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Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson (1920)

The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other.
(Chapter 4)

‘Any news?’ he asked.
(Riseholme’s catchphrase, Chapter 9)

Georgie explained the absence of his sisters and the advent of an atrocious dog.
‘He’s very fierce,’ he said, ‘but he likes jam.’
(Chapter 5)

When an irremediable annoyance has absolutely occurred, the only possible thing for a decent person to do is to take it as lightly as possible.
(Chapter 6)

‘Come into my house instantly, and we’ll drink vermouth. Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic, but we’ll hope for the best.’
(High-spirited Olga, Chapter 11)

E.F. Benson

‘Queen Lucia’ is a 1920 comic novel written by Edward Frederick (E.F.) Benson. Born in 1867, Benson came from a very pukka family; when he was born, his father was headmaster of Wellington School (in Somerset) and went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a prolific writer of popular comic fiction, with a side line in ghost stories. His breakthrough novel was ‘Dodo’, back in 1893 when he was 26, a satire on the composer and militant suffragette, Ethel Smyth. But he is best remembered for the series of six Mapp and Lucia novels which began 27 years later.

Queen Lucia

‘Queen Lucia’ is the first of six novels in the popular Mapp and Lucia series depicting provincial, posh, snobbish ladies and their struggles for social dominance in their tiny village communities. It was Benson’s first popular hit since ‘Dodo’ a generation earlier and established a new subject and manner which he successfully mined for the rest of his career, in the six novels and two stories which make up the series.

The ‘queen’ in question is Emmeline Lucas, who thinks of herself as the social queen of the quaint Elizabethan village of Riseholme, a hotbed of pretentious would-be arts and culture enthusiasts. Symptomatic of her pretentious approach is the way she refers to herself, Emmeline Lucas, as Lucia and her husband Philip, a retired barrister, as Peppino.

Though Mrs Lucas’s parents had bestowed the name of Emmeline on her, it was not to be wondered at that she was always known among the more intimate of her subjects as Lucia, pronounced, of course, in the Italian mode – La Lucia, the wife of Lucas; and it was as ‘Lucia mia’ that her husband hailed her.

Lucia has a best friend, the foppish, forty-year old George ‘Georgie’ Pillson, her aide-de-camp, her ‘faithful lieutenant’ in the endless war for cultural supremacy of Riseholme:

Lucia put on the far-away look which she reserved for the masterpieces of music, and for Georgie’s hopeless devotion (p.265)

He dyes his hair, passes the time with embroidery or pastel drawing, and accompanies dear Lucia on her piano duets. While Lucia’s chief rival in these genteel conflicts is her ‘friend’, Daisy Quantock (husband, Robert), enthusiastic devotee of every passing fad.

Riseholme

This deliberately quaint little village has a high street, a duck pond, a pub – ‘that undoubtedly Elizabethan hostelry, the Ambermere Arms’ – and a village green where its inhabitants circulate every morning avid for gossip. When the story opens the undisputed monarch of this little domain is Lucia.

Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism of maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queen was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracy pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were toppling, and imperial crowns whirling like dead leaves down the autumn winds.

Like everything else in the book, the self-obsession of Riseholme is extraordinarily exaggerated. Early on Lucia returns from a trip to London and when her husband asks about it, the resulting dialogue reveals that they really genuinely consider London a kind of hopeless backwater, compared to Riseholme, which is where true art and creativity and integrity flourish:

‘And how was London?’ he asked in the sort of tone in which he might have enquired after the health of a poor relation, who was not likely to recover. She smiled rather sadly.
‘Terrifically busy about nothing… I think this Riseholme life with its finish and its exquisiteness spoils one for other places. London is like a railway-junction: it has no true life of its own. There is no delicacy, no appreciation of fine shades. Individualism has no existence there; everyone gabbles together, gabbles and gobbles…’

Later on, when the classical singer Olga Bracely announces that she is buying a cottage in the village with the declaration that it is a charming ‘backwater’, Georgie believes she can only say such a thing because she hasn’t yet realised that Riseholme is the centre of the universe.

True, she had said that she was coming here because it was so ideally lazy a backwater, but Georgie did not take that seriously. She would soon see what Riseholme was when its life poured down in spate, whirling her punt along with it. (p.127)

And that is exactly what she comes to believe by the end of the novel:

‘Oh, it’s all so delicious!’ she said. ‘I never knew before how terribly interesting little things were. It’s all wildly exciting, and there are fifty things going on just as exciting. Is it all of you who take such a tremendous interest in them that makes them so absorbing, or is it that they are absorbing in themselves, and ordinary dull people, not Riseholmites, don’t see how exciting they are? Tommy Luton’s measles: the Quantocks’ secret: Elizabeth’s lover! And to think that I believed I was coming to a backwater.’ (p.259)

Gossip

The inhabitants of Riseholme live for gossip, are gluttonous for news. Every morning they circulate on the village green, bumping into each other and fiercely competitive to possess and impart the latest gossip in what Benson jocosely calls the village ‘parliaments’.

The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other. They went about from shop to shop on household businesses, occasionally making purchases which they carried away with them in little paper parcels with convenient loops of string, but the real object of these excursions was to see what everybody else was doing, and learn what fresh interests had sprung up like mushrooms during the night. (p.58)

And he who corners a piece of gossip (as Georgie often does), seethes with self-congratulation and happiness, and a glorious sense of superiority, and spends ages deciding who to share it with to maximum effect.

Georgie felt very much like a dog with a bone in his mouth, who only wants to get away from all the other dogs and discuss it quietly. It is safe to say that never in twenty-four hours had so many exciting things happened to him. He had ordered a toupée, he had been looked on with favour by a Guru, all Riseholme knew that he had had quite a long conversation with Lady Ambermere and nobody in Riseholme, except himself, knew that Olga Bracely was going to spend two nights here.

Lucia

Mrs Emmeline Lucas refers to herself as Lucia. She is a fantastic epitome of 1920s intellectual snobbery for whom speaking Italian is the quintessence of civilisation. She is obsessed by Beethoven, the first movement of whose Moonlight sonata she practices over and over again.

Lucia’s husband made his pile as a barrister in London. He is now retired and writes prose poems, is the author of two slim volumes, ‘Flotsam’ and ‘Jetsam’, printed:

not of course in the hard business-like establishment of London, but at ‘Ye Sign of ye Daffodil’, on the village green, where type was set up by hand, and very little, but that of the best, was printed.

Lucia considers herself responsible for turning Riseholme from a labourers’ village into a palace of culture. Her tea parties, performances on the pianoforte, her dinners, her tableaux featuring classical characters, are all legendary in the village.

Lucia lives in three cottages which she and Philip bought, knocked together, festooned with period features, and named ‘the Hurst’. Behind it is the Shakespeare Garden where only flowers mentioned in Shakespeare plays are grown. All the bedrooms are named after Shakespearian characters of plays, Hamlet, Othello, Midsummer Night’s Dream.

One of Lucia’s characteristics is her ‘silvery laugh’ with which, more often than not, she tries to laugh off yet another humiliation.

Queens, thrones and wars

The thing is that the metaphor of Lucia being queen of Riseholme is not a casual, peripheral joke. It is central to the book’s conception and the narrative abounds with metaphors of wars, campaigns, strategies, calls to arms and so on, from large events such as a garden party, right down to the individual cut and thrust of dialogue.

The competition for cultural supremacy is absolutely unremitting and colours all the thoughts of all the characters all the time. Eventually this comes to seem bizarre, almost surreal. Thus when the newcomer, Olga Bracely, threatens to become the new cultural supremo of the village, Lucia reacts:

Lucia had not determined on this declaration of war without anxious consideration. But it was quite obvious to her that the enemy was daily gaining strength, and therefore the sooner she came to open hostilities the better, for it was equally obvious to her mind that Olga was a pretender to the throne she had occupied for so long. It was time to mobilise, and she had first to state her views and her plan of campaign to the chief of her staff. (p.204)

You see how the entire thing is couched in military metaphors? They sprinkle the text:

Then with poor generalship, Lucia altered her tactics, and went up to the Village Green…

With the eye of the true general, he saw that he could most easily break the surrounding cordon by going off in the direction of Colonel Boucher…

By this time Georgie had got a tolerable inkling of the import of all this. It was not at present to be war; it was to be magnificent rivalry, a throwing down perhaps of a gauntlet, which none would venture to pick up. (p.165)

During dinner, according to Olga’s plan of campaign, the conversation was to be general, because she hated to have two conversations going on when only four people were present, since she found that she always wanted to join in the other one. (p.181)

Really it was rather magnificent, and it was war as well; of that there could not be the slightest doubt. (p.205)

The mock heroic

The entire thing is a peculiarly English, domestic example of the mock heroic. According to the Wikipedia article:

Mock-heroic or mock-epic works are typically satires or parodies that mock the elevated style of Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works by either putting a fool in the role of the hero or painting trivial subjects in heroic style.

That is exactly what happens here. Every new nugget of village gossip, every plan for a tea party or dinner, even down to individual conversational gambits, are all described as if they’re campaigns from the Napoleonic wars, major battles complete with battle plans, strategies and tactics. Here’s a little exchange which epitomises the mock heroic use of war metaphors:

Mrs Quantock, still impotently rebelling, resorted to the most dire weapon in her armoury, namely, sarcasm.
‘Perhaps, darling Lucia,’ she said, ‘it would be well to ask my Guru if he has anything to say to your settlings. England is a free country still, even if you happen to have come from India.’
Lucia had a deadlier weapon than sarcasm, which was the apparent unconsciousness of there having been any. For it is no use plunging a dagger into your enemy’s heart, if it produces no effect whatever on him. (p.73)

In a couple of places Benson breaks cover, as it were, and actually cites the classics almost in the manner of Homer et al:

Her passion, like Hyperion’s, had lifted her upon her feet, and she stood there defying the whole of the advanced class, short and stout and wholly ridiculous… (p.137)

Her whole scheme flashed completely upon her, even as Athene sprang full-grown from the brain of Zeus. (p.213)

He waited rather hopefully for their return, for Peppino, he felt sure, was bored with this Achilles-attitude of sitting sulking in the tent. (p.242)

Gay and camp

Benson was gay though, necessarily in the society of his time, concealed it. But as homosexual art and practice have been more openly celebrated over recent decades, critics have more openly discussed the camp aspect of the novels. Camp is, in a sense, a variety of mock heroic. Classic camp makes mountains out of molehills, wildly over-reacts to the trivial, simply adores those new shoes, ear-rings etc, just loves that haircut, simply worships the new Madonna look etc.

This gay aspect of the book is most obvious in the character of the self-involved Georgie, ostensibly devoted to Queen Lucia while all the time bitchily conspiring against her, fussing about his hair and toupee, worrying about his precious heirlooms. Critics have, predictably, seen Georgie as a humorous self-portrait.

Georgie (he was Georgie or Mr Georgie, never Pillson to the whole of Riseholme) was not an obtrusively masculine sort of person. Such masculinity as he was possessed of was boyish rather than adult, and the most important ingredients in his nature were feminine. He had, in common with the rest of Riseholme, strong artistic tastes, and in addition to playing the piano, made charming little water-colour sketches, many of which he framed at his own expense and gave to friends, with slightly sentimental titles, neatly printed in gilt letters on the mount. ‘Golden Autumn Woodland’, ‘Bleak December’, ‘Yellow Daffodils’, ‘Roses of Summer’ were perhaps his most notable series…

On a broader view, it’s possible to argue that the preening middle-aged ladies who dominate the narrative – Lucia, Daisy Quantock – are more gay men than straight women. This is the view of my wife who’s loved these novels since she was a student and impressed me by saying she’d never believed Benson’s older ladies were women at all; that they always seemed, to her, obviously gay stereotypes.

This is a subject I’m not expert enough to judge, but am just noting this view.

Plot synopsis

The narrative consists of a series of farcical episodes in which the Lucia’s extravagant artistic snobbery and battle for cultural control of the little village is repeatedly called into question, eclipsed, re-established and so on. These episodes are:

Mrs Quantock’s Guru

Mrs Quantock is a creature of fads. As the novel begins she is at the tail end of a fad for Christian Science. There is a great deal of secret comings and goings, investigated by nosy Georgie, before it is revealed that she has discovered a Guru, a Brahmin from Benares, who communes with spirit guides and practices meditation, stands on one leg in her garden, adopts complicated poses and positions (which he calls Yoga), teaches calming breathing and so on.

Mrs Q’s fussy faddishness is funny in itself, what turns it into Mapp and Lucia gold is the way that Lucia sets about annexing this new addition to Riseholme’s rich cultural life, persuading the Guru to come and stay with her, holding a lavish party to introduce him to the rest of the village, and setting up daily Yoga sessions for those interested in improving their spirituality.

The complexities of the discovery of the Guru, and his annexation by Lucia, are accompanied by a thousand and one little micro-aggressions between Lucia and Mrs Quantock who is, understandably, furious that her pet star has been hijacked.

Which makes it all the funnier when Georgie’s tomboy sisters, Ursula and Hermione, on a visit to Riseholme, recognise the high-souled spiritual adviser as none other than one of the cooks from the Calcutta Restaurant in Bedford Street, London, where the sisters often have lunch. He recognised them in the same moment they recognised him, and bolted indoors. The next morning he has disappeared and so have choice belongings from the homes of Lucia and Mrs Q. But again, rather than admit they have been duped, both ladies prefer to draw a veil of silence over the episode, not report the thefts to the police, and give out that the Guru had been called away on his endless spiritual odyssey.

Olga Bracely

In the same way, Benson creates a great deal of mystery and obfuscation about the next incident, which is the arrival of the noted soprano opera singer Olga Bracely in the village. At first she comes for a brief stay, but then confesses to Georgie that she has been thinking of buying a little bolthole miles from the hectic capital, before, amid various secretive hustling and bustling, she buys a cottage on the green and throws herself into village life.

This has all kinds of comic consequences. For a start Olga is bracingly candid as befits a girl who was born and raised, so she tells us, in an orphanage in Brixton (a mile or so from where I’m writing these words). It is a typical Mapp and Lucia joke that Olga tells the local lady of the manor and competitive snob, Lady Ambermere, that she belongs to the Surrey Bracelys seeing as ‘Brixton is on the Surrey side’ i.e. the south or Surrey side of the River Thames (p.101).

Both Lucia and Mrs Quantock valiantly compete for Olga’s affections and but she is stronger than either of them. Her arrival is like an earthquake in the small self-satisfied community or, as Benson puts it with characteristic hyperbole:

In the old days this could never have happened for everything devolved round one central body. Now with the appearance of this other great star, all the known laws of gravity and attraction were upset. (p.171)

Olga manages to make a fool of Lucia in particular on several memorable occasions.

The string quartet

On one occasion Olga invites a string quartet to play, and invites the villagers to her house to hear them. Lucia mistakenly thinks Olga has hired the quartet from the nearby town of Brinton, of which she has a very poor opinion. Therefore, when the performance has finished, she very loudly praises it but laments that it is not up to the standard of her favourite group, the Spanish Quartet – to which Olga artlessly replies that they are the Spanish quartet! (p.193) Everybody in the village overhears Lucia’s mortifying humiliation and Mrs Quantock emits a squeal of mirth. In Benson’s hilariously hyperbolical diction, this subversion of Lucia amounts to an almost Bolshevik revolution:

In that fell moment the Bolshevists laid bony fingers on the sceptre of her musical autocracy! (p.194)

The comedy then derives from Lucia’s desperate attempts to roll back from this humiliation.

Signor Cortese

Signor Cortese is an eminent Italian composer who has just completed a new opera, ‘Lucretia’, and writes to Olga, the noted opera singer, asking if he can come and visit her, play it for her and interest her in taking the part.

In her innocence Olga wonders who to invite for dinner with him and settles on Lucia and Peppino, because they refer to each other by Italian pet names and are always dropping Italian phrases into their conversation. They are a little intimidated by the invitation but spend some time brushing up their Dante in preparation.

But the dinner ends up being a howling humiliation because, upon being introduced, the composer lets fly a volley of Italian at Licia and Peppino, neither of whom have a clue what he’s saying. Cortese instantly realises this and courteously switches to his poor English, but the damage is done and Lucia’s reputation for Italian is destroyed in front of all the other guests in the most high profile way imaginable.

She knew that, as an Italian conversationalist, neither she nor Peppino had a rag of reputation left them. (p.197)

And the whole village will be informed and ridicule her:

The story would be all over Riseholme next day, and she felt sure that Mrs Weston, that excellent observer and superb reporter, had not failed to take it all in, and would not fail to do justice to it. Blow after blow had been rained upon her palace door, it was little wonder that the whole building was a-quiver. (p.198)

Princess Popoffski

The last major episode is the arrival in the village of a medium and clairvoyant, ‘Princess Popoffski’. She is another discovery of Mrs Quantock’s, who met her in a vegetarian restaurant in London. But this doesn’t stop her moving in and becoming a Riseholme sensation.

Spiritualism, and all things pertaining to it, swept over Riseholme like the amazing growth of some tropical forest, germinating and shooting out its surprising vegetation, and rearing into huge fantastic shapes. In the centre of this wonderful jungle was a temple, so to speak, and that temple was the house of Mrs Quantock…

This represents a setback to Lucia’s rule. She has been a lifelong sceptic and sniffs at mediums, séances and so on, but is badly left behind as the Princess becomes all the rage. Everyone else (Georgie, Olga, Lady Amblemere) attends the séances and feels the table knocking and witnesses ghostly ectoplasm materialising into the form of a character from ancient Egypt or ‘Amadeo’, who claims to be a Florentine and know Dante quite well.

Lucia is subject to a score of snubs and petty humiliations and micro-aggressions before the inevitable happens, and the Princess is revealed as a fraud. But not to everyone. Only to the Quantocks. When the princess goes back to London for a break, Daisy discovers she’s left behind a trunk which contains some of her props. Quite separately, Robert Quantock discovers an item in the newspaper describing the arrest of the Princess for fraud – he promptly buys up every newspaper in the Riseholme newsagents, especially Todd’s News which had a big feature on it, and burns them all.

The guilty husband and wife decide to hush the whole thing up. The other lead characters, particularly Georgie, suspect something is afoot, but can’t figure out what. Towards the end of the novel, Daisy and Robert discuss the case and consider inviting the convicted fraud Princess Popoffski back to Riseholme, treat her with all sincerity taking her at face value, purely to pull a tremendous confidence trick on the rest of the village! Consider it but then, reluctantly, decide to be safe rather than sorry…

Cast

  • Mrs Emmeline Lucas aka Queen Lucia
  • Philip ‘Peppino’ Lucas – husband, retired barrister, author of prose poems
  • Georgie Pillson – Lucia’s best friend, ‘her gentleman-in-waiting when she was at home, and her watch-dog when she was not’ – plays with piano with Lucia and makes charming little water-colour sketches – ‘his mother had been a Bartlett and a second cousin of her deceased husband’:
    • Dicky – George’s handsome young chauffeur
    • Foljambe – his very pretty parlour-maid who valeted him
  • Georgie’s two plain strapping sisters, Hermione and Ursula aka Hermy and Ursy – ‘they liked pigs and dogs and otter-hunting and mutton-chops’:
    • Tipsipoozie, a lean Irish terrier
  • Mr Holroyd – the barber who manages Georgie’s wig
  • Mrs Daisy Quantock
  • Robert Quantock – her husband
  • Rush the grocer
  • the Guru
  • Lady Embermere – local gentry, widowed
  • Miss Lyall – her companion – ‘This miserable spinster, of age so obvious as to be called not the least uncertain, was Lady Ambermere’s companion, and shared with her the glories of The Hall.. her head was inclined with a backward slope on her neck, and her mouth was invariably a little open shewing long front teeth, so that she looked rather like a roast hare sent up to table with its head on’
  • Olga Bracely – the prima-donna
  • Mr Shuttleworth – Olga’s accompanist and husband
  • Colonel Jacob Boucher with his two snorting bull-dogs
    • Atkinson, his man
  • Mrs Jane Weston in her bath-chair
    • pushed by her gardener boy, Henry Luton
    • Elizabeth, her parlour maid
  • Mrs Antrobus – with her ham-like face and her ear-trumpet
  • the two Miss Antrobuses – Piggy and Goosie (p.113)
  • Mr Rumbold – the vicar

Comic phrasing

For such a comic writer, Benson rarely comes up with comic one-liners or zingers. The humour derives almost entirely from the ludicrous attitudes of all the characters, which are treated with such deadpan seriousness, and the basic worldview of the novel, which is intrinsically comic. But there are exceptions:

Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing on the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in the fumes of the wood-fire.
(Chapter 1)

The doorbell:

By the side of this fortress-door hung a heavy iron bell-pull, ending in a mermaid. When first Mrs Lucas had that installed, it was a bell-pull in the sense that an extremely athletic man could, if he used both hands and planted his feet firmly, cause it to move, so that a huge bronze bell swung in the servants’ passage and eventually gave tongue (if the athlete continued pulling) with vibrations so sonorous that the white-wash from the ceiling fell down in flakes.
(Chapter 1)

‘Oh, I wonder if you can keep a secret?’
‘Yes,’ said Georgie. He probably had never kept one yet, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t begin now.
(Chapter 7)

Lucia’s garden-parties were scheduled from four to seven and half-an-hour before the earliest guest might be expected, she was casting an eagle eye over the preparations which today were on a very sumptuous scale. The bowls were laid out in the bowling alley, not because anybody in Hightums dresses was the least likely to risk the stooping down and the strong movements that the game entailed, but because bowls were Elizabethan.
(Chapter 7)

Chunky prose style

Over the past few weeks I’ve read a number of Agatha Christie novels and got used to her streamlined prose. Part of what makes Christie so readable was her development of a pared-back functional prose style.

Benson is the complete opposite. His prose is a hangover from the over-stuffed Victorian era, with long sentences packed with multiple clauses which create a very cluttered effect. At least one intention is that these elaborate periods to capture the complexity and subtlety of the rivalries and backstabbing which characterise the mental life of all Riseholme’s inhabitants.

There’s something comic about long sentences at the best of times, the piling up of details and clauses create a sense of cluttered absurdity.

Now the departing guests in their Hightums, lingering on the village green a little, and being rather sarcastic about the utter failure of Lucia’s party, could hardly help seeing Georgie and Olga emerge from his house and proceed swiftly in the direction of The Hurst, and Mrs Antrobus who retained marvellous eyesight as compensation for her defective hearing, saw them go in, and simultaneously thought that she had left her parasol at The Hurst.

A sentence like this also dramatises the way the whole of this little community focuses round the village green where everyone is spying on everyone else’s movements and continually deciphering and interpreting them, a hive of obsessive observation.

Stunt

The word ‘stunt’ crops up a lot in Christie (and F. Scott Fitzgerald) in the 1920s, to indicate a scam or schtick or technique or method. It was clearly a modish word and as such it crops up in Benson, too.

She had read the article in the encyclopaedia about Yoga right through again this morning, and had quite made up her mind, as indeed her proceedings had just shown, that Yoga was, to put it irreverently, to be her August stunt.
(Chapter 5)

Cat

I’ve got used, in the novels of Agatha Christie, to the use of the word ‘cat’ to denote a bitchy woman, and also the quality of bitchiness itself. Same here. Benson makes it the subject of a little joke passage. Lucia has made a comment to Olga about the forthcoming engagement of old Colonel Boucher and Mrs Weston, remembering how long ago she and Robert were engaged – which on the face of it sounds like sympathy but also subtly hints at how old the middle-aged couple are:

This might have been tact, or it might have been cat. That Peppino and she sympathised as they remembered their beautiful time was tact, that it was so long ago was cat. Altogether it might be described as a cat chewing tact. (p.196)

Summary

Very funny. Having skewered some of the popular fads of the day (Christian Science, Indian gurus, spiritualism) one wonders what was left for Benson to satirise in the sequels. Well, there’s only one way to find out…

Credit

‘Queen Lucia’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in July 1920. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

Mapp and Lucia reviews

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by Simon on November 7, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/07/queen-lucia-e-f-benson/

Edvard Munch Portraits @ the National Portrait Gallery

Munch at the British Museum 2019

Six years ago the British Museum held a big exhibition of Edvard Munch’s prints, including the famous Scream. In my review of the exhibition I summarised the exhibition’s narrative of how Munch (1863 to 1944), when a youngish man, in the 1890s, was part of a hard-drinking, permissive Bohemian set in the capital of his native Norway, Oslo (then called Kristiana), and how the hedonistic free-love and hard drinking ethos of this world clashed with his strict Protestant rural upbringing to produce an often unbearable tension and angst in the young man. Not just unhappiness – intense mental distress. The British Museum show had numerous quotes from Munch’s journals and diary up on the walls all making the same point:

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. (1908)

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted – and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there, trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (22 January 1892)

All art, like music, must be created with one’s lifeblood – Art is one’s lifeblood. (1890)

You get the picture, and a feel for the troubled mentality which produced not only The Scream but a host of other deeply haunting woodcuts – of vampire-like young women, of traumatised couples standing in front of lakes of bottomless meaning and forests of endless threat.

However, alongside the woodcuts and paintings with titles like Despair, Anxiety, Death, and so on, Munch throughout his life was an accomplished painter of portraits, of his family, his Bohemian friends, of society patrons, and of himself. In fact he produced hundreds of them.

Munch at the National Portrait Gallery 2025

This fine exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery brings together 40 of Munch’s portraits, ranging across 40 years of his long career, from the 1880s to the 1920s, for us to enjoy, savour, compare and contrast. It is the first such exhibition to focus on Munch’s portraits ever held in the UK and includes foreign loans never before seen in the UK.

A mixed bag

The main point to make at the start is the great variety of size and treatment over these 40 or so years – and the very variable quality. Munch’s star is obviously in the ascendant and the curators, and many of the media reviewers, make a big case for him being one of the twentieth century’s great portraitists. I just don’t think that’s true. It’s nearly true, there are a lot of good portraits here, including some portraits of writers which have long been classic – but there are a lot of poor paintings here as well; ones I thought were poorly executed, showed bad draughtsmanship, sketchy painting technique.

There are quite a few powerful, notable works, but just as many that I’d cross the road to avoid or wouldn’t look twice at in a general exhibition.

Stories

One other point. The gallery labels accompanying the portraits are excellent and full of interest. Very often exhibition labels fall back on woke clichés or very general descriptions of what you can already see for yourself, and can be exasperating or futile, accordingly.

However the picture captions here are uniformly excellent. Almost all of them move beyond a brief background of the image to give fascinating potted biographies of the subjects, and seeing as these come from a surprisingly broad range of figures, in Norway but also Germany where Munch spent a lot of time, all these potted biographies build up into a fascinating mosaic of the times. They range all the way from the biography of Munch’s father and sisters, via the various writers, artists and poets he knew in his merry Bohemian times, through to fascinating accounts of the physicians, industrialists and patrons he painted, and their lives and fates after he painted them.

Putting to one side the questionable merit of some of the paintings, these potted biographies bring to life a whole world of culture and patronage in north-central Europe which we in Britain, in thrall to a very Paris-based view of modern art, are almost completely ignorant of.

Layout

The exhibition is arranged thematically and chronologically, taking visitors on a four-part journey through Munch’s immediate family, bohemian artists and writers, his patrons and collectors, and finally his closest confidants, the so-called ‘Guardians’ who supported him in his later years. I’ll pick a key work from each section.

1. Family

The earliest paintings, from his early 20s, are small oil paintings of himself, his father and the aunt (Karen Bjølstad) who moved in after his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five (in 1868). I really liked the small portrait of his bearded father – Dr Christian Munch, a military doctor – lighting his pipe. They’re small, dark and inside and hark back to naturalist painting of the 1860s and 70s which he would swiftly work through and move beyond.

Quite quickly we move outside, though, to a much larger work like ‘Evening’ (1888). This, the caption tells us, depicts Munch’s sister, Laura, on a family holiday, just a year before she was permanently hospitalized with schizophrenia. The curators claim it captures her sense of alienation from her surroundings. Do you agree? Apparently in the centre of the painting was a standing figure but Munch painted over it in order to emphasise and increase the sense of distance between the soulful woman and the figures by the lake.

Evening by Edvard Munch (1888) © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

2. Bohemian friends

Munch left his family home to study art formally in the mid-1880s, becoming part of the bohemian scene in Kristiania. This was a network of internationally-connected artists and writers whose their ideals ran contrary to the strict religious principles of Munch’s upbringing. They advocated free love, atheism and women’s emancipation.

It was here that he developed a free-er more expressive way with paint which he called ‘soul art’, and which relied on the intensity of the relationship with the sitter as much as technical proficiency. In other words, his brushwork became looser. Leader of this set of freethinkers was the anarchist Hans Jæger whose portrait dominates this section and was chosen by the curators to promote the entire show. They comment on the cynical, confident pose of a man who knows he bosses his social group, comfortably slouched on a sofa in the Grand Café, Kristiana.

Hans Jaeger by Edvard Munch (1889) © Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, The Fine Art Collections. Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Børre Høstland

Munch didn’t stay in Kristiana but travelled to Berlin where he had been invited to show. Here he met the Polish writer and dramatist Stanisław Przybyszewski whose 1894 monograph ‘Das Werk des Edvard Munch’ was the first publication to promote Munch internationally and to suggest the idea of the ‘Naked Soul’ as being fundamental to his work. Przybyszewski believed that society placed such a constraint on basic human instincts that it was the artist’s duty to compensate by giving free rein to unconscious impulses and desires – what he termed ‘the naked soul’.

The other strong work in this section is the portrait of lawyer Thor Lütken. Do you notice anything odd about this picture?

Thor Lütken by Edvard Munch (1892) Private Collection. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong

The oddity is that, on close inspection, the lawyer’s left sleeve, along the bottom of the picture, contains a moonlit landscape inhabited by two mysterious figures, a man in black and a woman in white.

Detail of Thor Lütken by Edvard Munch (1892) Private Collection. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong

Are they lovers or a symbolic portrayal of life and death, Death and The Maiden? Whatever the intention, it’s a pretty unconventional thing to do in a professional portrait but indicates the tremendous influence the 1890s movement of Symbolism had on Munch’s thinking.

Talking of Symbolism, the section includes a series of works which aren’t paintings but black-and-white lithographs. These depict some super-famous figures from the time, notably the playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé, and the composer Frederick Delius who Munch met at the health resort of Wiesbaden, alongside group sketches of north European Bohemians in a number of cafes and bars.

The point is that for some of these portraits – notable Ibsen, Mallarmé and a striking portrait of himself – created a novel approach, presenting the sitters as disembodied heads floating in space. The detached floating head was a familiar motif in Symbolist art, signifying a split between the physical and spiritual self but hadn’t been used in such intimate and realistic portraits before.

The novel format does several things. In the portrait of Ibsen it emphasises the distance between the floating head and the busy life going on outside the window; in the wonderful portrait of Mallarmé, probably the most successful likeness in the show, it focuses you on the face and eyes so you feel you are just about to hear a pearl of wisdom from the witty old gent. According to the ever-interesting picture caption, Mallarmé was fascinated by the occult, which may explain the ghost-like feel of the portrait. And he said that the image reminded him of one of the images of Jesus on a holy shroud…

And in the self portrait with skeleton, the jet black background makes Munch’s head seem as if guillotined and floating in space, as in a bizarre dream.

3. Patrons and collectors

The third section of the exhibition examines Munch’s relationship with his patrons and collectors. By the early 20th century, Munch was one of the most exhibited artists in Europe. Returning to Berlin in 1902, he won the support of a group of wealthy and influential collectors, whose patronage further elevated his profile. It’s fascinating to learn that, in the curators’ words, ‘Many had Jewish heritage and held key professional and institutional positions in German society. They all shared an enthusiasm for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and his belief in the creative power of the individual’ – indeed the influence of Nietzsche’s insistence on the Superman overthrowing all society’s traditional values and creating his own, is mentioned in the commentary of quite a few works from this period. Also, disapproving moralists nowadays frequently associate Nietzsche with the strains of thought which led to the Nazis, so it’s striking to learn that quite so many Jewish figure were attracted by his ideas.

From 1902 to his breakdown in 1908, Munch began to take commissions from the rich and successful and this marked a turning point in his portrait style. Increasingly he painted in bright and bold colours to reflect the dynamism of his sitters. The outstanding work in this section is the super-striking portrait of German physicist Felix Auerbach, commissioned in 1906.

by Edvard Munch (1906) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

In my opinion, you can see at least three things going on in this portrait. 1) The face and in particular the eyes address you really directly, with startling immediacy. Their clarity and figurative accuracy are comparable to the Mallarmé image’s eyes.

2) This immediacy distracts you from the fact that a lot of the secondary detail is no precise, is done using Munch’s trademark curves. Look at the hand holding the cigar: the fingers, the hand, the sleeve do not stand out with photographic realism from the background coat but instead are moulded with his trademark blurred curves. Instead of focusing on light and shadow to make the detail crisp, he prefers to go over the rounded outline of the hand again and again, in different colours, to give it an almost cartoon simplicity.

Lastly, of course 3) the bright red background. Maybe it’s an attempt at the actual wallpaper behind this rich patron when he painted him, but it feels more like an aesthetic statement. At first glance it made me think of the Fauves and Matisse who were just starting to do the same kind of thing in France but the wall caption tells me it’s a homage to Van Gogh’s use of bright and non-naturalistic colours. (n fact this painting now resides in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.) It certainly feels like Munch felt free to create any kind of background he wants, and to use very strong vibrant colour in order to create an effect, in this case an extremely powerful and stirring effect.

The redness of the image reminded me of John Singer Sargent’s masterpiece, Dr Pozzi at Home (1881). Look at Sargent’s treatment of the hands, and indeed of the face. Pretty much none of the works in this exhibition demonstrate the draughtsmanship, the accuracy, or the painterly precision of Sargent.

In a very different mode, and much more reminiscent of his famous woodcut prints in its appreciation of feminine sensuality and its air of mystery, is The Brooch (1902), Munch’s lithograph of the Brixton-born violinist Eva Mudocci. As we’ve seen, Munch created a series of Symbolist ‘floating head’ portraits but almost all of them are of men. This portrait of Mudocci is a rare example of a woman depicted in this manner.

The Brooch (Eva Mudocci) by Edvard Munch (1902) © Private collection, courtesy Peder Lund

As usual the picture caption gives us a fascinating potted biography of the sitter and I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I read that ‘Eva Mudocci’ was actually born Evangeline Hope Muddock in Brixton.

These are the outstanding good works in this section, but there began to be ones I didn’t like or felt fell far short of a professional standard. There are three prints from a set of 16 commissioned by a Dr Linde of his wife and young children. These ought to be good and they’re nearly good, but when you look closely, you see that they’re not good. Look at this drawing of his four sons – all the faces are bodged and wonky. Sorry to be so literal minded, but compared to the draughtsmanship of Holbein or Sargent or Lawrence or numerous other painters, ancient and modern, Munch’s technique feels good, but not wow.

Breakdown

Ten years of heavy drinking, of numerous affairs and moving constantly from place to place took their toll and in 1908 Munch had a breakdown. He was admitted to a private nerve clinic in Copenhagen, run by Dr Daniel Jacobson and slowly, steadily made a full recovery, going on to become a virtual teetotaller.

When Jacobson requested a portrait, Munch chose to pose him in a powerful stance echoing Holbein’s iconic portraits of Henry VIII, painted in bright swirling colours as if engulfed by flames. The wall caption amusingly tells us that Jacobson hated the portrait.

Dr Daniel Jacobson by Edvard Munch (1908) © SMK, National Gallery of Denmark. SMK Photo/Jakob Skou-Hansen

This reproduction makes it look quite dark and more coherent than it is in the flesh. In the flesh it is enormous, larger than life size, and scrappy. You can clearly see the untouched canvas through the scrappy hurried brushstrokes. Now ordinarily I really like this kind of thing when it conveys a sense of dynamism, as in Degas, or experimentalism, as in Cézanne. But, sorry everyone, in Munch, for me, it just felt scrappy and half-hearted.

My opinion was exacerbated by the presence in this room of quite a few other middling to poor paintings, which had the effect of dragging the whole thing down. Take Olga and Rosa Meissner from 1908. I can see that Munch is moving into the new world of German Expressionism, in the breakthroughs of post-impressionism, anticipating the scrappy portraits of English artists like Dora Carrington or Vanessa Bell a decade later. But I don’t like it. The faces are poor and the painting style is scrappy and half-hearted.

There were quite a few paintings with this half-finished scrappy vibe in this section and even more in the fourth and final room.

4. The Guardians

Following his recovery at Dr Jacobson’s clinic, in 1909 Munch moved back home and settled permanently in Norway. In that year (1909) Norway had gained independence from its union with Sweden and Munch was hailed a national hero, having been knighted the previous year.

Munch’s recovery of his health and turning away from the ruinous ways of his Bohemian lifestyle were supported by a small group of new friends who he came to call his ‘Lifeguards’ or ‘Guardians’ – friends and supporters he found among writers, artists and patrons. These Lifeguards were so important to Munch that he refused to be parted from their portraits, which acted as talismanic substitutes for them when they weren’t around. So this last section of the exhibition brings together ten or so portraits of these people which, I’m afraid to say, I found almost uniformly ‘bad’.

In its press images the NPG supplies the two strongest pictures in the room, which are the full-length portrait of Jappe Nilssen and the one of Birgit Prestøe in ‘Seated Model on the Couch’ (1924). They do not supply any of the weaker ones, such as the double portrait of Käte and Hugo Perls, of painter Ludvig Karsten or writer Christian Gierløff.

Here’s the best image in the room, the portrait of Jappe Nilssen.

Jappe Nilssen by Edvard Munch (1909) © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Juri Kobayashi

As you can see, it’s a powerful work, employing van Gogh-style slabs of primary colours to create a dynamic image – although the real source of its power is in the man’s four-square, virile pose. But it’s arguably the best image in the room, and not typical of almost all the others, which feel far weaker and less finished, in at least one case, literally so.

The only other work in the this section that I liked is a portrait of a regular sitter for Munch, Birgit Prestøe. He painted her many times between their meeting in 1924 and 1931.

Seated Model on the Couch (Birgit Prestøe) by Edvard Munch (1924) © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong

I liked this image because, from a distance, it reminded me of the kind of mathematical modernism I really like – the post-cubist angularity of Futurism and Vorticism. But of course, it’s more by accident than design. When you go closer you see that not many of the lines are straight, most are in fact bent or curved or swirly, although I still like the random pools of colour, such as the dark orange on her shoulders and hip and knee.

And here are links to some of the much more characteristic, much less finished, much scrappier, and less pleasing works:

The Olsen, in my view, showcases all Munch’s weaknesses. The draughtsmanship of the face is poor, the arms are worse (at first glance, she looks like a thalydomide victim), the shadow looks like a pool of spilled dirty water.

The Christian Gierløff demonstrates the hold of what I early on came to think of as The Swirl on Munch’s technique, the way 1) the outlines of a figure’s body are echoed and repeated in multiple lines to create a kind of shadowy, faltering effect, and 2) the way the figure doesn’t stand out distinctly from the background, as people do in real life, but what background he can be bothered to paint in shapes itself around the foreground figure. This is most obvious in the rock of whatever it is behind Gierløff and on his right, whose contours entirely shape themselves around his figure, and the yellow line outlining the black which is presumably his shadow, and which curves round to a kind of golden loop on the ground at his feet, which to the schoolboy mind, suggests a puddle of urine.

Clearly Munch considers the backgrounds to his later portraits to be very secondary, to have a mostly decorative effect. Now whereas this works excellently in the striking and very finished portrait of Felix Auerbach, which is indoors, and whose backdrop hovers with pleasing ambiguity between a real wallpaper and pure abstraction – in my opinion this approach does not work when the figure is out of doors and so the background becomes more important, is necessarily more varied, we as animals want to understand the context and precise positioning of a fellow human, so I found Munch’s collapse into semi-abstract swirls and half-arsed shadows, frustrating and incomplete. They’re neither the realism of a Singer Sargent nor the purely decorative abstraction of a Matisse, but a muddy no-man’s-land in between.

Conclusion

The curators, and a surprising number of critics in the papers and magazines, try to persuade us that Munch was one of the great portrait artists of the 20th century. This excellent exhibition makes the strongest possible case for its cause, and is certainly very enjoyable for the biographical and historical facts to be found in all the picture captions – but, in my opinion, ultimately fails. Some of his paintings are excellent, the famous writer lithographs are classic – but, in my opinion, quite a few, especially of the later portraits, are badly drawn, scrappily painted, and the deployment of the swirly outlines which made his 1890s trauma works and the Symbolist portraits so powerful, has degenerated into a messy, irritating mannerism.

Here’s another work which features in the fourth room, a portrait of himself with friend, Torvald Strang.

It’s mildly interesting to learn from the wall caption that 1) the lawyer and barrister Torvald Stang had been a friend of Munch’s since the 1880s, often supporting him during difficult times. He was said to be an elegant man about town. And also to learn that 2) Munch had a strong liking for yellow and often used it as a background for his portraits.

But is this painting any good? Not really, no.

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Posted by Simon on May 17, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/17/edvard-munch-portraits-the-national-portrait-gallery/

A Room With A View by E.M Forster (1908)

‘I was hoping that he was nice; I do so always hope that people will be nice.’
(Lucy Honeychurch, the nice young lady at the heart of A Room with A View, page 29)

‘Well, I am no prude.’
(The prudish Miss Bartlett, Lucy’s chaperone, showing the same ironic lack of self-awareness as all the other characters, p.95)

‘Italians, dear, you know,’ said Miss Alan.
(Old Miss Alan expressing the universal disapproval of the people whose country all these Brits are visiting, p.59)

A Room With A View is very much a novel of two parts: the first, more vivid part, set in Florence, the second, more muted part, set in Surrey.

The first thing all the obvious sources (like the blurb on the back of the Penguin edition and the Penguin introduction, the Wikipedia article and Forster’s own Afterword) tell you is that, although this was the third novel Forster published (in 1908), it was the first one he actually wrote, starting it as early as 1901 after a lengthy sightseeing tour of Italy with his mother.

More importantly, as the Afterword tells us, he wrote the first, Italian part of the novel, all of a piece and then stopped, writing his next two novels (‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’ and ‘The Longest Journey’) before returning to write the second, English, part of ‘A Room With A View’.

The gap in writing makes an enormous difference. The Italian half is full of humorous, consequence-free high spirits whereas the second half continues to be moderately humorous but feels slower, more stodgy, and then becomes increasingly programmatic and predictable. It’s very much a novel of two parts and so I’ll review it as two parts.

Apparently, Forster’s working title for the novel was ‘the Lucy book’ and you can see why, as it’s all about young, innocent and virginal Miss Lucy Honeychurch. The cliché is to say the novel describes ‘the awakening’ of Miss Honeychurch, a virginal young woman – just the kind of subject a middle-aged gay man (Forster) would obviously be an expert on.

Part 1. Italy

Cast

Lucy is staying in Florence at the Pension Bertolini with her fussy spinster cousin and chaperone, Miss Charlotte Bartlett. In the pension they meet in quick succession:

Mr Emerson senior, ‘an old man, of heavy build, with a fair, shaven face and large eyes’.

George Emerson, his young handsome son.

The Reverend Beebe, ‘a clergyman whose head was bald and who wore a pair of russet whiskers’. ‘All his life he had loved to study maiden ladies; they were his specialty’ (p.53).

Miss Eleanor Lavish, ‘short, fidgety, and playful as a kitten, though without a kitten’s grace’, a consciously ‘unconventional’ older lady novelist who never lets anyone forget how desperately exciting she is:

‘I have always flown in the face of the conventions all my life.’

Or, as the occupants of the Pension like to say, ‘so original‘ and which, in Forster’s irony, means exactly the opposite. Miss Lavish is at pains to distinguish between herself – unconventional, exciting, creative – and all the other British tourists who she dismisses with breathtaking snobbishness.

‘Look at their figures!’ laughed Miss Lavish. ‘They walk through my Italy like a pair of cows. It’s very naughty of me, but I would like to set an examination paper at Dover, and turn back every tourist who couldn’t pass it.’

And:

‘The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace.’ (p.81)

Making up the numbers in the Pension are two elderly sisters, Miss Teresa and Miss Catharine Alan.

There is a resident Anglican clergyman in Florence, the Reverend Eager. He is short tempered and, like all the British residents of the place, tremendously snobbish about mere ‘tourists’.

The owner of Pension Bertolini, a Cockney lady.

Italians

The unnamed hawker who tries to sell them photos, which the Reverend Eager in his disdain, accidentally rips.

The unnamed driver of the carriage into the hills, characteristically referred to in Greek mythical terms, as Phaethon.

His unnamed girlfriend.

Anti-tourist, anti-Italian snobbery

The snobbery the book depicts and dissects is present right from the start with not only Charlotte and Lucy outraged by Mr Emerson’s intrusion into their conversation, but the disapproving tutting response of everyone else at the dining table.

In the first page you pick up that the Emersons, father and son, are a distinct social notch beneath everyone else and are therefore criticised and sniped at behind their backs by the snobbish ladies. As Miss Bartlett puts it:

‘It is dreadful to be entangled with low-class people.’ (p.92)

The room issue is that Lucy and her chaperone and cousin, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, are upset that they have not been assigned the room with a view they were promised. Overhearing them complain, Emerson father and son gallantly offer to exchange rooms with them. Their rooms have a splendid view which they’re not really appreciating.

There follow various walks around Florence and umpteen conversations in which the characters make snide, subtle criticisms of each other. This is the core of the book, not any particular dramatic event, but Forster’s careful notation of the shifting thoughts and feelings of these blinkered, constrained, painfully conventional, small-minded middle-class snobs.

‘There are some working men whom one would be very willing to see out here in Florence – little as they would make of it.’ (p.74)

Obviously this little gaggle of trippers think that they are different, they are not like the common herd of ‘pension tourists’ (p.71), ‘hot dusty unintelligent tourists’ (p.82) – they have soul, they have feelings, they have insight. When they trot off to all the obvious sights with a guidebook in hand they don’t do it like the vulgar mob, but it in a specially superior way.

‘Stop a minute; let those two people go on, or I shall have to speak to them. I do detest conventional intercourse. Nasty! they are going into the church, too. Oh, the Britisher abroad!’ (p.39)

They’re as dismissive of the Italians as they are of their own countrymen, in fact it’s astonishing just how much these pompous, self-satisfied Philistines dismiss the nation they’ve made such efforts to travel to and study. Specific Italian characters and the Italian nation as a whole are routinely dismissed for all the usual stereotypical reasons.

‘No one has the least idea of privacy in this country.’ (p.54)

‘She said: “Can I have a little ink, please?” But you know what Italians are…

The implication being that Italians are slow and lazy. Here’s the Reverend Beebe’s view (although, admittedly he is being a little satirical at the expense of old Miss Alan):

‘The Italians are a most unpleasant people. They pry everywhere, they see everything, and they know what we want before we know it ourselves. We are at their mercy. They read our thoughts, they foretell our desires. From the cab-driver down to – to Giotto, they turn us inside out, and I resent it. Yet in their heart of hearts they are – how superficial! They have no conception of the intellectual life.’

Here’s Lucy, the sensitive young woman whose spiritual awakening we are meant to warm to:

‘How very odd Italians are!… Mr. Beebe was saying that Italians know everything, but I think they are rather childish.’

And here’s the narrator:

An Italian can never be ignored, least of all when he has a grievance. (p.73)

This latter sentence is describing a hawker of postcards who is pestering another clergyman they meet, the Reverend Mr. Eager, the English chaplain at Florence, and I couldn’t help cheering every time an Italian pestered, tried to sell postcards to, overcharged and generally ripped off this gang of spoilt silly Brits.

Would we nowadays describe this relentless stereotyping of Italians as racist? What did Italians at the time make of these kinds of the countless fictions describing Brits trekking to Italy for the art and being very disappointed by actual Italians? What do they make of them now?

I call the characters philistine because the book goes out of its way to highlight how none of them have any feel whatsoever for real art or beauty but simply carry the Baedeker guide with them everywhere, into every square and every church, so it can tell them which painting is important and which tomb is beautiful and which view is delightful. Forster is explicit that Lucy only likes art she’s heard of and so knows to be important (p.61).

The one possible exception is the lady author Miss Lavish, who loudly deprecates guides and tells Lucy you can only understand the Italian soul through patient observation. But Forster makes it quite clear how trite and shallow her imagination is when she shares with Lucy her plan for her next novel. In a central incident in the novel two Italian men get into a fight over money and one stabs the other, causing Miss Honeychurch to faint. Next day Miss Lavish explains how she will use this incident as the basis of her next novel only she will change the cause of the argument from sordid money to a jealous fight over a beautiful woman ‘which would raise the tone of the tragedy, and at the same time furnish an excellent plot’, and the plot will concern ‘Love, murder, abduction, revenge’. In other words, she plans to transform something hard, violent and alien into melodramatic tripe, according to a set of hackneyed conventions. In case we can’t work this out for ourselves, Forster later has the (admittedly über-snobbish) clergyman Mr Eager describe Miss Lavish as ‘a shoddy lady writer’ (p.80).

Discussing the same incident (the stabbing) Miss Lavish also delivers sentiments of stunning banality, an opinion which was a thumping cliché even at the time:

‘I confess that in Italy my sympathies are not with my own countrymen. It is the neglected Italians who attract me, and whose lives I am going to paint so far as I can. For I repeat and I insist, and I have always held most strongly, that a tragedy such as yesterday’s is not the less tragic because it happened in humble life.’

And then Forster skewers Lucy’s chaperone, Miss Bartlett, when he has her remark of this superficially ‘unconventional’ but in fact trite, philistine woman:

‘She is my idea of a really clever woman,’ said Miss Bartlett. ‘That last remark struck me as so particularly true.’ (p.70)

Received opinion has it that Forster is gently comic about his characters, but beneath the sly humour I felt there was, at times, quite savage satire by which none of his characters are left unskewered.

Pat 1. Plot summary

Chapter 1. The Bertolini

In Florence Lucy and her chaperone Miss Bartlett room at the Pension Bertolini. They are very disappointed 1) that the Pension is run by a Cockney Englishwoman and 2) that they’ve been given rooms on the inside of the Pension facing the central well, which smells and doesn’t have a view. The Emersons, father and son, kindly offer to swap rooms to give the ladies a view despite the disapproval of all the other guests for their lower class intervention.

Lucy and Miss B are surprised to learn that the Reverend Beebe, who they know from back in England where he has a parish at Tunbridge, is also staying. They get to know the elderly sisters Miss Teresa and Miss Catherine Alan. They also meet the outspoken lady novelist Miss Eleanor Lavish with her unstoppable gush of clichés and condescension:

‘Tut, tut! Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy—he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation!’

‘One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness,’ was the retort, ‘one comes for life!’

‘Buon giorno! Take the word of an old woman, Miss Lucy: you will never repent of a little civility to your inferiors. That is the true democracy.’

Chapter 2. In Santa Croce with No Baedeker

Garrulous Miss Lavish takes Lucy to the church of Santa Croce. On the way they natter about Lucy’s family house back in Surrey (big house, 30 acres). Miss Lavish promises Lucy she doesn’t need a guide book and confiscates her Baedeker, but then darts off to talk to some old Italian, effectively abandoning Lucy, lost in this big barn-like building.

Here she bumps into Mr Emerson who is surprisingly aggressive – he despises religion of all types and insists we should live in the here and now – and candidly explains that his son, George, is unhappy with the universe and could she, Lucy, give him a sympathetic listening and maybe some support. All of which is way beyond Lucy’s comfort zone of middle class chatter (‘the world of rapid talk’) and dumbfounds her.

Chapter 3. Music, Violets, and the Letter “S”

Lucy plays the piano, not to concert standard but well enough, favouring Beethoven. She loves the touch of the keys and always feels emboldened after playing. On a wet afternoon at the Pension she plays the piano. Which reminds the Reverend Beebe of the time he heard her play at a recital and asked to be introduced. He quickly realised that, away from the piano, she is a shallow little creature with nothing to say for herself. Beebe is amused and detached, likes drawing people out and trying to make people happy. He is the nearest thing to a sympathetic character.

Back in the present Lucy, Mr Beebe and old Miss Alan natter and gossip, snobbishly dismissing the Emersons and saying they’ll have to find their own way. Bored and confined, Lucy says she wants to go out for a walk, to the disapproval of Mr Beebe and Miss Alan.

Chapter 4. Fourth Chapter

Forster was gay and his novels are about women. Lucy was recognised in her day, and has been hailed ever since, as a young woman trying to break free of the constraints placed on her sex by Victorian society. But Forster treats the subject in a typically elliptical way. Maybe, to be more accurate, he does so using his lyrical-historical-mythical style. This could be considered a form of euphemism, or a way of raising a subject without really addressing it. No analysis, instead a cloud of allegory.

In chapter 4 Lucy is restless and wants to go out, to experience something big. The biggest thing she can think of is to go for a ride on one of Florence’s electric trams.

This she might not attempt. It was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. (p.60)

That is reasonably straightforward, and describes a social view while neatly skewering Miss Bartlett’s worried conventionality. It’s what comes next that is characteristically Forsterian in its lyrical windiness.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war – a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.

A lot of words but not very useful, is it? Then Forster comes back to earth to apply all this back to Lucy:

Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious. Nor has she any system of revolt. Here and there a restriction annoyed her particularly, and she would transgress it, and perhaps be sorry that she had done so. This afternoon she was peculiarly restive. She would really like to do something of which her well-wishers disapproved. As she might not go on the electric tram, she went to Alinari’s shop. (p.61)

This wandering off into the world of whimsy, of vague windy allegorical visions, is very characteristic of Forster. He does it more usually when invoking the idea of the pagan beauty of Renaissance art and statuary (which he does here in chapter ), and the pagan power of the countryside, sprinkled with references to the god Pan (which he does in the chapter about the picnic in the country).

But I find it a form of evasion. When he comes to a real, knotty social problem Forster turns into Tennyson and flies away from it.

Anyway, thus blocked by convention Lucy goes shopping and buys postcards of classic paintings. It is funny to learn that she calls any example of nudity ‘a pity’, so that Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is great except that the Venus, being ‘a pity’, spoils the picture.

She’s just thinking how bored she is and how she wished something would happen when two men get into an argument, then a fight, then one stabs the other in the chest. She sees blood coming from his mouth then faints. She comes to cradled in George Emerson’s arms, feeling peculiar, gabbling.

But then George behaves just as strangely. They hail a cab to take them to the river and walk a little till George throws something down into the Arno. It was the photographs she’d bought, which were covered in blood. There follows one of those strange scenes in Forster where two ordinary people become the subject of one of his incandescent analyses, limned with purple prose. Forster has invented this incident (the stabbing) is savvy enough to investigate at length the impact it has on his two very different characters. And yet the resulting description is strangely diffuse and disappointing:

She had been in his arms, and he remembered it, just as he remembered the blood on the photographs that she had bought in Alinari’s shop. It was not exactly that a man had died; something had happened to the living: they had come to a situation where character tells, and where childhood enters upon the branching paths of Youth. (p.66)

There’s something persistently obtuse and unreachable in Forster’s attitude. It’s far stranger than his cosy reputation suggests.

Chapter 5. Possibilities of a Pleasant Outing

Next day Lucy accompanies Miss Bartlett as she sets about her chores. They encounter Miss Lavish in the piazza where the stabbing took place, and hear how she intends to transform it into a conventional melodrama. Among her other clichéd views, Charlotte tells Lucy that Miss Lavish ‘has a high opinion of the destiny of woman’.

They bump into Mr Eager, the resident Anglican vicar in Florence. He suggests they all make up a party to go on a picnic into the hills. He has a grand reputation of the being a true connoisseur with entrance to private villas, advanced knowledge of art etc. In reality he poses and spouts Wordsworth and trite truisms about the benefits of nature. Here in chapter 5 we get a distinct sense of Lucy’s ‘development’. The stabbing and something in George’s rescue of her mean she now no longer sees the reverend with the respect she ought to nor Miss Lavish who she begins to suspect of being a fraud.

They have the nearest thing to a quarrel because the Reverend Eager is haughtily critical of Emerson, who was a parishioner of his back in Brixton (!). He drops dark hints and, for the first time in her life, Lucy is irritated and more or less tells him to spit it out, at which Eager declares that Emerson murdered his life. Well, in the eyes of God. In a manner of speaking, and desperately rows back, leading Lucy to think even less of him.

Charlotte buys a gewgaw in the tourist shop they’re all standing in and restores civility and they part. Lucy suddenly realises she is sick of Florence and wants Charlotte to take her to Rome but the other just laughs at the wild suggestion.

Chapter 6. The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr Emerson, Mr George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them

They hire two carriages to carry the party. The one with Eager and Lucy in, also has Mr Emerson and is driven by a fiery young Italian who, a little into the journey, insists on stopping to pick up his ‘sister’. He immediately places his arm round her waist and spends the ride trying to kiss her. Mr Eager is facing away from the horses and so doesn’t see this but he drives too fast and the ride is exceedingly bouncy and after one particularly egregious bounce Eager turns round to catch the young couple kissing. The result is a huge fuss, Eager insists they get down, the girl must ride on the other carriage, the driver is told he won’t get a tip. Mr Emerson the atheist criticises Eager for denying Life and Lucy sympathises.

Finally they arrive at the viewpoint up in the hills and there’s some fol-de-rol about trying to find the exact position where the obscure painter Alessio Baldovinett set some of his works. They break up into groups. Miss Lavish and Charlotte want to have a good gossip, specifically a good laugh at the expense of George Emerson because the Reverend Eager asked his profession and George replied ‘the railway’ and so they ladies want to have a good snicker at his expense. So they mount a campaign to get rid of Lucy.

She goes back to the carriages and asks the young Italian to direct her to the clergymen. He guides her through woods till she stumbles out onto a terrace packed with beautiful violets. here is standing handsome sensible young George who sees her emerge from the woods like a nymph, so he steps forward and kisses her.

At that moment Miss Bartlett appears over both of them, shouting her name disapprovingly.

Chapter 7. They Return

It takes a while to round up all the scattered members of the outing for, as Forster characteristically puts it:

Pan had been amongst them – not the great god Pan, who has been buried these two thousand years, but the little god Pan, who presides over social contretemps and unsuccessful picnics. (p.90)

The weather turns, it starts to rain, then there is a terrific explosion as lightning his the stands of the tramline a little in front of them. They spend the journey back loudly discussing how lucky they were to escape. But Lucy is full of contrition over The Kiss and Miss Bartlett (her cousin and chaperone) is kind and supportive.

That night, back at the pension, it rains and rains and they have to socialise till finally Charlotte and Lucy are free to go to their room and discuss what to do about The Situation. Specifically, how are they going to stop George talking about The Kiss? They both regard is as an insult. Miss Bartlett wishes there was a real man in their party, such as her brother, who would defend her honour like a lion.

Charlotte announces that they must leave Florence and travel down to Rome by the first train in the morning (not telling Lucy that she had already given notice). These four or five pages very acutely convey the complex and changing relationship between the older, poorer cousin and the younger but developing young Lucy. Both wish things could go back to the simple affection they had before but know it can’t.

Cunningly Charlotte says it is she who will be blamed for The Disaster, unless of course Lucy doesn’t tell her mother… and so Lucy is manipulated into promising not to tell. Sadly, she is alone in her room when she sees the figure of a man outside. It is young George who got separated from the party and has walked all the way down from the hills. As he comes down the corridor Lucy is tempted to stop him and talk to him but she is nipped by Miss Bartlett who opens her door and in a peremptory tone demands an interview with the George in the drawing room. We can assume she extracts an apology and a promise never to speak of The Insult.

Next morning Charlotte and Lucy depart early for Rome (on what Lucy will later call ‘the flight to Rome’) and the Italian part of the narrative is over.

Part 2. England

Cast

All the English characters from part one, plus:

Cecil Vyse, the major figure in the second part of the novel who, right at its start, proposes to Lucy and is accepted.

Mrs Honeychurch, Lucy’s plump generally good-natured mother.

Frederick Honeychurch, Lucy’s rather dim, decent 19-year-old brother.

Floyd, barely mentioned friend of Freddy’s who comes over to play tennis.

Minnie Beebe, 13-year-old niece of the Reverend Beebe.

Chapter 8. Medieval

We are in the living room at Windy Corner, home of Lucy’s family, the Honeychurches. We find Lucy’s brother, 19-year-old Frederick struggling at his anatomy book (presumably studying to become a doctor) and his mother, writing and rewriting a letter to the Vyses. In Rome Cecil Vyse proposed to Lucy and she turned him down. Now Cecil has travelled to Windy Corner to try again and been successful.

Mr Beebe arrives and wants h is tea but finds himself in a conversation with Cecil Vyse that both find uncomfortable. Beebe greets the new politely but can’t help being disappointed. ‘Medieval’ is an adjective used to describe Cecil’s solid sturdy presence.

Chapter 9. Lucy As a Work of Art

A few days later Mrs Honeychurch invites Lucy and Cecil to a little garden party with some elderly ladies. Some coffee is spilt on Lucy’s dress so she and mother disappear leaving Cecil with the old ladies. They are gone some time and return to find him fuming.

They drive in a carriage round to the hillside village of Summer Street where the local landowner, Sir Harry Otway, has been too slow to act to prevent two ghastly modern villas being built. Tut tut, but he’s bought them both. Now he has to find a tenant for one of them, Cissie Villa. Lucy suggests it’s just the size for the two old ladies she met in Florence, Miss Alan and

Cecil is irritated (we are beginning to realise he is always irritated) by Sir Harry who he takes to be a provincial snob, ‘a hopeless vulgarian’, ‘all that is worst in country life’.

Cecil asks Lucy to come for a walk with him in the woods. He is irritated that she only envisions him in a room, never in the woods, in the wild. In the middle of the woods he asks her to kiss him and she acquiesces and he knows it’s all wrong, from the passive way she lifts her veil to the way his gold pince nez gets squashed between them (p.127).

Chapter 10. Cecil as a Humourist

Lucy’s background. Her father was a solicitor local to Dorking who built the modest house, Windy Corner, as an investment but then liked it and moved in. Over the years wealthier immigrants from London arrived and built bigger houses and accepted the Honeychurches as of their class and rank, which they aren’t. Lucy grew up in this tiny self-reinforcing society.

Lucy and Freddy are playing a children’s game with tennis balls when Cecil arrives. Maliciously, he has arranged tenants for Sir Harry’s villa and it is none other than The Emersons, father and son, who he happened to meet in the National Gallery Renaissance rooms. Lucy initially can’t believe it, then is really upset. Temper temper, thinks supercilious Cecil.

Chapter 11. In Mrs. Vyse’s Well-Appointed Flat

Lucy escapes from the immediate embarrassment of the Emersons moving into the villa at Summer Street by going to stay with her prospective mother-in-law, Mrs Vyse, in her London apartments (Beauchamp Mansions SW). Mrs V, like her son, is aware that Lucy is a notch or two below them in terms of class and polish, so she dreamily repeats to her son: ‘Male her one of us’.

Chapter 12. Twelfth Chapter

While the Emersons are still moving in, the Reverend Beebe and Frederick go to visit them. Old Mr Emerson pontificates about the future of equality which will be a Garden of Eden, which will arrive when we stop despising our bodies. He also believes there will be equality between men and women.

Frederick in his empty-headed way asks George if he wants to come to for a bathe in a remote pool in the woods, which he does and the Reverend Beebe joins them for a frolic. This becomes hysterical games of splashing and chase and rugby until, suddenly, Mrs Honeychurch, Lucy and Cecil come upon them, don’t know where to look, Cecil leads them away, but stumble over Frederick hiding in the bracken, then George appearing shirtless, and so on. Mrs Honeychurch is relaxed and just tells the boys to dry themselves thoroughly.

It is a yet another example of Forster’s sense of the spirit in the woods, the pagan gods, his penchant for seeing the sacred in all aspects of live:

It had been a call to the blood and to the relaxed will, a passing benediction whose influence did not pass, a holiness, a spell, a momentary chalice for youth. (p.152)

Or, more explicitly classical:

The sun rose higher on its journey, guided, not by Phaethon, but by Apollo, competent, unswerving, divine.

Chapter 13. How Miss Bartlett’s Boiler Was So Tiresome

1. Lucy had planned for her meeting with George in all manner of social situations but never in her wildest dreams imagined coming across him half-dressed in the woods, as she just has.

2. Mrs Honeychurch, plump and good tempered, for the first time starts to dislike Cecil when he is supercilious on a visit to a local old lady. Back at home Mrs H complains to Lucy that Cecil winces whenever she talks and is also visibly impatient when Frederick sings one of his comic songs. He’s ashamed of them. Class. Snobbery.

3. To try and distract her from criticising Cecil, Lucy mentions she got a letter from Charlotte and, over dinner, Mrs Honeychurch says she’s going to invite her to come and stay while she’s got the plumbers in to fix the boiler in her house at Tunbridge Wells, despite Lucy’s anxious demurrals. She is petrified Charlotte will tell her mother and Cecil about The Kiss.

Chapter 14. How Lucy Faced the External Situation Bravely

I find Forster’s narrative voice very odd, one minute lightly whimsical, the next moment invoking the gods or Fate. And quite often he deploys an intrusive narrator every bit as button-holing as Henry Fielding or Thackeray, thus:

It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude ‘She loves young Emerson’. A reader in Lucy’s place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome ‘nerves’ or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed? (p.161)

He meets George at a social visit with the vicar and they are both civil to each other. Then Charlotte arrives for her stay, immediately causing trouble by going to the wrong station and, instead of meeting Mrs Honeychurch who’d gone to meet her, taking a separate cab all the way to the house, and then insisting on paying the fare (five shillings, p.162). Fuss and trivia, thinks Cecil, visible above all this ‘stupefying twaddle’ (p.163).

Out on the lawn Charlotte drops her hapless pose and straightaway asks Lucy whether she has told Cecil about The Kiss with George and Lucy, irritably, says No because it was Charlotte who swore her to secrecy that evening back in Florence, for fear, if the story came out, Mrs Honeychurch would drop her for being a terrible chaperone. So first she wanted Lucy to lie, now, months later, she wants her to tell the truth. Exasperated, Lucy demands which is it to be?

More interesting, really, than the rather stereotypical situation (this entire novel is about One Kiss), is Forster’s characteristically intrusive, and playful, narrator.

Lucy thought this rather a good speech. The reader may have detected an unfortunate slip in it. Whether Miss Bartlett detected the slip one cannot say, for it is impossible to penetrate into the minds of elderly people. (166)

Chapter 15. The Disaster Within

The women (Lucy, Charlotte, Miss Honeychurch and Minnie, daughter of the Reverend Beebe) all go to church on Sunday morning, unlike the infidel men, Cecil and Frederick. Their victoria (horse-drawn carriage) parks near the Villa Cissie so Mrs Honeychurch asks to be introduced to old Emerson, who is courteous, and young George who is frank and humorous. Instantly he and plump Mrs Honeychurch get on.

And Lucy rejoices because it is obvious George has never told his father about The Kiss. In the carriage back Lucy rejoices, partly because she is not a trophy he has bragged about. Back at Windy Corner Forster lays it on thicker and thicker that Cecil doesn’t really care about Lucy. His model is feudal, of himself as a guider and moulder. Lucy will never be his equal. She has increasingly realised that he sneers not only at her family but at her, at her cultural inadequacy. Without realising it she is starting to dread their wedding, planned for the following January.

That afternoon George visits, invited by Frederick to play tennis. After much gabbling about how to make up a four, they play and George is surprisingly competitive. Cecil is not good enough to play and, feeling left out, takes the odd action of walking round the court reading out passages from the silly romance he’s reading. Then, afterwards they all sit on the court and Lucy encourages Cecil, visibly irritated with everything, to carry on reading.

Two things: 1) as Cecil reads the preposterous romantic tosh which is set in Florence, Lucy laughingly realises it’s the book Miss Lavish was threatening to write, which she has now managed to do, and get published under the silly pen name of Joseph Emery Prank. But 2), and much more importantly, somehow she has learned about The Kiss on the hill because she has included it in her romance and Cecil now reads this scene aloud to the assembled group, including the two protagonists of the original kiss, Lucy and George. The effect on both of them is electric and it takes all Lucy’s self-control not to betray it.

But how, the reader wonders, can Miss Lavish possibly have known about The Kiss? And then again, this novel itself, A Room With A View is merely another, higher, sort of romance and so does such a far-fetched coincidence matter?

All this leads to a fateful consequence. As they are making their way back to the house, through a patch of bushes, George kisses Lucy again. Just once then they are in sight of the others and he moves away.

Chapter 16. Lying to George

Lucy has ‘developed’ in the six months since the first kiss (in February). She imperiously summons Charlotte and without much difficulty gets her to admit to telling Miss Lavish (who she became thick as thieves with) about The Kiss. She is mortified that Miss Lavish then included it in her novel (although, it is not exactly a unique occurrence, the manly hero and sensitive heroine of a romantic novel having a kiss) but her bad faith and shiftiness make Lucy ‘despise’ her (p.183).

Next, imperious Lucy calls for George (or more accurately, dismisses Frederick from the room where they’re having post-tennis toast) and tells him to leave. In response George delivers an impassioned declaration of love for her which includes a really devastating critique of Cecil’s character as the type of man who needs to control, who likes playing malicious tricks and will never let her be his equal.

But Lucy doesn’t yield, he gets up and leaves the house, walking up the drive. Charlotte leaps to her feet and congratulates Lucy on her bravery. Lucy steps out into the autumn air at the moment that Freddy calls for her and George to rejoin them for another set of tennis. She says George has left so Freddy calls Cecil to make up the four. But Cecil refuses, pompously saying he is a book man. And at that moment Lucy realises he is intolerable and that evening breaks off the engagement.

Chapter 17. Lying to Cecil

Detailed account of the scene where she breaks it off. When Cecil takes it badly it only makes her angry. They are too different. She will never live up to his expectations. He despises her family. Pitifully, it takes this shock to make him see her for the first time as a woman and not some figure out of a painting by Leonardo, and in a spasm makes him realise he really does love her.

By a cruel irony she was drawing out all that was finest in his disposition. (p.191)

Too late. With great dignity Cecil realises she has become a new woman, with new insights and a new voice. For a moment she is distracted into saying she’s not in love with anyone else, when Cecil hadn’t even broached the possibility, angrily saying it’s disgusting when people always accuse a woman ending an engagement of having someone else when she’s doing it ‘for the sake of freedom’. The power of her speech in favour of women’s freedom reminded me very much of Nora Helmer in Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House.

There’s one major difference. ‘A Doll’s House’ ends with the door slamming as Nora leaves to start her new life. By complete contrast, Forster’s intrusive narrator delivers his longest speech and it is entirely, devastatingly, negative.

It did not do to think, nor, for the matter of that, to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged. Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before. (p.194)

Chapter 18. Lying to Mr Beebe, Mrs Honeychurch, Freddy and The Servants

Next morning Mr Beebe cycles up just as the coach is leaving to take Cecil to the station, accompanied by Freddy. They banter about a letter Beebe has received from the Miss Alans saying they’re thinking about going to Greece this coming winter while Cecil listens politely. When Cecil gets in the coach Freddy quickly fills the vicar in that the engagement is off. As the coach pulls away Beebe thumps the saddle of his bike with happiness and thanks the Lord. He knew Cecil and Lucy were mismatched.

In the house Beebe finds everyone discombobulated, Mrs Honeychurch fussing about the dahlias which have been knocked over by the autumn wind. Beebe goes into the living room to find Lucy playing a Mozart sonata and they slowly talk about the engagement, Lucy spelling out that Cecil was too controlling. But when she hears Beebe’s news that the Miss Alans are thinking of going to Athens, she is desperate to join them.

Their conversation is interrupted because Beebe had promised to take Charlotte and his niece, Minnie, up the hill to the Beehive tearooms. Here Charlotte strongly suggests that there is much behind the breaking of the engagement and when she hears of the Athens plan jumps to support it with an enthusiasm Beebe doesn’t understand (because she understands how much Lucy needs to get away from the vicinity of George).

Back at the house Beebe is instrumental in talking Mrs Honeychurch into letting Lucy travel to Greece. Lucy is thrilled. The Reverend Beebe cycles home in the dark and windy autumn night.

Chapter 19. Lying to Mr Emerson

Lucy is in London with her mother making the arrangements to travel to Greece with the Miss Alans. She refuses to tell them about the engagement being broken off because she promised Cecil she would tell no one till she was out of England. She realises she is becoming detached from her mother. In numerous ways she is growing up. They go shopping for guidebooks and such and quarrel and Mrs Honeychurch makes the biting point that Lucy sounds more and more like Miss Bartlett every day. This cuts Lucy to the quick, but is this Forster’s point? Are we meant to take Lucy’s decision not to reciprocate George’s love as a denial of the life force and so the beginning of her journey into warped spinsterhood?

Anyway, the carriage passes the Cissie Villa whose lights are off and their driver (Powell) tells Lucy the Emersons have moved out. They have collected Miss Bartlett along the way but she wants to go to church so they drive there. While her mother and Charlotte go into the church Lucy goes to the rectory to wait for them and is startled to discover that Mr Emerson Senior is there, notably ill and frail from gout.

He explains that he never knew his son was in love with her, but he did notice how he revived and picked up after the incident of the swimming pond, how he determined to live. He apologises that George was so forward but says he raised him to believe in love and life. For a moment, when he describes George as ‘gone under’ Lucy has a panic that George is dead but what Emerson means is his son has sunk into a depression. He no longer wants to live near Lucy and so has found a place in London where he and his father can live.

The conversation touches on her going away to Greece and the old man assumes she means with her husband-to-be. It’s only when Beebe pops in to collect something and check they’re alright here in the warm (outside it’s a cold and windy, rainy night) and mentions that she’s going away with the Miss Alans that the old man realises Cecil isn’t going, which forces her to admit she’s broken off the engagement and then the old man spots it: she’s in love with his son. She must marry him. Love is eternal and must be fulfilled.

Lucy tries to deny it, is angry, then bursts into tears, then the carriage is at the door and she says she is trusted, she has made promises. At which moment Beebe re-enters saying the carriage to take her home is ready and is thunderstruck when Emerson Senior tells him (Beebe) that Lucy loves George, that they love each other. Beebe becomes really serious for the first time in the book and tells her to marry George, turning and walking out.

She is still not certain and Emerson Senior delivers a page-long soliloquy about love being truth, while she cries. He says if George was here and kissed her it would clarify everything so she begs him to kiss her (in a chaste, fatherly way) and Forster’s prose takes flight into a typically lyrical hymn.

He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling that, in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world. Throughout the squalor of her homeward drive – she spoke at once – his salutation remained. He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire. She “never exactly understood,” she would say in after years, ‘how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.’ (p.225)

‘The holiness of direct desire’, surely that’s the key to the whole thing. I’m always surprised by how much Forster – supposedly poet laureate of maiden aunts – reminds me of D.H. Lawrence, the prophet of unbridled desire. But here, as in all his other books, he praises a pagan, unchristian notion of physical desire and fulfilment.

Chapter 20. The End of the Middle Ages

And so we find George and Lucy who have eloped and are back in the same rooms in the Pension Bertolini, kissing and canoodling and blessing their luck. Lucy tells us that she alienated her family (Frederick and mother) and at a stroke lost the interest of the Reverend Beebe. She optimistically declares that:

‘if we act the truth, the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run.’

Maybe. Alternatively, screw them. Live your own life. The narrative ends with a final twist. Charlotte told Lucy that she had no idea old Mr Emerson was in the rectory living room, but George disputes this. He says his father was napping and awoke to see Charlotte in the doorway turning to leave. What… what if her insistence, on that evening, on going to church was a ploy because she knew Lucy wouldn’t attend but would pass the time in the rectory where she’d seen George’s father… What if, at the last minute, she had set it up for Lucy to encounter George’s father, the only person who could talk her round to her impulsive course of action? What if deep within that dried-up spinster’s bosom still lurked romance and love after all?

At which the narrative ends in another one of Forster’s puffs of pagan smoke:

Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean. (p.230)

Forster’s Afterword: A View With A Room (1958)

Forster lived to be 91. In 1958, 50 years after the novel was first published, he wrote an Afterword to it, wittily or limply (depending on your sense of humour) titled ‘A View With A Room’.

This tells us several facts, notably that the first part, set in Italy, was almost the first sustained passage of fiction he ever wrote, which explains why readers from that day to this feel it is wonderfully light and effervescent and entertaining – but that he then put the manuscript to one side to write two novels, the melodramatic ‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’, and the long, worthy and (in my opinion) very stodgy ‘The Longest Journey’ – before returning to write the second and concluding half of ‘A Room With A View’ – which explains why, despite a handful of zesty scenes (most obviously the naked bathe in the woods) almost all readers feel there is a distinct falling-off in energy and high spirits.

I’d summarise it by saying the highly enjoyable bitchy satire on English snobbery abroad of the first part is replaced by a boring sense that he felt he ought to be writing something earnest and meaningful (about the growth of a young woman’s character) in the second.

In passing, Forster tells us that ‘The Longest Journey’, his stodgiest and least successful novel, is his favourite – presumably because it’s the most obviously autobiographical and so records events and feelings close to Forster’s own heart.

But the most interesting part of the Afterword, and the thing which apparently spurred him to write it, is the bit where he speculates on what would have become of his characters, in the fifty years since it was published. This is surprisingly detailed and also indicates the vast, almost inconceivable technological and cultural distance which separated 1958 from 1908. What vast catastrophes intervened! Here’s what Forster speculated might have happened to his characters:

George and Lucy marry and settle in Highgate. He gets a better job as a clerk in a government office. Cousin Charlotte leaves them some money and they live well until the outbreak of the Great War. George is a conscientious objector and accepted alternative service. Lucy defiantly continued to play Beethoven (Hun music!) on the piano until she was reported at which point Old Mr Emerson gave the police who called round a piece of his mind. At the end of the war they have two girls and a son and move out to Carshalton.

Hopes of moving to Windy Corner disappeared when Mrs Honeychurch died, Freddy inherited and immediately sold it to raise funds for his own growing family. The garden she tended so lovingly was built over.

When the Second World War broke out the pair were living in a flat in Watford. The children had grown up and moved away to their own lives. George enlisted at the ripe old age of 50. He discovered he liked soldiering, and also that he could be unfaithful to Lucy. The flat was bombed and they lost all their belongings.

George was captured in North Africa and imprisoned in an Italian POW camp (like Eric Newby). When the Italian government collapsed George headed north, arriving in Florence and tried to find the pension where the novel is set, but failed. Things change. The houses had been remodelled, extended, merged and renumbered. The View was still there and the Room, probably, too, but impossible to find. Now (1958) they live in peace, George is in his early 70s and Lucy in her late 60s.

As to the lead character in the second part, poor Cecil Vyse, when the first war came, he found his niche working in Intelligence i.e. the secret service.

Forster makes an interesting remark, in passing, as he describes the couple looking to move after the first war:

The characters in my other novels were experiencing similar troubles. Howard’s End is a hunt for a home. India is a Passage for Indians as well as English. No resting-place. (p.232)

Ten million papers must have been written about gender, ethnicity, empire and so on in all the classics of English literature. I wonder if anyone’s written about the search for a home, for a final resting place.

Feminism

The theme of women’s liberation is so obvious in the book that it’s the lead element in the blurb of the Penguin paperback. Quite clearly Lucy is a young woman who outgrows the social, cultural, religious and economic restrictions which hemmed in women in the late Victorian, early Edwardian era.

Emerson Senior and Junior have scattered comments about the equality of women, which they predict will come but only at some vague future time, in some future utopia. But it’s in Lucy’s bitter dissections of Cecil’s controlling personality that we get the strongest expressions of feminism.

‘When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you’re always protecting me.’ Her voice swelled. ‘I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman’s place! You despise my mother — I know you do — because she’s conventional and bothers over puddings; but, oh goodness!’ — she rose to her feet — ‘conventional, Cecil, you’re that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don’t know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap up me. I won’t be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious, and you hide them from me.’ (p.191)

‘Cecil was very kind indeed; only — I had better tell you the whole truth, since you have heard a little — it was that he is so masterful. I found that he wouldn’t let me go my own way. He would improve me in places where I can’t be improved. Cecil won’t let a woman decide for herself — in fact, he daren’t.’ (p.202)

And much more in the same vein. Cecil is a brilliant account of a certain kind of patronisingly controlling man. Part two is less lyrical and freewheeling than the Florence passages but Cecil’s clever, controlling, limited character makes it just as rewarding.

Does Forster’s pagan lyricism undermine his irony?

Forster’s style of timid irony cannot, I think, co-exist with his moments of pure lyricism. The kind of lyrical passages I’m thinking about are more obvious and sustained in the short stories, where every story contains poetic passages about pagan beauty, the spirit of the woods or countryside, the mystery of the seaside grotto in ‘The Story of the Siren’ and so on. In this novel these moments of pure lyricism don’t occur so often but they do occur, and at key moments.

The Piazza Signoria is too stony to be brilliant. It has no grass, no flowers, no frescoes, no glittering walls of marble or comforting patches of ruddy brick. By an odd chance – unless we believe in a presiding genius of places – the statues that relieve its severity suggest, not the innocence of childhood, nor the glorious bewilderment of youth, but the conscious achievements of maturity. Perseus and Judith, Hercules and Thusnelda, they have done or suffered something, and though they are immortal, immortality has come to them after experience, not before. Here, not only in the solitude of Nature, might a hero meet a goddess, or a heroine a god.

I can see how his subtle demarcation of the changing psychological impact of conversations is part of Forster’s spectrum of sensitivity about moods and feelings and how these can sometimes rise to the level of poetic dithyrambs, passages where the narrator gives vent to a style of lyricism which invokes the pagan gods as if real presences, as in this passage. These moments paint the background to the story, the setting for the English tourists. I can see how, from one angle, it works.

But, for me, these moments also undermine the sense of control present in all the dialogue and much of the descriptive prose. Forster’s irony works precisely because it is so underplayed, very restrained. It concerns very constrained, tightly-wrapped characters revealing themselves through charged conversations. For me, the moments of high lyricism I’m referring to blow wide open the air of restraint and constriction which his dry irony relies on for its affect. Like a stripper arriving at a vicar’s tea party. Like staring at the sun then turning your gaze back to the flowers in a border. After the great efflorescence of the pagan passages it’s difficult to focus back on the subtle details.

Credit

A Room with a View by E.M Forster was published by Edward and Arnold in 1908. References are to the 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

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The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett (1902)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Ostend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in Ostend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts

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

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

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

Quotes

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

The town was silent and almost deserted. It had a false and sinister aspect. She remembered tales which she had heard of this glittering resort, which in the season holds more scoundrels than any place in Europe, save only Monte Carlo.

The thin veneer of civilisation

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

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

And:

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

Fear

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

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

The eternal enemy

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

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

Credit

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

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The 80s: Photographing Britain @ Tate Britain

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Johnson isn’t mentioned anywhere in this exhibition but thinking about the 1980s made me dig up favourite playlists, and I ended up writing most of this review listening to his great 1979 album, ‘Forces of Victory’.

Introduction

Sometimes you wonder whether exhibitions at the Tate galleries are really about art at all any more, but aren’t more like polemically woke sociology lectures, with art, photography, sculpture and other evidence used merely as illustrations for a familiar set of well-worn, ‘radical’ themes.

This exhibition contains rooms or sections devoted to immigration, race, race riots, racism, the Black Experience, the Black Body, the Queer Black Body, feminism, identity, gender, colonialism, imperialism, immigration, sectarianism, pollution and environmentalism. As you can see, these look like the topic tabs on the Guardian website or a list of fashionable humanities subjects at any modern university.

As to the lived experiences of anyone not a left-wing activist, not a feminist, not Black or Asian, and not gay or lesbian during the 1980s, these are less in evidence than the subjects I’ve just listed and where they do appear, it’s mainly to be mocked and ridiculed.

I visited with a friend and we loved the first room because it is packed with a Greatest Hits selection of political issues from the 1980s: photos of anti-racism demonstrations (by Syd Shelton and Paul Trevor), of Rock Against Racism gigs, of the Miners Strike (by John Harris and Brenda Prince), of Greenham Common (by Format Photographers), protests about Section 28 and AIDS, all leading up to the Poll Tax riots – yes, all the usual suspects, shot in vivid black and white, which took us both back to our heady student days.

But as the exhibition progressed her enthusiasm turned to puzzlement and then irritation and, by the end, she was so fed up with being lectured about identity and gender and race and queer Black bodies that she gave up. She described it as the worst exhibition we’ve been to this year and I came to agree. If you read all the wall captions (as I’m addicted to doing), it felt like being trapped in a lift full of woke humanities lecturers all talking at the same time.

‘No title’ from the series Strictly by Jason Evans (1991) Tate © Jason Evans

The central problem with this exhibition

I naively thought the exhibition would be a portrait of the 1980s, that the curators would make an honest attempt to give a balanced account of this troubled decade and the wide range of social and cultural changes it witnessed, as captured in photography – that it would be a visual history of the decade.

Very wrong. What the curators have done is to make a personal selection of just the radical photographers from the period who covered what they think are the important issues (then, as now), the disruptors, the radicals, the subversives. And, as mentioned, although they initially touch on many of the obvious issues of the time (the Winter of Discontent, Thatcher, Miners Strike, unemployment, inequality, Greenham Common, poll tax) this is not where the curators’ hearts lie.

The curators are far more concerned with contemporary woke issues of gender and ethnicity than with genuinely trying to reach back and understand what it was like to live through the 1980s, as my friend and I (and, obviously, scores of millions of other Brits) did.

The result is an exhibition which feels top heavy with the woke curatorial concerns of our own day – gender, race, colonialism, immigration, inequality – but feels like it misses out important aspects of the decade in they’ve chosen to cover.

While the wall labels are fairly neutral and factual about the political history (Callaghan government; winter of discontent; days lost to strikes; Thatcher elected; deindustralisation; working class poverty; anti-nuclear protests) the actual exhibits are utterly one-sided, with a plethora of photos, pamphlets and posters decrying the authorities, the police, the government, for their racism, lack of concern for the poor, inequality, tax and regulation changes to benefit business and the middle classes, and so on.

While all these criticisms are true, they fail to take account of the key fact of the decade which is that Mrs Thatcher was, and continued to be, phenomenally popular with about 40% of the population. Here’s how many voted for her three Conservative administrations.

  • 1979: 13,697,923 (44%)
  • 1983: 13,012,316 (42%)
  • 1987: 13,760,583 (42%)

Lots and lots of people thought Britain had gone down the drain in the 1970s, thought the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan were in hock to the trade unions who, despite all their promises, seemed to be continuously on strike, while all manner of public services collapsed – that Britain was becoming a failed state or Third World country.

In this narrative, Thatcher not only saved Britain from endless decline under Labour, but went on to remodel the entire economy, letting unprofitable nationalised industries go to the wall while privatising other state monopolies in order to enable international investment (for example, modernising the dire railway network or allowing greater innovation in telecoms). The deregulation of the City of London allowed British banks and investment companies to compete more aggressively around the world and become phenomenally successful. Selling council houses to their owners (as per the 1980 Housing Act) allowed millions of poor people to feel the pride and security of owning their own home for the first time. And, on the patriotic front, her staunch attitude in the Falklands War and victory against quite daunting odds, allowed tens of millions of Brits to feel proud about their country again.

I personally disagree with a lot of this or can point out the obvious criticisms of most of these policies – but 40% of the population enthusiastically agreed with it, saw the world this way, voted for her, and hero-worshipped her.

And my point is simple: None of that is in this exhibition. This is an exhibition of radical feminists, Black and Asian civil rights marchers, gay rights activists, of campaigners against race hate and misogyny and unemployment and nuclear weapons etc. It is like a collection of all the fringe groups you find at a Labour Party conference vying for the attention of those in power who are always too busy to listen, today as 40 years ago.

The large number of people who were relieved by the breaking of union power, the end of permanent strikes, the people who made fortunes in the City or found their pay doubling in newly privatised companies or suddenly owned a home for the first time in their lives or felt the government was (unlike labour) seriously backing them in the war against the IRA, all the people who benefitted from the booming North Sea oil industries in Aberdeen or working on the rigs, all the people who were encouraged by the new spirit of entrepreneurism to set up their own business and prospered – none of them are here.

To be clear, and to bend over backwards for the curators, the main wall labels which introduce each room and give the historical facts behind each theme are broadly objective historical summaries, albeit of the predominantly leftish issues they’ve chosen to discuss. It’s the selection of photos and objects which are unrelentingly one-sided, tendentious and biased and it is, of course, these which make the main impact on the visitor.

For example, the exhibition includes a photo by Anna Fox of this jokey cutout of Mrs Thatcher which has been splattered with orange or something. But to really convey the atmosphere of the decade it should have included many more images of Thatcher, including some of the terrifying ones of her at her most domineering. Now I think about it, the show could have had an entire section devoted just to images of Mrs Thatcher, showcasing all the photographic and image manipulation styles of the day, from adoring Conservative posters to satirical photomontages by Peter Kennard or photos of the Spitting Image puppet of her. That would have been interesting, funny and thought provoking but no. Just this image of the cutout spattered with soup. Disappointing. Missed opportunity. Photos of the woman who dominated a decade.

Friendly Fire, target (Margaret Thatcher) by Anna Fox 1989 © Anna Fox

The relentlessly left-wing perspective of the curators quickly comes to feel so narrow. Can it really be true that every single photographer, photographic studio or collective during the entire 1980s was vehemently left wing, concerned only with radical causes, with ‘pushing boundaries’ and ‘subverting’ all the usual suspects (gender norms, heteronormative stereotypes, racist myths etc)? Can the entire decade‘s photographic output really have been so narrow, repetitive and obsessed with the same handful of left-wing themes and issues?

Facts about the exhibition

This is a vast show: ten rooms, 16 themes, over 70 ‘lens-based artists and collectives’ are represented by over 550 art works and archive items: lots of ‘radical’ photography magazines such as Ten.8 and Camerawork; lots of posters, leaflets, handouts, Greenham Common posters and flyers and badges, anti-racism pamphlets, posters etc. It is massive. Prepare to be overwhelmed and exhausted.

No reasonable human being can be expected to fully process and assess 550 photos and objects at one go – so the curators are either assuming people will go back a second time (probably a good idea) or will hop from one section to another, or will skim through and not give anything enough attention (all too likely).

The negative affect of this jumble-sale overcrowding is exemplified by the sections devoted to the black-and-white documentary photography of two photographers I revere, Tish Murtha and Chris Killip. I raved about their depictions of dirt-poor working class communities when I first saw them in shows at the Photographer’s Gallery entirely devoted to their work, when they had a devastating impact on me. Tish Murtha, in particular, was a photographer of genius.

But here, half a dozen of their (outstanding) photos are wedged in between 6 by someone else, 9 by someone else, 4 by someone else, 7 by someone else, a section about Asian identity, another about the Black Experience, some stuff about pollution in Devon, a sequence of seaside snaps… and so on and so on until the whole thing becomes a blur. They both deserve a better environment and more respect.

Critch’ and Sean by Chris Killip (1982) Tate © Chris Killip

It’s the difference between walking through a landscape, stopping to give every tree and plant time and attention – and driving through the same landscape in a car, noticing the occasional standout feature against the general blur.

Chronological slippage

The exhibition is so huge that it overflows its own boundaries. It is everywhere referred to as ‘The 80s’ and yet the first photo dates from 1976 and the last one from 1993. That’s a 17-year spread, not a ten-year one. It feels bloated chronologically as well as content-wise.

Exhibition structure

At one point I drafted a long section comparing my own lived experience of the 1980s (including going on protest marches as a student, then living in the Brixton depicted in some of these photos, clubbing, protesting, walking through one of the Brixton riots etc) with the depictions given here but it got too long and irrelevant. Instead here is a boiled-down version of Tate’s own exhibition guide (which you can read in full here).

As you can see, the opening sections tick all the boxes, contain interesting facts and seem set fair to give you an interesting historical overview of the decade. It’s only slowly that the curators’ obsession with race and gender become more prominent and you begin to wonder, and then become irritated by, the absence of so many other things.

First a list of what is in the exhibition. Then my list of what, in my opinion, has been omitted.

1. Documenting the decade

Protests and riots from the 1976 Grunwick strike through the Miners Strike, National Front rallies met with anti-racist demonstrations, the Clash playing their famous Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park, the election of Mrs Thatcher and the ideology of Thatcherism, Greenham Common (obviously), the poll tax riots.

Paul Simonon of the Clash at a Rock Against Racism concert, Victoria Park, East London, April 1978, photo by Syd Sheldon/White Riot, in The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain

2. Anti-racist movements

The 1948 British Nationality Act allowed everyone born in Britain or its Empire to become a ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ and tens of thousands came to fill job vacancies. Regrettably, sometimes tragically, this triggered hostility and racial discrimination, marking the beginning of decades of racist rhetoric, rioting and civil rights activism. 1968 Enoch Powell’s river of blood speech. By the mid-1970s, the far-right, anti-immigration National Front was England’s fourth largest political party. So the show has many photos of their rallies and protests by opponents (and posters, badges and flyers), including quite a few about the so-called Battle of Lewisham which took place on 13 August 1977.

Darcus Howe addressing the anti-racist demonstrators, Lewisham, 13 August 1977 by Syd Shelton (1977) Tate © Syd Shelton

Was 1977 in the 1980s? No. Why is it in the exhibition? Because this isn’t an exhibition about the 1980s: it is an exhibition about radical causes the curators support, and which had their origins in the 1970s.

Also, a bit of digging revealed that quite a few of the black-and-white protest photos in this first room are loans from the National Portrait Gallery a mile up the road. Handy. And they’re not just dusty old photos from the archive but are, in fact, star entries in the National Portrait Gallery’s Schools Hub. This includes the Darcus Howe photo and the photo of Jayaben Desai by David Mansell.

3. The Miners’ strike

In March 1984, the National Coal Board announced plans to close 20 collieries, putting 20,000 jobs at risk. The National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill, responded with a series of year-long strikes. Observed across England, Scotland and Wales, the strikes put industrial issues and workers’ rights on the national agenda. Many dramatic photos including the famous one of a mounted policeman wielding a baton against photographer Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave, 1984.

4. Greenham Common

On 5 September 1981, a group of women marched from Cardiff to the Royal Air Force base at Greenham Common in Berkshire. The site was common land, loaned to the US Air Force by the British Government during the Second World War and never returned. The group called themselves Women for Life on Earth. They were challenging the decision to house nuclear missiles at the site. When their request for a debate was ignored, they set up camp and the site became a women-only space. The camp lasted for 19 years although it was after only 6 years, in 1987, that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan signed a treaty which paved the way for the removal of cruise missiles from Greenham.

Greenham Common, 14 December 1985 by Melanie Friend (1985) reprinted 2023. © Melanie Friend, Format Photographers

I smiled when the curators proudly explained that Gorbachev subsequently paid tribute to the role ‘Greenham women and peace movements’ played in this historic agreement as if they, the curators, were partly responsible for its achievements. And I also liked the implication that you should always believe what a Russian politician says.

The massive political exhibition which filled the same Tate Britain galleries before this, Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990, also featured an entire room about Greenham Common. My friend jokingly suggested that maybe every Tate exhibition should have a section devoted to Greenham Common: The Pre-Raphaelites and Greenham Common. Victorian sculpture and Greenham Common.

5. Poll Tax

The community charge, commonly known as the ‘poll tax’, was introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1989 in Scotland, and 1990 in England and Wales. This flat-rate tax on every adult replaced previous taxation based on property value. The tax was accused of benefitting the rich and unfairly targeting the poor. The national anti-poll tax movement began on the streets of Glasgow and led to a series of anti-poll tax actions across the UK. Many demonstrations saw clashes between police and protestors, and resulted in rioting. The fallout from the tax triggered leadership challenges against the prime minister and, in 1990, Thatcher resigned. In 1991, following vehement national opposition, John Major’s Conservative government announced the poll tax would be replaced by council tax.

So news photos of anti-poll tax marches, some of which turned into riots, ‘ordinary people’ carrying placards, burning cars in Trafalgar Square. Ah, those were the days.

Nidge and Laurence Kissing by David Hoffman (1990) © David Hoffman

6. The Gay Rights Movement

In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised sexual acts between two men. It was the result of decades of campaigning but did nothing to address the discrimination gay and lesbian communities continued to face. So photos of LGBTQ+ people protesting for equal rights.

In 1981 the UK saw its first identified cases of AIDS. By 1987 the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a global health crisis. The public focus was largely on gay men who were being infected in much greater numbers than the general population, fuelling anti-gay rhetoric in politics and the press. Queer activists organised in opposition to the resulting homophobia, as well as Conservative ‘family values’ campaigns. Do you remember some media labelling it the gay plague? Bigotry on a national scale. Lots of photos of anti-homophobia and AIDS awareness marches.

7. (Political) Landscapes

This is the first and, as it turns out, pretty much the only section which isn’t about political protest, gender awareness and Black issues. But don’t imagine it’s pretty photos of the British Isles. It, also, takes a heavily ‘theoretical’ i.e. politicised approach to its subject.

This section points out how the entire concept of ‘landscape’ is socially, culturally and politically constructed, and how the British tendency to see the countryside as cosy and reassuring often conceals the way the land has been a battlefield for rights to common land and to roam.

Also, in line with the gloomy focus elsewhere in the show, there’s an emphasis on landscapes as places of deindustrialisation and ruins, and as degraded by pollution and fly tipping.

That said this room contained some of the best sets of images, neither part of the obvious political issues of the first few rooms nor of the gender and race obsession of the second half of the exhibition. Having walked through the whole exhibition twice I found myself gravitating towards this room for the understated, sometimes elusive quality of its photos.

For example, I liked the red river sequence by Jem Southam, a set of 12 colour photos of the country around a stream in west Cornwall. None of them individually are ‘great’ photos but the fact there’s 12 of them collectively creates a great sense of location and strangeness. And the dramatic black-and-white study of a standing stone on Orkney by Albert Watson.

Orkney Standing Stones by Albert Watson (1991) © Albert Watson. Courtesy Hamilton Gallery

But the pull of politics is unavoidable. Nearby are upsetting images from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, namely The Walls by Willie Doherty, and the disturbing series Sectarian Murder by Paul Seawright. This records the sites where murdered bodies were found, after the bodies had been removed and they had returned to their normal, litter-strewn banality.

Even this apparently bucolic image by Paul Graham contains the tiny detail of a Union Jack high up in the tree which, in its little way, throws the shadow of 800 years of history across the green fields and blue sky.

Union Jack Flag in Tree, Country Tyrone by Paul Graham (1985) © Paul Graham

8. Remodelling history

Extensive coverage of radical feminist photographers Jo Spence and Maud Sulter who set out to ‘challenge photography’s sexist and colonial past’, and its relationship to class politics.

Remodelling Photo History: Revisualization by Jo Spence (1982) Tate © The Jo Spence Memorial Archive

There’s a surprising amount about these two figures, Spence and Sulter, including a separate section on Spence’s collaboration with artist Rosy Martin to develop photo-therapy. As with other Tate exhibitions, maybe there’s so much of it simply because Tate owns their archive and needs a pretext to display a decent amount of their work. (We’ll see the same is true of the unexpected prominence given to an American photographer, Lyle Ashton Harris, at the end of the show. Tate owns them so this is a prime opportunity to dust them off and display them.)

9. Black women

There’s a separate section devoted to Maud Sulter who’s quoted as saying, ‘Black women’s experience and Black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalised’, and so set about rectifying this in series of photos of her dressed up in period costume looking like an extra from Bridgerton.

Zabat, Terpsichore, 1989 from Zabat by Maud Sulter (1989) © Estate of Maud Sulter. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2023. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

10. Image and Text

A section on the use of text in photos, texts designed to amplify or undermine the central image. There is much citing of the artist and theorist Victor Burgin who, the curators tell us, was very influential during this period. He’s represented by some of his series of large, poster-sized photos which include ironical texts, titled ‘UK 76‘. 1976? But I thought this was an exhibition of photography from the 1980s? No. As with all the photos of anti-National Front marches, the Battle of Lewisham and so on, the curators bend their own rules and boundaries when it suits them. (As with the Jason Evans photo at the top of this review, and Albert Watson’s Orkney Standing Stones, both from 1991 and so spilling over the other end of the boundary.)

This section also included some big poster-sized images of rubbish new townscapes with official-sounding quotes from brochures pasted on top (which I liked very much). And it’s the section with the satirical images of office workers by Anna Fox (with mockingly ironic text) and Kroll’s sequence of posh chaps in private clubs (with mockingly ironic text) which I’ll describe below.

10. Reflections of The Black Experience

This is the biggest room in the exhibition. It takes its name from ‘Reflections of the Black Experience’ which was an exhibition held at Brixton Art Gallery in 1986, commissioned by the Greater London Council’s Race Equality Unit. It was followed by D-MAX: A Photographic Exhibition in Bristol.

Both exhibitions played an important role in the development of the Association of Black Photographers, which is now called Autograph ABP. Established in 1988, Autograph’s mission was to advocate for the inclusion of ‘historically marginalised photographic practices’. Working from a small office in Brixton, the agency delivered an ambitious programme of exhibitions, publications and events. Autograph is now one of my favourite small galleries in London, which I’ll discuss below.

There’s lots in this big room, including photos of Brixton from the later 1980s, when I lived there. The display that made the most impact on me was the brilliant series of Handsworth self portraits. This project was set up by Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon in which they set up a makeshift studio in Handsworth, a multicultural part of Birmingham, and invited people to take self portraits of themselves. Over 500 people took part and the joy of people messing about, as solo shots, in pairs or larger family groups, is infectious. Once again, though, as throughout the show, works are included from outside the nominal time range because, well, they’re good.

Ting A Ling, from Handsworth Self Portrait, 1979 © Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon

11. (Political) Self portraiture

You might have thought this would feature a fascinating range of self portraits by people across society throughout the ten years of the 1980s but no, this is Tate and so only a handful of social groups really count, namely radical feminists, Black activists and LGBTQ+ people. In the curators’ words:

In the nineteenth century, photography was a valuable tool for colonial powers. Ethnographic images of Indigenous Peoples and landscapes were distributed through postcards and magazines. They ‘othered’ subjects and created racist stereotypes that legitimised the mission of empire. The photographs on display here challenge this colonial gaze. They present nuanced, multi-dimensional representations of Black and Asian British selfhood.

So the self portraits in this section are entirely concerned with subverting imperialist, colonialist stereotypes. They link up with the series in the last room by Grace Lau of him or herself dressing up as types from the decade in order to subvert gender norms etc.

From the series ‘Interiors’ by Grace Lau © Grace Lau 1986

Black activists or gender activists. Little attempt to consider the myriad other types of self portrait taken outside these areas, by anybody else, at any other part of the decade.

12. Community

This room hosts series from half a dozen photographers who went to live with communities around the UK to share their experiences and create accurate depictions. Most are in black and white with a 100% left-wing focus on poverty, crappy housing, unemployment, aggressive policing and racial stereotypical. It includes outstanding photos by Chris Killip which, for some reason, didn’t hit me as hard as when I saw his one-man show at the Photographers’ Gallery. I think being set next to the work of 3 or 4 other photographers (for example, the equally as good Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen) doing more or less the same, attenuated all of them.

13. Colour photography

A room full of big, blaring, gaudy colour photos. Apparently, Britain’s first exhibition of photography taken on colour film was Peter Mitchell’s 1979 show at Impressions Gallery in York. During the 1980s technological developments continually improved the quality of colour photography and this room brings together sequences of giant colour photographs by Martin Parr, Paul Reas and Tom Wood. Because they are almost entirely very unflattering photos of very ordinary white people I came to think of it as the Chav Room or the White Trash Room (fuller explanation below).

14. Black bodyscapes

In case you didn’t get enough Blackness in the opening room about anti-racist protests, in the room about Black women or the massive room about The Black Experience, here is a room devoted to the Black Queer Experience. The assembled photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ajamu X and Lyle Ashton Harris ‘explore masculinity, sexuality and Blackness’.

Fani-Kayode was described by Ajamu X as ‘the most visible, out, Black, queer photographer’ of the 1980s’. Ajamu X’s desire to document ‘the whole of Black queer Britain’ has been dubbed ‘Pleasure Activism’. Harris describes his photographs as a celebration of ‘Black beauty and sensuality’. The photos of Ajamu (black and white) and Fani-Koyode (moody, shadowy colour) are, in their different ways, staggeringly impactful.

Body Builder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990) Tate © Ajamu X

15. Celebrating subculture

The final room. You might have thought that a documentary look at the ‘subcultures of the 1980s’ might have covered some of the movements closely associated with ever-changing fashions of pop music such as post-punk, industrial music, Goths, New Romantics, synthpop and, later, Madchester, acid house, raves and so on. These affected how people dressed, thought about themselves, danced, partied, affected not just styles of music but graphics, album art, posters and many other types of visual content.

But no. None of that is here. Tate curators only know two subjects, race and sex, gender and ethnicity, and so they ignore all the pop cultures I’ve listed. Instead, at the mention of ‘subculture’ their thoughts immediately go to gender issues, to LGBTQ+, and to the furore surrounding the notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act.

The wall labels go into great detail about how Section 28 prohibited local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’ and triggered a wave of protest from gay and lesbian communities. They tell us how Section 28 forced many LGBT groups to disband and saw literature depicting gay life removed from schools and libraries, but that it also galvanised the Gay Rights movement. People took to the streets in a series of marches and so, with thumping predictability, the exhibition ends with lots of photographs of people protesting, marches, banners etc, very much as in the first room, or the Greenham Common room, or the Black Experience room.

If you’re maybe a little bored by the subject of gay activism, tough, because not far away there’s photos by Tessa Boffin who ‘subversively reimagines literary characters as lesbians’, while nearby Grace Lau ‘documents members of various fetishist sub-cultures’.

To be crystal clear, none of this is ‘bad’ in itself, some of it is very good. It’s just that by this stage the visitor who’s been reading all the wall labels is exhausted by the curators’ obsessive harping on just the same two or three subjects to the exclusion of everything else.

End of exhibition summary

I suppose I could stop here, having given you a good summary of what there is to see and my own negative response to it. And you might be wise to stop reading here. But several things triggered me so much I needed to work them through in print.

Omitted subjects

As explained, my friend and I got increasingly frustrated as we looked for evidence of the other, non-political, non-woke aspects of the 1980s which we and millions like us like us experienced. Without trying too hard I made a list of the domestic and international events, music, style and commercial changes which I associate the decade with.

Take sport. There’s nothing about sport at all. Apparently there was no sport during the 1980s and no sports photography. Even if you wanted to ‘keep it Tate’ and make sport as political as possible, they could have mentioned the disastrous Bradford City stadium fire, the legislation which followed forcing all football grounds to become all-seated, and the resulting accusations that the sport was losing its working class fanbase and becoming embourgeoisified. And there were lots of other sporting events, highlights and scandals. But not a hint here.

Pop music. There’s one photo of The Clash performing at a Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park and that’s it. Nothing else: no industrial rock, post-punk, synth pop, New Romantics, no Smiths and, at the end of the decade, no Madchester, no ecstasy, no raves, no ambient music. There’s a wall of style magazines at the end, sections on the impact of, for example, i-D magazine, but somehow the curators’ focus purely on design manages to omit the extraordinary output of a decade many consider the greatest era in British pop history. Where’s Wham for God’s sake?

This was the decade when MTV arrived in the UK (1981) and its reliance on pop videos changed the dynamic of how people consumed pop. Same with cable TV generally, and the arrival of Sky TV (1984) with its crazy aerials. I appreciate these aren’t photographic but someone must have taken photographs of them and of this huge transformation of the cultural and visual landscape. Not here.

No jazz. No classical music. None. They didn’t exist during the 1980s or if they did, no one took any photos of them. Whereas I remember in the early 1980s transitioning away from pop music altogether and listening to the likes of Courtney Pine, Loose Tubes or Andy Shepherd. OK they’re not photographers, but it felt like a big cultural shift at the time and surely someone took photos of them.

World music same. Lots of young people got fed up with boring old rock music and sought new sounds from around the world. WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) was founded in 1980 and the first WOMAD festival was held in Shepton Mallet 1982. Nothing here.

Live Aid, remember that, Saturday, 13 July 1985? Not here, not a whisper, not so much of the event itself, but as the invention of really epic mass charity events which it invented. It was based around images because of Bob Geldof’s response to Michael Buerk’s reporting of the Ethiopia famine. I know that’s TV reporting, but there were lots of photographs of it (of the famine and of the concert). Why is Greenham Common included but Live Aid, which was a vastly bigger event and, arguably, more socially transformative, not? All curators are feminists. 39 iconic photos of Live Aid at London’s Wembley Stadium

Fashion photography? No. None. There’s a wall about style magazines but this is chiefly about the magazine design itself: I saw nothing recording the drastic new looks which appeared in the early 1980s, the New Romantics, Blitz nightclub, big hair, big shoulder pads which became crazy fashionable. According to this exhibition, never happened. 38 Iconic ’80s Fashion Photos.

The royal wedding On Wednesday 29 July 1981 Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. It was a huge social and media event. If you think about it, royal photography is a specialised area or genre all to itself. As with Mrs Thatcher, the curators could have done an intellectually reputable section on how royal images are created, curated, marketed and disseminated, mocked and satirised. 70 Rare Photos From Princess Diana’s Wedding.

The Brighton bombing on 12 October 1984. See the relevant photos by brilliant photojournalist John Downing.

Architecture The 1980s was the great decade of postmodernism in architecture with its flagship building, Lloyds of London. Surely there were photographers specialising in the built environment across the UK and in particular this completely new look which swept across Britain? Not according to this exhibition. A Spotter’s Guide to Post-Modern Architecture.

Foreign reporting? Live Aid was of course a response to the Ethiopian famine and, in particular, the work of photojournalist Mohamed Amin, but there is no photography of events outside the UK in this exhibition. I take the point that the curators decided to limit their scope to the UK, but images of the major foreign stories of the decade were published in the UK and many taken by British photographers. So why aren’t they included here? How Mo Amin Inspired Change in Ethiopia

Chernobyl? No. No British photography of any aspect of it.

The Mujahideen in Afghanistan? Signature images of the decade were the reports on the evening news by some BBC or ITV journalist wearing a keffiyeh or pakol hat while Islamic freedom fighters fired off a Stinger missile in the background. Did no British photographers take any photos of this ten-year war? If they did, why are they excluded from this exhibition? To take one example from hundreds, the Afghan War photos of Scottish photographer David Pratt.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989. That was a massive, world historic event with photos and footage beamed into every home. The curators can quote Gorbachev when it suits their agenda, when he’s praising the Greenham women, but on none of the other vast issues of the 1980s, namely the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union in which he was the prime actor.

Photos linked to film and theatre, glitz, actors, red carpets – forget Hollywood, just here in the UK? No. Didn’t happen during the 1980s. None here.

One of the biggest domestic stories of the decade was the deregulation of the City of London, nicknamed the Big Bang, which transformed the worlds of finance, banking and insurance, and made lots of people very rich, with far-reaching consequences for the British and maybe global economies. There’s text about it in the room labels but not a single image. Surely someone took photos of the changing culture in the City of London? No? Why not?

North Sea oil? Nada. Did no British photographer take photos of oil workers, Aberdeen, the creation of the refining infrastructure in that boom town? No photographer made a project of recording all this?

And what about The Falklands War (2 April to 14 June 1982) which had a seismic impact on British society and politics – footage of ships setting sail, news photos of battles, muddy paratroopers yomping through the long grass, looking shattered after a firefight, guarding nervous Argentinian captives, the celebrations when the ships arrived back in Portsmouth or Southampton? Even, if you are a Tate curator and insist on taking a left-wing view of the war, surely there was a world of anti-war photos, posters, and what not. Here are 30 Photographs From The Falklands Conflict they could have borrowed from the Imperial War Museum. But no, nothing, zip. Zilch.

Summary

Can you see why I became increasingly dismayed, and then irritated, by how many issues, events, music and fashion styles, new industries and technological innovations that were absolutely central to the 1980s the Tate curators left out because they didn’t fit their handful of woke concerns?

Omitted ethnic groups

As I’ve shown there is plenty of stuff about Black photographers, Black resistance, Black identity, Black photographic practice, Black selfhood, Black representation and much more and yet there are other ethnic groups in the UK – where are they?

From the series Revival, London by Roy Mehta (1989 to 1993) Courtesy of the artist and L A Noble Gallery

It’s not that extensive coverage of Black issues is ‘wrong’, it’s that the curators’ monomaniacal obsession feels like it comes at the neglect of all the other issues, types of people, professions and experiences alive in 1980s UK. Here are some wall labels to recreate the experience:

Frustrated by the misrepresentation of Black people in British mainstream media of the period, Zak Ové used his camera to challenge this visual discourse.

Dave Lewis‘s photographs of Black British communities in South London emphasise the diversity of experiences within these communities.

Marc Boothe‘s photographs sought to challenge traditional documentary practices and introduce viewers to a ‘Black aesthetic’.

Suzanne Rodan‘s candid shots capture moments of everyday life within Black and South Asian communities in 1980s London.

In Impressions Passing Roshini Kempadoo manipulates photographic prints to reflect how racist imagery is perpetuated in modern media.

Ajamu‘s portrait photographic series Black Bodyscapes focuses on intimate sexual desires.

Autoportrait is a series of nine self-portraits which challenge the under-representation of Black women in British fashion and beauty magazines.

Magenta Dress with Pink Tulips by Joy Gregory (1984) Courtesy of the Artist © Joy Gregory. All rights reserved, DACS

To be fair, there’s also quite a lot in the early rooms about the Asian experience, starting with the very first photos of the 1976 Grunwick strike which was triggered by Asian women walking out of the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Dollis Hill. In that first room there are photos of Asians protesting about racism, against police violence (again, from the 1970s). The ‘Representing the Black Experience’ room also contains images of many Asians. The Communities room has some quieter photos celebrating Asian communities, religious festivals and so on.

Outside police station, Bethnal Green Road, London E2, 17 July 1978. Sit down protest against police racism, 1978 by Paul Trevor © Paul Trevor

I smiled when I saw the section devoted to Indian-born Canadian photographer Sunil Gupta. Gupta also has a wall dedicated to him at the Barbican exhibition of contemporary Indian art, and had no fewer than three sections dedicated to him in the Barbican’s epic exhibition about Masculinity.

Why is Sunil Gupta so popular with art curators? Because he is Asian and gay and so ticks two boxes in the curator’s diversity and inclusion checklist. No exhibition of 1980s or ’90s photography dare be without its Sunil Guptas. Now, you may love Gupta’s work but I found the photos at the Barbican and again, here, very meh. He is represented by ‘Pretended Family Relationships which juxtaposes portraits of queer couples with the legislative wording of Section 28 in order to subvert the blah blah bah. They seemed very average to me, but they are gay activism, so he’s in!

Anyway, despite the Asian presence in many of the photos, the word ‘Asian’ appears precisely once in the exhibition guide while the word ‘Black’ appears 27 times. Draw your own conclusion.

And were they any other ethnic groups in the UK in the 1980s? Apparently not. I tell you a word which doesn’t appear anywhere in the exhibition, which is ‘Jew’. Apparently there were no Jewish photographers in Britain during the 1980s and no Jews to photograph. In the ‘Community’ room there are (inevitably) Black communities, Asian communities and working class communities, but no Jewish community. Didn’t exist or no one bothered to photograph it.

In the same spirit of omission, there are no photos by or of Chinese, Arabs or Muslims. They either didn’t take photographs during the 1980s or have been omitted by the curators. Why? Hispanic communities, all the Brazilians in Stockwell, or European immigrants like the Poles, or the Somalis of Streatham, just to mention ethnic communities I live near? No. Nada.

Because feminism, Black and queer is where the money is. It’s where the academic courses and academic careers are. When I flicked through the exhibition catalogue and saw chapters titled ‘Feminist praxis’ and ‘Challenging colonialism’ I couldn’t help laughing. That’s where the money is, kids. Specialise in those areas and you’ll never be unemployed. Unlike being a trawlerman or a steel worker, being an expert in feminist praxis or post-colonial theory is a career for life.

Underground Classic (John Taylor) by Zak Ové (1986) © Zak Ové

Why Yanks?

Remember I was irritated by the lack of coverage of central events of the 1980s like Chernobyl, Afghan War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and so on while it seemed fine to have stuff about strikes or race riots from the 1970s? You could argue that those pivotal events are omitted because they’re in some sense foreign / happened abroad – which is why I was irritated by the presence of an American photographer, Lyle Ashton Harris, in the exhibition.

Why, you might well ask, are nine photos by American photographer Lyle Ashton Harris (born and works in New York) of American subjects – including one titled ‘Miss America’ – included in an exhibition about Britain and British photographers in the 1980s? Why is one entire wall devoted to four massive self portraits of the American photographer wearing bits of ballet costume?

Constructs 10 to 13 by Lyle Ashton Harris (1989) Tate

Because 1) Harris is Black and queer and, with Tate curators, Black or Queer trumps all other considerations, including the criteria of their own exhibition.

Because 2) America is like heroin to art curators. Everything ends up being about America.

And because 3) it turns out, after a bit of digging, that Tate owns these big Lyle Ashton Harris photos and so, like the room devoted to extensive coverage of Jo Spence and Maud Sulter – whose archives Tate also owns – it’s a good example of the way exhibitions are created around what a gallery already owns, or what curators can cheaply get their hands on, rather than an accurate, objective exploration of the nominal subject matter.

Conclusion

I hope you can see now why I told you this is very much not a photographic history of Britain in the 1980s – it is a selection of ‘radical’ left-wing, feminist, politically committed Black and Asian or LGBTQ+ photographers who were working from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s, some of whose work touches on social or political issues from the time, but a lot simply doesn’t. Unless you consider gay pride or feminism or anti-racism as uniquely 1980s phenomena – which, of course, they very much weren’t and aren’t.

Photos of the white working class

Amid the radical deconstructions of colonialism and the subverting of heteronormative stereotypes and celebrations of the Black Queer Body, there are some powerful photos of British working class life. Two of the best photography exhibitions I’ve ever been to were of Tish Nurtha and Chris Killip at the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, and both are represented here by half a dozen or so photos of supernatural power. In this vast show they were, however, swamped by so many other images along similar lines, and so neither of them had the devastating power of their Photographers’ Gallery shows.

There’s a set of vividly squalid colour photos by Paul Graham of the unemployed waiting like souls in hell in smelly 1980s job centres. Ken Grant took grim photos of working class people in and around Liverpool. There’s an excellent set of black-and-white photos of working class white people on the Meadow Wall Estate in North Shields taken by Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen.

Apparently it was in the 1980s that the phrase poverty porn was first used and, somehow, having so many series of stark black-and-white photos of poor people living in squalid or sad circumstances, demonstrated the law of diminishing returns. They began to seem rather samey. Again, this feels like an example of poor curatorship.

Photos of the white middle class

And what about the middle class people, the political, cultural and demographic centre of the United Kingdom? Not just the 13 million who consistently voted for Mrs Thatcher but all the people who made up the bulk of the population: the accountants or lawyers, doctor and dentists, people running family businesses or working at big corporations, the police and fire and ambulance services, people who worked in local government, the social services, in thousands of care homes, in the hundreds of thousand of charities, ordinary people? Not Black or gay or radical feminists or horribly impoverished Brits, but run-of-the-mill, ordinary people like the hundreds I saw visiting this exhibition, people like you or me?

Well, it was hard to not to conclude that these kinds of people, what you could call the white bourgeoisie, appear in this exhibition solely to be mocked and ridiculed. Anna Fox is represented by a series titled Work Stations which satirises people working in London offices. These are horribly vivid colour shots of ordinary office workers captured in the most awkward and unflattering poses, accompanied by ironic captions pinched from business articles and magazines in order to take the piss out of them and their values. Here’s a prime example. The text under the photo reads ‘Fortunes are being made that are in line with the dreams of avarice’, from Business magazine 1987.

Work Stations, Café, the City. Salesperson by Anna Fox (1988) © Anna Fox. The Hyman Collection, Courtesy of the Centre for British Photography

Next to Fox is the Old Master of colour photodocumentary, Martin Parr, represented by works from his ‘Cost of Living’ series (1986 to 1989). Parr felt the kind of people he mixed with, the comfortably-off middle class, had been systematically under-represented by 1970s and ’80s photography, so he set out to depict them. So he simply went along to art gallery openings, garden parties, Conservative party fetes, and photographed the people he saw. Because it’s Parr deploying his customary, unforgiving colour technique, all these people come out looking extraordinarily awkward and ugly, just like the people in the Anna Fox series.

The mere fact that an expert on contemporary photography believed that this huge tranche of the British population, the middle classes, the inhabitants of Middle England, was under-represented in his medium speaks volumes about the narrow ideological focus of the photography of his day. And the way both Fox and Parr’s photos are described as ‘satirical’ confirms how this huge class of people have become, as pictorial subjects, almost an outsider group in their own country.

Installation view of the ‘satirising the white bourgeoisie’ corner at ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ at Tate Britain, with the Anna Fox sequence at the back, Martin Parr on the right. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)

Near to the Parr ‘mocking the middle classes’ photos is a selection of 9 photos from the 26 in the famous series Gentlemen by Karen Knorr. Knorr was given permission to photograph the very posh members of the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs in London’s St James’s district. Beautifully staged and shot, she then ironically undercut the images with texts taken from news reports and parliamentary speeches (just as Fox had done with her office workers). Again, the aim is to mock and satirise.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that all of the depictions of the English middle classes in this exhibition are associated with irony and satire. Now, nobody takes the mickey out of the Black or Asian or women subjects – they are all portrayed as dignified or joyous or righteously angry. But posh white people? Look at the ugly, rich, privileged wankers air kissing, answering phones, stuffing their faces!

The Colour Photography room gives interesting explanations of the technological developments which made colour photography cheaper and better – but it, also, flays its white subjects mercilessly. It includes another series by Parr, his famous seaside scenes, The Last Resort, in which everyone is captured in bright colour with unforgiving candour.

Next to them are half a dozen similarly merciless photos of very ordinary people in Welsh supermarkets by Paul Reas. Like Parr’s photos, like Fox’s series, these seem so pitilessly unflattering as to be actively cruel. The Photography of Cruelty. Or maybe just mockery. Look at the poor white chavs.

Hand of Pork, Caerphilly, South Wales by Paul Reas (1988) © Paul Reas. Martin Parr Foundation

White trash, Black gods

The humiliation of white chavs and poshos in Parr and Fox and Wood’s photos is emphasised by the way that, in the rooms directly before and after them, Black people are depicted in stylish black-and-white photos which make them look dignified, noble or even godlike.

In the room before the white chavs is this set of serious, searching portraits made by Pogus Caesar. They were taken on an Ilford HP 5 camera using 35mm film to achieve a rich grainy effect as he travelled round the country taking shots of people in the street, as far as I can see, solely Black people. They’re really good. Stylish and atmospheric, they dignify and enrich their subjects.

Installation view of ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ at Tate Britain showing ‘Into the Light’ by Pogus Caesar (1985 to 89) (photo by the author)

The room after the white trash room is the one titled ‘Black Bodyscapes’, the one featuring photos by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ajamu X and Lyle Ashton Harris, photos which ‘explore masculinity, sexuality and Blackness’. I dare say these are important issues to the curators but to the ordinary visitor what you see is a set of spectacularly buff Black male bodies. Wow! Gorgeous, hunky men in prime physical condition, what’s not to lust after?

The Golden Phallus by Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1989) © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Autograph ABP. Courtesy of Autograph ABP

(I first encountered both Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X at the drolly titled A Hard Man is Good to Find! exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, and loved them both. I dare say they’re exploring this issue and subverting that stereotype but they are also extraordinarily sexy pictures of beautiful male bodies.)

Anyway, it’s impossible to miss the stark contrast between the dignified Black people in Pogus Caesar, the stunning Black nudes of Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X, and the 15 or so images of the pale, pasty, fat, badly dressed white people captured by Wood, Parr and Reas in the Chavs Room. Step into the Black room to be thrilled. Then back into the white room to be appalled. This isn’t a contrived comparison. The two rooms are right next to each other. They make for an unavoidable and extremely powerful visual contrast.

Autograph ABP versus Tate

Autograph ABP in Hoxton specialises in photography by Black photographers from around the world and is maybe my favourite small gallery in London. Everything I’ve ever seen there has been outstanding. It is a centre of photographic excellence and I was interested to read about its history in the ‘Representing the Black Experience’ room here in this show.

But it also made me wonder, why do I love Black photography at ABP but bridle at the exact same work when it is shown here in Tate Britain? Three reasons. 1) The attitude of the curators. At ABP it is taken for granted that the work is by Black photographers. There may be some stuff about combatting racism, if relevant, but quite often the labels just explain the specifics of the particular project. The ABP curators treat their artists and visitors with respect, as if they’re grown-ups.

Whereas Tate curators can’t stop haranguing their visitors about the horrors of racism and colonialism and the white gaze, as if we’re first year arts students who need to have all the evils of the world explained to us in a tearing hurry. The photographers’ Blackness or queerness becomes the primary thing about them.

This is what I meant be saying the Tate curators treat their artists and works as specimens in extended lectures on their handful of woke topics, about the evils of capitalism and colonialism and racism and sexism, explaining all these issues in words of one syllable or less as if it’s the first time their visitors had ever heard of such things.

So I’m not bridling at the photographers or their works. In other contexts I’ve really loved many of them. I’m reacting very negatively to the patronising tone of Tate’s curators.

2) Individually, many of the works here are great but something negative happens when a load of works by different photographers are all bunched together in a room demonstrating a thesis. So, for example, when I first saw Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photos, I read the captions about the queer sensibility and undermining stereotypes of Black male sexuality etc, but I also responded to their plain weirdness. To what they look like. These are strange, disconcerting, haunting images which trigger responses beyond the verbal or easily expressed. They did what all good art does which is take you to strange places in the imagination, open doors you didn’t know were there.

But here, lumped together in one room, they feel subservient to the curators’ concerns to lecture us all about the Black Queer Body. This is what I mean by turning art into specimens, pinned like butterflies to a board to make a point.

3) Bulk. Volume. Sheer number. Same point I made about Tish Murtha and Chris Killip. Seen by themselves, their work felt seismic. Bundled together with half a dozen photographers working on the same subject (dirt-poor white communities), and making the same point (Thatcherism, inequality, poverty = bad), a lot of the power and individuality leached out of them.

Message to the curators

  1. Less is more.
  2. If you’re going to group lots of artists together, doing it by their most obvious feature (feminists, Black, queer, working class) tends to diminish their individuality and impact. Think of more imaginative, left-field ways of arranging them. Try to create surprises.
  3. If you claim your exhibition is about a subject, please make an effort to make it fully and adequately about that subject and don’t just restrict it to the handful of woke subjects dear to your hearts plus chucking in some archives you happen to own. Make it about the world, not just the same three curator obsessions (gender, ethnicity, class).

Yet another conclusion

So you can see why, by the end, I was fed up of being lectured about the wonders of queerness and feminism and the Black body and post-colonial identity, and deeply disappointed that so much of the actual history of the 1980s, the global incidents or – just to restrict it to the UK – the key social and media events, and the changing face of technology, music and style which meant so much to me personally, had simply been left out.

This is why the friend I went with thought it was the worst exhibition we’d visited all year: because of its glaring omissions of loads of the things we liked and remembered about the 1980s, because of its systematic rewriting of cultural history to be only about radical left-wing artist-activists, because of its flagrant political bias, because of its mockery of the white middle class which (I’m afraid) I belong to (just like everyone else I saw visiting this show) but, above all, because of its terrible, terrible narrowness of vision.

Well, I’ve given you a strong flavour of my own negative reaction to the thing, but I’ve also tried to give an accurate summary of the exhibition structure, objective summaries of all the rooms, and a good selection of the images, along with the curators’ own words.

This is a massive, exhausting and deeply problematic exhibition – but there’s lots of very good stuff in it and maybe you’ll have a completely different response. Go along and make your own mind up.

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by Simon on December 21, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 21, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/12/21/the-80s-photographing-britain-tate-britain/

A Hard Man is Good to Find! @ the Photographers Gallery

‘The many men, so beautiful…’
(from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

A Hard Man is Good to Find! charts over 60 years of gay photography in London from the 1930s to the 1990s.

You don’t have to be naked to be butch, you don’t even have to be gay to be an object of gay attraction. Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, Spring/Summer 1957 edition, featuring model Sean Connery, photo by Bill Green. Courtesy the Alistair O’Neill Collection

Homosexuality illegal and legal

For the first half of the period homosexuality was a criminal activity which was severely punished, with the threat of exposure hanging over hundreds of thousands of gay men, and making them susceptible to blackmail and intimidation. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised gay sexual activity but left in place many forms of legal and social discrimination and so gave rise to the gay liberation movement which campaigned for full social equality.

Personal note: In 1978 I joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, enjoyed going on marches, signing petitions and spending time at Windsor’s only gay pub. Through all this I discovered that I am not gay but discovered a susceptibility to gorgeous men, hunky men, specially young working class men, the kind that you used to see doing labouring jobs with a wonderfully carefree physical exuberance, the kind of young bloke photographed in the 1960s by Anthony C. Burls (see below).

The Obscene Publication Act remained in force

Anyway, back at the exhibition: it brings together more than 100 photos of men’s bodies, taken with a distinctly gay or queer sensibility. The thing to really understand is that throughout the period, from the 1930s till well into the 1980s, despite the 1967 law about homosexual acts, risqué images of male nudity – taking them, owning them, distributing them, publishing them – remained a criminal offence under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.

A lovely boy. John Hamill by John S Barrington (about 1966) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

A secret history

All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.

Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.

Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.

The male nude as fine art. David Dulak by Angus McBean (1946) Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

London locations

The exhibition takes an interesting approach which is to divide the photos, and the gay magazines and bookshops which distributed them, by area of London. Thus it’s divided into sections which deal with Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Marylebone, Portobello, the Serpentine and Euston.

Highgate

Apparently Hampstead Heath is London’s most renowned cruising spot for gay men. Young artist Keith Vaughan bought a Leica camera and set up a dark room in his bedroom. Aged just 21 he then made a n album of photos of gorgeous young men at Highgate Men’s Pond in the summer of 1933.

Highgate Men’s Pond Album by Keith Vaughan (1933) Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries

John S. Barrington trained as an artist at St Martin’s School of Art. In 1938 he persuaded two men he’d met on the Charing Cross Road, dancer David Dulak and his friend Vik, to accompany him to Highgate Men’s Pond so he could photograph them nude – and thus began a long career as a ‘physique photographer’. Dulak was later photographed by Angus McBean, see two photographs above.

John Mckay made studies of ballet dancers and performers.

Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks

I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.

Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.

In the 1950s Basil Clavering ran a cinema on the Charing Cross Road but he also built a photographic studio in the basement of his house on Denbigh Street, Pimlico. Here they recruited military men to pose in genuine uniforms and also act out various scenarios, some kinky, some humorous. He and his partner John Charles Pankhurst, invented the ‘storyette’, a series of stills, as from a movie, which told a story, often saucy, sometimes featuring corporal punishment.

Just doing the housework. Storyette EX FJSS print, 1950s by Basil Clavering (aka Royale). Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

The Serpentine

In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.

Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.

Spencer Churchill, 1951 by Paul Hawker. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

Marylebone

‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.

In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.

Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.

Photo of Gervase Griffiths, titled ‘Narcissus of 1967’ by Cecil Beaton

Earl’s Court

This was the location of BDM publications, set up by Alexander McKenna and partners, which published a range of styles, from the lifestyle magazine ‘Jeffrey’ to more explicit titles such as ‘Hung Heavy’, ‘Taste of Beefcake’ and ‘Leather Studs’.

Notting Hill

Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.

One of the Portobello Boys, hopefully only fiddling with his zip. The Portobello Boys, early 1960s. Courtesy The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives

Euston Road

Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America. David Gwinnutt started taking photos of the post-punk gay scene as an art student. Patrick Prockter introduced him to his generation of artists.

Thomas Mervyn Horder (Baron Horder) was the chairman of Duckworths, the literary publisher in in the 1950s and 60s. He also had a sideline as a physique photographer under the pseudonym Larry Knight, publishing in specialist magazines with titles like ‘Grecian Guild Pictorial’ and ‘Der Kreis’.

History of the posing pouch

In line with the unwritten law that absolutely all exhibitions these days must either be about America or feature Americans, there’s a little annex off to the side of the main gallery which gives an amusing history of the posing pouch. In this version of the story this skimpy little piece of fabric, barely enough to cover a man’s meat and two veg with the thinnest of fabrics going round the waist, was invented in America.

It developed from the aim of American gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as legally possible. In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality.

Original 1955 posing pouch as sewn by Bob Mizener’s mum (or mom)

We are told that the shape and tan colour of the pouch was often lightly drawn on photos over the willy of nude models in order to avoid prosecution if the parcel they were distributed in was stopped and searched by the authorities; but that the happy recipient could then easily, in the safety of their own home, rub the little patch off and glory in the sight of total male nudity!

Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow.

Mixed media

It’s not just photos. Within each part of London the curators identify gay photographers who lived and worked in that area, but also includes catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications to show how the photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. In the 1970s publishers of gay photos send out catalogue sheets like this one to customers, who then ordered full-sized body shorts and prints of the guys they fancied.

Which one would you send off for? 1970s catalogue sheet by John S Barrington. Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection

White Brixton

Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre.

Back to John S. Barrington. In the later 70s he set up the 252 Gallery on Brixton Hill, which included photographs but also drawings and sculptures. He sent out catalogues listing his many gay models and categorising them by race as well as arranging them by head and masked torso. They’re included here as an interesting example of the taxonomy of desire.

Black Brixton

Rotimi Fani-Kayode lived in Brixton from 1983 to 1989. His work explores the paradoxes of the Black queer experience. He’s represented by a work called the Golden Phallus.

The Golden Phallus by Rotimi Fani-Kayode ( 1989) © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Autograph ABP

Guy Burch was director of the Brixton Art Gallery from 1985 to 1988. Artist, writer and curator, he’s represented by photo study drawings and collages.

Frank B came to prominence for his performances which involved blood letting, performed in the late 1980s in gay fetish clubs and is represented by photographic invitation cards to a private screening of a 6-minute art movie.

Ajamu X is an artist, curator, archivist and activist whose work explores ‘the nuances of intersectional experience as a Black British queer man’. He is represented by contact sheets which show him playfully wearing a white cotton bra and panties.

Thoughts

To be quite honest this exhibition wasn’t quite as sexsationally fabulous as I was expecting it to be. A lot of the images are quite small, many are only on contact sheets of 20 or 30 tiny, tiny images which I had to lean right up to in order to see properly. Take the contact sheet of 40 or so images of Black artist Ajanu X who is, unexpectedly, wearing a white bra and panties in various states of disarray. Funny and sexy but tiny, each image only an inch square or less.

I enjoyed the staggering physiques of some of the Greek athlete-style photos from the 1930s and 40s. I liked the couple of photos by Cecil Beaton of Gervase Griffiths lazing by a fountain or posing among cow parsley in some field, because they were so redolent of a kind of Pink Floyd 1960s.

I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at  funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair.

There were several sequences of young men, obviously soldiers, in full uniform and then various stages of undress, hanging out together. There was a whole set of young blokes around the house, sitting, reading, smoking, half dressed or with their cocks hanging out their trousers, the Portobello Boys. Mildly interesting, but I went to an all-boys school and shared houses with blokes at university; admittedly we didn’t spend social time with our willies hanging out of our trousers – at least not when sober.

Overall, I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.

And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.

Two learnings

I don’t think I’d ever noticed the phrase ‘physique photography’ before, but here it kept recurring and being explained as a style of photography which goes beyond the passive idea of the ‘nude’ to celebrate a kind of effortful, muscular, athletic masculinity. Think body-building.

Stunning example of ‘physique photography’. Indian bodybuilder Monotosh Roy shot by Bill Green (Vince) in the 1950s

Related to it was a comment in a wall label right at the end making a simple but devastating point that, as LGBTQ+ culture gained confidence in the 1990s, photographers, publishers and consumers felt more confident in producing and consuming gay pornography.

The point being that the delicate balancing act, the hints and subtleties of the preceding decades, the self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s – all this tended to be swept away as gay art gained confidence in the 1990s. Now artists could depict explicit photos of erect penises and men doing all kinds of things with them to other men. Obviously delicacy and subtlety continue in a thousand flavours, but the era of constrained delicacy and obligatory subtlety came to an end with the arrival of explicit gay pornography.

Bodybuilder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990)

A note on nomenclature

The introduction explains that ‘queer’ is now the accepted academic term for non-normative sexualities but the curators acknowledge that it used to be a term of abuse (as it was when I was growing up) and so older visitors might be offended by its use. At the same time, they acknowledge that the more factual, legalistic term ‘homosexual’, which older visitors might be comfortable with, is ‘problematic’ for the younger generation.

The need for this note prompts the reflects the ongoing (and, I imagine, eternal) struggle human beings have to make sense of the disruptions, embarrassments and irrational instincts of sex which we find ourselves saddled with.

Willies

Having been to hundreds and hundreds of exhibitions curated by feminist curators and read thousands of wall labels written by feminist curators, I have had the notions of toxic masculinity, of the poisonous affect of the male gaze, of the evils of male sexual attention, of male sexual harassment, and the unspeakable terror of seeing a penis from which some women, apparently, never recover, drummed into me again and again and again. Even the shamefully biased mega-exhibition about so-called ‘Masculinities’ at the Barbican didn’t include one single image of a penis for fear of offending sensitive visitors.

It was, therefore, rather disorientating, gave me a sense of vertigo, to walk into a pair of rooms absolutely flooded with this object of terror and fear – showing a proliferation of penises, peckers and plonkers, willies and winkles and weenies, cocks and tools and todgers.

Like all the other ‘banned’ part of the human anatomy, like women’s breasts and, more so, vulvas, if images of penises are strictly rationed and you only occasionally see one, it can all too easily be overloaded with lust and desire. Whereas if you freely see scores, then hundreds of them, in all their variety and humanity and mundaneness, quite quickly you get used to the sight, and then a bit bored.

From a visual point of view penises obviously come in two states, flaccid and bored or aroused and erect. Presumably this is, or was, in the period under study, the threshold between images which could be justified as art or at least decorative (flaccid) and pornography (erect).

Anyway, it’s worth mentioning that I don’t think there’s a single erect penis in the show. Maybe this is because the exhibition itself had to tread a fine line and the inclusion of erect penises would have crossed that line (? I don’t know the law on the matter). Maybe because pretty much all the photographers on show here used the flaccid/erect distinction as a simple rule of thumb (were there legal precedents under the Obscene Publications Act regarding the exact angle of arousal of the member? Again, not being a lawyer, I don’t know.)

For whatever reason, no erections at all are on display here and probably over half the images didn’t show penises at all (e.g. all the athletic, posing pouch-style photos; or a lot of the fully dressed soldiers or fairground workers; or just the many portraits which focused on faces) and all the ones that did include a penis showed it only as a slack, slumping, limp willy.

These kinds of images captured what I imagine is most men’s attitude to their penises; on rare and special occasions it may be roused and primed for action, but most of the time it’s just another part of the body which you barely think about unless you have to pee, or you inadvertently squash it while riding a bike or some such activity. Ouch!

In this respect a lot of the photos seemed (to me) to be surprisingly stripped of the urgency of sexual desire (lust) and instead conveyed quite a homely, almost domestic vibe of what it is to be a young man, to be naked and to lark around with other men. I’ve been to scores and scores of exhibitions making polemical points about women’s bodies, depicting them from every angle and analysing in immense detail the way women’s bodies are depicted in all sorts of media and the never-ending iniquity of the male gaze, as a matter of burning social and political importance.

This exhibition is a rare opportunity to look at scantily clad bodies without feeling a soupcon of guilt; and and space where the visitor can just accept and enjoy the sight of the male body, in all its variety, for what it is.

Catalogue sheet 3, 1949, by Bill Green (Vince). Stephen Cartwright collection

Last thought

This exhibition triggers nostalgia for an age before the internet: talk of photography as an activity restricted to a talented few, of hard copy magazines and subscriptions, of mail order catalogues, of the extraordinary lengths you had to go to to get sight of a photo of a naked man – all this consigns the entire exhibition to a past which is rapidly retreating.

For now we have 1) smartphones and 2) the internet. 1) More or less everyone has access not just to cameras, but to extremely high-quality cameras and amazingly sophisticated image manipulation softwares. Everyone’s a photographer these days. 2) And any image of anything, alive or dead or ever conceived, can now be accessed at the touch of a screen, including as many naked bodies, male, female or whatever, as your hard drive can cope with.

This entire exhibition bespeaks not just a world of repression and restraint, but of rarity and difficulty. Now nothing is rare and everything is available. Soon the subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact described in this exhibition will seem as dated and historical as the pictorial conventions of Georgian England.

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by Simon on May 24, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/24/a-hard-man-is-good-to-find-the-photographers-gallery/

Aladdin Sane: 50 Years Exhibition @ Festival Hall

This surprisingly extensive and greatly enjoyable exhibition on the ground floor of the Royal Festival Hall is premised on the notion that the cover to David Bowie’s 1973 album, ‘Aladdin Sane’ – the photo of Bowie’s face with the ‘lightning bolt’ drawn across it – was an epoch-making, benchmark-setting, game-changing, epochal work of art. On the wall labels and in the exhibition publicity the curators go so far as to claim that the cover photo is ‘the Mona Lisa of Pop’. Do you agree? This exhibition tries its damnedest to persuade you.

Cover of Aladdin Sane by David Bowie, released 19 April 1973

The album

‘Aladdin Sane’ was Bowie’s sixth studio album, released on 20 April 1973 on RCA Records. The previous albums had been:

  • David Bowie (1967)
  • David Bowie/Space Oddity (1969)
  • The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
  • Hunky Dory (1971)
  • The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

The concept album ‘Ziggy’, creating an elaborate mythology about an ill-fated, fictional rock musician, was Bowie’s breakthrough LP. It sold over 100,000 copies and catapulted him into the realm of real stardom. Concerts sold out, the music press started to treat him as a player, his fan base exploded. It established him as a leader of the more thoughtful, cerebral, art student end of Glam Rock, far more ambitious in his skilful deployment of a persona and concept than rivals like Marc Bolan, let alone the pure pop end of Glam such as Sweet or Slade.

The follow-up, ‘Aladdin’, is closely linked to ‘Ziggy’. Bowie recorded it with the same backing band (led by guitarist and arranger Mick Ronson) and it was recorded between gigs of his extensive Ziggy Stardust tour. The songs were mostly written on the road in the US between shows. This explains why the subject matter is often directly American (‘Panic in Detroit’) and also has a heavier, harder rock feel than Ziggy. The track listing is:

Side one:

Side two:

It contains one solid gold hit, ‘The Jean Genie’, which is a classic of a certain kind of style of repetitive, one-riff rock. It started with Mick Ronson fooling around with a Bo Diddley riff on the tour bus. Back in New York Bowie developed lyrics to entertain Andy Warhol acolyte, Cyrinda Foxe. In fact the way the lyrics describe a certain New York type is strongly reminiscent of Lou Reed, whose album Transformer, full of such portraits, Bowie had just finished producing and playing on. A cursory listen to both shows that Transformer is, quite obviously, much better than Aladdin, more varied, more interesting tunes (‘Perfect Day’, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’), has stood the test of time far better.

The bassist on the Jean Genie session later claimed it was recorded in an hour and a half flat. It went to number 2 in the UK chart (a chart which, one of the many entertaining and nostalgic wall labels tells us, had recently featured Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’ and Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’). But I find most of the other tracks on the album boringly repetitive and too long. And the lyrics?

Crack, baby, crack, show me you’re real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you’re knocking me dead

It was ‘daring’ and ‘risqué’ at the time to describe blowjobs in a song, 50 years later…not so much. And ‘professing’?

It’s surprising that this contrived performer, this cracked actor, so keen to display a glammed-up, self-consciously theatrical character, should include a Rolling Stones track, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, on the album. He said in interviews it was a tribute to the Stones-inspired feel of many of the songs, but it’s dire, isn’t it? The main difference is Bowie swallowing or snatching the word ‘together’ in contrast to Mick Jagger’s lazy sexy drawl, which is definitely worse, and the spoken ad lib at the end:

They said we were too young
Our kind of love was too young
But our love comes from above
Let’s make love

This sounds like a blatantly commercial play for the adoration (and money) of pimply misunderstood 15-year-olds everywhere.

Who is Aladdin Sane? In interviews Bowie simply described him as ‘Ziggy Stardust goes to America’, where he discovered urban decay, drugs, sex and violence on a scale you couldn’t get in Britain. Critic Kevin Cann is quoted describing him as ‘a kind of shell-shocked remnant of his former self’.

Installation view of ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ at the Southbank Centre showing a contact sheet and blown-up images of Bowie dressed for his performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops. Note the red-and-blue colour scheme already much in evidence. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead. Bowie photo by Duffy © Duffy Archive & The David Bowie Archive ™

The album had 100,000 advance orders which meant it went ‘gold’ and to number 1 in the UK album charts, staying there for 5 weeks and in the top 10 for 27. It’s estimated to have sold 4.6 million copies in total, the kind of figures record companies, accountants, and rock music geeks adore.

The exhibition includes an area dominated by a fantastic old-style hi fi system comprising record player, amp and big speakers, on which the album was playing. (For techies, the deck is a Michell Transcriptor, with Celestion 66 loudspeakers and a Rotel RX-1203 amplifier.) Someone must have been continually turning it over or putting the needle back to the start of the side. There are bean bags to slump on. Tellingly I came across someone’s daughter, obviously not very interested in the exhibition, slumped on a bean bag with headphones on, and when I asked her what she was listening to, it wasn’t Bowie.

However, the thing about this exhibition is that it isn’t really about the music. The actual content of the album is barely discussed. The focus of the exhibition is the cover art for the album. This, we quickly discover, was shot by fashion photographer Brian Duffy, was the most expensive rock album cover made to date and, according to the curators, is one of the most iconic rock images of all time.

Brian Duffy

Thus an immense amount of time is devoted to the background and build-up to the famous cover image. I counted no fewer than 84 photos devoted to telling the story. First the context and key personnel. So there are photos of each of the band members with wall labels explaining who they are and their contribution, the largest number devoted to the extremely photogenic Mick Ronson in various rock star poses, but also shots of the bassist and drummer. (The curators speculate that some of these shots were meant to be used in the gatefold of the album sleeve, but the power of the final slash image swept them aside.) There’s photos of Bowie’s producer, Ken Scott, manager Tony Defries, two photos of Bowie’s wife, Angie.

So much for the music. More central to the story of the iconic cover is the extensive section devoted to the photographer of the iconic image, Brian Duffy. We learn about his career before the shoot, that he was one of a trio of young London photographers, what older photographer Norman Parkinson called ‘the Black Trinity’ – the others being David Bailey and Terence Donovan – with contemporary newspaper clippings to that effect.

We learn that Duffy, as he was universally known, was a leading fashion photographer, which is backed up by a wall of 27 of his very impressive fashion photos. These powerfully convey not only the style of the day as found in glossy mags such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan, Elle and the Sunday Times, but also indicate the fashion, rock and celebrity figures of the era, such as John Lennon, Michael Caine, politicians.

There’s a cornucopia of 1960s gossip: Duffy’s collaboration with Len Deighton on the 1969 movie ‘Oh What A Lovely War!’, technical influences such as the way graphic artist Philip Castle used an airbrushing technique on the poster for A Clockwork Orange, which Duffy was to ask him to repeat on the Aladdin cover, the way the cover of Hunky Dory was printed as black and white and then hand coloured by Terry Pastor, how the cover photo of Transformer was taken by ‘legendary’ rock photographer Mick Rock, was accidentally over-exposed but Reed liked it that way, and so on.

The shoot

But there’s more, lots more, as the exhibition zeroes in on the creation of the iconic image. We learn about Duffy’s studio manager Francis Newman, and designer Celia Philo. We are treated to photos of the interior and exterior of the Duffy’s studios at 151a King Henry’s Road, Swiss Cottage NW3. where the famous shoot took place.

We learn about the canny strategic thinking of Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries. They shared a vision of how the marketing of a pop performer could be transformed into high art – or at least a good impression of what pop music consumers thought of as art. One extremely practical and canny reason is that Defries knew that, the more they spent on the cover art, the more record label RCA would be forced to cough up to boost sales in order to recoup their investment. Hence he and Duffy agreed on using an extremely expensive seven-colour printing technique which was then only available in Switzerland.

In order to justify the process the image had to be simple and striking. It had to make maximum use of bold colour. Hence the development of a bright red (with some blue shading) against artificially pale bare skin.

This explains why nobody on the shoot saw the final version on the day because the negatives had to be sent away for commercial processing to achieve that hyper-real effect.

Then we’re on to the photo session itself. An immense amount of resources go to describing in great detail how the shoot was conducted and where the idea for the famous zigzag across Bowie’s face came from. Bowie was 26, had hit new peaks of fame, was deeply aware of the importance of image and media presentation. He wanted something striking and new but didn’t know what. The shoot was crammed in between dates on an international tour.

Duffy had never done a shoot for an album cover before. Both star and photographer were in new territory. So the most striking thing about the shoot this whole exhibition is making such a song and dance about is it was all over in an hour,

In fact, rather disappointingly, or maybe fittingly, right at the heart of the story is uncertainty/mystery. Turns out nobody really knows where the idea for the iconic red flash came from. There are several possible sources. Bowie shared his birthday with Elvis and the King had developed a motto, ‘Taking Care of Business – In A Flash’, and accompanying logo:

Elvis Presley’s Taking Care of Business logo

Rather more prosaically, Duffy’s studio had a National Rice cooker and their logo was a red flash. In 1970 the company had created the world’s largest neon sign depicting the logo on the side of an office building in Hong Kong. From some source, Duffy conjured up the idea of painting a flash across Bowie’s face. It took make-up artist Pierre Laroche to achieve a first draft, establishing a pale ground for his face and chest, and then the red flash.

Then the background was brightly lit in order to burn it out or render it invisible. Bowie was positioned against it wearing only his underpants and Duffy started snapping (as the curators carefully inform us) using his Hasselblad 500 EL camera, using a David Cecil ring flash unit on Ektachrome ASA 64 120-format film. Turn to the left, turn to the right, look straight ahead, two rolls, 24 images, all knocked off in well under an hour. Clean make-up, free to go.

The exhibition features a wall of contact prints of the ‘outtakes’ or unused images i.e. other almost identical shots of made-up Bowie which were rejected for various reasons. The decisive factor was the eyes. In all the rejected versions Bowie has his eyes open. Seeing the final version among all the rejected ones makes you realise that the one with his eyes shut is head and shoulders more powerful than the rest. Why?

Aladdin Sane contact sheet by Brian Duffy

The curators explain that using the image of Bowie with his eyes closed broke with all the conventions of portrait photography. Usually there’s some kind of eye contact with the viewer, the eyes establishing contact or rapport. Even if they’re looking away, we get a stronger sense of someone’s character if we can see their eyes. Thus choosing the eyes shut image immediately created an aloofness and mystery about Bowie, exactly the kind of androgynous, alien effect he and Defries were cultivating.

The second big artistic decision Duffy took was to add the blob of mercury on Bowie’s collarbone. It was added by graphic artist Philip Castle. The curators, like all modern art curators, obsessed with sex, describe this blob as ‘phalliform’ i.e. shaped like a penis*. Is it, though? If it’s the shape of anything, I’d pick up on Bowie’s obsession with aliens and interpret it as being a a ray gun. At the time, this kind of special graphic effect was relatively new, and so I think I interpreted it as a sort of science fiction detail, the kind of thing you might get on a Hawkwind or Emerson, Lake and Palmer album.

Anyway, it certainly emphasises the other-worldly, disembodied vibe of the whole image. For the curators, constricted by their framework of gender and sexual identity, the image emphasises Bowie’s gender fluidity. Not being so constrained, I see it as far more playing to Bowie’s alien from another world schtick.

Anyway, any interpretation is equally irrelevant to the actual music which I outlined above, grimy, gritty portraits of New York types, the Jean Genie or Lady Grinning Soul. You only have to listen to half the album to realise that the cover image is wildly misleading as to its contents.

Last word about the lettering. This is Rémy Peignot Cristal with a blue-white-red gradient. It was Duffy who changed the dot over the i of Aladdin into a small flame shape.

Why the fuss? Gender, obvz

Personally, I was never that particularly struck by this album cover because it came from an era overflowing with striking album cover art. At the time it seemed just one among many amazing, imaginative and striking images, so I don’t quite get the fuss.

What comes over with increasing insistence as the show progresses is that the arguable over-valuation of this one image is in part because it is also being considered and valued as an emblem of gender, queer and identity politics. Aha. This explains why the actual music – its composition, production and performance, its lyrics and its value – are more or less ignored by the exhibition. Nobody says whether the album is any good, probably because it isn’t really.

Instead, as you progress into the second half of the exhibition you realise the whole thing is being seen through the lens of contemporary concerns about gender and identity. Seen from this perspective you see its value in a completely different light, namely that Bowie’s poses in the early 1970s, as bisexual, asexual, strange and alien (the aspect of his persona which was foregrounded in Ziggy, Aladdin, Diamond Dogs, ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ and, maybe, ‘Low’) helped a lot of people who were struggling with their sexuality. It’s made pretty plain in the show’s press blurb:

With a focus on the photo session that gave us Bowie’s ‘lightning bolt’ portrait, this exhibition explores the continuous reshaping of Bowie’s image, and his part, along with Duffy’s, in a reimagining of sexual and gender identity.

It explains why in the last part of the show – once we’ve got past the 80 or so large photos of the band members, manager, wife, and all the contact images from the shoot itself, past the wall-sized blow-ups of Bowie in full glam pose, and past the room with the hi-fi system playing the album – we come to a space with sheets hanging from the ceiling bearing quotes from people who grew up in the 70s and 80s, who struggled with their sexuality and identity, and who found solace in Bowie’s confidence and unashamedness and bravura performance of alternative sexualities.

Personal testimony room in the ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ exhibition at the Southbank Centre. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead

In a world dominated by macho movie stars and football hooligans, Bowie offered an alternative, an imaginative way out, a refuge. He made a lot of troubled, embattled people realise they weren’t alone. Bowie showed that you could not only feel confused and uncertain and not fit into any of society’s categories, but become a star on your own terms, appear on the telly, pack out concert halls, and make a fortune.

As the curators out it, Bowie’s message for generations of outsiders, not just sexual outsiders but alienated, unhappy teenagers, was:

Ignore what society wants you to be. Be what you want to be – including how you look to the outside world.

This part of the show – and the first-person tributes from young people who Bowie, with his many-changing masks and fluid sexual identity, helped and reassured and inspired – was genuinely moving, but also a bit disorientating. It was weird walking from the world of trash glam throwaway pop hits into quite a more serious and troubled realm, a world of gender anxiety and liberation, freedom but worry, which seems to be with us more than ever.

I doubt if Bowie set out to be sex therapist to a generation but, this exhibition suggests, that was the impact he had, for a lot of people.

Nostalgia

For me, though, being neither troubled by my sexuality (no more than average, anyway) and no particular fan of Bowie’s early music, I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition because it is an absolute riot of nostalgia. The opening rooms set the scene for the Great Photoshoot by establishing the social and political and music context of 1973.

Probably younger visitors walked swiftly past the background panels describing Britain in the 1970s, the collage of newspaper headlines from the period, the oil crisis, the four day week, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, the endless strikes, but I lingered long and lovingly, reliving the long-ago days of my boyhood.

Next to the politics was a similar size panel with a collage of contemporary music paper articles, giving an impressionistic sense of who was who in rock music, circa 1973, many of them, apparently about Elton John, whatever Paul McCartney and John Lennon were up to, a new young band named Queen, and so on.

Far more visually striking, though, was another collage establishing the context of classic rock album covers from the period. These included actual vintage copies of Sergeant Pepper, Abbey Road, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin IV, Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye, Slider by T Rex, early Roxy Music, Music from Topographic Oceans by Yes and many more. This is what I meant by the Aladdin Sane cover image being just one among many. Surely the cover of Dark Side of The Moon is as, if not far more, iconic than Aladdin Sane, is far more widespread in the culture, you’re more likely to see it on t-shirts or spoofed in cultural references.

Album cover of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by Pink Floyd, released 1 March 1973, 6 weeks before Aladdin Sane (19 April 1973)

And indeed the exhibition confirms that the Music Week Sleeve Design Award 1973 gave first place to Dark Side (with Aladdin coming a very creditable second). Looking more broadly, a quick internet search for rock albums of 1973 turns up:

  1. Gram Parsons – GP (January 1, 1973)
  2. Little Feat – Dixie Chicken (January 25, 1973)
  3. John Martyn – Solid Air (February 1, 1973)
  4. Iggy & The Stooges – Raw Power (February 7, 1973)
  5. John Cale – Paris 1919 (March 1, 1973)
  6. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973)
  7. King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (March 23, 1973)
  8. Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure (March 23, 1973)
  9. Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy (March 28, 1973)
  10. Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds of Fire (March 29, 1973)
  11. The Beatles – 1962-1966 (April 2, 1973)
  12.  The Beatles – 1967-1970 (April 2, 1973)
  13. David Bowie – Aladdin Sane (April 13, 1973)
  14. Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (May 25, 1973)
  15. Steely Dan – Countdown to Ecstasy (July 1, 1973)
  16. Mott The Hoople – Mott (July 20, 1973)
  17. Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin – Love Devotion Surrender (July 20, 1973)
  18. New York Dolls – New York Dolls (July 27, 1973)
  19. Lynyrd Skynyrd – (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd) (August 13, 1973)
  20. Faust – Faust IV (September 21, 1973)
  21. The Who – Quadrophenia (October 19, 1973)
  22. Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run (December 5, 1973)

Of which you’d have thought the cover art for Dark Side, Raw Power, Houses of the Holy, Tubular Bells, the two Beatles compilation albums and Band on the Run are getting on for being as ‘iconic’ as Aladdin Sane.

And a quick Google also turns up Rolling Stone’s list of top ten rock album covers of all time which doesn’t even include Aladdin Sane.

Consideration of general album covers from the period then moves onto another section focusing on album covers specifically by or closely related to Bowie i.e. the covers of his previous albums, especially the androgynous or sexually ambivalent ones such as The Man Who Sold The World where he’s lying on a divan wearing a dress, or Hunky Dory; and the equally ambivalent, but in a different, far more butch way, cover art for Lou Reed’s Transformer, produced by Bowie, which he and Mick Ronson both played on, and released a few months before Aladdin, in November 1972.

Front and back cover of Transformer by Lou Reed

All this is great fun, to see the great album art and play in your mind all the great tracks from long ago. There’s also a guilty pleasure: off to one side of the ‘classics of rock’ album covers is a montage of ‘square’ albums from the period, to remind us older guys how dire most music and entertainment of the period was. So there are the covers of albums by The Black Watch, the TV show Opportunity Knocks, the musical Godspell, Break-Through, character-based albums by Alf Garnett, Benny Hill and Tony Hancock, by Ken Dodd and his Diddymen and, a bit more acceptably, by ‘pop sensation’ Gilbert O’Sullivan. Half a century ago.

Montage of retro 1970s album covers at the ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ exhibition at the Southbank Centre

*Camille Paglia

A little further on into the exhibition I discovered the curators’ use of the word ‘phalliform’ is lifted from one of the lengthy quotes from American feminist academic, social critic and renatagob, Camille Paglia which are printed on the walls.

I remember Paglia’s presence on the scene in 1980s TV and magazines, touring her leather-jacketed, spike-haired form of aggressive New York feminism, and churning out page after page of mashed-up, hot-wired Beat prose poetry. The exhibition relies very heavily on her for its central premise, namely that the Aladdin Sane photo:

with its red-and-blue lighting bolt across Bowie’s face, has become one of the most emblematic and influential art images of the past half century, reproduced and parodied in advertising, media and entertainment worldwide.

This is the premise of the entire exhibition. Here’s another slice of Paglia’s all-about-everything, showily eclectic, name-dropping prose:

It contains all of Romanticism, focused on the artist as mutilated victim of his own febrile imagination. Like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, whose body was scarred by lightning in his quest for the white whale, Bowie as Ziggy is a voyager who has defied ordinary human limits and paid the price.

‘…and paid the price’ – this is sentimental tripe, a facile, clichéd, pre-modern view of the artist as specially damned and cursed for his gift, the kind of thing that Byron invented in the 1810s, felt a little ridiculous when Baudelaire did it in the 1850s, lived on into the poets maudits (damned poets) of the late nineteenth century (Rimbaud bunking off to Africa, Verlaine crying into his absinthe); was a thorough-going cliché worthy of mockery a hundred years ago.

It’s superficial magazine writing, rewarded for being exaggerated, over-written, sentimental and stereotyped. But, like wearing a leather jacket and having a spiky haircut, it was enough to persuade many people that Paglia was cool and has something to say, back in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s. If you like this kind of 6th form showing off, then it usefully underpins the exhibition; if you don’t (and you might have noticed that I don’t) then it undermines it.

Afterlife of an image

But back at the exhibition we haven’t finished yet. There’s more. This really is an exhibition for Aladdin Sane completists, because the exhibition goes on to chart further highlights of Bowie’s career after the album was released, and the long afterlife of the Aladdin image. For a start the curators aren’t backward in pointing out that Bowie himself had long links with the South Bank Centre, from his debut in 1969 in the recently opened Purcell Room, to his curation of Meltdown, their annual contemporary music festival, in 2002.

In the same year that the album came out, 1973, Radio 1 broadcast a series called ‘the Story of Pop’ in 26 episodes, and the cover of the first part of the associated part-work featured the Aladdin Sane image.

As to Duffy, he went on to work with Bowie on two further album covers, namely: Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters And Super Creeps (1980).

In 2002 Absolut Vodka ran an advertising campaign which used classic album covers, and one used the Aladdin Sane image.

In 2003 Kate Moss appeared on the front cover of Vogue sporting her version of the Aladdin Sane lightning to celebrate 30 years of its impact on culture and fashion (fourth photo down on this page).

After the 2008 financial crisis some parts of Britain issued their own local currency (news to me). Apparently a currency was issued local to just Brixton in south west London. Since Bowie was actually born in Brixton (at 40 Stansfield Road) the Aladdin Sane image featured on the Brixton £10 note.

In 2013 the Victoria and Albert Museum staged a huge exhibition about Bowie, titled David Bowie Is. it ‘set a new benchmark for immersive music exhibitions’ and was a sellout, going on tour round the UK and then abroad.

Bowie passed away on 10 January 2016. The following year Royal Mail issued a set of ten commemorative stamps for what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday year. Six stamps featured album covers, including Aladdin Sane. The first day cover was franked with a copy of the lightning bolt logo.

All these occasions are lovingly recorded, with appropriate illustrations and detailed captions. Bowie has been turned into an institution. All images have to be licensed by ‘the David Bowie Archive’. To quote the Clash, ‘turning rebellion into money’.

Chris Duffy

Things fall into a place a bit more when you learn that the exhibition is curated by Duffy’s son, Chris Duffy, and accompanies a book of the same name. Ah. And that it was Chris who described his Dad’s work as ‘the Mona Lisa of Pop’. Ah. And that Chris Duffy has set up the Duffy Archive to preserve his father’s work and legacy. Ah.

I loved this exhibition. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a relaxing, easy-going wallow in 1970s rock and pop and social nostalgia, full of nuggets and gossip and factoids. It’s a broad walk down memory lane. Like everything, it’s capable of multiple meanings and interpretations. The curators go heavy on the gender liberation aspect, which I see and understand. I responded more fully to the nostalgia elements. But once I understood the lead involvement of Duffy’s son, I also came to see it as a rather touching act of filial respect.

Installation view of ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ at the Southbank Centre showing Bowie posing in the flash make-up against a flash backdrop. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead. Bowie photo by Duffy © Duffy Archive & The David Bowie Archive ™

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Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (1988)

I’m discovering that the three novels of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl trilogy’ are more connected than I expected, featuring some of the same characters, themes and locations.

Like Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive opens with chapters explaining the set-up and situation of five different and apparently unconnected characters – so we straightaway realise that, as with Zero, part of the ‘interest’ of reading the book is going to be in finding out how these disparate personages are going to be woven together into one narrative.

But we also quickly realise that we’ve met some of these characters in the previous books and that this one represents a continuation of their stories, and so is a true sequel and not just set in the same fictional universe.

Kumiko

Kumiko Yanaka is the 13-year-old daughter of the head of a powerful corporation in Japan. The book opens in the confusing days after her mad (Danish) mother has committed suicide. Some kind of potentially violent infighting among the corporations is kicking off and her Dad has sent Kumiko to London to be out of the way of danger. She is met at Heathrow by a crop-headed, burly minder named, improbably enough, Petal, who drives her in a Jaguar along the M4 and to a safe house in Notting Hill, owned by one Roger Swain.

Her father gave her a device which, at a touch, projects a life-sized hologram of a chatty man named Colin who a) only Kumiko can see and b) has wide general knowledge, can access local computer and information systems, and so can give Kumiko advice. A cyber-guardian.

Next day she meets the owner of the house, Roger Swain, and an American woman with metallic lenses instead of eyes, named Sally Shears. Swain and Petal let Sally take Kumiko for a walk round the neighbourhood, in the falling snow, shopping and into a pub, where Sally explains that Kumiko is here because of an outbreak of infighting among the Yakuza (the Japanese mafia). So – her father is a senior member of a worldwide criminal consortium.

The device which projects Colin can also record. Colin tells Kumiko to hide it in Swain’s office and then reclaim it later in the day. They replay a conversation between Swain and Petal which mentions Angie Mitchell. If I’m not mistaken it hints at plans to kidnap her. Who she?

Angela Mitchell

Young Angie Mitchell was the central figure in the previous novel, Count Zero. A gang of professional kidnappers was expecting to extract her father, the star scientist Chris Mitchell, from the grip of a big multinational corporation, Maas Biolabs, and was surprised when she turned up instead, his teenage daughter.

It was later revealed that Mitchell had a) put her into the ultralight designed for him to escape in from the Maas Biolab compound, and b) then cut his own throat. Head of the extraction gang, tall rangy Turner, then took Angie on a cross-country odyssey, fleeing from agents of the vengeful Maas (and also Hosaka, the corporation who hired Turner and suspected some kind of double cross when Mitchell didn’t arrive). During this road trip it had become clear that Angie was special because a) Mitchell had embedded some kind of substance in her brain, presumably an example of the advanced ‘biosoft’ technology he was working on, so that b) Angie was able to tune into cyberspace without using any devices – without touching a console or dermatrodes, she could simply… enter cyberspace. And because of this unique ability, c) Angie had powerful dreams and visions in which she was visited by traditional voodoo gods and goddesses.

Indeed, it eventually was hinted that Mitchell had in fact been a pretty mediocre researcher but had stumbled across contact with the voodoo gods, who gave him the secrets of advanced tech (and thus made his career) in exchange for his daughter. What did they want with his daughter? That was hard to really make out, even by the end of the previous book.

Voodoo? Yes, these presences are powerful inside cyberspace but also capable of reaching out to speak through the minds and voices of humans outside cyberspace. At the end of the Count Zero it is explained that these entities are a legacy of the great Unification of Cyberspace which took place at the climax of Neuromancer, had then somehow fallen apart again into separate but related, super-powerful cyber-entities which had ranged over the whole history of human signs and symbols and discovered that the voodoo gods and goddesses of Haiti were the most convenient, appropriate guise in which to interface with human beings.

So much for the events in Count Zero. Now, in the opening chapters of this book, we cut to seven years later, years in which Angie has become a super-famous stimstim star (simstim being an advanced form of television in which people enter into the bodies and sensations of lead characters).

We learn that Angie has replaced Tally Isham, who was mentioned throughout the previous two novels as being the great simstim star of the age. But we also learn that the price of fame, and trying to deal with the occasional return of the voodoo voices in her head, has prompted a major league drug addiction, to a designer drug DMSO which helps suppress the voices and the memory of the traumatic events, including her father’s death, of seven years earlier.

Angie has been sent by her concerned superiors at the simstim corporation Sense/Net to a rehab clinic, but checked out after just a week and, as the novel opens, has arrived at a windy, abandoned, luxury house on the beach in California – Malibu to be precise.

Here she pads around the silent rooms, trying to get her head together, trying to resist the temptation to take a hit of the (futuristic) drug she was addicted to, all the while spied on by her boss, Hilton Swift, who makes regular phone calls to check she’s alright.

Count Zero

Then there’s a series of chapters which are written in a different, far more louche tone, as if from a sci fi comic or manga magazine.

Kid Afrika (who is black) is chauffeured across the crushed steel surface of ‘Dog Solitude’ in a Dodge hovercraft (reminiscent of the hovercraft in which Turner drives Angie in Count Zero) driven by a white girl named Cherry Chesterfield to ‘the Factory’, some kind of derelict building.

They’re spotted approaching by the retarded Little Bird who points the hovercraft out to Slick Henry, who is working on a huge sculpture titled ‘the Judge’. Got all that?

In the back of the hovercraft is a comatose body on a stretcher which Kid refers to as ‘the Count’. In a flash we realise this is Bobby Newmark, also known as Count Zero, a young computer hacker (or ‘hotdogger’) from the New Jersey slums, who gave the previous novel its title.

Kid Afrika has orders to hide Count Zero and wants Slick Henry to take him in. Henry is reluctant because he knows that the secretive Gentry, the man who first discovered the (abandoned) Factory and moved into it and, effectively, owns it, will not approve. Gentry hates people.

But the Kid reminds Slick Henry that he saved the latter’s life once and owes him a big favour. Reluctantly, Henry takes him in, accompanied by Cherry who will act as a sort of nurse to the comatose Count… leaving the reader wondering what happened to the Count and why he’s been sent here.

Mona

Mona is 16 and SINless i.e. does not have a Single Identification Number and so is off the grid of social security etc.

She lives with her pimp, Eddy, in a shitty, flyblown squat in Florida where he’s brought her, from Cleveland where she used to do erotic dancing in a seedy bar, in hope of making more money. Florida turns out to be polluted and dirty. Eddy sends her out to do tricks, beats her if she disobeys or complains, takes her money and then makes her describe the encounters to him, to make him hard so he can fuck her.

The whole milieu is painted with grim and depressing conviction.

After a chapter or two to establish this sordid set-up, Eddy suddenly introduces Mona to a smartly dressed man named Prior. To her surprise they are taken to an airport, loaded into a private jet and fly to Atlanta. Here they are taken to a swish hotel and next thing Mona knows she is having a medical checkover by a man named Gerald. Gerald and Prior seem to be discussing Mona’s appropriateness for some task – the colour of her eyes, her dental records, her age all appear to be relevant.

Now there have been several clues as to what’s going on:

a) In an earlier passage where Mona had gone shopping, she’d spotted a poster of Angie Mitchell and reflected that people sometimes remarked on her looking like the great simstim star. b) In the next chapter we are with Kumiko as she and Colin listen to a playback of the conversations they’d bugged between her ‘hosts’. They hear Swain discussing with Sally Shears an ‘extraction’ job, and talking about the way ‘the target’ is back in ‘the house on the coast.’

All this sounds like what we’ve learned about Angie Mitchell as she potters about the big house in Malibu. Swain goes on to say that ‘they’ (the unspecified client) don’t want her extracted by any number of mercs they could hire, but specifically by Sally Shears. And, he adds, there’s a new instruction: the client wants to make it look as if she’d been killed in the kidnapping. The client will provide a body.

Recap

So, by page 100 of this 300-page book, the reader has grasped that it’s going to be about a gang of crims, somehow organised by London-based Swain, and featuring lens-eyed Sally Shears, who plan to kidnap simstim star Angie Mitchell (for what reasons, we will presumably find out) and we can deduce that the lowlife hooker Mona has been shipped to a hotel and given a medical examination because ‘they’ plan to kill her and probably burn or mutilate her body enough to make investigators think it is Angie’s (an idea which seemed, to this reader, remarkably low-tech: don’t they have DNA forensics in this otherwise hi-tech future?)

Backgrounds

Threaded in between the storylines, we learn a lot more of the background to this futureworld, aspects which help shed light on the earlier two novels.

We learn what you might call conventional aspects of any sc-fi story set in Earth’s future, those hints and tips about future apocalypses which titillate the viewer’s taste for catastrophe. For example, we get a few more details about the ‘three week war’ which obliterated Bonn in a nuclear strike and resulted in clouds of radiation drifting west which led to food shortages in Britain. Petal shows Kumiko a hologram constructed from old footage of the Battle of Britain, created, he tells her, to commemorate the centenary i.e. 2040. Now since in an earlier novel we’d read about the ‘law of ’53’, presumably 2053, I’m guessing the action is set somewhere in the 2060s, maybe 2070s.

I couldn’t help feeling this third novel has, at least to begin with, a middle-aged feel: it doesn’t kick off at a furious headlong pace in a flood of amphetamine-fulled prose like Neuromancer, but takes its time and spreads.

Thus the book takes its time to give each of the characters a hefty backstory, even the hooker Mona, starting with her time back as a kid working on a crayfish farm and following through her sorry life to date, liberated from a crappy manual job by stylish confident Eddy, who turns out to be a pimp and beater.

We learn that Slick Henry committed a series of crimes – stealing cars apparently – he was caught and punished by having his memory permanently damaged via the technique of Induced Korsakov’s Syndrome. It flares up when he’s under pressure and he can only remember five minutes back…

Dog Solitude, we learn, is a vast landfill site full of toxic rubbish, somewhere beyond New Jersey. When it was finally full to overflowing rollers or something heavy were sent across its surface to crush and flatten the metal objects, resulting in the whole thing becoming an uneven but essentially flat surface of billions of tin cans and appliances and crushed cars. Nothing grows there, the rain collects in toxic puddles and, because of the unevenness, only hovercraft can cross it.

Slick Henry, for his own psychological reasons, is assembling vast sculptures, symbols of the authority figures who locked him up and stole his memory, while Gentry, the misanthropic owner of the Factory – a vast derelict building with flaps of waste plastic clumsily stapled over its long-smashed windows – is pursuing some quixotic quest into discovering the meaning and shape of the matrix of cyberspace.

And this rhymes, chimes and echoes Angie’s preoccupation with understanding the beings, the entities, which can enter, access and ‘ride’ her mind, what the two black men she met in Count Zero used Haitian voodoo terminology to refer to as loa.

So much for the characters’ backstories.

Tessier-Ashpool again

In among all these themes and stories, I was surprised at the way that for the third time the orbiting space station owned by the legendarily wealthy Tessier-Ashpool once again emerges as an idea and destination for the characters.

Tessier-Ashpool in Neuromancer

You will recall that in Neuromancer, the protagonists Case and Molly, helped by the cloned daughter of the billionaire Ashpool, 3Jane, fulfil the task set them of activating a codeword which allows the two separate parts, the two ‘lobes’ of the matrix – named Wintermute and Neuromancer – to unite. The rather visionary, transcendent result is that, right at the end of that novel, the matrix becomes self aware. All of this takes place in the orbiting space station, Freeside, created by the fabulously rich Tessier-Ashpool family.

Tessier-Ashpool in Count Zero

Count Zero is set 7 or 8 years later and brings Angie Mitchell, smuggled out of Maas Biolabs’ clutches to freedom and brought to a nightclub in New York, where she meets some heavy-duty black guys who explain to her that, above and beyond its rational business content, cyberspace is also possessed by strange religious god-like entities called loas, who have the names of Haitian voodoo gods (for example Baron Samedi).

Count Zero climaxes when the young art expert, Marly, fulfils the commission given her by the world’s richest man, Josef Virek, to discover the creator of a strange and haunting artwork – a vitrine filled with seven or so random objects. She follows the trail out into space, to very same orbiting space station, Freeside, more specifically to the section of it which the Tessier-Ashpool family created as its own private fortress and which has, since the events of Neuromancer, been ‘sawn off’ from Freeside and placed into its own orbit.

Here Marly discovers that someone has created a vast sphere with no gravity inside this space station, in which a cornucopia of rubbish and random objects floats slowly around, while a multi-armed robot device grabs random items as they float by, while other robot arms use lasers to shape and mould the objects, which are then placed in these vitrines. The whole thing is devoted to creating Damien Hirst-style artworks.

At the climax of the novel, the face of Josef Virek, the richest man in the world, who had given Marly her quest, appears on a monitor in this dome and tells her his people have followed her and are about to enter the dome. He thinks he is on the brink of getting his hands on a super-advanced technology which will give him immortality. I think what happens next is that we learn the dome, its robot artist and the haunting vitrines are all products of the loa, the self-aware entities within cyberspace. Marly’s quest was part of a scheme by the loa to lure Virek to his death and, sure enough, while logged into cyberspace in order to communicate with Marly, he is killed by the loa, thus freeing Marly from her quest.

Tessier-Ashpool in Mona Lisa Overdrive

Now, in this novel, Angie, on a very slender pretext, finds herself becoming obsessed with the Tessier-Ashpool family. She discovers that one of her simstim’s technical team had used the show’s recent break (while she was in the rehab clinic) to go ‘up the well’ (i.e. into space) to delve into the Tessier-Ashpool story. She asks for a copy of a recent documentary made into the mysterious fate of the Tessier-Ashpool family, which she watches several times, her viewings being opportunities for Gibson to feed us more bits of backstory.

Half way through Mona Lisa I had become a little bored of this Tessier-Ashpool theme. It seemed to me to close down the novel’s possibilities. It is a big world and, if you throw in space stations and extra-terrestrial travel, it is a very big world. It seemed oddly spastic for the stories to have to return to the same setting.

I thought Gibson is going to have to pull something pretty impressive out of the hat if he’s going to trump a) the climax of Neuromancer in which cyberspace becomes self aware! or b) the climax of Count Zero, with its hallucinatory vision of cyberspace being taken over by voudou gods!

Puzzles

This third of the Sprawl trilogy makes Gibson’s modus operandi clearer than ever. The main characteristic of the books is that they are deliberately confusing.

At the end of most thrillers there is some kind of explanation of what happened and often authors are considerate enough to tie up the loose ends. In Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive I was left more confused by the denouements than by the chase. I don’t think they can be summarised, really, because there are about ten named characters and all of them have shifting theories about what is actually going on, and the voices in the matrix themselves give changing interpretations of what is happening and why.

The result is a gathering sense of excitement, with a number of chases and battle confrontations all going off at the same time – but only a very confused sense of what is at stake. Something desperately important is at stake but, for most of the novel, it is hard to understand what.

For example, Kumiko escapes from the minder set to accompany her on a shopping trip around Portobello Road, and makes it across London to Brixton, to the scuzzy flat of the cockney console-cowboy Tick (real name, Terrance) who Sally Shears had introduced her to in a pub in Notting Hill early on.

Tick hands her some ‘trodes and takes her into cyberspace to show her a mystery which is puzzling the millions of other cyberjockeys around the world, which is the arrival of a huge new ‘building’ or artefact of gleaming data in the matrix. Why did Sally tell Kumiko to go to Tick’s? Who is Tick, really? What is the mystery of the shining artifact?

All that is relatively clear is that Swain’s men as well as the regular police will be out searching for Kumiko in force i.e. there is a strong sense of menace and paranoia.

Also, about a hundred pages we are explicitly told – if we hadn’t guessed it already – that ‘Sally Shears’ is none other than Molly Millions, the female lead in Neuromancer, characterised by her distinctive metallic lens implants where her eyes ought to be, and the 4-centimetre long retractable razor knives under her fingernails.

From various conversations Kumiko has overheard or we have witnessed, we realise she is a central part of the plan to kidnap Angie Mitchell, and that she is mighty unhappy about it. She says she’s only doing it because she’s being blackmailed and Swain says he’s only doing it because he’s being blackmailed, too, and I think – if I understood correctly – that they’re both being blackmailed into doing it by 3Jane, the mad daughter of Ashpool from Neuromancer, who is dead, but exists as an AI or ‘construct’.

More plot

Going back on the plan and abandoning Swain, Molly a) tells Kumiko to escape to the safety of Tick’s flat, while b) she, Molly, flees to America. First thing we know about her arrival is when she breaks into the clinic where Mona is having plastic surgery done on her to make her look like Angie Mitchell. The clinic door explodes as the minder, Prior, comes flying through it, followed by rough, tough Molly. She grabs Mona and escapes with her. (This is possible because she’s been tipped off about the surgery by the plastic surgeon, Gerald [did he do her lens-eyes, the reader idly wonders?])

Molly takes Mona off in a car and drives to New York, where she parks atop a multi-story car park and disappears, telling Mona to stay put.

Then we cut to Angie. In the intervening chapters she has more or less ‘recovered’ and agreed with her boss that she is ready to return to broadcasting. Her technical crew arrive, including hair stylists, make-up and so on, and then she flies back to New York, arriving by swanky corporate helicopter at the city’s smartest hotel, whose the top floors are permanently rented by her employers. Sense/Net. Remember, she is the most famous and highest paid simstim star in the world.

But Angie’s chopper has barely landed before Molly forces open the door, shoots Angie’s smooth gay black minder, Porphyre, with a stun dart, commandeers and flies the chopper over to the car park where she’d left Mona, and bundles Angie out of the chopper and into the back of the car.

Here, scared teenage Mona, doctored to look like Angie, meets her heroine, and Angie reacts with movie star aplomb to coming face to face with a clone of herself. Meanwhile, tough Molly is driving them off at speed, in fact, driving the car up the ramp into a nearby empty hovercraft which she proceeds to steal.

Meanwhile, in the derelict factory in the waste land beyond New Jersey, Gentry has become resigned to the presence of the comatose Count Zero at the Factory, because he’s jacked into the Count’s mind and realised that the Count, like him (Gentry), is on a mission, on a quest, to understand what’s happened to the matrix.

They both know that at some point, 14 years earlier, something changed in cyberspace. In their different ways they have pieced together the story told in Neuromancer, namely that Case and Molly oversaw the unification of the two lobes of an AI so enormous it effectively became cyberspace.

What is genuinely puzzling to this reader is the way Neuromancer climaxes with the matrix becoming self-aware at the climax of a thrilling, scary novel, but then the threat of the entire digital realm becoming self-aware is frittered away in the subsequent books.

At the very end of Neuromancer I thought it was going to become like the terrifying moment in the Terminator story, where the newly self-aware world computer declares war on its human creators.

But no. Nothing like that happens. Instead that-which-had-become-one appears to disintegrate again into a number of different entities and this fundamental oddity is compounded in Count Zero when we learn that these fragments have taken the shape and names and behaviour of the gods of voudou.

These are the Horsemen which dominated Angie’s mind in Count Zero and become increasingly present to her as Mona Lisa progresses:

And there they were, the Horsemen, the loa: Pappa Legba bright and fluid as mercury; Ezili Freda who is mother and queen; Samedi, the Baron Cimetiere, moss on corroded bone; Similor; Madame Travaux; many others… They fill the hollow that is Grande Brigitte. The rushing of their voices is the sound of wind, running water… (p.262)

We learn as the novel proceeds that this is why Angie became addicted to the drugs, because the drugs stopped her dreaming about the voudou horsemen.

But when the voices come through – the voice of Mamman Brigitte in particular being the dominant one in this novel – their explanations are even more confusing than in Zero.

They speak in highly mystical language: the loa came out of Africa but not as we (modern Caucasians) know them; Legba-ati-Bon – who rode Angie seven years ago at the climax of Zero – has also yet to come into existence i.e. he is and yet is not.

They confirm that the events at the climax of Neuromancer did indeed give rise to The One, but there was also an ‘other’. Then the centre failed and every fragment rushed away, each fragment seeking a form. Brigitte explains that, of all the signs and symbologies created by humanity, ‘the paradigms of voudou proved most appropriate’ (p.264).

But even if you’ve managed to process this, it is still not clear, even by the end of the book, what she is on about: more appropriate for what? For what purpose?

Brigitte confirms that it was the loa who approached Angie’s father, Chris Mitchell, star scientist of Maas Biolabs and offered him secrets; in return for this knowledge, he implanted biochemical programmes in Angie’s brain which made it easier for her to see the loa without jacking into cyberspace.

OK. But why?

And, as the novel progresses, Angie also realises that she has been seeing 3Jane’s dreams, memories of events which took place inside the Tessier-Ashpool fortress – but why? How is that possible and what does it mean?

My point is that – beneath the speed-driven, slangy, tech-jargon prose, and beneath the thriller motifs of gangsters and criminal cartels, and beneath the genuinely gripping, real world situations of kidnaps, and high speed chases, and getaways, and firefights – and even beneath the neon grid vision of cyberspace into which the characters pop with just enough regularity to remind us that depicting cyberspace is Gibson’s métier and USP – at the heart of all three novels in the Sprawl trilogy is a surprisingly mystical, non-rational and deeply confusing core.

If they were about money or drugs or gold or smuggling or guns or espionage or any of the other common thriller tropes, it would be one thing. But all three novels end up being about strange, mystical changes within cyberspace which all the books’ characters themselves don’t understand.

On balance this is a plus. It makes them rereadable. Usually at the end of a thriller the game is given away and we know whodunnit and why. Not in these books. They have all the structure and many of the trappings of conventional thrillers, plus all the hi-tech, lowlife drug paraphernalia thrown in. But at heart they remain oddly, eerily unknowable.

The last battle

The novel heads towards a climax at the Factory.

While we’ve been following the convergence of Angie and Molly and Mona in New York, things have hotted up at the Factory, namely bad guys have arrived. Using a loudhailer they demand the comatose body of Count Zero. Foolishly, Little Bird fires pretty much the only gun in the place at the tough mercs outside, at which point they announce they are going to storm the place.

The real world conflict is matched when Slick Henry jacks into Count Zero’s mind and discovers all kinds of wonders. Bobby’s consciousness exists in a tranquil paradise while he explores the mysteries of the new artifact in cyberspace. When Henry explains the situation, Bobby uses his control of cyberspace to reroute a passing automated cargo helicopter and make it drop its heavy loads onto the hovercraft and men approaching from outside.

Nonetheless, the mercs are just starting to fight their way into the Factory when out of nowhere the hovercraft driven by Molly erupts through the Factory walls. What follows next is largely seen through the eyes of 16-year-old Molly, who has found a stash of drugs and taken some, with the result that most of it is described in a stoned, dreamy, half-understood way.

Molly fights off the mercenaries aided by Slick Henry’s sculptures which, although they were built for his own psychological therapy, also happen to contain flame throwers and lasers and clutching claws and so on, all of which turn out to be handy in fighting off an attacking force of mercenaries.

While all this is going on, Angie makes her way up to the high-level ‘loft’ where Bobby’s stretcher is laid out and there, amid Slick Henry and Cherry, she embraces him. During the fight his weak body has finally expired. Angie puts on a spare set of ‘trodes, embraces his body, and she too disappears into cyberspace. Her body too expires, but we follow her into cyberspace where she imagines she is walking, being guided towards a wedding.

Back in the real world Molly has finished wiping out the mercs just as Angie’s boss, head of the Sense/Net simstim broadcasts, Hilton Swift arrives. His people had realised Angie had been kidnapped back at the hotel, identified the hovercraft she’d been driven off in, and it’s taken them this long to follow Angie out to the Factory.

Now Hilton and his people walk in at more or less the same time that Molly’s battered old hovercraft screeches off through a big gap in the Factory wall, taking with her Slick Henry and Cherry, who have forged some kind of bond in these last few hectic hours.

Tying up loose ends

As Hilton walks into the Factory he is confronted by just stoned Mona who, of course, is the spitting image of Angie, albeit twenty years younger. Entranced, Hilton and Porphyre (Angie’s minder) decide on the spot they will simply replace the dead Angie with Mona.

And so, after some extensive physical cleaning up and neural cleansing, it does indeed come to pass that Mona steps straight into Angie’s simstim shoes – and is even more of a hit than the original, returning to the world’s simstim screens new and refreshed after her detox break.

It had been explained, sort of, that Molly fled London and Swain because she had cut her own deal with (I think) 3Jane: this is what motivated her to bring Angie to the Count in his dying moments (though exactly why 3Jane wanted this to happen, I don’t understand). Anyway, in return for keeping her side of the bargain, all Molly’s criminal records are wiped clean, and she is a free woman.

It is confirmed that Swain, supposedly working for Kumiko’s dad, had in fact double-crossed him by selling out to 3Jane, partly due to her threat to expose all his criminal activities. But right at the end of the book we learn that Swain has been killed and replaced by the burly, crop-haired and rather fatherly Petal. Tick and Petal had taken a video call from Kumiko’s father explaining that the ‘difficulty’ he had been experiencing is now over. When Kumiko asks her father about his role in her mother’s suicide, he shows genuine remorse and repentance and Kumiko finds herself forgiving him. At which point there’s a knock on the door of Tick’s crappy flat and it is Petal who – to my relief – doesn’t just machine gun everyone inside – as happens in so many Yank movies – but instead kindly explains the situation and says he is taking Kumiko back into his guardianship under instructions from her father. Aaah.

The ‘other’

Despite rereading the ending I never understood why 3Jane’s dreams or thoughts appeared with such pressure and urgency to Angie. What I did understand is that all’s well that ends well.

Virtual Angie and virtual Bobby are shown living in a wonderful, luxury and very peaceful French chateau which he has constructed in cyberspace. Fragments of other minds drift in and out – tentative sad 3Jane, other players they’ve known such as Colin the smooth-talking cyber-guardian of Kumiko back in the early chapters, and in particular the foul-mouthed Finn, a character who has appeared in all the novels as a particularly wise and ancient cyber cowboy.

And then, one day, a limousine turns up and Bobby and the Finn, with Colin in attendance, lead Angie out and into it. They explain that on that day, 14 years earlier, when the matrix became one, it immediately sensed the presence of an ‘other’. Now they are taking her to meet that other. But cyberspace contains all human data, Angie protests. Sure, replies the Finn. But the ‘other’ isn’t human.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘If cyberspace consists of the sum total of data in the human system…’
‘Yeah,’ the Finn said, turning out onto the long straight empty highway ahead, ‘but nobody’s talking human, see?’
‘the other one was somewhere else,’ Bobby said.
‘Centauri,’ said Colin.
Can they be teasing? Is this some joke of Bobby’s?
‘So it’s kinda hard to explain why the matrix split up into all those hoodoos ‘n’ shit, when it met this other one,’ said the Finn, ‘but when we get there, yo’ll sorta get the feeling…’
‘My own feeling,’ said Colin, ‘is that it’s all so much more amusing this way…’
‘Are you telling the truth?’
‘Be there in a New York minute,’ said the Finn, ‘no shit.’

So a) it ends as many sci fi stories do, on the brink of the first encounter with intelligent life from another world b) I’m glad to see that even right at the end, there is no rational explanation for the One created at the end of Neuromancer is then discovered to have relapsed back into many fragments in the subsequent books, and not only that, but fragments which take the identities of voodoo gods.

Even right at the end where everything else is explained, this remains unexplained.

Other William Gibson reviews

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by Simon on March 19, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 19, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/19/mona-lisa-overdrive-william-gibson/

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1927)

This is the final collection of twelve Sherlock Holmes short stories, published in the trusty Strand Magazine between October 1921 and April 1927. Incredible that the character associated with London pea-soupers, hansom cabs, gas lamps and Jack the Ripper, should live on into the Jazz Age and see the publication of Ulysses and The Great Gatsby, the Russian Civil War, the rise of Mussolini, the General Strike and talking movies. As Conan Doyle writes in the preface to this final collection:

He began his adventures in the very heart of the later Victorian era, carried it through the all-too-short reign of Edward, and has managed to hold his own little niche even in these feverish days. (Preface)

Cruelty and violence

But, possibly as a sign of the traumas the world had passed through viz. the Great War, the collapse of Europe’s land empires, and the tempestuous Bolshevik Revolution, the stories are notably crueller and harsher than previous ones.

  • A handsome man has acid thrown in his face.
  • A man finds himself among half-beasts and catches leprosy.
  • Holmes is severely beaten and repeatedly threatened.
  • When he seizes the diamond from Count Negretto Sylvius he holds a pistol to his head, more the act of a Philip Marlowe than the debonaire Holmes.
  • A boy infects his baby brother with incurable poison.
  • A woman shoots herself in the head.
  • A man takes medicine which turns him into a half ape.
  • A maniac traps his wife and lover in a gas chamber.
  • A deadly jellyfish kills its victims by flailing their backs to a bloody pulp.
  • A lion rips a beautiful woman’s face off.

Animal imagery

And the greater cruelty and violence of the stories is reflected in the much more frequent comparison of humans to animals:

  • ‘When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.’
  • The Baron has little waxed tips of hair under his nose, like an insect.
  • How a beastman could have laid his vile paws upon such a being of the beyond I cannot imagine. You may have noticed how extremes call to each other, the spiritual to the animal, the cave-man to the angel. You never saw a worse case than this.
  • It seemed that none of them could speak English, but the situation wanted clearing up, for the creature with the big head was growing furiously angry, and, uttering wild-beast cries…
  • A sudden wild-beast light sprang up in the dark, menacing eyes of the master criminal.
  • ‘You cruel beast! You monster!’ she cried.
  • From keeping beasts in a cage, the woman seemed, by some retribution of fate, to have become herself a beast in a cage.
  • Ruffian, bully, beast – it was all written on that heavy-jowled face.
  • Holmes sprang at his throat like a tiger and twisted his face towards the ground.
  • I tell you, Mr Holmes. this man collects women, and takes a pride in his collection. as some men collect moths or butterflies.
  • ‘And is this Count Sylvius one of your fish?’ ‘

    Yes, and he’s a shark. He bites. The other is Sam Merton the boxer. Not a bad fellow, Sam, but the Count has used him. Sam’s not a shark. He is a great big silly bull-headed gudgeon. But he is flopping about in my net all the same.’

  • If I had said that a mad bull had arrived it would give a clearer impression of what occurred. The door had flown open and a huge negro had burst into the room.
  • She entered with ungainly struggle like some huge awkward chicken, torn, squawking, out of its coop.
  • ‘I see. You’ve tested them before.’ ‘They are good hounds who run silent.’ ‘Such hounds have a way sooner or later of biting the hand that feeds them.’
  • There have been no advertisements in the agony columns. You know that I miss nothing there. They are my favourite covert for putting up a bird, and I would never have overlooked such a cock pheasant as that.’
  •  With his dressing-gown flapping on each side of him, he looked like some huge bat glued against the side of his own house, a great square dark patch upon the moonlit wall.
  • In all our adventures I do not know that I have ever seen a more strange sight than this impassive and still dignified figure crouching frog-like upon the ground and goading to a wilder exhibition of passion the maddened hound, which ramped and raged in front of him, by all manner of ingenious and calculated cruelty.
  • It was a dreadful face – a human pig, or rather a human wild boar, for it was formidable in its bestiality. One could imagine that vile mouth champing and foaming in its rage, and one could conceive those small, vicious eyes darting pure malignancy as they looked forth upon the world. Ruffian, bully, beast – it was all written on that heavy-jowled face.
  • … the other, a small rat-faced man with a disagreeably furtive manner.
  • ‘For myself, I am deeply in the hands of the Jews. I have always known that if my sister were to die my creditors would be on to my estate like a flock of vultures.’
  • He clawed into the air with his bony hands. His mouth was open, and for the instant he looked like some horrible bird of prey. In a flash we got a glimpse of the real Josiah Amberley, a misshapen demon with a soul as distorted as his body.

And the fact that one story is about a vampire and another about a scientist who turns himself into an ape-man clinches the sense of the ab-human, of the human mutating into the Gothic creature or beast, which permeates the stories. Humans permanently poised on the edge of bestial violence.

The Strand Magazine, vol. 73, April 1927

The Strand Magazine, vol. 73, April 1927

Sex and seduction

There’s more sex, more overtly referred to, than in the earlier stories.

  • Baron Grüner is a smooth-talking seducer of women; the Illustrious Client hinges on Holmes purloining the Baron’s ‘Lust Diary’.
  • Similarly, the gorgeous Isadora Klein has seduced numerous young men, used them and then discarded them, and the case hinges (once again) on a text which records her sexual escapades, this time a roman a clef written by her lover.
  • Maria Gibson is jealous enough of her husband’s relationship with the maid to kill herself.
  • Professor Presbury is besotted enough with a young woman he’s met to experiment with a dangerous youth serum.
  • Leonardo the circus acrobat has ‘the self-satisfied smile of the man of many conquests’.

It is difficult to cast your mind back to the Victorian stories where the sex element is simply absent; where there is no reference to sex whatsoever, at any point; where men drop dead of heart attacks at the mere thought of their reputations being besmirched, where women are prepared to plunge their country into war rather than have their husband read an old billet-doux (The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plan).

This is the most obvious way that, despite the way the tales are still ostensibly set in the late ’90s or early noughties – in fact the post-War Holmes is operating in a new era with new conventions,

Anglo good, foreign bad

Foreigners are generally bad, such as the smooth Baron Grüner:

  • The fellow is, as you may have heard, extraordinarily handsome, with a most fascinating manner. a gentle voice and that air of romance and mystery which means so much to a woman. He is said to have the whole sex at his mercy and to have made ample use of the fact… His European reputation for beauty was fully deserved. In figure he was not more than of middle size, but was built upon graceful and active lines. His face was swarthy, almost Oriental, with large, dark, languorous eyes which might easily hold an irresistible fascination for women. His hair and moustache were raven black, the latter short, pointed, and carefully waxed. His features were regular and pleasing, save only his straight, thin-lipped mouth. If ever I saw a murderer’s mouth it was there – a cruel, hard gash in the face, compressed, inexorable, and terrible.
  • Isadora Klein was, of course, the celebrated beauty. There was never a woman to touch her. She is pure Spanish, the real blood of the masterful Conquistadors… She rose from a settee as we entered: tall, queenly, a perfect figure, a lovely mask-like face, with two wonderful Spanish eyes which looked murder at us both.
  • It was as if the air of Italy had got into his blood and brought with it the old cruel Italian spirit.
  • This gentleman married some five years ago a Peruvian lady the daughter of a Peruvian merchant, whom he had met in
    connection with the importation of nitrates. The lady was very beautiful, but the fact of her foreign birth and of her alien religion always caused a separation of interests and of feelings between husband and wife.
  • ‘She was a creature of the tropics, a Brazilian by birth, as no doubt you know.’ ‘No, it had escaped me.’ ‘Tropical by birth and tropical by nature. A child of the sun and of passion.’
  • He was looked upon as an oddity by the students, and would have been their butt, but there was some strange outlandish blood in the man, which showed itself not only in his coal-black eyes and swarthy face but also in occasional outbreaks of temper, which could only be described as ferocious.

But, thankfully, in contrast to the beast-people and dastardly foreigners, there are plenty of fine upstanding, Anglo-Saxon chaps (and the occasional chapess):

  • Mr James M. Dodd, a big, fresh, sunburned, upstanding Briton.
  • ‘I have found out who our client is,’ I cried, bursting with my great news. ‘Why, Holmes, it is—‘ ‘It is a loyal friend and a chivalrous gentleman,’ said Holmes.
  • ‘He had the fighting blood in him, so it is no wonder he volunteered. There was not a finer lad in the regiment!’
  • “Of course I remembered him,” said I as I laid down the letter. “Big Bob Ferguson, the finest three-quarter Richmond ever had. He was always a good-natured chap.’
  • Our new visitor, a bright, handsome girl of a conventional English type, smiled back at Holmes as she seated herself beside Mr Bennett.
  • Stackhurst himself was a well-known rowing Blue in his day, and an excellent all-round scholar.
  • Fitzroy McPherson was the science master, a fine upstanding young fellow…
  • ‘Forgive what is past, Murdoch. We shall understand each other better in the future.’ They passed out together with their arms linked in friendly fashion.
  • Who could have imagined that so rare a flower would grow from such a root and in such an atmosphere?.. I could not look upon her perfect clear-cut face, with all the soft freshness of the downlands in her delicate colouring, without realizing that no young man would cross her path unscathed.

High society and superlatives

These stories continue the trend of hobnobbing with the rich and famous – giving the reader a flattering Downton Abbeyesque feeling that they are rubbing shoulders with the glamorous, rich and aristocratic. If not actual aristocrats, the adversaries are generally men and women at the top of their field.

  • It is hinted that the illustrious client in the first story is the Prince of Wales.
  • All the doctors are the most eminent in their field – Sir Leslie Oakshott, the famous surgeon, Sir James Saunders the great dermatologist
  • The soldiers are all medal-winning heroes – Colonel Emsworth the Crimean V. C.
  • Ronder, of course, was a household word. He was the rival of Wombwell, and of Sanger, one of the greatest showmen of his day.
  • ‘There are the Shoscombe spaniels,’ said I. ‘You hear of them at every dog show. The most exclusive breed in England.’
  • ‘That is a colt you are running?’ ‘The best in England, Mr Holmes.’
  • And the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary come calling in person about the Mazarin stone!

The stories

The Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924)

Set in 1902, in Kingston.

The dapper Sir James Damery visits on behalf of an anonymous client who wishes to prevent sweet and gullible Miss Violet Merville from marrying the Austrian Baron Adelbert Gruner, not only a cad to women but probably a murderer. While Watson is distracting the Baron with the offer of a rare Chinese antiquity, Holmes sneaks in the back and purloins the notebook the Baron keeps of all his conquests. There is little or no deduction involved. What is involved is shocking violence as a) Holmes is badly beaten up by two of the Baron’s men b) the Baron has vitriol thrown in his face by an embittered lover, Kitty Winter. The Wikipedia entry on vitriol-throwing says the French press coined the word La Vitrioleuse after a wave of 16 vitriol attacks in 1879, all of them crimes of passion. In 1894 the French artist Eugene Grasset (1841 to 1917) created a haunting lithograph title La Vitioleuse.

La Vitrioleuse by Eugene Grasset, 1894 (Wikimedia Commons)

La Vitrioleuse by Eugene Grasset (1894)

The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier (1926)

Set in 1903, near Bedford.

First ever Holmes story narrated by Holmes himself. Fine upstanding soldier James Dodd fought side by side with good man Godfrey Emsworth, son of the famous Crimean VC. Rumoured to be wounded but then disappeared and family are strangely cagey about him. Holmes goes to Tuxbury Old Park and quickly deduces that the missing soldier has in fact contracted leprosy in South Africa and is hiding from the world with his family’s help

The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone (1921)

Set in 1903, in Harrow Weald.

First use of 3rd person narrator. Holmes has a mannekin of himself in the window to distract his watchers. By adroitly swapping places with it he persuades Count Negretto Sylvius to take out the stolen £100K jewel to show to his accomplice at which Holmes simply swipes it. Baker Street.

The Adventure of the Three Gables (1906)

Set in 1903.

Steve Dixie, a black boxer bursts in to warn Holmes off Harrow Weald which is a coincidence because he’s just had a letter from Mary Maberley who lives there. Off we go to meet her and hear her story, that an agent suddenly offered her a fortune for her house and everything in it. Through various clues Holmes deduces the involvement of the imperious Spanish beauty Isadora Klein who has dallied with half the men in London, including Mary Maberley’s dead son. Turns out he wrote a novel dramatising Isadora’s wicked ways and she suspected it was in his luggage, hence the offer for the house and all its contents.

The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire (1924)

Set in 1896, in Ryder Street, St James’s (London).

Good solid rugger player Bob Ferguson comes to Holmes stricken: after some suspicions he caught his wife at the throat of his little baby, and she turned with blood on her lips! then ran off weeping to her rooms and won’t emerge. On a visit to the rundown house Holmes quickly sees the lie of the land: the 15 year old son of the first wife is deadly jealous of the new baby by the second, Peruvian, wife and had nipped it with an south American arrow tipped with poison. The wife was gallantly sucking it out only to be completely mis-accused. The prescription for 15 year old Jacky is a year at sea! Near Horsham.

The Adventure of the Three Garridebs (1924)

Set 1902.

An American named Garrideb reluctantly appears before Holmes after an English eccentric with a vast collection of bric-a-brac named Garridenb has messaged him. His irritation and worn English clothes belie his cock and bull story about a multi-millionaire American back in Kansas named Garrideb who bequeathed his millions to whoever could find three Garridebs in the world. He claims to have found the third one in Birmingham and packs the eccentric off to meet him but, of course, Holmes and Watson stake out the now empty house where they reveal the first Garrideb to be none other than ‘Killer’ Evans from Chicago, who’d killed a confederate in London and served five years for it during which time the eccentric Garrideb moved into his flat, thus blocking access to the forger’s kit in the basement.

The Problem of Thor Bridge (1922)

Set in 1900, near Winchester, Hampshire.

Mr Neil Gibson, the Gold King, the richest gold magnate in the world, marries a Brazilian lady and settles in England but as her looks fade they argue a lot, and he becomes attached to his children’s maid, Miss Grace Dunbar. The wife Maria is found shot dead and the gun is found in Grace’s wardrobe. What could be simpler? Holmes deduces from the way the little bridge over the lake is chipped, that the wife planted a copy of the gun to implicate the maid, and then shot herself with a gun tied to a weighted string dangling into the lake!

The story is notable within the Sherlock Holmes canon for the initial reference to a tin dispatch box, located within the vaults of the Cox and Co. Bank at Charing Cross in London, where Dr Watson is said to keep the papers concerning some of Holmes’ unsolved or unfinished cases.

The Adventure of the Creeping Man (1923)

Set 1903 in Camford i.e. a fictional version of Cambridge.

Mr Trevor Bennett comes to Holmes with a problem. He is Professor Presbury’s personal secretary engaged to the professor’s only daughter, Edith. After a trip to Prague the professor has been behaving strangely, with a new vigour but also, on some nights, loping around the house and climbing the walls! Holmes shows he has been taking an experimental youth serum extracted from apes in Madagascar.

The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane (1926)

Set in 1907, on the Sussex coast.

One of the last of Holmes’s adventures and the second one to be narrated by Holmes himself! In his retirement on the South Downs cases still follow him. One of the teachers at the nearby ? academy is found stumbling up the cliffs from an early morning swim on the beach, his back horribly flailed and bloody. There is an interlude while speculation about his murderer implicates his rival in love for a nearby maiden. Only for Holmes to suddenly remember the same marks are made by a rare tropical giant jellyfish, but not before the chief suspect is himself stung almost to death.

The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger (1927)

Set in 1896, in Brixton.

The veiled lodger is the wife of the world famous circus owner ? He was a tyrant and sadist who whipped her. Her lover Leonardo the strong man cooked up a plan to stave the tyrant’s head in with a club with spikes in it to replicate a lion’s paw and release the lion they fed every day. The murder went ahead but, unfortunately the lion was maddened by the smell of blood and turned on Mrs, ripping her face off while the coward Leonardo ran off. She feels free to tell her story now she’s read that Leonardo is dead. And she has lived in retirement hiding behind a veil ever since. Holmes gallantly talks her out of committing suicide.

The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place (1927)

Set in 1902, in Berkshire.

Head trainer John Mason from Shoscombe Old Place, a racing stable in Berkshire, comes to Holmes about his master, Sir Robert Norberton. Mason thinks he has gone mad. The stables are actually owned by Norberton’s sister, Lady Beatrice, and the old man has huge debts. He is staking everything on the next race featuring his colt. Meanwhile, Mason lists various odd events which capture Holmes’s attention:

  • Lady B has stopped greeting her favourite horse
  • Sir Robert has become increasingly angry and stressed
  • in a fit of anger he gave Lady B’s dog away to the local publican
  • he’s been seen going into the local church crypt at night to meet a stranger
  • and then burnt human bones are found in the furnace at Shoscombe!

Holmes deduces that Lady B has actually died, but Sir Robert is maintaining the fiction that she’s alive to prevent his creditors seizing the estate before his horse can win the Derby. Which it does, and with his huge winnings he pays off his debts.

The Adventure of the Retired Colourman (1926)

Set 1898 in Lewisham, south London.

Holmes is hired by a retired supplier of artistic materials, Josiah Amberley, to look into his wife’s disappearance. She has left with a neighbour, Dr Ray Ernest, taking a sizeable quantity of cash and securities. Amberley wants the two tracked down. Holmes deduces that Amberley himself did away with the couple, locking them in his strong room and gassing them and then throwing them down a disused well. Holmes prevents Amberley committing suicide, predicting he will end up in Broadmoor not swinging from a rope.

Town versus country

Despite Holmes’s association with pea-souper fogs and so on, only four of these 12 stories actually take place in London. All the rest are located in the countryside.

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Posted by Simon on January 9, 2014

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)

The first two Holmes novellas, first published in magazines then in book form, weren’t particularly successful. But the editor of The Strand magazine, George Newnes, saw their potential and commissioned Conan Doyle to write 12 short stories using the Holmes and Watson characters, publishing one a month from July 1891 to June 1892. It was these monthly instalments which began Holmes’s rise to global fame.

A Scandal in Bohemia

Client: The King of Bohemia calls to say he is engaged to an eligible aristocrat but has had an affair with Irene Adler who has photos of them together. Holmes disguises himself as a groom to get the lie of the land, visits her and arranges an elaborate ruse whereby a fire cracker is thrown into the living room and her startled glance at the wall shows Holmes where the safe is. But the next day when he calls to claim them, she has decamped. She is always The Woman.

The Adventure of the Red-Headed League

Client: Jabez Wilson. Jabez is invited to join a league established by an American philanthropist; he is paid to go sit in a room and transcribe the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is an elaborate ruse to get access to his cellar and tunnel into the bank next door.

A Case of Identity

Client: Mary Sutherland, a quiet legatee of a will, becomes engaged to Hosmer Angel at a dance but he mysteriously disappears. Turns out it is none other than her mother’s young second husband trying to swindle her out of her inheritance.

The Boscombe Valley Mystery

Client: Alice Turner. In Herefordshire a landowner has been murdered by Boscombe pool and his son found bloodied and with the weapon. Eventually the richer neighbouring landowner reveals the back story where one was a bandit and one a security guard in Australia. The bandit, John Turner, came back to Blighty to go straight but was haunted by the blackmailing McCarthy who was determined to marry his son to Turner’s daughter, Alice.

The Five Orange Pips

Client: John Openshaw, his uncle Elias returned from the States in the 1860s but has been nervous since receiving an envelope containing 5 orange pips, becoming drunk and paranoid until he is found dead in a pool. Then his brother receives a letter containing five orange pips and instructions to leave ‘the papers’ on the sundial… It is leaders of the Ku Klux Klan coming and going to Britain on sailing ships, posting threats and murdering the unfortunate recipients of the pips.

The Man with the Twisted Lip

Client: Mrs. St. Clair. She glimpses her husband at the window of an opium den, runs upstairs, there is no-one but a raddled addict. The addict is her husband, ashamed to be a City beggar.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle

No client. A goose contains a vast blue jewel. It was stolen by James Ryder in league with a serving girl to the Countess of Morcar, smuggled across London then, in a panic, stuffed down the crop of one of his sister’s geese at her goose farm in Brixton, but then the wrong goose is despatched in a job lot to a pub where it is bought by a man who, drunk, is beset by toughs and drops the goose, which is rescued by a hotel commissionaire who brings it to Holmes!

The Adventure of the Speckled Band

Client: Miss Helen Stoner. Impoverished Dr. Roylott forces Helen Stoner, an heiress, to move into a particular bedroom of his heavily mortgaged ancestral home, Stoke Moran where her sister had mysteriously died, her last words being, ‘The speckled band’. It is a poisonous snake brought back by Roylott from India.

The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb

Client: Victor Hatherley. Victor is hired by a German-speaking man to fix a powerful hydraulic device in the country. He quickly realises it is not mining but counterfeiting equipment and makes his escape with the help of a sweet anguished lady but not before the swinish German has hacked off his thumb with a cleaver! He makes his way to Watson who brings him to Holmes…

The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor

Client: Lord Robert St. Simon marries Miss Hatty Doran of San Francisco in a very high society wedding but she disappears from the wedding breakfast. Holmes establishes she has been contacted by her first, American, husband, long thought to be dead and has returned to him.

The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet

Client: Alexander Holder of Streatham, a banker, brings home a priceless coronet but awakes in the night to find his son wrestling with it, half of it snapped off and stolen, his son refuses to say more and is charged. Holmes to the rescue!

The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

Client: Violet Hunter is mysteriously offered a job at very high pay to be a governess, to have her hair cut, wear a blue dress and sit in a window just so every day. She realises there is a locked wing of the house and suspects someone is incarcerated there, and asks Holmes’s advice…

The Sherlock Universe

From the get-go Conan Doyle deploys the simple strategy of having Dr Watson refer to innumerable other cases which Holmes has investigated, but most of them never written up in his case notes or stories. For example, Watson mentions in passing that in 1887 along Holmes was involved in the Adventure of the Paradol Chamber, the Amateur Mendicant Society, the loss of the Sophy Anderson, the adventures of the Grice Patersons, the Camberwell Poisoning, the Tankerville Club Scandal and so on. In The Speckled Band he says that Holmes was involved in now fewer than 70 cases between 1882 and the time of writing (1891).

This multiplicity, this cornucopia of events and cases which Watson conjures up in throwaway references, creates a universe around the adventures which he actually writes up, which 1) helps to give them plausibility and 2) continually reinforces the sense of Holmes’s fame and superhuman abilities.

It is also attractive to a certain type of mentality, a certain type of fan, who loves immersing themselves in the minutiae of the fictional universe, a mentality which in our day extends to a vast range of adaptation and merchandising – the Robert Downey Jnr movies, the Benedict Cumberbatch TV series, the new books and stories, the books about the historical background and wider context, quiz books, the board games and mugs and t-shirts and top trumps sets etc etc.

Literature and quotations

Early on in A Study in Scarlet Watson humorously summarises Holmes’s fields of knowledge and says ‘Literature: Nil’. In fact this is extensively refuted in the texts themselves, where Holmes is very given to sententiously quoting from a wide range of literary sources:

  • In A Study in Scarlet Holmes quotes Boileau: ‘Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire’ (‘A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him’). The very last words of the novella are a quote from Horace: ‘Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo / Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplor in arca’ (‘The public hiss at me, but I cheer myself when in my own house I contemplate the coins in my strong-box’)
  • Almost the last words of The Sign of Four are a quote from Goethe: ‘Schade dass die Natur nur EINEN Mensch aus Dir schuf / Denn zum wuerdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff’ (‘Nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man and a rogue’)
  • In The Boscombe Valley Mystery, when bored, Holmes pulls out a pocket edition of Petrarch.
  • In A Case of Identity he quotes the Persian poet Hafiz.
  • In The Red-Headed League he quotes Flaubert writing to George Sand, ‘L’homme c’est rien, l’oeuvre c’est tout’ (‘The man is nothing, the work is everything.’)
  • In The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor he quotes Thoreau.

Apart from Watson being wrong about Holmes’s lack of knowledge of literature, I think these literary quotations demonstrate two key aspects of the texts:

  1. Their sententiousness: Holmes is an extremely didactic character. On one level, the stories consist of Holmes endlessly lecturing, teaching and scolding Watson.
  2. Their multitextuality: the stories are made up of numerous other texts: newspaper reports and adverts, notes, police reports, Holmes’s own files and records, and so on. The stories are pieced together, stitched together like puzzles made of fragments of other texts.

The fin-de-siècle and Oscar Wilde

There are numerous points of contact between the Holmes and the works of Oscar Wilde.

We’ve seen how The Sign of Four was commissioned by the same publisher who commissioned The Picture of Dorian Gray, an indication of 1) how close the London literary scene was and 2) the financial realities underlying the creation of short dramatic stories.

But Holmes also has a lot in common with Wilde’s aristocratic protagonists, Lord Henry Wotton or Lord Arthur Saville. It’s true he is not an exquisite fainéant, a dandy, an aesthete. But he does display plenty of aristocratic disdain for convention, effortless superiority over the laughably incompetent bourgeois police detectives, a lordly indifference to how he is perceived, sang-froid and indifference to personal danger.

Ennui He suffers from the same kind aristocratic ennui (boredom) which drives the Wildean hero into dangerous moral territory. At the end of The Adventure of the Red-Headed League, when Watson admires his deductive skills, Holmes replies:

‘It saved me from ennui,’ he answered, yawning. ‘Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.’

Paradox And Holmes is much given to paradoxes: time and again his detective work reveals the strange and telling lying behind the apparently innocent and mundane, or vice versa; and sometimes he summarises his attitude in witty paradoxes which sound just like Wilde:

‘It is, of course, a trifle, but nothing is so important as trifles.’

London the cesspool of Empire

One of the many appealing things about the stories is how Doyle capitalises on London’s position as heart of the greatest empire the world has ever known to bring in characters with backstories from all over the world:

  • The Red-Headed League claims to have been set up by an American millionaire.
  • In The Boscombe Valley Mystery the two fathers made their money in the colonies, in Victoria state, Australia.
  • The Five Orange Pips is about the long reach of the sinister Ku Klux Klan from far away in the American South.
  • In The Adventure of the Speckled Band the ill-fated Dr. Grimesby Roylott has brought his snakes back from India.
  • The Noble Bachelor marries the daughter of an American who made his pile in the California Gold Rush.

And so it goes on, creating a particularly quaint and dated vision of the world when half the map was painted red and the world was run by Anglo-Saxon chaps.

Women

If the chaps are, for the most part, noble Anglo-Saxons, then the women are even more dated, fixed in amber from that period – saintly, innocent, virginal helpmeets, dutiful daughters, and damsels in distress. The image of the concerned and helpless young lady, flushed and panting, caught in a hapless plight and requiring help from Holmes the Master-Male, recurs again and again. Any grown-up would be repelled by this stereotyping, but Holmes isn’t for grown-ups.

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by Simon on December 25, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 25, 2013

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