All posts tagged Thames

Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (1922)

Words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street…
(Woolf’s sense of exhaustion and futility, page 88)

What people go through in half an hour!
(Woolf’s profound sense of the unhappiness of life)

Virginia Woolf was mad* and, I think, in this book as elsewhere, it really shows. She had a lifelong history of mental illness and ended up committing suicide. Reading this book, her third novel, helps you, I think, to understand why.

The basic subject matter is simple, insultingly simple, really: it’s another Bildungsroman or coming-of-age or growing-up novel about a clever young man from ‘the provinces’ named Jacob Flanders. The novel twist is the way the nominal protagonist, Jacob, is actually absent from most of the narrative.

We first meet Jacob as a boy on a beach holiday in Cornwall with his (widowed) mother, Betty Flanders. Then we see him roaming up the hill behind the family house in Scarborough. The local vicar and schoolmaster recommend him for Cambridge and lo and behold, in the following chapter we meet him there, hanging with other undergraduates, declaring, as if he’d invented the thought, that Greek literature is better than all modern literature. Virginia takes the opportunity to mock crusty old dons.  Then he graduates and moves to London where he meets ‘Life’ in the form of boring parties, does boring research at the British Museum and, as far as I could tell from the text, becomes involved with a prostitute, Florinda (in fact, I was wrong: Wikipedia tells me that Florinda is a sexually permissive art student; my mistake indicative of the way it’s often hard to make out exactly what’s going on.)

So far, so boring, so very like E.M. Forster’s worst novel, The Longest Journey, which describes the growth from boyhood of another provincial youth who goes up to Cambridge, knocks around with other callow undergraduates who all worship Greek literature and think they’ve invented being clever, before going on to discover how disappointing the world of work is (he becomes a teacher and is slowly crushed by the mundanity of it). So far, so dull, narrow and predictable.

But in literature it’s not the (over-familiar) subject matter, it’s the treatment of it which you pay for, and it’s here that Woolf is either a genius or a deeply disturbed individual, depending on your point of view.

A personal digression on mental illness

My sister had serious post-natal depression for years and is still on medication. Both her kids have mental health issues. At uni I went out with a woman whose mother was a schizophrenic, a trait she passed onto my girlfriend’s (deeply disturbed) brother and which darkened the lives of everyone in their family. My best friend at school had a nervous breakdown at university, jacked it in and ran off to the Continent, to the distress of his parents. Both of my children had troubled teenage years, my daughter cutting herself, my son developing month-long psychosomatic migraines which kept him off school for over two years. In the end I packed in my job to look after them both and try to get their lives back on track, but I found myself suffering a kind of secondary stress from the endless worry and ended up needing anti-depressant medication myself.

A few years ago my wife had the bright idea of taking me to see the stage production of ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ in the West End. The production used flashing white lights and loud sound affects to do an excellent job of taking you inside the mind of a severely autistic boy, so good that after ten minutes or so I had a panic attack and, at first, sat with my fingers jammed in my ears, rocking backwards and forwards, humming loudly myself to try and block out the chaos. Eventually I could stand it no longer and pushed along the aisle of seats and ran through the labyrinth of corridors till I burst out into the fresh air of Soho, leaned against a lamp-post and threw up. It took me the rest of the evening to calm down and days and days to get back to feeling ‘normal’ and being able to smile.

Reading ‘Jacob’s Room’ made me feel a bit like that. I experienced it as a kind of assault on my mental health and equilibrium. I’m glad it is so short (160 pages) because much more would have been bad for my sanity. Having finished it I went out in the garden and start the weeding and pruning, in the winter sunshine, to try and regain my balance.

Fragments

‘Jacob’s Room’ was Woolf’s third novel and the one in which she really announced herself as an experimental novelist, shedding Victorian novelistic conventions left, right and centre in order to achieve her effects. Fans of Woolf focus on her concern to ignore the traditional contexts of plot, scene or character, and instead zero in on fragments and details. These include:

  • focusing on very peripheral details of a scene or location
  • giving fragments of speech with no attempt to report a complete or coherent dialogue
  • jumping from one half-completed scene to a completely new scene with no explanation or introduction
  • jumping into the middle of conversations without bothering to report the start or finish
  • mentioning characters as if we ought to know who they are despite never having mentioned them before (e.g. ‘old Mrs. Temple’ who pops up for a passing appearance in chapter 7)

The London chapters are littered with descriptions of London street scenes which describe random passers-by, people begging or pitifully selling shoe laces or whatnot, crammed into paragraphs which either convey a marvellous panorama of London life or are the dazed fragments of an alienated mind, according to taste.

The book is all about fragments and a deliberately skittish, mosquito jumping from fragment to fragment. At moments I enjoyed this, at others I didn’t. Why?

I very much liked the opening chapter which is, I think, brilliant. It starts with Jacob’s mum, Mrs Betty Flanders, on holiday in Cornwall, sitting on the beach writing a letter, and something’s made her start to cry and the scene is depicted through her tears.

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

I see what Woolf did here, I understand the effect she’s aiming for, I thought it was brilliant and fresh. Incidentally the sentence ‘Accidents were awful things’, jarringly pasted into the stream of her thoughts, indicates the cause of her crying, thinking about an accident in which a friend has died. So you have a brilliant description of what she sees through tears and a deliberately hyper-elliptical reference to the cause of the tears.

It starts to rain and Betty makes her kids pack up their things and scamper from the beach up to the boarding house. Here she gives them tea and puts them to bed as the rainstorm continues outside and the chapter ends by zooming in on one of the kids’ buckets abandoned in the garden.

Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the earth. The child’s bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying again and again.

Brilliant.

I think I liked the two details I’ve selected, crying on the beach and the garden in the rain, (or I understood them) because they are both visual effects, they paint a very vivid visual picture indeed. In subsequent chapters the incidence of these visual details falls away as the book becomes increasingly psychological. As Jacob grows into a student he becomes steadily less interesting (having had two of my own, I know that student-aged people are a lot, lot less interesting than small children: small children are joyous and funny, students not so much). By the time we see Jacob attend some posh party or studying in the British Museum or walking through the busy streets, the disconnected fragments are no longer visual but psychological.

So Woolf finds herself applying her technique of fragments and pieces to people and situations which are 1) increasingly psychological and 2) of increasingly narrow subject matter (students at Cambridge, Cambridge graduates in London) and so 3) increasingly boring.

And unbearable to the narrator. What I found increasingly hard to read was not so much the tedious portraits of bright Cambridge students (God help us) or the descriptions of dinner parties or tea parties (give me strength) but the strong feeling Woolf gives of these things being too much for her.

In chapter 3 Jacob is invited to a tea party with his Cambridge tutor and wife and finds it stiflingly conventional and boring and, the second he escapes from the house,

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’ exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates left the house. ‘Oh, my God!’ Bloody beastly!’ he said, scanning the street for lilac or bicycle — anything to restore his sense of freedom.

That’s how I felt every time I put this book down and I escaped from the prison house of mental illness, of a narrator who comes under such pressure she feels she’ll start screaming – and back into my world of birds in my garden and sunshine and freedom.

There’s a vivid example of this Woolf pressure-cooker effect in chapter 4 when Jacob takes Florinda, a girl who fancies him (I think), to dinner at some restaurant. As more and more people come in, the noise level in the big echoing restaurant goes up and up:

The room was filling; the heat increasing. Talk in a restaurant is dazed sleep-walkers’ talk, so many things to look at — so much noise — other people talking. Can one overhear?

Until:

The room got fuller and fuller; talk louder; knives more clattering.

Knives more clattering. As you read, you can feel the mental stress of the narrator building and building until, the next thing we know, someone at a nearby table, a woman, suddenly leaps to her feet, sweeps the contents of the table onto the floor and shouts something at the man she’s lunching with, clearly the climax of some kind of argument.

I can see how Woolf fans would appreciate the technique used here and it’s powerfully vivid. But what I took from it was the sense of a super-sensitive sensibility being overloaded, being oppressed by the growing roar of the large echoing room, by the clattering of the knives and then… snapping, standing screaming, smashing plates, making a scene. I felt like I was standing outside that West End theatre again, my insides screaming in distress, pushed over the edge and beyond.

Why would I read a book that makes me feel like I’m having a panic attack? And when I wasn’t having panic attack flashbacks, I just felt desperately sad for her, for Woolf. She has, it seems to me, two modes: pent-up screaming panic mode or, when her mania is under control, a sense of glum, defeated depression. At the end of chapter 4 the narrator observes:

The thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Woolf was 36 when ‘Jacob’s Room’ was published. Reading that little bit of authorial wisdom didn’t strike me as very wise, it just made me feel sorry for her. Sorry for a woman who found the most commonplace sights and sounds too much to bear, which either made her want to scream and run out the room, or made her feel like they were aging and killing her. All her thoughts saddened me.

Tired of life

Here are some more examples of Woolf just sounding tired:

‘Holborn straight ahead of you,’ says the policeman. Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen’s Square, and there he shows you a collection of birds’ eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales’s secretary, and this (skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter’s day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise; and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, an outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and — fill in the sketch as you like. As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on. (p.91)

Is this an inspiring flight of fantasy? Or a kind of delirium? You can choose to be thrilled by the imaginative fantasia she projects onto the old man with the white beard she walks past in a London street – yes, excellent – or notice the tone of the last sentence: how we all ignore the fantasies of the street, walk straight past, missing out, leading blinkered lives. A sad thought.

And in the following, the never-ending people you see, lost and abandoned in the street, carries over into the powerful sense of the futility of trying to find meaning anywhere, which spills (characteristically) into the futility of reading, of seeking an answer which can’t be found.

The little man fingering the meat must have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and heard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself even volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, his face sad as a poet’s, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across the road — rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned — in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages… (p.92)

She has lots of these descriptions of London streets, London street scenes, which are superficially attractive – which, as a Londoner, I really enjoyed – except that they all end on the same note of futility or exhaustion. ‘Yet we keep on… What do we seek…?’

‘Come to tea, come to dinner, what’s the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers….’ These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet… when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us — drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. ‘Try to penetrate,’ for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps — who knows? — we might talk by the way.

Doubt, doom, is this all? She sounds as depressed as T.S. Eliot:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

So that eventually I learned that whenever she sets off on one of her digressions, I know it’s going to end up being depressing. ‘Is this all? Am I doomed? Why do we bother reading books? We have to keep on.’ On every page of this book there is the heavy, lowering sense of Woolf’s struggle against depression and futility.

He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread flat before him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of his cheek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, and defiant. (What people go through in half an hour! But nothing could save him. These events are features of our landscape. A foreigner coming to London could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul’s.) He judged life. These pinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the world. They take the impression of the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football, bodies found; vociferation from all parts of England simultaneously. How miserable it is that the Globe newspaper offers nothing better to Jacob Flanders!

‘How miserable it is…’ could be Woolf’s motto.

A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the white fields and the black trees …. At six o’clock a man’s figure carrying a lantern crossed the field …. A raft of twig stayed upon a stone, suddenly detached itself, and floated towards the culvert …. A load of snow slipped and fell from a fir branch …. Later there was a mournful cry …. A motor car came along the road shoving the dark before it …. The dark shut down behind it….

Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. The land seemed to lie dead …. Then the old shepherd returned stiffly across the field. Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden under and gave beneath pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.

Mrs Jarvis wonders why we all run round doing foolish unnecessary things, in tones which sound just like her creator:

‘I never pity the dead,’ said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at her back, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not hear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table. ‘They are at rest,’ said Mrs. Jarvis. ‘And we spend our days doing foolish unnecessary things without knowing why.’ (p.124)

Chapter 9 contains an extended description of scholars working in the British Museum Reading Room. I suppose it’s intended to be satirical but the effect isn’t funny, it’s just sad. It conveys all too vividly the immense waste of life in futile scribbling.

Nobody laughed in the reading-room. There were shirtings, murmurings, apologetic sneezes, and sudden unashamed devastating coughs. The lesson hour was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy children wanted to stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously — ah, another day over and so little done! And now and then was to be heard from the whole collection of human beings a heavy sigh, after which the humiliating old man would cough shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse. (p.101)

There’s lots of sighing in the book.

‘The Daily Mail isn’t to be trusted,’ Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him at any moment… (p.132)

What is the point, of this, of anything?

It all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be executed…

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention.

The artist’s model, Fanny Elmer, falls in love with Jacob but he doesn’t even notice which makes her feel suicidal.

‘Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames,’ Fanny cried, as she hurried past the Foundling Hospital. (p.132)

Hard not to read that and remember that Woolf, of course, eventually killed herself by drowning. On every page the characters sigh, are filled with gloom, wonder what the point is of all this fuss and fret.

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction — it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are. (p.133)

Lonely, lonely and sad. The over-familiar line from Pink Floyd came to mind: ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.’ In this book Woolf seemed to me a perfect epitome of quiet, well-mannered desperation.

Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, ‘What for? What for?‘ (p.153)

‘What for? What for?’ I wonder if Woolf made repeated suicide attempts before she finally succeeded. It sounds like it. Misery dribbles from every page of this grimly depressing book.

The thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

(A few days later, I read in the notes to the Oxford University Press edition of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ that Woolf suffered mental collapses in 1895, 1904 and 1913 to 1915; that she tried to kill herself by jumping out a window in 1895 (aged 13) and again in 1913 (aged 31). In 1922 when she felt another attack coming on, she went to see a Harley Street specialist who was, predictably, useless. Anyway: I wasn’t wrong to feel through the pages of this book a profound experience of barely controlled unhappiness, gloom, misery and mental dislocation.)

Muddle

It’s odd that the ‘serious’ authors of the 1900s, 1910s and 1920s went out of their way to indicate how puzzled and perplexed they were by the world around them. The buzzword which recurs in so many of these novelists is ‘muddle’, as they throw up their hands and declare: ‘It’s too complicated for me to understand; it’s all a big muddle’. E.M. Forster routinely gives up trying to understand his own narratives and admits it’s all a ‘muddle’. Woolf isn’t much better. Here she is in the Cornish holiday home in chapter 1:

There was a click in the front sitting-room. Mr. Pearce had extinguished the lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch was rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one’s back one would have seen nothing but muddle and confusion — clouds turning and turning, and something yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the darkness.

And now in central London:

Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn, and the empty sitting-room and the sitting-room with fifty people in it are liable at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps are more excitable than men. It is seldom that any one says anything about it, and to see the hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stop to Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the drums and trumpets. Only, should you turn aside into one of those little bays on Waterloo Bridge to think the matter over, it will probably seem to you all a muddle — all a mystery. (p.106)

So many of Woolf’s digressions kick off with bold declaration, with fine phrases, then get bogged down in her digressive meandering, and then completely give up, admitting it’s ‘all a muddle — all a mystery.’ Joseph Conrad’s more discursive passages quickly turn into moralising about Man and the Cruel Universe. E.M. Forster’s frequent digressions tend to bring in the Greek gods. Woolf’s digressions again and again end in the admission of defeat, failure to understand and a stifling sense of futility.

Send your hero abroad…

Like so many of the authors of the day, when Woolf couldn’t think what to do with her protagonist she sent him off abroad in the hope that something interesting might crop up, first to Italy, then to Greece. Just like Forster sending Lucy Honeychurch to Florence (A Room with a View) and Lawrence sending Aaron to Florence (Aaron’s Rod). So we are treated to descriptions of train journeys across Italy, views of the hot dry landscape, sturdy Italian peasants, Florence, the Colosseum blah blah, then – shazam! – we are in Greece, Patras, more trains, even hotter drier landscapes, Athens, the Parthenon.

Woolf may be a clever writer but this feels like a desperately tired expedience. Her views on the timeless beauty of the Acropolis join the exact same views of the thousands and thousands of other British tourists and diarists and journal-writers and essayists and archaeologists and historians and novelists who preceded her. Boring. And her protagonist is (rightly) bored. He diligently visits all the sights, reads all the guidebook facts but is stubbornly ‘morose’ (p.141).

I was hoping he’d get run over and killed by a tram, in the completely pointless way the protagonist of ‘The Longest Journey’ is run over by a train at the abrupt ending of that book, but no such luck. Instead, in Italy he falls in with an older couple, Evan Wentworth Williams who is a frustrated would-be politician, and his wife, Sandra Wentworth Williams, who sensitively swans around Athens in a long white dress.

It is made clear that Sandra wants to collect Jacob, to leech on to his youthful gaucheness, and that her husband acquiesces, staying behind in their hotel while Sandra and Jacob go for a walk up the Parthenon in the moonlight. But then, in a characteristic move to frustrate our conventional expectations, just as we are expecting something to happen (a kiss in the moonlight!), the narrative cuts away to Jacob’s mother in bed in her house in Scarborough. And after a few pages with her, when it cuts back to Athens, Jacob and Sandra have disappeared. It is a deliberate strategy of obliquity and evasion.

Then it’s the next morning, they all get up early and journey on to Constantinople. I don’t think anything at all happened between them, even a kiss. The only practical outcome is that Jacob gives Sandra the copy of John Donne’s poems which he’s reading and annotating and we are told it joins the select number of volumes the older lady keeps on her dressing table, and occasionally picks up as she moons over her old lovers. He has been collected.

All the important moments in these little scenes is deliberately omitted leaving a narrative made of fragments built around absences. The central character and all his key experiences, those character-forming experiences you expect from a Bildungsroman, have been carefully excised to leave a hole in the middle of the text.

… then bring him back

The penultimate chapter, chapter 13, gives a kind of panoramic overview of all the characters we have met so far, in the course of one day of coming and going, mostly in London.

Jacob is back in London, lean, brown and boring everyone with his trite opinions about the glories of Greece. He is walking through Hyde Park with his best buddy Dick Bonamy who is unhappy (of course) because of his frustrated love affair with the elusive Clara Durrant.

From one point of view the entire History of The Novel is a record of the long, pitifully useless efforts of adult human beings to manage even the simplest affairs of the heart, to manage their love lives. Whenever anybody gets up on their hind legs and starts pontificating about ‘human wisdom’ and what a clever species we are, even before you get out the history books with their mountainous records of wars and tortures, just hand them a couple of classic novels and say ‘Here: this is the evidence against’. Here are a half dozen examples of the human race who couldn’t manage the most basic aspects of human relationships and ended up killing themselves – Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina.

We are introduced to Mr Bowley, a new character, an older gentleman, who accompanies Clara as she puts her dog Troy on a leash and takes him for a walk in the park. They are disturbed when a horse which has thrown its rider goes galloping by. Characteristically for Woolf, this tear in the fragile surface of good manners and etiquette, is all it takes to trigger Clara to tears, just like the slow crescendo of knives and forks clattering triggered the unnamed woman in the restaurant.

“‘This statue was erected by the women of England…'” Clara read out with a foolish little laugh. ‘Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!’ Gallop—gallop—gallop—a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the pebbles spurted. ‘Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!’ she cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm, utterly unconscious, the tears coming. (p.159)

‘White, trembling, gripping his arm.’ It is my contention that this hysteria lies just below the surface of every sentence, every perception in the book, just waiting to burst out. Nice polite well-mannered young women are poised to snap and burst into tears at the slightest provocation.

This horse bolting is a symbol which is used to bring together disparate strands right at the end of the book. Assiduous visitor of the sick, Mrs Julia Eliot, saw the incident too, en route to her appointment with Lady Congreve in Bruton Street.

At that precise moment Florinda (the sexually permissive art student) who’s discovered she’s pregnant, watches the arrival of the painter Nick Bramham, at the restaurant, Verrey’s, where she’s booked a table. Have they agreed to marry? Has he agreed to pretend to be the father? Is he the father? Or is he stepping in for Jacob who is the real father? I can see that the way it isn’t spelled out is deliberate and artful. It joins the collection of many other issues which are elided and cut off. It creates the sense of a panorama of puzzles, allusions, mysteries, which is clearly how Woolf saw life.

At that moment far away in her country house, Sandra Wentworth Evans fondles the volume of Donne and wonders whether she can emotionally manipulate Jacob. Meanwhile, back in Hyde Park, abandoned by a cross Bonamy, Jacob idly draws in the dirt with the end of his umbrella what may or may not be a sort of diagram of the Parthenon.

A deckchair attendant asks him for a penny, but Jacob can only find half a crown which he gives the man, with some asperity.

Fanny Elmer loves Jacob more than ever and writes him notes and postcards which she never sends. She’s taken to hanging round the British Museum in the hope of sighting him. Why did no-one tell her that life is grim and frustrating?

‘One’s godmothers ought to have told one,’ said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand — told one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines. ‘This is life. This is life,’ said Fanny. (p.163)

At which point, with Woolfian misery, she bursts into tears. She catches a bus which is held up in the Charing Cross Road because there’s a big political rally marching down Whitehall, past the various government ministries and Woolf gives us the last of what have been quite a few page-long digressions about international politics, about the enormous reach of the British Empire and the need to address issues with Kaisers and Rajahs and so on all around the world. Because of my own personal interest in history, these were the only bits of the novel I really enjoyed, because of their sense of range, of the wider world rising above the petty, small-minded backbiting of most of the ‘characters’.

Back to individuals: Timmy Durrant (Clara’s brother) is at work in one of these government departments which Fanny is walking past. He is aided by Miss Thomas, one of the typists who doesn’t want to be late to meet her beau at the Gaiety Theatre.

Jacob gets up from his deckchair. It’s past five and the sun is setting. Far away in Scarborough his mother is writing a letter to his older brother, Archer, who works in Singapore.

Coming out of Carter’s shop in Piccadilly, the Reverend Andrew Lloyd half recognises Jacob as he walks past because it was he, Floyd, back in chapter 2, who recommended Betty to try her son for Cambridge i.e. had a hand in the formation of Jacob’s personality, in a sense is partly responsible for the entire narrative. But he hesitates to approach Jacob just long enough for the latter to disappear into the crowd. It is a world of lost opportunities. Fleeting glimpses and unfulfillment.

In a cab in a traffic jam in Long Acre sit smooth Mr Wortley, Clara and her mother Mrs Durrant, who is concerned about arriving late to the opera and missing the overture.

Far away on the edge of the moors overlooking the sea, Mrs Pasco watches two ships pass each other out on the waves.

Even further away, Greek housewives knit their stockings while the sunset colours the Parthenon red. Artillery fires over the Piraeus to mark the end of the day.

Betty Flanders is woken by a distant booming but can hear nothing distinct. It connects back to the guns in Greece but (being 1920), was it a prolepsis or anticipation of the sound of the guns of the Great War which was to sweep all this away?

I liked the panoramic effect of this chapter very much, although maybe it was simply from the relief of having gotten to the end of the book on one piece.

Chapter 14

The final chapter is precisely one page long and shows Jacob’s friend Dick Bonamy in Jacob’s room tutting about the chaos and the letters scattered everywhere. Then Jacob’s mother, Betty, enters, asking what is she to do with these, holding up a pair of Jacob’s old shoes? Is Jacob dead? Thank God! But how? There is no clue whatsoever, so I turned to the internet for help.

The SuperSummary web page tells me that:

When World War I breaks out in Europe, Jacob enlists in the British army and is killed in combat. The novel ends with a scene of Betty Flanders and Richard Bonamy clearing out Jacob’s London apartment in the wake of Jacob’s death.

Ah. OK. but none of that is expressed in the text. I had picked up on the booming of the guns but was misled because I thought Betty heard them on the same evening when Jacob was strolling through Hyde Park. No. Turns out that all the events the SuperSummary lists (war breaking out, Jacob enlisting, training, being shipped to France, fighting, dying, Betty receiving notification of his death and travelling to his London room) takes place with no mention or description in the narrative. Offstage. That’s a really significant amount of information, data, events, to completely omit from your story, wouldn’t you say?

It was already a strikingly non-conformist book, a revolutionary book in its understated way, simply ignoring most of the conventions of the novel up to that date. This highly elliptical conclusion really rams that home. Contemporary readers must have been mystified.

The implied author

I happily admit that the picture I’ve built up here of Woolf-the-author may bear no close relationship to the actual Virginia Woolf of 1920. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of ‘the implied author’:

The implied author is a concept of literary criticism developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the ‘authorial character’ that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written. In other words, the implied author is a construct, the image of the writer produced by a reader as called forth from the text. The implied author may or may not coincide with the author’s expressed intentions or known personality traits.

Many people’s main reaction to a novel they’re reading, whether they like it or not, is in fact a response to the character of its implied author – whether they find them warm and sympathetic or cold and brutal, whimsical and funny or difficult and literary, etc.

And canny authors exploit this, creating a persona which is not identical even with the narrator, but a larger thing – the book’s personality. As every reader knows, liking or disliking a novel often relies on your response to the total mood of the text, to the implied author, to the book’s personality.

I like literature which adds something to life, which adds factually or psychologically a richness or strangeness. Everything by D.H. Lawrence explodes with life and enhanced perception, even when he’s at his most messianic and delusional. My enthusiasm even extends to the wildest of Samuel Beckett’s prose works, a man renowned for concentrating on futility and despair, works such as the very strange How It Is. What is exhilarating about Beckett’s works is the totality of their commitment. They are bleak as hell but written with a visionary intensity.

By comparison, Woolf, to me, seems half-hearted. She is like E.M. Forster seen through a kaleidoscope, a distorting mirror. Her works radiate a kind of wet unhappiness. She – well the author implied by this book, its authorial persona – is very clever, very perceptive, very artful, but very wounded.

* A note on the word madness

I wondered whether I’m allowed to use the term ‘mad’ and ‘madness’. Surely I should be more sympathetic, up-to-date and use terms like ‘mental illness’ or ‘neurodivergent’? So I was struck by the way the author biography on the inner sleeves of the Granada paperback editions of Woolf’s works which I read bluntly states:

Recurring bouts of madness plagued both her childhood and married life and in April 1941 Virginia Woolf took her own life.

And it’s not just here. Throughout Victorian Glendinning’s excellent biography of Leonard Woolf, Glendinning refers to Virginia’s ‘madness’. And in her own writings and diary, Woolf freely uses the term mad and madness. She used it in the intensely moving suicide note she left for her husband – ‘Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again’. So I’m not using the word flippantly or insensitively. I’m using the same word used by her editors, publishers, biographers and by Virginia herself to describe her condition.

Credit

‘Jacob’s Room’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1922. References are to the 1965 Penguin paperback edition, 1971 reprint.

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by Simon on March 24, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 24, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/24/jacobs-room-virginia-woolf/

Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston (1605)

Six salient facts:

1. Eastward Ho and Westward Ho were the cries of the watermen who plied on the Thames, telling customers which way they were headed.

2. Eastward Ho! was a collaboration between three leading playwrights of the era, George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston. Scholars have been arguing for centuries about who wrote which bit.

3. Eastward Ho! was staged at the Blackfriars Theatre by a company of boy actors known as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, granted a patent by King James I in 1604. Boy actors! So imagine everything that follows being played by boys! All the double entendres and jokes about pricks and purses, Gertrude making eyes at Quicksilver, Sindefy the whore, all the vamping… boys.

4. Eastward Ho! was performed at the Blackfriars Theatre. This was an enclosed theatre which catered to a financial elite, charging sixpence admission, compared to 1 pence at the more popular and open-to-the-elements Globe Theatre.

5. Eastward Ho! includes references to and parodies of popular contemporary plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine and Hamlet. Even the play’s title is a reference, a riposte to the recently performed Westward Ho! by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, who then went on to write Northward Ho! as a response to Eastward. Jacobean theatre was a tightly packed, highly competitive, self-referential little world.

6. The play contained scathing satire on all manner of subjects to do with contemporary London life, but one of these was the widespread animosity against the many Scots who had accompanied the new king, James VI of Scotland who became James I of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in March 1605, down to London. Chronically poor from the start of his reign, James quickly became notorious for selling knighthoods for £40. 900 were sold in the first year of his reign. This created a mercenary atmosphere of corruption, that all that mattered was money, a sense that you could get rich and climb the social ladder overnight by clever scams. This is the corrupt vision which lures Quicksilver, Petronel and Security, the play’s three baddies, who all hope to get rich quick by various scams – and who are balanced by Touchstone, standing for the bourgeois virtues of hard work, and Golding, who stands for loyalty and honesty.

Having read the play I’m surprised that the handful of satirical references to the Scots and the selling of knighthoods are relatively trivial, you could blink and miss them.

1. When Sir Petronel Flash is washed up on the Isle of Dogs two passing gentlemen mock him, and then one – out of tune with his preceding remarks – says something in a Scots accent:

FIRST GENTLEMAN: On the coast of Dogs, sir; y’are i’th’ Isle o’ Dogs, I tell you, I see y’ave been washed in the Thames here, and I believe ye were drowned in a tavern before, or else you would never have took boat in such a dawning as this was. Farewell, farewell; we will not know you for shaming of you. I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights.
SECOND GENTLEMAN: No, no, this is he that stole his knighthood o’ the grand day for four pound given to a page; all the money in’s purse, I wot well.

It’s peculiar the way this one-off remark and its odd Scottish impersonation sticks out from the text around it, as if it’s been cut and pasted onto the rest of his speech in English. It’s an oddly random moment in the text

2. In the pub, the gentlemen who are joining the expedition to Virginia ask Captain Seagull what it’s like and he sets off on a long deceitful description of how it’s overflowing with gold,m in the middle of which he suddenly segues into a passage about Scots, and the jokey idea that it would be lovely if all the Scots in London could be magically transported to America.

SCAPETHRIFT: And is it a pleasant country withal?
SEAGULL: As ever the sun shined on; temperate and full of all sorts of excellent viands: wild boar is as common there as our tamest bacon is here; venison as mutton. And then you shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers, only a few industrious Scots, perhaps, who indeed are dispersed over the face of the whole earth. But as for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen and England, when they are out on’t, in the world, than they are. And for my part, I would a hundred thousand of ’hem were there, for we are all one countrymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times more comfort of them there than we do here.

Someone reported the playwrights to the authorities as disrespecting the new king. Marston got wind of it and went into hiding, but Jonson and Chapman were briefly imprisoned for lèse majesty.

Ten years later, Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden (a Scots writer who he stayed with on a visit to Scotland) that they thought they might have their ears and noses slit.

It’s very difficult for us to really assimilate the casual violence and casual death of the Elizabethan/Jacobean period. Tens of thousands died of the periodic outbreaks of plague. There were plenty of other ailments to die of in between. You were liable to be conscripted for one of the endless wars. Jonson is known to have killed a fellow actor in a duel. The plays refer to the common punishment of being whipped. And here are a couple of poets in gaol for a few weeks wondering if they’ll publicly have their ears cut off or noses slit! As I say, difficult for us to really imagine what life was like.

What happened to Jonson and Chapman? The pair wrote letters to every influential patron and person they knew asking for their intercession. These letters are included as an appendix in the New Mermaid edition of the play and very interesting reading they make, too. Eventually, they were released, whereupon they threw a big banquet for their friends and supporters.

Cast

There’s quite a large cast (all played by boys!):

Touchstone, a goldsmith.
Quicksilver, and Golding, apprentices to Touchstone.
Sir Petronel Flash, a shifty knight.
Security, an old usurer.
Bramble, a lawyer.
Seagull, a sea-captain.
Scapethrift, and Spendall, adventurers bound for Virginia.
Slitgut, a butcher’s apprentice.
Poldavy, a tailor.
Holdfast, and Wolf, officers of the Counter.
Hamlet, a footman.
Potkin, a tankard-bearer.

Mistress Touchstone.
Gertrude, and Mildred, her daughters.
Winifred, wife to Security.
Sindefy, mistress to Quicksilver.
Bettrice, a waiting-woman.
Mrs. Ford, Mrs. Gazer, Coachman, Page, Constables, Prisoners, &c.

Eastward Ho! plot summary

Master Touchstone is an honest but tetchy goldsmith. He has two daughters and two apprentices. The elder daughter, Gertrude, is ‘of a proud ambition and nice wantonness’, the younger, Mildred, ‘of a modest humility and comely soberness’. So with the apprentices who are nicely paired & contrasted, Quicksilver is a graceless unthrift ‘of a boundless prodigality’, but Golding is ‘of a most hopeful industry’, a model of industry and sobriety.

Act 1 scene 1

The play opens with Touchstone and Frank Quicksilver arguing, the latter insisting he is the son of a gentleman and is off to the pub to hang out with gallants and gull them out of money. Crossly, Touchstone says that he rose by hard work and repeats his catchphrase, ‘Work upon it now!’ Touchstone exits and Golding is left alone with Quicksilver, who insults Touchstone for being a flat-capped bourgeois, swears a lot and it is in this speech that Quicksilver says Golding shouldn’t face West to the setting sun, but look out for himself and fare Eastward Ho!

As the play develops East is associated with:

  • the rising sun
  • the mythical castle in the country which Sir Petronal Flash claims to own
  • the direction down the Thames the ship to America will take

Act 1 scene 2

Proud Gertrude is impatiently awaiting the arrival of her suitor, Sir Petronel Flash, while meek and mild sister Mildred watches her dress up in pretentious finery, mock the lowly origins of her own parents, and look forward to becoming a fine lady. Her tailor, Poldavy, encourages her to prance and bob like a ‘fine lady’. She is a type of the pretentious bourgeois.

Enter Sir Petronel Flash who quickly comes over as a superficial fool. Mistress Touchstone is as keen to be rich as Gertrude and the two of them, plus Flash, make a bevy of pretentious fools. Mistress T explains that Sir Petronel is one of the new knights, a reference to James I’s innovation of selling knighthoods. Gertrude wishes him to take her away from all this to his big house in the country. She uses the affected pronunciation of city-dames, namely saying ‘chity’ and ‘chitizen’.

The pretentious threesome exit leaving the stage to Touchstone, Mildred and Golding. Rather surprisingly Touchstone marries Golding to Mildred. She is all filial loyalty and so meekly agrees, Golding swears his devotion to his master and they go in to have a little wedding meal. Touchstone, alone on stage, explains that he is running a little experiment:

This match shall on, for I intend to prove
Which thrives the best, the mean or lofty love.
Whether fit wedlock vow’d ’twixt like and like,
Or prouder hopes, which daringly o’erstrike…

There is no mention of any love or affection whatsoever between the young couple. It is a striking example of Jonson’s didactic theatre, utterly lacking either the magical romance of Shakespeare’s comedies, or the innocent mirth of Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday.

Act 2 scene 1

Next morning outside Master Touchstone’s shop. He calls Quicksilver to him, who is hungover and explains he got smashed at the party to celebrate Gertrude and Sir Petronel’s wedding. He staggers off to drink some more. Touchstone retires and listens to the conversation of Golding and Mildred which is exemplary for love and devotion. At this point Quicksilver staggers back on stage, positively drunk and asks first Golding, then Touchstone if he can borrow money.

Touchstone has had enough and throws him out, giving him his indenture and all other belongings. Very drunk, Quicksilver quotes the opening speech from Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, then swears at Touchstone:

Quicksilver: Sweet Touchstone, will you lend me two shillings?
Touchstone: Not a penny.
Quicksilver: Not a penny? I have friends, and I have acquaintance; I will piss at thy shop-posts, and throw rotten eggs at thy sign.

As Quicksilver staggers offstage, Touchstone abruptly frees Golding from his apprenticeship, offers him a handsome dowry and promises to host a marriage feast even more spectacular than Petronel’s. Golding, modest and sober, demurs, saying it would be profligate and wasteful and he and Mildred will be happy to have a small ceremony with just Touchstone present, and then consume the cold leftovers from Petronel’s feast. Touchstone remarks that his daughter is now impatient to seat off Eastward to her knightly husband’s country pile.

Act 2 scene 2

At Security’s house. Security has a little soliloquy in which he introduces himself as Security, the famous usurer, who keeps people’s belongings, in this case the fine clothes of Quicksilver, who in the past has nipped in here to swap his prentice clothes for fancy togs to go meeting his gallant mates.

Enter hungover Quicksilver climbing into his swagger clothes. The notes explain the business relationship between the two: Quicksilver pretends friendship to city rakes and gallants, lends them money, then pretends to be in debt, persuades them to sign a bond for a commodity or an exorbitantly high-interest loan payable to Security, for which they are responsible. In other words, Quicksilver dupes his ‘friends’ into getting into deep debt with Security: which is why Security keeps his clothes and minds his affairs for him.

Security is married to a young woman, Winifred but has a sexy servant, Sindefy, ‘Sin’ for short, who comes bearing the rest of Quicksilver’s posh clothes. Quicksilver calls Security ‘Dad’. After lengthy speeches about how they rely on no trade, preferring to make money out of money, (which are designed, I think, to make the audience despise them) Security lays out their latest plan: Quicksilver will get Sir Petronel Flash into his debt. They’ve learned that Flash married Gertrude to get his hands on her inheritance, to convert it to cash and take ship for Virginia as a ‘knight adventurer’.

They devise a Plan: Gertrude has not yet gone down to the country to visit her husband’s (fictional) castle, but is still in London. Quicksilver will visit her and will help the introduction of Sindefy who will take on the character of a gullible young woman just up from the country – you can just imagine this will lead to an orgy of ridiculous social pretentiousness.

Just before they pack up, Security is called offstage by his wife (?) Winnie, leaving Quicksilver alone. Out of Quicksilver’s mouth oozes pure, malicious evil, as he insults Security behind his back and says he hopes to live to see dog’s meat made of his flesh. This sounds like Ben Jonson. It is exactly the tone of vicious hatred which animates Mosca in Volpone. Coming from the bonhomie of The Shoemakers’ Holiday, this kind of thing is like treading in dog poo.

Act 2 scene 3

Quicksilver is at Petronel’s London lodging as the latter prepares to set off. He wants to flee London to escape his wife, who he can’t stand. He readily admits he has no castle in the country, something Gertrude will shortly find out. With what I think of as typical Jonsonian heartlessness, Petronel hopes Gertrude will hang herself in despair.

Quicksilver persuades Petronel to stay and get Gertrude to sign over her inheritance, give it in bond to Security who will increase its value. Enter Gertrude now dressed grandly and swanking with grand manners, telling the men when to doff their hats and when to put them back on.

Security presents to her Sindefy, demurely dressed, and preposterously describes her as a simple country girl who intended to become a nun but has come up to the big city seeking advice. In her pretentiously lofty manner, Gertrude agrees to employ her as her personal maid.

Security invites Petronal to come and dine with him but Gertrude is hen-pecking him, and refuses to let him go, insisting they dine at home so she can quickly take him to bed. Quicksilver and Security make cheeky asides about her being bossy. Finally it is agreed that Petronel will visit Security the following morning.

Act 3 scene 1

The next morning at Security’s house, he has just given Petronel a fine breakfast feast. They exchange extravagant compliments, Security promising to make Petronel godfather to his first child, while Petronel gives him a diamond to give his first-born, and Security makes his young wife, Winifred, kiss him. Security’s lawyer, Bramble, has drawn up documents.

Enter the captain of the ship taking Petronel, Captain Seagull and Spendall who say they must haste and leave under cover since the ship is taken out in a false name.

Act 3 scene 2

An inn-yard where the harassed coachman and servant makes haste to prepare Gertrude’s coach. She is obsessed with being the wife of a knight and having a coach. Two city women, Mistresses Gaze and Fond, line up to watch the show and shout encouragement to Mistress Gertrude, who is accompanied by her mother, Mistress Touchstone, equally impatient to be a Great Lady.

Petronel himself arrives and asks her to wait, but she says she is impatient to decorate his castle for his arrival. Quicksilver also enters and tells Gertrude her father has just officiated at the wedding of Golding and Mildred. Gertrude is disgusted at her father for marrying her sister to a common apprentice: henceforth he (her father) will have to call her ‘Madam’.

Enter Touchstone, Mildred and Golding. Gertrude is appalled her sister got married in such a common hat. Touchstone disowns her for snobbery. Gertrude insults Golding for marrying her sister. Golding is tactful and considerate of his master.

Enter Security and his lawyers and they cozen Gertrude into signing away her inheritance, she thinking it’s a minor property in town and the money will be used to beautify the castle. She and Mistress Touchstone and Sindefy, her maid, depart in the coach. Petronel and Quicksilver discuss the very great disappointment Gertrude is going to have when she discovers he has no castle – but by then Petronel will have fled the country.

Petronel expects Security to bring him the money they’ve discussed at Billingsgate. There then follows a complicated sequence during which Petronel reveals to Security that he is in love with the wife of Security’s lawyer, Bramble. He would like, as a favour, Security to take Bramble out for a drink, while he steals Bramble’s wife away. Security enters into the spirit of the plot and exits. Only then do Petronel and Quicksilver reveal that, while Security is out with Bramble, Petronel will steal away Security’s wife, Winifred. Quicksilver and Petronel are fretting about how to disguise her, when Security unexpectedly re-enters and says the best disguise will be his wife’s cloak and hands it over.

Act 3 scene 3

Captain Seagull and his men (Spendall and Scapethrift) are at the Blue Anchor tavern, Billingsgate, awaiting Petronel. His dim men ask about Virginia and Seagull confidently tells them the streets are paved with gold, says the expedition there of 1579 was a great success and the Englishmen intermarried with the natives.

Petronel arrives and they toast the success of the voyage. Security and Bramble arrive, impressed with the toasting and confidence of the crew. Quicksilver arrives with Security’s wife in disguise and wearing a mask. Petronel explains, ostensibly for the benefit of Bramble, that it is a cousin come to see him off who doesn’t want to be recognised in a low tavern.

She is crying and so Petronel asks Security, as a favour, to comfort her. This is designed to elicit howls of laughter from the audience, as Security is all unknowingly comforting his own wife, telling her she is well shot of ‘an old jealous dotard’ and will soon be in the arms of a young lover! About six times various characters make the joke that the ship is bound that night for Cuckold’s Haven, a real place, on the Thames below Rotherhithe.

Increasingly drunk, Petronel suggests to the company that they hold their farewell feast aboard Sir Francis Drake’s old ship, and they dance round the silent, disguised woman to celebrate the idea. Bramble tells Security the mystery woman is wearing Security’s wife’s clothes, but Security just laughs at him, confident that she is Bramble‘s wife – everyone in the audience, of course, laughing at him.

Security and Bramble go their ways but the rest of the company calls for a boat to take them to Sir Francis Drake’s ship, where they’ll get even more drunk, before setting off to be put aboard their final ship. The pub’s drawer watches them go, remarking that the tide is against them and a storm is brewing and it is a fool’s errand.

Act 3 scene 4

A very brief scene, just long enough for Security to return home, find his wife not there, discover that she is at Billingsgate, make the deduction that she is the mystery woman and is sailing with Petronel, and run off yelling for a boat.

THE STORM

Act 4 scene 1. Cuckold’s Haven

There’s a storm blowing and the Thames is turbulent, A fellow named Slitgut is climbing up a tree at Cuckold’s Haven to attach cuckold’s horns to it, after an ancient tradition when he spies a ship going down in the river. He gives a running commentary of a man struggling through the waves who comes ashore and proves to be Security, who moans his wretched luck and crawls away. He has been crushed down to the earth.

The Slitgut sees another person wallowing in the weltering wave, a woman, and describes how she is rescued by a man who brings her to shore. It is the drawer from the Blue Anchor tavern who came down to visit a friend at St Katherine’s and he has rescued Winifred. She asks him to go fetch her bundle of clothes which she left at the pub, but begs him to keep quiet about her or it will ruin her reputation. A would-be whore, she has washed ashore by St Katherine’s monastery.

Next out of the water is Quicksilver, washed ashore capless by the gallows reserved for pirates. He bewails the fact the storm has sunk the ship and ruined all his plans.

Next to stagger ashore are Petronel and Seagull who are drunkenly, confusedly convinced they have washed ashore in France until two men passing by assure them they are on the Isle of Dogs and briskly make off, but not before making the joke that one of them (i.e. Petronel) looks like a thirty-pound knight.

I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights.

This is obviously written to be said in a Scots accent and was the most obvious bit of anti-Scots satire, which caused its authors to be thrown into gaol. Petronel and Seagull are now united with Quicksilver and all bewail their fate. They had not, in fact, made it as far as the main ship which was to take them to America, but worry that that ship will now have been seized (there was something illicit about it which I didn’t quite understand).

Petronel is all for giving in, but Quicksilver suddenly changes the subject by declaring he has the specialist knowledge to make copper look like silver: he’ll restore their fortunes yet. The other two adore him and they depart.

Enter the Drawer and Winifred now dressed in dry clothes. He has brought her near to the pub where he works, and very nobly leaves her to continue alone i.e. uncompromised by being seen with a strange man. Which is when she bumps into her husband, Security! Quickly Winifred ad libs and lies that she has come out expressly to look for him, that she was fast asleep when he returned to see her (at the end of act 3) and his shouting stirred her and she was about to call back but he ran off in such a hurry. Thus, lying her head off, she is restored to her husband and he ends up apologising, promising that every morning he will go down on his knees and beseech her forgiveness. They exit.

At which point Slitgut, who has been up his tree watching each of these encounters, climbs down saying he won’t continue the ridiculous pagan custom, and bids the cuckold tree farewell.

Act 4 scene 2. A room in Touchstone’s House

Touchstone has heard that Petronel and Quicksilver’s ship was sunk. He tells us he has also heard that his ungrateful daughter, Gertrude, and his wife and the maid, discovered there was no castle anywhere and so ended up sleeping in the famous coach until they crept back to London, repentant.

Golding appears and in his guileless way reports that he has been voted Master Deputy Alderman. He had already been taken into the livery of his trade, so Touchstone is thrilled that he is progressing in his career and doubts not that he will soon be more famous than Dick Whittington.

Then Golding tells Touchstone that the rascally crew were shipwrecked as they took a ferry boat down towards Blackwall, were washed ashore and are returning in dribs and drabs to London and Golding has organised a reception committee of constables. Touchstone’s reaction is what I think of characteristically Jonson, and the reason I didn’t like this play:

TOUCHSTONE: Disgrace ’em all that ever thou canst; their ship I have already arrested. How to my wish it falls out, that thou hast the place of a justicer upon ’hem! I am partly glad of the injury done to me, that thou may’st punish it. Be severe i’ thy place, like a new officer o’ the first quarter, unreflected.

Revenge, the fiercer and severer the better, is the Jonson theme. A mood continued when Gertrude and her mother and Sindefy enter. Mistress Touchstone is thoroughly mortified by the discovery that Petronel was a liar, but Gertrude remains comically obstinate, persisting in the belief she is a lady and owes nothing to her father who ought to bow to her. She flounces out.

A constable enters to announce the arrival of Petronel and Quicksilver. Touchstone is gleeful. He insists that Golding (in his new rank of deputy alderman) judges the rascals. The Shoemakers’ Holiday was about forgiveness and festivity. Eastward Ho! is about judgement and punishment. Golding lays out the accusations against both Petronel and Quicksilver in detail, and is seconded by a vengeful Touchstone. Then they instruct the constable to take them away pending further judgement.

Act 5 scene 1. At Gertrude’s lodgings

Gertrude and Sindefy bewail the hard times they’ve fallen on. Gertrude has pawned her jewels, her gowns, her red velvet petticoat, and her wedding silk stockings and all Sin’s best apparel. She wishes she could sell her ladyship. She fantasises about finding a jewel or gold in the street, anything which could save her from poverty.

Her mother enters and laments all her ambitions and decisions to become a lady, but Gertrude blames her and asks how much she’s stolen from her cursed father. But she weeps bitterly. It’s not a funny scene. Eventually Mistress Touchstone advises that she goes and throws herself on the mercy of her good sister Mildred.

Act 5 scene 2. Goldsmith’s Row

Wolf comes who is a gaoler of ‘the Counter’ where Petronel, Quicksilver and Security are imprisoned. He has brought letters from them begging for help and then describes their reformations. Touchstone is tempted to forgive but exists rather than give way to pity. Golding, true to his immaculate character as Good Man gives Wolf some money and messages of hope to take back to the prisoners.

Act 5 scene 3. The Counter

I.e. prison. Lawyer Bramble visits Security who has gone half mad in captivity and can’t stand the light. Two anonymous gentlemen comment on the extent of Quicksilver’s reformation, who gave away all his fancy clothes, has penned a wonderful apology for his life and helps the other prisoners write petitions.

Wolf arrives back from Golding with the message of hope and a little money. Quicksilver has completely changed. He genuinely thanks Golding, then asks Wolf to distribute the money to other prisoners. The two gentlemen who have observed this noble gesture, remark on Quicksilver’s reformation.

Next, Golding himself arrives in disguise. He has a Plan. He asks Wolf to let him into the prison, then take his ring to Touchstone and say that he, Golding, has been imprisoned for a debt to some third party, can he (Touchstone) come quickly. Then they will work some kind of resolution. Wolf agrees, lets Golding into the prison, sets off with the message to Touchstone.

Act 5 scene 4. Touchstone’s house

Mildred and Mistress Touchstone try to intercede on behalf of Gertrude but Touchstone insists his ears are stoppered like Ulysses’ against the sirens. Until Wolf arrives with the token, with Golding’s ring, which Touchstone recognises and instantly promises to come to his aid.

Act 5 scene 5. The Counter

Touchstone enters with Wolf. Petronel and Quicksilver enter, and a prisoner and two gentlemen are present to listen to Quicksilver’s sincere and moving song of repentance. It’s a long doggerel poem and various bystanders applaud, ask for more and, at every interval. In an aside, Touchstone tells us that his hard heart is melting. By the end he is quite convinced of Quicksilver’s reformation and forgives him. He goes bail for Quicksilver, Petronel and half-mad Security and they are all released.

Gertrude, Mildred, Mistress touchstone, Sindefy and Winifred all arrive i.e. all the main characters are on stage. Gertrude finally repents and asks Touchstone’s forgiveness, and also her husband’s forgiveness and he begs her forgiveness for deceiving her. Is anything missing? Only that Quicksilver should marry his punk, Sindefy, and make a decent woman of her. Which he instantly volunteers to do.

Bad tastes

I didn’t like this play for at least three reasons:

  1. The contrasts set up right at the start between Dutiful Daughter and Haughty Daughter, and Conscientious Apprentice and Spendthrift Apprentice, feel too mechanical, to put it mildly. Like many other aspects of the play the characters of Golding, who is Peter Perfect, and Mildred, who barely exists as an individual, feel schematic and lifeless.
  2. The rascal characters are all too inevitably riding for a fall and, when they hit it, are judged very inflexibly and harshly. They don’t just fall, they are crushed into the dirt and ground underfoot, reduced to miserable penury in prison. Security goes mad. The harshness of their fate feels cruel.
  3. And at countless incidental moments along the way, the characters are vile. Gertrude’s haughtiness to her father is meant to be funny, but can easily be read as just horrible. Much worse is the way Quicksilver and Security conspire against Petronel, but then Quicksilver and Petronel conspire against Security. They’re all scum. The basic attitude was epitomised for me by the way Petronel said that, once his deceived wife discovers there is no castle, she will be so angry, that she’d be doing Petronel a favour if she hanged herself. A kind of Tarantino level of heartlessness and hate underlies the whole thing. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

The quality of justice

Feels contrived. The rascals’ repentances have no real psychological validity. Gertrude in particular is a bitch up to the last moment – and believable and funny as such, probably the funniest character in the play – till she suddenly turns up in prison right at the last minute, a changed woman. It is literally unbelievable.

In my opinion there is something necessarily shallow about Jonson’s entire view of human nature, shallow and extreme. He sees people as viciously cynical and wicked right up to the last few pages… when they suddenly undergo miracle conversions. The cynicism is unpleasant and the conversions are insultingly shallow and contrived.

But the cardboard stereotypes are an inevitable result of the strictness of his theory of comedy. He thinks comedy should hold up folly and vice to ridicule. But this is a very ideological and schematic ambition, and explains the metallic inflexibility of the play. The precise details may be unpredictable but the ultimate outcome – the crushing humiliation of the rascals and fools – is never in doubt and feels profoundly unconvincing.

As C.G. Petter points out in his introduction to the New Mermaid edition of the play, there is a marriage at the play’s end, the rather tediously inevitable requirement of any comedy – but it is the marriage of an upstart social pretender (Quicksilver) to a whore (Sindefy) whose dowry is paid by a usurer (Security). Gertrude and Petronel’s marriage is a sham from the start, he only marries her for her money. And the marriage of Golding and Mildred in the first act has absolutely no romance or emotion about it whatsoever because it is the union of two wooden puppets.

The intellectual and psychological crudity of so much of this is typified by the thumpingly crude final moral, delivered by Touchstone. Having forgiven Quicksilver after the latter has read out his very poor, doggerel poem of repentance, Touchstone offers Quicksilver decent clothes to change into from his prison rags. But the newly penitent Quicksilver nobly turns down the offer, preferring to walk through the streets of London in his prison clothes to set an example to the children of Cheapside. At which Touchstone intones the final lines of the play:

TOUCHSTONE: Thou hast thy wish. Now, London, look about,
And in this moral see thy glass run out:
Behold the careful father, thrifty son,
The solemn deeds which each of us have done;
The usurer punish’d, and from fall so steep
The prodigal child reclaim’d, and the lost sheep.

Could anyone seriously expect that plays as wooden and contrived and stereotypical and obvious as this would ‘reform’ vice and folly? What a ludicrous idea. They’re a night out at the theatre, full of jokes, lots and lots of sexual innuendo, absurd farce, ironic reversals, sentimental speeches and a big round of applause at the end.

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by Simon on September 16, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on September 16, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/16/eastward-ho-george-chapman-ben-jonson-john-marston/

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Heart of Darkness was published in three monthly instalments in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in February, March and April of 1899. (The Victorian Web has an essay describing the other articles which Heart of Darkness appeared among.) The final text was still divided into three equal sections when it was published in book form in 1902.

Heart of Darkness is a masterpiece and as such can be approached from scores of different angles, interpreted in countless ways.

In line with my earlier comments about Conrad, I think its success is partly because, in the horrific facts of the Belgian Congo which he experienced on his 1890 trip up the river, Conrad found external realities which, for once, justified the extremity of his nihilistic worldview and the exorbitance of his style.

The Congo really was a vast immensity of suffering and pain. When he uses his almost hysterical language about Almayer’s daughter abandoning him, or Willems’s native mistress seeing through him, or Hervey’s wife leaving him, Conrad’s lexicon and syntax seem overwrought, hyperbolic. In King Leopold’s Congo there really was a subject which justified the obsessive use of words like ‘horror’, ‘suffering’, ‘immense anguish’ and so on.

Frame device

In Youth Conrad invents the frame device of the group of five mature men of the world sitting around smoking after-dinner cigars while one of them, Marlow, sets off to tell a long yarn.

Having come across this device in Youth Conrad immediately reused it for House of Darkness. Precisely the same five good fellows who we met in Youth are aboard the yacht Nellie, moored in the Thames at dusk, as Marlow recounts the story of his trip up the Congo.

So the book has two narrators: the anonymous one who describes the ‘we’, the five chaps; and then, via his narrative, we hear Marlow’s story – a story within a story.

Matching the tale to the teller, and creating subtle ironies between the actual events and the way they are told, are devices as old as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron, older. Thus, once Marlow finishes his story, the narrator returns for the concluding paragraphs, to describe the haunting final vision of the darkness of the Thames after sunset, when the full repercussions of Marlow’s story sink in.

The frame device:

1) guarantees a happy ending – we know that Marlow returned alive

2) guarantees a kind of sanity – periodically, when Marlow’s story rises to heights of absurdity or psychological stress, the narrator reminds us of the calm, bourgeois, urban setting the tale is being told in:

There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow’s lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame.

3) above all, it replaces suspense – what happened? – with reflection – what does it mean? It legitimises the way Marlow frequently stops the tale to ponder the meaning of his experiences, or stops to tell his audience how he’s struggling to convey the feelings he experienced – something that would be harder for an omniscient narrator to do.

The plot

Marlow takes a commission from a Belgian company to captain a steamboat up the Congo to find one Mr Kurtz, a prize ivory trader. Before he’s even set foot in Africa he sees signs of the greed and folly of the European imperial mission to Africa – a lone warship pointlessly firing cannon randomly into the jungle – and as soon as he arrives at the first station up-river he finds the building of the so-called railway a shambles where Africans are chained like slaves and worked to death.

When Marlow reaches the legendary Kurtz he finds he has sunk into horrific barbarity, savagely marauding through neighbouring country, killing natives and stealing their ivory, his campong lined by stakes on which are impaled human heads.

The young idealist Kurtz had written an eloquent pamphlet on how to bring ‘civilisation’ to the natives. Across the bottom the older, degraded Kurtz has scrawled, ‘Exterminate all the brutes.’

Kurtz is a symbol of the hypocritical cruelty and absurd folly of imperial enterprises. Marlow gets his native bearers to carry the sick and dying Kurtz onto his steamer, turns around and heads for the coast. Kurtz dies onboard and his last words – ‘The horror, the horror’ – have become classic, referenced by T.S. Eliot, the climax of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie adaptation, ‘Apocalypse Now‘, I’ve seen them on t-shirts.

Not British

Although Conrad doesn’t name the colonial power, he gives broad enough hints that it was Belgium. The Congo was the personal possession of King Leopold of Belgium, who modern historians nowadays place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot as one of the great modern mass murderers of all time, with an estimated 8 to 10 million Africans dying in the Congo as a direct result of the slavery he instituted during his reign (1885 to 1908).

But the point is – it isn’t British. This genocidal regime wasn’t British. Conrad was anxious about how his blistering critique of Imperialism would be received in his new home, the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

Later the same year Heart of Darkness was published, in October 1899, the Boer War broke out and whipped the country into a furore of Imperialist jingoism. Conrad knew it was impossible to criticise the British Empire, and he certainly goes out of his way in the opening pages to emphasise that he is NOT talking about the British Empire, and that the British Empire is qualitatively different from the imperial folly he attributes to Belgium.

‘On one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there…’

What’s more, the opening pages contain a great and deliberate hymn to the history and integrity of the British Empire.

I wonder what obligation Conrad felt under to clarify that, although he appeared to be saying that all empires are hypocritical, rapacious follies… he in fact meant, all empires except your empire of course, chaps.

‘The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests — and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith — the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!… The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.’

Furthermore, at a few key moments in the story, the English auditors interrupt the story to object to Marlow’s tone and implications.

These interruptions mark the boundaries, indicating not so much to the fictional audience but to us, the readers, that even Marlow’s overflowing style and withering irony has limits, is safely contained. That Conrad knows where the borders of taste are and is policing them:

‘I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for – what is it? half-a-crown a tumble –’
‘”Try to be civil, Marlow,” growled a voice, and I knew there was at least one listener awake besides myself.
‘”I beg your pardon,” [said Marlow]

Style

Because the bulk of the narration is meant to be spoken by Marlow, an Englishman telling his story to other Englishmen, Conrad is forced to rein in his style.

Much more of the narrative deals with facts, factually conveyed, than in his earlier texts such as the lyrical Youth, the first Marlow text.

Coming fresh from reading Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands and Karain, the style of Darkness seems mercifully sober and controlled.

But coming from outside Conradworld, to most ordinary readers the style will still seem extraordinarily florid, with long descriptive passages larded with lush adjectives, and Marlow’s comments on his experiences forever tending to the same nihilism and fatalism which drenched the narratives of Almayer, Outcast, Karain, Lagoon and The Return.

There include the liberal use of triplets –

‘all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.’

The long sentences which use multiple sub-clauses to repeat and amplify the message of despair.

Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

And the endlessly creative ways he finds to express the same underlying mood of despair:

…my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion.

…in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair.

A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.

…a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river, – seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.

The pattern itself

There are insights to be had about the role of women – about the contrast between the savage woman of the jungle and the white purity of Kurtz’s Intended who Marlow visits back in Brussels and whose innocent, naive love for Kurtz he is compelled to preserve.

There’s also a lot to write about the concept of the Voice – Marlow experiences Kurtz as predominantly a fluent, deep, authoritative voice – but then Marlow himself becomes nothing but a voice on the deck of the unlit yawl – the two are ironically yoked together.

Books can and have been written about Conrad’s racism, his fundamentally insulting opinion of Africans or ‘savages’ etc.

In all three ‘issues’ or themes or motifs (and in a host of others) Conrad deliberately creates multiple ironies, multiple systems of comparison and contrast. But however easily these patterns can be reduced to feminist or post-colonial or post-structuralist formulas, rewritten to support early 21st century political correctness, I also regard the patterning of the text as almost abstract, as an end in itself which can be enjoyed for itself.

The repetition of key words and phrases – the repetition of leading motifs – the multiple ironies i.e. the ubiquitous techniques of doubling and comparison – because they are expressed in words are susceptible of logical interpretation. But I suggest they can also be seen as abstract designs, comparable to the Japanese designs so appreciated by contemporary Aesthetes – or to the new languid style of Art Nouveau, the delicate intertwining of tracery meant to be enjoyed for its own sake and nothing more.

I think of the turn to patterning of a painter like Edward Burne-Jones who, in his final years, acquired a symbolist depth. His later paintings are full of grey-eyed women in increasingly abstract patterns or designs.

Symbolist poetry and painting was the new thing in the 1890s, paintings and poetry full of shimmering surfaces to be appreciated for their own beauty, without any straining after meaning. Like the intricate line drawings of Aubrey Beardsley where the style is much more important than the ‘subject matter’; or the ‘impressionist’ music of Claude Debussy.

Conrad hints as much in an oft-quoted passage right at the start, where the anonymous narrator is setting the scene and introducing Marlow:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

In 1917 Conrad wrote prefaces to a new edition of his works, and wrote the following about Heart of Darkness, explicitly comparing it not to a tract, not to a fiction, not even to a painting, but to music:

Heart of Darkness is experience, too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only a little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre tone had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.

In my opinion, you can write whole books about Conrad and Women, Conrad and Empire, Conrad and Race, and these will be interesting investigations, but all these approaches can (should?) be subsumed by a sensitive, receptive appreciation of the multiply-layered phrasing, of the styling and patterning of motifs and rhythms, tones and colours, words and clauses, sentences and paragraphs, of his grandiloquent and haunted prose style.

To appreciate it like a work of art or the intricate patterning of an exquisite piece of music. To penetrate to a deeper appreciation of the sheer sensual pleasure of this extraordinary text.

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by Simon on September 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, English literature, imperialism, Novella
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Posted by Simon on September 19, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/heart-of-darkness-joseph-conrad/