All posts tagged Olga

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.

Mapp and Lucia reviews

Queen Lucia (1920)
Miss Mapp (1922)
Lucia in London (1927)
The Male Impersonator (1929: short story)
Mapp and Lucia (1931)
Lucia’s Progress (1935)
Trouble for Lucia (1939)

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by Simon on November 7, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Novel

Tagged 1920, Amadeo, Ambermere Arms, ancient Egypt, Atkinson, Beethoven, Benares, Brixton, Camp, Cat, Christian Science, Colonel Boucher, Colonel Jacob Boucher, comedy, comic novel, Daisy Quantock, Dante, Dicky, Dodo, E.F. Benson, Edward Frederick Benson, Elizabeth, Emmeline Lucas, Ethel Smyth, Foljambe, gay, George Pillson, Georgie Pillson, Goosie, gossip, guru, Henry Luton, Hermione Pillson, Hermy, Hightums, homosexual, Italian, La Lucia, Lady Ambermere, Lucretia, Mapp and Lucia, medium, Miss Antrobus, Miss Lyall, Moonlight sonata, Mr Holroyd, Mr Rumbold, Mr Shuttleworth, Mrs Antrobus, Mrs Jane Weston, Mrs Lucas, Mrs Quantock, Napoleon, novel, Olga, Olga Bracely, opera, Peppino, Philip Lucas, Piggy, Princess Popoffski, Queen Lucia, queer, Riseholme, Riseholmites, Robert Quantock, Rush the grocer, Satire, séance, Shakespeare, Signor Cortese, stunt, table knocking, the Hurst, the Quantocks, the Shakespeare Garden, the Spanish Quartet, Tipsipoozie, Todd's News, Tommy Luton, Ursula Pillson, Ursy, village Parliament, Wellington School, yoga

Posted by Simon on November 7, 2025

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

Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (1901)

‘When you read a novel this kind of thing seems so trite and obvious…’
(The youngest of the three sister, Masha Prozorov, accurately commenting on this play)

‘Nothing ever works out as you want it.’
(Olga summing up the plays miserable defeatism)

Characters

The play represents snapshots, at roughly one year intervals, of the three sisters, their brother, their partners and friends, as their lives slowly unfurl in ways they never expected…

The Prozorov family

Introducing the three Prozorov sisters. Their parents are dead and they live in a house in a provincial town with their brother, Andrew. They were born and brought up in Moscow but moved to this (unnamed) provincial town (population about 100,000, p.182) eleven years ago when their father, Colonel Prozorov, ‘got his brigade’. The father who moved them there died one year ago.

Andrew is clever and aims to become an academic but also laments his laziness. Their father drove all the children hard (‘inflicted education on us’), forcing them to learn modern languages but, since his death, the pedal’s been taken off the gas. Apart from anything else, Andrew’s put on a lot of weight. In the first act Andrew declares his love for a local young lady, Natalia (Natasha). Natasha is 28, gauche and awkward: the sisters mock her for her clumsy dress sense (‘downright pathetic’, p.180).

Olga is the oldest Prozorov sister and assumes the role of matriarchal head of the family although she’s only 28. She’s a spinster and so, inevitably, wishes she had married. Olga is, also inevitably, a teacher at the high school, where she frequently fills in for the headmistress whenever he’s absent.

Maria (Masha) is the middle sister, 23 at the beginning of the play. She married her husband, the dull pedantic Latin teacher at the local high school, Kulygin, when she was 18 and just out of school. After five years of marriage she has, inevitably, grown tired of her husband. (Chekhov wrote this part for his wife, the Moscow Art Theatre actress Olga Knipper.)

Irina is the youngest sister and the play opens with celebrations of her ‘name day’ (she is turning 20) which is the pretext for half a dozen other characters to visit the household, mainly a bunch of soldiers from the local barracks, being:

The soldiers

Aleksandr Vershinin (42) – Lieutenant colonel who’s just been appointed head of the artillery battery. He knew the girls’ father in Moscow and reminds them that when they were little they called him the ‘Lovesick Major’. He is married to his second wife who’s mentally unstable and regularly talks about killing herself.

Baron Nikolaj Tuzenbach (29) – A lieutenant in the army and not handsome, Tuzenbach often tries to impress the youngest sister, Irina, whom he has loved for five years.

Captain Vasily Solyony – irritating man who continually makes bad jokes, keeps quoting refrains from songs, teases the other soldiers, sprinkles scent on his chest and hands.

Dr Ivan Chebutykin – 59-year-old army doctor, Chebutykin starts off as a fun, eccentric old man who enjoys his position as family friend. He is all courtesy and hand kissing, boasts of his own idleness, always has a newspaper stuffed in his pocket.

Minor characters

Ferapont – Doorkeeper at the local council offices, Ferapont is comedy deaf (‘eh?….what?…what d’ye say?’). Also given to blurting out random facts, usually about Moscow.

Anfisa – An elderly family retainer and former nurse, Anfisa is 81 years old and has worked forever for the Prozorov family. Natasha begins to despise her for her feebleness and threatens to throw her out but Olga rescues her, taking her to live at Olga’s teacher’s flat.

Unseen characters

The play has several important characters who are talked about frequently but never seen onstage. These include Protopopov, head of the local council and Natasha’s lover; Vershinin’s suicidal wife and two daughters; Kulygin’s beloved superior the headmaster of the high school, and Natasha’s children (Bobik and Sofia).

Act 1

It’s 5 May, one year since their father died and, coincidentally, Irina’s name-day. The three sisters are sitting together and quickly give their backstories: Olga is marking her pupils workbooks and complains about being exhausted by long hours teaching at the school, while Irina has woken up in a wonderful mood on this lovely sunny day!

Family friends – the soldiers Lieutenant Tuzenbach and Captain Solyony, along with old Dr Chebutykin – walk in very casually. Irina, in her naive gushing way, praises the joy of honest work; Tuzenbach quickly establishes his hobby horse, which is that a great avalanche is coming which will sweep away all their rottenness and boredom (and, indeed, there was to be a revolution 4 years after the play was produced).

Dr Chebutykin boasts about how idle he is, never read a book since he left university, only ever reads the newspapers and pulls one out of his pocket.

Masha announces she’s going home to her boring husband, says she is so depressed, kisses Irina through her tears of unhappiness. This triggers Olga who starts crying.

Dr Chebutykin re-enters with a soldier carrying a silver samovar which he presents to Irina as a birthday present. This is, apparently, a crass gift so Irina, Olga and the soldiers all mock it. Chebutykin responds with self pity: ‘I’m an old man, a lonely, insignificant old man.’

Enter Vershinin, the new battery commander. When he mentions he’s from Moscow, the homesick sisters excitedly crown round, as he remembers, all those years ago, coming to visit their father, and remembers the three little sisters, and they enthusiastically revive their memories, turns out they even lived on the same road, Old Basmanny Road, and Olga and Masha start crying (as usual).

Someone mentions their dead mother and Masha laments that she’s already starting to forget what she looked like which prompts Vershinin to a bit of cheap philosophising, pointing out that everything they think important will pass away and be forgotten. Tuzenbach counters that maybe later generations will look back and find their lives admirable, after all there are no longer torture and executions etc (they will be revived by the Bolsheviks in just 16 or so years’ time).

Enter Andrew who the sisters praise for his ability on the violin, and at making picture frames, but then tease for being in love. Every time he opens his mouth Vershinin talks philosophically about the future:

VERSHININ: In two or three hundred years life upon this earth will be beautiful beyond our dreams…’ (p.182)

Tuzenbakh picks up on this and says they all need to work for this better future. (In his history of Russia Orlando Figes comments on a recurring feature of Russian culture being its belief in utopias here on earth, whether the peasants dreaming of owning their own land or intellectuals dreaming of a free society. That’s why even pre-revolutionary literature sounds the same as communist exhortations to build a better future, because it’s a thread that runs through Russian culture no matter what the political system. This thread occurs in several Chekhov plays.)

Enter Kulygin, the senior assistant master at the local school who Masha married when she was young and impressionable. he establishes his crushingly boring character by presenting Irina with a history of the school over the last 50 years which he has written. It includes a list of every pupil who’s passed through it in the previous 50 years! Irina points out that he already gave her this as a present, at Easter. Unfazed, Kulygin turns to offer it to Vershinin.

Kulygin delivers a pedantic schoolteacher lecture about how summer is coming, they’ll soon have to take up the carpets and take down the curtains. He puts his arm round Masha and tells everyone his wife loves him, but Masha irritatedly frees herself and moves away. When he reminds her they’re due to attend a little party at the headmaster’s later in the day Masha irritatedly says she’s not going.

Everyone goes through to the back room for lunch, leaving Irina and Tuzenbakh alone so that he instantly declares his love for Irina. She is so young and fresh, he says he feels a tremendous zeal for life, to work and struggle and this is mixed up with his love for her.

But Irina bursts into tears. A little incomprehensibly she says that life is like weeds strangling the three sisters. What’s wrong is they ‘don’t know the meaning of work’. An odd thing to say seeing as how Olga is exhausted by her work.

Enter Natasha wearing a bright green sash, to the horror of all the other female characters.

The big birthday lunch starts with the characters swapping chit-chat. Notable that all this irritates Andrew whose main wish is to be left alone.

Enter the minor characters second lieutenants Vladimir Rodé, who is given the habit of rolling his r’s, and Alexei Fedotik, who is given the hobby of photography i.e. he’s always snapping whatever situation he finds himself in.

Someone notices there are 13 at the table, they joke that this means someone at the table is in love. When Dr Chebutykin jokingly mentions Natasha’s name she gets up and runs out the room, followed by Andrew. He tells her how much he loves her and how happy she makes with the characteristically bluntness, with the straightforward statement which is so typical of Chekhov:

ANDREW: I feel so wonderful, my heart is so full of love and joy. (p.189)

He kisses her and tells her he wants to marry her.

Act 2

It’s a year later. Andrew and Natasha have gotten married and had a baby, Bobik, which Natasha endlessly fusses over. Since the scene is the same as Act 1, clearly Andrew and Natasha are living in the Prozorov family home. As the act opens it’s 8 o’clock at night. We find out in quick succession that Irina has now got a job, working at the post office, that Natasha is harsh on the servants, that it’s the carnival and some revellers have been invited to the house which Natasha inevitably disapproves off since it might upset precious Bobik.

Natasha goes on to say that Bobok ought to have Irina’s room and Irina move in to share with Olga. In other words, Natasha is trying to take over running the Prozorov household and Andrew is too weak/scared of upsetting her, to intervene. Natasha leaves, the old servant Ferapont enters. He’s brought some papers from the council which triggers Andrew to give us his backstory, in that characteristically Chekhov way: this is that all his brave fantasies about becoming a university professor in Moscow, ‘a distinguished scholar, the pride of Russia!’ have been crushed and he’s ended up becoming secretary to the county council and his highest ambition is to be allowed onto the council itself.

He ponders the way that, if he were in Moscow he could drop into a restaurant for dinner and not know anybody there but somehow still feel part of the swing of things, whereas here in this provincial town, if he goes to a restaurant he knows everyone and everyone knows him but he still feels out of it.

He can tell old Ferapont all this because Ferapont is deaf and doesn’t actually hear him, instead telling some inconsequential stories told by a recent contractor from Moscow to the council.

Andrew stretches and exits to be replaced by Masha and Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin. They are a bit flushed from a night out. She repeats the story that she married her husband when young and still scared of him. They both lament how boring this provincial town is, how everyone here is fed up with their wife, with their house, with their estate and with their horses. Moan moan moan.

Then Vershinin moans about his unstable wife, they had an argument this morning, and ends up telling Masha he has no-one but her, ‘You’re a wonderful marvellous woman, I love you love you love you’.

While Vershinin is prattling on Irina and Baron Tuzenbakh enter at another door. He is telling Irina how much he loves her, how he loves to walk her home from work every evening, how he’ll do it for the next ten or twenty years if she’ll let him. But Irina ignores him because she is tired. We know this because, with Chekhovian lack of subtlety she says it six times.

The two couples spot each other and start a general conversation. Irina complains that working at the post office is not at all the intellectual adventure she romantically envisioned but just tiring drudgery (welcome to the world, baby). Irina and Masha share the news that Andrew has started going to some gambling club with the doctor and is losing heavily.

The doctor enters, combs his beard, sits and takes out a newspaper and the other characters laugh at this stereotypical behaviour.

At a loose end Vershinin and Tuzenbakh start off on their familiar hobby horse, the world of the future which will bring in a new and happy life. As per my citing of Orlando Figes’ point about the ubiquity of utopian thinking in Russian culture:

VERSHININ: Two or three hundred years, or a thousand years if you like – it doesn’t really matter how long – will bring in a new and happy life. We’ll have no part in it of course, but it is what we’re now living for, working for, yes suffering for. We’re creating it and that’s what gives our life its meaning and its happiness too… (p.197)

The good life is always round the corner. Of course this is the deep Russian mentality which the communists exploited throughout the Soviet era. Just one more five-year plan, comrade! All these sacrifices we’re making are for the future, it is people of the future who will benefit from our misery, our sacrifices, our starving and gulags and imprisonment. So:

VERSHININ: Our business is to work and go on working and our distance descendants will have the happiness that’s going…I won’t have it but my children’s children may. (p.197)

Anyway, Tuzenbakh completely disagrees. Forget all this ‘happiness in the far future’ stuff. our job is to be happy today! What if he’s happy right now! Masha enters with a third point of view which is life is meaningless without a point or purpose.

MASHA: What’s the point of it all?…Man must have a faith or be trying to find one otherwise his life just doesn’t make any sense…Either you know what you’re living for or else the whole thing’s a waste of time and means less than nothing. (p.198)

This is, maybe, the existentialist frame of mind which dominated so much continental thought and literature in the twentieth century but is obviously wrong. It is nostalgic for ‘faith’, it believes there’s a God-shaped hole in our hearts etc etc. But if there is no God and never was one and all faiths are psychological fantasies, then better to live in truth, face and overcome and be happy with who we are and the world we live in and the conditions on which we live in it (frailty, contingency, illness, accident) and so make the best of every day. Freud’s view in his little essay on transitoriness.

After reaching no conclusion, as discussions like this never can because there is no conclusion to an unnecessary question, to a question framed using invalid concepts (God, faith, meaning) the conversation collapses into general banter with the doctor inconsequentially pointing out facts in his newspaper, the junior officer Fedotik has brought Irina a box of crayons. He shows her a different type of patience (with cards). Servants bring in a samovar to prepare tea… It’s more like a youth club than a family home, the way in each scene this main room fills up with ten or more characters.

The room disintegrates into people saying things to themselves, continuing their hobby horse lines of thought, dialogue criss-crossing over others… Vershinin has another bit of gloomy philosophising:

VERSHININ: We have no happiness. There’s no such thing. It’s only something we long for. (p.200)

But the psychological basis of this view is revealed seconds later when he is handed a note which has been sent from his daughter to say his wife has taken poison again so he has to go in a rush, just time to tell Masha what a splendid marvellous woman she is…Leaving Masha in a filthy mood because she is in love with a man who is tied to a maniac, which explains why she (Masha) now wanders round the room losing her temper with everyone, telling off the servant Anfisa and scrambling the cards Irina was playing patience with.

Tuzenbakh carries a decanter of brandy over to Solyony and says they must make it up but Solyony says there’s no ‘it’ to make up before admitting that he’s alright when with one other person but in larger company feels tense and comes out with boorish and rude comments.

Tuzenbakh announces to several people that he’s resigning his commission because he wants to work, to do good honest work, he bets peasants sleep like logs after a good day’s labour. What an idiot. The Tolstoy view that authenticity is down among the mindless labouring peasants.

Solyony and the doctor get into a pointless argument about escalopes and shallots.

Tuzenbakh, Andrew and Solyony get into a pointless argument about how many universities Moscow has.

Tuzenbakh sits at the piano and starts to play a waltz, Masha dances by herself singing made-up words.

God these people really need to get lives.

As if to confirm that view Natasha enters and tells them they’ve all got to go because her baby Bobik is ill. Also it is announced that the promised carnival revellers will not now be coming to the house – for the sake of the baby, of course. All the other characters say goodbye and make various exits, all grumbling about Natasha, some saying it’s her that’s ill, mentally ill.

Leaving just Andrew and Dr Chebutykin who have obviously made a plan to go to a gambling club again tonight. Chebutykin admits that he was always in love with Andrew’s mother. Andrew takes this with surprising indifference because what he really wants to say is that marriage is rubbish (it’s clear that after just one year he’s had enough of small-minded but bossy Natasha). Yes but loneliness is a terrible thing, Chebutykin replies.

They exit whereupon there’s knocking at the hall door. It’s the carnival revellers who were promised a reception here. Irina tells the maid Anfisa to tell them there’s nobody home. At that moment Solyony enters, is surprised the carnival revellers are being turned away but, finding Irina by herself, takes the opportunity to tell her how much he loves her, ‘My happiness! My joy!’ (p.205) Unsurprisingly Irina very coldly tells him to shut up and go away, at which Solyony says he shall have no rival.

SOLYONY: By God I mean it, if there’s anybody else I’ll kill him! (p.205)

Enter Natasha with candle checking all the doors are shut. She imagines her husband is in his room reading so doesn’t look in, then encounters Irina and Solyony.

Natasha takes this opportunity to suggest to irina that she vacates her room and moves in with Olga to make way for precious Bobik. This is such an outrageous suggestion that Irina doesn’t at first understand her and then the doorbell goes. The maid comes to tell Natasha that it’s the leader of the council, Protopopov. Natasha switches from trying to ease Irina out of her room to giggling girlishly that Protopopov has come to take her for a spin in his sleigh and skips out. It’s pretty obvious that Natasha is infatuated with / having an affair with Protopopov.

Enter the oldest sister, tired Olga, and the boring schoolmaster Kulygin, obviously arriving from work, and they quickly tell us it’s because they’ve been attending a school meeting. When they quiz Irina, Irina says she’s too tired to talk. Olga announces that she feels ill with fatigue. Vershinin comes in, says his wife has stabilised after her latest suicide attempt and invites Kulygin to go somewhere with him but Kulygin completes the trio of characters saying he’s too tired.

Well, since there’s no party (the carnival people being turned away) both Vershinin and Kulygin say they’ll be off then, and take their leave of the two sisters (Olga and Irina).

Olga heads to bed leaving Irina alone onstage just long enough for Natashe to re-emerge with her outdoor clothes on and obviously off for a spin, a snog and maybe something more with Protopopov.

When she’s gone there’s only Irina onstage, with the weight of all these issues on her shoulders:

the wife of her brother, Andrew, is being unfaithful to him
in despair Andrew has taken to staying out late and gambling away the family patrimony
her older sister (Olga) is a sad old spinster
her second sister (Masha) is bored of her dull husband and wants to have an affair with Vershinin but Vershinin is tied to his suicidal wife and two daughters
she, Irina, is loved by dashing (if not handsome) Tuzenbakh but is the subject of unwanted attentions from the vile Solyony

It’s no wonder, then, that she ends the act with the play’s well-known refrain:

IRINA: [alone on stage, with intense longing]: Moscow, Moscow, Moscow!

Act 3

About a year later in Olga and Irina’s room – a clear sign that Natasha is taking over the household, as she asked them to share a room so that Bobik could have a separate room.

But we’re thrown straight into a high stress situation. it’s 3 in the morning, there’s a fire raging in the town, red from the fire can bee seen through the windows along with the sound of fire engines in the road outside.

People are running in and out in panic. Old Anfisa wants clothes for people who’ve taken refuge with them which turns out to be a lot of people: ‘the Kolotilin girls’ as well as the entire Vershinin household, Baton Tuzenbakh, the doctor, Fedotik. Obviously Olga and the nanny, Anfisa, both complain of being tired out.

Natasha enters and is only concerned that a) her beloved children are sleeping safely and b) tell-tale sign of self-absorbed narcissistic women everywhere, checks herself in the mirror and worries that she’s put on a bit of weight. In the middle of a huge fire and crisis when people are dying.

With similar selfishness she spots the 80-year-old servant Anfida sitting down and says How dare she sit in here presence? and orders her out. This, Natasha’s cruelty and the harsh words, make Olga cry which makes Natasha soften to her and kiss her. But they are mutually incomprehensible. Natasha thinks Anfisa is too old to work and so should be sent back to her village; Olga says she has served the family loyally for 30 years and so should be allowed to stay at which Natasha loses her temper and tells Olga that she runs the household.

Kulygin comes in with more news of the fire and to announce that he is, of course, tired out. These characters all need to take more exercise and multivitamin pills!

Enter the doctor who’s got very drunk. He talks to himself morosely, lamenting that he’s forgotten everything he ever knew about medicine and the other day, Wednesday, killed a woman. He hates himself, says he’s barely even human.

Just as in the previous acts the other characters drift in, Irina, Tuzenbakh, Vershinin. Tuezanbakh is in civilian dress and praises the soldiers for saving the day and the town. He says people are suggesting a concert to raise money for people who’ve lost their homes and says Masha must play at it.

Out of nowhere the doctor drops a valuable clock he’d been looking at and it smashes to pieces. Irina says it belonged to their mother but drunk Chebutykin rambles on saying what if he didn’t drop it what if they just think he did, what if he doesn’t exist, what if none of them exist. then changing tack he blurts out that Natasha is having an affair with Protopopov and they all pretend not to notice, before exiting.

There’s a pregnant pause which Vershinin breaks by leaping in to describe his actions earlier that night namely grabbing his children out of their house and the flames came closer. In his fanciful way, he wonders how much more his children will have to witness in their lives. (Well, if they’re 5 in 1901 they’ll witness Russia being trounced in the war with Japan, the 1905 revolution, the outbreak of war in 1915, the two revolutions in 1917, the Bolshevik coup and then the civil war lasting till 1922 or 3, millions dead from war, civil war and famine, then Bolshevik dictatorship leading to the collectivisation famines in the early 30s, the rise of the gulags and Stalin’s terror state, then the German invasion of 1941. Quite a lot, then.)

Continuing his theme he says that ‘in two or three hundred years’ people will lead wonderful lives…

Fedotik comes in to tell them his house has burned to the ground and he’s lost all his possessions, guitar, camera, everything.

Solyony enters but Irina tells him he can’t come in. He sprinkles himself with scent and Verishinin takes him into the dining room.

Tuzenbakh tells everyone how tired he feels before going on to kiss Irina’s hand and wishing she would come away with him. He reminds he how happy and optimistic she was on her name day i.e. the first act, but how somehow all the energy and optimism has been crushed. Rashly, he tells her that he would give his life for her.

Masha, exhausted of course, tells him to shut up and go away. This triggers her husband, Kulygin to tell her how much he loves her and has lovey every day of their seven years of marriage, but as schematically as in a masque or allegory she replies:

KULYGIN: I’m happy, happy, oh so happy.
MASHA: I’m bored, bored, oh so bored. (p.216)

Kulygin exists, leaving the Three Sisters alone.

Masha tells her sisters that Andrew has mortgaged the house and given the cash to his horrible wife but all four of them own the house so it’s unfair. Irina laments that Andrew’s gone to seed, lost all his ambition, once he wanted to be a professor but now he’s delighted just to get a place on the council. And his wife is having an affair with the head of the council, Protopopov, the whole town is laughing at him behind his back but he’s the only one who doesn’t know. It’s all too much for her and Irina bursts into tears.

IRINA: What’s become of everything, where’s it all gone? Where is it?… Life is slipping away, it will never, never come back again and we shall never get to Moscow… (p.217)

Once she naively looked forward to ‘work’ but after working at the post office she now works for the town council and hates it. She’s 23 and she’s shrivelled up, she’s thin and old. She’s sinking into a bottomless pit of despair. Why hasn’t she killed herself?

Olga, the spinster, advises Irina to marry, marry Baron Tuzebakh, he’s not very good looking but he’s a good man. Admittedly they were all upset when he resigned his commission from the army and turned up wearing civilian clothes – they just brought out how ugly he is.

Irina replies that she’s been waiting till they move back to Moscow, convinced she’ll meet her true love there. But now she’s coming to realise that was all a fantasy.

Masha takes the opportunity to confess that she’s fallen head over heels in love with Vershinin but Olga refuses to listen. Masha laments that life is not like a novel. In real life you discover that nobody knows anything and you have to find your own way through.

Enter Andrew in a bad mood and telling off Ferapont who’s only brought a message from the firemen asking if they can lay a hose through their garden to the river. Andrew realises it’s just the Three Sisters and suggests they have it out, this is an opportunity for them to tell him what their complaint is against him.

Masha goes out and Olga and Irina say they’re both too tired but Andrew insists on continuing. He delivers a massive monologue clearly fighting against his own bad conscience. Firstly, he insists his wife Natasha is a fine honourable woman and he loves her and he doesn’t know what they’ve got against her and demands they give her the respect she’s owed. Secondly, he thinks they somehow disapprove of the way he never became the university professor he wanted to be but he’s on the town council now and very proud of being a councillor and it’s an important job. Thirdly, he admits he’s mortgaged the house and used the money released to pay off his gambling debts which had reached 35,000 roubles but…but… the three sisters had annuities awarded them while he had no income, so…so…

Obviously he’s looking for their approval and forgiveness but neither Olga nor Irina say anything so he walks out.

The last piece of dialogue is Irina telling Olga that ‘their’ regiment is due to leave town. Oh what will they do without their soldiers, the only friends they have? As to Tuzenbakh, yes, alright, she’ll marry him.

IRINA: He’s a very good man and I will marry him, I will, I will, only do let’s go to Moscow. We must go, please! There’s nowhere in the world like Moscow. Let’s go, Olga, do let’s go!

Act 4

Act 4 is set in the garden of the Prozorovs’ house with the verandah just on the right. The regiment is leaving and our guys are saying their farewells. Tuzenbakh, Irina, Kugylin are saying farewell to Rodé and Fedotik who keeps telling everyone to stand still so he can photograph them. And then with a few more farewells, they part and walk away.

Dr Chebutykin announces he’ll be going with them but only for a year or so at which point he’ll retire and come back here to live off his pension.

Now the soldiers have gone Irina asks what was this fracas in town the night before involving Tuzenbakh. Tuzenback refuses to discuss it and walks off across the lawn and into the house so Kulygin tells Irina that objectionable Solyony encountered Tukenbakh on the boulevard, started picking on him until the Baron insulted him.

Irina shudders at the thought. She announces that she’s marrying Tuzenbakh tomorrow and then they’re moving to ‘the brick works’ [that Tuzenback is going to manage?] while she starts work as a teacher at the school and, she hopes, a New Life will begin. Although we, the audience, know that of course it won’t…

Irina has finally resigned herself to never going to Moscow so she’s going to stay here and make the best of it. But she does find it hard in the big house now that Olga’s been made headmistress of the high school and lives on the premises. But when she finally made up her mind to say Yes to Tuzenbakh she felt a revival of that old urge to work, work, work and now she’s almost looking forward to the future.

Masha appears to share with Dr Chebutykin how she feels that all their hopes have come to nothing. She was in love with Verishin but he’s leaving today and she’ll be back to being lumbered with boring pedantic Kulygin.

Andrew has been seen pushing a pram (with another baby in it?) presumably a symbol of his fall from the high ambition of becoming a world-renowned professor. Now he comes over and in turn asks about the incident on the boulevard the night before. Dr Chebutykin gives us a staggeringly significant new detail which he failed to mention earlier, when Irina was around, which is that when Tuzenbakh insulted Solyony, the latter challenged him to a duel and … that it’s scheduled to happen just about now, in the woods across the river (which we can see painted on the backdrop of the scenery). A duel!

Masha and Andrew all take it very lightly that the man their sister is engaged to is about to fight a duel. Instead of rushing to stop it or call the cops Andrew just feebly says it’s all very immoral. In a further development we learn that the duellists have requested Dr Chebutykin to attend on them!

Masha is disgusted with all this talk so walks away leaving Andrew to confide to Dr Chebutykin that he loves his wife, he loves her dearly, but sometimes he really doesn’t like her, she’s so bossy and vulgar. the doctor gives him the advice to put on his hat, pick up his stick set off walking and walk and walk and walk and never come back.

Enter Solyony and two of his seconds backstage. Solyony spots the doctor, walks over and tells him it’s time to go to the duel and they leave. Enter Irina and Tuzebakh. He tells her he just has to pop into town to, er, see some friends off. She knows he’s lying but wonders why (so she’s more or less the only character who doesn’t know about the duel). He tells her how much he loves her, that he’s loved her for five years, that she gets more beautiful every day…just a shame she doesn’t love him.

Irina cries and says yes, she doesn’t love him, she’s never loved anyone. Her heart feels like a grand piano that’s locked and nobody can find the key. I supposed it’s a scene of great poignancy because the audience strongly suspects Tuzenbakh is going to his death while his half-hearted fiancée knows nothing. He wants to say something mighty and significant, to sum up his love of life and her, but all he can think of is to ask her to ask one of the servants to put some coffee on for when he gets back.

Now, something has to fill the time it’s going to take Tuzenbakh to go and get in a boat, be ferried across the river to the forests beyond, find his way to the duelling place etc and so Chekhov gives Andrew, alone onstage, a massive speech asking where did it all go wrong leading into a long description of how awful this town is, how everyone is like everyone else, bored out of their minds, and are bringing up children who will be bored to death in turn. (Of course we latecomers know that Russians born around 1900 were fated to have anything but a boring life.)

The retainer Ferapont enters with some papers to sign so there’s some more business with reading anc complaining about these, before Andrew tries to cheer himself up by adopting the Verishin strategy of imagining what life will be like for his heirs two or three hundred years in the future. Hopefully their lives will be completely different.

He works himself up into such a state that Natasha leans out the window and yells at him to shut up. Which in turn wakes up baby Bobik who starts to cry and she turns her yelling indoors to tell him off etc. Stage business to cover Tuzenbakh’s journey to the duelling place.

Even more business follows when a couple of travelling musicians wander onstage and start performing. Olga tells the ancient nanny Alfisa to give them some money, which she does and they move on. This allows Anfisa to explain that although Natasha’s kicked her out of the house Olga has found a nice little crib for her at the school, so her story’s ending happily.

Enter Verishin who’s also leaving with the regiment and wants to say a private goodbye to Masha which is going to be difficult into the always hyper-busy Prozorov household. Olga asks him if they’ll ever meet again and he simply replies, No.

Masha enters and they have a short heart-breaking parting with a long kiss then lots of tears, then she won’t let him go but he extricates himself and hands her over to Olga. Kulygin enters, he saw some of this but tells Masha he forgives her and now they can go back to the old way of living which is, somehow, absolutely crushing.

Masha sings to herself the little song about a green boat which she has sung at moments of crisis throughout the play and that’s when a shot is heard in the distance.

The triviality continues. Masha’s anguish is made unbearable by the complete reasonableness and forgiveness of her husband who pulls out a fake moustache and beard he confiscated off a boy in class. Now he puts it on to make them laugh and Masha laughs then bursts into hopeless sobbing again. All her hopes for life have been utterly crushed.

Natasha arrives on the scene and it is clear how she has totally defeated the Prozorov family. She bosses everyone around, tells the maid to push the pram, criticises Kulygin for wearing the silly beard, says the minute Irina leaves the house she’s going to move Andrew into her room so he can scrape away on his violin and first thing she’s going to do is have the beautiful avenue of trees chopped down (anticipating the massacre of trees in The Cherry Orchard). She criticises Irina for dressing so plainly which, of course, reverses the sisters’ chiding of Natasha for dressing so gaudily at the start of the play.

They hear a military band in the distance as Dr Chebutykin enters in a hurry. He goes up and whispers in Olga’s ear. She says, No no it can’t be true. Irina begs to know and Chebutykin quite brutally tells her Tuzenbakh’s just been killed in a duel before wandering off, sitting down, taking out a paper and delivering his trademark line, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter anyway’ and then humming his stupid song’, Tarara boom di-ay.’

Now you might have expected a world-shattering howl of anguish and a long speech about the Injustices of Life but in fact Irina starts to weep quietly and just says, ‘I knew it’. Instead all three sisters are given a kind of collective last word as they speak in sequence, almost inn unison, almost with a musical effect.

And what they say is oddly, eerily cool and unmoved, a kind of vision of philosophical passivity, of how they must commit themselves to hard work and how this will bring about a better future. Did Chekhov in the slightest believe this or is it just a trope to thread throughout the play and, here, to end it with i.e an entirely aesthetic strategy? Or is is designed to convey the puzzlement, the bewilderment at life’s imponderability of the three sisters?

MASHA: Oh, listen to the band! They’re all leaving us and one has gone right away and will never never come back , and we shall be left alone to begin our lives again. We must go on living, we must.
IRINA: [puts her head on Olga’s breast]: What is all this for? Why all this suffering? The answer will be known one day and then there will be no more mysteries left, but till then life must go on, we must work and work and think of nothing else. I’ll go off alone tomorrow to teach at a school and spend my whole life serving those who may need me. It’s autumn now and it will soon be winter, with everything buried in snow, and I shall work, work, work.
OLGA [embraces both her sisters]: Listen to the band. What a splendid, rousing tune, it puts new heart into you, doesn’t it? Oh, my God! In time we shall pass on forever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices and how many of us there were. But our sufferings will bring happiness to those who come after us, peace and joy will reign on earth, and there will be kind words and kind thoughts for us and our times. We still have our lives ahead of us, my dears, so let’s make the most of them.
[The music becomes fainter and fainter. KULYGIN, smiling cheerfully, emerges from the house with a hat and coat while ANDREW continues to push the pram with Bobik in it.]
CHEBUTYKIN: [singing softly]: Traraboomdeay, ley’s have a tune today. [Reads the newspaper.] None of it matters. Nothing matters.
OLGA: If we could only know, oh if we could only know!

Fates

Olga will continue as an unmarried head teachers.

Masha will continue to be unhappily married to Kulygin.

Irina has said she wants to persevere as a teacher.

Natasha is mistress of the family home, in charge of everything.

Andrei is stuck in his marriage with two children, unwilling and unable to do anything for his wife or himself.

The characters describe themselves

As I’ve pointed out it’s a trick or trait of Chekhov that, rather than have the audience deduce how they’re feeling from their dialogue or actions, he always has his characters declare it in the most straightahead, bluntest kind of way. Strikes me as the opposite of subtle:

IRINA: I’m in such a good mood, I don’t know why. (p.172)

MASHA: I’m down in the dumps today, I feel so depressed… (p.175)

VERSHININ: I’m more pleased than I can say, I really am. (p.177)

Similarly, he has them just come out and describe their backstories or situations with equal lack of subtlety:

VERSHININ: I have a wife and two little girls, my wife is in poor health… (p.183)

KULYGIN: My name is Kulygin and I teach at the local high school, I’m a senior assistant master. (p.183)

KULYGIN: I’m happy today. I’m on top of the world. (p.184)

RODÉ: I teach gymnastics at the high school here. (p.188)

Leave me alone

MASHA: Don’t talk to me then…leave me alone. (p.200)

ANDREW: Leave me alone, for heaven’s sake, leave me alone. (p.229)

Characters in all Chekhov’s plays continually ask to be left alone but no-one does leave them alone. Nobody can escape. They seem to live in these households of eight or so people who are constantly prying and spying and commenting on each others’ behaviour. The effect is very claustrophobic. They seem to be walking demonstrations of Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known epigram that hell is other people.

Sssshhh, there’s somebody coming!

Chekhov’s houses are always very populous and, as someone or other is always declaring inappropriate love to someone else because they’re married or the other person’s married, I noticed the number of times when women (it’s always women) say things like:

MASHA: There’s somebody coming! You’d better talk about something else. (p.194)

And men have to reassure and cajole them:

ANDREW: Oh, they can’t see us, they really can’t. (p.189).

Hyperbole

Three (miserable) sisters:

IRINA: I feel as I’d gone out of my mind.

MASHA: I feel so depressed.

MASHA: Oh damn this life, it’s the absolute limit!

IRINA: Life has been choking us like weeds in a garden.

IRINA: Do you know I dream about Moscow every night? I feel as if I’d gone out of my mind.

OLGA: It really depressed me, actually makes me feel ill.

IRINA: Oh, it’s frightful, absolutely frightful. I’ve had as much as I can take, I just can’t stand it any more.

IRINA: I feel I’m losing touch with everything fine and genuine in life. It’s like sinking down, down into a bottomless pit. I’m desperate.

IRINA: I’m lonely and depressed with nothing to do and I hate my room…

MASHA: I feel I’m going to burst…

MASHA: I’ve made a mess of my life. I don’t want anything now.

Visions of the future

In ‘Uncle Vanya’ Dr Astrov is given a hobby horse subject completely separate from the action namely his concern for the ecology of forests. This gives him something to deliver speeches about for pages and which is, I think, designed to act as a relief from the characters’ obsessive self-centredness.

The same thing, structurally, happens in this play: Baron Tuzenbakh and Vershinin are both given the same talking point which is what life will be like for people in the future and what, looking back, they will think of the people of this time.

These subjects may or may not be relevant or interesting in their own right but, in dramatic terms, they’re part of giving all the characters identifiable, repeating tics or topics:

Solyonyi and his stupid jokes and splashing scent on himself
Dr Chebutykin and his pockets full of newspapers, but also his oft-repeated conviction that we aren’t really here and we don’t really exist
Rodé snapping away on his camera
Olga telling everyone how tired she is
Masha forever singing ‘A green boat by a curving shore’
Irina forever wishing they were off to Moscow

It sets the scene of the debate between Tuzenbakh and Vershinin where the two men propose their opposing points of view about the future, namely in the future everything will be great versus in the future everything will be exactly the same (p.197).

Thoughts

It’s complicated, isn’t it? Once the eight or so key characters are up and running they have all kinds of interactions. Onstage this may well work but, for me, there are two problems:

the characters’ personalities are too schematic, they are given 2 or 3 tropes, tics or topics each and then trot them out like robots
I suppose they’re put through their paces with admirable inventiveness (the town fire was unexpected) and yet, somehow, it all feels mechanical to me, like the parts of a Swiss watch, beautifully engineered, reliably ticking over, yet somehow pointless

Natasha’s victory

One of the many ways of looking at this complicated narrative is that Natasha wins. The bourgeois Prozorov sisters mocked her dress and manners at the start of the play but by the end Natasha is in complete, unquestioned control. She has outfaced and outwitted them all.

From this perspective the most notable thing about the Prozorov sisters, and four siblings, is how pathetic they are. To quote that great literary critic Donald Trump, they are losers. From this point of view all the rhetoric about work and finer futures and sacrifice and all the rest of it is the self-justifying excuses of people who lose.

Natasha doesn’t need any fancy ideas, she is notably uneducated, she goes with her instinct to dominate and control…and she cleans up, she wins, she triumphs. The triumph of the uneducated but unforgiving and determined working class over the feeble bourgeoisie was to be the subject of Chekhov’s final play – and, maybe, to be played out in the huge stage of Russian history less than a generation later…

Comparison with Waiting for Godot

The sense of stasis, of the characters being stuck in a situation they find hellish, kept reminding me of Waiting For Godot.

ESTRAGON:
Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR:
Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]

Compare with:

IRINA: I esteem, I highly value the Baron, he’s a splendid man; I’ll marry him, I’ll consent, only let’s go to Moscow! I implore you, let’s go! There’s nothing better than Moscow on earth! Let’s go, Olga, let’s go!

They do not move.

Credit

Quotations are from the 1980 World’s Classic paperback edition of Five Plays by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ronald Hingley.

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by Simon on September 23, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on September 23, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/23/three-sisters-anton-chekhov/

Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood (1935)

‘I must say, Bill, you’re a nice little chap, but you do have some queer friends.’
(journalist Helen Pratt to the narrator William Bradshaw, page 187)

Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood (b.1904) was a key member of the Auden Generation. In fact he first met its leader, W.H. Auden, when they went to the same prep school. Christopher went on to a jolly good public school (Repton – modern boarding fees £37,000 per annum) where he became lifelong friends with the novelist Edward Upward – and then onto Cambridge.

Throughout the 1930s Isherwood wrote novels and essays and collaborated with his friend from prep school, W.H. Auden, on three experimental plays – The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1937) and On the Frontier (1938) – as well as writing an extended prose account of their joint visit to China during the Sino-Japanese War, which was published along with Auden’s poems as Journey to a War (1939).

In January 1939, along with Auden, he sailed for America to make a new life. Auden stayed in New York but Isherwood moved onto California and to a long, successful career as a novelist, critic, screenwriter, devotee of Indian religion, and lived long enough (he died in 1986) to become a gay icon in Reagan’s America.

Right back at the start of his career, though, he wrote the books for which he’s most famous, the autobiographical accounts of his time in Weimar Berlin. (From 1918 until its overthrow by Hitler in 1933, Germany was a parliamentary democracy which came to be named after the town of Weimar where Germany’s new government was formed by a national assembly after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated in 1918. Thus anything from this era is referred to as ‘Weimar’ Germany, ‘Weimar’ Berlin etc).

Berlin had, by the late-1920s, become a byword for sexual, and especially homosexual, license, offering a freedom of lifestyle and sexuality which couldn’t scarcely be imagined in starchy, repressed, between-the-wars England, and which still hasn’t really arrived in Puritan England nearly a century later.

The first of the Berlin novels was Mr Norris Changes Trains, published in 1935. It is often combined with its 1939 sequel, Goodbye to Berlin into a single volume, The Berlin Stories, and together these formed the basis of the well-known 1972 movie, Cabaret. I remember arriving at them as a schoolboy having already read quite a lot of French literature with its explicit descriptions of sex and drugs, and being bitterly disappointed at their utter tameness and their prissy, public schoolboy tone. Now, returning to them years later, I appreciate them for what they are, hilarious social comedies.

Mr Norris Changes Trains

This is a bloody funny book. For the first 100 or so pages I smiled or laughed out loud regularly.

The narrator is William Bradshaw. He is an English tutor in Berlin. He appears to be 27 when the novel begins, for he is 28 a year later (p.129). It is autumn 1930. He is on a train back into Germany he meets ‘Arthur Norris, gent.’, a much older man, fat, fussy, nervous, who wears an outrageous wig, worries about his passport, his papers, is widely travelled, calls everyone ‘dear boy’.

William returns to his Berlin boarding house and his pupils but we hear next to nothing about them or his work. Instead the narrative focuses almost entirely on the larger-than-life figure of Arthur Norris. He is an eccentric, a posing exponent of out-of-date values and manners, he ‘risks’ the poor wine on the train, orders champagne with everything, delights in gossip and fine art.

Soon after his return to Berlin William goes round to Arthur’s flat (at 168 Courbierestrasse, a real Berlin street) where the eccentricity builds up. Arthur’s apartment has two doors right next to each other, one is the private entrance, one is marked ‘Import/Export’. A sinister young man with a big head opens the door, takes his coat, and visibly disapproves of his visit. Arthur flusters though, takes William by the hand and escorts him round the oddly arranged flat.

Over the course of successive meetings at cafes and restaurants, William learns that Mr Norris is a relic of the legendary Oscar Wilde circle from back in the 1890s. That’s when his beloved mother died and he came into a small fortune which, however, he managed to blow in just two years (p.45). Two years during which he met the divine Oscar and his circle, gossip is made about the scapegrace Frank Harris, and Mr Norris has a fund of stories which date from the late 1890s or the early 1900s, or the glory years just before the war when he had a large apartment overlooking the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, with decorations designed by himself and a unique collection of whips! (p.51)

Now he has very much fallen on hard times and tries to keep up the appearance of a cultured and flamboyant man of business, but in reality he is up to his neck in debt (£5,000!) and Schmidt – the sinister young man who opened the door – is his minder, receiving all the money deriving from Mr Norris’s dubious and mysterious ‘business ventures’, managing the numerous debtors in a blunt brutal manner which Mr Norris could never bring off, and in exchange taking 10% of the transactions.

He was one of those people who have not only a capacity, but a positive attitude for doing their employer’s dirty work. (p.46)

In fact, over scattered conversations in cafes, restaurants or his flat, Arthur slowly reveals he has had quite a few brushes with the law and then that he actually went to prison, Wormwood Scrubs, for 18 months. Something to do with embezzlement or misappropriated funds.

So the humour derives mostly from the outrageous pretensions, lies and evasions of Mr Norris, as well as his humorous turns of phrase. He is, in his way, a sort of Falstaff, pompously fond of all the good things in life while completely unable to afford them. He is a great comic character.

Arthur certainly gave things away with an air. He knew how to play the Grand Seigneur. (p.173)

But the humour is aided by Isherwood’s stone cold, precise and sometimes malicious eye for detail. The narrator reports everything with exceptional lucidity. Not only that but he disarms us with suddenly blunt turns of mind, which are often very funny, and which Arthur comments on:

‘Really William, you’re so unkind. You say such sharp things.’ (p.37)

For example:

As he spoke he touched his left temple delicately with his finger-tips, coughed, and suddenly smiled. His smile had great charm. It disclosed the ugliest teeth I had ever seen. They were like broken rocks. (page 7)

These moments are designed to show us that Isherwood has a kind of unblinking, unflinching clarity of observation. But their tactlessness, and their abrupt surprising appearance are also very funny.

‘This is Olga, our hostess,’ Arthur explained.
‘Hullo, baby!’ Olga handed me a glass. She pinched Arthur’s cheek: ‘Well, my little turtle-dove?’
The gesture was so perfunctory that it reminded me of a vet with a horse. (p.32)

Key to all these effects is the William/narrator persona. He laughs at everyone’s jokes, he gets on with (almost) everyone, he dances, he drinks but doesn’t get angry or maudlin. He knows what to wear, how to eat correctly at smart restaurants, he is tactful and polite. Quite a few paragraphs start with the simple sentences: ‘I smiled’, ‘I grinned’ or ‘I laughed’. He is flattering company. He is the perfect, well-mannered English house party guest and excellent company.

(I took the trouble of counting and the word ‘smile’ appears 80 times in the novel, ‘laugh’ 55, and ‘grin’ 14. The point being that all this smiling and laughing subconsciously nudges you towards reading the book in a good mood — rather as the hundreds of mentions of ‘death’ and ‘blood’ make the Penguin Book of Civil War Verse such a grim read.)

The cast

Arthur Norris – ‘I’m generally at my best in the witness box’ (p.42)
Schmidt – Arthur’s malicious assistant or minder (p.18)
Baron von Pregnitz aka Kuno – a scary drawling nightclub denizen, rimless monocle screwed intimidatingly into his pink face as if by some horrible operation (p.28)
Anni with the thigh boots who Arthur likes being whipped by (p.32)
Fraulein Schroeder – William’s ancient landlady, who enjoys dressing up and flirting with Arthur
Helen Pratt – Berlin correspondent to one of the weekly political magazines, tough as nails, no-nonsense, statistics and Freud, very earnest about Sex (p.38)
Fritz Wendel – German-American man about town, likes playing bridge (p.39)
Olga – enormous, wobbling hostess of decadent parties i.e. everyone gets blotto, men dance with men

Events, dear boy

Things happen. They have to in a novel. Early on Mr Norris takes William to a New Year’s Eve party to see in 1931 (p.30) at the house of a certain Olga, an enormous good-natured woman. Everyone is very drunk and Isherwood describes being drunk at a party very well. People appear, disappear, he finds himself with his arms round someone, dancing with two or three people at once. He is introduced to the slightly sinister Baron von Pregnitz, then to Anni a bored prostitute wearing leather boots up to her knees. Later on William staggers down the hall, blunders into a room and finds her standing with a whip in hand while fat Mr Norris is on his hands and knees polishing her boots and she is whipping him for being such a naughty boy. Neither of them minds him blundering in, in fact Anni says he can be next.

Anni lives with Otto, her pimp, an enormously strong, good-natured working class man, middleweight champion of his local boxing club (p.57). It is a recurring comic motif that he insists on shaking William’s hand whenever they meet, and crushes it so hard, it takes a while for William to recover feeling in it. Or slaps people so hard on the shoulder that they nearly fall over.

In a surprise development, Mr Norris takes William along to a Communist Party meeting, a hall full of Berlin’s working class, to which he makes a surprisingly impactful plea of solidarity with the poor peasants and workers of China!). William goes along and meets Anni and Otto there (chapter five). It is very funny when all four of them return to Arthur’s flat, open a bottle of wine,m and jovially refer to each other as Comrade Arthur, Comrade Otto and so on.

It is, of course, a scam. Desperate to pay off his debts, Mr Norris has fibbed to the head of the Berlin Communists, a short extremely self-contained man named Bayer, that he has ‘important contacts’ in Paris etc. He never explains it properly to William but the general idea is that he becomes some kind of go-between or messenger.

Mr Norris plans to host a party on his 53rd birthday but William gets there to find everyone gone – Arthur pawned his carpet to pay for it but when Schmidt saw what he’d done and he demanded all the money from the pawnbroker and only left Arthur a few marks.

Arthur tells William that Otto and Anni broke up after they argued about the Party and Otto smacked Anni so hard he knocked her back over the bed and against the wall so hard she dislodged the picture of Stalin which fell to the floor and its glass shattered. Anni runs off and next thing Otto knows she’s shacked up with a guy he knows who quit the Communist Party to join the Nazis. Otto goes right round to the bar or Lokal where this guy, Werner Baldow, and is just being thrown out for the second time when some police passing by and, when he starts attacking them too, arrest him so that he ends up sending a couple of weeks in gaol. (pp.72-73)

As it happens William and Arthur glimpse Otto from a window when Arthur is summonsed to Berlin police headquarters for a, er, meeting. Arthur is so nervous he asks William to accompany him, which our man does. There’s a typically light-hearted / facetious exchange as they emerge from the restaurant where they have a boozy lunch before going into police HQ:

‘Be brave, Comrade Norris, think of Lenin.’
‘I’m afraid, ha ha, I find more inspiration in the Marquis de Sade.’ (page 64)

It turns out to be a friendly enough chat with the authorities but it is just to let Arthur know that they know that he is linked with the Communists and they’re keeping an eye on him.

Half-way hiatus

There is a hiatus half-way through the book, a caesura. Arthur suddenly disappears. William goes round to discover the flat in Courbierestrasse empty and abandoned. A few weeks later William receives a letter from Prague in which he apologises for his sudden disappearance (p.83).

The political situation in Germany deteriorates with more violence in the streets and hysteria in the newspapers (pp.90-92). Nearly six months later William himself goes back to England for an extended break, which includes ‘four months in the country’. He promises to write but doesn’t.

When he finally returns to Berlin in October 1932, and tramps up the familiar stairs of Fraulein Schroeder’s boarding house, he is delighted to discover Arthur has returned! Not only that but he seems to be surprisingly flush and so, being the bon-viveur that he is, insists on immediately taking William to a wildly expensive restaurant. William gives us an amusing description of Arthur’s morning toilette which goes on for some time and involves plucking and make-up.

Mr Norris takes William to dinner at a restaurant where they find Baron von Pregnitz aka Kuno. They’ve had some kind of a fight and Mr Norris rather desperately tries to be the life and soul of the conversation, before making his excuses and leaving, making it clear he’s dumped William for Kuno to seduce, which the latter tries to do in a taxi home, while William successfully fights him off (chapter ten).

(It’s worth remembering that in an earlier chapter, Arthur and William had visited Kuno at a wonderful lakeside mansion he has and discovered it packed with a collection of almost naked, beautiful, tanned and fit young men, who oil themselves, sunbathe, swim in the pool and play practical jokes on Kuno. Gay paradise.)

November 1932. Germany’s confused political situation deteriorates. Everyone is making backroom deals, including Hitler. There is another general election and communist party support increase while the Nazis lose two million votes.

Mr Norris’s murky affairs appear to go downhill. He had been receiving mysterious telegrams from Paris which William and Fraulein Schroeder steamed open. They appeared to come from a woman named Margot and described his presents to her – must be a code, William decides.

One thing leads to another and finally, in a coy and roundabout way, Arthur explains to William that Kuno aka Baron von Pregnitz, now something in the German government, has an interest in a German glass manufacturer. Now his contact in Paris – ‘Margot’ – is interested in going into business with him. What they need to do is to arrange for Margot and Kuno to meet, not on German soil. Slowly Arthur reveals that he himself cannot go because he would find it ‘difficult’ to return to German soil, so, er, would William very much mind accompanying Kuno to Switzerland. Even more suspicious is when Arthur explains that Kuno mustn’t know – the rendezvous when it happens, must appear to be chance.

And so William finds himself kitted out with a new dinner jacket on a train to Switzerland. it didn’t take much persuading to get Kuno to agree to go – after all, we’ve seen that he’s already made one pass at William, he must have thought his chance had come. Their first morning in the sweet Alpine resort is Boxing Day 1932 (p.141).

Here, in chapter thirteen, the book veers into spy thriller / Eric Ambler territory. Over the coming days our duo (William and Kuno) meet several characters – a Mr van Hoorn and his son Piet, tall blond and striking in a Viking way – a French popular novelist Marcel Janin who Isherwood satirises for the brisk superficiality of his research (maybe it’s a lampoon of someone famous – this book has no notes or introduction, it would be nice to know).

The point of the chapter is that William is on tenterhooks trying all the time to guess who ‘Margot’ is that Kuno is supposed to be making contact with. There are various distractions, for example Piet and Kuno seem to form a gay friendship based on athletic skiing, and William has a hair-raising conversation with Piet who explains that Europe needs to be cleansed of its rotten Jews by a strong leader. Eventually, on day three of this mystery, William comes across Mr van Hoorn and Kuno deep in a whispered conversation in a corner of the lounge. Aha. He must be ‘Margot’.

It is just at this moment that William is handed a telegram which triggers the final crisis of the book. It simply reads: ‘Please return immediately’ and is signed Ludwig, an alias used by Bayer, head of the Berlin Communist Party. Something is up. William makes his excuses, packs his bag, catches a train back to Berlin, takes his bags to the flat – Arthur is out – takes a taxi to Communist Party headquarters. Here there is:

The big reveal

Bayer reveals that Arthur has, all this time, been spying for French security – on the communists or anyone else he can information about – sending reports to ‘Margot’ in Paris (p.157). Not only that, but the communists have been using him to send disinformation to the French. Not only that, but the Berlin police know all about it, as they made clear on a visit to Bayer a few days earlier. And now Bayer is, very generously, passing it on to William.

The ‘business’ trip to Switzerland was arranged so that ‘Margot’ – an official from French security – could make an approach to Kuno, not because he is a businessman (I didn’t think he was) but because he is now in the German government. The French are approaching him to see if he wants to spy for them. Bayer calmly lucidly explains that this makes William an accessory to an attempt to suborn an official of the German government. (It’s why Arthur didn’t want to go or be involved.) In other words – William could find himself in a German prison sentenced as a spy.

Listening to this William passes through the gamut of emotions – humiliation, embarrassment, mortification – but with this final revelation blazes with anger. Bayer restricts himself to advising William to be more careful how he picks his friends, and mildly suggests he might want to pass this all on to Arthur and shakes his hand. In a daze in a dream in a dazzle William stumbles down the stairs, out the building, into a taxi and charges up the stairs of Fraulein Schroeder’s boarding house.

Arthur has (conveniently for the theatrics of the situation) returned and William lets him have it with both barrels. Arthur tries to manage it all with his ‘dear boys’ and pooh-poohing but as William reveals that the communists know he’s been betraying them and the police know, too, Arthur’s confidence wilts and then collapses.

Arthur looked up at me quickly, like a spaniel which is going to be whipped. (p.161)

Eventually William’s rage blows over and he starts feeling sorry for the shattered old man before him.

He sat there like a crumpled paper bag, his blue eyes vivid with terror. (p.161)

He says there’s only one thing for it. Arthur has to get out of the country before he’s arrested. Already William’s noticed a detective has been posted outside the boarding house. They discuss it then William packs Arthur along to a travel agency (where the detective follows him) and he returns declaring he has, rather improbably, bought tickets for Mexico. He’ll catch a train to Hamburg, then get the boat.

There is then a Big Psychological Moment – a moment when the scales really drop from the narrator’s eyes:

Mr Norris tentatively asks William whether – given the fact the police don’t know everything yet and that there might be a big reward for more information and William stands to gain from it – whether… he’s going to tell on him…

And in a flash William and the reader realise that Arthur judges everyone by his own standards, thinks everyone can be bought and corrupted, that anyone is willing to betray his friends if the price is right.

William is at first scandalised and insulted by the imputation, by even the suspicion that he might betray his friend. But then he realises… he is the one at fault. All the time he had been projecting his own public schoolboy, English code of honour onto someone who really is from a different time and set of values. His bad. (There is also the deeper implication – that William might not understand anything which is happening around him).

Arthur washes and brushes up and they go for a last meal together but, although they giggle like schoolboys at the detective who so blatantly follows them and even enters the restaurant and has his own meal, the old spirit, the old closeness has gone.

Next morning Arthur liberally gives away those of his belongings he’s not taking with him, dispensing gifts to the porter, the porter’s wife and the porter’s son, and some of his wonderful silk underwear, incongruously, to Fraulein Schroeder.

After a final lunch (these characters and their eating out!) Arthur has packed his bags and moved them into the hall ready to depart when there’s a flurry of excitement. After banging on the door Schmidt his old minder-bully bursts in, very drunk, looking down at heel, demanding his money and, when he sees Arthur has packed his bags, accusing him of doing a runner. Real violence might have broken out except that, in a moment of Joe Orton farce, it is feeble old Fraulein Schroeder, so angry at having her lovely Herr Norris threatened like this, who runs at Schmidt from behind, taking him unawares, pushing him into the front room (‘like an engine shunting trucks’) and quickly locking the door on him.

William accompanies Arthur to the train station. There is a prolonged and excruciatingly embarrassing farewell during which Arthur pours out wishes and regrets which make William’s toes curl. ‘He was outrageous, grotesque, entirely without shame.’

Coda

The last chapter is a sort of coda or envoi. The Falstaffian figure of Mr Norris departs early in January 1933. His departure disenchants William who for the first time looks around him and sees the dire situation Germany is in. On 30 January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg, as a result of backroom deals, appointed Hitler as Chancellor. It is William’s acquaintance, the tough journalist Helen Pratt, investigating the uptick in arrests and rumours of torture, who tells William that Bayer, the communist leader, is dead. A Jewish friend suddenly becomes very fearful.

The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear. I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones.

William realises he’s got various Communist Party papers in his possession, which Bayer had given him to translate into English, and realises how incriminating these would be if the authorities discovered them. He and Fraulein Schroeder hide them. He lies awake at night hearing vans driving past wondering if one will stop and he’ll hear the thunk of Nazi boots on the stairs.

Otto turns up on their doorstep, dirty and dishevelled. His old rival, Werner Baldow, had turned up with six of his stormtroop but Otto escaped through the skylight and has been on the run ever since. They feed and wash him and in a few days he says he’ll leave and try to make his way to the French border. He has a list of comrades who are said to be dead. Of Anni his whore he knows nothing and doesn’t care. Olga the big hostess was protected by having an important Nazi as a client. She’ll be fine.

There is a wonderful bittersweet moment when William shows Otto a postcard from Arthur in Mexico. Otto’s face gleams, he is convinced Arthur is still true to the communist faith, is out there in Mexico making speeches and raising money, old Hitler had better look out when Arthur gets back. ‘Yes of course that’s what he’s doing,’ William lies, with the perfect poise we’ve come to expect of him.

He and Fraulein Schroder give him some food, a penknife and a map of Germany and wave him off. William never hears from him again. Three weeks later William returns to Britain, Helen Pratt comes to visit him, immensely fired up by her award-winning journalism about the new Nazi regime, full of scoops and insider info. She tells him that the police caught Baron von Pregnitz (Kuno) for spying, tailed him to a train station and then chased him into a public lavatory where he locked himself in a cubicle and tried to blow his brains out.

Helen also introduces the final thought and lasting motif of the novel, which is she discovered Pregnitz was being blackmailed by none other than Schmidt, Arthur’s venomous minder-blackmailer. This leads us into the final sequence where the narrator shares with us a series of hilarious-gruesome postcards from Arthur which recount how he moved from Mexico to California where he was hoping to manage a tidy little deal, but who should turn up and ruin it but SCHMIDT. Arthur elopes to Costa Rica – but Schmidt follows him there – ‘may try Peru’ says one brief postcard. But even there Schmidt follows him. He cannot shake him off. By this time the pairing has become allegorical, mythical, the two are tied together like Faust and Mephistopheles, condemned to torment each other for all time. In his very last postcard, Arthur is forced to admit that they are, reluctantly, going into partnership.

And thus the book ends on this complex note, all the preceding frivolity seriously undermined by the final ten pages detailing Nazi brutality and murders, and then this quasi-religious final image of a pair of rascals ‘doomed to walk the earth together’. The very last sentence returns to the comic mode, but now with all kinds of complex overtones.

‘Tell me William,’ his last letter concluded, ‘what have I done to deserve all this?’

Very funny. A comic masterpiece.

Gay culture

Knowing that Isherwood was gay, and would go on to become something of a gay icon, changes the way we read the book. There is the obviously gay character, Baron von Pregnitz and his villa full of tanned half-naked young men. That’s quite a hauntingly sensual image.

Mr Norris himself is a more complex creation. On the one hand he is very associated with the 1890s and the Oscar Wilde circle – what could be more gay? On the other hand Isherwood – presumably because he had to because of the times – makes his peccadilos solidly heterosexual – he may have naughty French erotic literature and he may like to be whipped as he polishes his dominant’s boots – but the naughty books are about schoolgirls and the person holding the whip is definitely a woman (Anni). I.e. the latent homosexuality of the character has been changed into acceptable, if still risqué, heterosexuality.

Despite this camouflage, the book can be seen as a kind of handing on of the torch. Mr Norris educates, shows and displays the camp values and behaviour of that older, late-Victorian and Edwardian, gay generation. William observes and analyses them, and in some measure absorbs them into his good-humoured schoolboy-in-Berlin persona, before taking them with him to sunny California.

The novel stands alone, but can also be interpreted as part of a gay lineage, a tradition, handing on the torch of a subterranean set of behaviours. In his introduction to a recent edition of this book, the gay American novelist Armistead Maupin describes meeting Isherwood at the end of his life, who was kind enough to read the manuscript of his first novel. Like Mr Norris Changes Train, Maupin’s novel rotates around a number of characters in a boarding house and thus, at one remove, invokes the outrageous, camp, very funny and sad persona of Mr Norris. It’s really Maupins idea that he was taking part in a gay lineage or tradition, I’m just pointing out that the entire novel can be read in this light.

Isherwood disowned it

Like many of the 1930s writers, Isherwood came to dislike and even despise his younger self and his early works, for their shallowness and immorality. Not their sexual immorality, the deeper immorality of seeing the real suffering, poverty, prostitution and violence around him in Berlin but thinking it was all frightfully exciting and fun, purely the raw materials for an Englishman’s novels – which is pretty much what the Berlin stories do.

Twenty years later, when Isherwood was invited to write an introduction to a memoir by the real-life person Mr Norris is based on, the memoirist, critic and crook Gerald Hamilton, he took the opportunity to put the record straight:

What repels me now about Mr Norris is its heartlessness. It is a heartless fairy-story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation. The ‘wickedness’ of Berlin’s night-life was of the most pitiful kind; the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an over-crowded market. … As for the ‘monsters’, they were quite ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods. The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy.

On this reading, the narrator’s endless good humour and incessant laughing is not a sign of his wonderful bonhomie but of his ignorance and superficiality. It encourages us to remember the couple of places where Isherwood explicitly refers to the narrator’s behaviour as immature, callow and schoolboyish.

We sniggered together, like two boys poking fun at the headmaster. (p.168)

Well, maybe this attitude of regret was appropriate enough for Isherwood in later life, but I don’t think we need to be limited by his perspective. Things have moved on since he wrote that. I can think of at least two comic movies about the Nazis which have been well received in our times (Jojo Rabbit and Life is Beautiful) and nobody seems to have questioned the 1972 movie Cabaret for its comic or silly interludes.

And then, the ending of the book, the last chapter, doesn’t at all treat the dangerous times, the Nazis’ arrival in power, the terror of his Jewish friends, at all frivolously. I thought he was being hard on himself.

Lastly, this novel is funny, and funny is good. We need more humour and less anger in the world. For a lot of the book the German background is irrelevant, it could have been set in Paris or any other European capital, any of which would have had communists and fascists fighting against a sense of looming disaster. And wherever it had been set, any novel describing a bunch of posh, amused characters drinking and diletantting against the backdrop of the Great Depression might have prompted the author to later berate himself for not being more sensitive to the poverty and sufferings of the poor, or to the political catastrophe just round the corner.

Don’t beat yourself up, Christopher. It’s a very funny book, Mr Norris is a comic masterpiece and the crisp witty prose it’s written in is a delight to read.

Weimar Germany

Novels from or about the 1930s

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by Simon on June 10, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Posted by Simon on June 10, 2020

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The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

[K.’s assistants] rushed to the [telephone], asked for the connection – how eager they were about it! in externals they were absurdly docile – and inquired if K. could come with them next morning into the Castle. The ‘No’ of the answer was audible even to K. at his table. But the answer went on and was still more explicit, it ran as follows: ‘Neither to-morrow nor at any other time.’

‘When can my master come to the Castle?’
‘Never,’ was the answer.

Plot

In The Trial Joseph K is ‘arrested’ (although he remained, in practice, entirely free to continue going about his business as he wishes) and spends the rest of the increasingly fraught story having encounters with Court officials, friends, lawyers and other advisers who (he hopes) can help him make his case to the Court and clear his name. But there never actually is a trial, Joseph K never gets to meet any important official, all the officials he does meet turn out to be powerless, he never manages to clear his name and, in the sudden, short, final chapter, he is taken to a quarry and miserably murdered. Kafka wrote The Trial in an intense burst in the second half of 1914 and abandoned it in January 1915.

Seven years later, Kafka began writing The Castle, working intensely on it from January to September 1922. But didn’t finish this novel, either, and the manuscript breaks off in mid sentence.

It opens with a Land Surveyor, referred to throughout simply as K., arriving in the depths of a snowy winter at an unnamed village in the shadow of a looming castle (which turns out more to be a ramshackle collection of low buildings) and checking into a rundown inn, the Bridge Inn, for the night. Here he is not made particularly welcome, and a young man bursts in to tell him he needs a pass to be there, and rings up the Castle to confirm the fact.

This sets the tone for the rest of the (unfinished) novel which K. spends trying to get an audience or meeting with anyone up at the Castle who can tell him what his task is, and what he’s been hired to do. In this he fails as completely as Joseph K. does to find anyone to present his case to. Instead K. ends up wasting most of his time in interminable conversations with characters from the village – starting with the landlord and landlady of the Bridge Inn, and their daughter, and his two so-called assistants, and a messenger from the Castle who K. hopes will get him an entrée there but rapidly turns out rarely to actually visit it. And so on. K’s asks them all for help and advice about how to get an interview with anyone of importance at the Castle, but their replies and interpretations are so tortuous, convoluted and contradictory hat he never makes it anywhere near the famous Castle, and then the text stops in mid sentence.

Just like The Trial, then, The Castle is an exercise in long-winded, verbose and dialogue-heavy delaying.

Just like Joseph K, K. meets a sequence of people, and has long exchanges with each of them about his plight, which, far from clarifying the situation, leave him steadily more puzzled and confused than when he started.

‘You misunderstand everything, even a person’s silence.’ (The landlady to K., p.72)

Just like Joseph K, K. forms immediate and very sexual relationships with the women that he meets. In K’s case this is Frieda, the serving woman in another inn which K. goes to in the hope of meeting the legendary Castle official, Klamm. In a bizarre scene, which i had to reread to make sure I had it right, K. ends up making love to this barmaid who he’s only just met, on the floor behind the counter, among the beer slops and fag ends.

Just like Joseph K, K. becomes increasingly obsessed with his forlorn quest, until it is all he can think about day and night – the simple goal of gaining access to the Castle, which is turned down by officials on the phone, pooh-poohed by the peasants that he meets, mocked by his landlady, and generally ridiculed by everyone he meets, while he is slowly, step-by-step, reduced in status, worn down and humiliated.

Decline and entropy

Reading The Trial acclimatised me to numerous aspects of Kafka’s approach or worldview. One is that things are never as grand or formal or impressive as they initially seem; they are always disappointing. The movement is always downwards.

‘You’re still Klamm’s sweetheart, and not my wife yet by a long chalk. Sometimes that makes me quite dejected, I feel then as if I had lost everything, I feel as if I had only newly come to the village, yet not full of hope, as I actually came, but with the knowledge that only disappointments await me, and that I will have to swallow them down one after another to the very dregs…’ (p.126)

In The Trial an impressive-sounding magistrate turns out to be a shabby little fat man with no control over anything. Joseph’s uncle recommends a well-connected advocate who, in the event, turns out to be ill and bed-ridden, and who candidly admits that advocates like himself are virtually powerless – in fact they may end up damaging a client’s chances. People’s reputations and power decay virtually in front of us. Every new opportunity turns out to be a dead end or worse, a setback.

Well, The Castle is dominated and defined by the same trajectory, by a hundred little fallings-off and declines and disappointments. The very first disappointment is that the Castle itself turns out to be a lot less castle-ey than we were led to believe.

It was neither an old stronghold nor a new mansion, but a rambling pile consisting of innumerable small buildings closely packed together and of one or two storeys; if K. had not known that it was a castle he might have taken it for a little town… on approaching it he was disappointed in the Castle; it was after all only a wretched-looking town, a huddle of village houses, whose sole merit, if any, lay in being built of stone, but the plaster had long since flaked off and the stone seemed to be crumbling away.

An early example of people being disappointing is the young man who bullies K. within an hour of him arriving at the Bridge Inn, officiously telling K. he needs a pass to stay at an inn and documents to prove he is who he says he is, who rings up the Castle and generally throws his weight about. But later the landlord of the inn tells K. that this young man is only the son of an insignificant under-castellan, a man of no importance or authority.

Also early on, there’s a small symbolic enactment of this relentless entropy in the incident of the bell. The morning after his arrival in the village K. sets off to walk up to the Castle but gets bogged down in the deep snowdrifts in the village, eventually has to knock on a peasant door for help, before being given a sleigh ride back to the inn where he’s staying. As he’s being driven away:

A bell began to ring merrily up there, a bell which for at least a second made his heart palpitate for its tone was menacing, too, as if it threatened him with the fulfilment of his vague desire. This great bell soon died away, however, and its place was taken by a feeble monotonous little tinkle which might have come from the Castle, but might have been somewhere in the village. It certainly harmonized better with the slow-going journey, with the wretched-looking yet inexorable driver…

It’s a small moment, but it’s typical of the way that in things great and small, from the overall shape of the entire narrative down to tiny details – everything falls away into a state of confusion and uncertainty:

‘If you had followed my explanation more carefully, then you must have seen that the question of your being summoned here is far too difficult to be settled here and now in the course of a short conversation.’
‘So the only remaining conclusion,’ said K., ‘is that everything is very unclear and insoluble…’ (p.66)

Take the handsome, slender messenger who comes to the Bridge Inn from the Castle and announces himself as Barnabas. Initially K. hopes Barnabas, as an official messenger, can take him with him up to the Castle, but it turns out that this is a misunderstanding and, after a trudge through the snow, they arrive not at some official residence but at the house of Barnabas’s parents, who turn out to be two decrepit old crones. K.

had been bewitched by Barnabas’s close-fitting, silken-gleaming jacket, which, now that it was unbuttoned, displayed a coarse, dirty grey shirt patched all over, and beneath that the huge muscular chest of a labourer.

Barnabas goes from being a slender official messenger, elegant in fine silk, to a coarse and oafish peasant wearing dirty patched clothes, even as we watch.

It is typical of Kafka that when K. finally manages to see the village Mayor he finds him far from being a superb figure of fitness and power, but ill in bed with gout, fussing and fretting and cared for by his wife, Mizzi. Later (and there’s almost always a ‘later’ moment in Kafka, when someone else comments on an important encounter Joseph K or K. has had, generally undermining and contradicting it), later the landlady tells K. that the Mayor is actually pretty powerless, it’s his skinny mousey wife who’s the power behind the throne.

‘The mayor is someone entirely without consequence, didn’t you realise?’ (p.77)

And so it goes on, Decline. Fall. Entropy. It is characteristic that beautiful young Frieda, within days of starting her affair with K., loses her beauty and goes into a decline (p.122) Everywhere, in aspects large and small, people, bells, buildings turn out to be less impressive or authoritative or even comprehensible than first imagined. Everything disappoints, everywhere the protagonist’s hopes or plans are dashed, on every front he finds himself being squeezed into a narrower and narrower corner.

‘If that is so, madam,” said K., ‘then I beg your pardon, and I’ve misunderstood you. For I thought – erroneously, as it turns out now – that I could take out of your former words that there was still some very tiny hope for me.’

Crowded with people

Another quick and obvious thing you notice is that The Castle, like The Trial, is packed with people. It has a surprisingly large cast:

the landlord and the landlady of the Bridge Inn where K is staying
Schwarzer, the son of the Castellan who bullyingly tells K. he needs a pass to stay at the inn
the peasants drinking in the hotel bar
the schoolteacher who tells him everyone is disappointed by the Castle
the cottage K. stumbles into up in the village, which contains two men in a bath (one of them the tanner Lasemann), an old man a woman breast-feeding, and a horde of screaming children
Arthur and Jeremiah, two thin men walking by the cottage who are hailed by the owner
the stooping coachman called Gerstacker who drives K back to the Bridge Inn in his sledge, after K. has got lost wandering the streets of the village
Barnabas the messenger who arrives at the Bridge Inn with a letter for K.
Barnabas’s family, consisting of his aged mother and father and sisters Olga and Amalia
Klamm, the legendary official from the Castle who everyone talks about and K. becomes obsessed with meeting
Momus, Klamm’s secretary
Vallabene, Castle official Momus works for
Frieda, daughter of the Bridge Inn landlady, and mistress of Klamm, who is working at the Count’s Inn where K. goes to find Klamm, and who K. has an affair with
the Mayor and his mousey wife, Mizzi
Sordini, a minor official in the Castle, who features in the Mayor’s extremely long-winded explanation of the bureaucracy up at the castle
the schoolmistress Gisa who sets her cat to scratch K. (p.117)
Pepi the stocky sturdy replacement for Frieda as barmaid at the Herrenhof (it is a minor element of the ‘Kafkaesque’ that the male protagonist is always horny; within moments of meeting Pepi K. is lusting after every bit as much as he did after Frieda [and the word used is ‘lust’, p.91])

Not only a fairly large cast but more intricately intertwined than in The Trial. Admittedly when K. discovers that the young woman he has so abruptly had sex with, Frieda, is in fact Klamm’s mistress, this very much echoes the situation in The Trial where the young woman, Leni, who throws herself at Joseph K. (to be precise, who falls backwards onto the carpet and pulls Joseph on top of her, thus making her intentions plain) is also the mistress of the Advocate Huld. Same with the Law Court Attendants wife who first with Joseph, but snogs another young man, Barthold, and turns out to ‘belong’ to the Examining magistrate.

Structurally, if we put aside the actual sexual content of these encounters for a moment, they can be seen to be yet another variant on the basic structure from which his texts are built, namely that things turn out to be something other than the protagonist thought. He thinks a woman is flirting with him alone, but she turns out to have multiple other lovers is cognate with the structure of Joseph being recommended to meet the Advocate who turns out to be ineffective and maybe even damaging to his cause.

But when we learn that Frieda is the daughter of the landlady of the Bridge Inn; and that Frieda’s mother was herself, in her time, a mistress of Klamm’s, then the latter book begins to feel more incestuous, more claustrophobic.

Attics and inns

One of the things I noticed in The Trial is the way so many of the ‘offices’ or rooms of supposedly important officials, and of the painter Titorelli, seem to be located right at the top of rickety staircases in dusty airless attics. The same initially happens here.

The house was so small that nothing was available for K. but a little attic room, and even that had caused some difficulty, for two maids who had hitherto slept in it had had to be quartered elsewhere. Nothing indeed had been done but to clear the maids out, the room was otherwise quite unprepared, no sheets on the single bed, only some pillows and a horse-blanket still in the same rumpled state as in the morning.

But in the event K. doesn’t get to meet as varied a selection of bureaucratic officials as Joseph K. and spends more of his time in the two village inns and at the schoolhouse.

Less intense, more surreal

The superiority of The Trial

The Trial is the better book. It gives you the pure Kafka experience, the sense of a hyper-sensitive man drowning in a sea of bureaucratic mysteries which he can never solve.

It has its bizarre moments but is mostly a kind of sustained meditation on the nature of the Court which has accused Joseph K and, by extension, of the nature of his guilt which is, in fact, tied to his entire existence. His mere existence implicates Joseph K. and it’s in this sense that Kafka’s friend and executor Max Brod makes the case for it being at bottom a religious book, an examination of the fundamental nature of human existence.

Moreover, the metaphor of ‘the trial’ is extremely large and flexible, it extends out into all kinds of meditations and metaphors to do with an extended range of related subjects such as ‘the Law’ and ‘Guilt’ and ‘Innocence’. Characters can say things which both apply to Joseph K’s plight in a literal sense, but also have quite weighty double-meanings to do with the nature of Divine Law and human existence etc.

And because the legal systems of any country are so complicated and bureaucratic, the central metaphor of a ‘trial’ allows Kafka to generate a potentially endless sequence of characters who are either officials of the Court or experts or advisers about the law or the Court or the bureaucracy and so on. You can see the truth of Max Brod’s comment that the Trial could have been extended almost indefinitely.

The weakness of The Castle

By contrast, the fundamental concept of ‘the Castle’ is a lot more vague and limited. The Castle is up on the hill and (supposedly) contains ‘the Count’ and his officials, but it doesn’t really provide a lot of metaphorical or conceptual framework, certainly not as much as the idea of a trial and of the Law.

This may partly explain why The Castle seems less unified and inevitable and quite a bit more random that The Trial. Whereas most of the encounters in The Trial were aligned with the fundamental metaphor of the Court, many of the incidents in The Castle seem simply bizarre and surreal.

Take the case of the assistants. When K. arrives at the Bridge Inn he says his assistants are following him not far behind. Then, impatient, he sets off to explore the village for himself but gets lost in the heavy snowdrifts, is rescued by some villagers who dry him and warm him and who, as they escort him back to their front door, hail a couple of young locals who are walking by. When K. gets back to ‘his’ inn, the one he’s checked into, he discovers the very same pair of men have arrived there and are telling everyone they are K’s assistants. Then – and this is the bizarre thing – K. himself accepts that they are indeed his assistants and treats him for the rest of the book as if they are, even though they haven’t brought the surveying equipment he said they had, and have different names, and behave like irresponsible children most of the time (‘ludicrously childish, irresponsible, and undisciplined’, p.123).

This doesn’t add anything to our understanding of the Court or the purpose of the book, it just becomes a permanent, bizarre addition to the narrative. Their exaggerated childishness and bickering soon reminded me of Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, which made me see the entire book in a different light; less 20th century ‘surreal’ than in the tradition of Victorian ‘nonsense’ verse and prose.

Similarly, K. is told that the important Court official Klamm is at another inn in the village, the Count’s Inn, and so treks off through the deep snowdrifts to try to meet him. Characteristically, this attempt fails, for Klamm is locked in his private room. But K. he does get chatting (at length – all Kafka dialogue is immensely long-winded) to the barmaid, Frieda, one thing leads to another and suddenly they are in an embrace, rolling among the beer slops on the floor behind the bar. This goes on for hours and, in his characteristically obscure and long-winded way, it appears as if they have sex, then fall asleep there, for most of the night.

As if this wasn’t fantastical enough, when they finally disengage K. and Frieda discover that the two assistants… have been perching on the edge of the bar all night long, and have presumably observed everything which went on.

Now this isn’t a necessary or logical consequence of K.s quest to meet the authorities, it is more a bizarre incident, made more bizarre by the presence of the two assistants perching like buzzards on the bar.

It’s easy to apply the word ‘surreal’ to these moments of Kafka, and he was certainly writing at exactly the moment that the idea of surrealism and the term surrealism were coined (by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire in a play performed in 1917, and taken up and popularised by André Breton, who published his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924). Breton defined surrealism as:

thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation

The early Surrealists were obsessed with ‘automatic writing’ where the writer went into a dream or fugue state and wrote or dictated whatever came into his mind unhindered by any rational censorship or conscious intentions.

Well, on one level, Kafka’s two main novels do indeed have a horrible, irrational dreamlike or nightmare quality, the kind of nightmare where you’re running fast but not moving, or trying to keep above the waves but feel yourself being relentlessly pulled down. Thus the scene where K. is chatting to the barmaid one minute and the next, somehow, having sex with her behind the counter, is a sort of letting loose of usually suppressed sexual fantasies, a delirious improbability carried out in the dream-novel in a way it never could be in real life. And then the detail of the whole thing happening under the gaze of the two bird-like assistants definitely has the uncanny quality of Surrealism.

And yet a lot of other elements in the works are far more conscious and crafted and consistent than that.

For example, the messenger from the castle tells him that, while they try to sort out whether he has actually been hired to do any land surveying for the Count, K. is being offered the post of janitor at the little local school.

Because K. is now in a relationship with Frieda – in fact K. himself offers to marry her and everyone accepts that they are now engaged – he feels obligated to take the job although it is an obvious come-down from the figure he presented on his first arrival at the village, that of a confident, urbane professional man.

Not only is this a very Kafkaesque degradation or lowering of K.’s status, but he is then informed that the school building only contains two classrooms, with no other rooms whatsoever, and that therefore he and Frieda (and the two giggling assistants who follow him everywhere) will have to set up a camp bed every evening in the schoolroom once school is over, but be sure to be up and packed away before the schoolmaster then the children arrive the next day.

In practice this is a profoundly humiliating arrangement and again has a nightmarish quality because, inevitably, the very first morning of the new arrangement Frieda and K. oversleep and find their ‘bedroom’ overrun by schoolchildren laughing and pointing at them as they get out of the rough ‘bed’, made of a straw palliasse on the floor, and pad around in their underwear – at which point the smartly dressed schoolteacher and schoolma’am arrive and are outraged.

I think I’ve had dreams like this, being discovered in a public place half-dressed and with an oppressive sense of being publicly humiliated.

But the point I’m driving at is that true surrealism is bizarre in all directions, is unexpected and unpredictable, tigers turn into steam train, eyes are cut open, it can be fantastical and horrifying and weird. Early surreal works were often scrappy and unfinished precisely because their exponents were trying to achieve spontaneity, to throw off professionalism and reason and control in order to let the unconscious break through.

Whereas, although Kafka may achieve some ‘surreal’ effects with some of his nightmarish scenes and some of the fantasy-like details in them — his dreams invariably head in the same direction – in the direction of humiliating, degrading and wearing down the protagonist.

In this sense, Kafka’s works are highly conscious and contrived and artificial products: they are not at all open-ended and unexpected: the complete opposite: the degradation of Joseph K and K. and Gregor Samsa are highly predictable and move in one direction only – relentlessly down.

Long-winded

A major part of the protagonists’ problems in these two core Kafka novels is that everyone they talk to gives contradictory advice, or starts off urging one course of action but then hedges it with caveats and ends up advising the direct opposite. Joseph K and K. never know who to believe.

Partly this is to do with the convoluted content of each one of these long dialogues, and an analysis of them would take up many volumes. Easier to summarise is their immense length. God, everyone talks to immense and hyper-verbose excess! Here’s the landlady in conversation with K, telling him how naive his hope to meet the Castle official Klamm is.

‘Upon my word,’ said the landlady, with her nose in the air, ‘you put me in mind of my own husband, you’re just as childish and obstinate as he is. You’ve been only a few days in the village and already you think you know everything better than people who have spent their lives here, better than an old woman like me, and better than Frieda who has seen and heard so much in the Herrenhof. I don’t deny that it’s possible once in a while to achieve something in the teeth of every rule and tradition. I’ve never experienced anything of that kind myself, but I believe there are precedents for it. That may well be, but it certainly doesn’t happen in the way you’re trying to do it, simply by saying “No, no”, and sticking to your own opinions and flouting the most well-meant advice. Do you think it’s you I’m anxious about? Did I bother about you in the least so long as you were by yourself? Even though it would have been a good thing and saved a lot of trouble? The only thing I ever said to my husband about you was: “Keep your distance where he’s concerned.” And I should have done that myself to this very day if Frieda hadn’t got mixed up with your affairs. It’s her you have to thank – whether you like it or not – for my interest in you, even for my noticing your existence at all. And you can’t simply shake me off, for I’m the only person who looks after little Frieda, and you’re strictly answerable to me. Maybe Frieda is right, and all that has happened is Klamm’s will, but I have nothing to do with Klamm here and now. I shall never speak to him, he’s quite beyond my reach. But you’re sitting here, keeping my Frieda, and being kept yourself – I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you – by me. Yes, by me, young man, for let me see you find a lodging anywhere in this village if I throw you out, even it were only a dog-kennel.’

Poor K. thinks he’s understood the gist of this long monologue:

‘Thank you,’ said K., ‘That’s frank and I believe you absolutely. So my position is as uncertain as that, is it, and Frieda’s position, too?’

But, of course, and as usual for Kafka’s protagonists, it immediately turns out that he hasn’t:

‘No!’ interrupted the landlady furiously. ‘Frieda’s position in this respect has nothing at all to do with yours. Frieda belongs to my house, and nobody is entitled to call her position here uncertain.’
‘All right, all right,’ said K., ‘I’ll grant you that, too, especially since Frieda for some reason I’m not able to fathom seems to be too afraid of you to interrupt. Stick to me then for the present. My position is quite uncertain, you don’t deny that, indeed you rather go out of your way to emphasize it. Like everything else you say, that has a fair proportion of truth in it, but it isn’t absolutely true…’

‘Like everything else you say, that has a fair proportion of truth in it, but it isn’t absolutely true.’ That could stand as a motto for both novels.

There is often very little ‘information’ or factual content in these countless dialogues. Instead their sole purpose often consists solely in being so long-winded and tortuous as to perplex and punish the protagonist.

Take this characteristic block of dialogue from the Mayor, who spends Chapter Four explaining to K. the processes at work in the organisation that runs the Castle, how different departments might issue contradictory instructions, how discrepancies might not be cleared up for years, or might suddenly and abruptly be cleared up and yet nobody be told about them, causing yet more confusion. Who, by the end, has thoroughly demoralised poor K. and utterly exhausted the reader.

‘And now I come to a peculiar characteristic of our administrative apparatus. Along with its precision it’s extremely sensitive as well. When an affair has been weighed for a very long time, it may happen, even before the matter has been fully considered, that suddenly in a flash the decision comes in some unforeseen place, that, moreover, can’t be found any longer later on, a decision that settles the matter, if in most cases justly, yet all the same arbitrarily. It’s as if the administrative apparatus were unable any longer to bear the tension, the year-long irritation caused by the same affair – probably trivial in itself-and had hit upon the decision by itself, without the assistance of the officials. Of course a miracle didn’t happen and certainly it was some clerk who hit upon the solution or the unwritten decision, but in any case it couldn’t be discovered by us, at least by us here, or even by the Head Bureau, which clerk had decided in this case and on what grounds. The Control Officials only discovered that much later, but we will never learn it. Besides by this time it would scarcely interest anybody. Now, as I said, it’s just these decisions that are generally excellent. The only annoying thing about them – it’s usually the case with such things – is that one learns too late about them and so in the meantime keeps on still passionately canvassing things that were decided long ago. I don’t know whether in your case a decision of this kind happened – some people say yes, others no – but if it had happened then the summons would have been sent to you and you would have made the long journey to this place, much time would have passed, and in the meanwhile Sordini would have been working away here all the time on the same case until he was exhausted. Brunswick would have been intriguing, and I would have been plagued by both of them. I only indicate this possibility, but I know the following for a fact: a Control Official discovered meanwhile that a query had gone out from the Department A to the Town Council many years before regarding a Land Surveyor, without having received a reply up till then. A new inquiry was sent to me, and now the whole business was really cleared up. Department A was satisfied with my answer that a Land Surveyor was not needed, and Sordini was forced to recognize that he had not been equal to this case and, innocently it is true, had got through so much nerve-racking work for nothing. If new work hadn’t come rushing in as ever from every side, and if your case hadn’t been a very unimportant case – one might almost say the least important among the unimportant we might all of us have breathed freely again, I fancy even Sordini himself. Brunswick was the only one that grumbled, but that was only ridiculous. And now imagine to yourself, Land Surveyor, my dismay when after the fortunate end of the whole business – and since then, too, a great deal of time had passed by suddenly you appear and it begins to look as if the whole thing must begin all over again. You’ll understand of course that I’m firmly resolved, so far as I’m concerned, not to let that happen in any case?’

If you find that paragraph hard going, you are not alone. I found much of The Castle very hard to read because it consists of page after page of solid blocks of tortuous dialogue just like this.

I’m tempted to say that it’s not really the situations Kafka’s protagonists find themselves in which are the problem, i.e. a) being told you’ve been charged with something but never being able to find out what and b) arriving at a castle to do some work and discovering nobody will acknowledge you or clarify what work you’re meant to be doing, if any.

No, it’s not the situations they’re in which are Kafkaesque, so much as the massive, inordinate, unending stream of interpretations and advice and tips and insider knowledge etc which their situations are subjected to by every single person they come into contact with – that is the core of the Kafkaesque.

At the heart of the Kafkaesque is people’s unending need to talk talk talk. The Kafkaesque would cease to exist if people just shut up. Or spat it out in a sentence. Twitter would sort out K.’s problems in a few moments. But instead, he is forced to listen to monstrously long monologues by the Mayor or the Landlady, which leave him bitterly concluding:

‘This is a great surprise for me. It throws all my calculations out. I can only hope that there’s some misunderstanding.’

But there hasn’t been a misunderstanding. Or, to be more precise, everything is a misunderstanding, everyone is in a permanent state of misunderstanding everyone else.

Meanings

‘It’s so hard to know what’s what,’ said Frieda. (p.142)

Kafka knows what he’s doing as he creates fables with enough layers, and enough symbolism, to be susceptible to multiple levels of interpretation. The three principal ones which first spring to mind are religious and social-cultural and political.

1. Religious

I mean the way in which Max Brod mostly interpreted the stories, as allegories or fables of Man looking for the Meaning of Life, for The Answer, trying to find the God or representative of God (priest etc) who will provide peace and fulfilment and knowledge about the True Path – but the permanent sense of frustration and perplexity which the Good Pilgrim is subjected to.

2. Social-cultural

By social-cultural I mean a reading which focuses on the oppressive and entirely secular bureaucracies which seem endless and impenetrable, which sweep us up in their processes and do with us as they please, without us ever finding out who to appeal to or how to get our case heard. Kafka is often taken as being ‘prophetic’ of the way large bureaucracies – whether belonging to the state or the private sector – especially after the Second World War, came to be seen as reducing individuals to the status of ciphers.

It is a characteristic of modern (i.e. since about the First World War) bureaucracies that they rarely admit their errors but prefer to hide behind jargon and contradictory statements.

‘Frankly it isn’t their function to hunt out errors in the vulgar sense, for errors don’t happen, and even when once in a while an error does happen, as in your case, who can say finally that it’s an error?’

3. The Political

The political is a more intense of the bureaucratic interpretation and argues from what we know happened after Kafka’s death i.e. the domination of Europe by terrible, deadly bureaucracies which consigned vast numbers to starvation, forced labour and death, in the name of ‘quotas and collectivisation (in Stalin’s Russia of the 1930s) or in the name or purifying Europe of its race enemies (under Hitler’s Nazis).

4. Hermeneutical

There is a fourth type of interpretation, which is hermeneutical where ‘hermeneutics’ means:

the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts (Wikipedia)

This occurred to me as I read the scene in Chapter Four where K. produces the letter he’s received from Kramm with a flourish and gives it to the Mayor as evidence that he has been taken on as a land surveyor. The Mayor then proceeds to read the letter closely and undermine all its claims to authority and even coherent meaning. When he’s finished, K. says there’s nothing left except the signature.

So you could say that Kafka’s novels revolve around, not so much the big Religious Questions which Max Brod read into them – but more technical philosophical debate about meaning. What does the letter mean? What did the phone call to the Castle mean? What does the landlady’s lengthy advice mean?

K. has lots of encounters, conversations, promises, threats, advice and so on. But almost always he then meets someone who immediately contradicts and undermines them. No meaning remains stable or fixed for long.

Worse, some of the characters suggest that, just possibly, K.’s entire system of meaning is alien to the villagers. According to Frieda her mother, the landlady

‘didn’t hold that you were lying, on the contrary she said that you were childishly open, but your character was so different from ours, she said, that, even when you spoke frankly, it was bound to be difficult for us to believe you.’ (p.138)

Subjected to this continual attrition erosion of meaning, can anything be said to be meaningful? In this respect, then, the books can also be interpreted as very 20th century meditations on the meaning of meaning, and of the difficulty, nay, the impossibility of ever really communicating anything to another human being.

‘He’s always like that, Mr Secretary, he’s always like that. Falsifies the information one gives him, and
then maintains that he received false information.’ (The landlady, p.102)

‘To anyone who knows how to read official communications, and consequently knows still better how to read unofficial letters, all this is only too clear. That you, a stranger, don’t know it doesn’t surprise me.’ (The Mayor, having demolished the content of Klamm’s letter)

Samuel Beckett

As soon as I read the name Klamm, and began to learn that he is a major character who, however, never actually appears, but about whom all the other characters speculate, I thought of the plays of Samuel Beckett – plays with titles such as Krapp’s Last Tape – and of course, of his masterpiece, Waiting For Godot. And the entire book radiates the wordy futility of Beckett’s novels.

Last word

‘Doesn’t the story bore you?’
‘No,’ said K., ‘It amuses me.’
Thereupon the Superintendent said: ‘I’m not telling it to amuse you.’
‘It only amuses me,’ said K., ‘because it gives me an insight into the ludicrous bungling which in certain circumstances may decide the life of a human being.’

Credit

The Castle by Franz Kafka was published in German in 1926. Page references are to the 1997 J.A. Underwood translation in the Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

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by Simon on September 25, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel

Tagged 1926, Amalia, Arthur, Barnabas, entropy, Franz Kafka, Frieda, Gardana, Gerstacker, Gisa, God, hermeneutics, Hitler, Jeremiah, Joseph K, Kafka, Klamm, Krapp's Last Tape, Land Surveyor, Lasemann, Mizzi, Momus, Nazis, Olga, Pepi, religion, Russia, Samuel Beckett, Schwarzer, Sordini, Stalin, the Bridge Inn, The Castle, the Herrenhof, the landlady, the schoolmaster, The Trial, Titorelli, Vallabene, Waiting For Godot

Posted by Simon on September 25, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/25/the-castle-franz-kafka/

Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre (1948)

“How you cling to your purity, young man! How afraid you are to soil your hands! All right, stay pure! What good will it do? Why did you join us? Purity is an idea for a yogi or a monk. You intellectuals and bourgeois anarchists use it as a pretext for doing nothing. To do nothing, to remain motionless, arms at your sides, wearing kid gloves. Well, I have dirty hands. Right up to the elbows. I’ve plunged them in filth and blood. But what do you hope? Do you think you can govern innocently?”
(Communist Party boss, Hoederer, in Act V of Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre)

This is by far the longest of the four plays in the Vintage collection of Sartre’s plays – Huis Clos is one continuous act of forty pages, The Respectful Prostitute is even shorter at 30 pages – whereas Les Mains Sales has seven acts and is 120 pages long! And I think it’s also the most enjoyable because the characters have time to breathe and expand and become believable.

The plot

Act I

It is 1944 in the fictional East European country of Illyria and the Russian Army is coming closer. Olga is in a flat used by the Illyrian communist party. Hugo arrives. He has just been released from prison. He is young, handsome, talkative. He has just served two years for the murder of the communist leader, Hoederer. A knock at the door and he hides. Olga opens the door to representatives of the Party, tough guys with guns. They’ve come to kill Hugo, they’ve trailed him here, he’s a liability, a loose cannon, he must be liquidated. Olga pleads for his life and says, ‘Give me till midnight to find out what really happened.’ The tough guys grudgingly relent and leave.

Hugo comes out of the bedroom where he’d been hiding. Olga explains he must tell her everything; maybe she can protect him, persuade the others he is trustworthy after all. ‘Tell me everything, right from the start.’ The stage darkens and now begins the majority of the play, which is told as a long flashback detailing the events leading up to the assassination of Hoederer.

(Setting up the threat of Hugo’s ‘liquidation’ in the present is a Hitchcock-like trick, like seeing the bomb being placed on the bus: everything that happens subsequently is charged with menace and suspense. Simple but effective.)

So the rest of the play shows in detail the build-up to the assassination and explores the very mixed motives of young Hugo the assassin.

Act II

It is 1942, Hugo has broken with his rich bourgeois family to join the People’s Party. As a callow young intellectual, he has been given the task of editing the party paper and is horribly intimidated by the ‘real men’ of action who surround him.

After a turbulent meeting of the party heads Louis explains to him and Olga that the party’s general secretary, Hoederer, is planning to sell the party out. He is persuading the central committee to go into an alliance with the Fascists and the bourgeois party after the war to create a government of national unity.

Olga and Hugo can’t believe he is a sell-out. Louis hesitates then lets them in on a plan to assassinate Hoederer. Hugo will get a job as Hoederer’s personal secretary. On a night to be arranged he will open the door to the assassins. Hugo bridles: he wants to be a man of action. Let him assassinate Hoederer. Louis hesitates but Olga speaks up for Hugo: let him. OK, says Louis. Pack your bags and take your new young wife, Jessica, with you (oh, he’s married, we realise). Move into Hoederer’s house. Become his secretary. Await orders.

The next few acts introduce us to the shrewd watchful Hoederer, surrounded by tough guy bodyguards (George, Slick and Leon). But by far the most interesting character is Jessica, Hugo’s attractive flighty nineteen-year-old wife. She and Hugo play baby games, play act, role play and neither are sure when the game is over or when they’re playing. This could have been a tiresome embodiment of Sartre’s ideas about people playing roles for others’ consumption, but in fact their young married flirting and flyting is done with a surprisingly light touch and I found very believable. It is Huis Clos but in a comic mode. When Hugo swears Jessica to secrecy then whispers that he’s here to assassinate Hoederer, Jessica bursts out laughing. Hugo’s plight is that no-one will take him seriously. He can’t even take himself seriously.

HUGO: Tell it to me now.
JESSICA: What?
HUGO: That you love me.
JESSICA: I love you.
HUGO: But mean it.
JESSICA: I love you.
HUGO: But you don’t really mean it.
JESSICA: What’s got into you? Are you playing?
HUGO: No, I’m not playing.
JESSICA: Then why did you ask me that? That’s not like you.
HUGO: I don’t know. I need to think that you love me. I have a right to that. Come on, say it.
Say it as if you meant it.
JESSICA: I love you. I love you. No: I love you. Oh, go to the devil! Let’s hear you say it.
HUGO: I love you.
JESSICA: You see, you don’t say it any better than I do. (Act III, p.156)

The next scene is set in Hoederer’s office, the representatives of the two other parties arrive, the Fascists and the Liberals. There is some interesting political analysis as Hoederer points out to the other two that, with the USSR on the horizon, the Proletariat Party, though numerically in a minority, will soon be supported by the conquering Reds: so they’d better do a deal now. At which point Hugo jumps to his feet, outraged that Hoederer is prepared to do a deal with the bourgeois he so despises, with the bourgeois party leader (Karsky) who actually knows Hugo’s own father and made a point of mentioning it to Hugo on the way in.

The bomb

Hugo is on the verge of pulling out his revolver and shooting Hoederer then and there, when a bomb goes off in the garden, shattering the window, throwing the characters to the floor. The political leaders are ushered into a safe room, leaving Hugo, the bodyguards and a terrified Jessica. There is now some dramatic irony because Hugo had blurted out ‘the dirty bastards’ just as the bomb went off. He was describing the cynical politicians making this stitch-up, as he worked himself up to shooting, but now has to pretend to Hoederer’s suspicious bodyguards that he was referring to the ‘dirty bastards’ who threw the bomb. In fact Hoederer had already (unwisely) given Hugo a few drinks before the politicians arrived, and now he has a few more to recover from the shock with the result that he gets hammered and starts drunkenly skirting round the fact that it is he who has been sent as an assassin.

They’re not particularly subtle, but these scenes where the callow Hugo teeters on the brink of giving himself away, unhappily revealing himself to be precisely the over-talkative intellectual he’s trying to stop being, while his quick-witted wife covers for him, are more dramatically complex and satisfying than anything in Sartre’s previous plays, whose characters have tended to be schematic and one-dimensional.

In particular, Jessica’s innocent quick-wittedness is a joy to behold. In an earlier scene, when Hoederer’s goons had insisted on searching the new arrivals’ room, Jessica had quick-wittedly hidden Hugo’s revolver in her dress and brazenly invited one of the bodyguards to search her who was, as a result, so red-faced that he only did a cursory job, not finding the gun.

Now Jessica quickly interprets Hugo’s drunken babblings as anger against the ‘dirty bastards’ who threw the bomb and devises other ways of masking what Hugo’s saying. In fact she encourages him to drink more, lots more, until he passes out and Slick and George just laugh at him, thanking their lucky stars they didn’t have a rich privileged upbringing.

Olga in the summerhouse

Cut to the summerhouse which is Jessica and Hugo’s quarters, and Olga is tending the unconscious Hugo, when Jessica returns to the room with a cold compress for his head. The two women confront each other over Hugo’s unconscious body – the scheming, hard, political woman versus the politically naive but sensuous and sharp woman. They wake a groggy Hugo and Olga tells him it was she who threw the bomb. The party’s getting impatient. It’s been ten days and Hoederer’s still alive. She came to finish the job off but botched it. Hugo’s got till tomorrow, then they’ll come en masse. Anyway, whatever happens, the party thinks Hugo’s sold out – he is in big trouble. Being blown up by the bomb would have done him a favour. Olga leaves, climbing over the wall and escaping.

Jessica confronts Hugo with the reality of what he’s promised. For the first time they’re not playing. Hugo admits he can’t believe it, can’t believe he’s a killer, can’t believe that Hoederer’s bright quick eyes will go dull, that blood will seep into his suit, all because he, Hugo, has pulled a trigger. He is over-thinking and over-imagining the deed. But Jessica is no Lady MacBeth; the opposite, she begs Hugo to reconsider and, instead of just murdering Hoederer, discuss the issues, arguing him out of whatever it is that Hugo so vehemently opposes.

At which moment there’s a knock on the door and Hoederer himself enters, to check up on his secretary. The goons told him he’s drunk himself unconscious: is he alright? Having made certain, Hoederer makes as if to leave but Jessica jumps up before him. Now, now is the time for Hugo to do it? For a moment we the audience and Hugo are flabbergasted: what? shoot Hoederer now? No, Jessica means now is the time for the two men to talk, to thrash out their differences, for Hugo to find out if it’s really necessary to kill Hoederer (Jessica obviously doesn’t say this out loud, but we know from the previous dialogue with Hugo that’s this is what she means).

Hoederer explains Realpolitik to Hugo

And this is the lead-in to a very enjoyable scene where Hoederer a) explains the political situation in Illyria b) explains why a political deal with the other parties is necessary c) taunts Hugo with his naive intellectual purity. He’s more interested in principles than men, Hoederer taunts. He doesn’t want to get his pretty little bourgeois hands dirty. Well, Hoederer’s hands are dirty all right, covered in blood and filth.

This works very well as drama; it is written really effectively with Hoederer’s arguments battering Hugo’s feeble denials. When Hoederer has left, even Jessica can see that his arguments were right and, worse, that Hugo knows it, despite all his denials, despite his intention to stay true to his original mission, Hoederer converted him.

But I was also fascinated by Hoederer’s analysis of the situation in this fictional East European country because it closely parallels the analyses of the post-war communist takeover of Europe I have just read in Anne Applebaum’s brilliant history, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 to 1956. Hoederer argues that:

The Proletariat Party cannot take power by itself; the proletariat only make up 20% of the population and not even all of them support the party. Hugo naively says, “Let’s seize power.” Hoederer replies that if they seized power, they would quickly be suppressed by the Peasants Party which represents 55% of the population, in alliance with the Fascists who control the army and police.
Hence the need to enter power peaceably in a national coalition.
Hoederer has suggested to the leaders of the Fascists and Bourgeois parties that they set up a national government with six on the council and the Proletariat Party will have three of those delegates. He even – and this chimes exactly with Applebaum’s description – wouldn’t want most of the ministries, just two: the interior and defence, because those are the only two that matter.
“But,” Hugo says, “the Red Army will be across our borders in weeks: why don’t we ride their coat-tails to power?” “Because, my naive friend,” replies Hoederer, “they will still have to fight their way across the country and many will be killed; the Soviets will be blamed. And because the Party will forever afterwards be thought to have been imposed by a foreign power rather than rising up to represent the people. And because, even for the national unity government, the country will be a wasteland when peace finally comes, difficult decisions about law and order will have to be taken; the Party can represent itself as a natural outgrowth of the nation and people, and can present itself as opposing these unpopular policies from within government. With control of key industries it can slowly isolate the leaders of the other parties and wait till the time is right to stage a coup.”

Hugo hates all this because it is messy and unprincipled and yuk. Hoederer laughs at his naivety and bourgeois prissiness.

Act VI

Next day, the day of the deadline Olga told Hugo he must act or else. Before the working day begins Jessica comes into Hoederer’s office and after a little flirting reveals that Hugo has a gun, and has been tasked with assassinating him. Hoederer knew it all along. Hugo knocks at the door, Jessica exits through the window (reminding me of all the entrances and exits through windows in The Respectful Prostitute).

Now Hoederer toys with Hugo, continuing the discussion over whether Hugo has it in him to be an assassin or whether he is too much of an intellectual. Because assassins don’t think at all, have no imagination, just kill. Whereas Hugo has too much imagination, can not only picture the dead body and the blood, but has grasped the political consequences, the cause of the Party set back, no single leader to greet the Red Army, its chance for power maybe irrevocably lost. He deliberately turns his back and fixes a cup of coffee, while Hugo gets the gun out his pocket and holds it trembling, very obviously struggling with himself. Hoederer turns, faces him, says “Give me the gun,” and takes it. Hugo collapses, virtually in tears, and says, “You despise me.”

Hoederer says he remembers being a naive principled young man. He can help Hugo to maturity, guide him, mentor him. Hugo is almost in tears. But he won’t give up his opposition to the political pact. Don’t worry, says Hoederer: he’ll go to town tomorrow and square it all with Louis (the guy who sent Hugo in the first place). Go back to writing, it’s what you do best; and he dismisses Hugo.

Re-enter Jessica who’s been perched on the window ledge all this time (!) She heard everything. She thinks Hoederer is noble. In fact, she’s realised she’s not in love with her silly immature husband, she realises she wants a ‘real man’ (p.232). Oh dear. The 21st century reader’s heart sinks a little. They look at each other in silence. She’s never thrilled to a man’s touch, sex with her husband makes her giggle. “Are you frigid?” Hoederer asks. “I don’t know,” Jessica replies. “Let’s find out,” says Hoederer and embraces and kisses her.

At just this moment Hugo re-enters the office. Oops. Incensed, he accuses Hoederer of lying to him and stringing him along and sparing him and promising to make him a man because all along he’s just wanted his wife. Hugo springs for the desk where the revolver was left, seizes it, Jessica screams, Hugo fires three shots at Hoederer who crumples in his chair. Enter the bodyguards, George and Slick with guns aimed at Hugo but Hoederer with his dying breath tells them to spare him, it was a crime of passion, that he – Hoederer – was sleeping with Hugo’s wife. And dies.

Act VII

Lights go up on the setting of the first act, as Hugo finishes pouring his heart out to Olga. She keeps asking, “So did you assassinate him because of our orders,?” and Hugo honestly doesn’t know. In a typically Sartrean way, Hugo isn’t even sure that he did it: or was Chance the key agent? If he’d opened the door two minutes later or earlier, it wouldn’t have happened. In fact, he was coming back to ask for Hoederer’s help.

It was an assassination without an assassin. (p.234)

Hugo is crushed by a characteristically Sartrean sense of his own unreality. But Olga is pleased. She thinks she can fend off the men who want to kill him. And here comes the punchline, the cynical climax of the play. For Olga explains:

The party line has changed. When they despatched Hugo to murder Hoederer communications with Moscow were poor. Later they discovered that Moscow did, in fact, want the party to go into a government of national unity with the Fascists and bourgeois parties. It would mean saving many lives among the Illyrian army (which would immediately lay down its arms). It would save Moscow embarrassment with the Allies (Britain and the US). The new plan is for the party to join a 6-man government, and the party to have 3 delegates. Hugo is amazed and then bursts out laughing. This is exactly what Hoederer intended, what we saw him proposing to Hugo just a few moments (and two years) ago down to the last detail.

“Yes,” Olga explains, “but Hoederer was ‘premature’ in his policy.” Meanwhile, another man, now dead, has been officially blamed for Hoederer’s assassination. Now Hoederer has been rehabilitated and… Hugo joins in, “You’re going to put up statues to him after the war. You’re going to make him a hero of the party?” Hugo collapses into helpless tear-filled laughter of despair.

Olga tells him to snap out of it, the Party killers are about to arrive. She is ready to tell them he is a new man, rehabilitated, he will go along with the party line, he will lie about Hoederer’s assassination, he will forget all about and never mention to anyone that he did it. He will live a life of deceit and lies for the greater good.

But Hugo refuses. The only thing that kept him going in prison was that he fired – maybe for personal reasons – but in accordance with the party line. To learn that the line has changed and the act become completely meaningless is too much to bear. He thought that killing someone would make him feel real, give him weight and substance – but he carried on feeling horribly unreal and contingent. Now, now he has the chance to stand up, to act for himself, to make himself real. Olga begs him to stop but as the killer’s car draws up outside, Hugo stands up and walks to the door. He will proclaim his guilt and force them to kill him. It will be his final, defining acte.

Thoughts

Apparently the big and powerful Communist Party of France disliked the play. You can see why.

In purely political terms, this was the decade when Moscow’s concept of Socialist Realism came to be enforced all across the Eastern Bloc. Art, music, literature, all had to be high-minded and inspiring, showing happy workers exceeding their quotas and merrily bringing in the harvest. It’s hard to imagine a more nihilistic, defeatist, cynical and plain anti-communist narrative than Les Mains Sales, hard to imagine anything more completely contrary to the spirit of Socialist Realism, focusing as it does on the amoral political manoeuvring, the lying to its membership, the cynical alliances with its class enemies, and the pointless infighting and murders of the communist party.

Politics aside, the communist party of Illyria comes over as a mob of gangsters, little different in terms of threat and violence from Al Capone and Chicago gangsters of Prohibition. Time and again I am reminded that Sartre and Camus were writing their intense, man-holding-gun fictions during not only the rather obvious violence of the Second World War, but also during the heyday of Hollywood films noirs which they both hugely enjoyed. Camus cultivated a Humphrey Bogart look with his collar turned up and a Gitanes cigarette permanently smouldering in his mouth. The romance, the glamour of being the dude with the shooter, calling the shots. Specially if you yourself are mostly the chap in the library with the pipe and the thick glasses.

As a specimen of intellectual French film noir, as a dissection of the worldview of communist politics in 1947 and 1948, and as pure entertainment, I think les Mains Sales is by far the best of these four plays.

Jessica and sexism

All the male characters utter contemptuously sexist comments either about Jessica in her absence, or to her face, which would get you locked up nowadays. They casually refer to her political naivety, her inability to do anything significant for the Revolution and her liability as distracting ‘bait’ for all the male characters. This was, after all, 20 years or so before the birth of Women’s Liberation / second wave feminism.

It is, for example, offensive to modern readers when the bodyguards make remarks about Jessica’s attractiveness in the first scene in the big house, and Hoederer is no better, dismissing her as a distraction, saying why doesn’t she ‘scratch her itch’ with Slick or George.

More to the point, there is something sexist about the entire conception of the play which sets the world of passive sensuality (Jessica) against the ‘active’ network of male politics and action (Hugo and Hoederer). With crashing stereotyping the main woman character represents Sex, anti-Politics (although, to be fair, she is balanced by clever calculating Olga, who is smart enough to try and save Hugo, and who, after all, throws a bomb in the middle of the play.)

But despite what we nowadays would describe as the #everydaysexism of the text, Jessica is, by and large, the most attractive character in the play. She is the least hoodwinked, the least deceived. She knows nothing about politics but she knows more about life than her over-intellectual husband, tricks the bodyguards with her nimble-wittedness, and is quite a match for Hoederer. She is the only one who sees through the men with all their high-handed rhetoric to ask the real questions, specifically; why does Hugo want to murder a man he respects and, by the end of the play, has come to love? Why? Fool!

Although it’s ostensibly a play about tough guy men politicking and conspiring, Jessica is – for me – the star of the show.

The movie

Despite being ‘the philosopher of the century’ it’s damn difficult to get hold of the movie versions of Sartre’s plays. The Respectful Prostitute seems impossible to track down in any shape or form. Here’s a print of the film version of Les Mains Sales, made in France in 1951. There are no sub-titles and the sound is out of synch for a lot of it, but it gives a stark sense of how stagey the story is. And how French.

Apparently, the French Communist Party were so angry about the play that they tried to organise a boycott of cinemas where the film was showing.

Credit

Les Main Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre was first performed in Paris in April 1948. This English translation – Dirty Hands by Lionel Abel – was published in the United States in 1949. Page references are to the 1989 Vintage paperback edition. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

Related reviews

Sartre reviews
Camus reviews
The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre versus Camus by Andy Martin (2012) an entertaining history and comparison of the two famous frenemies

3 Comments

by Simon on October 24, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in France, French literature, Politics, Theatre

Posted by Simon on October 24, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/dirty-hands-jean-paul-sartre/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Olga

Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson (1920)

E.F. Benson

Queen Lucia

Riseholme

Gossip

Lucia

Queens, thrones and wars

The mock heroic

Gay and camp

Plot synopsis

Mrs Quantock’s Guru

Olga Bracely

The string quartet

Signor Cortese

Princess Popoffski

Cast

Comic phrasing

Chunky prose style

Stunt

Cat

Summary

Credit

Related links

Mapp and Lucia reviews

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Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (1901)

Characters

The Prozorov family

The soldiers

Minor characters

Unseen characters

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Fates

The characters describe themselves

Leave me alone

Sssshhh, there’s somebody coming!

Hyperbole

Visions of the future

Thoughts

Natasha’s victory

Comparison with Waiting for Godot

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

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Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood (1935)

Mr Norris Changes Trains

The cast

Events, dear boy

Half-way hiatus

The big reveal

Coda

Gay culture

Isherwood disowned it

Related links

Weimar Germany

Novels from or about the 1930s

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The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

Plot

Decline and entropy

Crowded with people

Attics and inns

Less intense, more surreal

The superiority of The Trial

The weakness of The Castle

Long-winded

Meanings

1. Religious

2. Social-cultural

3. The Political

4. Hermeneutical

Samuel Beckett

Last word

Credit