into the living room and, now the men have gone, tells Nora that Krogstad has left town for 24 hours but she left a note begging him to call (round). When she goes to join the men in the dining room, Nora is left onstage alone to ponder out loud that she only has hours until the game is up, her secret is revealed, her life will be over.

In Act 3 is complicated. It’s the night of the party and the Helmers are attending it. Mrs Linde is in their front room (the set of all three acts). Krogstad enters. 1) We learn that they used to be in a relationship but Mrs Linde threw Krogstad over because he was poor, in order to marry a man with a business, because she had a widowed mother and two brothers to support. But now she reveals she always kept her feelings for him and, astonishingly, proposes that they join forces: she can mother his children, they can work together.

2) Krogstad suddenly has an insight and accuses her of buttering him up solely so he will retrieve the incriminating latter and get her friend Nora off the hook. Again, surprisingly, Mrs L says no, she wants Torvald to read the letter, she wants the truth to come out: ‘These two must have the whole thing out between them’ (p.66). She can’t bear the lies and deceit she’s seen in the Helmer household over the past 24 hours.

Radiant with happiness that he is wanted by his old flame, Krogstad agrees to beat a retreat as the sounds of the tarantella (from the party upstairs) signal that the Helmers are about to return. Barely has he slipped out that Torvald and Nora return.

A married couple alone, he is rather drunk and inflamed by watching her dress and so he comes on to her, embraces her and makes it as plain as someone could in a Victorian play, that he wants to have sex. All backed up by the notion that she is his possession and that, as a husband, he has a right to sex. Nora is repelled and wriggles out of his grasp and puts the table between them.

But then Rank knocks on the door and enters. He is in a merry mood and explains to Nora that he had the final lab results today which were conclusive. He asks for a cigar, has it lit and staggers out the front door.

Torvald now opens the famous letter box, in doing so discovering that someone’s been trying to open it with a hairpin. Nora blames the kids but obviously it was her. There’s also some cards Rank slipped into it on the way out with a black cross against his name. Nora and Torvald discuss how this was always going to be the sign that he (Rank) was going to go home to die. And the shadow of death (and decay) casts a pall over Torvald’s lust and so he agrees they can go to their separate bedrooms.

Torvald goes into his study with the letters leaving Nora in an agony of anticipation and then…He emerges waving Krogstad’s letter and demanding to know if it’s true. He delivers a great long diatribe (pages 75 to 76) calls her a feather-brained woman, a hypocrite, a liar, a criminal, not fit to bring up their children. He says she takes after her father who was feckless and irresponsible. He dwells on how his life is ruined, he will be a failure. People will suspect him of being an accomplice. His reputation will be ruined. He decides he must appease Krogstad, the whole thing must be hushed up. They will go on living as man and wife but in private, the children will be brought up by someone else. All they can do is ‘preserve appearances’.

So you are impressed with the totality of his response, the complete collapse of his love for Nora, his insistence on giving in to Krogstad and hushing it up. But during all this he doesn’t notice Nora’s expression as it hardens.

And then…another dramatic development – a messenger brings a note, the maid brings it in, Torvald tears it open wondering if it’s even worse news but…It’s wonderful news: Kroigstad has sent round the IOU with regrets for what he’s done, Torvald rereads and double checks then throws IOU and letter into the fire.

And this triggers a dramatic volte-face in Torvald. He dances with delight and he reverts to the baby pet name language of earlier times. Let’s forget the whole dreadful thing and promises to teach her how not to be so silly in future:

I shall give you all the advice and guidance you need. I wouldn’t be a proper man if I didn’t find a woman doubly attractive for being so obviously helpless. (p.78)

A theme he then goes on to expand:

For a man, there’s something indescribably moving and very satisfying in knowing that he has forgiven his wife – forgiven her, completely and genuinely, from the depths of his heart. It’s as though it made her his property in a double sense: he has, as it were, given her a new life, and she becomes in a way both his wife and at the same time his child That is how you will seem to me after today, helpless, perplexed little thing that you are. Don’t worry your pretty little head about anything, Nora, just be frank and I’ll make all the decisions for you…’ (p.79)

What he doesn’t realise is that everyone one of these lines is setting up The Author’s Message. For his reaction to the whole thing has killed Nora’s love for him stone dead. Her central point (as I read it) is that she was hoping for a miracle to sort the situation, she was hoping that Torvald would take upon himself the scandal of the IOU, he would own it and stand up to Krogstad.

Instead he did the opposite: in an impassioned two-page rant he blamed Nora for everything, roped her father into his accusation, said he’d do whatever it took to appease Krogstad, and the whole thing had to be hushed up.

Nora realises that her husband is not the strong and gallant man she thought he was and that he truly loves himself more than he does Nora.

And so the scales fell from her eyes and Nora is a woman transformed. She suddenly realises her entire marriage has been a lie. She’s been living with a man who doesn’t understand her at all. And she proceeds to deliver a six-page manifesto of feminist freedom. Key points are:

– her father treated her like a doll, called her his baby doll, played with her like a doll

– in her life with Torvald she has been living hand to mouth, performing whatever tricks will keep him happy

‘I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child.’

‘You and Daddy did me a great wrong. It’s your fault that I’ve never made anything of my life.’

– And so she must strike out on her own. She must educate herself. And not receive lessons in how to be a doll from her husband. And that is why she’s leaving him! She needs to understand herself, she needs to understand society, she needs to find out how she fits in and none of this can she do in the Doll’s House which is her marriage.

So she’s leaving. Now. Taking only her own possessions. ‘I don’t want anything of yours, either now or later.’ This is all incredibly sudden and brutally final. In a set piece passage Torvald accuses her of forgetting her ‘most sacred duty, to her husband and children’. And Nora, in a rebuttal which has had feminists leaping to their feet and cheering for nearly a century and a half, replies:

‘I have another duty equally sacred … My duty to myself!‘ (p.82)

Torvald says she is first and foremost a wife and mother but Nora simply rejects this. These are the roles and labels society has imposed on her. In reality ‘I believe that first and foremost I am an individual’.

Torvald tries to threaten her with religion but, again, Nora says all they hear about religion is the boring sermons of Pastor Hansen. religion, also, is something she has to find for herself.

He says she understands nothing of society. Well all the more reason, she replies, to find out for herself.

Nora says she doesn’t love him any more and never will again. Nothing he says or does can heal the breach. She expected him to take the guilt of the IOU upon himself but he let her down, he blamed her and thought only about himself. He is a complete stranger. Someone else can look after the children, they will do a better job anyway.

‘There must be full freedom on both sides’

Torvald takes off her ring and gives it back. Brutally, she says he may never write to her. He says can’t he even … but she says No before he can even finish the sentence. Only by a miracle of miracles but she doesn’t believe in miracles any more.

And she walks out the living room into the hall. Torvald slumps at the table with his head in his hands, then looks around, then has a wild moment of hope but … The play ends with the loud banging shut of the big front door which, in its way, has become a famous theatrical moment.

Comments

1) The play is superbly focused, assembled and streamlined in order to present its central dilemma unfolding with a horrible inexorable logic and then erupting in the powerful final set-piece speech from Nora. It moves from scene to scene with a grim relentlessness which distantly evokes the unyielding logic of the Greek tragedies. Initially I wasn’t sure I liked that. One of the appeal of novels is their scope for digression, or for the way completely new characters and storylines can just be added to give a new dimension, surprise and variety. Here everything is as focused as a German car design, sleek and immaculately assembled, making you feel horribly trapped and mesmerised.

2) In the same way, I didn’t, initially, warm to the very obvious prominence of the issues. Right from the start when Nora lies to Torvald about buying the macaroons, when he bombards her with animal pet names, when she plays up to him and insists that he knows best and only he can teach her (‘Oh, everything you do is right,’ p.69) etc, it feels like you’re being hit round the head with a male author’s version of Victorian feminism, with the issue of The New Woman, with the legal and cultural oppression of women, the babying and infantilisation of women, the tyranny of the patriarchy. It feels very manipulative the way all the lines of oppression converge on poor Nora who is not capable of bearing the burden.

3) But then, in the final ten pages, it stopped being a drama and became a manifesto, a piece of agit prop worthy of Brecht. Up till then I found it a bit too calculating to move me. But the blistering denouement of the final pages, as Nora makes her staggeringly unforgiving declaration of independence, blows away any reservations I had. It’s a phenomenal tour de force. You can see how it must have been vastly controversial at the time, and has provided a rallying cry to women readers and audiences ever since. Incredibly powerful and unforgiving, of Nora’s husband, of all men.

Credit

Four Major Plays by Henrik Ibsen, translated by James MacFarlane and Jens Arup, was published by Oxford University Press as a World’s Classic paperback in 1981.

Ibsen reviews

The Doll’s House (1879)
Ghosts (1881)
An Enemy of the People (1882)
The Wild Duck (1884)
Rosmersholm (1886)
Hedda Gabler (1890)
The Master Builder (1892)

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by Simon on September 27, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on September 27, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/27/a-dolls-house-henrik-ibsen/

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1897)

You were my enemy, such an enemy as no man ever had…In less than three years you entirely ruined me from every point of view.
(De Profundis, page 181)

While in prison doing two years hard labour for ‘acts of gross indecency’ (May 1895 to May 1897), Oscar Wilde wrote an enormous letter to his erstwhile lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed ‘Bosie’. It is a very long, very detailed indictment of Douglas’s selfish, spoilt behaviour for the entire period of their affair (they were introduced in June 1891), including a detailed description the hectic days leading up to his fateful trial.

Wilde wrote the letter in January, February and March 1897, towards the end of his imprisonment (May 1897). Wilde was upset that Douglas didn’t bother writing to him in prison (‘I waited month after month to hear from you’, p.238) and then had learned to his dismay (as he mentions on the first page) that Douglas planned to publish Wilde’s letters without permission and dedicate poems to him unasked – just the most recent of the many abuses of their friendship which Wilde taxed Douglas with.

Wilde wrote it under the strict prison regime at Reading Gaol, on sheets of prison notepaper which he had to return to the warders every evening. He wasn’t allowed to post it to Douglas but was permitted to take it with him when he finally left gaol. He presented it to his most loyal friend, Robert Ross, who he had selected to be his literary executor, with instructions to have two copies made and send the original to its intended addressee, Douglas. Shrewdly, Ross sent Douglas only a typed copy of the letter with a covering note and Douglas later stated that, after reading the note, he burned the letter unread. Typical.

After Wilde’s death in November 1900, Ross published extracts from the letter in a 1905 edition of Wilde’s letters, under the Biblical title which Wilde himself had suggested. ‘De Profundis’ is Latin for ‘from the depths’ and the phrase comes from the Latin translation of Psalm 130, ‘From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord’, so entirely appropriate if a little melodramatic.

In the preface to the 1905 edition, Ross included an extract from Wilde’s instructions to him which included the author’s own summary of the work:

I don’t defend my conduct. I explain it. Also in my letter there are several passages which explain my mental development while in prison, and the inevitable evolution of my character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place, and I want you and others who stand by me and have affection for me to know exactly in what mood and manner I face the world. Of course, from one point of view, I know that on the day of my release I will merely be moving from one prison into another, and there are times when the whole world seems to be no larger than my cell, and as full of terror for me. Still at the beginning I believe that God made a world for each separate man, and within that world, which is within us, one should seek to live.

The version Ross published in 1905 was incomplete, less than half the manuscript with all references to the Queensberry family removed (for fear of libel from this super-litigious family), in effect removing almost the entire first half. Succeeding editions gave more of text until, in 1962, the complete and correct version appeared in the complete edition of Wilde’s letters, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. Interestingly it appears that the full text version is still not available online as it is still in copyright in the USA. If you Google it, you are taken to variations on the heavily edited, incomplete 1905 version.

Structure

The letter is traditionally divided into two parts but when I read it, I thought it falls into four.

Opening lines

HM Prison, Reading

Dear Bosie,

After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain…

Part 1. Wilde’s time with Douglas

In the first half Wilde describes in excruciating detail the pair’s relationship, with numerous descriptions of Douglas’s unbearably spoilt, selfish and exploitative behaviour, his insensate rages, his addiction to a:

world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed.

How Douglas’s presence and demands for attention prevented Wilde doing a stroke of work, how he destroyed the ‘intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace and solitude’ he needed to work.

My life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative.

While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my art and, in allowing you to stand persistently between Art and myself I give to myself shame and blame in the highest degree.

He describes how Douglas lived a recklessly extravagant lifestyle and expected Wilde to pay for everything. At various points Wilde tots up what this or that escapade cost him, numbers imprinted on his memory since, as a result of the first trial, he had been declared bankrupt and had to go through his accounts line by line with a Bankruptcy Receiver (p.157). He estimates that between autumn 1892 and May 1895 he spent more than £5,000 cash on Douglas, not counting bills.

Every day I had to pay for every single thing you did all day long. (p.228)

I blame myself for having allowed you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial ruin.

You demanded without grace and received without thanks.

According to Wilde he found Douglas’s behaviour so intolerable that they broke up every three months or so, on one occasion Wilde fleeing England altogether to escape him (p.162). Yet always, at that point, Douglas bombarded him with begging letters and his mother (a surprisingly regular presence in the letters) would beg Wilde to be kind to her son and so…he would forgive him and take him back only for the same pattern to repeat itself. Wilde, humbled by prison life, blames himself for his weakness as much as Douglas for his heedless selfishness.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. (p.154)

Most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me. (p.157)

Ethically you had been even more destructive to me than you had been artistically. (p.159)

The accusations lead up to a detailed description of their stay, in October 1894, at the Grand Hotel in Brighton (pages 164 to 167) where Wilde tenderly nursed Douglas through a bout of flu with flowers and books and choice food; but then, when he was better and Wilde, having moved to lodgings, went down with it, Douglas disappeared off to entertain himself, only returning to demand more money, leaving Wilde, weak and feverish, to fend for himself, and at one point uttering the famous words: ‘When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.‘ (p.168).

At one point Douglas became so furiously angry with Wilde for cramping his pleasures and approached the sick man’s bed in such a threatening manner, that Wilde fled the bedroom and didn’t return until he’d summoned the landlord for safety (p.166). Later Douglas wrote to him that it was an uglier moment than he imagined (p.167). Did he mean he intended to kill Wilde? Wilde thinks so. He wonders whether he had the pistol on him which he often brandished around, one time letting it off in a restaurant by mistake (p.175); or had seized a paperknife?

Wilde is portentous. The letter loses no opportunity to elevate this sordid and pathetic affair and his wretched exploitation by a spoilt brat, to the rank of some great work of art or a tragedy supervised by the Greek gods:

The gods are strange. It is not of our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place. (p.169)

The Fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our divided lives… (p.173)

He describes how, when Douglas sent him an undergraduate poem, Wilde replied with a letter intended to be a prose poem invoking the Greeks, how Douglas gave this letter to a friend who passed it to blackmailers who tried to extort money from Wilde and distributed letters round society, to the manager of a theatre staging one of his plays, how it was produced in court against him, used as evidence of his corrupting influence, and helped convict and send him to prison.

The story of his gift of the Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young to a magazine set up by an undergraduate friend of Douglas’s, who then published it alongside a number of gay stories, which were read out as evidence against him at the trial.

The centrality of HATE for his father, much stronger than love for anyone else, in Douglas’s character (pages 174 to 180).

Details of the selling-off of Wilde’s belongings including priceless presentation volumes by all the authors of his day (p.179).

Part one ends with Wilde concluding that the only way to deal with such a monster of selfish ingratitude is to forgive him. He must forgive Douglas for his own sake. Otherwise he will carry the poison of bitterness in his heart forever and it will kill him.

I am far more of an individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world. (p.195)

The notion of forgiveness is the hinge into the second part of this long, long letter, which deals with what Wilde has learned through his two long years of intense suffering.

Part 2. Court, goal, suffering and enlightenment

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

Having raked over their relationship and the events which led up to his arrest, trials and imprisonment, Wilde turns to consider the spiritual aspects of the experience, what he has learned, how he is managing it.

I have to make everything that has happened to me good for me. (p.197)

The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, or be for the brief remainder of my days one maimed, marred and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to accept it without complain, fear or reluctance. (p.197)

To reject one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. (p.197)

I saw then that the only thing for me was to accept everything. (p.207)

I am simply concerned with my whole mental attitude towards life as a whole (p.199)

I write this account of the mode of my being transferred here simply that it should be realised how hard it has been for me to get anything out of my punishment but bitterness and despair. I have, however, to do it, and now and then I have moments of submission and acceptance. All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns. So perhaps whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender, abasement, and humiliation. I can, at any rate, merely proceed on the lines of my own development, and, accepting all that has happened to me, make myself worthy of it. (p.219)

For a while this striving of acceptance of everything which has happened to you reminds me of Nietzsche and the myth of eternal recurrence. But then he changes the tone by moving to a whole hearted consideration of Jesus. With typical Wilde bravado, and consistent with the depiction of him in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde portrays Jesus as a romantic, individualist artist (much like himself).

Christ’s place indeed is with the poets. (p.205)

Like everyone else, he appropriates Jesus for his ideology, in this case his aesthetic and poetics. Thus Wilde interprets Jesus’ entire life as ‘the most wonderful of poems’, rewriting Jesus’ entire career in his late-Romantic purple prose.

Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power of not merely saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful things to him…

The Letter morphs into The Soul of Man Under Socialism when Wilde declares that Jesus was, above all, ‘the most supreme of individualists’ in fact ‘Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.’ (p.207) All his alleged teachings and philanthropy really were about just one thing – perfecting oneself.

But Wilde’s (mis)interpretation also generates new insights:

With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who are dumb under oppression, and ‘whose silence is heard only of God,’ he chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose tongues had been tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found no utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven. And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom suffering and sorrow were modes through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate and is made an image, he made of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in doing.

That Wilde could conceive and write this while ill and depressed, imprisoned, shamed and bankrupted, having lost his belongings, reputation, career and family, is impressive. What it shows to me is that his aesthetic philosophy wasn’t an add-on which he worked up for public effect, but ran through him to the core.

What it also indicates is a substantial change in style from the first ‘half’. There Wilde had come close to whining in a text dominated by autobiographical reminiscences. Here, as you can see, the text feels much more worked-over, burnished and melliflous, to reflect a careful development of thought very similar to his critical essays.

He has been reading the four gospels in their original Greek and quotes from them with his own translations.

He moves on to explain the superiority of Christ’s all-encompassing compassion to the brutality of most of the Greek gods and their myths. And then gives an aesthetic explanation for the entire conception of ‘prophecy’ (i.e. that Jesus was the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies) by saying:

Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

This has the neatness, stylishness, of his essays. If he ever writes anything artistic again, he will take as his theme ‘Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life’ (p.213). In his hands Jesus comes perilously close to sounding like Oscar Wilde:

If the only thing that he ever said had been, ‘Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much,’ it would have been worthwhile dying to have said it. His justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be.

And goes on to say that Christ ‘preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment’. I won’t quote it all but his rewriting of the antinomian Jesus is extremely persuasive. His interpretation of the salvation of Mary Magdelen just for a moment of pure love is moving, as is his reading of Jesus’s special mode of understanding the sinner:

In a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection.

This strikes me as a very profound insight, the most profound thing I’ve come across in Wilde. And yet, the next minute, he sounds a little silly, too like the provocative poseur of his pre-prison days:

There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.

You can see how that has been worked-up to arrive at the provocative punchline. Or:

Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something.

What is pretty obviously missing from all this is any sense of divinity, of God the father and Creator who, if you read the Gospels, Jesus is very much at pains to invoke. Wilde describes an almost secular Jesus, a preacher of self-awareness and self-development, even at the cost of personal pain. It’s no surprise that the Catholic Church refused to accept him when he left prison, despite repeated attempts. It was quite simply because he wasn’t a Christian.

Nowadays this type of positive self-overcoming is called mindfulness or resilience, and Wilde gives the same basic thought a number of very powerful expressions:

And for the last seven or eight months, in spite of a succession of great troubles reaching me from the outside world almost without intermission, I have been placed in direct contact with a new spirit working in this prison through man and things, that has helped me beyond any possibility of expression in words: so that while for the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember doing nothing else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, ‘What an ending, what an appalling ending!’ now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!’ It may really be so. It may become so. If it does I shall owe much to this new personality that has altered every man’s life in this place.

This was due, as the notes tell us, to the arrival of a new governor of the prison. The governor for Wilde’s first year had been a martinet who kept the letter of the law and subjected the inmates to fierce discipline. In July 1896 he was replaced by Major James Nelson who immediately set out installing a more humane regime.

In a structured passage he rejects morality, reason and religion. ‘My Gods dwell in temples made with hands’. Wilde reworks his doctrine of the acceptance of experience: all of it must be accepted and transformed, whatever its origin.

Part 3. Back to Bosie

These repeated exhortations to acceptance reach a climax and then there’s a transition to what I take to be the third part of the letter. This returns to the subject matter and style of part 1, namely a return to wringing his hands over the entire wretched Queensberry family, and a return to the more factual, documentary and accusatory tone of part 1. This time round it’s Douglas’s mother who gets extended criticism for her cowardice in refusing to speak directly to her son but writing Wilde begging him to do her dirty work – i.e. telling her son to pull himself together – for her, and ending all her letters with the same refrain: ‘On no account let Alfred know that I have written to you.’

Part 4. Practicalities

In the last few pages Wilde turns to two practical issues. First he describes the details of his bankruptcy which is genuinely harrowing. He can scarcely believe that Douglas thought it would be ripping good fun if Wilde was declared bankrupt because it would stop his father claiming his court costs. I.e. he didn’t think for a minute of the impact on Wilde, just about spiting his hated father. That’s motivated from start to finish of their wretched affair, Douglas’s hatred of his father, and Wilde found himself trapped in the middle, and was ruined for it.

Then he describes what he plans to do at his release, namely go straight to France to stay with close friends who have remained true and commune with nature. There is no place for him in England. He wants to be beside the sea and praises the ancient Greeks’ attitude to the primal elements of nature.

Then he reiterates the need for him to accept his past in order to move into the future. It has been an epic read. What it must have cost him to write! And so it ends.

Subjects

Prison life:

‘We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain and the record of bitter moments. Suffering – curious as it may seem to you – is the means by which we exist because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing, and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity’ p.164)

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing…

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more… (p.186)

To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day’s experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one’s heart is hard, not a day on which one’s heart is happy. (p.219)

The terrible incident at Clapham Junction where he was made to stand in prison clothes, in chains, waiting for the train to Reading while trainload after trainload of scurrying passengers mocked and jeered and then spat at him (p.219). Compare and contrast with the incident of Robert Ross doffing his hat to Wilde after his conviction.

What you learn from prison:

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are, and will be what they will be. (p.185)

Philosophising:

To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life which we realise at every moment (p.172)

Fine writing (p.176)

Literature the greatest art (p.188)

The purple pageant of my incommunicable woe (p.186), laurel and bayleaf )p.187).

Douglas’s appalling character

‘So full of terrible defects, so utterly ruinous both to yourself and to others’ (p.162)

Douglas takes advantage of his ‘proverbial good nature and Celtic laziness’ (p.158).

Douglas’s extravagance (pages 156 to 157, 172).

Douglas stops Wilde working (pages 154, 155, 156).

Douglas’s rages (pages 158, 166).

Douglas’s terrible translation of Salome (pages 155, 160, 161).

I knew quite well that no translation, unless one done by a poet, could render the colour and cadence of my work in any adequate measure… (p.161)

Douglas gives careless gifts of suits away to his gay lovers and rent boys, their pockets still filled with incriminating letters. Some of the recipients used them to try and blackmail Wilde, and then were produced in court, linking him to the world of rent-boys which his young lover had led him into.

You had left my letters lying about for blackmailing companions to steal, for hotel servants to pilfer, for housemaids to sell. (p.182)

The Marquess of Queensbury – epileptic fury (p.167), vendetta (pages 174 to 175).

I who appealed to all the ages have had to accept my verdict from one who is an ape and a buffoon. (p.184)

Details of the days surrounding the trials – ‘Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles’ (p.158), ‘You forced me to stay to brazen it out’ (p.159). Douglas taunts into launching the action against Queensbury; when Wilde says he has no money, Douglas says his family will pay the costs so that ‘I had no excuse left for not going. I was forced into it’ (p.171)

At one point Wilde anticipates W.H Auden’s great poem, Musee des Beaux Arts:

There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God, but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest,

Thoughts

Gripping

De Profundis is by far the most gripping and ‘real’ thing Wilde ever wrote. All his letters are wonderful, and reading Wilde’s correspondence is to be touched and inspired by such a warm, humane, literate and educated presence – but ‘De Profundis’ is something else. It plunges you straight into a realistic depiction of a tortured, modern relationship with none of the artifice or elaboration which makes the plays or essays or Dorian Gray so artificial and false. (OK, there’s a fair amount of artifice in the description of his philosophy, invoking Jesus and the Greek gods, but in the core passages devoted to Douglas and his terrible father, and Wilde’s litany of humiliations, it feels immediate and lacerating.) I half expected rereading it for this blog to be a chore but I was absolutely gripped and absorbed.

Beggars

Was ever such an extensive character assassination committed to paper? After reading the content, it is astonishing that – as if deliberately dramatising his ongoing addiction to this vile young man – despite the letter’s vivid portrait of Douglas’s despicable character which emerges, Wilde starts the letter ‘Dear Bosie’ and ends it ‘Your Affectionate Friend’.

And it quite beggars belief that after writing the longest indictment any writer ever wrote of their one-time lover – decrying his extravagance, selfishness and ruinous improvidence – Wilde got back together with Douglas. He wrote asking to see him as soon as he was freed from prison and the pair went to briefly live together in Naples, until the friends and family of both men forced them to part. Among countless other passages of flaming criticism, Wilde writes:

It would be impossible for me now to have for you any feeling other than that of contempt and scorn, for myself other than any feeling of scorn and contempt. (p.192)

And yet…he went running back to this object of scorn and contempt. If the letter itself didn’t convey this, the fact that he reunited with such a worm suggests it was a profound psychological addiction, like heroin or cocaine, rather than a healthy, reciprocal relationship.

But why, that’s the great question. Bosie was a monster of selfishness, given to epic rages, nowhere near Wilde’s intellectual equal, completely unsympathetic to his artistry and utterly ruinous for his concentration and writing – why did Wilde keep going back to him, and went back after the wretched worm had utterly ruined his life? It absolutely wasn’t his personality or intellect or even looks. Was he great at some particular sexual kink? But Douglas, in his later memoirs, denied that they even had sex, saying most of what they did was kissing and cuddling and Bosie’s main activity was lining up rent boys and like-minded young men for Wilde to take his pleasure with. Why? Why did he go back to him?

Letters to be published

That said, there’s something peculiar about baring one’s soul, and listing every argument from a long and stormy relationship, with a view to its eventual publication. The letter is a gruesomely detailed description of a deeply troubled relationship but, you can’t help wondering, even here, was Wilde performing? Was he writing with an audience in mind? Yes, most definitely. It combines a detailed chronology of their affair and of the events leading up to the trials with passages of moralising about love and beauty and art and the soul which are quite clearly aimed at a wider audience, as crafted as anything (as I suggested above).

Homosexual absence

Initially I thought the letter completely suppressed any mention of homosexuality or the acts of ‘gross indecency’ Wilde was convicted of, probably for legal, social, all kinds of reasons. But slowly I realised I was wrong. The ‘issue’ is referred to half a dozen times, most clearly in an anecdote towards the end.

First of all, Wilde refers four or five times to the reason he and Douglas met in the first place, which is that Douglas, while an undergraduate at Oxford, wrote him a letter asking for his advice and help with a problem of a particular nature.

I told her [Douglas’s mother] the origin of our friendship was you in your undergraduate days at Oxford coming to beg me to help you in very serious trouble of a particular character. I told her that your life had been continually in the same manner troubled… (p.163)

Our friendship really begins with you begging me in a most pathetic and charming letter to assist you in a position appalling to anyone, doubly so to a young man at Oxford… (p.169)

I would not have expected or wished for you to have stated how and for what purpose you had sought my assistance in your trouble at Oxford… (p.184)

When Edward Levy, at the very beginning of our friendship, seeing your manner of putting me forward to bear the brunt, and annoyance, and expense even of that unfortunate Oxford mishap of yours, if we must so term it, in reference to which his help and advice had been sought, warned me for the space of an hour against knowing you, you laughed. (p.190)

Ten seconds searching on the internet tell me that in the spring of 1892 Douglas was being blackmailed by a young man over an indiscreetly gay letter he had sent him. Douglas wrote to Wilde asking for help, Wilde travelled down to Oxford and spent the weekend at Douglas’s lodgings. Back in London he consulted his solicitor, George Lewis, who advised resolving the problem by paying the blackmailer £100.

But this sequence of events is nowhere referred to in De Profundis and this leads to several thoughts. One is that, if course Wilde doesn’t make anything explicit in the letter: 1) he was a gentleman and gentlemen don’t discuss sex of any variety; 2) he regarded it as beneath his dignity and certainly beneath the moral purpose of the letter; 3) anything he wrote could possibly be used against him in yet another prosecution.

The second thought arises from something intriguing I read about ‘De Profundis’ which is that gay consciousness had barely begun. A man was a gentleman and he may or may not have peculiar tastes but a) no-one talked about it b) there was a less clear-cut line between gay and straight than was to be drawn during the twentieth century (and now, in the 21st century, is being blurred and elided again). So Wilde may never have thought of himself as homosexual but merely a gentleman who enjoyed Uranian activities.

The third thought is that this absence of sex does something funny to the text. It’s packed with accusations against Douglas, including lots of financial details, descriptions of his horrid family etc, then moves on to discuss spiritual and psychological development. And yet, all the time, it (almost completely) ignores the elephant in the room. A huge letter rotating around his prosecution and conviction and imprisonment and yet which…never directly addresses or refutes the prosecution case or evidence.

But as you read on, slowly slowly the love that dare not speak its name does make an appearance in asides and references. Is homosexuality what he’s referring to here, where he writes of a meretricious article Douglas had written for the Mercure de France, that:

Along with genius goes often a curious perversity of passion and desire?…[that] the pathological phenomenon in question is also found amongst those who have not genius. (p.183)

Later:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. (p.194)

And, in one of the rare references to the actual court case:

When your father’s Counsel desiring to catch me in a contradiction suddenly produced in court a letter of mine, written to you in March ’93, in which I stated that, rather than endure a repetition of the hideous scenes you seemed to have such a terrible pleasure in making, I would readily consent to be ‘blackmailed by every renter in London’, it was a very real grief to me that that side of my friendship with you should incidentally be revealed to the common gaze. (p.185)

‘That side of my friendship with you’ = gay sex. The entire long letter could be seen as Wilde’s attempt to deny ‘that side of my friendship with you’ (sex) and focus overwhelmingly on love, psychology, and then Christ and penitence. But according to modern accounts Wilde had lots of sex with lots of rent boys, servants and others, and he often coerced them into the act. In De Profundis Wilde suppresses all of that. Or, by his own lights, was he simply being a civilised gentleman and not mentioning it, preferring (still) to come across as artist by concentrating on character, emotion and so on?

When I told you that even that unfortunate young man who ultimately stood beside me in the Dock had warned me more than once that you would prove far more fatal in bringing me to utter destruction than any of the common lads I was foolish enough to know, you laughed, though not with much sense of amusement. (p.190)

‘I was foolish enough to know‘? He did a bit more than ‘know’ them. Later in life, Douglas said that the pair rarely if ever had sex and the relationship was mostly restricted to kissing and stormy arguments, but at the same time frankly admitted that the pair mostly procured gay partners for each other.

The references build up. Wilde describes how boring Douglas’s conversation was:

…and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one topic round which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me… (p.161)

Since he was not an intellectual, pretty uncultivated and not interested in Wilde’s work, would this one fascinating topic have been…gay sex? Did Bosie beguile Wilde not by any physical acts at all, but with his knowledge of forbidden sins i.e. gay sex and the gay underworld?

Towards the end of the long letter comes the only place (I think) where Wilde directly addresses the issue:

A great friend of mine — a friend of ten years’ standing — came to see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting malice, still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures and strange passions, and that unless he accepted that as a fact about me and realised it to the full I could not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his friendship on false pretences. (p.230)

Justification for consorting with lowlife

And then the danger – Wilde wanted to walk on the wild side, to play with fire.

People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But they, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approached them, were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement… They were to me the brightest of gilded snakes. Their poison was part of their perfection…I didn’t feel at all ashamed of having known them. They were intensely interesting… (p.221)

This is fine as artistic justification but it doesn’t address the central accusation, that he had widespread and systematic gross indecency with lots of young men, many of them boys, some borderline children (aged 15 and younger).

Wilde the abuser

For unscholarly but modern indictments of Wilde’s exploitative behaviour, see:

It’s Time For The Left To Stop Idolizing Oscar Wilde. He’s A Pervert by Nick Sheppard
Just Wilde about the boys (review of ‘Andre and Oscar: Gide, Wilde and The Art of Gay Living’) by John R. Bradley

Getting over it

Towards the end of ‘De Profundis’, Wilde launches into another sequence of pages trying to analyse how Douglas created such havoc in his life. He keeps coming up with formulations and saying ‘That’s it’, and being content for half a page… before coming round to the subject again and setting off on a whole new analysis. It is clear that, in writing the letter, Wilde was still very much working it through and this is what gives it – despite the artful passages I’ve mentioned – its psychologically gripping quality. He writes that at moments he has accepted the past and is ready to move on, but the sheer length of the letter, not to mention its repetitive analyses of the same traumas and wounds, shows that he was far from cured.

Credit

Page references are to the 1979 Oxford University Press edition of the Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.

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by Simon on August 28, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Autobiography, English literature, Literature

Posted by Simon on August 28, 2024

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An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895)

After the country setting of ‘A Woman of No Importance’, Wilde’s third social comedy is set firmly back in the heart of London’s High Society. The four acts alternate in setting between Sir Robert Chiltern’s House in Grosvenor Square and Lord Goring’s House in Curzon Street (0.4 miles and 5 minutes walk apart according to Google Maps) and the society it satirises and the values it mocks are just as circumscribed and limited. And it’s barely started before he is mocking his audience, London high society:

MABEL CHILTERN: Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.

London ‘Society’ continues to be mocked and satirised by various characters but, despite the incessant raillery, ‘An Ideal Husband’, like all the other plays, fundamentally accepts this class and its values as the premise of the story and setting.

Plot summary

Act 1. The Octagon Room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house in Grosvenor Square

Sir Robert Chiltern is a Member of Parliament (MP) and junior government minister and his wife, the upstanding Lady Chiltern, are hosting a party. Leading guests are the dandified Wilde avatar, Lord Goring, Chiltern’s sister Mabel, and other guests.

Storming into the party is the smooth-talking, suave but genuinely malevolent Mrs Cheveley. Lady Chiltern recognises her from her schooldays when Mrs C was expelled. Nothing has changed and she waits till she gets Sir Robert alone before bluntly blackmailing him. Mrs Cheveley and colleagues have invested in a blatantly fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. Sir Robert has been notable for opposing any British involvement in it on the basis of a parliamentary report he’s commissioned (‘a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle.’). Now Mrs Cheveley wants him to completely reverse his position, suppress the report and say he is in favour of the canal!

Obviously Sir Robert refuses to do so which is when Mrs C pull out her blackmailing threat. Turns out that Sir Robert’s vast wealth, name, reputation and influence all stem from a bad thing he did 20 years ago, back at the start of his career. He learned a Cabinet secret – that the British government was about to purchase the Suez Canal company and tipped off a stockbroker acquaintance of his, Baron Arnheim. The Baron bought shares which the British government then purchased at a much higher price, making the Baron three-quarters of a million pounds, of which he gave Sir Robert £110,000, enough capital to commence speculations of his own which brought him to his present dizzy wealth.

Anyway, Mrs Cheveley has a copy of Sir Robert’s letter to Arnheim, shows it to Sir Robert, and threatens to make it public unless he does what she wants. Not only will it ruin him, lose him his job in government, possibly lead to criminal proceedings – but will lose him the love of his life, his upright, morally unbending wife. He has no choice, he has to agree, and Mrs Cheveley leaves the party with his promise to suppress the report.

However, spurred on by Lady Chiltern’s earlier rudeness towards her, Mrs Cheveley cannot resist telling her (Lady Chiltern) about her husband’s sudden change of heart about the canal scheme. When the guests have gone and they are alone, Lady Chiltern confronts her husband with it and, blithely unaware of both her husband’s past and Mrs Cheveley’s blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert goes back on his promise to her. In fact she stands over him and watches him write the letter doing so which she then summons one of the servants to deliver to Mrs Cheveley’s hotel.

And here is the crux of the play: for Lady Chiltern her husband is ‘an ideal husband’, a model partner in both public and private life who she can trust and worship with no reservations.

Now so far I’ve given the impression that the play is a tragic melodrama but, of course, it’s anything but, seeing as how it’s festooned with witty banter and sparkling repartee, mostly thanks to the Wilde avatar in the play, witty Lord Goring, especially when he is sparring with Sir Robert’s sister, clever young Mabel Chiltern (very similar to the way the Wilde avatar in the previous play, ‘A Woman of No Importance’, Lord Illingworth, fenced with his female equivalent, Mrs Allonby).

In addition there are, as in the previous plays, three or four other guests, mostly older ladies – Lady Markby and Mrs Marchmont, generically referred to as ‘the dowagers’ – who are comic in their own right:

MRS CHEVELEY: Wonderful woman, Lady Markby, isn’t she? Talks more and says less than anybody I ever met.

LADY MARKBY: I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? With regard to women, well, dear Gertrude, you belong to the younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But modern women understand everything, I am told.

But these old buffers also act as foils to the ‘amoral’ and ‘shocking’ and oh-so-modern Lord Goring (‘Young people nowadays, I don’t understand a word they say’ etc). Plus the comic figure of the absurd Vicomte de Nanjac, French Attaché.

Back to the plot, towards the end of the party had been verbally sparring when she spots a diamond brooch one of the guests has left on the sofa. Lord Goring asks for it and puts it away in his pocket, explaining that he gave it to someone many years ago, and asking Mabel to inform him if anyone comes back to the house to retrieve it.

Aha! Could the lost brooch by any chance turn out to be the solution to Sir Robert’s dilemma?!

Act 2. Morning room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house

Next morning Lord Goring is round at Sir Robert’s house, being surprisingly earnest and supportive for such a ‘dandy’, telling him to fight Mrs Cheveley and admit his guilt to his wife. During the conversation Goring also reveals that he and Mrs Cheveley were once engaged, in a characteristically droll way:

SIR ROBERT CHILTON: Did you know her well?
LORD GORING: [Arranging his necktie.] So little that I got engaged to be married to her once, when I was staying at the Tenbys’. The affair lasted for three days…nearly.

He tells Lord Chiltern to telegraph the British embassy in Vienna (where Mrs Cheveley lives) to see if they know any dirt about her. But his efforts to persuade Lord Chiltern to do come clean to his wife fail – the latter is too afraid of losing the only woman he’s ever loved.

After finishing his conversation with Chiltern, Goring indulges in more flirtatious banter with young Mabel. Then, when she exits for some reason, finding himself alone with Lady Chiltern, Lord Goring does a very decent thing and tries to urge her to less morally inflexible and more forgiving. Since it’s the core of the play (and, possibly of Wilde’s work as a whole) it’s worth quoting in full:

LORD GORING: Lady Chiltern, I have sometimes thought that . . . perhaps you are a little hard in some of your views on life. I think that . . . often you don’t make sufficient allowances. In every nature there are elements of weakness, or worse than weakness. Supposing, for instance, that – that any public man, my father, or Lord Merton, or Robert, say, had, years ago, written some foolish letter to some one…
LADY CHILTERN: What do you mean by a foolish letter?
LORD GORING: A letter gravely compromising one’s position. I am only putting an imaginary case.
LADY CHILTERN: Robert is as incapable of doing a foolish thing as he is of doing a wrong thing.
LORD GORING: [After a long pause.] Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.
LADY CHILTERN: Are you a Pessimist? What will the other dandies say? They will all have to go into mourning.
LORD GORING: [Rising.] No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

Lord Goring leaves, having offered both Lord and Lady Chiltern his help. After some comic chat between Lady C and Mabel about the man who keeps proposing to her, one Tommy Trafford, they are interrupted by the return of Mrs Cheveley accompanied by the bufferish Lady Markby. They finally get rid of Lady M, at which point Lady Chiltern coldly tells Mrs C it was she who made her husband write the latter the night before.

At which point Mrs Cheverley brutally exposes Sir Robert’s secret to his wife, telling her all about the act of betrayal and corruption which made him his fortune and began his public career – with the result that Lady Chiltern orders the servants to more or less kick her out. Left alone, Lady Chiltern begs her husband to tell her it is not true:

LADY CHILTERN: You sold a Cabinet secret for money! You began your life with fraud! You built up your career on dishonour! Oh, tell me it is not true! Lie to me! Lie to me! Tell me it is not true!

But Sir Robert cannot tell a lie, tells her it is all true, this crushing her worship of him, thus wrecking their marriage, for she denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him. At which point Lord Chiltern delivers another iteration of the play’s moral:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.

Act 3. The library of Lord Goring’s house in Curzon Street

There’s a lot of hectic coming and going in this scene. It opens with Lord Goring doing the Wilde avatar thing with his monosyllabic manservant, Phipps.

LORD GORING: Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, Phipps.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.

Lord Goring receives a letter from Lady Chiltern who, having learned about her husband’s error, wants to take him up on his offer of support. This letter is, however, ambiguously worded:

‘I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you. Gertrude.’

So he expects her to arrive at any minute and tells the servants to take her into his drawing room. Instead the master and servant banter is interrupted by the arrival of Lord Goring’s father, Lord Caversham. The old man makes a sustained attack on Lord G, telling him he must get married.

While he’s getting rid of his father, instead of Lady Chiltern, Mrs Cheveley arrives and, as arranged, is shown into Lord Goring’s drawing room. Lord Goring manages to get ride of his father but, on the doorstep of the apartment, as Lord Caversham is leaving, Sir Robert arrives. He has come to tell Lord Goring that his wife knows everything and beg for his help.

While Chiltern and Goring converse in another room, Mrs Cheveley finds Lady Chiltern’s letter open on a table before sneaking back into the drawing room. The two men come back onto the main stage and it is here that Sir Robert overhears a chair being banged in the drawing room and realises that someone is there! Someone has been eavesdropping while he pours his heart out! He makes Goring swear on his word of honour that there is no-one in there, but nonetheless storms in and, of course, sees Mrs Cheveley.

He comes out onto the main stage disgusted with Lord Goring who a) lied to him on his word of honour and b) he jumps to the conclusion is having an affair with the woman. Lord Goring, still under the misapprehension it is Lady Chiltern in the other room, makes a series of claims which are either comic or tragic, depending on how it is acted, claiming that the woman in there is blameless and loves him dearly.

Outraged, Sir Robert storms out at which point Mrs Cheveley enters the main room with a broad smile on her face. They revert to Wildean banter:

LORD GORING: I am glad you have called. I am going to give you some good advice.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh! pray don’t. One should never give a woman anything that she can’t wear in the evening.

Lord Chiltern discovers Mrs Cheveley in the drawing room and, convinced the two former lovers must be having an affair, he storms out of the house.

When Mrs Cheveley and Lord Goring confront each other, she makes a proposal. Claiming to still love Goring from their early days of courtship, she offers to exchange Chiltern’s letter for Goring’s hand in marriage. Lord Goring declines, accusing her of defiling love by reducing courtship to a vulgar transaction. Also, he can only despise her for evilly wishing to ruin the Chilterns’ marriage.

Then two dramatic things. 1) Mrs Cheveley says she never went back to the Chilterns’ house to taunt Lady Chiltern, but simply to retrieve the brooch she thought she must have lost there. This reminds Goring that it is in his possession and he takes it out. He charmingly points out that it can also be used as a bracelet and slips it onto Mrs Cheveley’s arm where it clicks fast. It is now that he reveals his plan. He reveals that he recognises this brooch because ten years earlier he gave it to his cousin, Mary Berkshire. At a country house weekend it went missing, presumed stolen, and the finger of blame pointed at a servant who was sacked. Now he has the evidence that Mrs Cheveley stole it. He is going to get his servant to call the police and present Mrs Cheveley with the incriminating bracelet on her arm. Furiously, she tries to claw it off but Lord Goring says it has a hidden spring which only he knows how to operate. He will remove the bracelet if she gives him Sir Robert’s letter. At first she refuses but then gives up, hands it over, Lord Goring burns it and then unclips the bracelet. Phew. Everything sorted, right?

BUT 2) earlier Mrs C had spotted Lady Chiltern’s note to Goring and, while he is offstage instructing his servants, she steals it from his desk. When he returns, she announces that she has it and plans to take revenge on Lord G by presenting it to Sir Robert as a love letter from Lady Chiltern to Goring. Goring tries to grab it back but a servant enters and one does not argue in front of the servants. And so Mrs Cheveley exits the house in triumph.

Act 4. Back to the morning room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house

Lord Goring is at Sir Robert’s house, waiting to see any of the family but they are all busy.

His father arrives and 1) there is the paternal badgering of him to get married; Goring jokes that he will be engaged by lunchtime which his father doesn’t know is a joke or not. But 2) his father brings a copy of the Times which reports Sir Robert’s speech in the House of Commons the night before, a thundering attack on the Argentine canal scheme and modern finance in general.

Mabel Chiltern arrives from her ride in the Park, the one which Lord Goring absolutely positively promised to meet her for and she comically ignores him for a while before relenting into banter. He announces that he is finally going to propose to her which she turns into banter by pointing out that it’s her second proposition that morning since Tommy Trafford has already made one.

MABEL CHILTERN: It is one of Tommy’s days for proposing. He always proposes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, during the Season.

Lady Chiltern appears, and Lord Goring tells her that Chiltern’s letter has been destroyed but that Mrs Cheveley has stolen her note and plans to use it to destroy her marriage. They are just planning how to get his secretaries to intercept the letter (written on pink paper) before it gets to Sir Robert when he enters reading it.

At that moment Lord Chiltern enters while reading Lady Chiltern’s letter, but as the letter does not have the name of the addressee he is assuming it was meant for him, and reads it as a letter of forgiveness. The two are reconciled. (To be honest I was expecting a lot more complication to be caused by this letter. All the possible complications it could have caused seem to be conveniently swept under the carpet.)

This leaves one last Big Issue, which is whether Sir Robert should remain in public life. He tentatively suggests to his wife that, although the evidence against him has been destroyed, maybe he should leave public life to which she replies: ‘Oh yes, Robert, you should do that. It is your duty to do that.’

With heavy dramatic irony it is at this moment that Lord Goring’s father, the egregious Lord Caversham appears again, having come hot foot from Number Ten bringing news that the Prime Minister has offered him a seat in the cabinet! He is astonished, thrilled and then…downcast, as he catches Lady Chiltern’s look. Very reluctantly he tells Caversham he will have to reject the offer and that he is giving up public life and goes into another room to write his letter of refusal.

Which, of course, allows Lord Goring to deliver a long speech saying forcing her husband to quit public life will not only ruin his life but kill his love for her, ruining both their lives. But he actually couches his argument in stupefyingly sexist terms:

LORD GORING: A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses.

Which is why she must forgive him, because women must forgive their men.

LORD GORING: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

As I’m always saying, the provocative paradoxes in some of the banter, the slightly camp attitude of some of the men, none of that supposedly ‘transgressive’ discourse can hold a candle to the thumpingly sexist, gender stereotyping which the plots of the plays absolutely rely on. Suffice to say that when Lord Chiltern re-enters the room, Lady Chiltern has changed her mind and tells him to remain in public life directly quoting Goring’s ‘A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s’ speech.

Right. So everything’s sorted, is it? Not quite. One last issue. Lord Chiltern has barely finished thanking Lord Goring for saving his career and his marriage, when Goring follows up by asking for his sister (Mabel)’s hand in marriage. To everyone’s surprise Sir Robert refuses! Why? Because he still thinks that he discovered Mrs Cheveley in Goring’s rooms at 10.30 last night (the lateness of the hour is crucial and is referred to by all the characters as the clinching argument) because they are still in love.

When Goring denies this, Sir Robert doesn’t believe him. It takes Lady Chiltern to overcome her scruples and reticence and confess to her husband that it was she who planned to visit Lord Goring to ask his help about what to do in her marriage, and that Lord Goring honestly thought he had her waiting in his drawing room, which is why he said those absurdly inappropriate things about Mrs Cheveley. This has the incidental effect of making clear that the letter on pink paper wasn’t a loving reconciliation addressed to Lord Chiltern but a cry for help addressed to Lord Goring.

Anyway, this sufficiently explains Goring’s behaviour the night before and Sir Robert smiling relents and awards Goring his sister’s hand. So, to conclude:

Lord and Lady Chiltern are reconciled and now live on a new, more realistic basic to their marriage in which both recognise the frailties and fallibility of the other
Mabel and Goring are engaged to be married
Lord Caversham is delighted that his son is finally doing the right thing
and lunch is served, a pale echo of the feasts which ended comic plays from the time of the ancient Greeks

The old couple reconciled, the young couple newly engaged. What could be more thumpingly conventional?

The journey from rectitude to sympathy

The moral storyline is the same as the previous two. A woman of rigorous, unbending, inflexible moral rectitude is forced to realise, through her own suffering, that people are more complicated, more fallible, and more deserving of understanding, compassion and sympathy, than she previously thought.

In the ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance’ the stern unbending female moralists were Lady Windermere and the young American, Miss Worsley. In this play it is stern Lady Chiltern:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: Lord My wife! Never! She does not know what weakness or temptation is. I am of clay like other men. She stands apart as good women do – pitiless in her perfection – cold and stern and without mercy.

It is Lady Chiltern who must learn to abandon her unbending morality and forgive her husband. The author’s message is delivered by the Wilde avatar in the play, raffish Lord Goring.

LORD GORING: No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

And:

LORD GORING: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

When you know how his own marriage was wrecked by the trial which revealed his secret gay life, it’s is hard not to be distressed at how little the charity and forgiveness promoted in his plays were available in his own tragic fall.

Wilde avatars

In all of these stories there is one male character who echoes, mimics or acts as the Wilde surrogate, or as the figure Wilde would like to be, so I call him the Wilde avatar, avatar being a Sanskrit word which means ‘an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea’, and so the embodiment, in the plays, of the ideal Wilde protagonist:

in his 30s (and so younger than Wilde, who turned 40 in 1894)
a genuine member of the aristocracy
an unattached man-about-town with a reputation for ‘wickedness’ i.e. saying the most outrageous things (not actual wickedness)
rich and idle
overflowing with witty and ‘shockingly’ unconventional repartee

These avatars are:

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Lord Henry Wotton
Lady Windermere’s Fan – Lord Darlington
A Woman of No Importance – Lord Illingworth
An Ideal Husband – Lord Goring
The Importance of Being Earnest – Jack Worthing

Apparently, Wilde added the elaborate stage directions and character descriptions after the play had been premiered. He really goes to town with the description of Lord Goring at the start of Act 3:

Enter Lord Goring in evening dress with a buttonhole. He is wearing a silk hat and Inverness cape. White-gloved, he carries a Louis Seize cane. His are all the delicate fopperies of Fashion. One sees that he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it. He is the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought.

Apothegms, one-liners, facetious remarks and

As I worked my way through the third Wilde play it struck me that the banter sometimes descends to pointless wittering welded onto a plot of stock melodrama (husband’s dark secret revealed to noble wife), something many critics pointed out at the time (I particularly like the contemporary critic William Archer’s view that ‘An Ideal Husband…simply suffers from a disproportionate profusion of inferior chatter’).

However, in a good production in the theatre, the welter of one-liners and bons mots – if well delivered – can carry the audience along, especially the repartee between witty Lord Goring and his sparring partner and beloved, clever young Mabel Chiltern.

Mocking their own high society milieu

LADY MARKBY: Ah, nowadays people marry as often as they can, don’t they? It is most fashionable.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?
LORD GORING: Most pretty women do. But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks.

Politics

LADY MARKBY: Sir John’s temper since he has taken seriously to politics has become quite unbearable. Really, now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

LADY MARKBY: Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
MRS CHEVELEY: The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so sadly.
LADY MARKBY: They do, dear. But I am afraid such a scheme would be quite unpractical. I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it?

The importance of artifice

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: May I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?
MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Casual mockery of expected sentiments

In this case sending up the Victorian expectation of filial piety.

LORD GORING: Really, I don’t want to meet my father three days running. It is a great deal too much excitement for any son. I hope to goodness he won’t come up. Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.

Men and women aka gender stereotyping

As I’ve noted in the first two plays, it is ironic that this hero of the LGBTQIA+ movement (which has made such efforts to question, undermine and subvert gender stereotypes) relies so heavily in these plays on the stereotyping of men and women in both the plot itself and in the endless conversation gambits based on sweeping generalisations about men and women, husbands and wives – what often feels like endless riffing off utterly conventional stereotypes, that there are two genders, that they behave like this, think like this, and so on.

MRS CHEVELEY: Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women . . . merely adored.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?
MRS CHEVELEY: Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: And women represent the irrational?
MRS CHEVELEY: Well-dressed women do.

LORD GORING: No man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out. Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

MRS CHEVELEY: My dear Arthur, women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.
LORD GORING: Women are never disarmed by anything, as far as I know them.

MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, there is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

Husbands and wives

LADY MARKBY: They do, dear. But I am afraid such a scheme would be quite unpractical. I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? With regard to women, well, dear Gertrude, you belong to the younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But modern women understand everything, I am told.
MRS CHEVELEY: Except their husbands. That is the one thing the modern woman never understands.
LADY MARKBY: And a very good thing too, dear, I dare say. It might break up many a happy home if they did.

You don’t have to be non-binary to find this kind of thing gets pretty wearing, pretty quickly.

Lord Goring, the Wilde avatar, posing as a wicked man

MABEL CHILTERN: How very selfish of you!
LORD GORING: I am very selfish.
MABEL CHILTERN: You are always telling me of your bad qualities, Lord Goring.
LORD GORING: I have only told you half of them as yet, Miss Mabel!
MABEL CHILTERN: Are the others very bad?
LORD GORING: Quite dreadful! When I think of them at night I go to sleep at once.

LORD GORING: My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don’t see why I shouldn’t give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

LORD CAVERSHAM: Do you always really understand what you say, sir?
LORD GORING: [After some hesitation.] Yes, father, if I listen attentively.

A basic conceit repeated at:

LORD CAVERSHAM: Humph! Never know when you are serious or not.
LORD GORING: Neither do I, father.

Why this is tiresome is that Lord Goring perfectly well does know when he’s being serious. When he makes his plea to lady Chiltern to forgive her husband and let him continue his public career, he is very consciously serious. This ‘I never know when I’m being serious’ trope is just a joke or a pose, which is dropped the second it has to be.

Author’s message

Same message as in ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance’, in both of which the stern unbending moralist (Lady Windermere and Miss Worsley) is taught compassion and forgiveness by realising their own fallibility. In this case it is stern unbending Lady Chiltern who must learn to abandon her unbending morality and forgive her husband, who learns that love is not holding people accountable to the highest standards, but forgiving people for their weakness and sins.

LORD GORING: No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

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by Simon on August 14, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on August 14, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/14/an-ideal-husband-oscar-wilde/

Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen (1989)

‘This is the worst year of my life, and it’s only the seventeenth of January.’
(Private investigator Mick Stranahan, Skin Tight, page 134)

Skin Tight is the third of Carl Hiaasen’s scathing and savagely satirical depictions of the corruption, greed and environmental destruction infesting his home state of Florida. If its predecessor, Double Whammy‘s central subject was the surprising corruption and violence surrounding coarse fishing and its big-stakes competitions, Skin Tight‘s central theme is plastic surgery. But, as usual, from the central topic all kinds of weird, macabre and violent threads spin off in all directions.

Mick Stranahan, Private Investigator, is the tough and capable guy we’re used to in the thriller genre. He has killed 5 men, some in Vietnam (p.21), been married and divorced five times (all to cocktail waitresses, p.90), now lives as an ‘outsider’, on a house on stilts built over the ocean ‘in the stretch of Biscayne Bay known as Stiltsville’ (p.11). (It’s worth noting in passing that Skink, Hiaasen’s great recurring character, also served in Vietnam.)

Mick had worked at the State’s Attorney’s office till he went to arrest a notoriously corrupt judge, Raleigh Gomper, who pulled a gun and, in the struggle, Stranahan shot Gomper dead. Though he was exonerated at the trial, shooting dead a judge didn’t sit well with an employee of the State Prosecutor and so Mick was forced to take early retirement. Hence, he is now a part-time private detective, the absolutely classic profession of the thriller genre, most famously embodied in Raymond Chandler‘s Philip Marlow.

Dr Rudolph ‘Rudy’ Graveline runs a plastic surgery clinic, the Whispering Palms Spa and Surgery Centre. In fact he himself is an unqualified butcher of a surgeon but is wise enough to concentrate on acting as the avuncular salesman and comforter of the nation’s many misfeatured and malshaped narcissists – taking their money but leaving the actual surgery to a team of four well-paid and infinitely more capable juniors.

The trigger for the plot is Maggie Gonzalez for Maggie knows that four years earlier, on 12 March 1986, Graveline ran a clinic called the Durkos Medical Centre and was giving a routine rhinoplasty (nose job) to a young woman, Victoria Barletta, when he accidentally killed her (p.39).

In a panic, Rudy called his brother, George Graveline, who had a gardening and tree surgeon business, and they disposed of the body in a timber grinder. When her family raised Victoria’s disappearance with the authorities, Rudy and all his staff swore she left the clinic after surgery, went and sat at the local bus stop but then disappeared, presumed kidnapped. To get them to agree to this cover story, he had to pay key members of his staff a hefty bribe. (A year or so later one of the doctors, Dr Kenneth Greer, tumbled to what had happened and started blackmailing Rudy, so Rudy paid for him to be disposed of in a ‘hunting accident’, p.285.)

Back to the present and, after a failed marriage and a series of pathetic failed relationships, Maggie is now broke and decides to cash in on what she knows (p.56). She goes to the New York office of a crime-investigating TV show, hosted by the unbearably preening TV presenter Reynaldo Flemm (who has a kinky penchant for doorstepping criminals and provoking them till he gets beaten up) and his long-suffering, clever and dishy producer, Christina Marks.

(It is typical of the duplicitousness of almost all the characters that we learn, late in the book, that the would-be smooth Hispanic Flemm is in fact really named Raymond Fleming and changed his name and appearance to appear more ethnic and glamorous.) Maggie tells Flemm and Marks her story and promises to repeat it on camera for $5,000.

Then it crosses Maggie’s scheming mind that she can probably have it both ways –getting money from the TV company and blackmailing the doctor – so she phones up Dr Rudy and says she’s scared because a Private Investigator, Mick Stranahan, has come snooping and seems to be about to revive the case. She has Mick’s name and number from back before he retired, was still an active prosecutor, and was briefly involved in the initial investigation. Now she just whistles his name up out of thin air as an entirely fictional threat solely in order to gouge more greenbacks out of Rudy.

Mick knows nothing about any of this but Maggie’s ploy not only persuades Dr Rudy to cough up some more hush money for Maggie but sets him thinking how to eliminate Mick as a threat. And so it is that when the TV people, Flemm and Marks, arrange a meeting with Dr Rudy, telling him they know all about the fatal accident though refusing to reveal their source, Rudy mistakenly believes that their source really is Stranahan (not, as it actually is, Maggie) and that Mick is about to blow the whole story and get him arrested for murder.

Thus it is that, based on this misunderstanding (Maggie’s deception), Rudy decides he has to get rid of Mick and so phones a contact in New Jersey, ‘Curly Eyebrows’. Rudy used to do basic plastic surgery for the Mob up there, nothing too complicated, just nose jobs and tummy tucks for the wives. Now he uses these contacts to hire a Mafia hitman, Tony ‘the Eel’ Traviola (p.59).

The novel opens with Mick innocently sitting on the decking of his house out in the bay, watching the boat approaching carrying a guy who we, the readers, know to be this hitman. You don’t get many strangers round these parts so Mick retreats into his house, takes down the stuffed marlin head from the wall and, when the hitman makes his move, standing in the doorway with gun in hand, Mick leaps out and thrusts the marlin’s long frontal spike into the man’s chest, severing his aorta and snapping his spine. Ah. Oh.

All this information is conveyed in the book’s first 30 pages, as a scene-setter or prologue, a kind of powerhouse of information structuring and communication.

Undeterred, Rudy hires a second hitman who will turn out to dominate the novel, a freak called Chemo, 6 feet 9 inches feet tall. Chemo acquired his nickname after suffering a catastrophic accident during a routine electrolysis treatment for a couple of unsightly pores on his nose. The surgeon, Dr Kyle Koppner, had a stroke and swept the electrolysis machine right across Chemo’s face, with the result that it looks like it’s made of Rice Krispies.

He looked like Fred Munster with bulimia. (p.207)

In agony, Chemo killed Koppner on the spot. For added incongruity, Hiaasen gives Chemo (real name Blondell Wayne Tatum, age 38, six foot nine, p.223) a long convoluted backstory which has him orphaned at an early age, raised by the Amish relatives, before he finally rebels and holds up a bank,. However, Chemo then (typically for Hiaasen) discovers he has a talent for local politics, with its combination of intimidation and corruption. But the facial disfigurement and the murder of the doctor abruptly ends his career in politics which, in America, is all about appearance.

The plot ramifies outwards like ripples in a lake. We learn that Gravelines had planned to invest some of his millions in a crooked real estate deal at a property named Old Cypress Towers. When he comes under pressure from – as he incorrectly believes – Mick Stranahan, he lets the crooked authorities who were taking bribes to let the planning permission go ahead, know that he is going to pull out unless something is done about Stranahan.

And so the head of the cabal of crooked local councillors, Roberto Pepsical, goes to see two of the thickest, slimiest cops on the police force, Joe Salazar and John Murdock, and tells them there’s greenbacks in it for them if they can get rid of Stranahan.

Meanwhile, Stranahan, realising someone is out to kill him, calls up his philandering brother-in-law, Kipper Garth (married to Stranahan’s sister, Kate), a supposed lawyer who in fact runs a sort of phone sales operation which chases claims of malpractice or injury and passes them on to reputable lawyers (pages 113 to 114) in what he calls ‘the referral racket’ (p.309).

Stranahan tells Garth that, for once, he’s going to have to prosecute an actual case himself, against Rudy, and hands over files of over a dozen patients of Dr Gravelines who have made various failed attempts to sue him. Pick one and sue him for real, Stranahan tells his brother-in-law, otherwise he’ll tell his wife all about Garth’s numerous infidelities which, with his connections at the Prosecutor’s office, Mick has managed to get documentary evidence about.

The plot then thickens over 400 pages of increasing complications, farcical twists and violent outbursts:

Maggie goes to New York and records a video giving her eye-witness account of the death of Victoria Barletta. Rudy pays Chemo to track her down and kill her but, when he finally confronts her in her New York hotel room, Maggie is so touchingly sympathetic about his face and his crippled hand that they end up becoming an extremely odd item. It helps that she herself has just undergone some plastic surgery with a view to changing her identity, so they can compare scars.

Mick gets to know the TV producer Christina and ends up having an affair with her, showing her the delights of nature, far from the city, making love under the stars on the decking of his house on stilts.

Improbably but comically Rudy Graveline has an affair with a stunningly good-looking model and TV star, Heather Chappell, who insists he operate on her even though her body is absolutely perfect. To get a discount for the operation, Heather lets Rudy screw him every which way in a variety of unexpected locations.

Detective Al García from Dade-Miami Police Department (who Hiaasen fans will recognise from the first two novels) shows up, sympathetic to Stranahan but representing a kind of recurring threat that he (Mick) might be arrested at various points when various congeries of evidence point against him. For example, García doesn’t believe Stranahan’s claim that he has nothing to do with the macabre deaths of the two corrupt cops.

However, Stranahan steals a copy of the video in which Maggie describes the killing of Victoria Barletta and shows it to García who from that point onwards becomes a staunch ally.

In a dramatic scene Mick visits Rudy’s brother, George Graveline, at work as a tree surgeon. His questions rattle George so much that he whacks Stranahan over the head with a mahogany log and starts to feed his unconscious body into the timber shredder. However, García, who is quietly tailing Stranahan, sees this all happen and shoots Graveline, who drops Stranahan and himself falls head-first into the shredder and is blattered all over the place as Mick woozily regains consciousness.

Maggie reveals to Chemo the gravity of Rudy’s crime (murder) emphasising that Rudy is paying him an insultingly small amount. Angered, Chemo uses his garden strimmer on Graveline’s new apple red Jaguar.

Rudy takes a heavy suitcase containing $25,000 to meet the corrupt commissioner Roberto Pepsical in the confessional of a Catholic church but as they kneel, Rudy injects Pepsical with enough potassium to cause a massive heart attack, packs up and discreetly leaves. He is becoming a serial killer.

Meanwhile Kipper Garth had some luck with one of the plaintiffs Mick had turned up, one John Nordstrom who paid Rudy for his wife, Marie, to have a boob job which was so bad the boobs in question became rock hard and one day, during sex, she moved quickly and literally had his eye out, being blind in one eye leading him (Nordstrom) to lose his job as an air traffic controller. Savage comedy.

Garth pops round with the legal papers to see the couple and discovers that John is at work, in his new job as a sports coach. Seeing an opportunity, slimy Garth talks the wife, Marie, into letting him touch her rock hard boobs. He’s in the middle of doing it just when John walks in. John’s new job as as a jai-alai coach and so quick as a flash he fires off a hardball with his wicker-glove which hits Garth at the back of the skull, knocking him unconscious to the floor.

Maggie and Chemo help Rudy sell Reymondo Flemm’s corpse to a man named Kimbler who sells body parts to schools and colleges in Central America.

At some point in all this mayhem Chemo kidnaps Christina the TV producer from her hotel under Rudy’s orders. Rudy gets a messenger to deliver a ransom note to Mick out on his stilt house. However, Mick bites back by kidnapping the actress Heather Chappell who Rudy is boffing and taking her back to his house on the sea, leaving a written note for Rudy and his gang to bring Christina out to the house for a hostage exchange.

And it is this exchange of the two women which forms the climax of the novel: Rudy, Chemo, Maggie and their hostage Christina turn up in a boat at Mick’s stilt house expecting to do a hostage swap for beautiful Heather. Except Heather doesn’t want to go. Rudy had promised he’d give her light plastic surgery all over, had doped her out for a day, covered her in bandages and lied that he’d done the procedures. After kidnapping her, Stranahan removes all the bandages and proves that her ‘boyfriend’ is a liar. So now Heather doesn’t want to go back to Rudy.

Rudy, Christina, Chemo and Maggie clamber aboard Mick’s deck but as she gives him a helping push upwards, Maggie pickpockets from Chemo the keys to her and Chemo’s motel room, where they’ve stashed all the loot they’ve stolen from Rudy, meaning to head back by herself and take it all. When Chemo realises she’s done this he dives on top of her to seriously hurt her but Stranahan knocks him out with the butt of his shotgun.

When Chemo comes round, the boat has left with the women, Christina, Heather and Maggie. It’s just the men in the stilt house, Mick, Chemo and Rudy.

Mich has handcuffed Rudy spreadeagled to his bed. Mick has a cunning plan. He is going to recreate a nosejob on Rudy in order to terrify him into confessing everything, how he killed Victoria Barletta, got rid of the body, paid for a hit on the doctor colleague who was blackmailing him, hired Chemo to kill Mick, and so on.

But as the interrogation reaches its vital moment and as he has a small cold metal chisel stuck up Rudy’s nose as if he really is going to break the bone, unexpectedly Chemo gives it a big whack with a hammer and it goes right up into Rudy’s brain, killing him instantly. Shit. Stranahan had promised García he would hand over the culprit to the murder along with a full confession. Shit. Mick is going to have to come up with a plan B.

In the short concluding chapter Detective Al García is motorboated out to the stilt house by Luis Córdova, a young marine patrolman who regularly calls by Stranahan’s house, a good guy, where they find Chemo by himself with the corpse of Rudy Graveline. No Mick anywhere. The cops immediately jump to a false conclusion about what must have happened. They mistakenly assume that Chemo lured Rudy out here and subjected him to a torture which went gruesomely wrong. It all fits together. The bad guys are either dead or going to gaol.

When they look for Mick Stranahan there is no sign and his skiff is holed and sunk under the house. Off in the distance, hard to focus on, García thinks he sees a porpoise or giant turtle amid the waves. Couldn’t be a man. Couldn’t be Mick Stranahan swimming in the distance. Nah. He turns back to the murder suspect. It is a happy ending. Sort of.

Gruesome violence

‘It’s like a nightmare of weirdness.’ Al García (p.323)

The book is littered with cruel, grotesque and macabre violent incidents:

Chemo’s face being wrecked by a plastic surgeon having a stroke.
Mick killing the hitman Tony ‘the Eel’ Traviola with the spear of a stuffed marlin.
For a spell, Chemo hooks up with Chloe Simpkins Stranahan, one of Mick’s ex-wives. She tells Chemo that when Mick found her shagging one of the many men she was unfaithful with, Mick didn’t beat him up but glued him by the testicles to the bonnet of an Eldorado convertible (p.74).
Chloe eggs Chemo on to burn down Mick’s shack but eventually makes the bad mistake of ridiculing Chemo’s appearance while they’re driving a speedboat through the lagoons, with the result that Chemo chucks the boat’s 30 pound anchor at her, which knocks her straight over the side and down to the bottom of the lagoon, drowning her (p.99).
Mick feeds fish to a huge barracuda which likes to idle in the shade beneath his house on stilts. When Chemo comes to kill him, Mick shoots Chemo backwards off the decking and into the water where Chemo’s splashing attracts the big fish which darts up and bites off Chemo’s hand. Chemo survives and makes it back to civilisation where he goes to see a doctor. They offer him various prosthetic replacements, but Chemo’s preferred option takes across the narrative across a border into Hiaasen bizarro land when Chemo attaches a mini-lawn strimmer, a Weed Whacker, to his stump, powered by a battery tucked under his armpit, and which he uses to devastating effect in the second half of the book.
When the corrupt cops Joe Salazar and John Murdock hire a boat to motor out to Mick’s lake hideaway and bump him off, as ordered by their corrupt superior (in fact Mick is now staying in the rundown cabin of an old buddy, after his own house on stilts has been ransacked), Mick doesn’t wait for a shootout but ties super-strong fishing twine across the narrow entrance to the lagoon front of the house so that the two cops, approaching in a boat at 42 miles per hour, are instantly garroted. Well, one of them is, the other one takes a while to die in agony (chapter 23).
Stranahan goes to see George Graveline to try and get him to talk his brother into laying off the assassination attempts. George makes a bid to strangle Stranahan who punches him under the heart then in the balls, then treads on his neck to calm him down, then kneels down next to him to carry on the conversation. At which point George whacks him with a chunk of mahogany and starts feeding Stranahan’s unconscious body into the timber shredder. At which point, García, who’d accompanied Stranahan to the meeting but stayed in the car, shoots George Graveline who himself falls into the timber shredder and is shredded to a pulp and bone splinters (p.282).

See what I mean by violent and macabre?

But the cherry on the cake is the incident near the end of the novel when Reynaldo Flemm decides to go undercover at Dr Graveline’s clinic in order to get a TV scoop. He checks in under the false name Johnny LeTigre pretending to be a male stripper who needs liposuction and a nose job. The plan is that Flemm’s cameraman, Willie will burst in mid-nose job, toss Reynaldo a microphone and the latter will bombard Graveline with cutting questions about the Victoria Barletta murder and so get a TV exclusive.

But the plan all goes horribly wrong. 1. Instead of doing the nose job first, Graveline decides to do the liposuction, which requires a general anaesthetic so Flemm can neither shout out instructions to his cameraman loitering outside, carry out an interview or anything. 2. Graveline is an unqualified incompetent who barely knows what he’s doing. 3. When Willie finally finds the correct operating theatre and bursts in, distracting Graveline with his bright TV lights and bewildering questions, Graveline is so put off his stroke that he pushes the liposuction tube (the cannula) beyond the narrow band of fat he’s meant to be sucking out and deep into Reynaldo’s gut, sucking out one by one all his vital organs and killing him (chapter 30). Gruesome.

Clothes

There’s something deeply wrong and corrupt about a worldview which happily accepts the most violent incidents, corruption and casual murder, but is obsessed with identifying the exact labels and brands of what people are wearing:

[Flemm] was wearing another pair of khaki Banana Republic trousers and a baggy denim shirt. He smelled like a bucket of Brut. (p.50)
[Tina] wore a baggy Jimmy Buffett T-shirt over a cranberry bikini bottom. (p.86)
[Stranahan] was barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and a khaki short-sleeved shirt, open to the chest. (p.87)
[Chloe] was wearing a ridiculous white sailor’s suit from Lord and Taylor’s. (p.94)
[Al García]’s J.C. Penney coat jacket was slung over one arm, and his shiny necktie was loosened half-way down his chest. (p.101)
Kipper Garth wore grey European-cut slacks, a silk paisley necktie and a bone-coloured shirt, the French cuffs rolled up to his elbows. (p.114)
Stranahan had worn a pressed pair of jeans, a charcoal sports jacket, brown loafers and no socks. (p.132)
He saw a god-looking woman in a white cottony top and tan safaris shorts hop off the shrimp boat… (p.149)
The man wore blue jeans, boots and a flannel shirt with the left sleeve cut away. (p.167)
Chemo was dressed in a tan safari outfit… (p.183)
She wore a red windbreaker, baggy knit pants, and high-top tennis shoes. (p.227)
Christina wore a tartan flannel shirt, baggy grey workout trousers, and running shoes. Stranahan worse jeans, sneakers, and a University of Miami sweatshirt. (p.248)
Rudy Graveline was wearing a tan sports jacket and dark, loose-fitting pants and a brown striped necktie (p.278).
[Marie Nordstrom] wore electric-blue Lycra body tights, and her ash-blond hair was pulled back in a girlish ponytail. (p.310)
[Rudy] was wearing Topsiders, tan cotton pants, and a Bean crewneck pullover. (p.351)
[Stranahan] wore blue jeans, deck shoes, a pale yellow cotton shirt and a poplin windbreaker. (p.353)

Odd that so many modern American writers are so obsessively precise about clothes and brands and so utterly indifferent to the value of human life.

Anti-Florida

Amazing that a man with such a bilious view of his own home state could keep a job on its premiere newspaper and in some sense become its literary representative, despite the outrageous examples of corruption he chronicles in his novels, and the throwaway references to the ubiquity of corruption and graft at every level of Florida life.

One of the wondrous things about Florida, Rudy Graveline thought as he chewed on a jumbo shrimp, was the climate of unabashed corruption; there was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you. (p.108)

When some of his maltreated patients organise a suit against Graveline, he simply buys the hearing officer a shiny new Volvo station wagon and all charges are dropped. Not only that, but:

The board immediately reinstated Rudy’s licence and sealed all the records from the public and the press – thus honouring the long-held philosophy of Florida’s medical establishment that the last persons who need to know about a doctor’s incompetence are his patients. (p.109)

All the commissioners have off-the-record accounts in the Cayman Islands to stash the earnings they make through corruption and graft (p.110).

Commissioner Roberto Pepsical… found himself surrounded by ruthless and untrustworthy people – nobody played a straight game any more. In Miami corruption had become a sport for the masses. (p.228)

Miami, home of corruption and coke dealers.

Half the new Miami skyscrapers had been built with coke money and existed largely as an inside joke, a mirage to please the banks and the Internal Revenue Service and the chamber of commerce. Everyone liked to say that the skyline was a tribute to local prosperity but Stranahan recognised it as a tribute to the anonymous genius of Latin American money launderers. (p.316)

And crooked lawyers:

‘But lawyers aren’t supposed to solicit.’
‘Al, this is Miami.’ (p.324)

And all-purpose criminals:

‘Neighbourhoods like this are hard to find, Mick. You know, we’ve only been burglarised twice in four years. That’s not bad for Miami.’ (p. 322)

Hiaasen does have a few good characters: Luis Córdova, a young marine patrolman who regularly calls by Stranahan’s house, in his boat, warns him if trouble is coming. The old black guy, Cartwright, who Stranahan helped in a battle with crooked property developers back in the day (is there any other kind?).

And he creates a heavily symbolic figure, Timmy Gavigan, a retired cop who is lying in a hospital bed far gone with terminal cancer. He’s an old friend of Stranahan’s who visits him several times during the course of the novel, as does the TV producer Christina Marks as part of her investigations.

Gavigan is pretty obviously designed as a symbol of old-school Integrity and so it is no accident that he’s wasting away and dying, symbol of an old world of integrity and decency being drowned in a sea of scumbags.

There’s a scene where Gavigan is in bed, barely able to breathe, being visited by compassionate Christina, when the two piggish and corrupt cops, Joe Salazar and John Murdock, barge in and try to bully Gavigan into incriminating Stranahan, while she tries to moderate their behaviour. Worthy old symbol of honour harassed to the grave by swinish corruption.

Against this one good man is set a panorama of everyday corruption at every level and in every area of Florida life. And the terrible thing about corruption is it’s so dynamic, it has so much energy.

The county had hired [George Graveline, Rudy’s tree-trimming brother] to rip out the old trees to make space for some tennis courts. Before long a restaurant would spring up next to the tennis courts and, after that, a major resort hotel. The people who would run the restaurant and the hotel would receive the use of the public property for practically nothing, thanks to their pals on the county commission. In return, the commissioners would receive a certain secret percentage of the refreshment concessions. And the voters would have brand-new tennis courts, whether they wanted them or not. (p.275)

Anti-American

From time to time, Hiaasen suggests it’s not just Florida, that the vista of unreasoned violence and chaos which he so furiously depicts extends out across the entire United States. For example, he jokily refers to the occurrence of the ‘regular’ mass shooting in Oklahoma as if mass shootings are now a boringly familiar occurrence; or jokes that a shootout and fight at Chemo’s New York apartment (when Chemo finds Stranahan has broken in and is going through his things) barely even makes the papers in that ultra-violent city (p.223).

There are numerous other minor, casual incidents which highlight the casual sexism, violence and cynicism of American culture. At the start of the novel Mick boats it back to the house on stilts to discover that while he’s away a speedboat of young people has deposited their young women to sunbathe (nude) on his decking while the guys goof around and waterski on the boat.

Mick is polite to the women, who quickly cover up and is only a little disconcerted when one of them, Tina, strolls into his shack and asks him to assess her naked body. Why? Because she wants to have plastic surgery to perfect it.

But the point of the story is that when the young men return to the shack, Tina’s boyfriend, Richie, is jealous when he sees her walking out of the shack naked and accompanied by Mick. Mick courteously ferries the girls out to their boyfriends’ boat and has turned and is making away, when he hears and sees Tina’s boyfriend start badmouthing her and then smacking her. Mick turns his skiff round, jumps onto the speedboat and beats the crap out of the boyfriend.

I take the point that Mick is a beacon of chivalry in a sleazy shitty world but… not really. He himself is liable to violent rages and violent attacks. Everyone is. It comes over as a very, very violent place.

Even without the corruption, violence and killing, Hiaasen often appears to simply not like Americans, especially the chavvy scum he sees visiting the Sunshine State.

[Maggie and Chemo] got in line at the Pan Am counter, surrounded by a typical Miami-bound contingent – old geezers with tubas for sinuses; shiny young hustlers in thin gold chains; huge hollow-eyes families that looked like they’d staggered out of a Sally Struthers telethon. (p.221)

Bands

An entertainingly comic thread running through the book is the way that Chemo, in between his jaunts as a hit man, has a crappy job as a bouncer at a low-rent venue called the Gay Bidet, which hosts a succession of ‘punk’ rock bands, such as the Fudge Packers (p.163), Cathy and the Catheters, Queen of Slut Rock (p.236) or the Fabulous Foreskins (p.302).

I found these band names, and the fights which generally break out at the gigs between neo-Nazis and rednecks or rival gangs of skinheads, much more realistic and fun than any of the laboured, would-be ‘cool’ band references in the rock-obsessed novels of William Gibson.

Mind you, Hiaasen’s rock references are nearly as dated as Gibson’s. As a test to see whether they’re going to be compatible, Stranahan routinely asks his girlfriends to name the Beatles. Most fail. After sleeping with young Tina (who he rescued from her violent boyfriend and who, later, comes back to see him alone) a couple of times, Mick realises she’s far too young for him and, when she fails to name all the members of the Beatles, gives that as a reason for dumping her.

Whereas when he eases into an affair with the investigative TV producer, Christina Marks, taking her nude swimming at midnight etc, the fact that she not only names all four members of the Beatles but throws in early member Pete Best, jokily cements the affair (p.248). 1989 it was published, nearly 20 years after the Beatles split up. Hiaasen comes over as a textbook example of ageing Dad Rock.

Human relationships

I know it’s meant to be grotesquely extreme and fiercely satirical, but Hiaasen’s novels confirm the sense I get whenever I watch modern American TV or read about American novels or movies, which is that – Americans have stopped being able to relate to each other as decent human beings.

Everyone in Hiaasen’s fiction uses everyone else instrumentally, as tools to an end: the bad guys egregiously so, but even the good guys like Brian Keyes or R.J. Decker (in the previous two novels) or Mick Stranahan in this one, they also manipulate and use the other human beings around them, lying, deceiving and manipulating as necessary to achieve their goals.

There’s no-one in these novels who isn’t a crook or a user, in the sense of someone who takes advantage of or exploits others. The relentlessly bilious cynicism can, eventually, become a little wearing. And so, despite the presence of many comical and farcical moments, the book somehow lacks the joi de satiriser of the first two novels, the sprezzatura. The portrait of a society mired in corruption and casual violence is too persuasive and too depressing.

The name’s Bond

In my reviews of William Gibson’s novels I pointed out the slight but detectable ‘anxiety of influence’ they evince, the text’s feeling that, at key moments, it is veering very close to James Bond territory (Machiavellian mastermind, handsome omni-competent hero, dishy woman, state-of-the-art gadgets) and how Gibson tries to address and defuse the perception with a couple of jokey references to Bond movies or villains.

Interestingly, Hiaasen does the same. Sooner or later one or other of the characters realises the all-action adventure they’re in is coming perilously close to Bond territory, and Hiaasen anticipates the reader twigging this by making his own jokey reference. In the previous novel the slippery vamp, Lanie, tells the hero that her favourite Bond is Sean Connery. Here, the reference comes when Mick’s ex-wife Chloe is goading Chemo:

‘Have you got your plan?’ Chloe asked
‘The less you know, the better.’
‘Oh, pardon me,’ she said caustically. ‘Pardon me, Mr James Fucking Bond.’ (p.95)

Soon afterwards Chemo chucks the anchor at Chloe which drags her to the bottom of the lagoon and drowns her. Don’t mention Bond. That said the book contains more references to the TV series Miami Vice which was undergoing an explosion of popularity at the time and, maybe, threatened to steal Hiaasen’s thunder. In America, competition, for everything, is always fierce (pages 307, 348).

Recurring characters

Mick Stranahan returns to feature in Hiaasen’s 2004 novel Skinny Dip.

Chemo returns in the 2010 novel, Star Island.

Credit

Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1989. Page references are to the 1991 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

Carl Hiaasen reviews

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by Simon on May 21, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Comedy, Novel

Posted by Simon on May 21, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/21/skin-tight-carl-hiaasen/

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An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895)

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Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen (1989)

Gruesome violence

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Anti-Florida

Anti-American

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Human relationships

The name’s Bond

Recurring characters

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Carl Hiaasen reviews

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