All posts tagged Rossetti

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

You may well complain of the vagueness of my language.
(Woolf acknowledging that she doesn’t always have clear ideas or express them very clearly, in ‘Character in Fiction’, page 48)

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

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

I’ve published introductory notes on the themes and style of the essays. This blog post summarises the first four essays of the ten in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section (many but not all of which are available online).

  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]

1. The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905: 3 pages)

Summary: good essays are always personal and autobiographical.

Woolf was just 23 and exploring her talents in this early essay. She affects a world-weary omniscience of the literary scene and laments the overproduction of writing of all types:

Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger—come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast table is fairly snowed up with them.

Like many conservative-minded people she laments all the newfangled tricks and innovations of ‘modern’ writers (this was written before the genuine wave of modernist innovations, so reads like the standard conservative lament about everything going to the dogs; and is also deeply ironic seeing as she was to go on to become one of the most notable pioneers of modernist techniques in English fiction).

She claims that one of the most prominent innovations of the age (end of the Victorian era, start of the Edwardian decade) has been the advent of the personal essay which gives the opinions of the author, in which every sentence starts with ‘I’:

Its popularity with us is so immense and so peculiar that we are justified in looking upon it as something of our own—typical, characteristic, a sign of the times which will strike the eye of our great-great-grandchildren

Rather ludicrously she attributes this tidal wave of personal essays to the simple fact that so many people have been taught to write, presumably as a result of the late-Victorian education acts which expanded the scope of state schooling. But it’s the personal, egotistical element of essay writing which interests her:

The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays.

Then she arrives at a point, of sorts. When contemporaries write reviews about books (which we can all read for ourselves) or pictures (which we can all see for ourselves) what real value do they add? It’s only when critics write of what is really, distinctively theirs alone, ‘of that single book to which they alone have the key and of that solitary picture whose face is shrouded to all but one gaze’, that their essays have value. Too many essayists, like autobiographers, feel obliged to produce fine writing and orthodox views. For young Virginia Stephen, on the contrary, it is the personal element which is most valuable in criticism.

This call for the personal in criticism can be seen as a kind of manifesto for the deeply personal impressions and observations she would make a career out of.

2. Modern Fiction (1919: 7 pages)

Summary: Woolf rubbishes the novels of the popular writers of her day, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, for being obsessed with realistic detail and neglecting the spiritual aspect of human nature. Hence her calling them ‘materialists’. She goes on to define the kind of novel she desires, concerned with the internal psychology of its characters and registering the blizzard of sensory input and thoughts we all experience.

It is important to state that a good deal of Woolf’s essays consist of gaseous verbiage. She is prolix and verbose. She writes as if she’s being paid by the word, not the idea. Entire pages consist of filler. Particularly irksome is her adoption of the lofty, snobbish ‘we’ in her articles.

It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

The ‘we’ refers to ‘people like us’, privileged, educated, upper-middle-class who have the right stuff, an advanced sensibility and sophisticated tastes. Another reason for using it is that, very simply, it protects the writer from coming out into the open and admitting it’s just their own personal opinion. It makes it sound like she’s speaking on behalf of a group, a class. Safety in numbers.

It need scarcely be said that we make no claim…

This orotund phraseology is the tone of a conservative snob, the tone of an old buffer in clubland. The fact that it emanates from the consciously feminist Woolf makes it all the more ironic. If she’d been a man, she would have been unbearably snobbish and reactionary.

This is a notorious essay because it’s the first in a series in which Woolf criticises three of the most successful novelists of her time, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. Why? Because they lacked the refined and sensitive spirituality of a superior soul such as Woolf. They describe real people in an all-too-rackety and realistic way. Woolf struggles to find a word to describe what she dislikes and the best she can come up with is materialism.

These three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us.

Woolf was an atheist. Her novels rarely bother with traditional Christian belief or, if they do, do so only to mock it, as in the figure of the Reverend Streatfield in Between The Acts. As always, to get the full measure of her real opinions, you shouldn’t consult the novels but read her searing criticism of the Church of England as a perpetrator of misogynist patriarchy in Three Guineas.

But here, in this essay, in order to diss Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy, she is happy to invoke traditional religious metaphors, contrasting the heavy, materialist, clay of their writings with her ideal of writing which is, of course, pure, airy and spiritual.

Of Bennett she says that his books are solidly built and well crafted and present hosts of characters but ‘it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for?’ Bennett depicts nothing but comfortable lives, first class railways carriages and fine hotels at Brighton i.e. all the externals of life. Similarly, Wells overstuffs his novels with issues and ideas:

In the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the generosity of their creator?

‘The inferiority of their natures’ – there you have, in black and white, the clearest possible expression of Woolf’s snobbery.

All three novelists, in Woolf’s opinion, describe in immense detail the material facts of life and completely neglect the higher, spiritual aspects, the aspects, in other words, which Woolf intended to devote her novels to. They:

write of unimportant things… they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

‘The true and enduring’ being exemplified by the Classics of English Literature which Virginia found in her father’s well-stocked library and which he taught her to revere as the true repositories of Poetry and Truth – Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare – you know the list.

So, in Woolf’s view, All Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy’s novels fail to capture ‘life’ – but the obvious question is, Whose definition of ‘life’? Hers, of course, The higher, spiritual life, not the low, clay life of ‘inferior natures’.

For us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.

‘Vestments’, by the way, are ‘liturgical garments and articles associated primarily with the Christian religion’. See what I mean by how, in order to insist on the important of the spiritual in art, she has to temporarily resort to explicitly Christian metaphors, despite her contempt for the Church of England?

As so often in her polemical essays, it becomes more interesting when it opens up to describe Woolf’s own practice. She very vividly describes what she feels as the oppressiveness of having to create characters, think up a plot, come up with some comedy and generally conform to the existing pattern of The Novel. Does the novel always have to be like this? she asks.

It’s at this point, if it wasn’t obvious before, that you realise that Woolf is deploying her criticism of Wells et al in order to better define what she is aiming to do with the form.

Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

This is an interesting description of Woolf’s own dilemma as a novelist: she had written two traditional, conventional, heavy realistic novels but knew she wanted to break free and works out in the essay what that would mean and feel like:

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.

And then a ringing statement of intent:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

This is a very eloquent defence of the new aesthetic she was to embody in Jacob’s Room and even more so in Mrs Dalloway. It is a manifesto. You can see why these passages are routinely quoted in introductions and essays to her works.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Surprisingly, she goes on to praise James Joyce, whose ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ had been published just three years earlier, in 1916. Why? Because he, like she, and unlike the clayey materialists she deprecates, is spiritual.

In contrast with those whom we have called materialists, Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see.

Although she immediately goes on to qualify her praise, claiming that Joyce’s work ultimately fails:

because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind… centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?

This is her response to the early chapters of Ulysses which were circulated among potential publishers from 1918 onwards. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that her aversion to the later book is due to its inclusion of sex, always a queasy subject for Woolf.

Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of something angular and isolated?

As far as I understand it, Woolf deprecated sex in fiction not so much because of the sex itself, per se, but because sex is vulgar. A properly brought-up person, a well-bred writer, simply doesn’t talk about such matters. It is a paradox that Woolf cheerfully criticised other writers for being narrow and shut in and yet, on the subject which went on to dominate the fiction of the century, sex, it is she who is fastidious, aloof and taciturn.

Back to her manifesto, Woolf says the modern novelist must overthrow, ignore and reject all the constraints of the traditional novel – the concerns for realism and realistic detail and realistic settings and realistic plots, which she so dislikes in Wells-Arnold-Galsworthy – and strike out for new points of interest.

She thinks the new, the modern style will concern itself with a new psychology. She cites a short story by Chekhov, ‘Gusev’, for its obliqueness. She tells us that it is, at first reading, a little hard to work out what this story is ‘about’, whether it’s comic or tragic or really has an ending. It is this type of inconclusive obliquity which she thinks presages The Modern.

The last paragraph of this important essay briefly tells us that any serious conversation about modern fiction has to defer to the Russians. Why? Because of their superior spirituality.

If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human spirit.

Woolf is that very characteristic modern type, the spiritual and superior woman who, however, rejects all established religions (as male and sexist). They became a very common type in the 1920s, heavily satirised in their stories by D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but nonetheless real for that.

As to Russia’s superior spirituality, regular readers of my blog will know that I despise this point of view. The classic Russian authors (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) defined the superior spirituality of the great Russian soul by comparing it with the decadence and superficiality of the West, of the corrupt France and materialist Britain. My view is, look where Russia’s supposed superior spirituality got it in the following hundred years and look where Russia’s superior spirituality has landed it today? Woolf was just one of many sensitive souls who identified with the superior spirituality of the Russian soul.

In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery.

Well, Stalin wiped out any tinsel and trickery in his Russia. The great Russians wrote about the nobility of suffering and their children and grandchildren got the revolution, the civil war, the gulag archipelago and the Great Patriotic War. After a decade of drunken chaos under Yeltsin we are now back to traditional Russian values with Vladimir Putin, who has made speeches asserting the superior civilisation of Mother Russia and the hopeless decadence of Western democracies. Russia’s superiority over all other civilisations is an essential part of Russian culture and here we have Woolf espousing it.

Woolf backs up a little and concedes there is some merit to the English tradition:

English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body.

For me it is telling that she doesn’t really draw the obvious conclusion from this thought, which is that maybe the characteristic tone of the greatest English literature is comedy. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens are comedians, to which Bennett and certainly Wells, in their smaller ways, are the heirs. But Woolf has little or no sense of humour and so doesn’t see it. Given a choice between Dickensian humour and the solemn pieties of Romantic poetry, she chooses Keats, Rossetti and Tennyson every time.

She ends with more manifesto:

Nothing – no ‘method’, no experiment, even of the wildest – is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. ‘The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.

This essay is an impressive and resounding rallying cry for the type of novel she was to write over the next decade even if, like so many manifestos, it has to be unduly critical of her contemporaries in order to clear the space for her new approach.

3. The Modern Essay (1922: 10 pages)

The best essays are highly personal and express personality.

This was a review of a hefty five-volume collection of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920 which was published in 1922. It explains why this review refers freely to a variety of the essayists included in the set. It contains the paragraph on what makes a good essay which Bradshaw quotes in his introduction and I quoted above, the paragraph about the main purpose of an essay being to entertain and give pleasure.

The principle which controls [the essay] is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. (Modern Essays)

The review rambles through the famous names in these volumes but the striking thing about Woolf is that, despite the vast amount she wrote about fiction and literature, she’s not a particularly useful critic, either in theory or practice. What I mean is, she very, very rarely analyses a passage by someone to tell you whether and why it succeeds or fails. And she has few general critical ideas apart from the ones which help her gather her thoughts for her own endeavours.

For example, she thinks Walter Pater’s essay is best because ‘he has somehow contrived to get his material fused‘. Not very useful. She thinks Max Beerbohm’s essay is a success because in it ‘he is himself’.

He has brought personality into literature… We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes.

Not dazzlingly insightful, is it? And his style? ‘The triumph is the triumph of style.’ These are close to platitudes and she hits a kind of low when she tells us that the important thing in writing an essay is ‘to know how to write.’ Yes. Sounds likely.

This is pretty thin pickings, isn’t it? Barely exists as criticism. You can see why, despite fans like Bradshaw bigging her up, few if any of Woolf’s critical ideas are widely used or cited for the simple reason that she hardly has any critical ideas, apart from the ones where she is working out her own approach – but those passages are cited everywhere.

4. How It Strikes A Contemporary (1923: 9 pages)

The present age lacks one commanding critical figure, a symbol of the way that, since the war, literature has become fragmented and difficult.

The ‘it’ in the title isn’t the modern world or politics, it refers to contemporary literary criticism i.e. it’s a commentary on contemporary literary criticism circa 1923.

Why are there such radical disagreements about new books? Because there is no one critic who dominates the age. Like all conservatives, Woolf looks back to supposed Golden Ages when there was one towering critical figure who dominated their era – to the ages of John Dryden (the 1680s and ’90s), Dr Johnson (1760s to ’80s), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1810s to ‘1830) or Matthew Arnold (1860s, ’70s, ’80s). The fact that these are nostalgic conservative tropes is given away by her own phraseology:

Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline, which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now unknown…

‘Once upon a time…’ reveals that this is a fairy tale version of history, removing all its complexity and conflict.

Anyway, in Woolf’s opinion the real problem is simply the scale of output. No one critic could read everything that is produced nowadays and so the situation she laments, with thousands of reviewers scribbling away but no one central Man of Letters setting a standard.

It is revealing who she picks but then dismisses as possible contenders for this title of Master of the Age: Thomas Hardy has retired from novel writing; Conrad is an exotic outsider. No, like all cultural conservatives, Woolf thinks the present day (1923) was one of special collapse, decline, decay. It is an age of fragments, ‘it is a barren and exhausted age’ etc.

Interestingly, she gets it wrong about W.B. Yeats, thinking he will only be remembered for a few poems. Similarly and notoriously, she thinks that James Joyce’s Ulysses was a disaster and failure. In both of these opinions, she was, of course, dead wrong.

There are several passage of incoherent impressionism before she emerges with a tangible point: the present age is defined by The War. The First World War changed everything.

Nor has any generation more need than ours to cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed… The most casual reader dipping into poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of our time.

But:

Our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction.

We live in a special age, uniquely cut off from the past. Many writers are capturing this new spirit. But there is something unsatisfactory about their work. This is a useful impression and certainly a very useful background to understanding her own practice from ‘Jacob’s Room’ onwards.

But the essay also conveys a sense of Woolf feeling adrift in this new age. As so often with Woolf you feel that this is due, in part, to her own personal intellectual inadequacy. In her essays and her novels, you get the impression that things are always just a bit too much for her to cope with. She needs help. She needs Daddy.

And Daddy, here as everywhere, takes the form of looking back nostalgically to the age of Wordsworth, Scott and Austen. She likes those old authors because they were so sure of themselves. By contrast, her contemporaries:

afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They cannot make a world.

Her conclusion uses a silly metaphor to make a valid point:

It would be wise for the writers of the present to renounce for themselves the hope of creating masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made.

The great critics of the past spoke with confidence for their entire age. The Great War has made that impossible because it has shattered all traditional values. This explains the daring experiments but also the failures and sense of blockage and frustration among so many of her contemporaries. But she nonetheless cleaves to the hope that out of the current chaos great things will come. And she was, of course, correct. She was in fact living in an age of masterpieces, which included her own works.

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.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on April 16, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Essays, Literary criticism, Literature
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on April 16, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/16/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-1-reading-and-writing-1/

Oscar Wilde’s London by Wolf von Eckardt, Sander L. Gilman and J. Edward Chamberlin (1987)

A large format, 284-page coffee-table book most notable for its many contemporary illustrations (all in black and white).

This is not an academic book – it is a popular social history or review of the cultural life of London over the period between Oscar Wilde’s first arrival in London – having graduated from Oxford, in 1879 – to May 1897 when he was released from Pentonville prison and took the night train to Dieppe, never to return. Twenty years, quite a long time, a generation.

The introduction is a collection of clichés and stereotypes about the period, telling us the end of the nineteenth century was a time of immense social, economic, technological and cultural change etc – not only more people but more technological inventions (photography, electric lighting, telegraph, telephone, early motor car), more newspapers, journals and magazines, publishing more facts and figures and stories and photographs and illustrations than ever before, intellectual ferment Darwin, Arts and Crafts, the peak of Empire, Victoria’s jubilees etc etc – the kind of thing you read in absolutely every introduction to the period and quickly becomes over-familiar.

But when you get into the chapters on specific topics these get quite interesting on a whole range of topics, from the electrification of the first streets, public buildings and theatres to details about football, rugby and cricket, the rise of bicycling, various forms of religion and so on, all accompanied by jolly contemporary illustrations. A notable feature is extended quotes from interesting sources such as Wilde’s trial, police reports, WT Stead’s articles, T.S. Eliot’s obituary of Marie Lloyd and so on. These are interesting tasters, incentivising the reader to go searching for fuller texts online…

By way of a ‘review’ I thought it would be fun to give a brief summary and one image from each chapter.

1. Art and Life

Rapid expansion. The Underground. More train lines led to huge expansion of new suburbs.

From Pentonville Road looking west evening, 1884 by John O’Connor © Museum of London

Aestheticism already existed (Rossetti, Swinburne) but Wilde set out to make himself its apostle, peacock feathers and sunflowers. Mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience. Wilde’s lecture tour of America accompanying a tour of the opera.

Wilde lived with the painter Frank Miles who moved to an Aesthetic house at 1 Tite Street, where Wilde was later to move, in 1884 after he married Constance Lloyd (neighbours to James Whistler and John Singer Sergeant). They had the place redesigned by Edward Godwin. The interior decoration described by his son Vyvyan. The salon his wife, Constance, established.

Three or four page discussion of the overlap between Aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts movement, with its serious commitment to improving the surroundings and lives of the population with beautiful architecture, furnishings etc. Ruskin and Morris’s serious political commitment, and Wilde’s take on it in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

2. Lilies and Sunflowers

The Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris, Burne-Jones. The Kelmscott Press. The vegetal style i.e. the sinuous line based on lilies which spread across Europe in Art Nouveau, the Jugendstil etc (p.41). The fashion for Japanisme.

Ruskin thought ornament was the basis of architecture. Morris thought ornament was the basis of civilised society (p.32). This explains why Arts and Crafts interiors, wallpaper and furniture were so heavy, cluttered and dark.

Acanthus wallpaper by William Morris

Libertys. The Kelmscott Press. Ruskin and Morris were populist, Whistler and Wilde were elitists. The Ruskin versus Whistler libel trial. The fashion for Japanoiserie. The rise and rise of home decoration and furnishing in lots of new magazines. Wilde’s American lecture which explains the two types of beauty epitomised y the sunflower and the lily (p.41).

The PRB artists: Burne-Jones, Millais, Waterhouse. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the Yellow Book and Wilde’s play, Salome. Beardsley’s self presentation was every bit as calculating and immaculate as Wilde’s but in a different mode.

Aubrey Beardsley photographed by Frederick Hollyer (Victoria and Albert Museum)

3. The Call of the Stage

In October 1881 Richard D’Oyly Carte opened the New Savoy Theatre on the Strand, the first building in London to be lit by electricity, specifically 1,200 electric arc lamps and 715 stage lamps. D’Oyly Carte had already produced:

  • Trial by Jury (1875)
  • The Sorcerer (1877)
  • HMS Pinafore (1878)
  • The Pirates of Penzance (1879)
  • Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride (1881)
  • Iolanthe (1882)
  • Princess Ida (1884)
  • The Mikado (1885)
  • Ruddigore; or, The Witch’s Curse (1887)
  • The Yeomen of the Guard (1888)
  • The Gondoliers (1889)
  • Utopia, Limited (1893)
  • The Grand Duke (1896)

Leading actors of the later 1870s and 1880s Henry Irving and Ellen Terry who appeared together in an 1885 Hamlet.

Ellen Terry

Playwrights before Wilde, namely Arthur Wing Pinero, author of ‘The Second Mrs Tanqueray’ (1892) the latest of umpteen ‘Woman with a Past’ stories (the premise used by Wilde in, for example, ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’).

Mrs Patrick Campbell

Mrs Patrick Campbell is from the next generation of actresses, starting her career in ‘The Second Mrs Tanqueray’. She kept up a spirited correspondence with the young new playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose first production was ‘Widowers Houses’ (1892). Notes on Wilde’s run of four social comedies:

  • Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)
  • A Woman of No Importance (1893)
  • An Ideal Husband
  • The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

The influence of Henrik Ibsen, his various translators and adapters. Popular theatre, Sadlers Wells, pantomime and penny gaffs.

4. Readers and Writers

The proliferation of outlets for the reading public; bookshops, kiosks, railway shops; newspapers, magazines from The Labour Prophet to The Yellow Book. The yellow press (‘newspapers that use eye-catching headlines and sensationalized exaggerations’). Proliferation of literary magazines (p.83) but also pulp, penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers.

Magazine seller at Ludgate Circus

Tennyson (d.1892)’s anxiety about progress and materialism. Robert Browning (d.1889)’s dramatic monologues, mostly from history. New kid on the block Rudyard Kipling’s poems and stories. Inevitably the authors quote from his poem The White Man’s Burden, about empire, everyone always does.

Meanwhile…Socialism! The Socialist League of Hammersmith. The Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. 1886 riots in the West End.

New science inspired Robert Louis Stephenson (d. 1894) but also, with huge impact, H.G. Wells. Both of them and many other authors were associated with the new mystique of cities – fogs, mysteries, doppelgangers. The well-known story about American publisher J. M. Stoddart inviting Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle for dinner and commissioning the second Sherlock Holmes novel and The Picture of Dorian Gray which triggers quotes from reviews of Dorian, particularly the famous one by Charles Whibley which accused it of immorality (p.94).

One literary feature of the fin-de-siecle was the Rhymers Club meeting at the Cheshire Cheese pub in the Strand, including Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Symons with Wilde attending meetings that were held in private homes.

Wilde’s death in 1900 coincided with the date W.B. Yeats thinks the whole fin-de-siecle thing evaporated. As he wrote in the introduction to his (quirky) Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did I have forgotten.

5. London’s Growth

‘It was a turbulent time.’ New buildings and boulevards. Electric lighting spread quickly. Creation of the Embankment and ongoing extension of the Underground. Regent Street. Trafalgar Square. Horses and carts and hansom cabs. Traffic jams on the Strand.

Regent Street Quadrant at Night by Francis Forster (Museum of London)

The pong of horse poo. Drinking troughs. Crossing sweepers. Thick fogs.

Horse bus outside the Shard Arms on Peckham Park Road, circa 1895

Accents of different parts of London which is the basis for Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’. Crooked property developers and ramshackle tenements. The fourth Earl of Bedford’s Covent Garden development of the 1630s became a model or sorts. The financial motivation for all those tall narrow Georgian houses facing squares (p.113).

The army of domestic servants. In Wilde’s day London houses as many as a million and a quarter domestic servants. Many, maybe most female servants were subjected to sexual harassment. If they were caught or got pregnant they were fired without a reference. This forced most into a life of prostitution, hence the vast numbers in London.

The Season began as a method of getting marriageable young daughters up from their country estates to find husbands at a packed series of parties and public events. By Wilde’s time it was also a market for industrialists and financiers and men with money to acquire a pedigree by marrying into aristocratic families. By Wilde’s time there was a growing influx of American heiresses looking for posh husbands, a type he mocks in essays and in the character of Hester Worsley in ‘A Woman of No Importance’ (1893).

The vast army of dressmakers and seamstresses who supported these well-dressed women during the Season, as many as 20,000. Middle class consumption, more shops, more manufactured goods. The new big department stores: Harrods, Whiteleys. Huge new restaurants and grill rooms.

6. …and London’s Shame

The poverty of the East End and other slum quarters. Workers slaved long hours in the ‘stink industries’ like soap, rubber, tar, glue, fertiliser made from blood and matches. Sweatshops which were, in fact, freezing cold in winter.

Fore Street, Lambeth

Dr Barnardo’s Home for Working and Destitute Lads. Wilde was notoriously dismissive of charity which he thought applied sticking plasters to a system which needed to be completely overthrown. At least that’s what he said in the Soul of Man Under Socialism.

Vast armies of prostitutes, dolly mops (promiscuous servant girls) including the boy renters Wilde frequented. Conscription to the army during the Boer War (1899 to 1902) not only revealed the wretched physical state of working class men but that a large percentage had sexually transmitted infections (20% of the army, more in the Navy).

The armies of the poor were continually replenished by immigrants, notably Jews from East Europe who suffered periodic antisemitic riots when times were hard, but also Chinese and lascars. Nine pages about the Jack the Ripper murders 1888 to 1891 i.e. as Wilde wrote his best essays and Dorian Gray (pages 130 to 139).

New architecture. The later Victorians rebelled against the straitlaced classicism of Georgian architecture and exploded in a plethora of wild styles, including all manner of Gothic covered with decoration and ornament e.g. St Pancras station by Gilbert George Scott. Plus the Law Courts, Piccadilly Circus,

The suburbs were built partly for political goals. Lord Shaftsbury said ‘If the working man has his own house. I have no fear of revolution’. And hence an 1883 Cheap Trains Act forcing the railway companies to offer cheap fares for those commuting in and out of the centre. Developers packed suburban terraces so that architectural critics complained about their sameyness. Certainly the case in South London where I live and you can cycle through Streatham, Tooting and on down to Morden seeing the same type of 1900s terraced houses in street after street.

The Golden Age of the London Pub with plenty of gilt and mirrors. Somehow this segues into testimony from the Oscar Wilde trial from one of the many young men Wilde paid to have sex with.

7. The Lower Classes

The population grew from 3,215,000 in 1870 to 4,211,000 in 1890, from two sources: immigration from the countryside; immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. the long recession 1873 to 1893 led to unemployment as did cheaper better imports coming from America then Germany.

‘The Bitter Cry Of Outcast London: An Inquiry Into The Condition Of The Abject Poor’ by Andrew Mearns (1883). ‘In Darkest England and the Way Out’ by William Booth (1890). The Salvation Army.

Victorian street kids

Life expectancy in the country 51, in London 28. Armies of rough sleepers. Long quote of Beatrice Webb’s eye witness account of a steamer arriving carrying refugee Jews from the East. The great hero Dr Barnardo. Phos girls who lacked jaws or fingers, eaten away by phosphorus as they made matches.

The work of Henry Labouchère, MP, social reformer, best known for his campaign to stamp out ‘vice’ which led to the Labouchère Amendment (Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885) which for the first time criminalised ‘gross indecency’ meaning any type of male homosexual activity in Britain and was the law Wilde was convicted under.

1888 article in the Fortnightly Review detailing the unfair conditions domestic servants labour under.

8. Religion, Spirits and Hosanna

Religious belief declined steadily through the second half of the nineteenth century. Some posh people defected to the Roman Catholic church (as Wilde did on his deathbed). But allegiance to the Church of England slowly steadily declined. Wilde has several comic churchmen, notably the Reverend Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest.

My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing. [All sigh.] I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days. The last time I delivered it was in the Cathedral, as a charity sermon on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Discontent among the Upper Orders. The Bishop, who was present, was much struck by some of the analogies I drew.

The central importance of Darwinism (On The Origin of Species 1859, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871). In fact Darwinism was mostly known through various popularisations of it the most damaging of which was Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism which preached that the weak in society deserve to go under.

Upper and middle class dimwits were taken in by Theosophy, spiritualism and so on (as Wilde’s wife, Constance, was). Occultism, mesmerism, seances, clairvoyancy.

Charles Bradlaugh’s defiant refusal, as an atheist, to take the oath of allegiance when he was elected MP. Controversy around Sabbatarianism i.e. whether shops or anything could open on a Sunday. Bradlaugh helped organise the National Sunday League.

9. The Sounds of London

Music high and low. Gilbert and Sullivan. Religious music by Villiers Stanford and Herbert Parry. The astonishing popularity of the oratorio as a form, ‘the dull centre’ of Victorian music. The widespread popularity of choral societies around the country. George Bernard Shaw’s very funny mockery of all this English earnestness. Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts began in 1895, the year of Wilde’s conviction.

Serious music had to be imported from abroad, Italy, France and especially Germany. The cult of Wagner among aesthetes and students.

Truer to English culture was the music hall, first one opened in 1852 by 1860 there were 250 in London. I’ve always admired Kipling for immediately grasping, on arriving in London, that music hall was the true voice of the capital and basing his Barrack Room Ballads (1890) on them. The authors give an extended quote from an 1891 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine describing the different kinds of music hall in London and their audiences and content (pages 186 to 192).

Stars of music hall such as Marie Lloyd and Harry Champion. The fashion for ‘coon’ songs sung by minstrel troupes.

Quote from T.S. Eliot’s obituary of Lloyd:

The working-man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the work of acting; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art. He will now go to the cinema, where his mind is lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon, and he will receive, without giving, in that same listless apathy with which the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art. He will also have lost some of his interest in life.

Which carries on with some prophetic words:

Perhaps this will be the only solution. In a most interesting essay in the recent volume of Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia the great psychologist W.H.R. Rivers adduces evidence which has led him to believe that the natives of that unfortunate archipelago are dying out principally for the reason that the “Civilization” forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom. When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, When every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bed-time stories through a wireless receiver attached to both ears, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.

Others lamented the crudity and vulgarity of the music hall and preferred the imagined purity of folk song, such as Herbert Parry at the inauguration of the Folk Song Society in 1898.

10. Virtues of Sport

The English upper and middle classes worshipped sport. The public schools put more onus on sporting prowess than intelligence as the history of the British Army indicates. Football. Cricket. The MCC founded 1787. The Football Association founded 1863. Rugby left The Football Association in 1863 and, in 1895, split between rugby union and rugby league. The first lawn tennis championship was held at Wimbledon in 1881.

The authors do not hesitate to quote Vitaï Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt as absolutely everybody writing a book like this has to. It was written in 1892, the year Wilde’s first play was produced.

Bicycling became a craze in the 1890s. In a sense it was a middle class equivalent of the aristocratic habit of riding horses. The bicycle had an impact on women’s liberation because women could, quite simply, travel further and associate with more people, friends and young men.

1890s cycling women

Cycling became involved in the movement for women to wear more rational i.e. practical and flexible clothing. Wilde wrote articles about more sensible clothing for women and his wife became very involved in the movement.

The modern Olympic games were established by Baron de Coubertin in 1896.

Mountain climbing: Judge Alfred Wallis who sentenced Wilde to two years hard labour was the author of one of the best mountaineering books of the nineteenth century, Wandering Among The High Alps.

Boxing was still illegal and notoriously corrupt. The Marquess of Queensberry’s rules had been drafted as long ago as the 1860s but were only really accepted in the 1890s.

Horse racing was the sport of kings, for owners, but had a large working class following among the gambling classes. In 1874 there were 130 race courses in Britain; a decade later there were half that number, all bigger and more professional.

Rise of the sporting press and specialist journals devoted to each sport and activity. And in the 1890s the first ever filming of sporting events took place…

11. Jumbo and Sundry Diversions

Freak shows, peep shows, theatrographs, dancing bears, Astley’s Theatre at the south end of Westminster Bridge. The story of Jumbo the popular trained elephant who was sold to the American showman P.T. Barnum in 1882 but refused to leave. The story of Jumbo gets nearly as much space as Jack the Ripper and maybe rightly so.

Pubs. Londoners liked drinking, many till they became fighting drunk. Hence the Temperance Movement with its pamphlets and sermons. These emphasised grisly stories of wife beating and child abuse caused by drunkenness.

Drug addition: cocaine and the opium dens of the East End docks. Detailed description of a visit to an opium den by George Augustus Sala.

At the opposite end of the social scale, the world of gentlemen’s clubs such as the Carlton, the reform, the Garrick, the Marlborough, the Guards, the Army and Navy, and the Albemarle which Wilde was a member of. Comic account of election to a club, again by Sala.

Dancing as described in The Diary of a Nobody in 1889. Magic and magicians. Street corner Houdinis.

Public trials. The Darwinian zoologist brought a prosecution against American medium Henry Slade (1876). Whistler sued Ruskin for libel in 1877. Several adultery cases in which the Prince of Wales was scandalously compelled to appear. the 1889 prosecution of a male brothel keeper in Cleveland Street (p.259). The two trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

12. Juliets of a Night

Pornography and prostitution. This chapter opens with photographs of nude underage girls which, if I tried to search them online let alone included in this review, would, I think, get me arrested.

The cult of ‘the little girl’, most notoriously associated with Lewis Carroll.

The authors quote Arthur Symons, Rossetti and Wilde justifying sex with prostitutes. Visitors to London could buy guides listing locations for strip tease, prostitutes, rooms to rent, ‘introducing houses’, brothels and so on. It was a major industry.

The same territory covered in immense detail in Ronald Pearsall’s huge study ‘The Worm in the Bud’ (1969) which has lots about Victorian orgies, prostitution and fetishism. The authors give a lengthy quote explaining the situation by General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Excerpt from a police report of officers trying to round up prostitutes, especially children.

Commentators in politics and the Church warned that young women were corrupted by their reading hence the importance of jumping on all immoral reading matter such as the novels of Thomas Hardy or the Oscar Wilde. This was twaddle then as it is now: what propels women into prostitution is poverty, desperation and drugs, or violent coercion.

It was the famous series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1885 by William Thomas Stead titled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ that led to the raising of the age of consent from 13 to 16 under The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (the same act which included the Labouchère Amendment). The authors give an extended quote.

Surprisingly the European centre of child prostitution was Brussels.

Many stolen, kidnapped or betrayed English girls of 12 to 15 years were sold to Brussels brothels. (p.248)

Sometimes history just doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyway – the London Society for the Protection of Young Females founded in 1853. Quotes from evidence given to an 1881 House of Lords enquiry on the subject. Beatrice Webb’s experience going undercover among the poor.

All this segues into descriptions of the two Wilde trials with full-page illustrations from the Illustrated Police News.

Oscar Wilde’s arrest and trial from Illustrated Police News (1895)

13.Epilogue

The three-page epilogue is in the form of a summary of the debate between Tennyson and the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. In 1886 Tennyson published a poem, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, in which he claimed, in the manner of all depressed aristocrats, that the country had gone to the dogs.

Gladstone took exception to this and wrote an article for the magazine Nineteenth Century magazine in which he set out to refute every one of Tennyson’s charges, point by point, and asserting that in very measurable way – economic, social and moral, life expectancy, working hours, support for the unemployed and so on – society was vastly superior, improved and advanced to what it had been in their youths i.e. the 1830s. A choice of temperaments. An interesting conclusion to a fact-packed but popular and entertaining book.

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on September 2, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in History, Literature
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 2, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/oscar-wildes-london-wolf-von-eckardt-sander-l-gilman-edward-chamberlin/

The Decay of Lying: An Observation by Oscar Wilde (1891)

‘The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.’

Originally published as a magazine article in 1889, Wilde substantially rewrote this essay for inclusion in his volume of four long critical essays, Intentions (1891). In De Profundis Wilde refers to it as ‘the first and best of all my dialogues’ (Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, page 157).

The dialogue form

It is in dialogue form, harking back to the Platonic dialogues Wilde would have studied for his Classics degree, and signalling Wilde’s embryonic interest in drama – and his realisation that his ‘ideas’ were maybe less amusing than his taste for paradox, for surprising reversals of expectations, for sudden bon mots and witty phrases – all of which are easier to engineer in dialogue form. Dialogue allows:

  • quick fire interchange
  • one person to develop an idea at length until it is in danger of becoming boring, at which point – the other person interrupts with a deflating remark or a witty summary of the argument so far; this means that:
  • treatment of individual notions can be pages long or made in a throwaway one-liner; and
  • the case of the proponent can itself subjected to irony and satire by the interlocutor – Wilde can parody or ironise his own argument

His earlier essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, is a straightforward essay, no dialogue, so Wilde has to go a long distance in his own voice and strains a bit to make a consistent ‘argument’. The digressions and cul-de-sacs are there for all to see. In Lying, as soon as the dramatic lead (Vivian) tires of one line of witty sophistry, his foil (Cyril) can interrupt – not understanding, or pooh-poohing the idea, or asking for clarification, thus neatly ending one line of thought and setting up the next one.

The Argument

All Art is lying, wonderful imaginative lying.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

However, in Wilde’s time more and more artists were determined to drag the ‘real world’ into their art, making it ‘relevant’, addressing ‘issues’ and thus showing a tragic misunderstanding of what Art is and is for, and – the great crime in Wilde’s eyes – destroying their individuality – so that all the writers end up sounding like Parliamentary reports and all the artists end up creating works which are grim and depressing.

Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind.

Art is a form of lying, of rejecting the banality of ‘reality’ and creating something marvellous from our imaginations. Wilde must have had notebooks packed with sentences starting ‘Art is…’:

The object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.

Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of overemphasis.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.

Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts.

Taking this as his point of departure, the entire essay enjoys contradicting the popular view of the day (Wordsworth, Ruskin, Morris), that we must somehow get ‘back to Nature’, that Nature is a cure for modern industrial society. Quite the opposite:

What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition… Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity’ is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.

And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.

Provocation 1. The incongruous

Wilde enjoys provoking his reader, which takes at least two forms: one is the witty application of homely phraseology in an unexpected way, to create a humorously incongruous effect.

Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out…Art is…our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.

Thus, as he endeavours to show his friend Cyril how far lying has decayed, the protagonist Vivian makes a humorous survey of the professions, all on the witty assumption that they are and have been professed liars, so that he is in the witty position of lamenting the decay of lying in professions which most Victorians would assume to have been the bedrock of British honesty and probity:

CYRIL. Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.

VIVIAN. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue [!]…Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members. Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful…They…have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent [!]. But they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon [!]. One feels it as one wades through their columns…

Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy…or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination! and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability.

Later, he manages to include journalists in his list of the lying professions. The same journalists who would hound him into prison and cackle around his fallen corpse.

Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader writer is not without its advantages. But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity.

Provocation 2. Anti-England

Like any man of feeling or imagination, Wilde is depressed by the small-minded, xenophobic, philistine culture of England (something which has always driven our best writers abroad, to escape our stifling conformity and seek out a wider world). An attitude given bite by the fact that he was, of course, Irish and saw himself, as so many literary men of the Modern period (1890s onwards), as an outsider.(1)

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.

Nonetheless, one trembles when one reads his casual insults of England and the English. For, as we know, the English were going to have their total and humiliating revenge on Wilde and to drag all his witty paradoxes down into the lowest mud.

A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious non-comformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas.

But in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle.

The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy La Chimere, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.

The contemporary scene

Wilde gives a fascinating summary of the contemporary literary scene, of which he laments: ‘the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.’

He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything’ and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself. The loss that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.

In his way Wilde is echoing Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on Romance, a conscious revolt against the Gradgrindish obsession with facts, a wish to escape, to soar on the wings of free imagination. Although Stevenson is first in line to be criticised:

  • Mr Robert Louis Stevenson… is tainted with this modern vice [of realism]… There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet.
  • Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.
  • Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible ‘points of view’ his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.
  • Mr George Meredith! Who can define him ? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate.
  • Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot hear what he says.
  • Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a shortsighted detective.
  • The horses of Mr. William Black‘s phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.
  • Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things.
  • Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about ‘le beau ciel d’Italie.’ Besides, he has fallen into a bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying.
  • ‘Robert Elsmere’ is of course a masterpiece – a masterpiece of the ‘genre ennuyeux,’ the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy. It is only in England that such a book could be produced.
  • As for that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.

Wilde prided himself of his knowledge of French culture – their poetry and painting vastly more advanced than their English counterparts. But he is equally as damning of the new French realist school:

  • M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears.
  • M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!.. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed. M. Zola’s characters have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.
  • M. Daudet is better. He has wit, a light touch, and an amusing style. But he has lately committed literary suicide… The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.
  • What is interesting about people in good society – and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London – is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit, and the like. The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality!

But he likes Balzac:

  • Balzac was a most wonderful combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples: the former was entirely his own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola’s L’Assommoir and Balzac’s Illusions Perdues is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality… A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism… But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.

Art does not express the world, Good Lord no! It expresses the individuality, the genius, of the artist.

Art should be quite detached, quite useless

Where Morris the Marxist argued that Art in an ideal world would be the results of happy men expressing their creativity, especially in decorating the everyday objects of our lives, so that everything a happy fulfilled worker makes is Art – Wilde the hyper aesthete argues that all Art should be quite useless, quite irrelevant to our everyday lives and concerns: that is its point.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject matter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind…

I do not know anything in the whole history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful book, The Cloister and the Hearth, a book as much above Romola as Romola is above Daniel Deronda, and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over.

Life imitates Art

So far, so plausible. Wilde has moved beyond outraging the bourgeoisie to establish his main point: Art is a wonderful kind of lying which, in his age, was everywhere in danger of being hobbled by the mania for Realism. But the essay goes to another level when Wilde pushes the conceit further to say that, not only is dull and vulgar Life bad for Art, but that Life itself actually copies Art.

Paradox though it may seem, it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters [the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti and Burne-Jones], has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the strange squarecut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of The Golden Stair, the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the Laus Amoris, the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivien in Merlin’s Dream.

And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They brought their types with them, and Life, with her keen imitative faculty, set herself to supply the master with models.

As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into sweet shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and unloaded revolvers… The boy burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is with trying to reproduce Fiction.

And, he goes on:

  • Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
  • The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.
  • Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
  • The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempre, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comedie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.

Wilde doesn’t say there is a tendency to copy art: he thinks it is an absolute rule:

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life – the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it – is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.

This anticipates Raymond Chandler’s 1930s comments about his hoodlums and gangsters modeling themselves on the movies, a sentiment echoed by Alistair MacLean in his thrillers of the 1960s, and of what I know of Auden and his circle modelling their posing, the way they lit and held cigarettes, on the movie stars of the 1930s. It seems to me a very persuasive argument indeed that Art gives us the models and then people enthusiastically set about copying them – except that Wilde probably wouldn’t call movies, TV and pop videos Art: but they are what provide contemporary humanity with our models for behaving and talking.

Nature imitates Art

And Wilde’s comic style, his essential humour, combines wonderfully when Vivian is goaded by Cyril to go one step further and suggest that Nature imitates Art – the precise opposite of what most of the nineteenth century has been telling itself:

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows ? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge ? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art.

Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.

Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.

And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has done so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pisaros. Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to be relied upon.

The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.

But I don’t want to be too hard on Nature… That she imitates Art, I don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilized man.

Art doesn’t reflect its society and times – it creates them

In the same spirit, Wilde rejects another cliché, that Art reflects the society and times it was created in. Wrong, says Wilde; the precise opposite: Art doesn’t reflect: Art creates the style and look of its times.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence ? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

The Japanese people are, in fact, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

A new world

The essay ends, with a witty call for a revival of lying at all levels of society, beginning in the nursery and extending through school and into the higher professions. In a kind of satire on the millennial, revolutionary rhetoric of this decade of revolutionaries and nihilists and anarchists, Wilde looks forward to the overthrow of the present dull world of facts and the rebirth of a wonderful world of lying and imagination:

The solid stolid British intellect may not hear the voice of fantasy now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings. And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land.

The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.

Three principles

And the essay winds up with some more generalisations from Wilde’s books of sentences about Art.

1. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.

2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything… It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

3. The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.

It is a revealing moment when Wilde jokingly says that society must return to its ‘lost leader’, the skilled liar. Mostly this is paradoxical wit – but the phrase ‘lost leader’, by 1891, already referred to Charles Stewart Parnell, whose affair with a married woman split the Irish Parliamentary Party of which he was leader, and, arguably, set back the cause of Irish independence by a generation. Wilde’s oblique reference to a man hounded to his death by the British establishment because of his private life has a terrible reverberation for us who know what Wilde’s fate was to be.

Related links

Related reviews

4 Comments
by Simon on July 17, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Books
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/07/17/the-decay-of-lying-oscar-wilde/

The Rossettis @ Tate Britain

This is a spectacular exhibition, by turns absorbing, inspiring, fascinating and deeply educational about the individuals, their lives and their times. Not all the work on display is good, some is positively poor, but there are good things throughout, and it’s huge – featuring over 150 paintings and drawings as well as photography, design, wallpapers, furniture, rare books, printed and spoken poetry and more. And then, in the last few rooms, it turns into a spectacular celebration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s huge, sumptuous paintings of stunning pre-Raphaelite women, an orgy of masterpieces to leave you reeling. More than just an exhibition it feels like a sustained immersion in their lives and times.

I thought the exhibition might disintegrate into a general splurge about the extended network of artists and models which made up the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – surely, the most written-about subject in British art – the gift shop is heaving with books about the Pre-Raphaelites.

But I was wrong. The exhibition remains very, very focused on the Rossetti family and, above all, on the favoured son, Gabriel. (Only in adult life did Gabriel move his middle name, Dante, to the front of his three names – maybe partly to catch up with triple-barrelled friends like John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt – but the curators refer to him as Gabriel throughout and so shall I.)

Firsts

Tate owns a lot of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings so it’s surprising to learn that this is the first retrospective of Rossetti ever held at Tate, and the largest exhibition of his iconic pictures in two decades. Less surprising to learn that this is also the most comprehensive exhibition of Elizabeth Siddal’s work for 30 years, featuring rare watercolours and important drawings, because most of us have never hear of her.

The rooms devoted to them show how Gabriel and Elizabeth’s relationship and works intertwined and reflected each other. If you like reading about the lives of great artists, then this deep dive into biographical minutiae will be right up your street.

Immigrants

First of all, they were immigrants. Gabriele Rossetti (1783 to 1854) arrived in London in 1824, as a political refugee from Italy. More than that he was an Italian nobleman, poet, constitutionalist, scholar, and founder of the secret society, the Carbonari. A noted Dante scholar he secured the post of Professor of Italian at King’s College London from 1831 as well as teaching Italian at King’s College School. He and his wife Frances Polidori Rossetti had four children, two sons and two daughters. Raised in a home drenched in poetry and literature, all four children went on to become artists or writers in their own right. They were: the writer Maria Francesca Rossetti (1827 to 76); poet, artist and designer Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (1828 to 1882); artist and critic William Michael Rossetti (1829 to 1919); and poet Christina Rossetti (1830 to 1894).

The curators add into this gang of four the figure of Elizabeth Siddal, model, artist and poet, who posed for many of the Pre-Raphaelites (most famously as Ophelia in the classic painting by John Everett Millais) but who enjoyed a lengthy relationship with Gabriel, in which they drew and painted the same subjects, copying and learning from each other. They married in 1860 at which point she became Elizabeth Rossetti and this, from a naming point of view, justifies her inclusion in the exhibition.

Christina Rossetti

The curators do something genuinely bold and interesting which is to start a major art exhibition with a room devoted almost entirely to poetry. Never seen that before. They are mostly by Christina Rossetti and are not only printed directly onto the walls in very large font size but, if you stand in places marked by signs on the floor, you can hear the poems being recited by what must be very cleverly focused loudspeakers, which seem to be addressing you and you alone.

Installation view of ‘The Rossettis’ at Tate Britain, showing Room One which features just three paintings because it is devoted to the poetry of Christina Rossetti, which are reproduced on all the walls. Photo by Madeleine Buddo © Tate

All four Rossetti children were artistic and wrote and drew from early ages, but it was Christina who had the earliest success, having a volume of 42 poems published when she was just 16, some of which were written when she was as young as 11!

Remember by Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

This bold start does two things. One, it fulfils Tate’s feminist aims of promoting women, bringing women out from the shadow of more famous men, giving women more of a voice etc (as the promotion of Elizabeth Siddal later in the show also does). Two, it vividly demonstrates the extraordinary combination of sensitivity and sensuality which, arguably, were to be distinguishing features of the family, and especially the arch-sensualist, Gabriel.

Christina’s talent peaked with the volume containing her most famous poem, Goblin Market, of 1859. During her career she published over 900 poems, a phenomenal output. Taking five minutes to read all the works written on the walls here, and let them alter and direct your thoughts towards her strange combination of Victorian piety, with astonishing sensuality, is a rare and lovely experience.

Early sketches

The narrow but scholarly depth of the exhibition’s focus is established in the second room which contains 30 or so very early drawings and sketches by the boy Gabriel, alongside some by his sister, and two by his brother William. They demonstrate his precocious skill and his enthusiasm for original voices like William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe. Gabriel was an early devotee of the small cult of Blake, who didn’t become widely known until the 1860s. And he did numerous illustrations of Edgar Allen Poe stories and poems, notably The Raven.

The Raven by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1848) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

These are very uneven: some have great verve but many of them are cranky and cramped. So I suppose the idea of a progression of beautiful young girl ghosts, on the left, is well done, but nothing about the figure on the right is good, his tangled legs, the odd posture of his hands. But they’re all very interesting in a dry, scholarly way. You rarely get to see the early beginnings of a major painter in such detail and for this reason alone I found myself taking the time to study each of the sketches. I liked two sketches drawn with thick black lines which reminded me of Goya, but these were exceptions.

Man with a Woman Wearing Trousers by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1844)

To buck the curators a bit, possibly the best things in this room are two marvellous charcoal and white chalk drawings by brother William, studies of Yarmouth beach. These far exceed in sophistication, depth and technique anything by Gabriel. And they are outdoors, giving them an airiness and lightness unlike anything by brother Gabriel. I can’t find them anywhere on the internet 😦

Gabriel’s unevenness

Maybe it’s worth making the point now, early on, that Gabriel Rossetti is strangely patchy or uneven as an artist. Many of these sketches are positively poor. What I mean is their depiction of the human frame is awkward and cranky. Gabriel’s figures are often bent at improbable or at least uncomfortable angles. His faces are sometimes smooth and angelic but sometimes angular and amateurish.

Later on there’s a room devoted to the period he spent living and working with Elizabeth Siddal, originally a model but, as this exhibition goes to great lengths to demonstrate, an artist in her own right. The curators place sketches, drawings and small paintings by Gabriel and Siddal alongside each other but I had the same experience as in Room 2 i.e. a lot of both of their work seemed to me poor, amateurish, ungainly, badly modeled figures and badly drawn faces.

The sketches introduce another theme which is how cramped and confined so much of Gabriel’s art is. At one point the curators point out that The Artist In His Study was a recurring theme of Gabriel’s work, but it’s not just the artist trapped indoors. In sketch after drawing after painting, the subject (always people, never landscapes or still lifes) has to bend over, lean in, wry their neck into the claustrophobic confines of the framing space. Almost all of his people are indoors and in a very cluttered, cramped and confined indoors at that.

All these qualities are on display in Ecce Ancilla Domini. It’s indoors; in a very cramped narrow room, emphasised by the vertical line of the narrow bed and, of course, the standing figure. Look how tightly frame it is with the picture edge right up against the left side of the angel’s gown and the red stand on the right, and the terrified woman pressed up tight against the hard cold whitewashed wall. I can barely breathe.

Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1850)
© Tate

What’s so odd as to be barely believable is that the artist who produced these small cramped images, up to and beyond his Pre-Raphaelite phase in the late 1840s and 50s, then blossomed into the artist of the big, lush, sensual masterpieces of the 1870s and 1880s. It’s as if they were two completely different people.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (the PRBs)

The exhibition has to cover Gabriel’s involvement with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which he founded in 1848 along with soul mates William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner, but it keeps it under control, as it were, not splurging but maintaining its focus on Gabriel (and to a lesser extent Christina).

This room is the one place where the curators bring in other works, by Millais and Hunt in particular, in order to explain the shared aims of the group. The idea was to reject the shadowy forms and stylised poses of the Italian Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. The PRBs believed the classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael, in particular, had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence their ambition to go back before Raphael to recapture the clean, detailed and precise style of artists who preceded the High Renaissance.

This led to a kind of super-realism where you can make out every hair on the head of the figures, where the background isn’t shady and blurred to indicate distance, but everything is seen in full detail, sparkling with a kind of universal light. This is one of the 3 or 4 paintings that the curators include as examples of the early, radical style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a typical selection of a medieval subject by William Holman Hunt. Note the hallucinatory clarity of every detail, of the flowers at bottom centre, the hair of the horseman on the right, the loving detail of the light reflecting on all the armour.

Rienzi vowing to obtain justice for the death of his young brother, slain in a skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini factions by William Holman Hunt (1849) Private collection of Mrs E. M. Clarke

Realists and rebels – or inventors of a new form of escapism

A comment on the wall caption made me smile. The curators state that ‘The men and women in the Pre-Raphaelites’ circle wanted to express themselves authentically, with art and poetry based on lived experience and nature.’ Elsewhere they talk about the PRB’s commitment to depict the life of their times, and imply that this or that painting is a piercing critique of Victorian sexism, social inequality, poverty and so on. And indeed some, a very small number of paintings and drawings, can be interpreted in this way.

But a wider truth is conveyed in the wall label’s very next sentence: ‘Their paintings and writings explored stories from the Bible and medieval books that resonated with their modern lives.’ That’s closer to the mark because what comes over is the PRB’s commitment to flee the social realities of their time. The curators themselves point out how Gabriel, his family and friends sought inspiration in anything but their own time, in stories from the Bible, fairy tales, folk tales, Greek myths and legends and, above all, by escaping into a beautifully rendered and idealised version of the Middle Ages.

The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, The Roman de la Rose, the Arthurian legends and, above all of them, a lifelong obsession the 14th century Dante Alighieri – all this was about as far away as you could possibly get from the political, economic or social life of their times.

The PRB’s speciality was escapism, and in this they followed the other poets of their day who mined John Keats’s lush sensuality to produce the medievalising monologues of Robert Browning but above all the tremulous emissions of the presiding poet of the era, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Take Browning’s poem ‘Pippa Passes’, allegedly written ‘to speak for the masses … cuffed and huffed from morn to midnight’. but whose subject, Pippa, is a silkworker who walks through the medieval Italian town of Asolo, singing and inspiring good. Or Tennyson’s log work the ‘Idylls of the King’, the king in question being King Arthur. While the British army subjugated more and more parts of the world, Britain’s poets vapoured about knights and damsels. And the Rossettis? Well, could they have made more drawings, sketches and paintings of knights in armour and damsels in distress?

Arthur’s Tomb by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1860) © Tate

No, for actual lived experience of the mid-Victorian period the Rossettis and Pre-Raphaelites are the very last source you would consult. You would look in the novelists – the poet laureate of London, Dickens, to a lesser extent Thackeray, or the gritty novels of Mrs Gaskell with their harrowing accounts of working class life.

So taken at face value the notion that the PRBs were radicals who sought ‘authenticity’ and to depict life  with a new realism in defiance of the conventions of the society around them and of the artistic establishment represented by the Royal Academy seems nonsensical.

But maybe I’m missing the point. I think PRB fans would point out that the realism and authenticity they were seeking was an emotional and psychological realism. In the subjects of their art they fled the reality of their times to Greek legends and medieval stories in order to capture complex, fleeting, intense and evanescent emotions which the banality of day-to-day living in industrialising London seemed to crush and stifle.

Thus Gabriel’s very strange painting of Arthur’s Tomb, above, is radical in the sense that it rejects the entire tradition of Salon art, of the huge Grand Historical or Mythological Subjects promoted by the founder of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, with their grand gestures and beautiful finish. Instead the characteristically cramped and claustrophobic composition, the sense that both figures are being squashed by the tee above, the awkward bending of Lancelot, Guinevere’s hand fending him off – the cramped awkwardness of the entire thing conveys a very modern, complex psychological moment, fraught with tensions.

So the flight into the Middle Ages which is enacted in painting after painting, was it a flight from contemporary reality – or was it the adoption of distant subjects the more easily to convey complex modern psychological states? Discuss.

Elizabeth Siddal

Following new research, Elizabeth Siddal’s surviving watercolours are shown in a two-way dialogue with contemporary works by Gabriel, exploring modern love in jewel-like medieval settings. As a working­ class artist who was largely self-taught, Elizabeth’s work was highly original and inventive, but has often been overshadowed by her mythologisation as a tragic muse (see, for example, this BBC article, The tragedy of art’s greatest supermodel).

According to the curators Siddal and Gabriel’s work together marks a turning point from Pre-Raphaelitism to the new, more imaginative and expressive Aesthetic style which emerged in the 1870s.

Lady Affixing Pennant to a Knight’s Spear by Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1856) © Tate

Aestheticism – Gabriel’s second revolution

There’s such a huge difference between Gabriel’s often clunky, cramped compositions of the 1850s and the huge, gorgeous flowing masterpieces of the 1870s that it’s as if they’re by two completely different people. The curators clarify that, a generation after helping found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti was at the epicentre of a second great artistic revolution, this time the Aesthetic Movement with its credo ‘Art for Art’s Sake’.

He went on to lead a new avant-garde group even more influential than the Pre-Raphaelites: the aesthetic movement. This would change ideas, art and design around the world.

Already in 1864 the hazy light, colour and heavy symbolism of Beata Beatrix looked forward to the Aestheticism and the international Symbolist movement later in the century.

Gabriel’s portraits [in the later 1860s and 1870s] reflected the aesthetic movement’s ideals of ‘art for art’s sake’ and a new modern beauty. He adapted the likenesses of working-class women of unconventional appearance, notably model Alexa Wilding, into fantasies of enchanting femininity. Inspired by Renaissance portraiture and mythological texts, these sensual portraits suggested touch, sound and scent as well as vision. They emphasised the pleasure of form and colour, looking ahead to the abstract art of the following century.

This is the thinking behind the final two rooms which amount to an orgy of spectacular Rossetti classics.

Installation view of ‘The Rossettis’ at Tate Britain, showing Room Seven which features ten stunning paintings from Rossetti’s sensual prime. Photo by Madeleine Buddo © Tate

We learn about the art collector Frederick Leyland who owned the three paintings in the photo above plus two more which are hanging nearby. He displayed all five in the drawing room of his mansion at Princes Gate, London, and the exhibition features a contemporary photograph to prove it. Apparently it’s the first time all five paintings have been reunited in one space since Leyland’s heyday in the 1880s.

Originally from a modest background, Leyland rose to run one of the largest transatlantic shipping companies of his day. Because they see it as their job to take every opportunity to remind us of woke and feminist issues, the curators tell us that much of Leyland’s trade was based on the cotton that fed textile manufacturing in northern British towns and that the cotton came from the American South where exploitative labour continued long after the abolition of slavery.

Leyland used the money he made from his business to become a key figure in the aesthetic movement, transforming his Liverpool and London homes into palaces of modern art. It was Leyland who commissioned The Beguiling of Merlin by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and commissioned the architect Thomas Jeckyll and the American ‘aesthetic’ painter James McNeill Whistler to decorate his dining room, a commission which resulted in the Peacock Room, considered one of Whistler’s greatest works. A really key figure, then, and purchaser of some of Gabriel’s most stunning and sensuous portraits of beautiful, strong-jawed, thick-necked, frizzy-haired aesthetic beauties.

Monna Vanna by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866) © Tate

The femme fatale

Uneasy with these lush and opulent depictions of sensual, semi-erotic women, the curators take refuge in a familiar feminist trope. This is the notion that some of Gabriel’s paintings in his mature late style are of femmes fatales. This allows the curators to take refuge in familiar tropes about sexual objectifying of women and gender stereotyping and male anxiety about female sexuality, the usual shopping list.

Gabriel engaged with the idea of the dangerous, sexualised ‘fatal woman’ or the ‘femme fatale’. This usually negative figure of feminine power responded to Victorian anxieties about social change. It became a popular fantasy figure towards the end of the century, and persists in literature and art today.

Persists in literature and art today? Tut tut. And despite all the brave attempts of feminist curators to change the world. Shame. Sometimes I wonder how old art curators think their readers are. 10?

The kind of painting we’re talking about is Gabriel’s depiction of Lady Lilith. The ancient story has it that Lilith was Adam’s independent-minded first wife who he put away and replaced with Eve. In revenge, Lilith seduced and persuaded the serpent to tempt Eve which led to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden’s bower and the fall of mankind. Naughty Lilith.

Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866 to 1868) Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

If you allow yourself to get worked up about millennia-old stories this is obviously a sexist trope designed to demean and blacken independent women everywhere. For those not so easily upset, it’s a pretext for a staggeringly sensual painting, rich in details of fabric, hair and flowers. Doesn’t look much like a denizen of prehistoric Mesopotamia, does she? Desert, snake, tree? The picture could, frankly, be given the name of almost any woman from myth and legend and make as much sense.

In fact, my view would be that this is a painting about money and luxury. These are the kind of extraordinarily richly coloured, beautifully detailed, dreamily luxurious images of extremely attractive women which Gabriel sold by the cartload to mega-rich patrons like Leyland. It is a luxurious depiction of luxury for those rich enough to live in luxury.

The magic of exhibitions like this is that we poor peasants, for the hour or so that we spend strolling round masterpieces like this, are also lifted into a realm of luxury, beauty, sensuality that has never existed with this kind of other-worldly perfection but which we, for a tenner, can for fleeting moments, enter and inhabit. The scent of the roses! The texture of that silk dress! The luxury of those endless tresses!

Lilith poem

As we’ve learned, Gabriel and many of his friends and lovers often wrote poems about the subjects they were painting or painted their poems, the two art forms interpenetrating. Thus next to this amazing painting there’s a striking sonnet by Gabriel. If you stand in the right spot (on one of the signs on the carpet) you magically trigger a reading of the poem in the lugubrious tones of actor Bill Nighy.

Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?

Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

The slightly knotty syntax takes a couple of readings to get quite straight (it took me a couple of goes to understand the importance od ‘not found in the 9th line) but then, wow. You could argue the slight entanglement of the lines deliberately mimics the strangling effect of Lilith’s golden hair.  Maybe. Presumably Lilith’s hair is golden in the poem because ‘golden’ sounds good, but orange-auburn in the painting because orange is such a dramatic and deeply luxurious colour as, for example, in Frederick Leighton’s famous painting, Flaming June.

Special attractions

Curators not only need a theme or pretext with which to concoct an art exhibitions but score extra points if they can come up with rare or unique or special features that make the show extra-special. The curators of this exhibition have excelled themselves with four or five of these ‘special features’ to look out for / be impressed by.

1. The wallpaper

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s previously unrealised work as a designer is brought to life in The Rossettis. A wallpaper he designed 160 years ago has been created for the first time especially for Tate Britain’s exhibition. Intended to decorate the home that Dante Gabriel shared with Elizabeth Siddal after their marriage, the artist sketched and described the design for this unusual wallpaper in close detail but ever, it was never put into production and only existed as a drawing until now.

Now Tate Britain has worked with illustrator and designer llyanna Kerr to bring Rossetti’s design to life. The design depicts a grove of apple trees at dusk, with stars appearing in the deep blue sky above, in a style that looks forward to the Art Nouveau movement at the end of the 19th century.

Installation view of ‘The Rossettis’ at Tate Britain, showing Room Five which showcases a wallpaper designed by Gabriel but never produced in his lifetime. Photo by Madeleine Buddo © Tate

And it’s not just wallpaper. This room also includes some big bits of furniture, namely a Rossetti-related cabinet, chair, and sofa.

Installation view of ‘The Rossettis’ at Tate Britain, showing King René’s Honeymoon Cabinet (photo by the author)

King René’s Honeymoon Cabinet (1861)

J.P. Seddon (1827 to 1906) designed this architect’s desk, including the metalwork and inlay, in 1861 for his own use. Seddon had the desk made at his father’s cabinet-making firm. He also commissioned ten painted panels depicting the Fine and Applied Arts from Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Ford Madox Brown, who also designed the panel representing ‘Architecture’, suggested the overall theme. The ‘Painting’ and ‘Sculpture’ panels were by Edward Burne-Jones, while Gabriel was responsible for ‘Music’ and ‘Gardening’. Morris designed the decorative background for each panel. (Text from the V&A article about the cabinet.)

Installation view of ‘The Rossettis’ at Tate Britain, showing chair and sofa designed and decorated by Gabriel (photo by the author)

The chair and sofa

The conspicuous consumption that characterised fashionable Victorian interior design did not suit Elizabeth and Gabriel’s ideal of a more authentic life. They sought out and adapted furniture that was basic and true to its materials and methods of making. They found beauty in handcraft rather than elaborate ornamentation and liked open, gracefully turned wood.

Gabriel collaborated with William Morris’s design firm to create rush-seated chairs like the one on display here, and this early-19th-century style sofa for his and Elizabeth’s home. On the sofa backrests are insets representing Love, the Loving or Lover, and the Beloved, painted by Gabriel.

Honeysuckle wallpaper

The big blue wallpaper isn’t the only one created specially for this exhibition. Room 8 has a wall covered in honeysuckle wallpaper made specially for this exhibition. It’s based on an embroidered hanging designed by William Morris and sewn by Jane Morris. Jane, her sister Bessie and her daughters May and Jenny played a key creative role in the making of textiles and embroideries for the family firm Morris & Co. This collective approach makes it difficult to identify individuals’ work. We know Jane was embroidering Honeysuckle around the end of Gabriel’s life. The finished embroidery was exhibited at the first Arts and Crafts exhibition in 1888.

Installation view of ‘The Rossettis’ at Tate Britain, showing the honeysuckle wallpaper in Room Eight. Photo by Madeleine Buddo © Tate

The blue wallpaper, the closet and the sofa had one overwhelming impact on me which was to get rid of them. ‘Chuck out your chintz’ as the old Ikea ad had it. This was precisely the kind of heavy, dark, wooden, over-decorated clutter which the Modernist designers of the Bauhaus had to reject in order to create the modern, clean, simple design aesthetic of the twentieth century. It has great historical interest, and kudos to Tate for recreating it, but I cordially disliked all of it.

2. A handwritten poem

A handwritten poem by Gabriel is exhibited for the first time, on loan from the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. Entitled The Portrait, this is believed to be one of the pages which were buried with Elizabeth Siddal’s body in Highgate Cemetery in 1862. The coffin was later exhumed in October 1869 to retrieve the pages when Gabriel was preparing to publish his first collection of poetry. The manuscript shows his frantic revisions ahead of its publication, including editing out some of the more sensual lines like ‘our hair had to be untangled when we rose’.

The poem describes the ability of a portrait painting to inspire memories of an absent lover and bring her to life. It is closely associated with Gabriel’s iconic painting of Elizabeth, Beata Beatrix, which was created at the time of the poem’s retrieval, seven years after her death. The two are now brought together in this show, and their paring is typical of the way both Gabriel and Elizabeth conceived of poems accompanying paintings and paintings made to accompany poems.

Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1864) © Tate

3. Three Proserpines brought together

Tate’s famous Rossetti painting of Jane Morris as the mythological figure Proserpine has been brought together with two later paintings of the same subject, both on loan from private collections. They reveal the artist’s obsessive attention to detail and his fondness for revision and experimentation, developed over multiple versions spanning many years. The languid yet studied pose, and the amazing finish of the dress, went on to influence many modern artists who wanted to express emotion in art through colour and shape.

Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1874) © Tate

Gabriel first began depicting Jane as Proserpine around the time they became lovers in 1870. Her sadness and longing for the summer months is perhaps intended to evoke the time Jane and Dante Gabriel are not able to be together. The painting is also a study in melancholy, a subject the two often spoke about. The exhibition includes a book on the subject, Robert Burton’s famous ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, which Dante Gabriel gave to Jane as a Christmas present in 1873. An ink drawing of her, intended for her eyes only, was hidden inside.

4. Portrait of Fanny Eaton

The exhibition is a rare opportunity to see one of Gabriel’s finest drawings. On loan from Stanford University in California, this portrait of Fanny Eaton is one of a series of portrait studies of working-class professional models whose likenesses reappear in paintings throughout the exhibition. Eaton was one of the most successful and sought-after of these models, often shown by other artists in expressive and dramatic roles, but Rossetti here depicts her in a private moment of quiet thought. It is one of the finest images in the show.

Born in 1835 in Surrey, Jamaica, probably the daughter of an enslaved mother, Eaton came to Britain after abolition and set up home with James Eaton, a coach driver. She bore him 10 children who she continued to provide for on her own after James died in his 40s. Her grave in Margravine Cemetery, Hammersmith, was finally marked with a headstone 6 months ago, followed by a blue plaque on her last home near Shepherd’s Bush.

Head of a Young Woman [Mrs. Eaton?] by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1863 to 1865) © Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

The Eaton study appears in a fascinating room, Room Six, which is devoted to just one painting, The Beloved.

The Beloved (‘The Bride’) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866) © Tate

To quote the curators:

Gabriel’s composition for ‘The Beloved’ was inspired by Renaissance artist Titian’s painting ‘Woman with a Mirror’ (1515) conceived as a Venus figure surrounded by many mirrors. He adapted this into an image inspired by the biblical ‘Song of Solomon’, about a young woman meeting her bridegroom, surrounded by attendants. In his eyes, the seven figures represented a universal vision of female beauty’. Created at a time when Britain was more connected to the globe through travel and colonial expansion, ‘The Beloved’ is Gabriel’s only oil painting to include models of colour. The work was conceived during the American Civil War (1861 to 1865) when newspapers debated universal freedom and the liberation of Black people enslaved in the Southern US states. The figures, flowers and accessories in the painting are appropriated from cultures around the world, particularly those from Asia and North Africa. They represent an ‘orientalist’ fantasy which mis-imagined these areas as archaic, exotic and interchangeable.

There you have a good example of the censorious, scolding tone of modern art scholarship. The purpose of devoting a room to this one painting is that the curators have assembled Gabriel’s preparatory sketches for each of the six heads which appear in the finished painting. It’s in this context that the stunning Head of a Young Woman appears a study of Mrs Eaton who appears in the final work as the third head from the left, with a completely different expression.

Thus there’s also a study of the black boy at the front of the painting. We don’t know his name but, as you can imagine, the Tate curators are super-alert to all the possible negative implications of his appearance:

Little is known of this boy, a visitor to London. Gabriel met him outside a hotel. Children had few rights in Victorian times. In this case, Gabriel negotiated the boy’s modelling work with an American described as his ‘master’, suggesting he was a student, servant or born into slavery. His gaze engages the viewer strongly, but Gabriel’s main intention was aesthetic. He wanted a model with what he described as ‘pure’ African heritage to add a different skin tone to the composition [giving him a] decorative and dehumanising role…

They go on to say something which slightly puzzled me:

Little is known of the boy’s experience of sitting. Gabriel is believed to have said he was both playful and tearful, and wondered whether he missed his mother. Where the girl models were drawn clothed, the boy was required to pose partly undressed. This may have contributed to his discomfort, expressed, perhaps, in the serious gaze. For the artist, the nudity objectified his appearance, displayed his dark skin and removed him from the present to the archaic fantasy space.

The bit that puzzles me is the idea that just this one boy, because he is black, has suffered a unique and grievous crime in being removed ‘from the present to the archaic fantasy space.’ Hang on. Haven’t the other four models been just as removed ‘from the present to the archaic fantasy space’? In fact, a moment’s reflection suggests that pretty much every model who ever posed for Gabriel and his friends was removed from the gritty realities of 1860s London and magically recreated in, the generally medieval, ‘fantasy space’.

I was genuinely puzzled why this ‘removal to fantasy space’ is absolutely fine and not worthy of comment on the hundreds and hundreds of occasions when it happens to white models, but troubles the curators so much that they comment on it in two separate captions, when the subject is black.

5. Rarely seen photographs of Elizabeth Siddal’s lost drawings

After Elizabeth Siddal’s death, Gabriel collected her drawings, had them photographed, printed and pasted into albums. Three pages of these albums are on display for the first time in this exhibition, on loan from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Many of the original drawings have since been lost, such as her evocative depictions of the knight’s enchantment with the femme fatale from Keats’ poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. New research into these drawings has revealed the ‘call and response’ of ideas between Elizabeth and Gabriel, with poses she used in her work reappearing in his later work.

The inclusion of these dozen or so photos of Siddal drawings is important to the curators because it furthers their deep aim of boosting women in art, in this particular instance adding just that bit more evidence to their case for the importance of Elizabeth Siddal, as an artist in her own right, and as a creative partner with Gabriel. They’re not, to be honest, anything special, but I appreciate where the curators are coming from.

Summary

I’m not a particular fan of the PRBs nor of Rossetti but, even as a semi-sceptic, I was blown away. This is a lovingly assembled, deeply intelligent and learned exhibition, beautifully designed and laid out, which includes many fascinating digressions and diversions, before leading up to the final rooms packed with staggering masterpieces. Wonderful. Amazing.

The video

Related links

Merchandise

More Tate Britain reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 12, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/08/12/the-rossettis-tate-britain/

The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh

Waugh was a professional writer from the year he published his first short story in 1926 till his death in 1966. During that period he published some 26 short stories. There are several editions of his collected short stories, notable the Everyman one and the Penguin one. I read the Penguin one but the Everyman edition (which includes a few more stories than the Penguin) is the one that’s available online.

What all the editions tend to highlight is that Evelyn Waugh did not, in fact, write many short stories. All the editions include the juvenilia written at school, and the half dozen stories written at Oxford, to bulk up the books. And for real aficionados and completists it’s good to have everything in one volume like this. But the fact remains that in a writing career of 40 years he only published 26 short stories.

Spin-offs from novels or no short stories at all

Not only that, but when you look more closely, you realise that a number of the stories are offcuts of the novels and so closely linked as to be barely standalone narratives.

Thus ‘Incident in Azania’ is set in the fictional country created for the novel Black Mischief and feels very much like an anecdote which could have been included in that novel but was cut as surplus to requirements. ‘Cruise’ is a short squib, a lampoon consisting entirely of postcards written by a gushing, silly, posh young lady on a cruise round the Med, an idea recycled from one of his travel books. ‘Charles Ryder’s Schooldays’ is quite obviously a spin-off from Brideshead Revisited and ‘Basil Seal Rides Again’ is a final flurry for the character at the centre of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags.

So four of the 26 are direct spin-offs from novels.

More than that, three of the stories are actual extracts from the novels: ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ is an early version of the final chapters of A Handful of Dust and ‘By Special Request’ is not a standalone story at all, but the original ending of A Handful of Dust as it first appeared when the novel was serialised in Harper’s Bazaar. ‘Compassion’ was recycled in its entirety into the end section of Unconditional Surrender.

So seven of his adult short stories aren’t really standalone narratives but either rely on the novels they derive from or are actual excerpts from them. Leaving 19.

Two of these 19 aren’t really short stories at all. The post-war narratives ‘Scott-King’s Modern Europe’ and ‘Love Among The Ruins’ are far longer than your normal short story, certainly than the other stories included here, and so are generally categorised as novellas. Leaving 17.

And lastly, by far the longest item in the collection, at around 80 pages, is ‘Work Suspended: Two Chapters of an Unfinished Novel’ which, as the title suggests, is not and was never intended to be a short story, but the first sections of an abandoned novel.

Leaving only about 16 short stories gleaned from a career which lasted nearly 40 years.

Commissions

Finally, the notes in the Penguin edition reveal one more fact about the ‘short stories’, which is that quite a few of them were commissions, not written off his own bat. Now there’s nothing wrong with a story being commissioned – both Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four were commissioned over the same historic dinner (30 August 1889) with the magazine editor, J. M. Stoddart. However, all of Waugh’s commissioned stories only make sense, or make a lot more sense, when you learn they were commissioned as part of series on a set theme:

Thus:

  • ‘A House of Gentlefolks’ was commissioned for a series titled The New Decameron
  • ‘The Kremlin’ was commissioned for a series titled Real Life Stories by Famous Authors (which explains its opening sentence: ‘ This story was told me in Paris very early in the morning by the manager of a famous night club, and I am fairly certain that it is true.’).
  • ‘Too much tolerance’ was commissioned for a series titled The Seven Deadly Sins of Today and only really makes sense in that context
  • and ‘The Sympathetic Passenger’ was written for the Tight Corner series in the Daily Mail, ditto

The short story not Waugh’s metier

So the conclusion I draw from this little statistical analysis is that Waugh was very much not a short story writer, certainly not in the manner of Saki or Somerset Maugham or Kipling or J.G. Ballard, writers who produced a tremendous output of short stories but, more importantly, who suited the short story format. All four of those authors, in their different ways, knew just how to manage their material into artefacts which create maximum artistic and psychological impact and a range of effects. Waugh not so much.

In fact I’m afraid to say I found a lot of Waugh’s stories disappointing. A few I didn’t even understand, I didn’t see the point of them.

In a novel like Vile Bodies Waugh took scores of anecdotes about the shallow, heartless behaviour of his upper class Bright Young Things and combined them in such a way as to produce a kind of group portrait which was much larger than the sum of its parts. But broken down into short, isolated texts, most of these anecdotes feel much weaker, and sometimes pretty lame.

For me the stories’ value was analytical, they gave me a greater understanding of what you could call the ‘mosaic technique’ of Waugh’s novels, what I’ve referred to as the importance of gossip, not only as subject matter of the novels but as a key element of his technique. The way the central events of the novels are always commentated on by the shoals of secondary characters which fill his novels, gossiping at parties and restaurants and balls and dinners, mingling catty comments about the central events of the novel’s narrative with deliberately throwaway mentions of the trials and tribulations of other, unrelated people to give a powerful sense of their ultimate irrelevance; or the way all stories, and all lives in the modern world are swamped and trivialised by the sheer number of people and tragedies and stories we’re meant to pay attention to.

This technique has multiple benefits: from the point of view of literary realism, it helps create the illusion of the throng, of the crowdedness of London High Society, where everyone knows everyone else, goes to each other’s parties and dinners, where everyone spends a lot of time energetically gossiping about each other’s ups and downs and affairs.

Seen in terms of technique it has at least two benefits: it allows Waugh to skip or cut briskly between scenes with great dramatic effect, just as films can cut from one scene to another in a split second. This encourages or suits Waugh’s tendency to be concise and clipped, so that some of his best scenes are only half a page long before they cut away to something completely different. Technique and style are perfectly combined.

(Waugh’s debt to cinema technique becomes overt in some of these texts, not least in ‘Excursion in Reality’ which is a Vile Bodies-era satire about a hapless young writer who gets caught up in the 24/7 crazy world of film production; and the very first text in the collection is a kind of commented-on version of the screenplay of a black-and-white, silent movie.)

Waugh’s understated debt to Modernism

The second benefit of Waugh’s ‘mosaic technique’ is the way this approach subtly incorporates some of the best features of the previous generation’s Modernism. Modernism refers to a movement in literature during and after the Great War which sought to depict the hectic, frantic, fragmented, fractured experience of living in big cities in styles or narrative structures which reflected psychic collapse and disintegration. Thus the disintegration of a highly sensitive mind portrayed in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, the extreme fragmentation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the collapse of a unified narrative and then of the English language itself in James Joyce’s Ulysses, or the collapse of the patriarchal Victorian tone of voice into the swirling stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf’s novels.

Waugh swallowed Modernism whole, experimented with it, and then adapted it for his own purposes, keeping only what he needed. The very first story in the collection, ‘The Balance’, published in 1926, is the best example (described below) in the way it is broken up into short snippets headed by the captions of the silent movie it describes. This immediately recalls the clever use of newspaper headlines in the ‘Aeolus’ chapter of Ulysses and anticipates the blizzard of newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, popular songs and so on which litter the classic example of German high Modernism, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, published a few years later in 1929.

My point is that this technique of fragments, of consciously breaking up the text of a narrative into a mosaic of short clipped scenes, of cutting away from the main protagonists of an event to a group of their friends heartlessly laughing about their fates, a technique exemplified in Vile Bodies but which appears, with greater or lesser frequency throughout all his fiction, this was Waugh’s version of Modernist fragmentation and alienation.

Waugh and mental breakdown

And although Waugh has the (deserved) reputation of being a great comic writer, actually rereading the novels as I’ve been doing, it has been a shock to realise just how much misery, suffering and pain they include.

There are scores of examples but, focusing literally on mental breakdown, I think of the devastating impact on Tony and Brenda Last of the tragic death of their son in A Handful of Dust. Take the scene where they return from their son’s inquest to big, empty Hetton Hall and Brenda barely makes it into the entrance hall before sitting down in a decorative chair which nobody usually sits on, sitting there and looking around her in a daze. Or immediately after Tony gets news of his son’s death and trembles on the brink of going to pieces, is only saved by the compassion of ‘the Shameless Blonde’, the sturdy American woman aviator who stays with him and forces him to play cards all afternoon. A scene of tremendous psychological power.

Or take Vile Bodies which is all very hilarious up till the racing car crash which precipitates the concussion and nervous collapse and eventual death of the bright, confident heroine Agatha Runcible.

A key strand in the similarly polyphonic novel Put Out More Flags is the psychological decline of Angela Lyne, up to that point a confident, dominating presence in London High Society, whom the advent of war reduces to an alcoholic wreck, hiding out in her serviced apartment, drinking all day in dark glasses with the curtains closed.

A central thread in Brideshead Revisited is the agonising decline of the bright and beautiful young undergraduate Sebastian Flyte into a shambling, poverty-stricken, feverish wreck in the slums of Tunis.

And then, of course, Waugh wrote an entire novel dramatising his own mental breakdown, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in 1957.

So for a writer who’s (correctly) associated with the reactionary views of England’s moneyed upper classes and (correctly) famous for his high-spirited comedy, it’s worth repeating that Waugh also wrote throughout his career about extreme tragedy, psychological trauma and mental collapse, and did so using his own version of the polyphonic, mosaic narrative technique – both a subject matter and a technique more usually associated with the avant-garde.

Anyway, to return to the short stories, my point is simply that if most of them had been included in one of his novels, they would have made one more hilarious scene amid the general mayhem of the polyphonic, multi-stranded plots and contributed to the complex artistic and psychological impact of the novels. But given here, as standalone short stories, as just one bald anecdote, a surprising number of them come over as lame and flat.

Which is why I wouldn’t really recommend these short stories to anyone. I’d recommend reading pretty much all the novels first, before you bother with them.

Pre and post-war

One last point. The stories can also be divided in chronological order into those written before the Second World War and those written after. At a glance you can see that he was far more prolific in short stories before (21) than after (5). (For the period of the war itself he was either serving in the Army or, from December 1943 to June 1944, entirely busy writing his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited.)

If we count Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins as novellas, then he can only be said to have written three short stories between 1945 and 1966, confirming my feeling that the short story was emphatically not his genre. That said, all three post-war short stories are good.

Short stories 1. Pre-war

1. The Balance (1926)

Born in 1903, Waugh was only 22 when he wrote this, by far his most experimental and avant-garde text.

In the cinema

Very much in the style of Vile Bodies, this fairly long text uses a number of highly experimental narrative techniques. Most of it, the long first part, consists of scenes from an imagined film. It opens with a cook and a house parlour maid (Gladys and Ada) making their way to their seats in a cinema and then making cheerily working class comments on the action of the movie they’re watching. Somewhere behind them (in the more expensive seats) sits a Cambridge student who drawls knowing intellectual comments (pointing out the debt to European Expressionism of some of the shots, explaining what steak tartare is). And the text is punctuated by the captions in CAPITAL LETTERS which are appearing onscreen, as this is a black-and-white, silent film.

Thus the text consists of: capitalised captions, interspersed with the narrator’s description of what is happening onscreen, interspersed with the working class comments of the two servants given in italics, and the occasional sardonic comment from Mr Cambridge.

The ‘story’ is made up of clichés and stereotypes, which allows his working class women to spot in advance what’s going to happen, the Cambridge man to make superior comments, and Waugh to mock all of them.

Adam is at art school. He loves Imogen. Imogen’s mummy tells her she must stop seeing him. They share a cab to Euston where she catches a train to the country. Ada, catches cab to home near Regent’s Park, goes up to room, melodramatically considers suicide by pills, imagines the vulgarity of family breaking down door, calling police, thinks again. Scoops up his best books and takes them to a luxury second-hand bookseller, the fussing about first editions suddenly reminding me of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He gets a tenner for his books, then a cab to Paddington and train to Oxford and goes to see, one by one, his incredibly posh undergraduate friends. Old Etonians, the Bullingdon Club, chaps who hunt, who paint, who drink very heavily.

The window blind has become stuck halfway up the window so that by day they are shrouded in a twilight as though of the Nether world, and by night Ernest’s light blazes across the quad, revealing interiors of unsurpassed debauchery.

Yes, Dorian Gray. Waugh is channeling Wilde turned into a 1920s silent movie. And deliberately elitist or excluding references to aspects of Oxford life. Eights week. Commem. The Bullingdon. The Canning. All the posh young men he tries are busy till he resorts to visiting the rooms of Ernest Vaughan.

They go for dinner at a local pub, get plastered, go on to some rough proletarian pubs, play darts, get into loud arguments, get kicked out, catch a cab back to the colleges, gatecrash a party, pour drinks on the carpet, nearly get into another fight till Ernest walks dignifiedly out into the quad, throws up and passes out.

Cut to the next evening when the pair gatecrash a Liberal Association party at Oxford town hall. Having irritated the guests and got blind drunk they walk outside where Ernest steals a car, drives it haphazardly down St Aldate’s before mounting then kerb and crashing into a shop window. Police close in and arrest him. Adam walks very depressed back to his hotel room. He uncaps the bottle of poison and drinks the contents down in one.

End of film. Glady and Ada and the smart Cambridge graduate and a hundred others exit the film, all chatting about it, the two women to make their way back to their shared rooms in Earls Court where they’ll carry on discussing it over cups of cocoa.

Adam outside the film

At which point the text cuts and changes to a series of three sections of parts. Part one finds Adam in the hotel bedroom piecing together the fragments of the last 24 drunken hours and then remembering standing by the bedroom window in a storm of nausea before throwing up through it into the courtyard, presumably evacuating the poison from his system.

A boyhood memory

In the short part two he has a vivid memory of being a 7-year-old boy and playing a game with the family cat, Ozymandias, which consisted of locking it and himself in his bedroom then chasing it round the room terrorising it at every stop; only then did the real game begin, which was the challenge of trying to coax it back to a state of relaxed affection. And the particular memory which floats into his head as he lies on the bed recovering from his failed suicide attempt, is of the time that Ozymandias escaped to the top of the wardrobe, so the 7-year-old Adam pulled his table over to the wardrobe and put a chair on top of the table and climbed up on both and reached out for the cat and… the whole lot collapsed to the floor and he fell and knocked himself out. Vivid as yesterday he remembers the sensation of slowly ‘regaining consciousness’ and piecing together like a jigsaw the scattered flowing bodily sensations till he had attached particular pains to particular parts of the body and his ego was once again in control.

This early experience of psychological fragmentation, flotation and reassembly recurs at moments of drunkenness, as now. Now he gets up and has breakfast in the hotel still in a hallucinatory state:

He had breakfasted in a world of phantoms, in a great room full of uncomprehending eyes, protruding grotesquely from monstrous heads that lolled over steaming porridge; marionette waiters had pirouetted about him with uncouth gestures. All round him a macabre dance of shadows had reeled and flickered, and in and out of it Adam had picked his way, conscious only of one insistent need, percolating through to him from the world outside, of immediate escape from the scene upon which the bodiless harlequinade was played, into a third dimension beyond it.

Adam talks to his reflection

Adam walks out of Oxford along the towpath. He had written a letter to Imogen begging her to come back. He crosses a bridge over the canal and looks at a swan sailing by whose reflection is broken and fragmented. He tears up the letter and chucks the fragments into the river, then has a brief conversation with himself. He supposes tearing up the letter means he is over Imogen, and the fact that he’s here at all means he’s resolved to go on living. Was there no moral influence on his decision to live, no wish not to burden his loved ones, no profound insight into the meaning of life? No. Simply a rest, a sleep, a change of scenery. Ultimately, those are the small measures which make all the difference. No intrinsic motives from the soul. Just as random as…circumstance.

A shift of perspective

And then in its last two pages the text does what I mentioned so many of them doing: it switches perspective altogether to create a deliberate alienation effect. Suddenly we are at a country house named Thatch and Mrs Hay has invited her undergraduate son Basil and one friend for luncheon but a whole carload has turned up, gossiping and smoking all the time.

The point being, they are all telling each other about the other night when horrible Adam gatecrashed lovely Gabriel’s party with some ghastly man named Vaughan who was offensive to everyone then threw up. Here, right at the start of his career, we find Waugh using a technique which will serve him again and again, which is spending a lot of time on a close account of the incidents and thoughts of one or two protagonists; and then suddenly cutting far away to hear the same events being retold as throwaway gossip by people who don’t give a damn about the characters we’ve just been following and have invested so much time and trouble in.

It’s a very simple technique but very modernist in feeling, pulling the rug from under our feet, suddenly making us realise how silly and trivial the little trials and tribulations we’ve been following are in the great scale of things. Making the entire fictional edifice in which we had been investing time and emotion seem infinitely fragile and inconsequential.

Short conclusion

Arguably, and certainly to someone like myself, soaked in early twentieth century modernism, this is the most interesting of all the stories in the book. It clearly foregrounds three things: one, the very self-conscious modernist technique which Waugh studied, copied and assimilated; two, the interest in altered and extreme psychological states, reflected not only in Adam’s drunkenness but the much more interesting and vivid descriptions of regaining consciousness after his concussion as a small boy; three, the determinedly, almost offensively, upper class nature of the settings and characters – Mayfair, Lord and Lady this, Old Etonians at Oxford etc.

Of course it was this latter strand, the supremely upper class settings and characters, which were to characterise the rest of his writings. But this, Waugh’s first published short story, makes abundantly clear the surprisingly experimental nature of his early literary taste.

And also shows how an interest in morbid or damaged psychology was not just a personal thing, but has its roots in the fin-de-siecle obsession with decadence, its hyper-Gothic interest in altered states and very deeply troubled psyches, epitomised by Wilde’s novel Dorian Gray which leaves stray echoes in some of the self-consciously aesthetic moments this text – but reborn thirty years later in the era of Freudian psycho-analysis, jazz nightclubs and cocktail bars.

For these reasons I found it by far the most interesting, and intellectually stimulating, story in the collection.

A House of Gentlefolks (1927)

Only a year later and Waugh has swallowed, assimilated and concealed his learnings from Modernism (although there is a surprising reference to the famous Modernist author, Gertrude Stein, on the second page).

This is a first-person narrative which, in style at least, is thumpingly traditional, telling a simple narrative in chronological order with no fancy tricks. The narrator arrives by train at a rural station, it is raining, catches a taxi to Stayle, a grand country house surrounded by a wall, entry via umpteen gates, seat of the Duke of Vanburgh.

The narrator tells us his name is Ernest Vaughan, same name as the drunk in the previous story and, as he tells us he was sent down from Oxford for bad behaviour, it is presumably an early example of Waugh’s career-long habit of populating his fictions with recurring characters.

Anyway, sent down from Oxford, Ernest is at a loose end when his godmother tells him the Duke of Stayle is looking for a tutor to take his 18-year-old grandson and heir to the earldom on a tour round Europe. The only snag is the boy is mad. They now introduce him to the young fellow, actual name George, who has, it must be said, odd manners. Ernest feels sorry for him, as he only attended school for a term and is obviously ill at ease with strangers. He decides to take the job on.

Within a few hours they’re on the train to London, Ernest with a check for £150 in his pocket, where they check into a hotel and Ernest takes George on a tour of London’s attractions, revues, nightclubs and parties with his super-posh friends. Plus the very best tailors to get formal suits and travelling clothes made up. Over the next few days Ernest watches George blossom, learning about food, restaurants, fine wine, and party etiquette before his very eyes.

At one point they have a candid conversation in which he suggests that he isn’t mad at all; maybe it’s his grandfather and his great-aunts (who Ernest met in the first scene) who are the eccentrics, and this certainly seems likely to Ernest and to the reader.

Then it all grinds to a halt. In an ending almost as crass as saying ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream’, Ernest gets a letter from old Lord Stayle saying the family’s thought better of the experiment and are cancelling the trip. George is to come home straight away. A lawyer arrives to cancel all obligations and take him off. George’s parting words are that in 3 years time he’ll come of age and be able to do what he wants.

In a way the most telling moment comes in the final sentence:

Five minutes later Julia rang up to ask us to luncheon.

This has the brisk brevity of Vile Bodies, powerfully conveying the sense that, oh well, that adventure’s over, he’s mad, she’s dead, they’ve gotten divorced, Harry’s married Margot, he died in the war, she’s pregnant, whatever – conveying the dizzy speed of the high society social life Waugh dedicated himself to.

The Manager of ‘The Kremlin’ (1927)

The unnamed narrator likes going to a restaurant in Paris. One night he stays late and the manager, Boris, tells him his story. He was a student when the revolution joined out and joined a white army fighting the Bolsheviks. It was a motley crew which included various foreign nationals including a Frenchman. Boris helped save this man’s life by lending him his Russian uniform when they travelled through the most backward parts of Asiatic Russia. They were forced to flee east. Once in Japanese territory they shake hands and part. Boris took ship to America where he hoped to join his mother who had fled there early in the revolution. He does not thrive and after a couple of years takes ship to France, travelling to Paris where he hears there is a large diaspora. Here he really runs out of money and is down to his last 200 francs. In a very Russian gesture, he decides to blow it on one last luxury meal. As chance would have it the Frenchman he saved those years ago is dining at the next table. He accosts his old colleague and asks him how he’s doing. Boris explains he’s skint. The Frenchman runs a motor car company and toys with offering him a job but reflects that a man who could blow his last francs on an exquisite French meal is really cut out for the restaurant business. And so he loans Boris the money to start a restaurant and Boris employs some Russians he knows and now he is rich. Which is the story he tells the narrator in the early hours, as the ‘Kremlin’ restaurant closes up.

Love in the Slump (1932)

Big gap between the previous story published in 1927 and this one in 1932. During that time Waugh published his biography of Rossetti, Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), travelled to Abyssinia and produced Remote People (1931).

Originally titled ‘The Patriotic Honeymoon’, this is broad farce. An eligible if unremarkable young couple get married, decide to spend a patriotic honeymoon in England then experience a series of farcical mishaps. The portrait of the young wife is obviously a lampoon but nonetheless interesting social history about just what subjects were lampooned back then – portrait of a frustrated singleton c.1932:

Angela was twenty-five, pretty, good-natured, lively, intelligent and popular—just the sort of girl, in fact, who, for some mysterious cause deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon psychology, finds it most difficult to get satisfactorily married. During the last seven years she had done everything which it is customary for girls of her sort to do. In London she had danced on an average four evenings a week, for the first three years at private houses, for the last four at restaurants and night clubs; in the country she had been slightly patronising to the neighbours and had taken parties to the hunt ball which she hoped would shock them; she had worked in a slum and a hat shop, had published a novel, been bridesmaid eleven times and godmother once; been in love, unsuitably, twice; had sold her photograph for fifty guineas to the advertising department of a firm of beauty specialists; had got into trouble when her name was mentioned in gossip columns; had acted in five or six charity matinées and two pageants, had canvassed for the Conservative candidate at two General Elections, and, like every girl in the British Isles, was unhappy at home.

It’s interesting that what spurs Angela on to take the initiative and propose to bland, boring, safe, accountant Tom Watch is that he father has announced he has to make economies and will probably be closing the London house in order to retrench to his place in the country, sack a few of the servants, live a simpler life. Angela doesn’t want to live a simple life. So she combines her £200 a year with Tom’s £800 a year which they reckon they’ll be able to live on, just about, though not being able to have a child.

It rains on the wedding. They catch a train to Aunt Martha’s house in Devon. At some remote rural stop Tom gets out to check if they need to change and is buttonholed by an old school acquaintance who insists on buying him a drink then another at the station bar. When they come out on the platform the train’s gone, along with his baggage and bride!

He reluctantly accepts the old school chum’s back to his place and stay over. They drink a lot. He wakes up to discover his host is going hunting. Against his better nature he dons a hunting outfit, is loaned a mare, and has a good day’s run till he’s thrown and the mare trots off. He makes his way across country to an inn, the Royal George Hotel Chagford, where he’s taken in and given a bed for the night. Next morning he discovers the stop for his aunt’s place is no fewer than three changes from his present location so he sets off on slow local stopping trains not arriving at the station till late at night. He has travelled all day in wet clothes. No car is available. He decides to stay the night in the station inn.

Next morning Tom wakes hoarse and feverish. A taxi takes him to Aunt Martha’s where he discovers that… his beloved fiancée has left, having received a telegram from his first host saying Tom had met with an accident, she has travelled to his (the first host)’s house. Tom is too coldy to do anything and goes to bed. Next day, the sixth of the honeymoon, he begins to feel it’s not working our quite as he expected. His aunt’s maid suggests the host’s name will be inside the jacket he lent Tom and so there’s a brief exchange of telegrams with Angela a) saying she’s having a lovely time and b) no point meeting up now, wait till they meet up back in London. Which they do the next day.

And, as so often, the story cuts away from the main protagonists so that we learn from a conversation between Angela’s parents that she’s been given access to a lovely cottage in Devon, quite near the estate of the chap she stayed with. Won’t that lovely? The implication is that, after less than a week of honeymoon, Angela has found someone richer and more exciting than Tom to have an affair with.

Too Much Tolerance (1932)

The narrator is stopping between ships at a stifling little port on the Red Sea. It’s important to know that this ‘story’ was commissioned for a series about the Seven Deadly Sins and as such is a lampoon on the idea of tolerance, too much tolerance. It’s a simple idea. The narrator falls in with the only other European in his hotel, an amiable round-faced moustachioed commercial agent and this man displays the virtue of tolerance to excess. He likes all the races and creeds he meets.

In a gesture towards psychology Waugh explains that he had been brought up by elderly parents, retired from India, who held very fixed beliefs about etiquette and social distinctions. So as a young man he set out to consciously rebel against all that, to be open, and tolerant and accepting.

Slowly the narrator learns how this attitude has led to the man being hopelessly abused and reduced in life. Out of kindness he took a fellow into partnership in the business he’d set up with the legacy from his parents, but while he was serving in the Great War the fellow ran it into bankruptcy. Strange thing, though, almost immediately afterwards, his partner set up a new concern and is now a rich man.

In a similar vein, he reveals he has a 27-year-old son who’s never had a job, wants to be something in the theatre, gads around London with well-off friends. So our chap sends him as much money as he can to support him.

Lastly, he has a wife, or had a wife. His father had strict moral principles about who could and couldn’t be introduced at home, but he thought that was all rubbish and encouraged his wife to have her own friends and go out and about on her own. She liked dancing, he didn’t, she went to dance lessons and then dance clubs and then left him for a chap who was good at dancing and had a bit of a fast reputation.

So here he is. Reduced to ‘selling sewing machines on commission to Indian storekeepers up and down the East African coast’, a victim of his own niceness and credulousness:

a jaunty, tragic little figure, cheated out of his patrimony by his partner, battened on by an obviously worthless son, deserted by his wife, an irrepressible, bewildered figure striding off under his bobbing topee, cheerfully butting his way into a whole continent of rapacious and ruthless jolly good fellows.

Excursion in Reality (1932)

Struggling young novelist Simon Lent, living in a pokey mews flat and managing a relationship with demanding Sylvia, is hired out of the blue by British movie mogul Sir James MacRea. He is collected from his mews flat and plunged into a mad whirligig of meetings, missed appointments, canteen breaks, tours round film studios and sets, a whirlwind affair with Macrae’s secretary, Miss Grits, all based on the nonsensical notion that he should write an updated version of Hamlet, with modern dialogue, with a bit of Macbeth thrown in. Lent demurs. Sir James steamrollers over him:

“Ah, you don’t see my angle. There have been plenty of productions of Shakespeare in modern dress. We are going to produce him in modern speech. How can you expect the public to enjoy Shakespeare when they can’t make head or tail of the dialogue. D’you know I began reading a copy the other day and blessed if I could understand it. At once I said, ‘What the public wants is Shakespeare with all his beauty of thought and character translated into the language of everyday life.’”

For three weeks Lent throws himself into the ridiculous project, working hand in glove with Miss Grits and summoned to meetings at any hour of day or night. And then, as suddenly as he was summoned Lent is dropped by the director and studio, his contract terminated, and returns to the calm life of a struggling novelist, living in a tiny mews flat and having long moody dinners with Sylvia again.

Incident in Azania (1933)

Azania is the name of the fictional African country Waugh invented as the setting for his fourth novel, Black Mischief, loosely based on Zanzibar which he had visited on his 1930 trip to East Africa, recorded in Remote People.

The story is so inconsequential, I wondered if I’d read it right. Into the small colonial society of Matodi, port city of Azania, arrives the strapping blonde Prunella Brookes, attractive feisty daughter of the local oil company agent. Since there are only eight Englishwomen in the entire town, including a 2-year-old and all the rest married, her arrival inevitably causes a stir and soon there is gossip about which of the most eligible bachelors she is likely to date.

Then she disappears, then ransom letters arrive at the club. She has been kidnapped by bandits, led by the notorious Joab! They want £10,000 for her safe return.

The story is picked up by the wider press and a strapping Australian journalist flies in, a reporter for the Daily Excess. In a repetition of the satire on the press which featured in Black Mischief and was to form the central theme of Scoop, this chap writes a series of sensational and utterly invented descriptions of the bandits and their squalid caves and their fearsome leader.

Finally, he collects the ransom money, takes a jeep and the local Armenian businessman and all-round fixed Mr. Youkoumian up in the hills determined to find and confront this Joab, hand over the ransom and free the lovely young virgin. Instead, in a tremendous anti-climax, they encounter Miss Brooks stumbling down the track towards them, apparently freed and unharmed. With complete illogicality, instead of turning and heading back to town, Prunella insists they are surrounded by Joab’s snipers and so Youkoumian had better take the car and ransom and drive further up the hill to the bandit camp.

During the wait Prunella gives the ardent journalist a detailed and obviously completely fictional account of her stay among the bandits. Then Youkoumian returns, Prunella declares the snipers have all withdrawn, they get in the car and return to Matodi.

Much fuss and bother about her, the memsahibs clucking like hens, the chaps congratulating themselves on job well done, the journalist files his last triumphant story and departs, and a couple of months later Prunella quietly sails back to Blighty.

Only slowly does it dawn on some of the senior members of the ex-pat community that they have been diddled. There’s no proof and it isn’t explicitly stated, but the implication is that the entire ‘kidnapping’ was a con set up by Prunella with Mr Youkoumian, who split the £10,000 ransom between themselves.

Bella Fleace Gave a Party (1933)

Miss Annabel Rochfort-Doyle-Fleace or Bella Fleace as she is known to the entire countryside, is a very old lady, ‘over 80’ (p.103), who lives alone in a grand house which somehow survived the upheavals surrounding Irish independence, in a place called Ballingar.

One colourless morning in November she decides to give a Christmas party in the old style. The preparations are elaborate and described in length, along with pen portraits of the house’s staff (butler Riley), the caterers and so on.

The preparations were necessarily stupendous. Seven new servants were recruited in the village and set to work dusting and cleaning and polishing, clearing out furniture and pulling up carpets. Their industry served only to reveal fresh requirements; plaster mouldings, long rotten, crumbled under the feather brooms, worm-eaten mahogany floorboards came up with the tin tacks; bare brick was disclosed behind the cabinets in the great drawing room. A second wave of the invasion brought painters, paperhangers and plumbers, and in a moment of enthusiasm Bella had the cornice and the capitals of the pillars in the hall regilded; windows were reglazed, banisters fitted into gaping sockets, and the stair carpet shifted so that the worn strips were less noticeable.

Bella takes a great deal of trouble writing the invitations by hand and considering who to invite and who to exclude, which leads to more brief portraits of the inhabitants of the grand houses in the area, including the various arrivistes and nouveaux riches.

The great night comes, the mansion is illuminated by candles, decorated by swags of flowers, the staff are ready, the expensive food is cooking but…nobody comes, nobody that is except the two arrivistes she had specifically excluded from inviting, but who are attracted by the lights and music from the old house. Puzzled, then perplexed, the old lady slumps on the sofa in the hall. Next day she dies. Her heir, a distant cousin and Englishman named Banks, arrives to make an inventory of the house and its contents. Tucked away in Bella’s escritoire, beautifully written, stamped and addressed he finds the invitations to the party, unsent.

Cruise, or Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure (1933)

Consists entirely of a series of letters and postcards sent home by a silly young woman on a Mediterranean cruise. Must have seemed very clever when it was published. Still pretty funny.

POSTCARD

This is the Sphinx. Goodness how Sad.

POSTCARD

This is temple of someone. Darling I cant wait to tell you I’m engaged to Arthur. Arthur is the one I thought was a pansy. Bertie thinks egyptian art is v. inartistic.

POSTCARD

This is Tutankhamens v. famous Tomb. Bertie says it is vulgar and is engaged to Miss P. so hes not one to speak and I call her Mabel now. G how S. Bill wont speak to Bertie Robert wont speak to me Papa and Lady M. seem to have had a row there was a man with a snake in a bag also a little boy who told my fortune which was v. prosperous Mum bought a shawl.

The Man Who Liked Dickens (1933)

A version of the story which ends the novel A Handful of Dust namely the man, named Mr McMaster here, Mr Todd in Handful, who lives an extremely isolated life among the Shiriana Indians in the Amazonas for 60 years. One day the Indians bring an Englishman to him who has staggered out of the rainforest, shattered, suffering from shock and exposure, an explorer whose partner Anderson has died.

This Paul Henty has a very similar backstory to Tony Last in Handful i.e. his wife left him for another man and, in the first flush of embitterment he got talking to a chap in his club who was planning an expedition to Amazonia and here he is.

The details of the ‘expedition’ are different. There were initially more members, who are all given pen portraits and to whom various misadventures happened, eventually depriving Henty and Professor Anderson of colleagues and a lot of supplies. And in this version Anderson simply falls ill of malaria and dies, compared to the version in the novel where it is the main hero who falls ill, and the expedition leader, Dr Messinger, who sets off to find help in a canoe and is washed over a waterfall to his death. Here the Indians who had brought him this far overnight abandon Paul, taking the canoe, leaving him to stumble along the river bank, becoming increasingly starved, feverish and hallucinatory. This, also, is less effective than the devastating description of the state of utter, helpless misery Tony Last is reduced to after Dr Messinger disappears.

As in the novel the McMaster/Todd figure has power over the local Indians because he fathered most of them – and he has a gun. He informs Henty that a black man stayed with him and read to him every afternoon. Henty is happy to do the same and is shown the man’s ant-eaten collection of Dickens novels. At first all goes well, but by the time they’re into the second volume of Bleak House Henty is restless. He brings up the idea of him leaving and returning to civilisation and for the first time McMaster becomes slightly menacing. Yes. The black man had the same ideas. Then he died. McMaster says he will get the Indians to build a canoe. The months drag on. Then the rainy season arrives and McMaster says it will be impossible to travel. He tries to communicate with the Indians but they don’t even understand sign language. He finds a token left in Martin Chuzzlewit which is a pledge McMaster gave to the black man, Barnabas Washington, that he would be allowed to leave at the end of reading that book. When Henty insists that McMaste lets him leave McMaster simply tells the Indians to stop making him food, to stop bringing him the same breakfast, lunch and dinner he’s been having as McMaster. Henty is forced to resume.

Then a lonely wandering prospector arrives at the camp. McMaster is vexed, gives him something to eat and sends him on his way in under an hour. But that’s time enough for Henty to scribble his name on a piece of paper and press it into the man’s hand. From that moment he lives in hope that his name will eventually reach civilisation, the towns on the coast, and an expedition will be launched to find and rescue him. Thus encouraged he accepts McMaster’s invitation to a feast given by the Indians. He eats and drinks heartily.

When he wakes up it is days later and his watch has gone. McMaster explains that while he slept a little expedition of three Englishmen arrived looking for him. His wife in England is offering a reward. McMaster shows the men the grave of the black man, saying it was Henty’s, and gave them Henty’s watch as proof that the poor man had gotten ill, died and been buried there. The Englishmen went off well contented with the story, the evidence and the proof. No-one else will come looking for him. Ever. He is doomed to spend the rest of his life reading Dickens to a madman in the depths of the Amazon jungle.

So in all important points it is identical with the text used as the final part of A Handful of Dust. And, as there, the final speech where McMaster explains how he tricked him and that he is now doomed meets with no reply from Henty, no indication of his reaction, making it a thousand times more powerful. In much the same way that there is no response from Basil Seal when the old native in Black Mischief explains he’s just taken part in a cannibal feast and eaten his own girlfriend. None needed. This situation itself is shock enough.

Out of Depth (1933)

This is an oddity, a science fiction story, a time travel story. It starts conventionally enough in Waugh’s usual environment, the posh upper classes. Rip is an ageing American who always dines with Lady Metroland when he’s in London (Margot Metroland having weaved in and out of Waugh’s stories since Decline and Fall). When he arrives for dinner he finds most of the other guests gathered round an unusual figure:

An elderly, large man, quite bald, with a vast white face that spread down and out far beyond the normal limits. It was like Mother Hippo in Tiger Tim; it was like an evening shirt-front in a du Maurier drawing; down in the depths of the face was a little crimson smirking mouth; and, above it, eyes that had a shifty, deprecating look, like those of a temporary butler caught out stealing shirts.

Lady Metroland introduces him as Dr Kakophilos, a magician. She is very proud of the sensation he creates, but Rip finds him a sinister, repellent person with a thin Cockney voice. At the end of the party a very drunk Rip finds himself driving Dr Kakophilos and old friend Alistair Trumpington home. Kakophilos invites them in and in his sitting-room is suddenly dressed in magician’s garb, ‘a crimson robe embroidered with gold symbols and a conical crimson hat.’ He launches on a discourse about time and space, recites words of power, while Rip and Alistair giggle drunkenly. As they get up to leave, the magician asks them both if they have a favourite period in time. Alistair says the time of Ethelred the Unready, Rip prefers to go forwards, to five hundred years in the future, thinking it a load of gibberish then stagger to their car and Alistair drives off very drunk and crashes into a van in Shaftesbury Avenue.

When Rip comes to he finds himself in London five hundred years hence, a deserted city in ruins which has been reclaimed by nature. Piccadilly Circus is covered in hummocky turf and a few sheep.

The entrance of the Underground Station was there, transformed into a Piranesi ruin; a black aperture tufted about with fern and some crumbling steps leading down to black water. Eros had gone, but the pedestal rose above the reeds, moss grown and dilapidated. (p.137)

He walks down to the river, almost all the buildings have gone, it is wild. He finds a cluster of huts built on stilts. At dawn the inhabitants emerge, savage tribal people dressed in skins. He walks forward and they surround him, offering no violence, just puzzled. Rip is convinced this is a drunken hallucination but it just won’t wear off.

Days then weeks pass as he is fed fish and coarse bread and beer. Finally there is a great fuss and some educated people arrive. The big thing in the story is that they are black. For a start the boat they arrive in is mechanically driven i.e. far above the scope of the savages, and they were wearing uniforms of leather and fur and well organised under a commanding leader. They trade with the natives, exchanging manufactured goods for gewgaws the natives have dug up and also taking Rip from them.

In other words, the tables have been turned, the roles reversed, and instead of technologically advanced white men penetrating darkest Africa and trading with primitive blacks, now it is the whites whose society has collapsed and the blacks who penetrate up the wide lazy Thames.

Eventually their ship arrives at a military station on the coast, in the style of the early western outposts in Africa. There is a steamer, a black anthropologist with glasses studies him, they get him to read old books with what is obviously, to them, an ancient accent, they measure his skull with calipers. In every way a reversal of white colonial practice.

Then, described in the briefest way, barely a paragraph, he is in a Christian mission and finds the congregation of illiterate whites staring at an altar where a black priest in the outfit of a Dominican friar conducts a Mass, something Rip remembers from his youth, something which has obviously not changed for 2,500 years.

Then he comes round in a hospital bed to find a priest by his bedside, obviously calling into question the extent to which anything he’s just experienced was ‘real’. But when the priest tells him that Alistair, also in hospital, has woken from a dream of being in the middle ages, Rip in a panic thinks maybe it was true, maybe his consciousness was thrown forward in time.

I have seen this described as Waugh’s most overtly Catholic story, which it might well be. But it was the vision of an England fallen back into uncivilised savagery, and visited by colonising technologically advanced Africans which caught my imagination.

By Special Request (1934)

This was the original ending of A Handful of Dust as it appeared in the original magazine serialisation in Harpers’ Bazaar. It feels very flat and banal compared to the horrifying reading-Dickens ending which he eventually chose. Above all, this original final version of the story is very, very short at just eight pages.

In this version, Tony takes the elaborate steps to secure a divorce which feature in the novel but then, when he realises how avaricious and selfish Brenda has become, he calls off the divorce settlement negotiations and – this is the point of divergence, does not set off on a hair-brained expedition to Brazil, but instead (much more likely) treats himself to a long and leisurely cruise.

The story commences as Tony’s liner returns to Southampton. He is met by his chauffeur but surprised to learn that his estranged wife, Brenda, is in the car. They are frightfully decent and polite to each other. Brenda explains she just had to give up that flat, it smelt so frightfully of hot radiators. He knows this is a Decision Moment: should or should he not take Brenda back and forgive her? But in reality, he falls asleep in the warm soft back of the car and only wakes when they reach Hetton.

Where they are greeted by the butler and the luggage unloaded and then he and Brenda inspect the work which has been done in the renovated bathrooms, checking the taps and so on like a, well, an old married couple.

After dinner they sit in the library and Brenda timidly hopes Tony wasn’t in a rage with her when he left, isn’t in a rage now. Course not, he replies, and asks after Beaver, her one-time lover. Well, it all ends up being about money. Tony cut her off without a cent and Beaver didn’t have any money, was blackballed from clubs, she tried to get a job with Mrs Beaver who turned her down, then working in her friend Daisy’s restaurant but that didn’t last.

Then Beaver met the Shameless Blonde and fell madly in love and chucked Brenda, who was now on the brink, living on scraps from the delicatessen round the corner. But the Blonde wouldn’t have anything to do with him and so his mother eventually sent him off to Europe to be a buyer for her business. And so here she is, penniless and without prospects. During the recitation Tony begins to nod off again and so she says, ‘Come on, let’s go up’, and as simply as that their marriage resumes.

In a 3-page coda months have passed and Tony and Brenda are happily married and have popped up to London to do some shopping. Brenda is on at Tony to do something about the flat she leased a year ago for her affair with John Beaver. So at last Tony goes round to see Mrs Beaver, who owns the apartment block. Only instead of simply cancelling the lease, he comes to a discreet arrangement with Mrs Beaver…to have his name removed from the lease and name board of the block, for a fee. Tony rejoins Brenda after her shopping and they catch the train back their country house.

And the train sped through the darkness towards Hetton.

Clearly that is a metaphorical darkness, for the transaction inaugurates a new era of infidelity and betrayal in their marriage. On the one hand this ending is obviously much more realistic than the reading-Dickens ending. But you can also see why it’s unsatisfactory in several ways.

  1. At a stroke it wrecks Tony’s character, his position as the unchanging moral rock at the centre of the story. And in doing so undermines the… the moral or psychological structure of everything which had preceded it.
  2. And undermines the value of the death of their son. That was such a shocking, staggering event that for the entire story to fizzle out in Tony’s go at having an affair feels cheap and nasty. The reading-Dickens ending may be weird, wildly implausible, bizarre and cruel but it has the great advantage of matching the cruel death of little John. In its madness and cruelty it is a far more fitting ending to the novel.

Period Piece (1936)

Lady Amelia, an old lady, likes having stories read to her by Miss Myers. She likes crime stories, often quite violent ones, American ones with ‘brutal realism and coarse slang’, ‘narratives of rape and betrayal’. I suppose, in Waugh’s circle and for his audience, this idea itself might be quite amusing.

When Miss Myers one day ventures the opinion that the story she’s just finished reading was far fetched, Lady Amelia replies that if you recounted stories from the lives of the people around them, you’d probably call them far-fetched. She then tells the story of ‘the extremely ironic circumstances of the succession of the present Lord Cornphillip.’

Etty a cousin of her mother’s marries Billy Cornphillip, a phenomenally boring man. Lady Amelia was a bridesmaid (p.155). Their marriage upset Ralph Bland who was Billy Cornphillip’s nearest relative and stood to inherit his fortune if he’d died without an heir. He has a wife and children to support and not much money. Over the years, though, Etty fails to become pregnant so Ralph bucks up.

Ralph comes to stay one Christmas but his 6-year-old son gives the game away when he tells Billy that, when he (Billy) inherits, he’ll pull the whole place down. At that point there is a complete breach between the two men and war declared. Billy is a Conservative and Ralph comes down to stand in his constituency as a Radical (and wins). At which point Billy accuses Ralph of corruption during the election and successfully gets him unseated.

Ralph takes this very badly and takes to attending speeches Billy is giving and laughing of clapping in the wrong place, he gets drunk in the local pub and is found asleep on Billy’s terrace. All this is very difficult for skinny Etty who had been friends with Ralph.

One bonfire night Ralph got drunk and made a load of threats against Billy, who called the police and had him up in magistrates court and he was given a banning order but amazed everyone by leaving that very afternoon for Venice with Billy’s wife, Etty! However, the affair was not a success, they stayed in an insanitary palace, Etty fell ill, Ralph ran off with American lady who was much more his type, and so Etty returned to England. She tries to find friends to stay with but, eventually, everyone hears she was back with Billy and about to have a baby. It is a boy i.e. a son and heir.

So this is very broadly the same plot as in Unconditional Surrender – a posh chap accepts the child his wife has had by another man she’s been having an affair with.

But the point of the story, or maybe its literary feature, is the way it veers away at the very end from what might well be the most bombshell part: which is that the boy never knew he wasn’t the son of his father, and which is described only indirectly:

until quite lately, at luncheon with Lady Metroland, when my nephew Simon told him, in a rather ill-natured way. (p.159)

It is very characteristic indeed of Waugh that these kind of bombshell moments are told at one remove or prompt little or no response. Blink and you might miss them. Imagine the impact on the son, his confused feelings, the agonised conversations when he confronts his mother and father. Absolutely none of that is here, all left to the reader to work out, that’s if he or she even notices this revelation, given the way it is tucked away at the end of the little story as a throwaway sentence.

On Guard (1934)

Millicent Blade is a lovely girl but she has a small shapeless nose. In another example of the way Waugh, when reaching for a comparison for anything, thinks first of his prep or public school, his description of Millicent’s nose goes:

It was a nose that pierced the thin surface crust of the English heart to its warm and pulpy core; a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays, to the doughy-faced urchins on whom it had squandered its first affection, to memories of changing room and chapel and battered straw boaters.

Hector kissed her reverently on the tip of this nose. As he did so, his senses reeled and in momentary delirium he saw the fading light of the November afternoon, the raw mist spreading over the playing fields; overheated youth in the scrum; frigid youth at the touchline, shuffling on the duckboards, chafing their fingers and, when their mouths were emptied of biscuit crumbs, cheering their house team to further exertion…

Hector gazed at her little, shapeless, mobile button of a nose and was lost again . . . “Play up, play up,” and after the match the smell of crumpets being toasted over a gas-ring in his study . . .

A good deal of the upper-class pose in Waugh’s fiction derives from the failure of all these public schoolboys to ever grow up and genuinely confront a wider world; their preference to stay within the safe sanctuaries of Oxbridge colleges or Westminster common rooms or Inns of Court chambers or their gentlemen’s clubs, mentally prisoned in their boyhoods, never growing up.

Anyway, Millicent’s fiancé, Hector, is off to Africa, buying a farm off a chap named Beckthorpe who has consistently bad luck with it. Dining with Beckthorpe at his club, Hector wonders what he can give Millicent as a memento, to make her remember him till he’s well off enough to invite her over. Some jewellery? A photo?

Beckthorpe suggests a dog, and so as to ram the point home, name it Hector. Next day Hector goes to one of London’s largest emporiums and, in rather a panic, buys a poodle. When he leans down to commune, the little perisher takes a snap at him which he adroitly avoids. Hector tells the doggy to prevent any other men getting at Millicent.

Millicent, characteristically, goes to the wrong station so misses seeing Hector off on the train to the port to the ship which will take him to Africa. Hector gives the poodle to Beckthorpe to give to Millicent. Millicent writes to tell him she loves it and it has already bitten a ‘man called Mike.’

The narrative now steps back to reveal that Millicent’s passions for men generally last about 4 months and was reaching that period when Hector’s last minute flurry of activity to find a job slightly renewed it. The comic conceit of the story is the idea that the puppy heard and understood Hector’s injunction not to let other men near Millicent.

The rest of the text develops this idea via mishaps with a series of suitors. Hector the dog adopts strategies to be the centre of attention so no suitor stands a chance: he makes a fuss of the sugar bowl, goes to the door and scratches to be let out then scratches to be let back in, or pretend to be sick, gagging and retching so that Millicent carries him from the room thus destroying any attempt at humour.

As for Hector the supposed fiancé, Millicent soon forgets about him. He writes weekly from the farm in Kenya where things are hard, but Millicent rarely even opens the envelopes and never reads to the end. When friends ask her about Hector, she increasingly thinks they’re referring to the dog not her beloved:

it came naturally to Millicent to reply, ‘He doesn’t like the hot weather much I’m afraid, and his coat is in a very poor state. I’m thinking of having him plucked,’ instead of, ‘He had a go of malaria and there is black worm in his tobacco crop.’

If young men she’s met at parties call, Hector learns to mimic taking a call, cocking his head on one side, so that Millicent gets into the habit of putting the receiver to the dog’s muzzle, deafening the (hungover) young men with a barrage of barks. If men invite Millicent for a walk in the park, Hector goes on ahead, carrying her bag and periodically dropping it so the young man has to pick it up.

Two years pass. Suitors come and go each of them, eventually, foxed by the dog. She has long ago stopped caring about her lover in Kenya. At last Hector meets his match in the person of the middle-aged Major Sir Alexander Dreadnought, Bart., M.P., a man routinely put upon by friends and family from an early age who had developed a forebearing nature.

Hector tries out all his tricks but Dreadnought simply finds him charming. Dreadnought invites Millicent and her mother to his place in the country where Hector does everything he can to be obnoxious, ragging the carpet, rolling in poo in the grounds then coming back and soiling every chair in the house. He howled all night, killed some partridges, hid so the household were up half the night looking for him. Dreadnought takes it all in good part.

Back in London Hector the poodle ponders his options and realises that, all his strategems having failed, there was only one last desperate way for him to keep his promise to his original master, his purchaser, Hector. And so the next time Millicent leans over to nuzzle him, Hector makes one quick snap and bites Millicent’s pretty little snub nose clean off! A plastic surgeon repairs it but creates a new type of nose, strong and Roman. Gone is all Millicent’s schoolboy charm. Hector achieves his aim, and turns her into a suitorless spinster:

Now she has a fine aristocratic beak, worthy of the spinster she is about to become. Like all spinsters she watches eagerly for the foreign mails and keeps carefully under lock and key a casket full of depressing agricultural intelligence; like all spinsters she is accompanied everywhere by an ageing lapdog. (p.171)

Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing (1935)

Has a great comic opening line:

‘You will not find your father greatly changed,’ remarked Lady Moping, as the car turned into the gates of the County Asylum.

Ten years earlier Lord Moping had attempted to hang himself after a particularly distressing annual garden party had been ruined by squally weather. He was taken away and housed in the wing of the asylum reserved for wealthier lunatics where the Lady Moping visited him periodically. This is the first time their grown-up daughter, Angela.

Lord Moping is brought to the doctor’s office where they wait by a kindly old gent with lovely white hair who the doctor tells them is named Mr Loveday. He has become Lord Moping’s assistant in the asylum, patient and kind.

Lord Moping is huffy and busy with all his ‘work’, under the delusion that he needs to do a great deal of research about rivers and fisheries and send off letters to important people such as the Pope. He claims not to recognise or know Angela and hurries back to his room, but Mr Loveday very kindly comes back a few minutes later to see Lady Moping and Angela and assure them that his lordship will like to see them again, it’s just he’s very busy and distracted at the moment.

When he’s gone the governor tells him Loveday is not a warder or nurse, as they thought, but himself an inmate. Why? Twenty years earlier, when a young man, he knocked a young woman off her bicycle and strangled her. Gave himself up immediately.

Angela is a noble spirit, a compassionate soul. She thinks it’s unfair such a sweet kind old man as Mr Loveday should be locked up. She studies the laws surrounding lunacy. She makes an excuse to pop over to the asylum again and asks to ‘interview’ Mr Loveday. When she asks him if he’d like to be free, Loveday replies that, yes, he has one little ambition he’d like to fulfil before he dies.

Angela leaves with the tears of the sensitive in her eyes. She studies more, lobbies the various important personages who come to stay at their house over the summer. Finally she gets her way and it is announced Mr Loveday will be released. There is a big ceremony with the governor, Angela and various lunatics in attendance, then Mr Loveday walks free.

A few hours he is back, handing himself in. He took advantage of his hours of liberty to strangle another young lady who happened to ride by.

Gruesome, in the manner of Roald Dahl’s boom-boom Tales of the Unexpected.

Winner Takes All (1936)

A tale of two brothers, Gervase and Thomas Kent-Cumberland, the first much favoured, feted, celebrated and blessed with all the gifts a grand family can bestow; Thomas an unwanted second child which his mother hoped would be a girl. Throughout their lives Gervase receives all the benefits and gifts:

  • Gervase is born in an expensive nursing home with all the trimmings, his birth celebrated with a bonfire on the beacon hill, his christening with a garden party leading to fireworks; Thomas in a shoddy modern house on the East Coast delivered by a repellently middle class doctor
  • when their uncle buys Thomas the big red model car he’s always wanted for Christmas, their mother assumes he’s got it wrong and changes the labels so Gervase receives the grand toy
  • when their father dies during the Great War their mother becomes extremely parsimonious and obsessed by the threat of Death Duties, cuts are instituted all through the grand household and in their school activities, so that poor Gervase doesn’t inherit the debts – ‘ “It is all for Gervase,” Mrs. Kent-Cumberland used to explain’
  • Gervase is sent to Eton, to save money Tom is sent to a much cheaper, modern school
  • Gervase goes up to Christ Church Oxford where he consorts with other magnificent Etonians in the Bullingdon Club; when Tom goes to visit him he is intimidated and drinks too much in a corner
  • marooned at home after school, his mother sets Tom to reorganising the family library; in it he comes across a manuscript journal kept by a Colonel Jasper Cumberland during the Peninsular War; Tom does a lot of research, identifies maps of the campaign and a picture of the Colonel and writes an introduction and notes to it; all this is taken off him and given to Gervase who publishes it under his own name and gains all the praise and kudos
  • swiftly followed by Gervase’s 21st birthday party whose celebrations are lengthy and elaborate; Tom’s old bedroom is given to a guest and he has to sleep in the local pub
  • meanwhile Tom had been found in a motor manufacturing firm in Wolverhampton and found digs over a fruitshop on the outskirts of town

After a while you realise Waugh has just sat down and made a list of every single humiliation a younger son can be put through, and then inflicted in his fictional Tom. The sequence of humiliations rises to a sort of climax when Tom falls in love with a very ‘common’ girl from the motor manufacturer works, Gladys Cruttwell. When he, finally, reluctantly, takes Gladys home to meet his mother, Mrs Kent-Cumberland is, as you might expect, appalled.

With the result that Tom is swiftly removed from the motor business and dispatched to a farm in Australia! Meanwhile Gervase has come of age and now owns and runs the estate at Tomb with lavish prodigality, extending buildings, buying hunters, contemplating a swimming pool, entertaining lavishly each weekend.

Meanwhile years pass and Mrs Kent-Cumberland does not notice from his letters (which she rarely reads) that Tom has fallen in love with an Australian girl, that he is sailing with her and her father to London, that they have arrived!

She sends Gervase to meet them who reports back that they are a) staying at Claridges (rich and b) going to stay in the country with the Chasms (socially connected). Eventually they arrive, tall Mr MacDougal and daughter Bessie. What quickly emerges is they own vast territories in Australia and are loaded. Bessie is a comically naive and impressionable young woman, impressed by everything she sees. But the more she sees of England the less remarkable Tom seems. The more his brother stands out as a copy of him but with more life. When Mr MacDougal has a confidential chat with Mrs Kent-Cumberland and informs her that his annual revenue is somewhere around £50,000, a twinkle comes into her eye.

She makes plans and carries them out. She encourages Gervase to be very nice to Bessie, drops hints to Bessie about the advantages of being attached to the eldest son and then carries off her masterstroke – she returns from London one day to tell Tom she has just bumped into Gladys Cruttwell! Of course she arranged a luncheon and told Gladys that Tom had never got over him. Now she lies to Tom and tells her Gladys never got over him. She has invited her to come and stay for a few days. She plays on Tom’s sense of guilt and fair play, asking whether he had not, in fact, led on the poor girl and then dumped her.

When they are reunited and left alone they both proceed along these carefully arranged lines with the result that two weeks later Tom and Gladys are married. Mrs Kent-Cumberland explains everything to the MacDougals, not least that Gervase, the taller, handsomer brother is free and available. They are married after 6 weeks engagement. He and Bessie have two children and six racehorses. Tom and Gladys are packed off to Australia where MacDougal gives him a junior management job on a remote ranch in the middle of nowhere.

Not so much a tale of sibling rivalry as of sibling crushing defeat. And the indomitable figure of the scheming upper class mother.

An Englishman’s Home (1939)

Mr Beverley Metcalfe made his pile in the cotton trade in Alexandria and then bought a large acreage and house in the quaint Cotswold village of Much Malcock. He is nouveau riches, he insists on calling the nice Georgian house he’s bought Much Malcock Hall, although all the locals, including his ineffective gardener Boggett, insist on referring to it by its traditional name, the Grumps. The narrative paints a lazy, comic picture of the village and its inhabitants, at least those of the ‘card-leaving class’ aka ‘the gentry’, namely Lord Brakehurst, Lord Lieutenant of the County, his wife Lady Brakehurst had, Lady Peabury (‘a diligent reader of fiction, mistress of many Cairn terriers and of five steady old maidservants’) and Colonel Hodge, and ‘the Hornbeams at the Old Mill were a childless, middle-aged couple who devoted themselves to craftsmanship’, vegetarians and bohemians. Everyone cordially dislikes everyone else. It’s all very English.

Into this placid little world drops a bombshell – a young man has bought one of old farmer Westmacott’s fields and is planning to build an estate of suburban villas there! Now this field abuts at different points the properties of Metcalfe, Peabury, Hodge and Hornbeam and so they convene a series of meetings at which they agree to find out what can be done to prevent the development, contact the local council, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and so on.

Eventually it becomes clear they are going to have to buy the field off its purchaser in order to keep it undeveloped. Colonel Hodge is sent by the committee to meet the purchaser, Mr. Hargood-Hood at the village’s one pub, the Brakehurst Arms. Here Mr. Hargood-Hood very successfully terrifies the Colonel by showing him what he intends to build: it’s not an estate it’s an experimental industrial laboratory, complete with two great chimneys to emit the poison fumes, a water tower to get high pressures, and six bungalows for his staff.

The text then includes correspondence between Metcalfe and Lady Peabury in which it is revealed that Mr Hargood-Hood wants £500 for the field (and lawyer’s fees and cost of the architect’s drawings). (Back when he bought his Georgian house Metcalfe had been offered the option of buying Westmacott’s field for some £170 but turned it down because of the expense; so this represents a tripling of the asking price.)

Peabury refuses Metcalfe’s offer to go halves on the purchase – the two obstinately refuse to co-operate – with the result it looks like the development will go ahead and both Peabury and Metcalfe begin to make plans to sell their homes and move out of the village when Colonel makes a last-ditch bid to avert building going ahead. He comes up with a solution to the great Peabury-Metcalfe standoff which is to purchase the field in order to build a scout hut on it: Lady Peabury will contribute £250, Metcalfe £500, and the other families a few pounds. This allows the field to be purchased from Hargood-Hood and disaster averted, while Metcalfe gets to have the new building named after him and can swank round the village as a public benefactor.

Only in the last few paragraphs do we learn that it was a scam all along. Hargood-Hood’s ‘lawyer’ is in fact his brother and they make a tidy living by descending on idyllic country villages, buying up a plot with suitably loaded neighbours, then threatening to build their toxic factory and letting the gentry buy back the field at a grossly inflated rate. it’s a scam, a con, although, as ‘Jock’ admits, they cut this one pretty fine. The gentry of Much Malcock squabbled for so long that the brothers were nearly left holding the baby!

The Sympathetic Passenger (1939)

Mr James hates the radio, the endless blare of music from wirelesses owned by his wife and daughter. (Dislike of wirelesses which are on all the time blaring out music being a theme which also crops up ‘Tactical Exercise’ and is prominent in the final volume of the Sword of Honour trilogy)

With relief he leaves his house and sets off to drive to the local train station. On the way he sees a man trying to flag down lifts. He stops and offers him a lift to the station. What follows is the dialogue of these two people in a car. Mr James casually mentions his dislike of the radio and this triggers the hitchhiker into an increasingly demented rant, in which he accuses the BBC of mind control and other wild, delusional accusations. A car overtakes them playing loud blaring music and the hitchhiker orders Mr James to chase it and overtake it so they can kill the heathen driver. Mr James is by now terrified but his car simply won’t go faster at which point the hitchhiker says he will kill Mr James.

They arrive at the station and Mr James leaps out but the other guy is quicker and is closing in on him when…a load of policemen sortie from the station entrance and pounce on the man, Oh yes, he’s a well known lunatic, the policeman tells him cheerily. In fact Mr James is lucky to be alive.

Mr James drives home a chastened man and when he arrives, for once, doesn’t complain about his wife or daughter playing the radio. In fact he now finds it strangely reassuring.

Work Suspended (1942)

This is a long piece and reviewed in a separate blog post.

Charles Ryder’s Schooldays (written 1945, published 1982)

I’ve mentioned the struggle many privately educated writers of Waugh’s generation had in escaping the mental world of their prep and public schools and this is a kind of quintessence of that world and that problem. The thirty or so pages of this fragment are set at a private school named Spierpoint Down which is pretty obviously Waugh’s own public school, Lancing on the South Downs. Crucially, unlike Brideshead Revisited, it is not a first-person narrative told by Charles, but a third person narrative about him. Charles is in the Classical Upper Fifth.

It is the first day back after the summer holidays, Wednesday 24 September 1919. We are treated to an excruciatingly tedious exposition of life at Spierpoint, with its hundred and one stupidly named buildings (Head’s House, Old’s House) and petty regulations and privileges for the different year groups or prefects and so on (the way one is allowed to wear coloured socks or walk arm in arm with a friend once one has graduated to this or that privileged class or clique).

It is a world of private rules designed to create a strong esprit de corps among those who are in the know and exclude everyone outside. It is drenched in hyper-privileged assumption that all the pupils are rich, know London’s restaurants and theatres, belong to a network of extended families which run everything and know each other, and the assumption that all these insufferable fifth formers will, in due course, go on to ‘the university’ meaning Oxford.

Charles likes Art and Drawing. He helps a rather over-confidential master, Mr Graves, assemble a small printing press and sort out the moveable typepieces into different fonts. There is Sunday morning communion with a lavish description of the vast Victorian and unfinished chapel. Charles and two friends are caned for refusing to say their evening prayers when ordered to by their head of house.

The diary of classes, sports, book reading, conversations and petty jealousies continues for another few days until Sunday 28 September and abruptly halts, exhausted by its own tedium. This fat chunk of public school fetishisation lacks any of the wit or humour or fun or lightness which characterises the best of Waugh’s writing. it feels intolerably smug and superior and self-satisfied. You can see why he never published it during his lifetime.

Short stories 2. Post-war

Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947)

A novella – reviewed in a separate blog post.

Tactical Exercise (1947)

This is good story, in a grim, grand guignol sort of way. John Verney hates his wife Elizabeth. He was wounded in Italy. The pain of the wound leads to outbursts of anger. He returns home to have to live with her family in house in Hampstead. Everything infuriates him: the back garden is a bomb crater, all the glass in the back windows are broken. A grimy life of rationing. John stands as Liberal in a county constituency but loses badly to a Radical who happens to be a Jew. His bitterness against life makes him increasingly antisemitic.

Meanwhile, his wife Elizabeth works in something clandestine in the Foreign Office. She’s clever, she’s a linguist. When John learns her boss is a Jew it crystallises his hatred of his wife. She becomes a symbol of everything he hates with all the resentment and bitterness of the war, his coming down in the world, his political failure. For John his wife becomes a representative of the shabby socialist bureaucracy which shackles him, she is helping communist regimes in eastern Europe, and she works for a Jew!

Still they manage to just about be civil to each other and live together. They both go to see a film, a trite murder mystery in which the wife drugs the husband and throws him out of the window of a holiday home overlooking a cliff. He falls to his death. She inherits his wealth. This gives John the idea of copying it.

A month or so later they go on holiday to a holiday cottage at the edge of a cliff. John thinks he’s being clever by softening up the locals for the crime he plans to commit by telling everyone that his wife sleepwalks, telling chaps at the golf club, down the pub. One of them even recommends him to go talk to the local doctor, a nice chap.

The twist in the tale is that she has been planning to murder John all along. She brought a bottle of whiskey along as a treat and John has been having a glass every evening before supper. Now, when he finishes the glass he starts to feel strangely woozy. She helps him to the sofa, by the window, the window overlooking the cliff, and the long fall to the jagged rocks below…

This macabre little tale is one of several which anticipate the twisted stories of Roald Dahl.

Compassion (1949)

This narrative was recycled in its entirety, and almost verbatim, into the final part of the third novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy, Unconditional Surrender.

In the novel the events involve the trilogy’s protagonist, Guy Crouchback; here they involve a Major Gordon. The basic narrative is identical: Gordon is posted as British Military Mission i.e. liaison with the communist Yugoslav partisans in a place called Begoy in Croatia. He describes the wrecked town and the heavy-handed Partisan authorities who call themselves ‘the Praesidium’. To be precise:

Begoy was the headquarters of a partisan corps in Northern Croatia. It lay in a large area, ten miles by twenty, of what was called “Liberated Territory,” well clear of the essential lines of communication. The Germans were pulling out of Greece and Dalmatia and were concerned only with main roads and supply points. They made no attempt now to administer or patrol the hinterland. There was a field near Begoy where aircraft could land unmolested. They did so nearly every week in the summer of 1944 coming from Bari with partisan officials and modest supplies of equipment. In this area congregated a number of men and women who called themselves the Praesidium of the Federal Republic of Croatia.

Gordon is assigned a creepy interpreter named Bakic who spies on him. The narrative concerns the 108 Jewish displaced persons Major Gordon discovers in the town. Their representative, an anxious young woman named Mme. Kanyi, tells Gordon they want to leave, to get away to Italy. Mme. Kanyi’s husband is an engineer and does his best to keep the struggling power plant going.

Gordon becomes obsessed with helping the Jews but is blocked at every turn, especially by the communist authorities who are very suspicious of his motivation. He manages to get two representatives out on a flight to Bari, but by the time the authorities give permission for the rest to be flown out the autumn fogs and then winter snows prevent planes landing at the airstrip.

When his mission is wound up and he is transferred back to Bari Gordon eventually learns that the Jews were in the end evacuated and sent to a camp for displaced persons near Lecce. When he visits the camp the Jews he helped crowd round but Mme. Kanyi and her husband are not there. All they know is that they were taken off the lorries evacuating them from Begoy at the last moment.

At this point occurs the biggest difference from the narrative as it appears in the novel. Here Gordon gets a cousin in the newly opened embassy in newly liberated Belgrade to do some digging for him. This cousin writes him a letter which is quoted verbatim in which he reports that the Kanyis were executed by the communist authorities. The husband was blamed for sabotaging the power plant and the wife was accused of having an affair with the British liaison officer and for concealing counter-revolutionary propaganda. Now we and Gordon know that the husband was the only person keeping the wretched power plant going, and that the wife was not at all having an affair with him, they just spoke a few times. As for the ‘counter-revolutionary propaganda’ that was a load of old London magazines Gordon left with her to help her while away the long winter nights. Their execution is, in other words, a farcical tragedy and an enormous injustice.

In the story he recounts all this to his regiment’s second in command and the chaplain. When he says it was a complete waste of time, the chaplain gives him a more subtle theological interpretation, saying that no matter how pointless it may seem, the situation a) prompted good works by Gordon but also b) that the Kanyis in some way did him good, drawing out of him a new feeling for compassion and charity which hadn’t been there before. Hmm. Thought-provoking.

In the novel the facts remain mostly the same but the treatment feels completely different. The final scene with the bluff second in command and the chaplain offering words of comfort are completely absent from the novel. But it’s not the absences, it’s the positive additions in the novel which transform the story.

  1. We have known Guy intimately for almost three novels. Everything which happens resonates with his character of sterling integrity and quiet determination.
  2. In the novel Guy has other Brits around him, namely the squadron leader and de Souza who add a kind of variety to his responses, so his obsession with saving the Jews becomes one action among multiple ones carried out by the British Mission.
  3. The final scene with the chaplain is swept away and replaced by a more complex final arrangement: in this, instead of getting a written and therefore rather bland report about the fate of the Kanyis, it is told to him by a lickspittle functionary of the army who we have, through the course of the book, come to realise is a communist fellow traveller or stooge. Unlike the anonymous cousin in Belgrade of the story, this creep, Gilpin, the coward who had to be kicked out of the plane on his first parachute jump then lied to everyone about his ‘bravery’, it is this character who Waugh has gone to great lengths to build up as a representative of the corrupt ‘values’ of the new era, who tells Guy to his face about all the ‘evidence’ of the Kanyis’ counter-revolutionary activity, and smirks that they got the revolutionary justice they deserved. It is a vastly more powerful and disgusting experience to read the version in the novel, and very effectively crystallises all the morel, military, political and social failures and compromises which he sees the end of the war as bringing.

So this is an interesting enough story, but you shouldn’t read it here, you should read The Sword of Honour trilogy where the same basic story acquires multiple extra resonances and meanings from its inclusion in a novel.

Love Among the Ruins (1953)

A novella – reviewed in a separate blog post.

Basil Seal Rides Again (1963)

This was Waugh’s last published work of fiction. All critics quote Waugh’s own description of it in the dedication to old friend Ann Fleming, as: ‘a senile attempt to recapture the manner of my youth’. It certainly contains a roll call of well-loved characters from the 1930s comic novels, including Peter Pastmaster, Parsnip and Pimpernell (the joke names he gave the left-wing 30s writers Auden and Isherwood), Lady Metroland, Sonia Trumpington and numerous others, indeed the narrative opens with Peter and Basil attending a banquet to celebrate the award of the Order of Merit to Ambrose Silk (the lisping aesthete character Waugh based on Brian Howard). Peter and Basil have let themselves go: ‘They were two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers’.

Critics have judged the story harshly but I found some of it funny, for example the opening dialogue between the two old boys as they suffer through long speeches then go for a pee at the same time, gossiping all the time in an amusingly drunken senile way:

‘This Albright married someone — Molly Meadows, perhaps?’
‘I married Molly Meadows.’
‘So you did. I was there. Well, someone like that.’

Returning to his wife, Angela, in their London house, Basil, having caught sight of himself in the toilet mirrors, is more than usually aware that he is fat and unwell. Basil reviews his life and we learn that he blew all the toes off one foot while demonstrating an explosive device during the war, hence his  family nickname of ‘Pobble’ and the need to walk with a cane. Suddenly he realises he is old:

His voice was not the same instrument as of old. He had first assumed it as a conscious imposture; it had become habitual to him; the antiquated, worldly-wise moralities which, using that voice, he had found himself obliged to utter, had become his settled opinions. It had begun as nursery clowning for the diversion of Barbara; a parody of Sir Joseph Mannering; darling, crusty old Pobble performing the part expected of him; and now the parody had become the persona.

He and Angela agree to try out one of those health clinics, sanatorium thingies. They drive down to Kent, check in and have an interview with the presiding doctor:

‘You complain of speechlessness, a sense of heat and strangulation, dizziness and subsequent trembling?’ said this man of science.
‘I feel I’m going to burst,’ said Basil.

For 3 or 4 days they put up with the diet of carrot juice and raw eggs but then, in an entirely predictable bit of comic business, Basil procures some brandy off the young man who runs the resort gym and runs a tidy black market in illicit booze and grub. He drinks it down in one and passes out. The sanatorium  doctor expels him. Basil and Angela return to London.

Here he discovers his daughter, 18 year old Barbara, is in love with a ghastly, uncouth young man, Charles Albright. Late at night Basil discovers the pair rummaging around in his wine cellar, basically stealing some booze to take to a ‘happening’. This is barely into the 1960s so it’s not a psychedelic 60s happening, it’s a beards-and-jazz, beatnik 50s happening.

Basil insists on having an interview with the young man by himself, a solemn occasion for both parties at which Basil is disconcerted to find himself being bested. He looks into the young man’s eyes and face and recognises himself.

After a boozy lunch Basil drops in on Sonia Trumpington who lives alone, with her son, doing charitable works and sewing. He asks Sonia is she knows this Charles Albright, she replies yes, he’s a friend of her son, Robin. When Basil whiningly asks what his daughter can see in the scuffy, beardy young man, Sonia robustly replies, you! He looks, speaks and behaves just like a young Basil.

Sonia says she has photos somewhere of the mother and digs up an old photo album from the 1930s. She identifies the young woman as Elizabeth Stayles, there’s a photo of Basil about to throw her into a lake at some gay 1930s house party.

Seeing the photo awakens an old memory in Basil’s mind. Elizabeth Stayles, yes, didn;t he have an affair with her, all those years ago?

Basil thanks Sonia and returns to his London house whence he invites young Barbara for a chat in Hyde Park by the Serpentine. Here he informs his daughter that her lover is his, Basil’s son. He had a brief fling with Elizabeth Stayles when he got out of hospital after the toes incident, during the Blitz winter of 1940. Only lasted a week then Basil took back up with Angela and Elizabeth (Betty) rooted around for someone else and ended up marrying Clarence Albright, killed in action 1943. Betty herself died young of cancer in 1956. The point is there’s no-one to gainsay his story.

His story being that his daughter, Barbara, has been going out with, and fooling around with, her half-brother. Barbara gets up from the park bench and stumbles across the park. Basil catches a cab to Bellamy’s club for an egg nog, and then onto Claridge’s to meet his wife. She says their daughter returned home looking tragic and locked herself in her room. ‘What she needs,’ says Basil, ‘is a change of scene. I’ve bought all three of us tickets to Bermuda.’

To be honest, from the text I’m not sure whether Charles really is Basil’s son or whether it’s the last in Basil’s long list of outrageous lies and scams. If it is an outrageous lie he has conjured up to scupper his daughter’s relationship with the young man, then it is obviously cruel and heartless. If is isn’t a lie, if it’s true, it’s still a pretty heartless story for Waugh to concoct; told from the father’s point of view it completely ignores the emotional devastation the revelation must have on his daughter.

But I don’t quite understand the handful of critics I’ve read who say the story is ‘disgusting’, as if it was an entirely new note in Basil or Waugh’s career. They seem to forget that Waugh has Basil unknowingly EAT the young woman he fancies in Black Mischief after she’s been caught, killed and cooked by a tribe Basil is staying with. That book was published in 1932, precisely 30 years before this story. Or that in Waugh’s first novel the kindly Mr Prendergast has his head cut off with a hacksaw by a psychotic prison inmate. Or the short story about the polite and docile Mr Loveday who strangles young women to death. Or the devastating ending of Handful of Dust. Or the heartless death of Angela Runcible in Vile Bodies. Or the not one but two suicides in The Loved One.

In other words I wasn’t upset by the story’s apparent cruelty because casual cruelty had been a stock in trade for Waugh’s fiction right from the start.

So: I like the bufferish tone of the story and I liked the old-boy banter between Peter and Basil and especially between 60-something Basil and his wife. It felt both sweet and charitable to the infirmities of age, as was the brief sad interlude where they visit old Margot Metroland and find her sitting in the dark hunched over a television set (as so many lonely old people become addicted to doing).

On the other hand, all the dialogue with his daughter struck me as hopelessly unrealistic, stiff and unnatural, really false although – but how can I know how 60-something posh fathers spoke with their debutante daughters in 1962?

And as to the harsh, cruel sting in the tail, well, it doesn’t feel to me like some sad falling-off of Waugh’s powers at all but entirely in keeping with the cruelty and sadism lurking in the wings of all Waugh’s 1930s novels and of a piece with macabre little horrors such as ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’ (1935) or ‘The Sympathetic Passenger’ (1939).

Credit

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh was first published by Chapman and Hall in 1947. All references are to the 2018 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 17, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Literature, Short stories
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 17, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/17/complete-short-stories-evelyn-waugh/

News from Nowhere by William Morris (1890)

Reading William Morris’s fiction is difficult for two reasons:

  • his prose is poor, his characterisation and plotting non-existent
  • every cause he believed in and hoped for, and which his prose exists to champion, has been defeated

Morris’s life

Clive Wilmer’s introduction to this Penguin edition paints a handy overview of Morris’s life. Number one, he was rich. He inherited money from his father, who was a successful financier. He inherited an interest in a copper company, becoming familiar with the practicalities of business at the young age of 21. Hence his later business ventures, namely William Morris and Co. – unlike most artists’ ventures into business – were efficiently run and profitable. He died leaving some £60,000, which Wilmer calculates to be £12 million in 1990s money, even more today.

The trajectory of his life is clear enough:

  • involvement at Oxford with the Pre-Raphaelite group round the charismatic Dante Gabriel Rossetti with their passionate interest in medieval life, architecture, poetry, art
  • the powerful impact of John Ruskin, art and social critic, with his belief that Art should be incorporated into everyday life, that Work should be made useful and rewarding instead of the slave labour of the factory
  • unsatisfactory attempts at painting which quickly gave way to interests in the decorative arts which came to include fabrics, wallpaper, furniture, stained glass window and book-making
  • as a young man he married the ‘stunner’ Jane Burden, a working class girl who married to escape her poverty, but the marriage was unhappy and eventually Jane became mistress of Rossetti, plunging Morris into decades of personal unhappiness

Communism

As his arts & crafts business thrived, Morris worried that the works his company were making were only affordable by the rich. It was his lifelong concern to make beautifully-made things more accessible to everyone. Alongside this, the growing conviction that society as a whole needed a wholescale revolution to abolish the crushing poverty of the Victorian age, to liberate the great mass of the labouring poor, to remove the ugliness of Victorian industrialism, to make work rewarding, free people from the capitalist cash-nexus, and restore Nature to pristine beauty unspoilt by factories and pollution.

  • In 1883 Morris joined the Democratic Foundation, a socialist group, but left the following year to found the Socialist League (SL), disagreeing with DF support for Britain’s Imperialist foreign policy and its readiness to accept a Parliamentary route to reform. Morris thought Parliament hopelessly corrupt. What was needed was a Revolution.
  • For the remainder of his life Morris poured immense energy into giving speeches, organising meetings, writing socialist poems and chants and songs, promoting his uncompromising Marxist beliefs in the necessity of an international communist revolution. He was introduced to Friedrich Engels and worked with Marx’s daughter, Eleanor. He was arrested a number of times when police broke up meetings or marches led to scuffles, but escaped prison due to his impeccable middle class credentials.
  • Morris edited, wrote and subsidised the Socialist League’s newspaper, Commonweal. From November 1886 to January 1887 Morris’s novel, A Dream of John Ball, was serialised in it. From January to October 1890, Morris serialised his most famous novel, News from Nowhere.

News from Nowhere

The authors of utopias tend to adopt the form in order to make polemical points, resulting in many utopias being strangely monotonous books which unravel into shopping lists of the author’s obsessions. Compare and contrast the success and popularity of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) a fully dramatised vision of future worlds, with his much more preachy A Modern Utopia (1905), which no-one reads. This, Morris’s most famous book, is no exception to the rule.

‘Plot’

In News from Nowhere a man in his fifites like Morris wakes up in Morris’s house in Hammersmith to find it is a hundred years in the future, England has gone through a Revolution and become an earthly paradise in which there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no money, no divorce, no courts, no prisons and no class systems. People work freely for the joy of it. Everything they do, because it is freely done with joy, results in objects which are beautiful.

The plot, if it can be called that, starts with Morris – renamed William Guest – meeting the folk who now live around his Hammersmith home. This home is no longer crammed among smokey factories, iron bridges and bustling Londoners and the neighbouring buildings are now just a handful of cottages standing in open fields next to a magically unpolluted river Thames.

Perceiving his bewilderment these friendly strangers take Morris in a horse and cart across what was once London and is now a series of picturesque villages thinly populated with beautiful, healthy, artistically-dressed men and women, to meet an old man living next to what was once the British Museum who – in a long chapter – retells in detail the leadup to ‘the Great Change’ i.e. the Revolution which brought about this communist paradise.

Then they go back to Hammersmith and get in a boat and row up the Thames, now pure and clean and sparkling, denuded of horrible factories and the vulgar houses of Victorian nouveaux riches, until they reach Morris’s country house, Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire.

Along the way they pick up a laughing young woman Ellen, who falls in love with Guest. Then he wakes up and it was all a dream.

Psychological power

The journey up the Thames represents a journey through an idyllic, prelapsarian world to Home, which is also a journey back to Morris’s boyhood memories of a happier, simpler world and a journey towards the mutual, loving fulfilment he so miserably failed to have with his wife, Jane.

As I stood there Ellen detached herself from our happy friends who still stood on the little strand and came up to me. She took me by the hand, and said softly, ‘Take me on to the house at once; we need not wait for the others: I had rather not.’ (Ch XXXI)

It is a basket of deeply personal wishes expressed as a fable and I think what power it has comes from these psychological sources rather than any socialist ideas or doctrine. It is an adult’s powerful dream of returning to the golden summers of his boyhood.

…the garden between the wall and the house was redolent of the June flowers, and the roses were rolling over one another with that delicious superabundance of small well-tended gardens which at first sight takes away all thought from the beholder save that of beauty. The blackbirds were singing their loudest, the doves were cooing on the roof-ridge, the rooks in the high elm-trees beyond were garrulous among the young leaves, and the swifts wheeled whining about the gables. And the house itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of summer. (XXXI)

Issues

For the serious-minded, News from Nowhere also contains a shopping list of the usual issues which crop up in utopias and, presumably, it was the touching on these hot topics which helped the book become a classic not only here but among socialists and communists across Europe. In Morris’s post-revolutionary, communist paradise:

  • work: work is Art because it is free and unforced, done for its own joy and benefit
  • economics: there isn’t any economics because there is no money, no buying and selling, no capitalism
  • education: is not compulsory, children are left to find their own way to express themselves, not force fed in ‘boy-farms’
  • women: are free equals of men, not given or ‘owned’ in marriage
  • government: there is none – the Houses of Parliament have been converted into a large communal Dung store 🙂
  • Nature: has been liberated from factories, steam engines and all the dirt and stink of industrialism, reverting to pristine beauty – ‘As we went, the folk on the bank talked indeed, mingling their kind voices with the cuckoo’s song, the sweet strong whistle of the blackbirds, and the ceaseless note of the corn-crake as he crept through the long grass of the mowing-field; whence came waves of fragrance from the flowering clover amidst of the ripe grass.’ (Ch XXXI)
  • technology: there doesn’t seem to be any at all, no steam engines or factories, let alone electric lights or telephones or motor cars, ‘so that the most obviously useful works looked beautiful and natural also.’ (Ch XXX)
  • communism: is the name given to this ideal unspoilt world of equality and freedom

Almost none of these ‘ideas’ are really worthy of serious consideration.

No-one would disagree that work for many is a grinding drudgery, that soul-less economics is the ruling ideology of our time, that education has become more regimented than ever and yet still seems to fail millions of children, that woman are still not equal or free, that the government is inept and political parties are just different flavours of yes-men fronting for banks and big business, that Nature has been ruined and despoiled, that a lot of technology is poisonous and destructive – and that it would be lovely if all this could be swept away and replaced by an eternal summer of beautiful men and women living lives of simplicity and rural leisure.

By framing the issues in such a vividly romantic vision of a world born again, Morris certainly in his own day, and maybe still in ours, gives a kind of psychological power to his vision of how the world could and should be if only we could get rid of ‘capitalism’, the ‘system’, ‘pollution’. But this nostalgia for a better world doesn’t find any practical solutions in the book, because Morris has no solutions except a mysterious and sweeping change to human nature, which transforms everyone into tall graceful characters from a medieval romance.

Style

Beguiling as this vision may be, and long into the night though the arguments about any of these perennial topics of conversation could last, a novel is made out of words and Morris, although he has the fluency and confidence of a man of his age and class (Marlborough public school, Oxford) seems to be incapable of writing an interesting sentence.

Bland and energyless and utterly predictable is every sentence in this long book.

So on we went, Dick rowing in an easy tireless way, and Clara sitting by my side admiring his manly beauty and heartily good-natured face, and thinking, I fancy, of nothing else. As we went higher up the river, there was less difference between the Thames of that day and Thames as I remembered it; for setting aside the hideous vulgarity of the cockney villas of the well-to-do, stockbrokers and other such, which in older time marred the beauty of the bough-hung banks, even this beginning of the country Thames was always beautiful; and as we slipped between the lovely summer greenery, I almost felt my youth come back to me, and as if I were on one of those water excursions which I used to enjoy so much in days when I was too happy to think that there could be much amiss anywhere. (Chapter XXII)

The book’s sub-title says it all: ‘An Epoch of Rest’.

Old-fashioned diction

Morris thought returning to the decorative motifs and subjects of medieval tapestries would result in better design and this may well be true of his famous and successful wallpapers, curtains, furniture coverings and so on.

However, it was not a successful strategy for his prose. Merely writing ‘quoth’ and ‘said I’ and ‘methinks’ and chucking in a few archaisms like ‘sele’ and ‘mamelon’ does not medievalise or beautify his style. It simply becomes standard Victorian with irritatingly anachronistic phraseology and vocabulary.

Around the time of the Great War English prose underwent a revolution which had many streams, many authors and styles, but nearly all of them led towards a Modernist rejection of all old-fashioned diction and an emphasis on modern words assembled in shorter, stripped-down sentences, reflecting, say, the move towards Art Deco in the decorative arts or neo-classicism in music.

In one short generation, by, say, the mid-twenties, Morris’s entire style and the endeavours of everyone like him who hoped to recapture and restore something of medieval beauty by using medieval words, looked ludicrous.

In the 1900s Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy had created a kind of suburban English style; by the end of the War writers like Aldous Huxley were creating a slick, spiffy style to reflect the Roaring Twenties. And then, of course, there were the Americans.

A short generation after his death, Morris’s prose, like his dark fussy wallpapers and fabrics, had come to look unbearably stuffy, a relic from a prehistoric age, tired faded books from an era become completely irrelevant to the permanent crises of the twentieth century. Why dream about lazy boating trips down the Thames when the Bolshevik army was invading Poland, or the Italian fascists were marching on Rome?

Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years later, in a society and a world completely dominated by the triumph of Finance Capitalism, throwaway consumerism and environmental destruction, it is hard to read News from Nowhere because its vision seems too naive and personal, because all the causes Morris fought for have been comprehensively defeated, and because it is written in a prose which offers almost no rewards, apart from the lulling, drowsy soporific of a lazy summer afternoon.

We came just here on a gang of men road-mending which delayed us a little; but I was not sorry for it; for all I had seen hitherto seemed a mere part of a summer holiday; and I wanted to see how this folk would set to on a piece of real necessary work. They had been resting, and had only just begun work again as we came up; so that the rattle of the picks was what woke me from my musing. There were about a dozen of them, strong young men, looking much like a boating party at Oxford would have looked in the days I remembered, and not more troubled with their work: their outer raiment lay on the road-side in an orderly pile under the guardianship of a six-year-old boy, who had his arm thrown over the neck of a big mastiff, who was as happily lazy as if the summer-day had been made for him alone. (Chapter VII)

The whole book is like the lapping of small waves against the sides of a punt on his beloved river Thames, pleasant, relaxing, utterly without impact.

History

News from Nowhere was published in book form in 1891. One hundred years later, in 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed. For that hundred years the book was part of the continuum of socialist or communist texts which helped to support and justify communist regimes around the world. Now it has lived on into the ideological vacuum of the post-communist era. Much of what it says about the misery and exploitation of the capitalist system, about the importance of fulfilling work and well-designed surroundings and the despoliation of nature, remain true today.

The difference is no-one believes anything can be done. Most people have abandoned any engagement with politics and live as atomised units connected only by their smartphones and Facebook.

Seems to me what impact News from Nowhere possesses comes from two sources:

  • the psychological or imaginative power of its sustained dream of the long lazy summers of childhood
  • and a nostalgia for a time when people gave a damn about politics and believed they really could change the world

These two strands, I think, overlap and combine to give the book its sad nostalgic feeling.

News from Nowhere, Kelmscott edition frontispiece

News from Nowhere, Kelmscott edition frontispiece

Related links

Reviews of other William Morris articles and essays

More nineteenth century reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 10, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, English literature, Fantasy, Novel, Politics
Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 10, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/news-from-nowhere-william-morris/