All posts tagged Raskolnikov

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (2)

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s essays, reviews and miscellaneous prose pieces, and groups them under four headings:

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. Looking On

Earlier blog posts give my introductory notes to the essays and summary of the first four essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section. This post summarises and comments on the last six essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section, numbers 5 to 10 in this list.

  1. The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905)
  2. Modern Fiction (1919)
  3. The Modern Essay (1922) [review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920]
  4. How It Strikes a Contemporary (1923)
  5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923)
  6. Character in Fiction (1924) [a talk]
  7. ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926) [Thomas de Quincy]
  8. How Should One Read A Book? (1926)
  9. Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927)
  10. Craftmanship (1937) [BBC radio talk]

5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923: 5 pages)

The essence of fiction is character but the complexity of the world the Georgian novelists face means they have to reject the simplistic notions of character good enough for their Victorian and Edwardian forebears.

The story of this and the following essay are a bit confused.

In March 1923 the bestselling novelist Arnold Bennett wrote a review of Woolf’s avant-garde novel ‘Jacob’s Room’ (1922) in which he claimed her characters would never survive in ‘the real world’. This triggered Woolf to write 1) a rebuttal of Bennett’s criticisms that was published in the Athenaeum magazine in December 1923 under the title of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

Woolf realised she was onto something and expanded her points into a 2) longer essay and, the following year, presented the expanded version in a paper read to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University, still titled ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, on 18 May 1924.

When T.S. Eliot, as editor of The Criterion magazine, asked Woolf for an article she submitted the text of this talk and it was published in July 1924 under the title ‘Character in Fiction’. This second version, the expanded version, is the essay following this one in this selection, number 6 in my list. Woolf and her husband then published it themselves, as a standalone pamphlet, in their own Hogarth Press, on 30 October 1924. What makes things confusing is that they chose to publish it under the title of the short version, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

So this is my summary of the original 5-page review. In his selection Bradshaw follows it by publishing the longer version, as published in The Criterion and under the Criterion‘s title, ‘Character in Fiction’.

***

Woolf quotes the best-selling serious novelist of his day, Arnold Bennett, as writing in a recent essay that the foundation of good novel writing is character but that the Georgian novelists have lost interest in depicting character in preference for a blizzard of details. Woolf agrees but claims that it is Bennett and the two other successful novelists of his generation, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy, who are chiefly responsible for drowning character in facts and details.

She claims that the characters of modern books such as Kipps or ‘The Old Wives Tale’ pale into comparison with any character from ‘the splendid opulence of the Victorian age’, notable for ‘the astonishing vividness and reality of the characters.’

For Woolf the Edwardian novelists suffer from at least three disadvantage: 1) In a sense they simply couldn’t compete with the scale and depth of the great Victorians. 2) There was also something squalid and vulgar about them. She is very rude about Samuel Butler.

No sooner had the Victorians departed than Samuel Butler, who had lived below stairs, came out like an observant boot boy, with the family secrets in ‘The Way of All Flesh’.

In the same vein John Galsworthy is accused of being overly concerned with social injustices, which was even more true of H.G. Wells and his incessant issue-mongering.

3) The impact of Constance Garnett’s powerful English translations of the Russian classic novelists, particularly Dostoyevsky. Not only the Edwardians but even the Victorians couldn’t compete with the scale and depth and complexity of characters such as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin et al.

Galsworthy gives us his sense of compassion, Wells his generous enthusiasm and Bennett his sense of time passing, but none of them match up to the great Russians.

Woolf claims that it was this, the change to a new sense of the depth and complexity of human nature, which marked the decisive break between the culture of the Edwardians and of the Georgians (King Edward VII died and was succeeded by his son George V in May 1910). This is the thinking behind her much quoted saying that ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’, which comes in the expanded version of this essay (see below).

Character, she asserts, is crucial to human beings’ sense of life, of who we are and who other people are. Hence, if we disbelieve in the characters in novels as they are presented to us, then we want to go deeper and further, to search out their real meanings for ourselves.

At this point she introduces the figure of Mrs Brown – who is to feature so largely in the expanded version of the essay – but in a very different way from her later appearance. Here she is not much more than a name Woolf gives to her notion of a deeper, more unpredictable conception of character than the Edwardian writers can cope with, a notion which breaks up and shatters traditional ideas about character.

And it is amid these ruins of the old Victorian and Edwardian notions of ‘character’ that her generation of writers, the Georgians, have to somehow construct a reasonable dwelling place. She argues that the difficulties each of the Georgian writers encountered in trying to work out their own conception of ‘Mrs Brown’ (i.e. how to depict modern character) explain both the failures but also the daring experiments of her generation.

6. Character in Fiction (1924: 18 pages)

Extended criticism of the Edwardian novelists – Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells – for their excessive naturalistic detail which swamps their characters, for ignoring the spiritual for the material, which is why her generation of Georgian novelists must reject them.

This is the text of the paper read to The Heretics in Cambridge on 18 May 1924 mentioned above. (The Cambridge Heretics was a society formed at the University of Cambridge in 1909, to oppose compulsory Christian worship and celebrate humanist values.)

Woolf actually delivered it under the title of the original article rebutting Bennett i.e. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (see above) which was also the title she used when she published it in her own Hogarth Press edition. But in an effort to distinguish between the two versions, David Bradshaw publishes it here with the title it was given when published in T.S. Eliot’s journal, The Criterion i.e. ‘Character in Fiction’.

This explains why, when you look it up online, you find the text given here as ‘Character in Fiction’ is everywhere else given the Hogarth Press title of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.

***

Woolf opens with a modest, self-deprecating tone. She describes herself as ‘one solitary, ill-informed, and misguided individual’ and goes on to say:

It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me—the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.’

She gets the ball rolling going by quoting Arnold Bennett as saying that the most important thing in novel writing is creating character, everything follows from that. So that’s the Mr Bennett of the title accounted for.

To the reader’s mild surprise, Woolf suddenly makes the grand declaration that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’ What changed? She explains. Between her generation and the Victorians there is a gulf:

All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

Ah. So it’s an arbitrary but useful dividing line which she has airily invented.

She goes on to admit that to some extent everybody is an expert in ‘character’. To assess other people’s characters is a fundamental human need. But novelists take it a stage further:

The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.

Then she makes what appears, at first sight, to be one of her bewildering digressions. She tells everyone about an incident which occurred to her recently, when she was late catching a train and hurriedly climbed into a compartment where a man and woman seemed to be having an argument. They both shut up when she got in but she could feel the tension in the carriage. being Woolf, she promptly invented names for these two unknown strangers, naming the bluff irritated man Mr Smith and the much older, visibly poor woman, Mrs Brown. So this is the Mrs Brown of the title.

Woolf then reports this pair’s inconsequential conversation, Smith leaning forward and threateningly extracting from the woman what he wanted, namely a promise to meet someone named George somewhere on Thursday. Once assured of this, the man jumps out at Clapham Junction, while Mrs Brown continues on to Waterloo station, gets out and walks – like so many of the bit characters she observes in London streets – out of Woolf’s life.

What just happened? We have just watched Woolf conjure character and interest out of an apparently chance and trivial encounter and she begins to make her point:

I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character — not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.

She reminds us that Arnold Bennett claimed that fictional characters must be ‘real’ to make a book work, but Woolf asks the obvious question: what is reality? One man’s reality is another man’s nonsense.

For instance, in this article he says that Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes is real to him: to me Dr Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun.

Anyway, her point is this: Why are there no plausible characters in contemporary (1920s) fiction? She has another go at Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, saying their books lack the completion and closure of, say, Jane Austen. They miss something, they are incomplete.

To make her point she entertainingly speculates what Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett would have made of her made-up Mrs Brown. Her three little parodies are unusually funny for Woolf. She spends most effort on Bennett’s version. Then, to check, she takes down a novel of his, Hilda Lessways. She quotes from it, from the long factual description of Hilda Lessway’s house, in order to graphically demonstrate what a blizzard of realistic detail clutters up Bennett’s texts. No wonder his novels are so bloody long.

But Woolf says Bennett’s approach is the wrong way round. The house isn’t important, the person living in it, Hilda, is the important thing.

Back to 1910 and Woolf says that E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence spoiled their early work by giving in to the British public’s need for conventions and facts. They compromised with what she calls the Edwardian quality of Wells-Galsworthy-Bennett’s books. Foster and Lawrence had to wriggle free of the old conventions in order to capture the uniqueness of ‘Mrs Brown’.

By now we can see that this ‘Mrs Brown’ has become a metaphor for a particular view of reality, of Life as portrayed in fiction. And so Woolf comes to the present day and tells us that she can hear all around her the sound of authors crashing and smashing down those Victorian-Edwardian conventions in order to convey the truth of life. But the trouble with contemporary authors is they don’t know what to replace all those dead old conventions with. Hence the sense of confusion and lack of common values which she lamented in ‘How it strikes a contemporary’. It’s one thing to tear down the old rule, but what are the new rules and how do we agree on them?

Then Woolf is surprisingly harsh on a couple of notorious modern writers, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. She condemns Joyce for his indecency and Eliot for his obscurity. It’s part of her broader point that modern writers have to waste so much of their energy smashing the old conventions and forging their own way. This was not true of her ideal writers from earlier times, authors like Jane Austen or Macauley the historian, who were at one with their times and so wrote easily and gracefully. Instead:

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr Prufrock — to give Mrs Brown some of the names she has made famous lately — is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her.

Drawing to a conclusion, Woolf asks her readers to be tolerant of the problems and difficulties of modern fiction, to ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.’ Modern authors are trying their best but they are having to invent a whole new world.

After all this talk about smashing and crashing and difficulties, she ends with the surprising claim that:

We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown.

Summary

Well, this is a Great Essay. She delivers a good, clear point of view, forcefully and vividly expressed. Just as T.S. Eliot’s essays in the early 1920s helped him think through his position and helped the perplexed public understand what his new type of poetry was trying to do, so Woolf’s essays show her developing her new and radical aesthetic, and this is very interesting. And her criticism of Wells and Bennett’s materialism becomes more debatable, discussable and powerful, the more you read it.

7. ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926: 8 pages)

Justification of her wish to restore poetry to prose, on the model of her hero Thomas de Quincy.

She means poetic prose, prose poetry. She laments that most prose fiction is resolutely factual, that we are continually told that it is a solecism to include poetic flights in a prose text.

If the critics agree on any point it is on this, that nothing is more reprehensible than for a prose writer to write like a poet. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose—how often have we not heard that! Poetry has one mission and prose another

Trouble is that this occludes half of life, prevents us exploring our subjective, inner lives.

Therefore all that side of the mind which is exposed in solitude they ignore. They ignore its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams, with the result that the people of fiction bursting with energy on one side are atrophied on the other.

Luckily there are in all ages writers who are not themselves of the first rank but who widen the possibilities of writing for contemporaries and successors. The example she has in mind is Thomas de Quincey who wrote a huge amount, and had a poetic sensibility, but never wrote any poetry because he didn’t have the sustained gift; and by the same token wasn’t interested enough in people to be a novelist so never write fiction.

In what form was he to express this that was the most real part of his own existence? There was none ready made to his hand. He invented, as he claimed, ‘modes of impassioned prose‘. With immense elaboration and art he formed a style in which to express these ‘visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams’. For such prose there were no precedents, he believed; and he begged the reader to remember ‘the perilous difficulty’ of an attempt where ‘a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music’.

And so he carved out his own space, writing poetically in the other prose genres: essays, biographies, confessions and memoirs.

He was an exception and a solitary. He made a class for himself. He widened the choice for others.

She goes on to describe at length the strength and weakness of her favourite among de Quincey’s books, the ‘Autobiographic Sketches’. By this stage she’s made her point, for surely she is the modern de Quincey, deploying ‘modes of impassioned prose’ to convey a deeper perception of life, than the stony prose writers. We sit with our friends and family, eating, talking, in too close proximity.

But draw a little apart, see people in groups, as outlines, and they become at once memorable and full of beauty. Then it is not the actual sight or sound itself that matters, but the reverberations that it makes as it travels through our minds. These are often to be found far away, strangely transformed; but it is only by gathering up and putting together these echoes and fragments that we arrive at the true nature of our experience.

She is describing her own technique.

8. How Should One Read A Book? (1926: 11 days)

Quite frequently Woolf displays the number one mistake of intellectuals and writers in thinking that the present moment, the moment she’s writing about, is somehow uniquely special, and moreover uniquely degraded and decadent. Thus she opens this essay:

At this late hour of the world’s history…

But it isn’t ‘this late hour of the world’s history’. Who’s to say this isn’t an early hour in the world’s history, that the last 3,000 years are just a prelude to what comes after. In fact they obviously will be. Human history will go on as long as there are humans to record it and who knows how long that will be – maybe thousands and thousands of years to come. This decline-and-fall trope is a cliché and doesn’t give you confidence of her broader understanding of history or society. You get the feeling that her orientating herself in culture and history is subtly awry, but then there’s something awry about all her writings, the detachment, the alienation, but also the odd insights of the mentally ill.

Anyway, her point is that there are more books than ever before (another cliché, something she also complains about in ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’) so how should you read them? Well, there are no rules but the first thing to acknowledge is that books come in all shapes and sizes and genres and forms and we should respond appropriately.

Her essays often address issues which feel very outdated; her values are those of another age. Still in thrall to Victorian earnestness, she asks whether one should read books for pleasure or profit? Answer: no-one really cares. It’s a non-question. Maybe a GCSE-level question to get schoolchildren thinking but tangential to our concerns.

Anyway, she does make one simple Big Point, which is that nobody really understands what reading is. The physical activity, yes; you can test people on their ability to read, on their level of comprehension, on what they understand or remember. But at the more advanced level of registering nuance and implication… I wonder if there’s a specialist area of modern neuroscience devoted to the science of reading?

Belles letterism

Belles-lettres is a category of writing, originally meaning beautiful or fine writing… The phrase is sometimes used pejoratively for writing that focuses on the aesthetic qualities of language rather than its practical application.

I can’t see how a lot of Woolf could not be considered belle-letterism: the concern for fine, flowing elegant prose redolent of nineteenth century fine writing (Lamb, Pater); the use of the royal ‘we’; mention of ‘turning to the bookcase’ which evokes the comfy air of a book-lined study in a fine house or gentlemen’s club. It’s a permanent puzzle how radical and drastic her experiments in fiction were and yet how conservative and backward-looking her prose style is.

The problem [of what to read] is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens. Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

The leisurely, all-the-time-in-the-world elegance of this authorial ‘we’, the royal we, the superior ‘we’ of the privileged literary elite.

Co-production

At the end of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Woolf introduced the idea that any book is a co-production between the writer and the reader. (This idea was taken up decades later, in the late 1960s, by reader response theory and to some extent anticipates Roland Barthes’ ideas about the death of the author and the birth of the creative reader.) She does the same again, here:

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.

Writers’ worlds

She asks us to imagine encountering a beggar in the street (as I, in fact, routinely do, every time I go shopping there are people begging or selling the Big Issue at both the front and the back entrance to Sainsburys: no escaping the modern beggar in London town).

Woolf gives an entertaining account of how such an encounter would be turned into fiction by 1) Daniel Defoe, 2) Jane Austen, 3) Thomas Hardy. Out of this little frolic she makes the fairly obvious point that each really great writer is a world of their own with a distinct perspective.

It is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us.

She makes the equally obvious point that: sometimes the writing we have to work hardest to understand is ultimately the most rewarding; and that different works appeal to us in different moods. (Along the way she betrays her bias or premise that ‘real books [are] works of pure imagination’, in contrast to histories and other factual books.)

Over-reading

She mentions something equally as common but which I’ve never seen described before, the risk of ‘over-reading – when you overdo it with a book you’re enjoying, read too much, become tired, and suddenly realise you’re tired, fed up, and abruptly take against the whole thing:

Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and can not attend.

The cure (pretty obviously) is to read something else of a different type, Woolf’s favourite alternatives being biography or history. But:

However interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.

Thus speaks the novelist who (surprise) believes that the novel is the highest form of writing. The risk of reading literary writers is taking them at their own value. As you get older you realise there are many other types of writing with just as much claim to importance, and that’s before the thousands of other human activities we need (doctors, nurses, teachers etc). Presenting the reading and writing of novels as some kind of heroic endeavour is a form of chauvinism; deeper down, a type of narcissism, defined as: ‘an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own needs.’ All Woolf’s essays are about herself.

Reading poetry

Then she switches to what is required of reading poetry and its rewards.

Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity.

Good description.

After-reading

In the last part of the essay she describes what happens when we’ve finished reading a book i.e. we judge it. Here she suggests that in reading we go through two processes: one might be called the actual reading; the other the after-reading. It is really in the after-reading that all the bits and pieces we’ve been bombarded with during the reading coalesce into an overall view and opinion. Neat idea.

And is it good or bad, the novel, the fiction you just read? It’s the question which has been dogging literary theory for two and a half thousand years. The simple answer is – it’s up to you. Critics can’t help. They all disagree with each other. Opinions aren’t much help because ‘minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail’. The best approach is:

by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past.

We must ask demanding questions of the book and follow the answers to the limits of our ability. Only when we’ve completed this process can we hold our opinion up against other people’s or the criteria laid down by the great critics.

Summary

To summarise:

A good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.

A defence of reading

She has a last word for the moralists who criticise reading books as a lazy self-indulgent activity. She thinks the firmest defence is that books give pleasure, ‘mysterious, unknown, useless as it is’.

This is the argument of an aesthete and could have come from the lips of Oscar Wilde (we always have to remember what a Victorian Woolf was). The most obvious defence of reading is that it is educational and an educated population is an undeniable public good. The more educated and literate a population, the more economically active, productive and wealth creating. Then there’s the liberal defence that reading imaginative literature broadens the mind and produces a population of broad-minded, empathetic readers. Personally, I’ve always found this a weak argument because the twentieth century provides ample evidence of highly literate and civilised populations which allowed fiendish behaviour, Germany being the obvious one. Other factors are required to produce a liberal, civilised population besides just widespread literacy and reading.

Personally, I think practical arguments which eschew lofty aims and avoid moral principles, are most effective in a debate. And so it’s most effective not to argue that reading is valuable for this or that noble or social or moral end, but to start with the empirical fact that lots of people simply like reading. Begin with the evidence in the real world, the statistics about the numbers of books published, bought, borrowed and read each year. Can’t argue with the facts.

Lots of people go to football matches or pop concerts or go fishing or potter in their gardens. Reading takes its place among the range of activities practiced by tens of millions of people in a civilised society. It needs no more defence than that.

Comic conclusion

Woolf concludes with a piece of satirical exaggeration, stylish and silly, which made me smile.

That pleasure [of reading] is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.

Heroically wrong. Houses, pavements, plumbing, wiring, power stations, reservoirs and sewerage farms aren’t designed and built by bookish readers. But it’s a rare florescence of humour in Woolf’s writing and so a little treat.

9. Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927: 11 pages)

Describes a theoretical work of fiction in the future which will incorporate into its prose a high degree of poetry and drama, pointing towards her own novel The Waves.

Woolf claims that the present (1927) is problematic for fiction. She and so many of her contemporaries are struggling to express themselves. Why? One reason is that poetry, which was so easily available and expressive for the Victorians, has become impossibly complicated and difficult. Not only that but society is in turmoil, with the old Christianity destroyed yet people yearning to believe; with the awesome scale of scientific discoveries, from the age of the earth to the size of the universe, crushing the human spirit, creating an atmosphere of ‘doubt and conflict’.

For some reasons she moves on to consider the poetic play and notes how the attempts of the great nineteenth century poets – Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne – were miserable failures, and how the attempts of her contemporaries (maybe she’s thinking of T.S. Eliot’s doomed attempts to revive the play in Elizabethan blank verse) have likewise failed.

Why? You have to go back to the Elizabethan dramatists (as she so often in her essays goes back to Shakespeare) to understand why. It’s because the Elizabethan playwrights could write about anything; they completely shared a worldview and experiences and a diction with their audiences and readers, and so didn’t need to hold back. Modern authors, by contrast, live in a highly atomised, class-ridden society, where everyone lives locked up in their own houses, in their own living rooms, listening to their own records or radio or reading their own books, each in little worlds of their own. No wonder the modern writer finds it so hard to cut through.

Above all there’s a corrosive cynicism which means the modern writer daren’t be caught out celebrating simple beauty without hastening to show the dark and ugly side of life as well. Poetry hasn’t the flexibility, the ability to change subjects and register, which the fragmented modern mind requires.

Therefore – and here’s her point – it may be that modern prose is going to take over some of the duties formerly performed by poetry. It may be that in 10 or 15 years’ time prose will be used for purposes it has never been used for before; that that cannibal, the novel, will have swallowed up even more of the territory of literature.

In particular there may come a book which is written in prose but with the sensibility of poetry, which will have some of the exaltation of poetry but written in prose. It will be read but not acted. We won’t even have a name for its hybrid form. I realise that she is referring to the experimental novel she was currently writing, The Waves, published in 1931 and which she referred to not as a novel but as a ‘playpoem’, and she goes on to describe other ways in which poetry will be melded with prose in her experiment.

Surprisingly, maybe, she thinks the classic novel which most successfully incorporated poetry is Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne. Because it is continually changing subject matter, tone and register, we tend not to notice that there are passages of deliberately exquisite feeling, because these are completely incorporated into the text alongside the farce and pratfalls and bawdy and sentiment. Sterne fashions a prose which is getting on for being as flexible and omni-expressive as the Elizabethans.

10. Craftsmanship (1937)

A radio broadcast on April 20th, 1937. This text is immediately bewildering because it starts with a series of claims all of which seem questionable, simplistic or wrong.

We know little that is certain about words, but this we do know—words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

‘Words tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ This is so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. What words are, what language is and how it works, is too encyclopedic a subject to be knocked off in a pithy phrase. The claim is so vague and insubstantial I wondered if it’s one of her mad essays.

Let us then take for our starting point the statement that words are not useful. This happily needs little proving, for we are all aware of it. When we travel on the Tube, for example, when we wait on the platform for a train, there, hung up in front of us, on an illuminated signboard, are the words ‘Passing Russell Square.’ We look at those words; we repeat them; we try to impress that useful fact upon our minds; the next train will pass Russell Square. We say over and over again as we pace, ‘Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square.’ And then as we say them, the words shuffle and change, and we find ourselves saying, ‘Passing away saith the world, passing away… The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ And then we wake up and find ourselves at King’s Cross.

Woolf comes from another time and place. Having never done any real work, having servants to do all the housework, leading a pampered, sheltered life, Woolf has no idea, no idea at all, of the importance of words in professional contexts, in the law, in the civil service, in the administration of nations and counties and cities, in rules and regulations, in the vast world of healthcare and medicine. Only if you leave out most of what people in civilised societies use language for, can you acquiesce in the dreamy digressions of this pampered lady.

Very symptomatically the quote which ends the piece – ‘The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ – is from Tennyson, patron saint of mellifluous dreaminess. It’s a characteristically Victorian reference point, to a man who devoted his long career to ignoring the gritty, complex realities of the Victorian age and created a dream otherworld into which his many readers and fans could take refuge. Despite her often challenging handling of her content, in terms of her style Woolf’s novels offer a similar level of mellifluous, elegantly shaped escapism, part of the reason for her enduring popularity.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

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by Simon on April 18, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 18, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/18/selected-essays-by-virginia-woolf-1-reading-and-writing-2/

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Bienfilâtre sisters (10 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Véra (11 pages)

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

3. Vox populi (4 pages)

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

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

4. Two augurs (14 pages)

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

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

5. Celestial publicity (5 pages)

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

6. Antonie (2 pages)

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

7. The glory machine (16 pages)

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

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

8. The Duke of Portland (7 pages)

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

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

9. Virginia and Paul (5 pages)

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

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

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

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

10. The eleventh-hour guest (25 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the Wikipedia article on Symbolism explains:

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

Or, as de L’Isle-Adam puts it:

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

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

11. The very image (4 pages)

A very short text which is a premonition of Kafka.

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

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

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

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

12. The impatient mob (8 pages)

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

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

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

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

14. Sentimentality (9 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A small digression on outsider literary criminals

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

17. Flowers of darkness (2 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

19. The brigands (7 pages)

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

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

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

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

20. Queen Ysabeau (8 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

21. Sombre tale, sombre teller (10 pages)

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

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

22. The sign (19 pages)

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

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

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

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

23. The unknown woman (14 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

24. Maryelle (10 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25. Doctor Tristan’s treatment (5 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

26. Occult memories (5 pages)

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

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

27. Epilogue: The messenger (23 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Purple prose

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

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

Characteristic ingredients include:

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

A.W. Raitt’s notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit

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

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Posted by Simon on June 28, 2024

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The Farewell Party by Milan Kundera (1972)

Kundera’s third novel feels shorter and more streamlined than the first two. At 184 pages (cf The Joke pp.267 and Life Is Elsewhere pp.306) it is a slim, quick, funny, if sometimes shocking read. The first two novels, though comic in tone and often in content, contained big wodges of serious, sometimes tragic material about politics and repression under the Czech communist state. In The Farewell Waltz some of this content intrudes, in the character of Jakub the embittered political dissident. But apart from him, the rest of the story feels much closer to a farce, a sex comedy. According to the internet, a farce is:

a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay, and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations

That doesn’t really describe this book, but it does gesture towards the way The Farewell Party begins with a predicament and then goes on to wring as many comic situations and variations out of it as possible, placing its characters in improbable and unlikely situations in order to extract as much comedy, and plain absurdity, as possible.

The plot

First Day (Monday)

Klima is a famous Czech jazz trumpeter. He is happily married. Two months before the action starts he had played a gig at a health spa in the country. He and the band were treated to an after-gig party by a rich American staying at the spa (Bartleff), and Klima ended up having sex with one of the spa nurses, Ruzena. Now she’s pregnant, and on the second page of the book she rings him up at his Prague apartment to let him know it. Thus the ball is set rolling. The book is divided into five sections titled simply First Day, Second day etc. and it all happens over this tight, compressed timespan.

Klima is a coward, a timid man, who takes advantage of his fame to seduce women, but always feels nervous about it beforehand, guilty about it afterwards. Deep down, he is deeply, sincerely in love with his wife.

He tells the band he’s rehearsing with about the call, and his bandmates are sanguine, suggesting a variety of tactics to fob her off. The young guitarist (18) even suggests bumping her off in a supposed ‘road accident’. The reader is a little startled.

Klima thanks them all, then phones Ruzena and says he’ll come and visit her tomorrow. Then goes home and cobbles together a cock-and-bull story to tell his wife, Kamila, about having to play some socialist party youth conference or other. She doesn’t believe a word. She is well-attuned to his infidelities and lies. He knows he doesn’t believe her.

Second Day (Tuesday)

Klima motors to the spa and looks up Bartleff, the American patient with the bad heart, who hosted the party where Klima met the fateful nurse. He shares his problem (he’s gotten a nurse at the spa pregnant) with this bluff man of the world, who offers various suggestions.

Klima is surprised to learn that Bartleff paints religious pictures. There’s a new one, of Saint Lazarus, on the wall of his apartment. Bartleff explains it is blue because real saints’ halos really are blue. Klima is only paying half attention.

Klima phones Ruzena at the bath where she’s working and arranges to meet her after work, at 4pm. Then Bartleff takes him across the way, to the clinic, to meet Dr Skreta, the leading specialist at the spa.

IRONY The spa exists to treat infertile women. The place is packed with well-off, middle-aged women who can’t get pregnant. It is therefore a primal, structural irony that the entire plot rotates around a young woman who has gotten pregnant, after just one act of hurried coitus, but the father wants to terminate it.

Throughout the conversations with his band, and then with Bartleff, and now with Dr Skreta, the men discuss women as a problematic category, in an objectifying way, which I imagine most modern readers would find horrifying. I couldn’t tell whether the guitarist’s casual suggestion that they murder the nurse, and Klima’s casual acceptance of it, was meant to be ironic or straightfaced. The book is stuffed with men casually discussing the trouble with women and the problem with women and how to handle women and the differences between blondes and brunettes – dismissive and gross generalisations, which would give a feminist a heart attack.

Anyway, when Klima and Bartleff explain Klima’s problem, Skreta is immediately sympathetic. He tells them the next abortion committee meeting is on Friday and he can slot Klima and Nurse Ruzena straight in. And he shares a private passion of his which is that he is himself a keen jazz drummer. Could Klima maybe see his way to playing a gig with him and a bassist who also works at the spa?

So anxious is he to secure the decision for an abortion that Klima would agree to anything. Good, yes, whatever. They set the concert date for this Thursday, the day after tomorrow. Galvanised, Dr Skreta vows to set about creating the posters and printing up tickets.

Klima meets Ruzena at 4pm outside the baths and takes her to the spa dining rooms. Here he commences his strategy: he tells Ruzena that he loves her so much that’s why he didn’t phone her at all for two months after their liaison; it was because he was afraid of the intensity of his emotions. He carries on despite her sceptical protestations, to assert that of course he will leave his wife, and wants to marry Ruzena – she begins to soften and swoon – BUT: the first few years of any marriage are the most blissful and he wants to spend them with her, unobstructed, unencumbered with a new baby. And that’s why he thinks she should terminate the pregnancy.

He suggests they get out of the dining rooms – where he is uncomfortably aware that everyone in the place can see him. Ruzena is impressed that he has a car, and so is easily persuaded to go for a drive in the country. Klima puts his arm round her as he drives and presses home his advantage, spinning fantasies about where they’ll go once he’s divorced his wife and married her.

He stops the car at a scenic spot and they walk into the country. He kisses her, a long lingering passionate kiss. He is in the middle of describing how Italy will be the first stop and he’s in the middle of painting the beauties of Italy when she surprises him by giving in. Yes. OK. Alright. She’ll place herself in his hands. She’ll agree to go to the abortion committee on Friday. (p.44)

Klima can’t believe his luck. In the end it was so easy. They walk back to the car, her head on his shoulder, but as they get there realise a motorbike is parked next to it and the motorcyclist looms threateningly up to Klima and starts telling him that, just because he’s famous, he thinks he can get away with anything; well, not this time, buddy! Klima hasn’t a clue what’s going on, Ruzena tells the man to shut up and go away and scrambles into the car, as the man turns towards her side, Klima jumps in his side and accelerates off. She explains he’s a maniac who stalks her. We will, in fact, come to learn that this is Ruzena’s boyfriend, a local rough named Franta, who has had sex with her and who may, indeed, actually be the father of her baby…

Arriving back at the spa, Klima escorts Ruzena to her nurse accommodation in the stylishly named Karl Marx house, before walking thoughtfully to Bartleff’s flat. He knocks and when there’s no answer, tentatively opens the door. For a moment he is awed. The room is lit by a soft blue glow. Remember the dialogue when Bartleff explained that he liked painting religious pictures? And that he had painted St Lazarus’s halo blue because that is actually the colour of saints’ halos? Well… Klima backs out and quietly closes the door, but next minute it is opened by Bartleff looking fresh and wearing the same clothes he had on that morning, who welcomes him inside, rejoices when he hears that Ruzena has given in and agreed to an abortion, and plies him with food (crackers and tinned ham). Then waves him off as Klima leaves, belatedly, to drive back to the capital and explain why his day took so long to his long-suffering wife.

Third Day (Wednesday)

A friend of Dr Skreta’s arrives. This is Jakub, who was in trouble with the authorities in the grim years after the 1948 coup, and for whom Dr Skreta knocked up a blue pill of concentrated poison, so that if Jakub was arrested, before he was tortured, he could control his own destiny and end it all. Now he announces he is leaving the country, he has official permission and is going to a teaching position abroad. He wants to return the pill. Dr Skreta won’t hear of it and pushes it back into Jakub’s hand when it is profferred.

(There is some very casual comedy, when Skreta forces his friend to accompany him into the examination room where a woman is lying on her back, naked, with her legs wide open so Skreta can examine her. It is a feature of Skreta’s character that he takes all this in his stride and tells the nurse to fetch his fellow doctor a white coat, and then confidently asks for his second opinion. So that the lady on the table is not discombobulated by the presence of another man looking at her privates, but quite flattered to have two specialists examining her case. Dr Skreta’s boundless self-confidence will recur at important moments later in the story.)

Jakub is here because he’s come to say goodbye to his ‘ward’, Olga. This young woman is the daughter of a friend of Jakub’s who was arrested and executed by the communists in the purges of the early 1950s when Olga was just seven. Jakub vowed to look after her, became her legal guardian, and when she left school got her a job here at the spa, via his old friend Dr Skreta.

Skreta says Olga is fine and tells Jakub which accommodation block to find her in. He also tells him about a) the famous jazz trumpeter Klima, his problem with the pregnant nurse, and how Skreta is going to play in a concert with him this Thursday. And b) about his latest money-making scheme. You know the rich American, Bartleff? He paints oil pictures. Skreta is trying to persuade Bartleff to let him become his agent and sell the paintings to gullible ladies at the spa, and take a commission.

Jakub shakes his head. He’s known Skreta since school, and he is continually coming up with hare-brained schemes.

We are introduced to Olga. She is bright but not excessively so. She fusses and frets about her appearance and figure. She is called out of the pool by Nurse Ruzena who she cordially dislikes. She makes a fuss about what to wear for Jakub, makes a decision then goes to meet him for lunch in the spa dining room. He tells her he’s leaving the country.

She is sad but, as usual, they end up discussing her father. Recently she’s been receiving letters claiming he wasn’t the political innocent Jakub’s brought her up to believe, but himself a hardline communist and arrester of others, till he himself was consumed.

Jakub’s thread introduces the serious themes of History or, to be precise, the tragic history of Czechoslovakia’s early years under communist rule, when some 100,000 opponents of the regime were imprisoned or sent to camps, and there were successive waves of executions of enemies of the state, traitors and saboteurs. Olga’s questions prompt several basic reflections from Jakub:

1. It was all a long time ago. The Farewell Party was published in 1972, 24 years after the 1948 communist coup, and that’s been long enough for Jakub to reflect that the younger generation can have no idea what it was like and, indeed, even people like himself who lived through it, are starting to forget what it was really like.

‘Time flies so fast, and the past is becoming harder and harder to understand.’ (p.60)

2. And, cynically, he remarks that if he’s learned anything from the experience of living through those times, it’s that, most people spend most of their lives living in a small bubble of family and work, but if History intervenes, and if the situation becomes stressed and difficult, then people will do anything to survive. Now the dust has settled, he thinks there was no ultimate difference between the communist authorities who locked up all those innocent people, and the victims. People are people.

There isn’t a person on this planet who is not capable of sending a fellow human being to death without any great pangs of conscience. At least I have never found anyone like that. (p.61)

Cut to Ruzena’s morning at work, where her fellow nurses flock round her and ask how her meeting with the famous trumpeter went. They are disappointed when she says he’s persuaded her to terminate the pregnancy. One of them gets a tube of pills out of a drawer and gives it to Ruzena, tranquilisers to calm her nerves.

Exiting the building she is again confronted by her young man, Franta, who begs her to be more friendly and loving to him. But Ruzena has set her sights high, on a national celebrity, o Klima, and tells Franta to bugger off. She tells him he’s driving her frantic, he’ll drive her to suicide if he keeps on harassing her like this! (p.66)

Back in Olga’s room, Olga and Jakub continue their conversation. He tells her about his friend Dr Skreta and his eccentric ideas. On an impulse he pulls out the blue pill, the suicide pill, and explains how Dr Skreta made it for him with no questions asked, just before Jakub was hauled off to prison. (He was lucky; he only served one year.)

Blue symbolism The colour blue recurs in key symbols. The sky is blue above this rather fairy tale spa. The mysterious halo in Bartleff’s room is blue. And the pill of death is blue.

The dog squad

As well as an irritating young boyfriend, Ruzena also has an embarrassing old dad, who has joined some cockamamy squad of old codgers who have formed a ‘squad’ to round up all the stray dogs running wild in the town who are pooing and peeing everywhere, or so they claim.

The importance of this for the plot is that it triggers the deep dislike between Jakub and Ruzena. For Ruzena has just finished her shift and is walking between buildings, her head full of thoughts about the two worlds she inhabits: the stifling provincial one of the spa, characterised by hordes of fat middle-aged women and hardly any eligible men, only biker losers like Franta – and the big wide glamorous world of Prague and beyond, with which she associates Klima. Throughout the book she vacillates between going along with his request for an abortion, and then in a panic realising having his baby is her only hope for escaping her sad little destiny.

She is in just such a wavering state when she sees her dad and a few of the other dog squad emerging from bushes where they’ve been hunting dogs with long poles with wire nooses at the end. They’ve captured a dachshund. Suddenly Ruzena sees Jakub walking along the pavement towards her. He was sitting with Olga earlier, Olga who she hates for her superior manner. Now Jakub calls to her ‘Come here, don’t be afraid, come to me’ and is startled until, a second later, she realises he is talking to a dog, to a squat ugly bulldog which was behind her. He has completely blanked her in preference for some ugly mutt! The humiliation!

As Jakub picks it up to protect it from the dog hunters, Ruzena steps forward and grabs its collar, telling Jakub she’ll report him to the authorities.

They engage in an absurd tug of war which is also, Kundera points out, no less than a battle between two worldviews: she, driven by resentment and humiliation and anger at her cramped small-town life, burns to take revenge on this smarmy, self-confident, big city intellectual. He, for his part, sees in her exactly the petty-minded, bureaucratic, vengeful, small-minded party zealot who, in their thousands, supervised the arrest, stage trials and imprisonment of him and a hundred thousand like him, epitome of all those ‘prison guards, inquisitors and informers.’ (p.75)

In fact it’s even worse: Ruzena is the type of the bystander who rushes to help the executioner, rushes to pin the victim down so his throat can be cut, and full of pious self-justifying high-minded rhetoric about society and morals – a type who came to prominence in the century of calamity.

In this moment History returns in the form of a man and a woman absurdly tugging at the collar of a mutty old bulldog. Jakub wins, and yanks her hand away, turning and quickly entering the building where Olga lives. For a moment their eyes meet in a look of pure hatred.

Jakub takes the dog up to Olga’s apartment where Dr Skreta arrives and, with his usual confidence, announces the dog is well known, named Bobis, and belongs to a couple a little way out of town. Now he takes Jakub with him to Bartleff’s apartment, explaining on the way his latest hare-brained scheme, which is to ask the American Bartleff to adopt him, Dr Skreta, so that Skreta immediately becomes an American citizen and can travel freely outside Czechoslovakia!

The three men gather for a convivial chat on many subjects. It is now that we explicitly learn that Bartleff believes halos are a consequence of experiencing oneness with the Godhead, divine delight and are, indeed, blue. Doesn’t think this – he knows it (p.78).

Moving on from this eccentric view, they go on to discuss Klima’s predicament, and then the conversation turns to the topic of fertility in general. Jakub, clearly established now as the Cynic, gives a suite of reasons why he thinks human beings should not procreate, climaxing with the Big One, that procreating implies an absolute affirmation of human life which he, personally, after his life experiences, feels unable to give. After all, as even the usually bullish Dr Skreta is forced to admit:

‘Humanity produces an incredible number of idiots.’ (p.92)

Olga leaves her water treatment and finds a note on her door telling her they’re all at Bartleff’s. There she joins Bartleff, Skreta and Jakub for a convivial private diner, brought to them by a waiter (Bartleff is a rich American, remember) during which he holds forth with a pet theory about the religion of the saints, namely that is was built on a thirst for admiration rather than holiness, as such.

Then the meal is interrupted by a beautiful little girl of 12, in a white dress tied with huge bow behind which looks like angel wings, appears to tell Bartleff he has another appointment. About this stage – what with his knowledge of halos and religion and the arrival of this little angel – I began to wonder whether Bartleff would be a redeeming saving angel in the story: whether it would have a truly supernatural element, as all these little symbols and moments suggest…

Bartleff leaves and Olga, with the callousness of youth, dismisses him as a posing self-dramatist. Skreta and Jakub walk her back to room and then go for a stroll under the big August moon. And it is now that Skreta lets Jakub in on a profound secret: all the women he treats for infertility and who get magically pregnant (including Bartleff’s own wife) – he, Skreta, has created a frozen store of his own sperm, and he is inseminating them all with his own seed. He is creating a world of brothers. No end of communist rhetoric craps on about a world of equality, where brothers and sisters share a common interest, and common values. Well, he, Skreta, is taking steps to really bring it about!

But, as so often in Kundera, his interlocutor, Jakub, is miles away, thinking about his conflicted feelings for Olga, and whether to leave tomorrow or not. He only half hears what Skreta tells him, and thinks it’s another one of his hare-brained schemes.

Fourth Day (Thursday – 47 pages)

Mrs Klima knows all about her husband’s infidelities and they drive her wild with jealousy. As soon as he said some communist committee obliged him to play a benefit gig at some spa resort with a pickup band including a doctor, she knew he was lying. Now, Thursday morning finds them in bed and he lies all over again and can see in her face she doesn’t believe a word. She goes to work. She works in a theatre. She used to be a famous actress but fell ill and her stage career ended. Now she asks if she can have the afternoon off. She’s going to take the train to this bloody spa and confront Klima with his lies!

Olga is having her morning dip in the spa pool among all the naked fat middle-aged women when a young dude in jeans walks in, then a few more follow him. They’re a film crew down from Prague, they’re filming a documentary about the spa. Olga is outraged, gets out and flings a towel round her, before storming off to her cubicle, leaving the woman supervising the pool, nurse Ruzena, fuming.

Jakub has been persuaded to stay on at the spa for an extra day. Dr Skreta has told him that the bulldog which he saved from the dog squad belongs to a young couple who live out in a village. So he drives the dog back to their owners, a young couple with a baby. They’re grateful and give him lunch and present their squawling new baby. What a big nose it’s got, rather like Dr Skreta’s comic banana nose. Hang on! Jakub asks if they were treated by Dr Skreta? ‘Yes! How did he know.’ So maybe Skreta’s hare-brained scheme about breeding a little generation of brothers isn’t mad after all. Maybe he really has been treating all the women’s fertility problems by impregnating them with  his own semen.

For Franta, Ruzena is the only girl he’s ever slept with, she made him a man, she is his world. To watch her swanning off with this big city musician makes him furious. He finishes a fridge repair job (that’s his work) and motorbikes into the spa, heading for the concert hall to watch Klima practice for that night’s gig. For the rest of the day he will be Klima’s shadow.

Jakub drives back to the roadside restaurant where he’s arranged to meet Olga. He doesn’t notice Klima’s car there or Franta’s motorbike. Klima is waiting impatiently for Ruzena and when she arrives he guides her impatiently to a table by the window. She’s been realising Klima is lying to her and begun to be full of righteous indignation. Klima grasps her hand and is half way through telling her how much she loves him when she announces that she’s changed her mind: she’s going to have the baby after all. Klima’s world collapses around him. Glancing out the window she sees Franta peeking out at them from behind some bushes. God, he’s following her everywhere. Feeling harassed she remembers the tube of pills her nurse friend gave her, pulls it out and opens it and pops one of the blue tranquilisers. Klima takes both her hands in his and begins some long speech and then it crosses his mind to take her for a cruise, maybe being in the car will bring back the mood of yesterday.

So up they get and leave. Jakub has been watching all this from across the restaurant and now goes over to the vacated table (the one with the best view in the place). He notices the vial of blue pills Ruzena has left on the table and picks it up and idly plays with it before opening it and being struck how the pills inside are the identical colour as the famous suicide pill Dr Skreta made for him. He gets the suicide pill out. He toys with it in his hand. Playfully he slips it inside Ruzena’s glass vial.

And just at the exact moment Ruzena appears at the table asking for her pills back. She’d got all the way to Klima’s car then realised she’d forgotten them. Jakub hesitates. Ruzena insists. They both recognise each other as the antagonists over the lost dog. Their hatred revives. She reaches out for the vial and he moves his hand up out of reach while he blusteringly tries to think of an excuse not to give them up. But Ruzena screams at him to hand them over, and suddenly something snaps in him. Coldly and ceremoniously, Jakub hands over the vial with the poison pill in it.

For the next seventy or so pages of the book, whenever we come back to Jakub, he will be agonising that he has just condemned the young nurse to death and that – given his political history – this makes him no better at all than the inquisitors and executioners who murdered his friends.

Mrs Klima gets a train to the spa to spy on her friends and is pleasantly surprised to come across the film crew who so upset Olga. They are old friends, they persuade her to come for a lunchtime drink.

On the drive it occurs to Klima that what might persuade Nurse Ruzena that he loves her would be if he made love to her again, if they reconnected on a primal level. Come and see me after the concert, he says, and drops her off.

Ruzena is walking through town at a loss what to do when he hears a voice calling. It’s the three-man camera crew who she let into the pool this morning and so upset Olga. They call her to join them and the pretty woman with them (Klima’s wife).

Jakub hurries his meal with Olga to an end and then rushes to the concert hall where he finds Skreta and Klima rehearsing. He asks if either of them have seen Ruzena, which they haven’t. Suddenly it dawns on him that this is the fulfilment of a deep unconscious wish. He is now proving his most cynical tenet true: there is no difference between the persecutors and the victims. He is thrilled to be murdering one of the petty-minded little bullies. And at the same time he is horrified by himself.

In the nook at the outside pub the three-man film crew are chatting up the two women, the director rubbing Mrs Klima’s thigh with his, while the cameraman puts his arm round Ruzena and accidentally-on-purpose touches her breast. Things are heading towards a drunken orgy when Ruzena suddenly sits bolt upright. She has recognised Kamila as being Klima’s husband. Suddenly it feels like the whole universe is mocking her. The men laugh at her sudden outburst of propriety, and she is longing, longing to tell them she carries the fruit of the loins of oh-so-high-and-mighty Kamila the famous actress. She reaches into her handbag to get the vial of tranquilisers, when she feels a strong hand grip her wrist.

It is Bartleff. His intervention just as Ruzena was about to pop the suicide pill feels a little supernatural, and emphasises even more his magic and mysterious powers. A big, confident man, Bartleff sits down with the crew – who make the resentment they feel at this intrusion prety obvious – and takes charge of proceedings, asking the boy waiter for the best wine in the house, insisting the owner comes to join in a toast, and toasting Ruzena’s beauty. Suddenly she feels transformed from a squalid small town girl to an angel.

Bartleff gets up and accompanies Ruzena off. The party atmosphere of the others collapses. Kamila feels suddenly revolted by the film crew, gets up and leaves.

The concert Jakub takes Olga to the concert. As they settle in, he sees Bartleff and Ruzena sitting not far away and believes more than ever that things have been arranged by a malicious God to torment him. The concert starts and, after a few numbers, Jakub begins to stand up, so he can go and talk to them and warn them about the pill, but at that moment a) Olga grabs his hand and tells him to sit down b) Bartleff and Ruzena themselves get up and swiftly exit the hall. The moment has gone.

Klima had noticed Bartleff and Ruzena coming in and felt confident she was there and he could see her after the show. But when he notices Bartleff and Ruzena exiting, his energy slips, he feels deflated: he just wants the concert to be over. But Dr Skreta is drumming like crazy behind him and won’t let him stop.

Bartleff takes Ruzena back to his apartment and tells her he loves her, he has always loved her. His words are like honey, like magic, she warms and stirs and for the first time for as long as she can remember is not full of self-hatred and doubt. As Bartleff describes how beautiful she is, Ruzena begins to believe it. As he begins to strip her, her body turns to him like a sunflower towards the sun.

As the concert ends Jakub takes Olga back to her room. His mind is obsessed with Ruzena and the pill and he goes round and round in circles trying to decide whether he is a murderer or a hypocrite or an angel of death or the instrument of some higher purpose. He hardly notices when Olga leans forward and kisses him.

Mrs Klima elbows her way through to the dressing room after the concert. She is convinced her husband is having an affair, and expects the arrival of some dollybird any moment, and so is watching him like a hawk. But Klima just seems to be tired, and tells Dr Skreta and the bassist the same. Tired and just wants to go to his room.

Olga kisses Jakub again and leads the absent-minded older man over to the couch where she starts loosening his shirt.

Franta was at the entire concert and now tails the trumpeter to the dressing room, hangs around, and then follows him towards his temporary flat, but… where the devil is Ruzena? Franta just knows she was going to meet the trumpeter after the show, so where’s she got to?

Three acts of love

Kamila and Klima walk to the building and apartment Dr Skreta has arranged for them to stay in overnight. It’s in the same corridor as Olga’s and Bartleff’s. In one room Bartleff is showing Ruzena the most wonderful night of her life; not because of his sexual technique as such, but because he has a magical way of really making her feel beautiful and loved.

Next door Olga has stripped and laid on the couch and Jakub is quietly appalled to find himself in the position of having to make love to her lest he embarrass and humiliate her on the last time they’ll ever spend together. Reluctantly he tries to rise to the occasion, despite a world of details reminding him that she is his ward and charge.

And in the third bedroom, Kamila slowly strips for Klima but he knows she is only doing it, provocatively, because she is convinced he had some erotic escapade lined up. He hates her jealousy and, in his bitterness, his penis shrinks away from her ministrations, convincing Kamila even more that it is not she her husband had been planning to make love to that night.

Meanwhile, Ruzena has never known love like it. She realises she has her whole life ahead of her. There is no need to rush into anything. She falls asleep snuggled in Bartleff’s arms and, when she wakes in the middle of the night, notices the dark room lit by a strange blueish glow. Is he a saint?

Fifth Day (Friday – 34 pages)

Next morning Klima gets up early to go and find Ruzena but she isn’t at her work, or in her dormitory. Unknown to him he is tailed everywhere by Franta, who’s been waiting outside Ruzena’s dormitory all night, frantic with jealousy. Eventually, Ruzena exits from Bartleff’s apartment and is confronted in quick succession by both men, Klima desperate that she is going to come with him to the abortion committee at 9am as they agreed yesterday.

Jakub wakes and immediately calls the bathhouse asking for Ruzena. They say she’s busy right now. An enormous weight lifts from his shoulders, and he thinks: what if the pill Dr Skreta made him was harmless? Yes, that would be the act of a true friend. And he spends a page expanding on this idea that Skreta, the true friend, would never have given him poison. Phew! What a relief!

Klima waits in the waiting room outside the spa pools where Ruzena works till 9. She emerges and he escorts her in silence to the abortion clinic.

Jakub dresses and tiptoes out of the room without waking Olga. He bumps into Mrs Klima who is just leaving their room. They introduce each other and walk downstairs, cross the road into the park. Jakub is absolutely staggered by Kamila’s beauty. Now, on the verge of leaving his homeland forever, he is overcome by a sense that he has never understood the world of art beauty and culture. Suddenly, on impulse, he tells her he is going away, he is leaving the country, he is never coming back, and that she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Then he turns and walks away leaving her standing, watching him, till he disappears from view.

The abortion clinic is grim. Abortion is frowned on in the communist state. The country needs more patriotic citizens. The waiting room is plastered with posters encouraging procreation and praising motherhood.

Jakub returns to Olga’s room. She’s awake now, and inordinately pleased with herself. She is no longer a passive creation of men, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s ward. She has asserted her personhood. Jakub sadly says he really is leaving. He offers to walk her to the pool. On the way she comes over as so gushingly girly, so sweetly indifferent to the fact that he’s leaving his homeland forever, that he realises he has, once again, misjudged the situation. The only thing he knows, is that he knows nothing.

The meeting of the little abortion committee should be grim but is comical. Dr Skreta chairs the session, flanked by two chunky communist party matrons, and he has their measure to perfection. He puts on a tone of aggrieved sternness, and reads the unhappy couple a lecture about the joys of procreation and the needs of the socialist state etc. The matrons nod heavily. But then, with a sigh, he turns to the psychiatric report saying Mrs Klima is in a delicate state, a divorce might kill her. And we don’t want young nurse Ruzena to suffer the indignity of single motherhood. And so, with a heavy heart, Skreta declares that, alas and alack, he is going to sign the form for the abortion to go ahead. The matrons sternly lecture Klima and the nurse and then in turn sign the form. He goes to get up but they say, ‘Not so fast’. They dismiss Ruzena but announce that Klima has to remain behind to ‘volunteer’ to give blood. Cheap at half the price.

Finally, they allow Ruzena to leave, but she finds an angry Franta waiting outside, who blasts her with accusations and follows her down the stairs despite seeing she is distraught.

Having made all his goodbyes, Jakub crosses the spa, and comes across a group of schoolchildren being taken on a nature trail. Looking closely he sees that more than one of them looks like a little Dr Skreta and feels giddy, feels a sense of unreality. All his life he has been close to the centre of things, to the heart of the action, to politics and weighty affairs. What if all that was nonsense? What if the real beating heart of a country, a nation, of the thing we call reality, is miles away and other than we can possibly imagine?

Furious Franta follows Ruzena across the spa and into the hall where she works, up the stairs and along the corridor and into the hall lined with beds where women patients rest in cotton dressing gowns after their dip, shouting all the way that it is his baby and how dare she seek to terminate it. (Franta is under the misapprehension that Ruzena is pregnant with his baby and has somehow paid or blackmailed the trumpeter to pose as its father in order to secure a termination. The much worse reality hasn’t dawned on him.)

At the climax of their argument Ruzena reaches into her handbag, pulls out the vial of tranquilisers, fetches out the one at the top and pops it into her mouth, moments later feels a stab of pain in her tummy, bends double, and falls to the floor, dead!

The aftermath of nurse Ruzena’s mystery death

Franta gets even more hysterical and starts shouting that he killed her, it was him, he drove her to it. Another nurse runs to investigate then goes off to get a doctor. A dozen semi-naked women patients cluster round the figure on the floor. Everyone is pricked with curiosity to see death.

At the very same moment, Jakub is making his goodbyes to his old friend Dr Skreta. He decides to come clean about Olga’s father. He was not the persecuted hero everyone believes him to have been, on the contrary. It was Olga’s father who sent him, Jakub, his best friend, to prison. In fact Olga’s father thought he was sending Jakub to his execution. Olga’s dad felt very heroic about it, because it showed that he could put the principles of the revolution above personal concerns.

Six months later he himself was arrested, tried and executed, and Jakub was eventually released. This revelation leads Skreta to make a complicated analysis of Jakub’s mixed motives in looking after the girl, but Jakub disagrees with it, and then they’re both getting into a big argument when the phone rings, Skreta picks it up and learns there’s an emergency over at the baths, he is needed.

Crucially, they don’t tell him that nurse Ruzena has dropped dead, and so he doesn’t tell Jakub. Instead they do a big handshake and part for ever, walk down the corridor and out of the building, Jakub makes for his car, and Dr Skreta hurries to the halls.

A police inspector has arrived at the scene. He is standing over the prostrate body interviewing witnesses and trying to keep the frantic Franta at bay, who keeps on yelling that he did it, he drove her to suicide. (And indeed, for the rest of his life, he will carry this conviction like the mark of Cain on his forehead.

There is now some sharp comedy for Dr Skreta demonstrates his superhuman ability to grasp a situation and say the best thing. Since Franta is so loudly claiming the baby was his, Skreta immediately falls in with this lie, and then explains to the inspector that Klima had accompanied her to the abortion clinic because he was doing a kindly deed and volunteering to appear to be the father, so that Ruzena wouldn’t be forced to marry Franta.

Jakub drives off in blissful ignorance of how his chance gesture with the poison pill played out. He spends three densely argued and highly intellectual pages worrying about the meaning of his act, and comparing it unfavourably with Raskolnikov’s famous murder in Crime and Punishment. Here, as elsewhere throughout his works, a Kundera character reflects that whereas in the old days life was heavy and tragic, now it seems almost unbearably light, as if it can blow away in a puff of wind. (p.171)

Klima has finally finished giving blood and walks briskly over to Dr Skreta’s office to find the doctor out. When the doctor finally walks in looking a bit ruffled, Klima grabs his hand and thanks him profusely, for playing such a great set on the drums, but for stage-managing the abortion committee so smoothly. Well, it turns out not to matter since Ruzena is dead.

Klima continues shaking the doctor’s hand, his mouth agape, his brain trying to process this news, which lifts the nightmare burden he’s been labouring under for so long. Quickly, Skreta fills him in. It looked like suicide, and her boyfriend has been telling everyone that a) he’s the father and b) she threatened to kill herself if he didn’t leave her alone. So – Skreta explains to Klima – on the spot he devised the story that Klima had done the chivalrous thing in accompanying Ruzena to the clinic, but was in no other way involved.

He’s in the clear! They shake hands a bit more then Klima leaves the office and staggers back to the room to meet his wife. He kisses her face and neck and shoulders and then sinks to the floor and kisses the hem of her skirt, God he is so grateful, more grateful than words can express. They carry the bags down into the car, and he asks her to drive back to Prague and all the way there her beauty fills the car like a fine fragrance.

But then we go over to her mind, and we see her slowly realising, for the first time, that maybe the only thing that holds her to Klima is her jealousy. But that strange man who stopped her in the park and simply told her she was beautiful before walking off… he made her think. She is beautiful, and strong and independent. If she overcame her obsessive jealousy of Klima what would be left? Precious little. For the first time she can envision a future without him. And she smiles.

And Klima, completely misinterpreting her smile, looks over at her smiling and is filled with love and relief.

The inspector

The last ten pages are taken up with a mixture of broad comedy, clever paradoxes and cunning reversals. Olga arrives in Bartleff’s apartment to find him, the inspector and Dr Skreta discussing the death. Bartleff is absolutely firm that the night before nurse Ruzena had undergone a spiritual experience unlike any other in her life, and had seen a world full of new possibilities, and that suicide is absolutely the last thing she would have done.

Several of his remarks irk the inspector who decides to put the American in his place by devoting a page to demonstrating how all the existing evidence could in fact be stacked up to prove in a court of law that Bartleff was the murderer, the motive being to shut the nurse up before Bartleff’s wife arrives later that day. A tense silence. Then the inspector laughs. He was just showing how evidence in such an ambiguous case can be twisted anyway you want (which makes a distant link with Jakub’s remarks at several places about ‘revolutionary justice’ which incarcerated him and thousands like him).

The inspector shakes hands and leaves and Bartleff goes to his room to change. Alone with Dr Skreta, suddenly Olga remembers the blue pill, the suicide pill, which Jakub showed her, could… might it… was that… She asks him straight out: Did he ever prepare a poison pill for Jakub?

‘That’s absolute nonsense. I never gave him anything of the kind,’ Dr Skreta replied with great firmness. Then Bartleff returned from the other room, wearing a different necktie, and Olga took her leave of both men. (p.182)

I love Dr Skreta.

And the end belongs to him. On the penultimate page, as he and Bartleff are strolling to the railway station to meet their wives, Skreta hesitantly asks if Bartleff can adopt him. Initially surprised, Bartleff lets himself be talked into it and announces it will be great fun.

And then, as the two wives get off the train and walk with their husbands, Mrs Bartleff shows them all her new baby. And they all comment on how very like Dr Skreta he looks, ha ha ha. But of course the reader knows this must be because Mrs Bartleff is yet another of his patients who he inseminated with his sperm. The baby really is his son! But also his brother, since Bartleff has just adopted him. And so the two happy couples walk from the train station towards the resort, laughing and joking about the brotherhood of man under a big autumn moon.

Thoughts

Clever, isn’t it? Very clever. Very beautifully assembled. Like a Swiss clock, with all the parts fitting together just so.

The Farewell Party is funny and a little mysterious (the blue halo and the saint) and thought provoking (Jakub’s political musings about human nature and betrayal), but in the end, there’s no getting around the fact that the central premise is how to shut up and repress a difficult woman, so all concerned can go back to their philandering ways – and that the only solution turns out to be killing her.

I came to really like Dr Skreta’s combination of eccentricity with his whip-smart ability to manage situations (the abortion committee, his immediate exculpation of Klima when he is called to the dead nurse). He was the purest comic creation, not least in his plan to create a real brotherhood of man by inseminating all his patients.

Jakub is a more complex creation, like a bitter ghost overthinking everything but, as always, I warmed to his accounts of the political repression of the country, and of the grim logic of revolutions i.e. people betray their best friends in order to show their revolutionary zeal.

I hoped right to the bitter end that the mystique surrounding Bartleff (blue halo, painter of saints, big hearty ability to put people at ease, the angelic little girl who appears at his dinner party…) would mean that he would somehow, magically, be able to revive Ruzena. After all, the point is made at the start of the novel that he has just painted a portrait of a saint named Lazarus, named after the man Jesus raised from the dead. I can’t overcome a deep sense of disappointment that this didn’t happen, that he didn’t somehow raise Ruzena from the dead… Maybe, on reflection, that is the point.

Klima is a cipher – the harassed philanderer. It’s often the minor characters which intrigue and linger in your mind. Mrs Klima – Kamila – doesn’t appear much but when she does her jealousy, her own status as once-famous actress, and her dawning realisation that she might be able to go it alone, these make for a potent character. And Olga is a minor character but has a lingering effect: Jakub is appalled that she takes their act of love so lightly; but in this she represents precisely the lightness and inconsequentiality of the young generation.

Related links

Milan Kundera’s books

1967 The Joke
1969 Life Is Elsewhere
1969 Laughable Loves (short stories)

1972 The Farewell Party
1978 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1986 The Art of the Novel (essays)

1990 Immortality
1995 Slowness
1998 Identity

2000 Ignorance
2014 The Festival of Insignificance

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by Simon on August 29, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 29, 2019

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